/agdg/ - Amateur Game Dev General

I can't stop shitposting at myself in my text boxes and I broke the enemy fighter's AI by fucking up his animation indexes, but it's PROGRESS!

Sure, I wouldn't mind talking about it. I'm always up to discussing game design. Not expecting that one user who enjoys shitposting nearly 24/7 to try and stir shit on your post though is just ignorant.

Shitposting has zero (0) effect on your ability to post ideas

give it a shot

I mean, they're cute and the watercolor aesthetic works, but you're pretty much asking us to rate some nice concept doodles, unless you're gonna be watercoloring the entire game.

zug zug

its furry but it doesn't make me want to throw up.

good job!

Look at it this way: If you ever want a game that lets you punch furries, I think I'll have you covered.

the eyes look too "reddit"

did a screencap in case anyone missed the last incredible thread

someone please immortalize this in the Google Drive

is a furry an animal character or someone who likes animal characters

danke

Both, I guess?
Either way, there will in fact be punching animal characters once I unfuck the animation indexes so the enemy animates and spawns hitboxes like he's supposed to.

that's the goal for now anyways.
Individual sprites are pretty small so I can get away with being bad
This better?

progress:
playing around with different views, still not completely sure which one looks best.

...

kys

How do you strongly tie progression and exploration? As in; if you want the players to explore the world but also get stronger doing it, do you just make all the progression gear based and let them go find good shit?

Started work on the last major character subsystem in Dixie, which is reloading (I guess technically I haven't 100% finished ground pounding yet since it doesn't do impact damage but still).

Ironically, I did so by doing something that only works for melee weapons and doesn't involve reloading: throwing!

Like in Mayhem League, if you hold reload, you "prep" your magazine as a throwable weapon (a grenade or some other lobbed projectile, usually) for when you press shoot. However, since you can wield melee weapons in your "gun hands" in Dixie, I've extended this subsystem to enable the throwing of melee weapons as well.

Most melee weapons, when thrown, will actually be removed from Dixie's inventory. They can be reclaimed from the ground/wall where they land later. I can envision some having boomerang-like properties, but for the most part this is the system. However, when unarmed, there's nothing to throw, so I've implemented a special system for "throwing" one of your fists (that disables unarmed gun-hand combat until the animation is over). This has very little actual use in combat, since it does fairly moderate impact damage and has no splash (and a small collision sphere) though it can be used when no other ranged options are available.

The main function is to provide Dixie with SOME sort of projectile for those pieces of level geometry (like the bullseye drawbridge switches in the first level) which require it, even if she doesn't have a gun equipped.

Still to come, camera fixing for the "grenade aim" as well as a dedicated toss reticle which shows the in-air arc.

hue

how did you make the model characters in your game?

Boring and uninspired. Not trying to be a negative shithead or anything, but I've seen the vacant-eyed cutesy potato look a million times already.

I can already imagine the street fighter ko shout in sheep form

new meta game discovered

Illustrator crashed far to many times making this.
If you can't think of a better name, work with what you've got.

I know the buildings still aren't fixed, one thing at a time

Just cobbled them together in Blender the usual way (edge loop splitting, extruding, and vertex manipulation)

cool neo tokyo

Guess you're gonna get hired by Rockstar.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ofr8qqdZ_f0

It looks great. It feels so sharp.

Depends how much exploration/items you can have.

On a bigger and more boring scale you can let the player find generic stuff which gives XP or money for upgrades.

any good blender tutorials you recommend?

right now I am on learning loop cuts for Blender

project pulseman

first for python

Lua is better

I didn't really follow any, except one I don't recall the name of in the VERY beginning which was on the basics of blocking-out.

It's a good process; get together a 2D image of the object you want to model, set it as your background, press num3 or num1 (side-on orthogonal views) and use extrusion to get a 2D silhouette of the object. Then you use loop cuts to thin and thicken segments to model the object, and subdivision/smoothing to round out the edges.

For Dixie herself I use like 5 separate meshes, though; she's low poly so her legs and torso are disconnected, and the skirt covers that. Her hands and head are also separate from her body. I get away with a lot of tricks like that which lets me avoid having to use rigging-conscious geometry (adding tris in areas which deform most heavily) because a lot of the key joints are just disconnected entities that intersect.

