/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

yes, typically the fail is going bankrupt or getting bought out by the competition

victory is more difficult to define, depends on the theme really

Do people say BroForce is a rip off of Contra or Metal Gear Solid?

Unless you're literally making a 2d co-op action platformer, no one will care.

The failstate is already given by going bankrupt. If you can't go bankrupt in a tycoon game, call it a sandbox mode and implement the bankruptcy.
Objective in sandbox mode is whatever the fuck the player wants. In scenario mode, give some slightly creative objectives, meaning other than "get x money by y date". Go for "have 99% population above the poverty line" or similar.

Top down shooters with !Rambo and !Arnie have existed decades before BroForce. Some of them even ditched the !.

Daily reminder that if there isn't both a winstate and losestate it's not a game, it's a toy
"game overs" are not a losestate unless you actually lose all progress with it. If you can continue right where you left of, there's no point of having lives at all

Does the code work?

hastebin.com/xuvamajigi.pas

i always see a bunch of people who make 8directional movement a giant wall of ifs and elses involving all possible combinations for directions but this little thing works out just fine for me

is there anything wrong with it that i'm not seeing?

yes, remove the if else completely, no input will still give 0 speed

i already checked it without the if else and it drifts away because the direction is set to 0 but the speed still exists

That's the basics. Good movement code however will try to keep the player from getting stuck on edges in collision detection. Being blocked by a single pixel is frustrating. If you have no collision in your game, this will suffice. Although you should really account for speed /= root(2) when pressing both axis at once so you don't move faster by going diagonally.

Anyone want to check out my autistic attempts at trying to modify autoexplore behaviour?

youtu.be/Ftq9IVCXQ18

It appears some of them actually provide reliable results, but I only checked a few times, and it might just be specific to the type and size of map/los/etc I'm using.

I plan to actually do statistical tests a little later, and just do away with all GUI/rendering - but only when I have all the properties I think are worth testing.

It's fine, but you might want to do a little verification (do you restrict movement to certain ranges, do you precheck tiles if you use grid based maps, etc)

Using direction enums just makes things simpler in the long term.

i think states in tycoon games are fluid in that they're not real. if you mismanage your economy and your thing is garbage, you're in the failstate. that doesn't mean that you have to force the player to end the game. instead, make it fun to watch the burning pile of garbage and offer tools to put out the fire.

who /neet/ here?

>tfw staking my future on making money from a game in the next couple years

>Although you should really account for speed /= root(2) when pressing both axis at once so you don't move faster by going diagonally.
He did.

oh you're using a direction vector, right

why are you not using a component vector? just add the two inputs, normalize and multiply it by the speed

Actually, now that I think about it, I think I'm using the same random seed on both explorers.

What are the chances that could influence my results?

Shit, yeah. It's late.

You need a failstate.

I've been playing a lot of Software Inc, Game Dev Tycoon and OpenTTD recently. When the game is too easy it really becomes unfun but the main draw for playing those games a long time is the freedom to sandbox your own challenges.

For example I've been trying to do an "Everquest" playthrough of Game Dev Tycoon where I launch a Fantasy MMO at year 19 (1999) and keep it running until year 32 (the games end date).

Its really hard because the game is kind of designed like shit and the MMO server cost vs profits are bullshit. If you have 20 million people playing your MMO and you release an expansion you get the money for a couple of months but when they stop paying money you still have to pay the server costs as if 20 million people were still actively playing your game. Essentially MMO's are designed to be terminal after a certain point even though that doesn't really reflect reality very well. Even if you release expansion packs constantly the drain from the servers is fucking insane and it will bankrupt you almost instantly once your subscriber count gets mythically high.

>staking your future on indiedev
RIP

>Playing Game Dev Tycoon instead of the original Game Dev Story which isn't a shit game

How can you do this to /ourguy/?

Say I have a hundred sprites of moving mobs to render. To make it so I draw them in order of their x-axis position or whatever, would I just have pointers to them in a self-sorting list where the beginning of each frame sorts them first, and then draws them in order?

friendly reminder that the absolute best way to make money from indiedev is mobile games

"make bank after getting your game on steam" doesn't work anymore

Same. Got some savings, but the outlook is most dire.

