|OT| Indie Game Development thread

Deku

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Just in case someone has missed it, www.pluralsight.com is free during April. A place with tutorials for all kinds of fields. Taking a C++ beginner course right now just too see.:D
Is it free only on April?
Let me know what you think about their courses

Humble is doing another Asset bundle. 7000 icons which can be used for games or applications
 

Le Pertti

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Is it free only on April?
Let me know what you think about their courses

Humble is doing another Asset bundle. 7000 icons which can be used for games or applications
Yeah it's only free during April, because of the lockdown. I've only done one part now and it's good, nothing I havent seen before when it comes to tutorials though.
 

Ruvon

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No worries. :) And if you have any questions then I am fine to provide more detail about specific things I have done to overcome problems in the past.
It was really interesting to read, especially one point I never thought about : the fact that so many people are shipping a game on Steam so they can add that experience on their resume.

It might explains why so many games without any chance to make any money are shipped everyday... But maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.
 

Grindwheel Games

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It was really interesting to read, especially one point I never thought about : the fact that so many people are shipping a game on Steam so they can add that experience on their resume.

It might explains why so many games without any chance to make any money are shipped everyday... But maybe I'm wrong, I don't know.
Well I was hoping to make money from them too. In fact, I was hoping that they would make enough money to just skate on by for the next few years so I didn't have to go back to working in the increasingly developer-unfriendly industry for someone else. But yes, ultimately, I had to be realistic and remember that the biggest thing is that if it isn't a released product it does not count as experience.

I mean, one company I applied to had been set up by people I had worked with, who knew I could work with 3D tech and design everything from systems to story. The company they owned rejected me because I didn't have any released games, and the only design I could show them was for the metroidvania I mentioned through the thread. Since that was 2D, I was rejected on the grounds that a) I didn't have ANY Unity experience, and b) I apparently only knew how to design 2D games.

I think it is also fair to say most shovelware is out there to make money, rather than be something the developers are proud of. I am talking specifically about things like asset flips, obvious rip-offs, games with no way to beat the first level etc. You can tell when something low budget has love and attention paid to it, and the people who made it are proud. Things like that game which was just a single, copied pasted map which game with a $99 dlc skin to change the poorly animated asset-store guy green are not made with pride.
 
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Ruvon

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Well I was hoping to make money from them too. In fact, I was hoping that they would make enough money to just skate on by for the next few years so I didn't have to go back to working in the increasingly developer-unfriendly industry for someone else. But yes, ultimately, I had to be realistic and remember that the biggest thing is that if it isn't a released product it does not count as experience.

I mean, one company I applied to had been set up by people I had worked with, who knew I could work with 3D tech and design everything from systems to story. The company they owned rejected me because I didn't have any released games, and the only design I could show them was for the metroidvania I mentioned through the thread. Since that was 2D, I was rejected on the grounds that a) I didn't have ANY Unity experience, and b) I apparently only knew how to design 2D games.

I think it is also fair to say most shovelware is out there to make money, rather than be something the developers are proud of. I am talking specifically about things like asset flips, obvious rip-offs, games with no way to beat the first level etc. You can tell when something low budget has love and attention paid to it, and the people who made it are proud. Things like that game which was just a single, copied pasted map which game with a $99 dlc skin to change the poorly animated asset-store guy green are not made with pride.
I never meant to say that your games are in the same basket that asset flips or shovelwares. I know your games are made with pride and dedication, as you say, you can tell just by looking at it. Sorry if I gave you that impression :cat-heart-blob: I'm not a native english speaker, so maybe that's why my thought were not correctly transcribed into words...

I was just wondering if maybe some people do that for their resume. Even if it's poorly made, maybe that's enough to fill the requirements of some companies like the experience you had you're talking about. Is this particular company would have considered your application differently if you had shipped a "cheap made" 3D game on Unity ?
 

