Hey guys ! I make Royalty-Free Music, and here's a playlist that gathers all my Retro-Gaming tracks. They're all free to use, even in commercial projects ! Feel free to use them in your games !

For university, I need to have some considerations for doing the low-poly character model from my high. We're basically at the retopology stage. However, I'm confused about texture maps. My lecturer drew the textures broken down like this in Photoshop (not sure why I can't add images...):

https://imgur.com/mFipYK0

Where one or two textures may be 2K and the corner ones are 1K etc. How are they done like this? Do they have to be set up manually to be like this? Or does something like Substance Designer do that? We also need to research games in the industry and how many texture maps they use. I've doing various Google searches but I can't find anything. All the articles I've come across on making a character are quite vague on the details and how the person did them. :-\

Thanks

submitted by /u/DustyShinigami
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Need help with brainstorming a topdown shooter AI navigation architecture for a large amount of fast moving units

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 09:53 AM PST

Hello!

I'm working as an AI programmer on a 2D topdown shooter (it's mostly a student project we're doing in our free time), and I'm struggling with writing a performant and most importantly good looking AI movement. In the last two years, I've already rewritten the AI system several times, tried out different approaches, and it never really worked as I wanted. And now, to make it even worse, the team has decided we want to implement a maze-like level (in comparison to open fields of the previous levels) that suddenly requires a more thought out approach to navigation. Which is why I'm finally going to ask for help and ideas here, and if it works out, I will try my best to make a blog/tutorial out of it and post the code publicly.

So, lets start! It is a pretty long journey, but even if nothing comes out of it, let it serve as an warning about what not to do!

What I Need

I'll start with what I'd love to achieve, and what I have right now - It's an AI for a two player coop 2D topdown shooter game, with hectic gameplay that is mostly "action in your face, killing tens of enemies". Not really a bullet hell, because there is a lot of melee AIs, but also nothing tactical, we want the action to be fast and ever present.

Basically, I'd say that the goal I want to go for is something similar to the zombie AI of Left44Dead, i.e you are swarmed by a lot of melee, but with an addition of ranged enemies keeping their distance and shooting at you, while being able to handle both open spaces, and closed maze-like tunnels. With the most important part being - the navigation target is constatnly moving. I need to follow the player. (This is why almost none of the RTS mass unit navigation solutions work - they rely on units being grouped up and nav taget not changing too often)

Now, here is the current architecture:

What I Have

The AI has an AIStateManager component, that has a few more simple AIStates. As of right now, it's only eigther Seeking the player, Shooting (if Ranged) or Idling. Both the Ranged and Melee AI is using the same Seeking player state, because the movement is handled by another set of components - the ContextSteeringManager.

Now, this is where most of my performance issues are, and that I do not know how to solve.

The ContextSteeringManager is implementing several Context Steering behaviors. In the past, I've tried traditional context steering, but that tends to produce floaty behavior that is not really that good at avoiding obstacles, and tends to get stuck easily.

The difference between context steering and "traditional" steering is that in traditional steering, you simply calculate and sum the desired vectors of movement for every behavior (i.e seek player, avoid obstacles, align with allies around you), and using a specified maximum deviation per frame try to gradually match the desired direction. In context steering, you have a predefined set of 8 movement direction, and every behavior returns two arrays - one array with a value how desirable that direction is,, and one danger vector - how much the behavior wants to avoid that direction. You sum it and select the direction with highest value.

The advantage of context steering is that it is surprisingly good at walking around obstacles - as long as it's not something like a dead end, it usually walks around pretty naturally. The disadvantage is that it can still get stuck and end up shuffling at one place in some circumstances (which is an unavoidable problem with local navigation).

Why it doesn't work

Also, there is another huge issue, and one of the motivation for this question - the context steering is pretty resource heavy. I have implemented and use few behaviors - Avoid Obstacles, Separate (every unit has a List of nieghbourgs, populated by OnTriggerEnter, so that is not an issue), Seek and Flee. Out of these, Avoid Obstacles is the one that gives me the most trouble, because to reliably work, it needs to send a raycast in every one of the 8 directions every few frames, to figure out the danger map. And if you need around 100s of enemies to do this at the same time, it does not work.