>mobile
>best way

Here's the problem with your assertion: You presume mobile isn't crowded to hell and back five times harder than Steam is.

Friendly reminder that you're retarded.

You have a bigger chance of success on Steam, than mobile.

There are devs that made versions for both, and ALWAYS the mobile one does shit compared to the Steam version.

you're forgetting that mobile games take 5% of the effort of a pc game

To make money from mobile you either have to make an apealing puzzle game twice a year to profit off the long tail, or pump hundreds of thousands into advertising.

Why do you need to draw them in order?

>putting in no effort into a mobile game

"How to fail at making any money at all or leaving it entirely up to the whims of fate in two easy steps."

Since we're making shit up, you're also going to make 1% of the money on mobile as opposed to steam.

So 1% of the money for 5% of the effort doesn't seem worth it.

If you are working in an engine with built-in z-layering, you can update z on movement modified by x.

>5% effort of a pc game
>no effort
pick one

...

I didn't even know that game existed because mobile games are heresy.

>5% effort for perhaps no profit at all
>100% effort for perhaps 5-12x the profit your mobile app might make

pick one

That's y-sorting though. If you move an object, do z = y, so objects lower on the screen are drawn later.

>tfw you make a comfortable living off the passive income of a couple shitty mobile games you made a couple years ago in the span of a few months

Nigger, you're playing a clone of that mobile game on your PC.

I hope you're doing something useful with all that good luck, user.

This is what the depth buffer is for.

If you really really need to sort them (for example for alpha blending and other effects like that) then it depends how dynamic the objects are. If most of the objects move every frame, it might be fine to resort the entire thing. If not many of them move every frame, you should take the ones that moved out and insert them back in with insertion sort. Profile if you're in doubt.

if you have an engine that gives you access to the depth buffer, just use that

otherwise sorting works just fine

re-read what you just posted and tell me how the mobile game option isn't better

>Trying to learn how to draw
>No time for gamedev because my free time after work is spent drawing now
Eventually it pays off, right?? You can't make games without art!

>You can't make games without art!
Watch me!

But you have time to blog about it on Veeky Forums.

Yes.

I'm talking about using a phone for games instead of using my PC for games. The PC is an objectively better environment for playing games. I'm not going to sit there and hold a phone tapping a fucking screen to play games.

>want to make horror game
>can't come up with any good ideas

help?

>trying to 1ma without an artistic background
you should probably just give up now

>tfw currently making a menu only game

Art is a crutch desu

fuck off googum

Should have pulled some bigger numbers out of your ass. This is mobile, hands down.

Sure.
>Spend 4 months, launch crapware, make no profit - people downrate your crapgame.
>Spend another 4 months, launch another, still make no profit.
>Spend another [...]

Repeat until lucky.

PC:
>Spend a year or two on a game, launch, make profit -- whether it's enough to make back your time and effort is questionable. Gain fanbase.
>Spend another year or two on a game, launch, maybe make more profit. Your fanbase enlarges again.

You can emulate android on your PC really easily, and then play the game exactly the same way you're playing the clone.

You picked the best possible genre of games, you don't need any good ideas to make a horror game.

slender but good

The problem with that code is not whether or not it works, the problem with that code is how easy it is to break.

In my experience in game development the problem that most often arises is code that is poorly maintainable. Such as
>changing one aspect will cause this aspect to break
>changing one aspect will force you to rewrite this system
>making a simple typo which will cause a bug without being noticed by the compiler

The code yandere dev shows is EXTREMELY difficult to maintain in that respect. For example he uses raw strings every, raw strings do not error when you type them incorrectly. This is why you use enums or preprocessor defines instead to hold such states since they will properly error if typed incorrectly.

Sure you can make a small game while completely ignoring maintainability, but adding features continually and being forced to spend the vast majority of your time squashing bugs to an expanding game is the risk you take.

Loud noises
No lights
Ugly faces
Send to faggots on YT
Cash

My bad, and I do plan to do that, but the list and sort by position every frame thing still stands

I'm using only C++ and SFML, and as far as I know, I need to implement openGL for depth buffer, which I don't know much about unfortunately.

