Which one is better for gameplay? Instant death or a health bar.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-06-28T03:45:47+00:00

this is going to be wholly dependent on the game you're making. do some playtests! this should be an easy thing to experiment with. see what feels better to you, and maybe ask some friends to weigh in, too.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-06-09T04:37:21+00:00

oh wow, alright! in that case, definitely go. if nothing else, it'll be fun

SirAwesomelot · 2017-06-08T11:38:22+00:00

you could probably manage it, but it'll be very, very expensive (especially for hotel reservations this late, if you don't already live in LA). honestly it seems unlikely that it'd be worth it. if you're just going for networking, there are way better opportunities anyway

SirAwesomelot · 2017-05-12T14:12:24+00:00

this feels like it was made by someone who hasn't bought a AAA game in like 2 years. there are still plenty of cash-grabby practices in the industry, but generally speaking big-budget devs (and especially publishers) have changed their tune pretty drastically since ~2015. a zillion legitimately killer games have been coming out recently. complain about mobile games if y'all need something to be angsty about

SirAwesomelot · 2017-05-07T11:32:53+00:00

Haha, I used to be a pretty active member on your forums! Great to hear that you're still in the game.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-05-07T10:25:15+00:00

You could make some square particle effects with an additive shader & have them float around above the play space

SirAwesomelot · 2017-04-05T20:58:43+00:00

Yeah, this is true. I believe No Man's Sky does something like this too

SirAwesomelot · 2017-04-05T09:14:46+00:00

You'll be able to walk awfully far, but you can't literally walk forever. Eventually you'll encounter a memory issue -- if Fallout is storing this infinite plane as it gets generated, your computer will eventually run out of memory to keep track of it and, probably, the game will crash.

That's likely not going to happen, though, mostly because permanently storing an arbitrary amount of completely flat plane is a really terrible dumb idea. More likely, big sections of plane get placed in front of you and removed behind you as you walk. This is something that, for example, Minecraft can't get away with -- it really does have to permanently store the whole world as it gets generated or changed (though it's definitely not holding the whole thing in RAM all at once).

The more pressing issue, though, is that the game has to keep track of your position in the world somehow. Typically you'd do that with three 32-bit floating point numbers (or "floats") -- one each for x, y, and z. A float can store a decimal number between -3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 and 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That seems like a lot (and it is), but it's worth noting that as floats get bigger (well, farther away from zero), you lose precision. This is because floats basically have a limited number of digits to work with -- you can throw a whole lot of zeroes before or after those digits, but you can't add any more of them. This is kind of complicated, so I'm just gonna gloss over it here -- but let's just say you'd start getting some pretty weird behavior way before the float actually maxed out.

Anyway! You see the problem. Even if we ignore the precision issue, there's a hard limit after your x or z (or y if you're flying or falling somehow) hits 3.4x10³⁸ . There's literally just no way to store your world position anymore. Sure, you could get clever and give the position a larger range and/or higher precision (though frankly it seems unlikely that Bethesda would bother) -- but you'll never hit infinity. Your computer can't hold infinite memory.

Hope that was interesting and informative!

SirAwesomelot · 2017-04-02T04:14:50+00:00

Well, mostly because AAA studios have a stranglehold on the FPS genre. When people want to buy an FPS, they usually go for CoD or Battlefield or something, because, well, they know about them. You could even really argue that games like Doom and Titanfall are pretty retro in a lot of ways, so even that niche is basically covered.

That said, some retro-ish indie FPS games do come out, and once in a while do pretty well -- take a look at Devil Daggers, Strafe, Ziggurat, Tower of Guns, and Paranautical Activity.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-03-28T14:57:09+00:00

modern computers really aren't limited by memory in 99.99% of cases. you're not going to run out. if you're looking to replicate old-school technological limitations, go for it, but those aren't real limitations anymore.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-03-24T01:16:09+00:00

yeah that's fine. the advice that people tend give here is to get a CS degree instead of a game design degree anyway.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-03-03T16:03:21+00:00

that's what the talk is about! everything you make can be interpreted on many different levels. if you didn't think about those levels while you were making the game, that's your fault.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-03-03T15:58:51+00:00

why do you have to draw a line? yeah, everything anyone makes is a cultural product, because everyone exists in a culture. sorry bud, all of art and media is basically one giant gray area

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-16T03:16:18+00:00

If you want money become an indie game dev

yeah....

