Hobby and Indie Game Dev |OT 2020| Discussion, Help and Show-off

Saybrook · Jul 27, 2020

Dead Prince said:
hey.
i entered my first game jam with my first game lol

Sonar by OrangeTapioca

Score Jam 2020 Entry

creepypastasauce.itch.io

i used construct3 for it.
its very tutorial tier level game but i made something xD

art/music isn't my thing so i just slapped something together.

also i took on the task to learn to use defold game engine (uses lua).

it looks almost like godot except different scripting language.

was just easier to understand following the tutorial.
hopefully the support is there.

This is a good start. Try a more complex animation for the enemies getting hit. Also use a cursor out ahead of the ship to make it easier to tell the direction of firing. Using the ship for the play again screen is really fun.

EssBeeVee · Jul 27, 2020

Saybrook said:
This is a good start. Try a more complex animation for the enemies getting hit. Also use a cursor out ahead of the ship to make it easier to tell the direction of firing. Using the ship for the play again screen is really fun.

thanks for the feedback. it seems the cursor is a bit small. and it blended in with the background but there was one ;D

are we allowed to update the game post jam? its just changes like increasing the mouse cursor and removing some logic about fullscreen as it's not needed.

EDIT: Idk why its not showing the game as submitted? i must have done something wrong hm.

PeterVenkman · Jul 27, 2020

Weltall Zero said:
Is your game capped at 30 FPS? Half of your wait time is spent waiting for the next frame, although it could be that it just misses the next frame by very little and this has to wait for the next.

Still, to get a more accurate picture of the frame times, disable VSync and have your game render at the max possible speed (on powerful computers you should do this only for the test, since it will otherwise tax your computer to the max: it's probably OK to leave it like that on a laptop that's already being overworked by the game itself).

Spoilers for below -- I finally figured it out.

No cap, just using vsync. I was guessing based on research that a lot of the "waiting" was because of that, but I'm not sure. I spent most of the day trying to crawl through the profiler while testing turning things on and off, but I'm getting similar results. The thing that is confusing me is that, while I do want to improve the overall performance, I'm trying to figure out why the player controls are different on different hardware, so the profiler makes even less sense to me in that regard.

I set up a test where everything was deleted or hidden except the character, the ground and a coin. The only active lines of scripts were those that the character needs to move forward. I ran it on both my laptop and my desktop, where pushing forward on both would debug the amount of time it takes to reach a certain point. In all of my tests, the numbers were off on my laptop, even with just about everything in the scene disabled. Totally out of my depth with this one.

Anyways - here's a couple profilers with it disabled, both on my laptop (one with the GPU and one without):

EDIT: Might have found a good route - instead of looking for input in the Update, firing off the force in the FixedUpdate, and then allowing input again after the force is fired, I've pushed more of the equation back to the update:

Code:

if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.D) || (Input.GetAxis("Horizontal") == 1 && statsController))
        {
            rotateRight = true;
        }
        else
        {
            rotateRight = false;
        }

Now instead of making rotateRight false in the FixedUpdate, I do it here in the Update. Knock on wood but this might have fixed the issue. I'll keep testing.

DOUBLE EDIT: I think that did it! I flipped all of my player input bools to the Update and changed my player forward movement to Forcemode.Acceleration (which is what the rest of the were anyways, save for the jump). What a nightmare. Now I can finally play the game at 15FPS, the way god intended.

BlazeHedgehog · Jul 27, 2020

Now that I've completely nailed down the first level, I guess I could show a longer video of this weird Bubsy pseudo-remake-late-april-fools-whatever thing

This isn't SUPER different from the first video, but it's me wandering around a bit more, showing off more of the level and a few of the other features.

Deleted member 62221 · Jul 27, 2020

This is not directly related to my projects but it's something that's starting to piss me off and I think indies should be wary.

Basically the Unity Asset Store and Sketchfab are selling pirated 3D models. This is not really something new but the real problem is that it seems these stores just gave up when dealing with these scammers. Some time ago it would have been enough to report an obviously stolen asset and it would get removed (for example, some Mass Effect weapons I found once) but now they will ignore user reports and ONLY remove them if the COPYRIGHT OWNER fills a DMCA form.

Here's a scammer selling 3D models from the game "Ghost in the Shell First Assault Online", a dead south korean game (it seems dead south korean games are the ideal target because it's kinda hard to contact their owners so they fill the DMCA form, at least I haven't received response from Nexon regarding this):

I understand the DMCA form is something that only the copyright owner can fill but you can't convince me these stores can't just remove offending users from their stores, that's absurd, what's the point of having an EULA then?. They just washed their hands if any developer buys an stolen asset and then is forced to shut down their game if the asset is found after publishing.