I cheated with my N64 art style specifically to avoid having to develop good models, because I have zero talent for modeling and rigging. My only real knack (I think, anyway) is animating, which I think I'm pretty alright at for an amateur.

>starting indexes with 1

the only scripting language you should be using is a functional one 2bqh.

Why does everyone make a big deal out of this

How do I balance an RPG without fucking everything up?

Or basically; how do I make sure the enemies aren't too easy or hard? How do I tell how fast the player should grow in power and how to balance the combat around that?

That's the idea. The design doc is essencialy a list of anime and Technosoft games.

Thanks user!

There's no mans to pulse and I don't think gamefreak would be too happy about that.

I can't launch Gamemaker unless i'm offline, how do i fix this?

How hellish is it to use Git with Unity and multiple contributors? (It has to be Git because reasons.)

i can just hear youtube.com/watch?v=mMXEsII85C0 playing in that webm right now

god speed shmoopdev

lots of trial and error iteration
RPGs are really a planned genre and not something you should just make as you go and decide a stopping point randomly.
>map out all the areas and their general difficulty
>map said difficulties to a level range
>then play with the transition progression from area 1 & 2

I would probably change the colors a tiny bit but I really love how good your game looks

pastebin.com/sD6h65ih

So this is my reload script

I need to add in incremental reloading (aka shotguns)

Here's the deal though, I need the animation to replay over and over until the shotgun is loaded.

Ideally I'd like to have this flow chart, is this standard for the incremental reloading or is there an established method?

Two weeks until Rush Hour Jam
itch.io/jam/rush-hour-jam

The correct answer you don't want to hear: playtesting and iteration.

What I'd suggest is determining how many concrete "sections" your game has. I'd then divide that number by roughly half the level cap (if it's 99, the player should be clearing the game at level 50-60; if it's 50, the player should be clearing it at 25-30) to get how many level-increments, roughly, the player should progress through.

So if there are, say, 8 dungeons, and your level cap is 99, you'd have 60/8 or roughly 7.5 levels to be gained per-dungeon This might flex a little bit with a non-linear XP curve but whatever.

So you then want to determine, through iterative testing, about how many fights the player will encounter between each segment. So if the stretch between dungeon 1 and 2, for instance, has 100 fights for a player taking an average route (i.e. not exploring every nook and cranny, but also not running from every encounter), he should be gaining enough XP from winning to grow roughly 7 levels, which is about 35%-distance-to-level-gain per fight.

That's not exact since XP needed should increase with each level, but it's a decent way to start approximating.

Then, you playtest. When you find that one segment seems to leave you underleveled, you reduce the levels of ALL following enemies to compensate. Etc. etc.

There's no strict formula, unfortunately. Just play and tune over and over until it feels right.

t. someone who has no experience developing an RPG, but this is how I'd do it.

Why do the USA still use imperial units?

You should stop pirating.

That's exactly how I'm gonna do it for Dixie

laziness in not wanting to convert everything.
thats literally it.

>It's the 1.4 free version
Thanks for the insightful reply user

I've finally got puzzles loading from external files.

Because metric is not American enough for them, I guess

i made my hotbar too good now I have to redraw everything!

>Ruby
That's a new one

>Powershell
>Ruby
I see you're trying to give /g/ a heart attack.
Also I like your artstyle.

We already have someone making this game, NEXT

I assume it's some kind of dumbshit thing with the steam version 'cause you're a dumbshit who gets his game development software through a digital distributor rather than directly through the source.

Nah i got it from the site, anyway fixed it by disabling "show news on startup"

Sorry for calling you a dumbshit then.

>GameMaker
Found the problem.

I'm not sure if I should tone down the amount that the player moves or tone up the amoung that the enemy fighter moves (or both). My eye's being drawn to the player character instead of the enemy and that's not good since in games like this you need to keep your eyes on your opponent.

pls no bully

The problem is that the player is almost completely in front of the enemy, in Punch-Out the player is just a tiny guy.

Super Punchout had a transparent view like that dev's

And my game is a clone of Super Punch-out, where the player covers a lot of screen space and is transparent. I can totally rescale them though so that they're larger than the player.

