clyde

Amateur Game Making Night

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I'm in for any kind of narrative stuff, since I love to write. I could also perhaps get some writing pointers to anyone who shares the same interest, it could be useful! 

I'm totally in for narrative and dialogue stuff. I realize this isn't the rarest gift to bring to the table, but I'd like to be involved in what little way I can. Meanwhile, I'll be lurking and continuing to watch Unity tutorials. 

 

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So how about we set up a date to talk on Google Hangout? Could make things much easier.

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Here's a thing I made a while ago and sort of gave up on because I couldn't figure out how to make it fun. GIVE ME YOUR IDEAS.

 

Left-clicking spawns an explosion that knocks the ball around. Middle-clicking spawns the object displayed in the upper right corner. Scrolling the mouse wheel selects different objects to spawn. There are explosive barrels and two types of ships - one which breaks apart into the other upon colliding with the ball or an explosion.

 

Also here's my horrible blog posts documenting what little progress I made.

 

Key takeaways:

 

 

 

 

I recently had a pretty sick idea for a sort-of-platformer that I'm interested in exploring, and once I shape the idea better in my head, I'll write something up about it and get your opinions, or not, whatever works.

 

EDIT: Whoa, I just realized that this build is actually older than I thought (not much, but old enough to make a difference). I'm going to upload the latest build sometime tonight, I think, with some more thoughts.

I think there is a potential here for a converse of Peggle where you place the pegs instead of launch the ball. The way I see it, it might be a nice arcade game if you add gravity (attraction of the ball to the bottom of the screen). Score modifiers could make it more interesting. Maybe points are based on how long ago the peg was placed. Combos could be awarded for the ball hitting the pegs in the order that you placed them.

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So how about we set up a date to talk on Google Hangout? Could make things much easier.

I'll try "Hanging out" right now until I need the bandwidth for something.

 

Edit: After a brief but pleasurable interaction with Gormanator, I'm out to go play Rust. 

A specified time would be exciting. I should always include an exclamation mark if I end the sentence with "exciting". 

A specific time when we meet up in the hangout would be exciting!

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The main thing that gets me in Unity (and C# in general) is trying to figure out what has permissions to see what variables and other objects, and getting them to interact properly without just marking everything as public and going for it.

 

Edit: The video tutorials on the Unity site were actually quite good.

 

Don't make everything public: the whole idea of having to give things explicit permissions is to force you to think about exposing as little as possible. If you don't, once you start building sizable projects, your code will become a nightmare.

 

Think of each class as a self-contained entity. For instance, take a bullet hell shooter. PlayerShip would be a class. GameState would also be a class, which would know about the PlayerShip. Your player ship has things it needs to be told, and things other entities need to know about it: for instance, the PlayerShip needs to know when to move left and right, and shoot a bullet, and the game state needs to know when a collision's happened.

 

You might think we should report the boundaries of the player ship to the GameState and have the GameState work out whether or not something's collided. However, we want to send as little information as possible, because that way it's easy to predict where the code makes a decision. We also want to ensure complex and potentially buggy code like detecting collisions is in only one place, because that kind of code is usually rewritten more times than it's written, and if it's in more than one place you're almost guaranteed to forget a bug in one of them. Because we only have a few different types of things that care if they've collided with something, namely ships, we can put collision code in a Ship class, and have our PlayerShip and our EnemyShip inherit from that Ship. All the PlayerShip needs to do is tell the GameState if it's collided with something - this seems roundabout, but it's not much slower (compilers will pull these bits together) and it means all the GameState has to worry about is 'does this bullet hit the ship? if so, destroy the ship'.

 

So we'd have public functions that would let the GameState reset the position of the ship, and tell the ship to move. (This also means we can change the movement logic without needing to change the controller code - maybe you speed up a little if you move long enough in one direction.) We'd also have one that, when given the collision area of an object, returns whether or not it hits the ship. See how you don't actually have to tell anything else what the coordinates of the ship is? The only things that actually care about the coordinates now are the PlayerShip itself, and the display class - and even then the display only cares about the coordinates because it needs to translate them to an array of pixels.

 

Unity usually handles a lot of this stuff for you, but the principle is the same.

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I can't think of a specific example right now as I'm installing Unity on my new machine right now, but the types of problems I run into are things that require running calculations on data from multiple places at once. I have a really hard time figuring out where that work should take place and how to make the proper variables visible.

 

I'll try and be more specific when I get a chance to hop back in and take a look at my few-months-old work.

