Amateur Game Making Night

[Joewintergreen]

I made some super cool first person movement today and yesterday, trying to get kind of a Mirror's Edgy/Dishonoredy feel

 

[Blambo]

Whoa...have fun animating flailing arms.

 

Actually I'm kinda into seeing arms pumping frantically during a first person run, versus either invisible hands or a swaying gun. Awesome work!

[BigJKO]

Nice! It already looks pretty solid and smooth!

[Twig]

As someone who implemented all of that and more at one point... GOOD LUCK!!!!

[Joewintergreen]

Maybe I'm turning it into a Thief clone?!

[Dinosaursssssss]

I spent probably way too long making this odometer. It's not quite done (the numbers don't loop around correctly) but I donno if I'll even use it...it's too hard to read while you're driving, since most of the time you can see half of two numbers and have to spend unnecessary time processing it.

 

On the other hand, I think if I fixed it up I could probably put it on the asset store for a couple bucks? There's an odometer there already but it's for nGUI and it seems like the sort of control that other folks might want.

 

 

Also I showed this game and Flapjack Flinger at a game showcase event thing here in Boston last week. It was my first time running a table and I think it went pretty well? I wasn't the least professional looking setup and people seemed to like the games so I felt alright about it. I also got to hand out several dozen of my new business cards that list my title at my company as 'CEO / Ghost Lord' which was very satisfying.

 

In retrospect the bottom half of this post is really more geared for a 'professional game making night' thread

[Spenny]

Yeah Dino, I thought maybe we needed a "Professional Game Making Day" thread so I can have a place to complain about my job

For your odomoter, doesn't it make more sense for the tens digit to flip over as the unit digit moves from 9 to 0? Isn't that how they work?

[Dinosaursssssss]

Maybe? The one in my car is digital, and I couldn't find a decent video of one running...every youtube video about odometers is a news report about odometer fraud.

 

edit: you're correct! Well, that's good, I was worried I'd need some kind of smoothing function to try and keep it closer to centered.

[zerofiftyone]

Hey, looks like Source 2 is now formally a thing and will be free. Sure is a good time to be getting into game development.

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/237944/Valve_debuts_Source_2_for_free_in_bid_to_compete_with_Epic_Unity.php

[BigJKO]

If anyone didn't notice, the free version of Unity 5 has all the engine features previously missing from the free versions, like Render Textures (BLOOOM!), soft shadows and now the new Physical-based shaders and Global Illumination, etc.

 

That's pretty darn cool!

 

I'm trying to decide if this is enough bloom for Tiny Tires?

 

 

Also, tilt shift effect! This is basically Tiny Tires: Instagram edition now.

 

[zerofiftyone]

If anyone didn't notice, the free version of Unity 5 has all the engine features previously missing from the free versions, like Render Textures (BLOOOM!), soft shadows and now the new Physical-based shaders and Global Illumination, etc.

 

That's pretty darn cool!

 

I'm trying to decide if this is enough bloom for Tiny Tires?

 

 

I don't think that's enough bloom. I can still make out shapes.

[Joewintergreen]

Today I realised I can do a running slide while shooting a fire arrow in one of my proto-games 

 

[zerofiftyone]

Phwoosh!

That is extremely cool looking. Is this the current state of your free running project you showed earlier?

 

I should really show what I'm working on here... What software do you use for capturing gifs from UE4?

[Joewintergreen]

Thiefygame is kinda forked off that same movement system, yeah. 

I use GIFcam! This is good guide http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/01/how-to-record-animated-gifs-and-videos.html

[zerofiftyone]

I figured out how to make recordings through UE4's Matinee, but it's a pretty long winded process to turn a .png sequence into a gif. The process reminds me of using the demo recording tool in the Source engine. I'll give GIFcam a try.

 

I made this clip using Matinee:

http://gfycat.com/ImpishSkinnyAsiaticgreaterfreshwaterclam

[Dinosaursssssss]

Ooh neat, I've been recording video to mp4 using OBS, then editing that in Photoshop but gifcam seems a lot easier.

 

Also while I'm looking at this Robert Yang post, I found this other post he wrote the other day interesting http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/04/the-joys-of-sub-projecting-in-unity.html . It's a method of sharing code between Unity projects by using one massive project to house multiple sub-projects, and letting the compiler strip out code from other projects when you need to build one. Not a perfect solution, but great for rapid prototyping/game jam stuff.