Grindwheel Games

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I never meant to say that your games are in the same basket that asset flips or shovelwares. I know your games are made with pride and dedication, as you say, you can tell just by looking at it. Sorry if I gave you that impression :cat-heart-blob: I'm not a native english speaker, so maybe that's why my thought were not correctly transcribed into words...

I was just wondering if maybe some people do that for their resume. Even if it's poorly made, maybe that's enough to fill the requirements of some companies like the experience you had you're talking about. Is this particular company would have considered your application differently if you had shipped a "cheap made" 3D game on Unity ?

Just to be clear, I didn't think that was what you were saying at all. :) No worries on that front.

I think that it is entirely possible some people have tried this. After all, there are a lot of people who skip from company to company, working just long enough on a title to get the credit before using that to leverage a better job elsewhere. So the idea that they could use the easily available tools to push out a game for their CV is not entirely unreasonable. I remember years ago there was a guy who applied for an animation position using a video he had stolen off the internet, and claimed that what it showcased was his editing skills because he had removed the real credits from it. So, having people do an asset flip to say 'I know Unity' sounds about right too.

I think, overall, that it'd be rare. Anyone so lazy that they would think this is a good scheme is also probably too lazy to go through all the additional steps too, specifically trying to leverage it into actual work.
 
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Deku

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Game Maker Studio 2.3.0 Beta is available
Here is a blog post of what new features are being added

Lots of promising features. Although lots of these should have been added to Game Maker Studio a long time ago.

Can't wait until a stable version is released :)

 
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SaberVS7

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Y'know what, since I'm starting to get up to speed on development again, I might as well introduce myself properly - For the past three years I've been working on an RPG by the name of JAEGER in my spare time - Though functionally only the past two months due to several hiatuses and rebooting development in UE4 after originally developing it as a 2D isometric game in GameMaker S2 for two years, abandoning that and moving to Unity due to a desire to go 3D (Among a whole boatload of other complicated reasons that made me want to abandon GameMaker)... And then going over to Unreal 4 after that whole thing with Epic buying Quixel went down - But now I'm finally able to put time into this again and there's sure as hell not going to be any scrapping of work anymore after all the well-learned lessons.

In any case, JAEGER is a first-person Sci-Fantasy RPG I am currently working on inspired primarily by Deus Ex and Prey 2017, putting the player into the shoes of the 2nd in command of a mercenary-band called the Schwarzer Löwe Jägercorps, Aaren Kaufman (The girl in my avatar), looking to score big on mercenary/"Private Security" work for her father and her's mercenaries in the Imperial Free City of Lupercal wracked by Counter-Revolutionary terrorism six months after the usurpation of Lupercal's ruling Viscount by a syndicate of interstellar merchants - Unaware of just how sinister things truly are under the surface in Lupercal, and the looming threat of the Kaiser's intervention in the affairs of fledgling merchant-republic once news of the revolution reaches the Imperial Diet.

But enough of the HRE-Wank premisedump, I think I've made it abundantly that the setting is basically Space-HRE (There's a lot more wrinkles to it than that, but I'm not here to infodump) - Instead, I guess I'll just show some samples of what I've been working on recently. It's not much, but of course this has effectively only been in development for two months so far so, ¯\(ツ)

Deus-Ex style Item Equipping/Throwing - As for the inventory system, I decided to go against having a Grid System in favor of a solution similar to PUBG's where the player has equippable storage that can store a certain amount of items based off their numerical "size" - It's... Significantly simpler to get running than the standard grid-inventory design is and avoids having to have Item Tetris, or worse, having to make an Auto-Sort algorithm like DXHR has.

And the player's starter-pistol and some animations I whipped up after finally learning the proper workflow for animating for first-person gameplay.




Anyway, I'll try to post more soon.
 

lashman

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Deku

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Playtech has sold Yoyo Games, who makes Game Maker Studio, for 10 million dollars. It's unknown who the buyer is. But speculation is that Opera is the buyer. Yes, same Opera who made the browser

I don't know what to feel if it's true that Opera bought Yoyo Games. I use Game Maker Studio sometimes whenever I feel like doing experimenting with few things.
 