This also affected me personally because I bought one of those assets before finding out they were pirated so I put a negative review and started a thread in the Unity forums to warn people and ideally get an official response. The problem is that the scammer "deprecated" the asset (basically marked as obsolete and removed the page so now users can't buy it but also can't see the negative review warning them of piracy) so I sent a refund request to Unity support and they told me that I can't get a refund because the asset was deprecated too close to my purchase date (it's just $8 but this answer is just insulting).

The thing is even if Nexon reaches out and fills the form, the problem will persists, nothing will stop another scammer from coming to the Unity store or Sketchfab and upload a lot of models from a dead or obscure game and make some quick buck while Unity takes its 30% and pretends like they did everything they could. I'm thinking the only way for this to stop is to maybe get some youtubers and game journos involved.

Weltall Zero · Jul 28, 2020

Lautar0 said:
This is not directly related to my projects but it's something that's starting to piss me off and I think indies should be wary.

Basically the Unity Asset Store and Sketchfab are selling pirated 3D models. This is not really something new but the real problem is that it seems these stores just gave up when dealing with these scammers. Some time ago it would have been enough to report an obviously stolen asset and it would get removed (for example, some Mass Effect weapons I found once) but now they will ignore user reports and ONLY remove them if the COPYRIGHT OWNER fills a DMCA form.

Here's a scammer selling 3D models from the game "Ghost in the Shell First Assault Online", a dead south korean game (it seems dead south korean games are the ideal target because it's kinda hard to contact their owners so they fill the DMCA form, at least I haven't received response from Nexon regarding this):

I understand the DMCA form is something that only the copyright owner can fill but you can't convince me these stores can't just remove offending users from their stores, that's absurd, what's the point of having an EULA then?. They just washed their hands if any developer buys an stolen asset and then is forced to shut down their game if the asset is found after publishing.

This also affected me personally because I bought one of those assets before finding out they were pirated so I put a negative review and started a thread in the Unity forums to warn people and ideally get an official response. The problem is that the scammer "deprecated" the asset (basically marked as obsolete and removed the page so now users can't buy it but also can't see the negative review warning them of piracy) so I sent a refund request to Unity support and they told me that I can't get a refund because the asset was deprecated too close to my purchase date (it's just $8 but this answer is just insulting).

The thing is even if Nexon reaches out and fills the form, the problem will persists, nothing will stop another scammer from coming to the Unity store or Sketchfab and upload a lot of models from a dead or obscure game and make some quick buck while Unity takes its 30% and pretends like they did everything they could. I'm thinking the only way for this to stop is to maybe get some youtubers and game journos involved.

The Unity team's response to a lot of things is just embarrassing. I feel like they have reasonably competent programmers and hit the jackpot by offering a good product at precisely the right time when it was most wanted, but their community teams and their responses are almost unanimously a shitshow, if there's any response at all.

You may want to contact jschreier directly about this, since he seems to be almost the only person in games journalism that takes the "journalism" part seriously. Alternately, it seems like a good topic for a Jimquisition video.

funkygallo · Jul 28, 2020

Finally the Steam page is up, and if you wanna see there is also the Xbox One trailer

Qwark · Jul 28, 2020

The #PitchYaGame thing is live on Twitter today, right?

Lautar0 said:
This is not directly related to my projects but it's something that's starting to piss me off and I think indies should be wary.

Basically the Unity Asset Store and Sketchfab are selling pirated 3D models. This is not really something new but the real problem is that it seems these stores just gave up when dealing with these scammers. Some time ago it would have been enough to report an obviously stolen asset and it would get removed (for example, some Mass Effect weapons I found once) but now they will ignore user reports and ONLY remove them if the COPYRIGHT OWNER fills a DMCA form.

Here's a scammer selling 3D models from the game "Ghost in the Shell First Assault Online", a dead south korean game (it seems dead south korean games are the ideal target because it's kinda hard to contact their owners so they fill the DMCA form, at least I haven't received response from Nexon regarding this):

I understand the DMCA form is something that only the copyright owner can fill but you can't convince me these stores can't just remove offending users from their stores, that's absurd, what's the point of having an EULA then?. They just washed their hands if any developer buys an stolen asset and then is forced to shut down their game if the asset is found after publishing.

This also affected me personally because I bought one of those assets before finding out they were pirated so I put a negative review and started a thread in the Unity forums to warn people and ideally get an official response. The problem is that the scammer "deprecated" the asset (basically marked as obsolete and removed the page so now users can't buy it but also can't see the negative review warning them of piracy) so I sent a refund request to Unity support and they told me that I can't get a refund because the asset was deprecated too close to my purchase date (it's just $8 but this answer is just insulting).

