Since I completely forgot about the summer jam, I was kinda taken by surprise when it came up. I scrambled around and decided to try and remake the game I made in the first summer jam, except hopefully better and not pixel-art.
I whiped up some tilesets with normal maps (they're far from perfect).
I got the player's movement figured out with jump, double jump and the megaman-esque "only three shots at a time". The shots on the original game had some weird "inaccuracy", where it doesn't fly in a straight line but rather it kinda floats around, so I recreated that. I also have the shots requiring mana and a mana regeration system.
I have the system in place for the witch taking damage with a knockback force dependant on a strength, read from a damaging component that can be added to anything.
And lastly some basic pickups to restore mana and hp.
I'm pretty happy with the turnout so far BUT I'm about to move so that's pretty much as far as I could get. In short, I'm fairly sure I won't be making it to submission. Either way, I'll post the tileset when I get it cleaned up.
@ZomB I dropped that sound file into animate and stretched the keys out and it kinda synchs up. Unfortunately, I won't have time to do the mouth animations. I only spent maybe 20 minutes on the banner to be a part of the crowd anyway lol Either way, good work.
@Spring My progress is almost non-existent. Ive only had 4 development sessions, two of which I recorded to be a sudo-tutorial series. There's a lot of complaints in the UE4 community about there not being any c++ tutorials (almost all of the tutorials are for the visual scripting) and there's next to nothing for 2D. So, like 3 birds with one stone. Hopefully, IllI get something playable.
Oh, man. I completely forgot about this. I didn't even think of anything or do up any art work, but I might still try something that is in a super tiny scope. Good luck guys!
I usually start with a simple idea and build a prototype, using stand-in visuals. If the game is fun to play with blocks, then it's a fun game. I usually get a lot of the basics done in that way (pickups, enemy AI, interactives, UI, Hud etc). I then fork the project and try some different things with artistic aesthetics. As spring said, mixing art styles is painfully obvious. Also, I've noticed that when I start projects with art first, I waste a lot of time doing things that don't translate well into game assets or have no point in a game environment. But yeah, KISS it: keep it simple, stupid
I've bounced around a lot. Flash, unity, game maker, godot and ultimately settled on unreal 4. Great visual tools, easy to build custom tools, a easy to use material editor to make shaders with ease, a particle editor that you can get lost in forever, visual scripting (blueprints) for prototyping, editor and platform profiling for performance and the full power of c++. I probably won't use anything else. I even use it for rendering my silly drawings.
@medicine Thanks, that's better than what I did initially lol Yeah, I have problems when I'm doing forum stuff on my phone in the body directly too, so I dunno.
@spring You're music is always good. Unfortunately, it meshes best with pixel games and I don't do very well in that area, so I haven't been able to use ''em :/
@spring I'm really sorry, I didn't even pay attention to that video. IGN is pretty gross lol I'm sure you'd set a different vibe, your awesome music alone would set you apart. The point was just to see their mechanics and how they bridged rpg and platformer.
@xcom That's probably off topic but I'll bite lol
As for game engines, I've done a good deal of research and dabbled in quite a few engines to find the best one for me. I'll be honest, though... I haven't really paid a lot of attention to licensing.
As for simple to use, dulsi hit it on the head. If it's overly simple to use, then it's probably going to come with heavy restraints.
I'll throw out the two I like the most, based on my personal experience and that I know are open-source (MIT)
Godot
As dulsi also mentioned, godot is a great engine and it's relatively simple to use.
Pros:
I'm sure there's tutorials but even without those, there's built in, off-line documentation that conveniently resides in the script editor tab, so it's pretty easy to figure out what you need.
It's incredibly lightweight, responsive and relatively quick to prototype.
You can change any aspect of the engine itself and the framework code is well organized and easy to understand.
Package sizes are probably the smallest I've ever dealt with, outside of flash-based engine.
It has python support, which reall expands on what's possible!