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Nyarlathotep

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Playtech has sold Yoyo Games, who makes Game Maker Studio, for 10 million dollars. It's unknown who the buyer is. But speculation is that Opera is the buyer. Yes, same Opera who made the browser

I don't know what to feel if it's true that Opera bought Yoyo Games. I use Game Maker Studio sometimes whenever I feel like doing experimenting with few things.
It was confirmed to be Opera, and it looks like they're making a bit of a push into browser based gaming with a dedicated gamers web browser (lol?) too.

Regardless how you feel about Opera, it makes more sense for Game Maker to be owned by someone with at least a tangential interest in game development processes than some random gambling company though, right?
 
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Deku

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It was confirmed to be Opera, and it looks like they're making a bit of a push into browser based gaming with a dedicated gamers web browser (lol?) too.

Regardless how you feel about Opera, it makes more sense for Game Maker to be owned by someone with at least a tangential interest in game development processes than some random gambling company though, right?
I am still uncertain with Opera's plan with Yoyogames. It's still better than Playtech
 

Nyarlathotep

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I mean, Game Maker is kind of in a bad spot as a 2D engine you gotta pay for because its not as simple to use as something like MS MakeCode for absolute newbies, and its a lot more limited in functionality than stuff like Godot or Monogame, even ignoring the bigger players in the space.

Plus the whole buying export modules thing is kind of wack.

I'd assume that Opera would be looking at making HTML5 exports free, and pushing their own marketplace alongside OperaGX as a sort of replacement Flash portal now Flash is officially done. There's definitely a gap there where your Kongregate and Newgrounds etc used to fill.
 
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Deku

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I mean, Game Maker is kind of in a bad spot as a 2D engine you gotta pay for because its not as simple to use as something like MS MakeCode for absolute newbies, and its a lot more limited in functionality than stuff like Godot or Monogame, even ignoring the bigger players in the space.

Plus the whole buying export modules thing is kind of wack.

I'd assume that Opera would be looking at making HTML5 exports free, and pushing their own marketplace alongside OperaGX as a sort of replacement Flash portal now Flash is officially done. There's definitely a gap there where your Kongregate and Newgrounds etc used to fill.
If you intend to only make games for PC then buying exports is absolute unnecessary.
While I haven't tried Godot or Monogame, I wouldn't say that GMS is limited in functionality, you can do pretty anything if you have somewhat knowledge in programming and game design.
 
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Nyarlathotep

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I dunno, by the time you're starting to bump into functional limitations and thinking about learning a proprietary-will-only-ever=work-in-gamemaker-and-nowhere-else language, in todays environment you're probably actually better off learning a 'real' language and using one of the many engines out there that support it instead ¯\(ツ)

When I wrote up the useful links post for the OP, I would have been a lot less hesitant to recommend people pick up GM.
Nowadays, with the limits it has, the competition and quality of competition it has, plus that price tag... I couldn't hand on heart recommend it to someone looking into starting making games, even with all its historical pedigree.

I mean, shit, its getting harder to genuinely recommend Unity nowadays with their absolute mess of trying to cater to all levels of games development concurrently via plugins
 

Parsnip

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Finland

 

Nyarlathotep

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I see this got bumped, its Ludum Dare this weekend if anyone enjoys that sort of thing.
There are usually some freeby / trial software LD specific versions of things for LD too - I noticed Construct is free for the weekend as a result.
 

SaberVS7

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Well, now that my company finally doesn't have multiple upcoming project launches I need to be under crunch for and I'm not seeing a constant stream of bug-report tickets, I think I can finally put some passion into my VR project again without feeling completely burnt out - Decided to do some modelling and...