The thing is even if Nexon reaches out and fills the form, the problem will persists, nothing will stop another scammer from coming to the Unity store or Sketchfab and upload a lot of models from a dead or obscure game and make some quick buck while Unity takes its 30% and pretends like they did everything they could. I'm thinking the only way for this to stop is to maybe get some youtubers and game journos involved.

That Unity response makes no sense. Deprecation close to a purchase should be grounds for a refund. The whole thing is disgusting and people continue to prove how awful they are.

PeterVenkman · Jul 28, 2020

Qwark said:
The #PitchYaGame thing is live on Twitter today, right?

That Unity response makes no sense. Deprecation close to a purchase should be grounds for a refund. The whole thing is disgusting and people continue to prove how awful they are.

got moved to tomorrow:

HandsomeCharles said:
Keeping you all in the loop:

#PitchYaGame has been rescheduled to 29th July

In response to the #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate hashtag (Which is a 48 hour twitter silence in protest of their inaction on antisemitism), PYG is being postponed until a day later , the 29th July. The timings remain the same. If you have scheduled any tweets (as I have), best update them now!

dannymate · Jul 28, 2020

I'm back baby. I would like pity please my health is crap and the NHS is truly a hellscape of privitisation (at least where I am). But at least I can eat a little and my brain is working again.

So I created a twitter (please tell me if I'm doing it wrong) account for PitchYaGame (not sure if I'll have anything for then maybe next month). I have no idea how to use twitter... I'll figure it out I'm sure.
Are people participating? I'm sure the fine/not fine people here can do some critiquing if anyone is interested in a second opinion.

PeterVenkman · Jul 28, 2020

dannymate said:
I'm back baby. I would like pity please my health is crap and the NHS is truly a hellscape of privitisation (at least where I am). But at least I can eat a little and my brain is working again.

So I created a twitter (please tell me if I'm doing it wrong) account for PitchYaGame (not sure if I'll have anything for then maybe next month). I have no idea how to use twitter... I'll figure it out I'm sure.
Are people participating? I'm sure the fine/not fine people here can do some critiquing if anyone is interested in a second opinion.

Yeah we're gonna do the pitch - trying to cut together a new trailer for it. Any extra GIFs, screenshots etc will go in the comment thread following.

Weltall Zero · Jul 28, 2020

dannymate said:
I'm back baby. I would like pity please my health is crap and the NHS is truly a hellscape of privitisation (at least where I am). But at least I can eat a little and my brain is working again.

Ouch, that sounds bad, even without knowing the details; have my full empathy and support. :(

Feel free to talk about it in more detail, or perhaps make a new thread about it (and post the link here); people tend to be supportive and empathetic with these kinds of things because shitty healthcare system issues are so widespread and fuck so many people over. :/

Ciao · Jul 28, 2020

Good news for artists like me who don't know anything about C# ! Seems like that will be good for quick prototyping !

HandsomeCharles · Jul 28, 2020

PeterVenkman said:
DOUBLE EDIT: I think that did it! I flipped all of my player input bools to the Update and changed my player forward movement to Forcemode.Acceleration (which is what the rest of the were anyways, save for the jump). What a nightmare. Now I can finally play the game at 15FPS, the way god intended.

Nice! I'm glad you got this figured out! Vsync can be a pain sometimes.

dannymate said:
I'm back baby. I would like pity please my health is crap and the NHS is truly a hellscape of privitisation (at least where I am). But at least I can eat a little and my brain is working again.

So I created a twitter (please tell me if I'm doing it wrong) account for PitchYaGame (not sure if I'll have anything for then maybe next month). I have no idea how to use twitter... I'll figure it out I'm sure.
Are people participating? I'm sure the fine/not fine people here can do some critiquing if anyone is interested in a second opinion.

Welcome back!

So yea, twitter! It's confusing don't worry.

If you want to take part in PYG, essentially all you have to do is make a twitter post between 12pm-12am (BST) with you pitch, and include the hashtag "#pitchyagame" in the post. That's all! (The time limit is there to try and focus attention at a specific point, rather than have it spread out as a generic hashtag).

Feel free to post up your "pitch" here (Text wise) before making the twitter post if you'd like us to check it if you're unsure.

Also, for everyone using twitter I'd really recommend using https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ if you aren't already! It makes organization so much easier! You can view different hashtags as feeds, as well as schedule tweets to be posted automatically at a later date!

Deleted member 62221 · Jul 28, 2020

Weltall Zero said:
The Unity team's response to a lot of things is just embarrassing. I feel like they have reasonably competent programmers and hit the jackpot by offering a good product at precisely the right time when it was most wanted, but their community teams and their responses are almost unanimously a shitshow, if there's any response at all.

You may want to contact jschreier directly about this, since he seems to be almost the only person in games journalism that takes the "journalism" part seriously. Alternately, it seems like a good topic for a Jimquisition video.