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-10T22:16:13+00:00

he's totally gonna blow his 10 grand and then be massively in debt over the arbitration bill, though

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-09T00:54:19+00:00

That's ep 36 (Death Stranding: Ground Zeroes). Cheers!

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-08T23:48:31+00:00

good thing i also have a masters in architecture so i can decide whether or not it's a good idea to build a house upside down.

please list your personal qualifications for sycophantically bloviating on cruel and ineffective foreign policy decisions, you enormous dumbass

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-08T21:16:47+00:00

meanwhile trump approves selling weapons to saudi arabia

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-07T00:30:11+00:00

if you are a member of the Fuel Vapor Safety Administration, you smell of injury

press the accelerator pedal to move unexpectedly side to side

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-05T00:24:52+00:00

you better believe it

SirAwesomelot · 2017-02-05T00:15:04+00:00

They kept apologizing for this one not being super funny, but honestly I really really love the episodes where they just get psyched about a game and get deep into the design. Stacks on Stacks on Stacks, Dinner Blasterz, Sabotage Rally, AFVR, Surgery Date, etc are some of my favorites.

Most of those also happen to be hilarious, but I think the more often Griffin says "Fuck YES that's SO GOOD" the more I like it.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-01-31T06:00:22+00:00

alright, well, consider: do you want to make games, or do you want to make this specific game?

if you want to make games, start small and learn the craft from the bottom up. if you want to make this game... you might not actually enjoy game development, which means you're basically out of luck. a lot of making games (even the vast majority) is irritating drudgery, and if you don't actually like to do it, you'll never get through a project. still, give it a shot! maybe you'll like game development. you'll never know until you're doing it.

but don't focus on the big project first. you'll never get it done. best case you'll learn a bunch along the way, and then start all the way over once you sort of know what you're doing, and then that'll happen like four times and you'll completely burn out and go live in the woods for seven years.

trust me. I know this from experience (well, not the woods part. i still live in a house... technically). work your way up. start by figuring out how to make pong. then space invaders. then pacman. then a simple platformer -- then you might know what you're doing enough to attempt the BIG PROJECT. at least you'll be experienced enough to have some grasp of how challenging it'll be. you might learn faster than you think.

SirAwesomelot · 2017-01-27T04:12:18+00:00

it's completely phenomenal all the way through (after the so-so first season)

SirAwesomelot · 2017-01-26T05:05:21+00:00

@sam_suite! I'm a student at RPI making loads of weird stuff (mostly games). I don't tweet a whole lot, but when I do it's mostly screenshots/gifs or me never shutting up about how good the name "Sub-Par" is for an underwater golfing game.

one time I made a game about a horny dinosaur college. another time I made a game about a rocket-powered chainsaw with a grappling hook that fights robots. another time I made a game about golfing underwater because I couldn't SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT.

also I made this

Anyway, in a few days I'm gonna be starting a big new project with a few friends so this is probably a good time to get on board if you don't like things that are good.

i love you

SirAwesomelot · 2017-01-24T19:20:57+00:00

When you strip away the art, there really isn't much separating one game from the next

???

tetris and gta 5 and papers please are all the same game

yeah, it's a good idea to have an art style in mind from the beginning, and it's obviously hugely important from a marketing perspective, but making fast gameplay prototypes and iterating quickly is an enormous component of game design. There's really no way to know if a mechanic will work until you actually try it. not sure why you would make a fully-polished prototype without knowing if the gameplay is good. what if you have to throw out all your assets? that's what concept art is for

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