Oh dear, I think I noticed "Diagram not to scale" on that .45ACP blueprint a little too late



Fuck it, who's going to notice that the magazine is slightly thiccer on the Y-Axis than it is IRL and thus bleeds into where the Hammer's spring is supposed to be? (Knowing how some VR nerds are, that Who list will probably be in excess of 1)

Just wait till they see what I already intend to do to the SMLE.
 
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Nyarlathotep

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The asset library thingy in Blender 3.0 is amazing.
You can store everything from materials, to premade models for kitbashing, to poses for fast animations!
 
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Ascheroth

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It's been about a week and some change since I got motivated to make a game again and I'm pretty pleased with the progress! :evilblob:

Was mostly nailing down the concept and refreshing my Unity basics again (and looking into what fancy new stuff it got since the last time I worked with it), so there's isn't actually anything playable yet, but that's up next!
Gonna see if I can whip together a quick and shitty prototype for the battle system (which is gonna be the meat of the game) to see if what I have in mind actually works in practice before I'm committing to work on this properly (I did already go through what feels like 50 different variations and permutations of diffent mechanics before I ended with what I have now. Rapid prototyping in my head, if you will, lol).
No art. No sound. No options/localization/saving/loading/etc. Just the core to see if that works (and if not, if I can tweak some things to make it work), or if I need to go back to the drawing board.

The theme is "chains" and the concept is now a simplified "seal enemies to gain their abilities". It's less of a card game now and more of a regular RPG-roguelike, though both the combat and progression mechanics are heavily "chain"-themed and hopefully fairly unique.

I dropped the "where your Deck is not necessarily your friend" aspect that I was thinking of initially, because I really couldn't come up with something that seemed to work and wasn't super complicated.
So away it went. I'm trying to ruthlessly cut down on complexity and scope as much as possible, cause I know that I'm an expert in scope creep :grimacing-face:
I can save the fancy stuff for a sequel if I ever make it this far :thumbsupblob:
 

Ascheroth

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By the way if you're interested in Unity and coming at GameDev from more of a Programmer-background (but a lot of it is applicable to everyone), this channel is an absolute goldmine:

There's a lot of architecture design for GameDev in there, but also tips and tricks for beginners, workflow and sorta project-management (I guess?) tips, quick introduction for new unity features, best practices, developer Q&A and even live-stream recordings about making a full-game (games?) from scratch. I haven't dug into all of it, cause, well I just found it a few days ago and there is only so much time in the day, but the stuff I watched was already genuinely very helpful and interesting).
 
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Ascheroth

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Behold, Prototype #1!


Obviously no art and no interface considerations (the health slider is technically already more than I should have done 😬).
Things already changed a bit when I actually had to think about what to implement and obviously this is just a very very basic prototype with a few things still missing, but it did show me that at its core its a system that should work once I plug in proper numbers and abilities, I think 🤞 .

To summarize how it works right now:
The player doesn't have any fighting abilities on his own, however he has a number of chains (some supernatural power or artifacts or whatever). They're kinda like party members except (most) of their abilities are from enemies. Whenever an enemy gets defeated it gets sealed into a chain and "drops" an ability. A chain can (probably) store multiple abilities and the player can place new abilities onto free spots or overwrite an existing ability if the new one is better.
In combat, all enemies attack the players health directly by default. To prevent this, you can enchain them. This makes the enemy deal damage to the chain instead. If an enemy needs to be enchained with multiple chains, the damage gets distributed among all of them (and the player, if not enough chains are on an enemy). I have a rock-paper-scissors like type system, so maybe you could use that to smartly lessen some damage as well.
Chains should have less health than the player, but they are technically indestructable. If a chain gets destroyed, it will regenerate after a turn. However, while it is recovering, you cannot use any of its abilities. And if they get destroyed repeatedly there will be more penalties (takes longer to recover, less damage, less health, etc...) that will persist (at least in some form) between battles.
However chains can get repaired if you sacrifice an ability (permanently). I was initially thinking that a chain getting destroyed has a chance that an ability gets lost and the more often it breaks the higher the chance gets... but thinking about it, that probably would feel way too punishing and unsatisfying if a cool ability just gets lost to the RNG. So instead I've changed it so that "losing an ability" is a choice the player can make and plan around :evilblob: .