I sent the story yesterday to Jim Sterling, Yong Yea and Kotaku. Now I have very little hope this gets picked without too much noise or fast enough before all evidence is removed because the scammer started deprecating every Ghost in the Shell asset (and even a Marvel Contest of Champions asset) already. There's still some in Sketchfab though (they also ignore reports and just use the DMCA form defense).

What bothers me more is that a real Unity publisher got his asset stolen and republished by these guys, he made a thread and probably filled the DMCA form because now the asset was properly removed but somehow this publisher is still free to sell the rest of his stolen assets. A DMCA form only removes the reported asset, it doesn't trigger a ban of the publisher. This is absurd, a single strike should be enough for a ban.

Rolento · Jul 28, 2020

Ciao said:
Good news for artists like me who don't know anything about C# ! Seems like that will be good for quick prototyping !

As a longtime Visual Scripting advocate (I push it heavily with my non-for-profit for artists) I am glad this is finally a thing (plus I've been using Bolt for the past few years for my Unity projects)... BUT after using Unreal for so long, with deeply integrated Visual Scripting with Blueprints, the jump back to Unity really is harsh.

I'm still really waiting until they fully release their integrated visual scripting in Unity.

I love Unity, but man, I feel in the span of under two years they seem to have lost site of what drove them, and Epic came in to pick up the pieces /opinion

Pleiades · Jul 29, 2020

Took a week long break from coding my little project. Back now so this time I worked on planetary production lines and base building.

https://twitter.com/OArkko/status/1288524739032616961

Very much a WIP still but in any case it's something.

And some bonus screenshots, more base building and some space rays to hunt!:

BlazeHedgehog · Jul 29, 2020

Oh wow, that's pretty cool looking.

Weltall Zero · Jul 29, 2020

Pleiades said:
Took a week long break from coding my little project. Back now so this time I worked on planetary production lines and base building.

https://twitter.com/OArkko/status/1288524739032616961

Very much a WIP still but in any case it's something.

And some bonus screenshots, more base building and some space rays to hunt!:

This always looks so neat. Also a whole new meaning to "catch some rays". :)

dannymate · Jul 29, 2020

Busy day today, had an appointment with a consultant (at 9:10am jesus christ) and he actually posed a possible diagnosis along with follow up tests and medication. It's a shame I was forced to go private for somebody to actually put an effort in but there you go. He thinks its Functional Dyspepsia if anybody has any experience.

I was determined to get something down for PitchYaGame and it's the first time I'm properly showing this game off. It's super early in development but I mocked up a WebUI in a website designer. The pros of choosing a low art game I suppose.

Also I'd love to see PeterVenkman pitch if you don't mind sharing. Also anybody elses. EDIT: Added actual tweet.

Weltall Zero · Jul 29, 2020

Nearly forgot, thanks dannymate for reminding me!

dannymate said:
Busy day today, had an appointment with a consultant (at 9:10am jesus christ) and he actually posed a possible diagnosis along with follow up tests and medication. It's a shame I was forced to go private for somebody to actually put an effort in but there you go. He thinks its Functional Dyspepsia if anybody has any experience.

Sometimes private is the way to go even if your country has socialized healthcare, yeah. That's why medical insurances is one of the few things I've never cut back on. Glad that you got a diagnosis at least, hopefully the treatment will work. I have no experience with functional dyspepsia per se but my SO had frequent reflux and heartburn due to both helicobacter pylori and hiatal hernia.

dannymate said:
I was determined to get something down for PitchYaGame and it's the first time I'm properly showing this game off. It's super early in development but I mocked up a WebUI in a website designer. The pros of choosing a low art game I suppose.

No Name #PitchYaGame time!

Manage a successful datacentre by hitting those SLAs. Use a WebUI to scale up services to manage the increased load from new users.
As your basic services grow, R&D complex apps allowing you to become the next Google or AWS.

Also I'd love to see PeterVenkman pitch if you don't mind sharing. Also anybody elses.

This is such an unusual concept for a videogame. I was super confused about the screenshot because it seemed of an actual video platform, until I re-read your pitch and realized no, you're not pitching an actual service, you're pitching a game about managing these services. That's kind of fascinatingly unique, but also feels like it's going to be hell to market to people and make them understand that it's a game, hahah.

PeterVenkman · Jul 29, 2020

dannymate said:
Busy day today, had an appointment with a consultant (at 9:10am jesus christ) and he actually posed a possible diagnosis along with follow up tests and medication. It's a shame I was forced to go private for somebody to actually put an effort in but there you go. He thinks its Functional Dyspepsia if anybody has any experience.

I was determined to get something down for PitchYaGame and it's the first time I'm properly showing this game off. It's super early in development but I mocked up a WebUI in a website designer. The pros of choosing a low art game I suppose.