Then read the rest of my post that you replied to.

Honestly it doesn't even really matter, it's not going to be noticeable for performance unless you have a lot of enemies. In that case you'd need spatial partitioning which could be used to accelerate the sorting as well.

>Spend another year or two on a game, launch, maybe make more profit. Your fanbase enlarges again.
just like when hopoo made millions off RoR and his next game barely made a blip

it's luck just like mobiledev

Added customizable controls.

Deleted the controls file? No problem, the game will generate a default one when you next start it.

Well done. You have reached a new level:

Bare minimum.

>DEADBOLT
>35k sales before humble

He literally made over 200.000 dollars on that game, how is that barely a blip?

mean.

RoR was pretty quality and happened to be lucky.
Also, 50k is hardly 'barely made a blip'.

It's not luck. On mobile you might not ever get noticed. On Steam you are likely to at least find some people. Very rare is the game I find on Steam that has less than 500 lifetime owners - but I am certain there are mobile apps out there that have even less impressions than those games have owners.

And that's really the big gamechanger in the end: Visibility. Steam isn't nearly as crowded as nearly any appstore on the web catering to mobile. You put something out on a mobile store, it's going to get buried like nobody's business unless you have the perfect name, perfect logo and perfect treatment these days.

Where is your game?

what the fuck is this why isn't this maya waht the fuck who what who designed this what the fuck im going back to maya holy shit

Canceled, because I could not make the gameplay fun enough.

Still had customisable controls and file regeneration though.

60% of mobile apps have 0 downloads on iOS.

>He did.
I did?

If that figure's accurate, that's practically a death sentence by comparison to Steam.

People give away steam keys for marketing purposes
And 500 owners is shit anyway, even if they all bought at full price

no bully

Alright thanks. I'm just worried about the overhead of these things happening every frame as my project gets larger

Because you used direction and speed.

>0 downloads
>not even their parents gave them a pity download
>not smart enough to fake interest by proxy
I doubt that figure's accuracy.

I might as well dump this here, too.

I'm not a good programmer and I've never really looked down my nose at anyone's code, as long as it works, but man, there was something incredibly gratifying about looking at Yanderedev's code. It almost inhumanly bad.

We could all make it, bros.

I look down on people who use webshit and dynashit languages all the time, it's therapeutic

>Spend about 3 days scouring the internet for different ways of making 2d destructible terrain in unity that won't murder low end PCs or take a year to optimize.
>Finally settle on a ghetto way of doing it that will will be semi effective and won't require spending 15 hours programing a custom editor to be even remotely ergonomic for map building.
>Still going to take ages to perfect and have high overhead, plus I'll have to ditch rigidbody2d on my character, because it doesn't interact with tiled colliders properly.

>Google "destructible terrain GM:S" on a whim.
>Three videos pop up showing superior versions of what I have planned and they only take 10 minutes or so to develop.

Well, there goes the last reason I had to make this project in unity.

There are over 2000 apps being added to iOS per day.

Are you sure it's inaccurate?

You don't need a fail-state at all, carrot works as well as a stick here.

Make it so that building more/better unlocks new stuff so you can build even bigger and better!

Achievements also work nicely as casual goals that feel nice for some people to unlock, but aren't required for people who'd rather ignore them.

500 more-or-less minimum owners is better than maybe 10 owners by default. Also there's no way that more than 1k of those are freebie keys that were given out.

I do too - but I expect that apple would filter out your downloads as the owner - and I can see some people lacking the business acumen to get friends and family to try the thing out if they felt they could generate interest.

how many times do people have to tell you that 2d unity is a meme before you believe it?

Absolutely. 0 downloads means they couldn't get a single person to fake download it. No way.

My project's doing just fine in 2D Unity?

I could see someone being dumb enough to just expect that launching their app on the store is all they need to do to make money.

Unity is perfectly fine for 2D, you're the one memeing here.

I'd prove you wrong by making a game but I can't make 2D art.

You're thinking these apps are published by 1MA devs trying to make games.

They're not, the majority of them are Chinese companies creating copies of similar apps and flooding the market.

Steam doesn't have this problem yet.

...

here's a (you), dont spend it all in one place

Because I am