And then there is the next issue of navigation in enclosed spaces. Steering behaviors are awesome at avoiding a boulder or a lamplight here and there, but will not get you through a tunnel. And a few weeks ago, my team has come up to me with this. Hah.

I did already run into issues of pathfinding in previous levels, where we needed a reliable AI to find a path to the players, and it works like this: It uses A* Pathfinding Project and a special PathfindSeekContextSteeringBehavior, that works similar to normal Seek, but instead of seeking a player, it's trying to follow a path.

And that is where everything basically fell apart, and why I think I need a new approach. Because this does not scale well. My first approach was to calculate a path, ask every nieghbourg whether he needs the same path and is close enough to use it, and then follow the path.

Following the path turned out to be harder than it looks - simply seeking to the next point and going to the next if close enough looked awfull and units got stuck dancing around one point. So i tried to figure out how to pick the furthest visible point on the grid graph - by... Raycasting from the end of the path and stopping at the first visible point... Which was a terrible idea, and after spending few hours writing the code and running the game, I was greeted with a whole 3 FPS because apparently, making 8+30 raycasts per frame per unit for 50+ units is not really a good idea.

But that is where I am now. Seeking the paht point by point with a large enough radius that sends you tot he next point kind of works, but looks awfull. And runs awfull.

So, to sum it up - I have an architecture Context Steering Behaviors with A* Pathfinding, and problems with scale - calculating path for 50+ of units, and raycasting 8 raycasts every frame to avoid obstacles per unit simply does not scale, but I need a scaleable solution.

What now?

And this is where I need your help. I've spent long time trying to google for tutorials, look at how others do AI, but never found what I was looking for. Never found a scalable solution for topdown shooter games that would look good, and most importantly - work for 100+ of units. There are several keywords I have found that I think could help me, but looked too math-heavy and difficult to implement that I'd rather ask for experience of other people, before I go into that rabbit hole. Which leads me to

The Brainstorm

I'm looking for someone I can talk things through, or terms to google, ideas to try out, architecture or patters that could work for this. Here are the possible solutions I came up with, but all of them require an overhaul of almost everything, and I'd love to talk it through with someone more experienced than me, a simple gamedev student, whether it makes sense and is a good way forward!

First topic I found are RVO - Reciproical Velocity Obstacles. (Or it's variants, HVO, RVHO and who-knows-what.). For me, this is something that I tried reading through and figure out how it works, but couldn't wrap my mind about it. It's the "this is serious math with integrals and wierd symbols, that no one really has tutorials for" territory, as far as I've researched. I know I probably could figure it out, but I'm not sure whether it's worth it, and that's why I need someones opinion on this. Should I try implementing that? Will it be worth it, and will it scale? Or, is there a beter solution, such as...

Getting rid of local navigation - This is a solution that I think would help with scalability - do not figure out navigation locally per single unit, but group them up and work with them that way. I tried googling for solutions to this problem, but unfortunately could not find any. It's something I will need help with, in pointing in the right direction. Anyone knows how to make something like this work?

Another solution woult be to get rid of Astar grid, and get a proper minimized navmesh. During my time on uni I saw a talk about how to reduce a navigation grid (which I use now) into as few nodes as possible, while still making it possible to use it for Astar pathfinding. Most of the implementations I've found for unity however a) do not use 2D Physics, and b) the paths look wall-huggingly awfull. Both of those points would probably be solvable, given a little bit of thought and time, but the question is - will it help? Will reducing the grid-graph for A* into a minimized navmesh and getting rid of local navigation solve the scalability and path-ugliness issue? And how should I follow the path? Can I get rid of local obstacle avoidance and rely on the graph? This is something I need help with, anyone tried it out?