Also I'd love to see PeterVenkman pitch if you don't mind sharing. Also anybody elses. EDIT: Added actual tweet.

Happy to share - we were able to get a big new patch together for the pitch, as well as a new "launch" trailer:

Deleted member 62221 · Jul 29, 2020

Might as well show my city builder in #PitchYaGame because my other projects are not even close to prototype stage:

EDIT: it seems Unity services are down at the moment.

qhoang · Jul 29, 2020

Here's the project I've been working on for a few months. I have no coding or gamedev background. Settled with Godot, because C# and C++ seemed intimidating and GameMaker cost money. Followed a few courses, scoured Youtube for tutorials and slowly built on what I had learned and could figure out on my own.

Mike Armbrust · Jul 29, 2020

It's great seeing all these game pitches. There is a ton of variety between people's projects.

Hopefully this can stay popular every month.

Qwark · Jul 29, 2020

qhoang said:
Here's the project I've been working on for a few months. I have no coding or gamedev background. Settled with Godot, because C# and C++ seemed intimidating and GameMaker cost money. Followed a few courses, scoured Youtube for tutorials and slowly built on what I had learned and could figure out on my own.

That looks really good! Can't even tell you're new to coding! I'd play the heck out of that.

Weltall Zero · Jul 29, 2020

Qwark said:
That looks really good! Can't even tell you're new to coding! I'd play the heck out of that.

Seconded; amazing work, qhoang! It's downright mindboggling what one can do nowadays without coding. As a coder myself, it kind of makes me feel a bit redundant, hahah... hah. :/

I'm also wondering if I should make my next game in B/W. It's such a beautiful and clean look, and amazing games like Minit and Downwell use it so well.

qhoang · Jul 30, 2020

Thanks for the kind words!

The B/W color palette is a great way to not deal with color theory and putting together good palettes. Another choice for devs who lack artistic skills is to go low res. I'm using 320x180 which scales to 720p, 1080p and 4k perfectly. I think working with these limitations makes it easier to create a consistent look (not claiming that my project has).

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

qhoang said:
Here's the project I've been working on for a few months. I have no coding or gamedev background. Settled with Godot, because C# and C++ seemed intimidating and GameMaker cost money. Followed a few courses, scoured Youtube for tutorials and slowly built on what I had learned and could figure out on my own.

Woah that looks like it plays better than Hollow Knight! :o

And what is this Godot??

I'm using Unity and while you can do a lot with its drag & drop functionality I eventually had to dabble with C#, which I really don't want. But there are lots of guides so I'm still having fun.

Current state of The Adventures of Aurora (wife picked the name, I wanted to call it Laura Craft :p)

Weltall Zero · Jul 31, 2020

Fredrik said:
I'm using Unity and while you can do a lot with its drag & drop functionality I eventually had to dabble with C#, which I really don't want. But there are lots of guides so I'm still having fun.

There's some pretty great news for you then!

Ciao said:
Good news for artists like me who don't know anything about C# ! Seems like that will be good for quick prototyping !

Bolt visual scripting is now included in all Unity plans | Unity Blog

A short while ago, Unity announced the acquisition of the Bolt visual scripting Asset from developer Ludiq. Now that the integration and technical transition of Bolt to Unity is complete, we are very happy to announce the next step in our plan to deliver visual scripting to all Unity creators:

blogs.unity3d.com

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

Weltall Zero said:
There's some pretty great news for you then!

Bolt visual scripting is now included in all Unity plans | Unity Blog

A short while ago, Unity announced the acquisition of the Bolt visual scripting Asset from developer Ludiq. Now that the integration and technical transition of Bolt to Unity is complete, we are very happy to announce the next step in our plan to deliver visual scripting to all Unity creators:

blogs.unity3d.com

Oh wow I will definitely look into that! :)
I love how game development has become easy enough for anyone to at least give it a try. I'm mostly an art guy really so for me it has been like the heavens has opened when I realized I could get my art interactive without having to code much. I can lift the drawings straight from the iPad to Unity through iCloud and it's even automatically resized.

Ciao · Jul 31, 2020

Yeah, every tool is more and more streamlined, we live in the best time for indie game devs! I started learning C# some weeks ago but the news of that visual script tool makes me reconsider, as I don't have enough time to do everything. I'm already busy with 3d modeling and art in general.

I just finished my first full character in Zbrush, too ! I made it to test my new 3D printer, but now I'll retopo her and start building my fighting game prototype. I plan on sculpting one character a week, for figure printing and then for game purpose. Two bird, one stone !

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

Ciao said:
Yeah, every tool is more and more streamlined, we live in the best time for indie game devs! I started learning C# some weeks ago but the news of that visual script tool makes me reconsider, as I don't have enough time to do everything. I'm already busy with 3d modeling and art in general.

