Been working on a 2d top-down survival game where you are stranded on a deserted island. This short clip shows some some things I've been working on for the past 2 months. Made with Unity2D��

After building a raw draft I noticed there's nothing preventing the player from fully recovering after each encounter, this takes away all urgency and limits the handicaps introduced in mechanics like ability cool-down.

What are some strategies to promote player advancement through your map?

I've noticed that on Helldivers they implemented patrols that periodically scout the map but I would love to have more solutions or games that deal with similar issues.

To get a sense of the type of movement through the map you can look at the example below (although early in dev), or sift through the devlog.

https://reddit.com/link/c7qqsb/video/edaqg82b3o731/player

Thanks in advance!

submitted by /u/mastern2k3
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UE4 FREE Assets - July 2019 - Quick Video Overview

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 09:37 AM PDT

submitted by /u/FeluccaStudios
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How to make pixel art - Flaming knight helmet

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 08:49 AM PDT

submitted by /u/PerryCherryPro
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Career opportunities without programming knowledge?

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 07:04 AM PDT

I graduated college a year ago with a degree in economics and a minor in entrepreneurship.

Since October I've been working at a large niche insurance company as an analyst. Quickly realized how soulcrushing it is to work at a company you genuinely do not care about.

The one thing I've been able to stick to throughout my life has been videogames. It's my number one interest, and I'm thinking working for a video game company will make my work seem worthwhile.

My question is, what career opportunities would there be for me in the video game industry? I'm almost certain these companies need a numbers guy and that's what I specialize in. Sadly I can't code or program so anything in that end is out of the question for me.

Appreciate the help in advance!

submitted by /u/grandview18
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Yaoi Game Jam 2019 starts today

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 06:56 AM PDT

submitted by /u/NokoMoe
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Daunting Game Development Issues

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 06:38 AM PDT

I am a undergrad going into my junior year. I want to be a game developer, but it seems so daunting to start. I have made a top-down zombie shooter in my freshman year, but i followed a tutorial the whole way through.

What im trying to get at is what can i do to get a better understanding? I am taking two game development classes next semester with a great professor (name is Paul Gestwicki, you can find him on youtube), but id love to get some beginner experience before the semester starts. Any courses or tutorials that have helped people get into game development are appreciated! Please help this gamer live his dream!

submitted by /u/AvidCuberCoding
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RRPG - Idea to get started with RPG

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 11:08 AM PDT

Hello everyone, i am here to get some feedbacks on the game idea i need to create for a school project (and maybe i'll continue it outside the school project, if it's decent enough XD).

So, basically, i am a fanatic of RPG and real-life activities. I used to play videogames all day everyday after school (yea, i was and still am a nerd in some ways lol). I started programming 3 months ago with C++ and now, even if too early, i want to create the game that was on my mind for a while...

It's called RRPG (can change), "Real RPG", a multiplayer game where the player's real-life improvements goes parallel with the player's advancement on the game. I took inspiration from Life RPG (Android game), but i wanted to make it more playful.

There will be a big map with biomes, enemies and dungeons. By doing real-life tasks, you gain ONLY exp. To get the gold you have to kill enemies but as you level up, the enemies gets stronger, and to kill them you need the right equipment, and for the right equipment you need levels.

The player will have hunger too (the player can set at what hour they usually eat), acting like a reminder. Parties and Guilds can be formed and if you don't level up with your team, you stay behind.

I have a lot of ideas right now to share with you. It's my first project, and my programming/art skills are not perfect, but i will do my best!

Thank you for reading! Any feedbacks and ideas are appriciated! :)

submitted by /u/yhkc
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Documentation of an open-source game

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 10:51 AM PDT

Hey guys!

I am leading the development of an open-source mobile game, and I am wondering if it's worth documenting how it works and stuff in our wiki, as the whole code is full of useful comments and is easy to understand. And it's not like it's some sort of API, it's just a game...

