Hi I’m Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress and co-editor of 2 procedural generation books. AMA! |
- Hi I’m Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress and co-editor of 2 procedural generation books. AMA!
- Real-Time Ray Traced Reflections in CRYENGINE
- Don't underestimate the power of a creative flyer
- ΔV: Torrent of Releases and what I learned from it - a pre-mortem.
- Blender 2.8 UI Addon : Up/Down Widget
- how to model base gun model for games or films in blender 2.8 (workflow)
- Research for student project
- Totally lost - java sprites, transparency, and image formats
- How do you do a hardware reset on a Windows 10
- I feel like I've finally gotten pretty good at Cocos2d-x, but was it worth it?
- Should a bachelor go on to get masters degree?
- How game developers get permissions to use copyrighted material?
- some posts about ODE physics
- Advice on creating a city building game. (Godot engine)
- Working on a small VR pet simulator game for my graduation project. Aim to make all assets myself but have no experience, started learning how to use Blender yesterday and made this!
- Tips for a Newcomer?
- Any good game design document that I should see before making games ?
- GameDev for kids?
- Feedback Friday #331 - Breaking Things
- If you use anything in your game that is public domain or you want to release your game into the public domain, take caution from what happened with One Hour One Life.
| Hi I’m Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress and co-editor of 2 procedural generation books. AMA! Posted: 14 Mar 2019 01:56 PM PDT Hello /r/gamedev! I'm Tarn Adams, one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress, a fantasy world simulator/colony-builder/roguelike that we've been releasing for over a decade now. Recently we've decided to bring DF to Steam and itch with the help of Kitfox Games, but I'm here to chat about procedural generation, game development, cats, or whatever else. AMA! I'll start from 2pm PT until 3 or a bit later! EDIT: okay! I've got to go, sorry for the ones I didn't get to. Hope I could help a bit. [link] [comments]  |
| Real-Time Ray Traced Reflections in CRYENGINE Posted: 15 Mar 2019 08:17 AM PDT |
| Don't underestimate the power of a creative flyer Posted: 15 Mar 2019 04:05 AM PDT Hello developers from reddit! Today, I received the flyers for our new game in development and it inspired me this article to share my love for creative flyers. I am completely allergic to simple/classic ones and love when you try to tell a story with these pieces of paper instead of just giving information about your game. I feel like when people are taking your flyers on a stand, these flyers should be able to already convey a part of the game experience. Even better, they should feel like a piece of a collector's edition. Our very first game, called Epistory, was the story of a girl riding a giant fox and fighting an insectile corruption in an origami world. There was a voice over reading you a story written on the ground. The story is written on the ground Another aspect of Epistory was the world unfolding under your feet. The game looked like a giant pop up book. The game unfolding like a pop up book So, when it came to communicate with flyers, I thought a bit about the message and what I'd like the player to understand, almost subconsciously: Epistory is telling you a story while you are playing. That message gave me the idea to create bookmarks as flyers. For our second game, Shift Quantum, the exercice was more tricky. Shift Quantum is a puzzle platformer in black and white where you twist your environment and invert space around you to solve puzzle and reach the exit of each level. You \"Shift\" from black to white I used exactly the same process and asked myself what I wanted people to remember about my game: the SHIFT mechanic. Oh well! How to convey that with a print now? I thought a bit more and came up with a lenticular flyer. A lenticular flyer to show the mechanic of Shift Quantum With a new game in development and PAX East approaching, I asked myself once again: What do I want people to think about when it comes to Nanotale? The game shares the same core mechanic as Epistory: it's a typing game. But it's not an Epistory 2. It has a brand new story, new art style, new characters. It's more RPG than Epistory, with NPCs, a real lore to explore. Nanotale is a typing adventure RPG OK. Now, how to convey the RPG part? What else do we have? What's the story about? It's the story of Rosalind a young archivist venturing out into a dying world cataloging its mysteries and its wonders to unearth the truth. An archivist huh? How does she catalog things? Rosalind carries with her a handbook where she writes notes about the lore. Rosalind catalogs