I just finished my first full character in Zbrush, too ! I made it to test my new 3D printer, but now I'll retopo her and start building my fighting game prototype. I plan on sculpting one character a week, for figure printing and then for game purpose. Two bird, one stone !

Yeah it's especially nice for art folks, a C/Java coder has always been able to make a game but a graphics artist used to be 100% dependent on a coder to actually make something into a game.

Cool art style btw!

Ciao · Jul 31, 2020

Thanks!

I remember using the Blender Game Engine 3 or 4 years ago, it was super crap but it worked and was easy to use with it's basic Visual Scrip tool. I made a couple of working prototypes, and it was so satisfying to make stuff move, fight, etc. I hope I'll have the same feeling when I can make Unity work for me someday !

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

Ciao said:
Thanks!

I remember using the Blender Game Engine 3 or 4 years ago, it was super crap but it worked and was easy to use with it's basic Visual Scrip tool. I made a couple of working prototypes, and it was so satisfying to make stuff move, fight, etc. I hope I'll have the same feeling when I can make Unity work for me someday !

Since you're doing 3D it's likely a lot harder. I'm just doing 2D and then I could start off using the 2D platformer template in Unity and tweak things when needed. Super easy!

My biggest hurdle was actually getting the title screen and menu working as I wanted :p It's still not behaving correctly, when I press an option in a menu the character starts off by jumping as soon as I'm back into the game. Same button for confirm and jump. :/

I have a 15 layer paralax scroll going on as well, no coding but it took lots of work to align everything.

But I'm having fun! And the whole family comes with ideas and the kids are my play testers :)

Jintor · Jul 31, 2020

you could set it to ignore inputs x frames after loading or something? its a bandaid solution but if it works it works!

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

Jintor said:
you could set it to ignore inputs x frames after loading or something? its a bandaid solution but if it works it works!

Hmm yeah maybe so. I don't know how to do actually do that though but that's my story throughout this Unity journey lol

At the moment I'm trying to fix a problem where all sounds from the enemies at the beginning here sound all over the level, perfectly synced. :s
I just want to hear the stone smack sound from the individual enemies when they are within the camera view. Probably need to make an audio manager of some kind, I'm currently having an Audiosource on each enemy object, but since they all play on awake they're all synced, starts when the scene starts.

Jintor · Jul 31, 2020

An audio manager is probably a good idea, that's something I've yet to dive into.

Another might be for each to have a randomTimeOffset var that is between 0 and 1 that rolls randomly on object create (i don't know if this is how unity works) and use that to offset when each actor plays the sound by?

just spitballing here

anyway i'm jealous you have a main menu and parallax, i aint got that lol

qhoang · Jul 31, 2020

Fredrik said:
Woah that looks like it plays better than Hollow Knight! :o

And what is this Godot??

I'm using Unity and while you can do a lot with its drag & drop functionality I eventually had to dabble with C#, which I really don't want. But there are lots of guides so I'm still having fun.

Current state of The Adventures of Aurora (wife picked the name, I wanted to call it Laura Craft :p)

Good job! Inspired by George Kamitani's/Vanillaware's art style/proportions? ;)

Godot is a free and open source engine. It's not really drag and drop. It uses its own python-like scripting language which is a dynamic language. As a layman, a dynamic language seems "lazier" than a static language.

Unity is probably a better option for beginners than Godot thanks to its wealth of resources online and fleshed out asset store and especially if you want to work in the industry. The work flow in Godot is easy to grasp, but then again I have nothing to compare to.

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

Jintor said:
An audio manager is probably a good idea, that's something I've yet to dive into.

Another might be for each to have a randomTimeOffset var that is between 0 and 1 that rolls randomly on object create (i don't know if this is how unity works) and use that to offset when each actor plays the sound by?

just spitballing here

anyway i'm jealous you have a main menu and parallax, i aint got that lol

I saw a youtube tutorial for an audio manager, they used a randomizer to make the sounds seem less repeated. But the timing for me needs to be synced to the animation when the stones smack so the timing offset needs to sit on the animation too in that case. I'm sure it's doable, not sure it is for me though lol

Maybe it's possible to pause the enemies until they're almost on screen? And maybe insert the smack sound through the animator?

About the title screen and parallax. The truth is, I have a chaotic mind, a ton of ideas just flying around in a tornado, I really just jumped right at what I thought was cool to do at the time lol
I suck at planning so I started digging after footstep sounds when the game was barely even working at all, and having a 40 frames idle animation was apparently the most important thing ever since I spent like a week doing that 🤪

qhoang said:
Good job! Inspired by George Kamitani's/Vanillaware's art style/proportions? ;)

Godot is a free and open source engine. It's not really drag and drop. It uses its own python-like scripting language which is a dynamic language. As a layman, a dynamic language seems "lazier" than a static language.