Do big open-source games have documentation? What is your opinion on this?

submitted by /u/___pro___
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Has anyone here ever heard of or worked with Doublethink game publisher?

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 09:52 AM PDT

They reached out to me about working together, but I can't find much information on them and I don't have any experience with publishers. Any insight would be appreciated!

submitted by /u/ZACaRAY
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DevSquad Summer Game Jam - Now Live!

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 09:34 AM PDT

WHAT IS THE DEVSQUAD JAM?

The DevSquad Game Jam is a relaxed competition in which you make a game based on the theme (which will be announced at 6PM GMT on 1st of July) and submit it before 6.00GMT GMT on 22th July. It will be a great opportunity to meet new people and become part of a growing community as you push yourself to learn new skills and create an amazing game.

THEME

The theme has just been announced as DeJa Vu which literally means already seen. There's loads of possibilities with it and we can't wait to see what you guys all create!

PRIZES

Game Jams are rewarding in more ways than one, not only will you learn a bunch of a new dev skills, we've teamed up with a bunch of awesome dev companies to offer each member of the winning team some sweet prizes. Each of these partners have been carefully chosen to add value to yuor game dev career.

1ST PLACE

- 1 FREE Developer T-Shirt from https://DevSquadMerch.com

- 3 FREE Unreal Engine 4 Plugins of the user's choice from https://outofthebox-plugins.com/

- 6 Months FREE subscription to game ready materials on https://beta.gametextures.com/

- LIFETIME Game Jam winner role in our community server at https://discordapp.com/invite/virtus

- FEATURED article and interview published for the winners game at https://www.virtushub.com/

2ND PLACE

- 2 FREE Unreal Engine 4 Plugins of the user's choice from https://outofthebox-plugins.com/

- Single use 50% OFF code redeemable on developer T-Shirts from https://DevSquadMerch.com

- 3 Months FREE subscription to game ready materials on https://beta.gametextures.com/

3RD PLACE

- 1 FREE Unreal Engine 4 Plugins of the user's choice from https://outofthebox-plugins.com/

- Single use 25% OFF code redeemable on developer T-Shirts from https://DevSquadMerch.com

- 1 Months FREE subscription to game ready materials on https://beta.gametextures.com/

GETTING INVOLVED

Getting started could not be simpler, head over to the itch.io page to sign up and hand in your submissions by the 22th of july for your chance to win some awesome prizes!

https://itch.io/jam/devsquad-summer-jam

submitted by /u/VirtusHub
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How to use sound design to cultivate a memorable, impactful experience for your player

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 09:23 AM PDT

Hey /r/gamedev, we're the team behind the ASCII-animated game, Stone Story RPG!

The other week, we sat down with Stone Story's sound designer, Rafael Langoni Smith. Rafael has a long and storied career with music, and he brings an incredible spread of talent and experience to the project. We picked his brain about the role of music in video games, how to compose for games, and the evolution of game music at large.

While it ostensibly relates to Stone Story RPG, much of this can be used in the design process to help foster a more cohesive experience.

If you'd like to hear some of the music that was composed for Stone Story, check out this playlist on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmlwzBg6Z9g&list=PLuSmtYLrtlFfCcPqxwctGLdFD4czjeek2

Additionally, if you'd rather listen to this talk instead of reading it, we've uploaded the Q&A on our channel: https://youtu.be/iQiqPNWP--o

Who you make your music for

You don't have to be a composer to make a soundtrack, you have to be more of a dramatist. You have to manipulate music in a way that it reminds people of things, where it makes them associate with something they lived in the past. It's not about doing your music or making your print in the world. It's not about self-expression, as much as it is expressing whatever the listener has to feel. When you make soundtracks, you work with the cultural references of whoever is listening. Not yours.

As a sound designer you cultivate an emotional, evocative experience in the player by tapping into shared cultural contexts. Stone Story has these anchor points that much of the soundtrack is based in.