elements from the lore in a field notes handbook The handbook kind of journal, inspired me to create a flyer that looks like a small book that you can carry in your pocket. The cover is meant to give you facts about the game: name, description, socials, website, screenshot. The inside is more like a journal where Rosalind herself wrote the first pages of her journey starting with "Here my ADVENTURE begins!". The flyer is Rosalind's handbook All the images and texts inside the flyer are meant to make you think RPG; showing you Magic flower, cute critters, people that she met giving her quests and creatures she has to fight. Leaving you with the last sentence: "I hope I won't put myself in DANGER!" Thank you for reading. I hope that I manage to convey the idea that flyers are really important and can be as creative as our games. If you know about other creative flyers, don't hesitate to share them here. Cheers, VirginRedemption [link] [comments]  |
| ΔV: Torrent of Releases and what I learned from it - a pre-mortem. Posted: 15 Mar 2019 06:05 AM PDT Initial commit of ΔV was made on Sunday, Mar 18 of 2018. That's almost a year working on an indie game on a shoestring budget with minimal team. There are some stuff I learned along the way and I want to share with the community. https://i.redd.it/a7sfx1n0aam21.jpg 148 days ago I released a free, public demo on Steam and I kept it in-sync with game development at all times - and kept releasing new versions, 76 up to now, averaging 1.9 days between releases. Why did I do that? How? Did it pay out? Release of the demo did wonders to my playerbase. Wishlists spiked, and demo did a great job filtering out the players that were only superficially interested in a kind of game I'm making. I'm seeing 7.6% of wishlist deletions and these are honestly godsend - this is one negative review less for each one that tried free demo and did not like it. Keeping demo in-sync with the development of the game was not that hard. It did require building a buildscript - you don't really want to manually build 6 versions of the game every day (windows, mac & linux + beta version of each). Once you do that, releasing a game is a simple keypress and 5-10 minutes wait, including uploads to Steam and Itch, another 10 minutes compiling changelog and presto - new version is up for public. Why release so often? There are many advantages:
Does it pay off? It does for me. So - how do I do that? Toolset:
https://i.redd.it/x55rtnd4aam21.jpg
https://i.redd.it/hti4bmg5aam21.jpg
https://i.redd.it/wipxkqhoaam21.jpg Mindset:
TL;DR frequent releases (averaging every two days) worked out great for me. They keep me motivated, they keep my players happy, they attract more players and they keep my codebase clean. After a brief automation there is virtually no overhead. 5/7 would do again. [link] [comments]  |
| Blender 2.8 UI Addon : Up/Down Widget Posted: 15 Mar 2019 09:55 AM PDT |
| how to model base gun model for games or films in blender 2.8 (workflow) Posted: 15 Mar 2019 12:04 PM PDT |
| Posted: 15 Mar 2019 11:27 AM PDT Just a quick one, what is the stages in designing a game and what is the most important out of all of those stages? [link] [comments]  |
| Totally lost - java sprites, transparency, and image formats Posted: 15 Mar 2019 05:39 AM PDT Title says it all. I have no idea where to begin. So I've already drew all my sprites in a program called Paint Tool SAI. Due to certain circumstances I often found my files being corrupted, so in the end I saved them all in .PNG format (because I heard the compression would not erase any data). I want to draw the sprites onto a background, but I believe the background of all the images are totally white. As in, not transparent. I would like it so that the edges of the sprites have a different transparency than the insides, if that makes sense. I heard that PNG supports something called an "alpha channel" but frankly I doubt mine used it. I've had no indication whatsoever that any of my images had any transparency whatsoever. I have no idea how to draw my images using just basic Java currently, and it's very possible the images themselves lost the data needed. Am I just screwed or have I missed the forest for the trees? As an example, here's the same drawing saved on a white and green background. You can see that the edges of the sprite seem to be storing some form of transparency in the art program, however I don't believe it had the capability of storing alpha values. I'm thinking I need to move to a different program to save it in a correct format. If that's the case how can I migrate the .sai files? Is there some shortcut here? E:I have no access to programs locked behind paywalls. Even then I haven't seen anything about java2D being able to read alpha values in the first place. Only stuff about making the entire image more or less transparent. Do I need some other technology to draw this stuff? Any info would be appreciated. I have no clue where I should begin. E: Thanks for the help. There was an option to set the background to transparent in SAI after all. I had to download a different version to read some of the files, and resaved all of them. Java seemed to be perfectly fine drawing an image with transparency values without any input from me. So that was quite lucky. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you do a hardware reset on a Windows 10 Posted: 15 Mar 2019 11:54 AM PDT I think 3d engine devs have enough low level knowledge on Windows internals. Is it really possible for a DX12 game to do something that would lead to hardware reset? Overheating cpu? Overheating gpu? Bad kernel architecture? Audio/video driver bugs? Not even a bsod, just immediately from a video frame to counting RAM in BIOS (doing the POST). [link] [comments]  |
| I feel like I've finally gotten pretty good at Cocos2d-x, but was it worth it? Posted: 14 Mar 2019 10:17 PM PDT What sensible people do is try making an over-ambitious game in Cocos2d-x, have it turn into a garbage fire, and then make something less ambitious in Godot or Unity. I am not a sensible person. What I've done is try to make an over-ambitious game in Cocos2d-x, have it turn into a garbage fire, and then keep trying to make the same over-ambitious game in Cocos2d-x, on and off, over and over, for an embarrassing number of years, when I also had a bunch of shit going on in my life, and having them all turn into garbage fires. Now, the factory where I work is moving, which has been motivating me to get my act together, learn OpenGL, and build a portfolio so I can try and get into the software industry in some sense. And I'm actually pretty close to releasing a much less ambitious game in Cocos2d-x. And after a lot of trial and error, and after finally becoming disillusioned with much of the object oriented design dogma I learned in college, I'm finally starting to feel like I've kinda mastered this engine. I've figured out not only how to get things done, but how to do things right. There really aren't enough tutorials on the latter for Cocos2d-x. But I'm starting to wonder if this engine is worth it. I'm not set on working in the game industry, more than any other part of the software industry. I've gotten into games through the confluence of my social life, my mental health issues, and my obsessive vendetta to not let that flaming monkey get the best of me. Every time I consider trying something new, I'm like "Well, five years from now, I could be someone with five years' experience with Unreal or machine learning and N years experience with Cocos2d-x, or I could be someone with N + 5 years' experience in Cocos2d-x. I feel better off waiting until I'm getting paid to learn something new before I learn something new, instead of dipping my toes in something else that seems hot right now in the hopes of getting a job in it. "I don't fear the man who's learned a thousand frameworks, I do fear the man who's learned one framework a thousand times", and all that. Of course at this point it's probably more bad than good that I've spent this long battling the monkey without releasing anything. But that should change once I release something. Which should be soon! It's been coming along pretty quickly, actually. All I have to do is integrate SDKs... I'm also afraid that Cocos2d-x may be dying. the industry is moving toward GUI based game building suites. Cocos Creator isn't very well thought of, and I still don't feel inclined to get into it. The whole idea of building games without code seems like overkill for casual games, and that's apparently the market to be in right now. Those GUIs always struck me as a white elephant that appeals to novices, though in hindsight I must admit that it would have been nice to have gone that route when I was more of a novice. But now I'm hearing that sort of thing is basically an industry standard at this point, and wondering if my skills are more relevant to C++ in general than modern game development Plus, Cocos2d-x is under documented, especially when it comes to how to do game architecture well. A lot of people, myself included, seem to make the mistake of mimicking Cocos2d-x's object oriented architecture in their application code. A well written Cocos2d-x game leverages Cocos2d-x's existing architecture to allow the game logic itself to be highly procedural and avoid almost all manual memory management. 99% of all retain/release calls I see in other people's code are unnecessary. Without taking advantage of the engine, you're not really using the Cocos2d-x engine, you're building your own redundant engine on top of it. But people don't do it right, so they wind up hating the engine. That makes me worry that no one is going to be using it in 5 years. But I digress. Where should I go from here? Once I release a game or two that is. . [link] [comments]  |