Unity is probably a better option for beginners than Godot thanks to its wealth of resources online and fleshed out asset store and especially if you want to work in the industry. The work flow in Godot is easy to grasp, but then again I have nothing to compare to.

Thanks! Lets just say that I'm tired of all the slim gym characters in every single game, gaming needs more BMI +25 representation :)

Well what you're doing in Godot is definitely working, you nailed the gameplay! Top quality!

Sounds like I should stick to Unity though, I just have to realize that things will get hard before they get easy. And I need to create a to-do list so I get some structure on this mess lol

DonAntti · Jul 31, 2020

New gameplay footage of my project!

Weltall Zero · Jul 31, 2020

Fredrik said:
Since you're doing 3D it's likely a lot harder. I'm just doing 2D and then I could start off using the 2D platformer template in Unity and tweak things when needed. Super easy!

My biggest hurdle was actually getting the title screen and menu working as I wanted :p It's still not behaving correctly, when I press an option in a menu the character starts off by jumping as soon as I'm back into the game. Same button for confirm and jump. :/

I solved similar problems like that at the same time that I implemented my input buffer.

In an input buffer, inputs are not read directly: they're stored in a queue, each with an expiry date of a few frames later. This means that, e.g. if the player pressed jump two frames before touching the ground, they will jump immediately once they touch the ground, which feels a lot better than the jump input simply being ignored.

This also fixes instances of "exiting the pause menu makes the character do something" because you consume the input when you use it (out of necessity, since it would otherwise still be there in the queue the next frame, causing you to e.g. double jump instantly).

Fredrik said:
Hmm yeah maybe so. I don't know how to do actually do that though but that's my story throughout this Unity journey lol

At the moment I'm trying to fix a problem where all sounds from the enemies at the beginning here sound all over the level, perfectly synced. :s
I just want to hear the stone smack sound from the individual enemies when they are within the camera view. Probably need to make an audio manager of some kind, I'm currently having an Audiosource on each enemy object, but since they all play on awake they're all synced, starts when the scene starts.

Yeah, sounds playing at the same time (resulting in a single, super loud sound effect, because of how waveforms work) is such an annoying issue, without an easy solution. I ended up implementing an AudioManager that checked if a given sound had been played that frame, and ignore further plays that frame if so. Unity should really have something like that built-in...

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

Weltall Zero said:
I solved similar problems like that at the same time that I implemented my input buffer.

In an input buffer, inputs are not read directly: they're stored in a queue, each with an expiry date of a few frames later. This means that, e.g. if the player pressed jump two frames before touching the ground, they will jump immediately once they touch the ground, which feels a lot better than the jump input simply being ignored.

This also fixes instances of "exiting the pause menu makes the character do something" because you consume the input when you use it (out of necessity, since it would otherwise still be there in the queue the next frame, causing you to e.g. double jump instantly).

Thanks for the tip! I'll look into that. And it's not just when clicking resume on the pause menu, a single X button input when clicking start at the title screen makes the character jump at the start when the game scene has loaded. Super annoying!

Weltall Zero said:
Yeah, sounds playing at the same time (resulting in a single, super loud sound effect, because of how waveforms work) is such an annoying issue, without an easy solution. I ended up implementing an AudioManager that checked if a given sound had been played that frame, and ignore further plays that frame if so. Unity should really have something like that built-in...

Yeah that's exactly what happens! The smack sound essentially gets lower and lower until I've killed all enemies lol

Your solution, what would happen if enemies were almost in sync, with just a few frames? Would the sounds go c-clank or just clank?
I actually don't mind having sounds synced, if the enemies are appearing on screen simultaneously, which is unlikely.
But I don't want to hear a perfectly synced enemy 3 screens away. And I don't want all enemies on the whole level synced just because they're all loaded the same time.

Is there no simple way to have the enemies paused and silent until they're entering the screen?
if enemyPositionX<maxScreensizeX
Alive!
else
Frozen!

Weltall Zero · Jul 31, 2020

Fredrik said:
Thanks for the tip! I'll look into that. And it's not just when clicking resume on the pause menu, a single X button input when clicking start at the title screen makes the character jump at the start when the game scene has loaded. Super annoying!

Same problem, same solution. You are checking if the button was pressed this frame, which it was, then exit the pause menu / start the game, then the game code asks if the button was pressed this frame, which, again, it was.

A simpler solution would be to simply wait one frame between reading the button press and starting / resuming the frame.

Fredrik said:
Yeah that's exactly what happens! The smack sound essentially gets lower and lower until I've killed all enemies lol

Your solution, what would happen if enemies were almost in sync, with just a few frames? Would the sounds go c-clank or just clank?