Cons:
GDscript (the native scripting system) has an odd tabbing system that goes against the grain with how most other coding languages are, and you have to use it.
Also with GDscript, you can't use other code editors (to my knowledge) and copy/paste isn't really an option because you have to go through and tab it all out...
Using mono or c is just... Unstable at best, but it's optional.
I had an unreasonable amount of problems with android ports, some of which I was never able to solve.
There's an inconvenient terminal that runs along side godot UI that kind of interferes with alt+tab flows.
Unreal
I'm still fairly new to this one but I absolutely love it and it's what I use on a regular basis for 2D.
Pros:
The blueprint system is incredibly easy to use and debug, because you can visually trace where your code is running to.
Like godot, you can change any aspect of the engine itself.
You can easily make beautiful particles, shaders, fog, occlusions, etc by just clicking on stuff and dragging sliders around.
Making HUD, UI and dialogues with their umg system has been easier than any other engine I've ever used.
It's getting a lot of and frequent optimization and compatibility updates, which comes down-wind from their tried and tested fortnite work.
Cons:
It's not royalty free! (I think it's fair, though, if that counts for anything)
They don't actively add new paper2d (their 2d system) features. Even their tilemap system says "expirimental", though it's fully functional.
Blueprints can get messy if you don't maintain a "neat" workflow and making some math formulas in blueprints can be annoying compared to just typing it out.
If you decide to use the C++ method, it can get complicated and it's not really easy to figure out what goes where (even if you already know C++).
Package sizes tend to be bigger than if it were on a native 2D engine.
For another discussion, I made a little video comparing how quick and easy it is to get a block moving on the screen on Unreal vs Gamemaker. I'll leave that here so you can see what I'm talking about.
Yeah, I'm going to commercialize my game, yes. It's just not a part of a "get rich quick" scheme nor do I have expectations or anything crazy. But yeah, I think it's one of those things where it costs pride to get pride? I dunno.
Seriously, check out child of light. It has some neato innovation and it certainly stands out. The only thing I didn't really care for is the dialogue is all rhymes, so they tend to make some cringeworthy stretches to make it happen. It can totally be done, it's just a lot of thinking outside the box, and it's the only game I know of that's in line with what you have in mind. There's so many things you could do with that and it doesn't necessarily need to be turned based or anything but I do like the idea of isolated battles. Maybe make it like the roaming map enemies in mario where you get pulled into a room where you gotta beat the hammer bros or something. That'd give plenty of opportunities to apply dialogue to typical platformer dealios. I dunno, you're creative and you'll figure something out, I'm sure.
Here's a link to a review, I think it might get some wheels turning!
Since I completely forgot about the summer jam, I was kinda taken by surprise when it came up. I scrambled around and decided to try and remake the game I made in the first summer jam, except hopefully better and not pixel-art.
I whiped up some tilesets with normal maps (they're far from perfect).
I got the player's movement figured out with jump, double jump and the megaman-esque "only three shots at a time". The shots on the original game had some weird "inaccuracy", where it doesn't fly in a straight line but rather it kinda floats around, so I recreated that. I also have the shots requiring mana and a mana regeration system.
I have the system in place for the witch taking damage with a knockback force dependant on a strength, read from a damaging component that can be added to anything.
And lastly some basic pickups to restore mana and hp.
I'm pretty happy with the turnout so far BUT I'm about to move so that's pretty much as far as I could get. In short, I'm fairly sure I won't be making it to submission. Either way, I'll post the tileset when I get it cleaned up.
https://youtu.be/kBhEvydDJX0
EDIT:The game isn't actually laggy, I just accidently recorded at 30fps instead of 60.
@Chaser That gif is pretty slick, dude!
@ZomB I dropped that sound file into animate and stretched the keys out and it kinda synchs up. Unfortunately, I won't have time to do the mouth animations. I only spent maybe 20 minutes on the banner to be a part of the crowd anyway lol Either way, good work.