| Should a bachelor go on to get masters degree? Posted: 15 Mar 2019 11:14 AM PDT Basically title says it all. I have a bachelors degree and 3 years of experience 2 of which are from game dev and one is from another job (still in programming). I'm currently thinking about doing my masters degree (weekend university so I can keep my current game-dev job). Everything I know already told me that masters is kind of a waste of time (and money, since weekend university requires a tuition), but I wanted to ask a broader audience from other parts of the world. I have some games in my portfolio already and based on my experience no-one ever asked me about my degree and I can't see any job offers asking for it either. Thank you for any and all answers [link] [comments]  |
| How game developers get permissions to use copyrighted material? Posted: 15 Mar 2019 09:59 AM PDT For example, the game is The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings:_Conquest ) This game is basically playable version of the movie. I think the movie was made just by producers of New Line Cinema buying the rights to make a movie from Tolkien Gateway. But what about this game ? Did Pandemic games have to contact Tolkien Gateway or / and New Line Cinema and all of their crew to make this game? I mean this game consists of many copyrigthed materials : characters, armor design, story itself. Also, they included the music of Howard Shore, the man that composed everything for the movie. Did they have to contact him? And how deals like that go? Do they have to pay something or is it just based of agreement for free or some percent of revenue for each of these people that created copyrighted material? It is stated that the dev team " happened to get access to the Lord of the Rings license ". Getting access to license? How does that go? Can anyone explain with some detail (not perfectly for this specific game but for all games like this) behind it? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Mar 2019 03:29 AM PDT I've put together some posts all with downloadable source ready to compile and run http://bedroomcoders.co.uk/c-and-physics-the-preface/ http://bedroomcoders.co.uk/c-and-physics-falling-bodies/ http://bedroomcoders.co.uk/c-and-physics-hinge2-vehicle/ Its not production ready code, but its enough to show how to use ODE and should be a good start for anyone interested in getting into game physics... [link] [comments]  |
| Advice on creating a city building game. (Godot engine) Posted: 15 Mar 2019 09:16 AM PDT I would like to create a simple program/game that uses premade assets to procedurally generate a traversable city. I mostly want to experiment with implementing concepts of urban design but if would be cool to create a sort of rpg out of it. The world would all be a procedurally generated city. I'm imagining a traditional isometric rpg kind of aesthetic with realistic medieval buildings. At first I thought about doing it in FLARE but I did some research and it looks like the Godot engine is well suited for what I want to do and probably has the asset libraries I need. Godot looks very cool and tbh FLARE is a bit weird. Does anyone have advice on how to go about this kind of project in the Godot engine? Specifically what frameworks/asset libraries would be useful for something like this ? Please and thank you [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Mar 2019 02:20 AM PDT |
| Posted: 15 Mar 2019 08:16 AM PDT So uhh hello guys. My name is Lawrence Jhezzell L. Domingo. I have the utmost respect for any game developers out there. You guys have driven me to become passionate at making games. I now have a dream. A new goal in my life. And that is creating games. So as a newcomer as I am. I want to hear your thoughts and opinions and question that I want to ask. Give me your opinions or suggestion on this: Number #1 Software Software is the stepping stone on all gaming projects. I want to ask what is the most beginner friendly or at least somewhat beginner friendly and what software should I start on. I also want to ask on what software should I move next if I am planning to create bigger projects. Number #2 Music Music is really the hardest thing to make in a game. It includes a lot of license and a pain in the ass to make it yourself. I have a question. For my first ever game that I'm about to do should I buy a license from music companies so that I can reuse that since its permanent/semi-permanent and I can use it on other projects. Or should I make it myself, compose it myself. Number #3 Assets I want to find a beginner friendly asset maker for now. I need 2 programs. One for 2d models and another one for 3d models. I just don't want to use other assets made by people. I want a game that is made by myself ground-up. Number #4 Genre What genre should I start as a beginner? It shouldn't be something big like sandbox game or strategy games. But I think like platformer games for a starter or rpg games. But I don't really know what are your opinions? Number #5 Where to Publish Should I publish it on the internet something like KingsRoad, Adventure Quest Worlds, League of Angels yada yada and more. Or should I put it as a downloadable game on something like steam or gameranger? Or should I upload it on play store or app store as a mobile game? Number #6 Monetization Now this is the hard part. I don't know anything about monetization. But you guys have any idea about monetization just comment below. I don't want to go to this phase yet of my development since it will hinder my ideas and I don't really want money as long as someone plays it I'm happy. But its still an important part of game development since a game would be cancelled if money goes out. [link] [comments]  |
| Any good game design document that I should see before making games ? Posted: 14 Mar 2019 11:26 PM PDT |
| Posted: 15 Mar 2019 04:24 AM PDT Can you recommend an easy-to-use engine for making simple games? Something that maybe comes with a lot of assets and behaviors which are easy to throw together, and I guess is a little bit more of a level editor with a library of assets rather than an actual engine.. I have an 8 year old son who is really enthusiastic about gamedev. We've looked at Unity and GameMaker a bit, but he's had most success with some mobile app where you simply drag and drop stuff together to make a platform game. It's almost just a level editor, and I've been impressed that he can manage it completely by himself and produces entire levels with bad guys and collision and sound effects, without coming and bugging me to do the coding parts :) The software is a horrible heap of shit though which makes him watch Ads to unlock content or to test his game, so Im looking for an alternative. I think it needs to be really simple and involve a lot of building from a library of components, maybe with an option to import some original sprites, but the flexibility of a decent engine is just a drawback at the moment. The actual genre or game type doesnt matter too much. I see RPG Maker XP is cheap on Steam right now. Might that do the trick? Any other recommendations? [link] [comments]  |
| Feedback Friday #331 - Breaking Things Posted: 14 Mar 2019 08:00 PM PDT FEEDBACK FRIDAY #331 Well it's Friday here so lets play each others games, be nice and constructive and have fun! keep up with devs on twitter and get involved! Post your games/demos/builds and give each other feedback! Feedback Friday Rules: Suggestion: As a generally courtesy, you should try to check out a person's game if they have left feedback on your game. If you are leaving feedback on another person's game, it may be helpful to leave a link to your post (if you have posted your game for feedback) at the end of your comment so they can easily find your game. -Post a link to a playable version of your game or demo -Do NOT link to screenshots or videos! The emphasis of FF is on testing and feedback, not on graphics! Screenshot Saturday is the better choice for your awesome screenshots and videos! -Promote good feedback! Try to avoid posting one line responses like "I liked it!" because that is NOT feedback! -Upvote those who provide good feedback! -Comments using URL shorteners may get auto-removed by reddit, so we recommend not using them. Previous Weeks: All Testing services: Roast My Game (Web and Computer Games, feedback from developers and players) iBetaTest (iOS) and Indie Insights (livestream feedback) Promotional services: Alpha Beta Gamer (All platforms) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Mar 2019 06:30 AM PDT Apologies if you were already aware of this story. Last week, the developer of One Hour One Life tried to say Dual Decade was committing fraud after they created a mobile version of his public domain game but didn't put 'Unofficial' in the title. His complaint was focused on the fact that Dual Decade had done things with the game he'd never have done, and he wanted everyone to know it wasn't sanctioned. It's important because, if you're anything like me, you'll have loads of elements of public domain material in your games and prototypes - Music, Soundeffects, Fonts, UI art, Assets... etc. So, I made a video covering the whole story and my opinions on it. Very spicy. 😗👌 [link] [comments]  |
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