The beautiful thing about making music for our generation is that we have a pool of shared knowledge that's very deep. Everyone shares a group of influences that comes from the start of video game music, and we have this very emotional, nostalgic connection to each other. We can listen to the same things and communicate; video game music is a very universal means of expression.

https://i.imgur.com/6FdV4ps.gif

Exploring a shared cultural connection

Composing music is somewhat like playing a game withyour audience. It's true of a lot of creative processes, where you have to imagine how the listener is going to think and feel.

It's all based on expectations. When you write music and it's easy to understand, when it's very referential, when it's easy to apprehend, it's like you're losing the game. You're letting the listener win, because the music is so easy to "get" and the audience is in a superior position to you as the composer. When you up the bar and make it not so easy to understand, you're in a more balanced game. You're dealing with expectations, you're surprising the person at times, you're presenting new stuff.

Be confident in your shared cultural background with your listeners in order to explore the language you have from all the games you've played throughout your life. You can be pretty sure that everyone who listens to the soundtrack will understand everything that you did. It won't be easy for them, but that challenge can excite and entice them. The role of sound and music in video games can be thought of as opportunities to make people listen to different stuff and widen their musical horizons.

That might sound contradictory when we say that we're trying to get people to listen to new things while at the same time tapping into this shared body of knowledge. But it's like this: everyone that's playing Stone Story, presumably, will have part of the culture that the development team has. You don't really get to our game as the first game in your life. It's likely that if you've looked into playing Stone Story it's because the fact that the graphics are in ASCII mean something to you.

So this person that's going to play Stone Story has lived throughout decades of video game music that are meaningful. When creating the soundtrack, that can be an advantage. It's like talking to old friends: you have so much shared history. You can tell them new things, but they'll have enough in common with you to care about it. Music, when it comes to video games, has developed into a pretty universal language as a way to communicate feelings and thoughts. It's beautiful to be able to be verbose in that language by bringing new things.

https://i.imgur.com/F3qCVfC.gif

Creating a soundtrack based around the concept of "progression"

One suggestion that came up in the process was each location having seven different incarnations, corresponding to appropriate levels of difficulty. When you start a location in-game, it starts at difficulty 0. Each time you beat it, it gets harder and gains a star. Each time the location gets harder, the music gets more complex. Initial thoughts were "That's crazy", as there are eight levels in the game, each with eleven difficulties.

It was a pretty big undertaking that was harder than expected. The original tracks were fully realized, and there wasn't much to take or put in. They were effectively "full packages" that couldn't just have instruments removed or added at will. The soundtrack ended up being multiplied.

When the decision was made to create a progression-based soundtrack, most of the music was already done. This made for a bit of a problem, as the music that already been composed was made with equipment that had been setup in a specific way. Once a track was recorded it was near impossible to replicate that exact sound.

https://youtu.be/pkd5w3wMZTI

Some of the music had to be redone in order to simulate what was done before because Rafael, the sound designer, didn't note down how sounds were created or recorded. With his gear setup, that was rather difficult to do, as it's basically an old telephone switchboard: lots of jacks and cables that you can connect to and meters to adjust.

There are so many moving parts to the music that you can't exactly keep static and have on-hand to reference. They all interact with each other in a way; they're all distorting together, modulating together, etc. It's never an accumulation of parts, it's more of an engine that runs with different parts that all play off of each other.

Stone Story's Temple location is one of the best examples for this concept of soundtrack progression. At the lowest level of difficulty, the Temple's music probably has the least amount of action. It begins with these ambient tones that convey an ominous feeling of dread, where the soundtrack has taken a much more suspenseful, dramatic turn. Over time it evolves into a huge, bombastic, overwhelming track.

https://youtu.be/bOu0fT7IYWY

The style of Stone Story's music and "post-chiptune"

The style of the music in Stone Story is considered to be "post-chiptune": it's what happens after chiptune has gotten through all its cultural consequences. Chiptune has done its original phase, where the technical limitations of the game would dictate what was and wasn't possible. Back then, people were trying to transcend the limitations of chiptune. They were trying to make the hardware do what it couldn't do musically.