As long as sounds are not perfectly synced, they sound like multiple, separate sounds, like in real life. It's only when the exact same waveform is played at the exact same frame that they add together resulting in a single, loud sound. For looping sounds, what I do is to "advance" the starting point of the loop if there's multiple such sounds playing together. If you're using Unity, you can do this by setting audioSource.time greater than zero (e.g. a random float for each played sound, between zero and the clip's length).

Fredrik said:
I actually don't mind having sounds synced, if the enemies are appearing on screen simultaneously, which is unlikely.
But I don't want to hear a perfectly synced enemy 3 screens away. And I don't want all enemies on the whole level synced just because they're all loaded the same time.

Is there no simple way to have the enemies paused and silent until they're entering the screen?
if enemyPositionX<maxScreensizeX
Alive!
else
Frozen!

What I do, and would recommend as it's much nicer than an on / off, is to attenuate enemy sounds when they're offscreen (sound volume decreases the further offscreen they are, being zero when more than one screen away). I also make the sound louder from the left or right speaker / headphone depending on their position relative to the player, and even simulate a doppler effect for enemies like planes and such. :)

Fredrik · Jul 31, 2020

Weltall Zero said:
What I do, and would recommend as it's much nicer than an on / off, is to attenuate enemy sounds when they're offscreen (sound volume decreases the further offscreen they are, being zero when more than one screen away). I also make the sound louder from the left or right speaker / headphone depending on their position relative to the player, and even simulate a doppler effect for enemies like planes and such. :)

Yup I'm doing this for the ambient sounds, birds and wind etc. It's cool! But the stone clonk sound is played via the Animator to always have it synced to the animation and I don't get where the controls for the sound characteristics are then.

napkins · Jul 31, 2020

been slowly making progress on this
still unsure of what is really is or what it will be

Weltall Zero · Jul 31, 2020

Fredrik said:
Yup I'm doing this for the ambient sounds, birds and wind etc. It's cool! But the stone clonk sound is played via the Animator to always have it synced to the animation and I don't get where the controls for the sound characteristics are then.

That PlayAudioClip script is yours, isn't it? Unity doesn't provide default state machine behaviours that I know of. Check whick AudioSource is being used, and set its volume according to distance to the player or screen.

Also, since the issue is that sounds are syncing, and these sounds are played by the walk animation, it would make sense to try to start these walk animations at a different point in time for each enemy. Perhaps start each enemy's walk when they see the player (i.e. are closer than a certain distance from them)?

HiddenTrack · Jul 31, 2020

Slightly late to the party, but thought I'd put our #PitchYaGame pitch here:

We're a political interactive theatre company based in the UK, and when the country went into COVID lockdown we teamed with an indie game dev to start looking into online gaming. We've released 2 out of 4 chapters of 'How to Win', with new chapters being made and released in Unity, in quick response to suggestions from our players, and topical issues like the BLM protests.

The project has come from a commission from two UK theatres (Harrogate Theatre and HOME, Manchester) but we've had a lot of fun doing it, and as the future of theatre is very up in the air right now, gaming might become something we pursue more actively...

More info on the project is at https://hiddentrack.org.uk/howtowin, and the game is available on a Pay-What-You-Decide basis, going as low as free, from https://homemcr.org/production/how-to-win/

This is still very much an experiment, working in a totally new medium, and we're still very much developing this thing as we go, so any feedback we could get would be so, so useful.

Weltall Zero · Jul 31, 2020

HiddenTrack said:
Slightly late to the party, but thought I'd put our #PitchYaGame pitch here:

We're a political interactive theatre company based in the UK, and when the country went into COVID lockdown we teamed with an indie game dev to start looking into online gaming. We've released 2 out of 4 chapters of 'How to Win', with new chapters being made and released in Unity, in quick response to suggestions from our players, and topical issues like the BLM protests.

The project has come from a commission from two UK theatres (Harrogate Theatre and HOME, Manchester) but we've had a lot of fun doing it, and as the future of theatre is very up in the air right now, gaming might become something we pursue more actively...

More info on the project is at https://hiddentrack.org.uk/howtowin, and the game is available on a Pay-What-You-Decide basis, going as low as free, from https://homemcr.org/production/how-to-win/

This is still very much an experiment, working in a totally new medium, and we're still very much developing this thing as we go, so any feedback we could get would be so, so useful.

This certainly takes interactivity to a whole new level, congratulations!

HiddenTrack · Jul 31, 2020

Weltall Zero said:
This certainly takes interactivity to a whole new level, congratulations!

Thanks very much!

The theatre work we do is all about make a connection with our live audience in unusual ways, and letting what they do shape our peformances in real-time.
We wanted to try and see what we could do in gaming that touched on the same sort of areas, trying to do something new (that also didn't require any crazy advanced or original programming skills, because... we don't have any!)

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