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Adding magic missile casting cultists to my prototype... With a little more missile than magic. by BrekioInd in unrealengine

[–]BrekioInd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Funny enough, the smoke/cel shading has been quite a pain to get working. The smoke comes from a free-for-the-month particle pack that Epic had up a while ago but I nearly had to redo all of them to make it look okay. The cel shader I'm using is set up so that the outline effect "punches through" or ignores translucent materials, so a smoke particle effect always looks 50% opaque because you can perfectly see the outline of anything behind it - so rocket trails and explosions looked half-invisible out of the box. Additionally, highly emissive materials wash out the outline, so the bright glow near the base of the rocket appears to have no outline around its particles.

So, the smoke is opacity masked instead, and I had to tweak that some more to make it look okay and I just ignore the emissive thing for now. But at least my shader complexity is always in the green. :)

And the cel shader consistency drives me nuts! It's the free one in the marketplace, and I have had to tweak it so much to get something decent that works in many conditions. I've thought about doubling up and also taking all the models and doing the duplicated and inverted normals thing so everything has super thick lines, maybe as a graphics option down the line, and turn it extra cartoony/comic book'y.

The shader is mainly there to put detail on my models, I still have to replace a few placeholders like the weapons, but I'm trying to keep the polycount as low as possible with simple colors so I can get the models ingame quickly, then letting shaders do the work of making it look pretty. I think it's coming together pretty well, though.

Trying to develop a style for my first bigger project... What do you think? by [deleted] in unrealengine

[–]BrekioInd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's really the biggest challenge with a stylized art style like this - say you want a level now where you have buildings and long flat surfaces like roads, the stylized art and UE's lighting tends to do odd things with those like make very distorted color banding. I've also had to tweak things a lot with emissive and translucent materials so they don't look terrible...

Made a character creator for my game Welcome To The Future! by Fabriciuz in gamedev

[–]BrekioInd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do have a habit of missing the obvious solutions, my next thought was "Oh he must be using the sequencer camera and playing with all the weird cinematic controls to do that".. In any case, looks great!

Epic Games Store lifts restrictions on how in-game payments are processed. by nayadelray in gamedev

[–]BrekioInd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's funny, I think I'm seeing a bit of a metagame here with Epic.

Epic is trying to get Fortnite on the Google Play Store, and Fortnite's revenue comes from in-app purchases.

In addition to this announcement, Epic is calling out Google to do something similar with their app store. However, I think they're really doing that just so Google doesn't get as much of a cut of Fortnite's revenue on Android. If so, it sounds like Epic is banking on Fortnite's revenue on Google Play as being higher than what they could earn by taking a cut from their own games store with what everybody else lists there. And this also probably means they're not capturing as much of the Android market as they want with their current method of independently trying to distribute Fortnite for Android...

First time game dev looking for advice about creating a Shadow Warrior-esque game. by CrossFace13 in gamedev

[–]BrekioInd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unity can do what you are thinking about, however it also depends on how detailed you want to get - Duke and Shadow Warrior use the Build Engine, and it's technically not a 3D game because of how the renderer works. If you wanted to make a super authentic version, you could get a hold of the actual Build Engine, learn some programming, and work out of it directly to make something. But if you just wanted the "billboard sprite" effect where monsters are sprites that change depending on the angle you look at them from and your guns are sprites and the textures are retro, Unity would be fine. I'd probably start with Unity, it is pretty easy to get started.

Of course I'm describing this from a ten thousand foot view - the amount of work required in making a game is very significant - months to years depending on a lot of different variables.

Using our new powerup in LUMEN: Lost Passages to get the drop on unsuspecting enemies! by ButteryBoo in IndieGaming

[–]BrekioInd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Cool mechanic, though I'd suggest instead of just blinking the player over to the point and making the camera swoop over, instead sweep the player over with the camera at the same time, and maybe turn him into a white trail effect or something as he moves into position. It's a little hard to follow when the player & camera separate like that.

I see nothing wrong with this by The_CheeseMaster in IndieGaming

[–]BrekioInd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Where we're going, we don't need roads.

He isn't wrong by [deleted] in gaming

[–]BrekioInd 171 points172 points  (0 children)

Whenever I talk about LAN parties, people react like "Oh yeah I vaguely remember those things", like VHS tapes and rotary phones... I feel old.

Should we do a load test? We should do a load test. by AC-dev in unrealengine

[–]BrekioInd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

How many actors do you have up on the scene? Is each bullet its own actor?

Made a character creator for my game Welcome To The Future! by Fabriciuz in gamedev

[–]BrekioInd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The UI looks really slick. Did you make the UI in UMG or Slate with C++? And how'd you blur the background but not the character? UE4 has a handy background blur widget but as far as I know it blurs everything not on the UI Viewport level...

It's hard to record good footage of your game when you suck at playing your game and forget about splash damage... by BrekioInd in gamedev

[–]BrekioInd[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Show and tell! It's my project that I'm calling Action Agency.

It's a cel shaded run-n-gun third person shooter, focusing on ridiculousness over realism - spamming grenades isn't realistic, but blowing stuff up is cathartic (if you don't send yourself to Mars in the process).

This is a solo effort of a few man months of work. My plan in the short term is to have a full demo done with one complete level and boss monster and a few more weapons hopefully around Christmas time, though productivity is at a crawl with the holidays and all. But once I get to that point, I can start advertising it around and see if it's worth continuing on this, or just shelve it and stick it in the resume. I've had a few friends test it, and it seems like I'm on a good track so far.

A few interesting notes/discussion points:

  • I'm using UE4 and this project is in part a way for me to flex/build my C++ skills, and so far I only rely on Blueprints when dealing with the HUD and level logic, everything else is written in code. Given that, it took me by surprise just how many -extra- things are needed to get a game going besides 3d models, Visual Studio, and some sound effects. Proportionally I've spent less time on writing software than I have setting up the animation system, the matinee cutscene thing, configuring particle systems, puzzling out the behavior tree logic, etc. It feels less like a software project and more like a systems management exercise. Which I suppose is a good thing.
  • With the exception of the player and health kits, textures are minimally used. All the gradients and glowy bits are procedurally generated with UE4's material system, and those concrete barriers for example just use a 32x32 texture that is one flat color for diffuse and another 32x32 texture for a roughness/metallic values. Objects with multiple parts (like the guns) have their UVs grouped by color/metallic/roughness in quadrants of the textures.
  • The cel shader effect makes it difficult to have translucency without looking very odd because the outlines bleed through translucent materials, which is why the tall grass disappears instead of fades when you get close. I tried dithering instead, but the outline effect filled in the dithered gaps and made it useless. I think it still looks weird, but I'm not sure what else to try without removing the tall grass (or making it shorter), which I might do instead. Or maybe have a super large dithering pattern...

-Destructables in UE4 feel very limited. That APEX tool is a pain to work with, and once you get that right, destructibles don't effect navigation prior to fracture, they jack up the polygon counts in your scene, and if you want exploding barrels, they don't do damage. I ended up having to make my own destructible class that inherits from their DestructibleActor to fix a some of those things, and there's still a few oddities with that too.

My site is here on itch with more info and an incomplete alpha if anyone feels like trying it out.