A few years ago there was a revival of the chiptune style. Everybody started to simulate the limitations again. They made music as if it was for a chiptune platform. What Rafael is calling "post-chiptune" is going past this phase of simulating the limitations and trying to use the style for what it was aesthetically, but with no limits.

It's the same for the visual style of the game, which is ASCII art without the limitations. It's true to the style in a certain way, but we can go beyond ASCII with things like unicode characters or special effects where it makes sense to do so. Things that weren't possible on DOS back in the day.

https://i.imgur.com/SxWRlNH.gif

Influences and how to make use of them

As far as influences go, Stone Story's music draws upon several different cultural contexts in order to cultivate a specific kind of mood. The Temple, for example, features Indonesian gamelan, which is a pretty new set of sounds to a lot of people. However, Rafael was able to use those sounds and have it not be foreign to whoever's listening. The kind of rhythmic scheme used for the Temple is very tense, and the fact that it's a foreign sound adds to the atmosphere of something bizarre going on.

There are many other influences playing into Stone Story's soundtrack, but it mostly boils down to this idea of a shared culture: what all of us have played in the past and what we can use to talk between ourselves in a musical way. Sometimes you have an influence and you don't even realize it. Self-analysis is tough! It takes a lot of thought to sort out where those inspirations can come from.

https://i.imgur.com/QSLnKNC.gif

Synchronizing sound cues for the player experience

Some scenes in Stone Story were done like a movie: video was captured, then Rafael scored it like he would a film. Most of the music in the game, however, consists of loops and doesn't synchronize with the action in any way.

What's nice is that when you do get to those moments in-game where the music syncs up with the action on-screen, it's pretty dramatic. You're not expecting it to go that way. They create these beautiful moments, these revelations when someone is playing Stone Story for the first time.

In some of these scenes, there's a certain amount of cinematography, a kind of visual poetry that works independent of the game. These scenes, in conjunction with an accompanying score, create powerful moments because you need to reward the player for spending their time. This is an important part of the game design as well: Stone Story is a game that sometimes makes you wait and have patience, which, in this day and age, is something that people may not be used to. When you do that you're rewarded with beautiful visuals and an awesome soundtrack!

https://i.imgur.com/zOGKgtn.gif

Creating sound effects to make the world come alive

The thing about Stone Story's sound design is that early on in the process, it was decided that the characters were living in a naturalistic world with a veneer of fantasy added on. As a result, that necessitated a sort of realistic sound design in a way where the wind would sound like the wind, grass would like grass, and things hitting things would sound like things hitting things!

There are some synthesized sounds happening on top of the realistic stuff, quite a lot of reverb, and it's used to simulate the game's environments. Lots of soundscapes were done for the game's locations; there's music, but there's also this underlying bed of sound that represents the natural world around the character.

For example, one of the scenes in-game involves a massive, rushing waterfall. In Rafael's design process for what this waterfall's audio design, he honed in on the unique sensation of seeing ASCII characters falling down and what that would sound like. You look at this very unreal scene and you obviously can't fool yourself to make believe it's a natural environment, but you listen to it as if it was.

https://i.imgur.com/BODXiKH.gif

The original direction for the game's ASCII art was to represent what's in peoples' subconscious; how the mind deconstructs what it sees. It's sort of a cartoon expression of the world. The role of audio is to add the realism that the visual doesn't deliver. It's a juxtaposition, which is important.

When a sword hits an enemy, the audio needs to convey what material the sword is made of. You can't show that, there's no texture on the sword; visually you can't tell! But is it wood, is it metal: what are these things made of? When a chest bounces on the ground, you can hear what's inside the chest.