@Spring My progress is almost non-existent. Ive only had 4 development sessions, two of which I recorded to be a sudo-tutorial series. There's a lot of complaints in the UE4 community about there not being any c++ tutorials (almost all of the tutorials are for the visual scripting) and there's next to nothing for 2D. So, like 3 birds with one stone. Hopefully, IllI get something playable.
Haha, thanks guys.
@Chaser I just did it on my phone, through "choose file" and "upload". I haven't been able to do anything on oga via desktop firefox :/
I decided to slop together my own banner!
Oh, man. I completely forgot about this. I didn't even think of anything or do up any art work, but I might still try something that is in a super tiny scope. Good luck guys!
I usually start with a simple idea and build a prototype, using stand-in visuals. If the game is fun to play with blocks, then it's a fun game. I usually get a lot of the basics done in that way (pickups, enemy AI, interactives, UI, Hud etc). I then fork the project and try some different things with artistic aesthetics. As spring said, mixing art styles is painfully obvious. Also, I've noticed that when I start projects with art first, I waste a lot of time doing things that don't translate well into game assets or have no point in a game environment. But yeah, KISS it: keep it simple, stupid
I've bounced around a lot. Flash, unity, game maker, godot and ultimately settled on unreal 4. Great visual tools, easy to build custom tools, a easy to use material editor to make shaders with ease, a particle editor that you can get lost in forever, visual scripting (blueprints) for prototyping, editor and platform profiling for performance and the full power of c++. I probably won't use anything else. I even use it for rendering my silly drawings.
@medicine Thanks, that's better than what I did initially lol Yeah, I have problems when I'm doing forum stuff on my phone in the body directly too, so I dunno.
@spring You're music is always good. Unfortunately, it meshes best with pixel games and I don't do very well in that area, so I haven't been able to use ''em :/
@spring I'm really sorry, I didn't even pay attention to that video. IGN is pretty gross lol I'm sure you'd set a different vibe, your awesome music alone would set you apart. The point was just to see their mechanics and how they bridged rpg and platformer.
@xcom That's probably off topic but I'll bite lol
As for game engines, I've done a good deal of research and dabbled in quite a few engines to find the best one for me. I'll be honest, though... I haven't really paid a lot of attention to licensing.
As for simple to use, dulsi hit it on the head. If it's overly simple to use, then it's probably going to come with heavy restraints.
I'll throw out the two I like the most, based on my personal experience and that I know are open-source (MIT)
Godot
As dulsi also mentioned, godot is a great engine and it's relatively simple to use.
Pros:
Cons:
Unreal
I'm still fairly new to this one but I absolutely love it and it's what I use on a regular basis for 2D.
Pros:
Cons:
For another discussion, I made a little video comparing how quick and easy it is to get a block moving on the screen on Unreal vs Gamemaker. I'll leave that here so you can see what I'm talking about.
https://youtu.be/eyXoTj70tAQ
edit:I don't know what happened to my spacing, so I'm sorry for the wall of text.
Yeah, I'm going to commercialize my game, yes. It's just not a part of a "get rich quick" scheme nor do I have expectations or anything crazy. But yeah, I think it's one of those things where it costs pride to get pride? I dunno.
Seriously, check out child of light. It has some neato innovation and it certainly stands out. The only thing I didn't really care for is the dialogue is all rhymes, so they tend to make some cringeworthy stretches to make it happen. It can totally be done, it's just a lot of thinking outside the box, and it's the only game I know of that's in line with what you have in mind. There's so many things you could do with that and it doesn't necessarily need to be turned based or anything but I do like the idea of isolated battles. Maybe make it like the roaming map enemies in mario where you get pulled into a room where you gotta beat the hammer bros or something. That'd give plenty of opportunities to apply dialogue to typical platformer dealios. I dunno, you're creative and you'll figure something out, I'm sure.
Here's a link to a review, I think it might get some wheels turning!
https://youtu.be/DNOfWMBTJDk
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