The Conclusion

So, this turned out longer than I anticipated. If anyone made it this far, I thank you, and if you have anything that could help me, be it a hint, keyword to look for, paper to read, or to simply tell me that I'm overthinking it, please let me know. I would love to chat with anyone about this eithter here in the comments, or in a chat, because it's something I like to talk about and - it's always better to brainstorm with more people. Feel free to reply or contact me even if you do not have answers for my questions, want to ask more about my experience to know what to avoid, or anything really. And if you are a developer working on a 2D topdown sprite-based game, please let me know what you are working on, I would love to talk and learn about your workflow!

The tl;dr

I am working on an AI for a topdown shooter game, and I need to figure out architecture for the navigation of 100+ zombie-like swarming units supported by ranged enemies. It needs to look natural while moving, and be able to find player in a maze or in open space, while still being scaleable. What architecture could work for this? Right now, I use Context Steering Behaviors with A* on per-unt base, but it is not scaleable above 50+ units. If you can spare the time, I have some ideas I need help with in The Brainstorm section, and I would appreciate any kind of help, keywords or papers or ideas to look at ^^.

Thank you!

submitted by /u/Mikina
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Looking for some advice on making a browser game/portfolio

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 08:09 AM PST

Hi,

I am a Python programmer that recently started gamedev !

I am looking into making a game available online on a personal website I have seen this amazing portfolio/game: https://bruno-simon.com/

I was looking into doing something similar would it be possible to make a game in Unity and then implement it in a website seamlessly ?

any advice is welcomed !

submitted by /u/Firetwice
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Something different: How NOT to make a text adventure game?

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 11:51 AM PST

I've seen a lot of questions and posts on Reddit about the things you should do when making a text adventure, but what I haven't seen is posts asking the opposite: what to avoid. You should be as specific as possible, but the topics can range from technical aspects (programming languages, methods of data storage, paradigms of programming) to more general aspects. So please, shoot away.

submitted by /u/Emergency-Layer8132
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The Chinese market for game devs

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 02:05 AM PST

Hey Everyone!

Last year, I published my master's thesis on how indie devs have gotten into the Chinese market.

https://digitaldisaster.se/research/f/how-indie-games-can-find-success-in-the-chinese-market-in-2021

Friday, I published my first blog post based on my year of research. Because of the large scope of the content, I had to make this into 2 parts. The first part focuses on a more general approach related to publishers and includes all platforms. However, Part 2 (I will post this at the end of the month), will relate to special things PC devs are able to do with the use of Steam/Epic.

I fully intend on making more industry research articles in the future. Please, by all means, give me your full critique and if you have personal experiences with the market, I would love to hear them.

Thanks for your time!

submitted by /u/mwagner1385
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Laptop Advice

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 11:18 AM PST

Hi guys, I'm an indie dev from Turkey. My system is too laggy and its annoying me. In my county, computers are too expensive because of extremely high taxes and our currency having low value. Imagine buying a $1000 computer for $15000. So I'm thinking of buying an used low budget laptop. Is 8gb ram, 7-8th i5 or i7, GTX 1050 enough? Please write your specs and experience my low budget brothers! :D

submitted by /u/Vuthax
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How do you usually go about balancing skills, equimpent etc. in rpg-like games?

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 06:46 AM PST

I'm in the process of creating a fully procedurally generated game - new enemies stats are determined on players level, equipment dropped from them will also be scaled accordingly. While implementing all of this seems like a challenge, I'm more afraid of another thing - balancing.

Do you simply spend hours testing and tweaking the numbers and formulas till they work out? Do you know any good videos / articles regarding this topic? I'm not afraid of math, since they most likely will be math heavy

submitted by /u/matbiz01
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Godot Tutorial: Xbox controller auto-detection and dynamic UI controls

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 08:05 AM PST

submitted by /u/myrealityde
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How to make a climbing mechanic?