As you play Stone Story, you're accumulating resources and thinking about stockpiling things like wood, stone, and tar. It's all stuff that you can't really see in the game, since it's represented by symbols. You're always looking at the game and forcing yourself to think of reality within the game that is realistic and naturalistic: it's a departure from what it looks like.

While this approach to sound design may not be necessary for the game, it does make some things easier and helps to keep the immersion. The main function of the audio in Stone Story is to add this layer of gravity, emotion, tension, and realism to the visuals in order to draw the player in even more.

https://i.imgur.com/xuudw7x.gif

submitted by /u/StoneStoryRPG
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Guys I want to pursue Game development as a professional career.

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 09:19 AM PDT

I've applied to five University in the Uk Staffordshire University Brunel University London Manchester metropolitan Glasgow Caledonian Abertay University

Which one do you think offers the best course?

submitted by /u/YESIAMYOURDADDY
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Learn How To Make A Tree With Collectable Dropable Fruits

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 09:06 AM PDT

submitted by /u/4Knights
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Algorithm to create two-dimensional Tavern Maps

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 08:55 AM PDT

Hi everyone :)

I'm working on a engine that creates procedurally generated maps for TableTop games (for private purposes). Currently I'm working on adding prodecurally generated taverns, unfortunately I can't wrap my head around a good algorithm for this as I've never created such structures or alike by code and, thus, am probably missing some tricks and background knowledge.

Basically, I only want to create a (more or less) random shape that makes sense for a house/tavern and after that fill it with interiors (bar, tables, chairs, ...) in a somewhat sensible way. All the maps are tile-based so I'm using a two-dimensional array for storing those tiles. Every piece of furniture etc. is stored in a field inside the tile it occupies, so my data looks roughly like this:

public class Map { Tile[ ][ ] map; } public class Tile { Object furniture; }

As of now I'm only generating some random overlapping rectangles to layout the building but that already doesn't look too good and I have absolutely no clue I should distribute the furniture.

If anyone knows a good way of doing this, I'd be more than grateful if you could help me out. Otherwise I'd be glad to discuss any ideas with you. :)

Thank you in advance

submitted by /u/Karrzun
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Legality of creating a game in spare time while working at a AAA company?

Posted: 30 Jun 2019 05:35 PM PDT

Hey guys, A coworker and I have been bouncing ideas back and forth for a while now and have decided to start a project together. Since we are both currently working at a AAA studio, we are wondering what sort of legal issues we might run into if we go ahead and work on this project and release say, 5 years down the line (assuming it works out).

Does anyone have any experience with this?

submitted by /u/0rionis
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Recommend an engine to me (Cpp + ECS + VR)

Posted: 01 Jul 2019 06:47 AM PDT

I am looking for an engine for a new project and thought I'd ask.

There's only three requirements:

Has to expose the C++ layer (so Unity's out) without much tampering (so Godot is also a bit wonky)
Has to allow for ECS usage (I intend to use EnTT) without workarounds (e.g. AFAIK UE4 requires the programmer to modify the update loop so that the Actors aren't always treated as objects).
Has to support OpenVR. (So I can't really use Urho3D, which was what I have been considering, since all I found was a deprecated fork and I have no time/budget to work on my own integration).

submitted by /u/Sir_Lith
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Breaking News

Programming29

Monday, July 1, 2019

Been working on a 2d top-down survival game where you are stranded on a deserted island. This short clip shows some some things I've been working on for the past 2 months. Made with Unity2D🦀

Been working on a 2d top-down survival game where you are stranded on a deserted island. This short clip shows some some things I've been working on for the past 2 months. Made with Unity2D��

Who you make your music for

Exploring a shared cultural connection

Creating a soundtrack based around the concept of "progression"

The style of Stone Story's music and "post-chiptune"

Influences and how to make use of them

Synchronizing sound cues for the player experience

Creating sound effects to make the world come alive

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