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I'm up for this as well. I have zero game development experience, but I do know some things that might be useful, such as production management of volunteers. 

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I've put together a rhythm-based shooter game prototype thing that's kind of like binding of isaac, except you move on a grid and everything steps to a timer with a changing bpm. Here's a gif (bullets are represented by a blue streak that the gif dropped a bunch of frames of. Player character is in yellow):

 

HDl0vOI.gif

 

And here's some character concepts:

 

oXlgzk4.png

 

I can't think of a title. It's about a guy in his sixties fed up with the disco music-based gangs in his neighborhood and stands up to them in musical arenas.

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 I can't think of a title. It's about a guy in his sixties fed up with the disco music-based gangs in his neighborhood and stands up to them in musical arenas.

It makes me think of the movie Gran Torino. I've been racking my mind for 20 mins trying to think of a musical pun on that but I failed.

 

Sounds like it could be really awesome though!

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It makes me think of the movie Gran Torino. I've been racking my mind for 20 mins trying to think of a musical pun on that but I failed.

 

Sounds like it could be really awesome though!

If only it were science based, then we could have Gran Neutrino...

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Since no one has floated a time/date yet, I'd like to throw out that I've got time this Sunday to hang around for 4 hours or so. I'm thinking between Noon and 4pm pacific (3-7 eastern.) I'm a bit flexible on time if enough people are interested in joining up.

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HEY GUYS

 

I'm up for chillin' this Sunday, though I make no promises regarding any contribution I might make.

 

Also here's some things.

 

Earlier I posted my explosions prototype (which at the time I was using to familiarize myself with Unity), and said that what I had uploaded wasn't actually the most up to date. Here's the most up to date, still with no guarantees that I want to actually continue working on it, although I did feel a bit of inspiration as I cleaned it up for uploading, so who knowshttp://www.twigbits.com/2014/02/04/bouncy-2/

 

But more important than THAT, I have a different idea that I'm quite fond of that I made in half a day a couple weeks ago and then promptly forgot in all the excitement about getting a job, which can be found here: http://www.twigbits.com/2014/02/04/a-new-idea/

 

Please to be making fun of everything I do, thank you.

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Just got done listening to the newest idle podblast and decided to come over and say hi.

 

I'm completely new to games-making, have no training is music or art making, or graphic design or really anything. But I have ideas and time so I bought a Unity instructional book and downloaded Unity a few days ago. And learning that is actually pretty fun. And the program clicked with me right away; once the guide book got into coding and the handful of programming classes I took in college rushed back to me and I saw the Unity Script Reference I just thought "oh, I can do anything in this"

 

I'm also considering learning Game Maker, since that seems to be pretty good and easy for 2D stuff (and 2D stuff is easier for the less graphically inclined). I'm not super anxious to get started on a game yet, just learning the ropes and seeing what would work best for myself.

 

any advice/tips for Unity learnin' or whatever are appreciated.

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Since no one has floated a time/date yet, I'd like to throw out that I've got time this Sunday to hang around for 4 hours or so. I'm thinking between Noon and 4pm pacific (3-7 eastern.) I'm a bit flexible on time if enough people are interested in joining up.

 

I'm in.

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"Gran, no pee...NO!"

 

Yeah, I don't know either. Gran Tempo? Gran Vibrato?

 

 

Hm Gran Vibrato is a super good one. Thanks guys!

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I've been intimidated by

 

Just got done listening to the newest idle podblast and decided to come over and say hi.

 

I'm completely new to games-making, have no training is music or art making, or graphic design or really anything. But I have ideas and time so I bought a Unity instructional book and downloaded Unity a few days ago. And learning that is actually pretty fun. And the program clicked with me right away; once the guide book got into coding and the handful of programming classes I took in college rushed back to me and I saw the Unity Script Reference I just thought "oh, I can do anything in this"

 

I'm also considering learning Game Maker, since that seems to be pretty good and easy for 2D stuff (and 2D stuff is easier for the less graphically inclined). I'm not super anxious to get started on a game yet, just learning the ropes and seeing what would work best for myself.

 

any advice/tips for Unity learnin' or whatever are appreciated.

 

I've been watching the video tutorials on the Unity website, and I've found them to be really good. The ones in the 'Live Training Archive' section cover all the basics really well.

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Maybe this ins't the best place to ask, but after the cast where they discussed programming languages I had a few questions. Chris mentioned Processing as a really accessible language, and right now I am trying to learn C# and Python but are there any others I should know about?

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