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 09:55 AM PST

I know this is an engine specific question and this community is for more general questions. But I'm asking just for what logic to use to do this. Like I think the basic concept is the same everywhere and only the physical code is different for different engines. I tried asking at r/godot but the suggestions there were not quite effective. So I ask here.

Thank you for your answers.

PS : sorry for bad English :/

submitted by /u/Code_Monster
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Free assets mostly for VN's (links in comments)

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 09:42 AM PST

Hello to all, i'm a 3D artist and create background items in my free time and want to share them, they are mostly created for daz 3D to render images for Visual novels, i do not recomend importing them into game engines because normals are not calculated and will look wierd, if your game engine can ignore normals in some way then there is a possibility to import them, everything on the site is created by me and are FREE to download and use by anyone who finds them useful :)

Free3DCG - where i upload my 3D models ( sorry for the advertisment )
How to import into DAZ 3D - this is a small tutorial i've created on how to import my models into DAZ 3D.
Patreon - if you enjoy my work and want to buy me a cup of coffee.

submitted by /u/MCI_Frostbite
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I need your help

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 09:17 AM PST

Hello guys,

I'm new here and I'm 18. And I'm really tired of procrastinate.

I'm studying GameDev and I really want to start doing my own game, by myself.

I was thinking about doing a RPG Pokemon type game for PC, with PixelArt or 3d (I'm still not sure), and I was wondering, would you guys prefer a Survival type of game, or a casual one? (like Stardew Valley for example).

Thanks for your time, if you want to give any tip or to ask me anything, I'll try to answer.

Thank you so much!

(sorry for my bad english)

submitted by /u/XxCoelhoEX
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Why you are doing 2d platformers?

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 12:19 PM PST

Hi guys maybe i am stipud but i dont understand why so many indie developers make so much 2d platformers. Its old genre and its boring to play. Do this games make a lot of cash? I think that in 2021 people prefer 3d to 2d. Please explain me

submitted by /u/HelloTeacher1
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Controlling animation quality through streaming

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 12:13 PM PST

submitted by /u/zeno490
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What are some good practices for getting the most out of your colors?

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 11:57 AM PST

I hope the title isn't too confusing! I'm using Substance Painter to texture/color my environment assets right now, and while I have the color palette mostly right, I'm getting different brightness and saturation values between programs.

My workflow is Blender -> Substance -> Back to Blender -> UE4

What are some practices I can use to ensure my colors/values stay consistent through each program?

submitted by /u/Nightfallkitten
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The binding of Isaac VS OOP

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 08:08 AM PST

Hi, I'm a computer science student with a good knowledge of Java and C.
I was watching/playing TBOI and I was thinking about how could I implement/write a game like this.

As a OO programmer, my first thought is to make a class of every item since they have different effects.

I mean, items like pills are easier because they have X parameters in the constructor where X is the number of "Isaac" stats, so if you create a pill with Health Up = 0, it doesn't count while if DMG up= 2, it adds it to Isaac.

But how about pills that have special effects like farts or full health?

Do you have to create a class that extends Pills and change it's effect on use?
It's the same kind of question that I've asked myself when I tried to recreate pokemon. How would I say that a certain move not only has X damage with Y precision but it has a chance to burn or it has more chance if it rains?

I hope you get what I'm trying to say
Thanks and sorry to bother you for this.

submitted by /u/MasterDrake97
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Some questions about graphics in a 2D isometric game (engine)

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 11:51 AM PST

Hey there fellas I'm currently working on a game + engine (mostly from scratch) that is 2D-isometric, sort of like Bastion. I'm using SDL2. I have a very barebones working prototype with physics and everything, but I have some questions about the graphics side:

If I want to add lighting effects and shaders, is there a way to do this directly in SDL, or do I need to look into a graphics library? I'm currently considering Vulkan because it seems to be the only cross platform library although I wish OpenGL was still more of an option because Vulkan takes a lot of code writing to get going and doesn't seem as well documented as OpenGL (and I've used OpenGL a bit in the past). I was also looking into if there are any wrappers that hide away the finer details of Vulkan since I don't think I need that level of optimization.
For depth perception/sprite layers, I am torn between two approaches. The first one is to assign sprites a priority based on their coordinates and sort the sprites every time I am about to render them, and the other one is to just do everything in 3D which would take care of the sprite ordering. Obviously if I need 3D for lighting effects and shaders, then this one becomes a no brainer.