Essentially I want the player to always have to ask himself the following questions:
Are there enemies I should let attack directly?
Are there enemies I absolutely need to stop from attacking directly?
Which chains do I use to stop enemies from attacking directly?
Are there abilities that I absolutely can't lose (temporarily)?
How often can I afford to let a chain get broken?
Do I have abilities I don't need that I could use to repair a chain?
And so on.

Still a bunch of open questions though. I guess I should probably build a bit upon this shaky doundation to get answers for these questions as well before I start thinking about fleshing this out into a proper game :thinking-face:
 
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Le Pertti

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I have my annual period of inspiration and think again that I want to learn game making haha. It always goes away at some point but every time I do write a bit in my book about what the game is and how it functions, so sooner or later I will have a full game design document!

I think what helps this time, is that I did learn some programming last year and now Godot and the coding doesn't seem as unapproachable this time as every other time.
 
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SaberVS7

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Working on a Tarkov-style inventory for my project after learning that it's conceptually slightly less complex to implement than I originally had believed.

Err, in general, not exactly much progress since my previous post other than moving it to Unreal 5.

EDIT:

Oh right, I should mention I moved away from it as a "VR" project in favor of a hybrid approach - Ideally though VR Mode isn't going to be shite unlike Hitman 3's - But ultimately I feel it's better for my prospects with the project to target Desktop right now.
 
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Le Pertti

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Any of you do pixel art? Im considering to dabble in it, since it seems much better to start with than 3D. But not sure what software would be the best to learn. I mean I pay for photoshop so should I just stick to that?
 
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Li Kao

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Talking about pixel art... how do you do it ? Yeah, totally good question with a simple answer, I know.
No but seriously, what I mean is, how do you get proportions right ?
What fucking resolution should I work with ?

Let's say I want to create a sprite. I use some stupid res I got on a random page telling me JRPG in 19xx were made in this res, ok. I try to draw my sprite and it's apparent the proportions will be fucked. What do I do ? Do people resize their sprite instead of redrawing it ?

Yeah, it's quite apparent I get the pixel part but I don't get the whole process at all.

Oh, and don't start me about pixel perfect drawing, the first few rules are simple enough then my brain splurts.
 

Le Pertti

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Talking about pixel art... how do you do it ? Yeah, totally good question with a simple answer, I know.
No but seriously, what I mean is, how do you get proportions right ?
What fucking resolution should I work with ?

Let's say I want to create a sprite. I use some stupid res I got on a random page telling me JRPG in 19xx were made in this res, ok. I try to draw my sprite and it's apparent the proportions will be fucked. What do I do ? Do people resize their sprite instead of redrawing it ?

Yeah, it's quite apparent I get the pixel part but I don't get the whole process at all.

Oh, and don't start me about pixel perfect drawing, the first few rules are simple enough then my brain splurts.
I thought this video was pretty good. I watched it when I wanted to get started with pixel art.

 
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Deku

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Here's probably a good read from one Derek Yu of Spelunky fame about pixel art in general.


It might be a bit out of date now in regards to recommended software of course, but aside from that, it's good stuff.
Aseprite is still the best software for pixel art around. If you don't want to pay for it you can still grab the source code and compile into executables if you know how to do that. But I think Aseprite is worth the money anyway.

Here is another good place for tutorials, although it cost some money, not a fortune though

Edit:
More tutorials
 
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Deku

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Yeah aseprite seems great! I’ve been waiting for a sale on it, sure it’s not expensive but still.
It's on sale here, it's cheaper with Humble Choice discount too
 

Le Pertti

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It's on sale here, it's cheaper with Humble Choice discount too
Oh nice! Sadly all my funds are on steam, have 0.16€ in my bank account haha!
 
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