The enemy player is going to need to be moved either lower, closer to the player, or the player needs to be moved higher, closer to the enemy, to make sure that the punches line up, too.

I'm about to get my masters degree in software engineering. I would rather kill myself than become a mindless drone and work on shit I hate as all friends and relatives expect me to. Which of the paths do you think would give me the best chance of becoming a successful yesdev?

1. My current savings would allow me to stay afloat for around 6 months without working. Those 6 months would be my deadline before I release/kickstart or go to support myself part-time.
2. Return to parents' home (from UK to a third-world EU country) and start gamedeving in their basement. Blow all savings on assets and marketing instead.
3. Get into any gamedev company for any wage to get experience on a working gamedev pipeline, possibly some contacts and then leave in a year or two and dedicate all resources to my own project.

>6 months
I have serious doubts that you will be able to stick to that deadline.

4. Discard those options and follow this simple advice.

youtu.be/YcS7ZIS_sG0

>tfw you're not sure if your engine is finished

0. Get a job, London is one of the best places in Europe to be a software engineer.

should of bought clickteam fusion 2.5

what?

Time to make a frog game user.
Battletoad reboot

>1. My current savings would allow me to stay afloat for around 6 months without working. Those 6 months would be my deadline before I release/kickstart or go to support myself part-time.

I did this, and let me just say that things never go as you plan. I'm actually still "in it". I quit my job and had 5 months of living expenses, 6 if I was tight. Before I quit I laid it all out, how long everything would take me, down to aprox how long each model would take to make. I'm at month 4 right now and nowhere near done. I estimate I have maybe another 5 months. I would do a kickstarter but honestly I don't have a lot to show, stuff just kept happening in the development cycle and I had to force myself to start taking breaks because I was starting to get health issues. Luckily I won a smaller prize in the lotto here that landed me 4k which will let me develop those extra few months. Almost seems like fate.

ANYWAY, take your estimated time to finish, then double it.

if Nintendo won't make F-Zero, someone will have to

Math

"Playtesting" is just for polishing. RPG systems must rely on coherent math

Isn't that just Wipeout?

If you decide to work on your game rather than getting a job then you need to make your game your job. That means working on it 8+ hours a day regardless of if you feel like it or not otherwise your just wasting your time.

That's mainly the reason why I think it's the poorest choice.

I know that London is a great place to be a wagecuck (and a brown-infested shithole to live in). But then what? I already have an offer from my previous internship (not London but good salary) and during that 6 month employment of fixing bugs (I was basically a full-time programmer that got paid less) I got a clear understanding that it's impossible for me to work on a personal project while having a full-time job.

Thanks for the life advice user. I hope the day I'll be able to play your game will come. Godspeed.

They funded a SS of srts for the wii-u and switch though. Its just no body fucking knows about it because they did 0 advertising for it.
I honestly have no idea why they didnt just do atleast a remaster of GX

ez sales

3 if you want to go AAA and actually make money, but be forced to work on garbage until you can luck your way into a decent company
Mindless drone job if you want to spend half your time hating yourself but being able to work on anything you want

I'm the mindless drone option, and boy does it drain your motivation over the years. My friends are 3, and while they fucking hated grinding through shit companies they're getting into some decent companies after 4-5 years

>I would rather kill myself than become a mindless drone and work on shit I hate as all friends and relatives expect me to

Hey, I know exactly how you feel. I think your plan sounds reasonable, though I too expect you to fail at meeting that deadline.
That's not a bad thing, though. Having a goal and a plan helps motivate progress.

Maybe you shouldn't take advice from me, since I'm being even more stupid in my pursuit of this dream, but I'd go for option 3 (minus blowing money on advertising) or 1 if I were you.

I have a degree in moonrunes, and for about 1 year I've been living on saved up student loans while trying to make a game. Now I'm taking up a 3D/animation course so that I can get more loans and grants (studying is free in my country) just to fuel more gamedev. I think it's going to work well because I pretty much know everything they teach, so I'll have a lot of time to make progress while "studying".

Whatever you do, I don't think it'll be a big problem, seeing as you have a proper education in a profession. You should never have trouble finding work if you run into money problems.

the webm doesn't really show it but you can drive over any surface

.

>saved up student loans
Won't you need to pay those back at some point?

Medieval peasant simulator?

Thoughts?