And of course any good resources on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

I'm sure there's going to be the issue of "why are you making an engine instead of using Unreal or Unity" — it's a learning experience for me and I'm looking to get a better understanding of how things work under the hood. I'm not bound by a release date or doing this for a living, so for my purposes I'm not interested in using an engine that already exists.

submitted by /u/Dry-Shoulder-3438
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Helpful keyboard shortcuts that every game dev should know

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 11:44 AM PST

submitted by /u/josephmbustamante
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Modern day equivalent of Flash? (Teaching a kid how to code, and he's growing out of Scratch.)

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 11:23 AM PST

When I was a kid, I learned how to make games using Macromedia flash (later adobe) and it was the perfect balance between coding/click and drag/drawing. You could make custom art, and then write code to control it. I really feel like I wouldn't have learned to code without Flash.

Currently I'm teaching my partner's little brother how to make games. I started by teaching him scratch, so he could wrap his head around thinking logically, without the confusion of code. He's been doing super well, and has made some fairly complicated games in there (copycats of RPGs, Doodle jump, platformers)

But he really wants to learn how to write actual code to make games. I'm trying to figure out what the best game development platform is for a kid - and I was hoping that maybe there was a new sort of modern day equivalent to Flash that let you code, but also wasn't PURELY code (like using python with PyGame)

submitted by /u/AustinWitherspoon
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Hi there! I need help with a game I'm developing in Unity. Is there a common bug about the HDRP package that causes lots of RenderTexture memory usage? Please, read it for more info

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 07:25 AM PST

My game uses the HDRP package, and I have a problem with the RenderTextures memory usage since it uses ~550MB with no aparent reason (I am pretty sure that I don't have so much of them to produce such an inmense use of memory).

The names of that RenderTextures (displayed by the Unity Memory Analyzer) seemed to point out at postprocessing effects, so I reduced/quited all possible settings in the HDRP Asset, disabled all volumes to avoid postprocessing, etc. By doing all those things I was able to reduce only the memory usage by 100MB, but I have more than 400MB left, while I have aparently set all rendering settings to minimum.

I have also searched in the package code and it seems that the increase of memory is caused by RenderTexture.Alloc(...) calls, which would have sense if I had lots of them, but just in the main menu I have 399MB of Render Textures usage, so I think there is still something wrong with it.

I was wondering if there is any known bug related to this, that in some way forces HDRP to alloc the RenderTextures with more memory than the asset has set, or if there is another way I am missing of reducing RenderTextures memory usage (related to HDRP or not).

Thank you for reading and have a nice day ;)

submitted by /u/georgemadman2703
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Can making hyper casual mobile games a good start for part time game developers?

Posted: 18 Jan 2021 10:57 AM PST

Due to lack of time, I want to start to develop simple games part time. For that, will entering hyper casual mobile game market be a good idea also considering I would mostly rely on free marketing tactics or very less budget. What are your views regarding this?

submitted by /u/hidden_legend5stars
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Breaking News

Programming29

Monday, January 18, 2021

Hey guys ! I make Royalty-Free Music, and here's a playlist that gathers all my Retro-Gaming tracks. They're all free to use, even in commercial projects ! Feel free to use them in your games !

Hey guys ! I make Royalty-Free Music, and here's a playlist that gathers all my Retro-Gaming tracks. They're all free to use, even in commercial projects ! Feel free to use them in your games !

What I Need

What I Have

Why it doesn't work

What now?

The Brainstorm

The Conclusion

The tl;dr

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