[Joewintergreen]

Robert is among the raddest dudes

[Berzee]

I've been working on an adventury-type browser game to practice HTML5 canvas stuff some more. Nearing the end, I'm now to the point where it becomes necessary to add things like options menus with volume and dialogue speed controls...which is exciting because it means I'm almost done, but is boring because it's meeeennnuuuus.

 

*siiigh menus*

 

So I decided to come here and whine about it a little bit. =)

[Lechimp]

Awesome, I'm also trying to not die from boredom from the iOS game menus and UI I'm designing.

 

Menus are the best worst!

 

I mostly hate them because at least I have a better idea of what feels right during the gameplay. With the UI and menus I'm not as sure and I don't think I'll really know until I start making friends test it out.

[Spenny]

UI is the worst stuff.

I'm curious if anyone knows of anyway that making UI could be made less bespoke to your game. I'm kind of hoping that I'm just ignorant to something powerful in Unity. But like seriously, the last game I made professionally was like 99% bespoke UI work.

[Joewintergreen]

Wooo. AI catches me off guard at 1:20 and you can see how I jumped. Also starring water arrows, light/shadow stealth

 

[zerofiftyone]

Wooo. AI catches me off guard at 1:20 and you can see how I jumped. Also starring water arrows, light/shadow stealth

 

This is looking really exciting! How did you approach making the light-based stealth system? Also, some of those debug messages were amusing

[Berzee]

Hah, excellent. If I were the owner of that manor I would sit down with my security staff and discuss some options going forward for ways they might apprehend intruders without reducing my home to charred rubble in the process.

 

The minute or so of carefully extinguishing torches with water arrows makes the ensuing conflagration even more amusing.

[Joewintergreen]

Thanks guys!

 

I struggled a bit with the light/shadow system and doubt I have the most efficient solution but it goes basically like this: I get a list of all the light actors in the world on game start, and update it very rarely, like every 30 seconds (number of actual light actors rarely if ever changes). For any lights where lightdistancefromplayer < attenuationradiusofthelight, I do a trace from the player to the light's location, and if the trace hits anything (meaning something visible lies between the light and the player) I disregard that light. For the remaining lights (so all lights which are within their attenuation radius from the player and aren't occluded) and also the directional light if a trace determines it's unoccluded, I do some math based on the light intensities/attenuation radii/falloff exponents to end up with a LitAmount value for the player between 0 and 1 where 0 is completely dark, 1 fully illuminated, which is the light gem value printed in white at the top of the screen. 

 

This approach doesn't completely work for times when I'm being illuminated by lightcomponents rather than lightactors, which is often, because I have a lot of blueprints with lightcomponents - the torches and windows in that video mostly - and you can't get a list of every lightcomponent in the world the way you can every lightactor, and that wouldn't be super efficient anyway if I had to update that list a lot. So I have a custom component called DummyLightComponent which gets placed on every blueprint that has a lightcomponent, and automatically inherits that lightcomponent's values for intensity, falloff and attenuation. Every so often if the DummyLightComponent is within its attenuationdistance from the player it adds itself to an array of dummylightcomponents on the player (this is the usually-0-or-1 value being constantly printed in the video in blue), and removes itself when it becomes irrelevant for distance/whatever reason. The array of dummylightcomponents gets the same math done to it at the playercharacter's end and contributes to the LitAmount in the same way.

So the downside of this is there's some amount of overhead for every light source in the game even when it's not in range, but it's only to the tune of every so often (not every tick) checking the light's distance from the player to see if it's become relevant to stealth, going no further if it's out of range. I have no idea how much overhead that is but I wouldn't imagine much, particularly if I'm not doing it every tick. However obviously it's going to grow with how many lights are in the level, which isn't going to be a negligible amount. Anyway, I try to mitigate it by having an "irrelevant to stealth" bool on my light-containing actors that I can check if the light is out of player range/not near a situation where stealth is relevant/whatever, in which case the dummylightcomponent is actually removed and doesn't tick. Also, if the last time a light checked the player's distance, it was above a certain amount, it will check less often, tuned omre or less so that the time it takes for a light that thinks it's far from the player to update is slightly less than the time it would normally take for the player to cover the distance to stand near it. So theoretically, you never get a situation where a light isn't updating the player's LitAmount when they're standing near it and it's unoccluded, and most lights in the scene aren't going to have a significant performance hit.

[Lechimp]

Does anyone know of any good tools or guides for doing pixel art? I know it's over used in games but it's probably the only way I'll be able to do art for my game