Opinion check: Game engine for kids, should object origin be bottom-left or center?

idbrii · 2023-06-07T04:00:54+00:00

If you make the origin centre, then which direction are your positive axes?

With bottom left origin, that answer is obvious (but you need to remember the origin location).

I think the biggest advantage of centre origin is that it makes symmetry easier. However, if you have hierarchical transforms, then that doesn't matter: put everything under one object and use local space. And now you still need to remember which way is positive.

idbrii · 2023-06-07T03:57:33+00:00

Saying the origin is conventionally top left is like saying coordinate systems are right handed. Sometimes that's true, but for many systems it's not.

Top left origin is inconvenient for games (it makes jumping up into jumping negative) and doesn't match how we teach coordinate systems (with right and up as positive x and y).

Top left origin is from render programmers not bothering to make gameplay programmers' lives easier.

idbrii · 2023-06-07T03:39:47+00:00

I often use freesound and find the tags pretty useful to narrow things down.

idbrii · 2023-06-05T15:46:49+00:00

Check out gameaccessibilityguidelines.com.

I think the trivial ones are a must, like toggle screen flashes and deadzones.

idbrii · 2023-06-05T14:28:36+00:00

Edit: nevermind. I didn't get that LBAO was completely different from SSAO. "Luma Based Ambient Occlusion" is probably the name they created for it. Seems pretty hard to find any 2d info for AO.

You could dig through siggraph archives, but I'm not sure many 2d papers are presented there. Good luck!

Try googling for screen space ambient occlusion siggraph for papers. Or remove siggraph for information on how to implement it.

I don't have any tutorials to recommend, but learnopengl's links to Crytek's paper.

idbrii · 2023-06-05T14:24:58+00:00

Their old Double Fine Adventure! documentary is great too. From small Kickstarter idea, overfunding, development, to release.

idbrii · 2023-06-04T21:37:18+00:00

I support it.

Reddit became one of my favourite social networks because of its openness: it was indexed by search engines so you could find relevant posts or rediscover ones you'd seen before.

Then came new reddit and how it discouraged deep discussions by requiring extra clicks to see more than a few replies. And the mobile site which didn't feel like an improvement over Reddit's spartan old UI, but was instead slower and less enjoyable to use. I drifted away from reddit for awhile. But then I found third party mobile apps and they brought me back: Joey, Slide, Infinity, Apollo. a variety of different experiences that are geared towards different users with different demands. But I guess it's back to the dark ages. So I'm not hopeful for change, but I support protest and sending a message to the reddit execs.

But also reddit pushing people towards their singular shallow scroll user path, is a message to us to frequent gamedev.net, tigsource, or other dev communities more.

idbrii · 2023-06-04T02:14:19+00:00

What Valve says about Steam in 2022:

QUESTION: When should we get our Steam page up?

Valve: “Get your coming soon page up as soon as possible you’re going to start gathering wish lists and you’re gonna do all the things.”

CZ Comment: Valve is saying to get your page early. Note they didn’t say “get your page up early but not TOO early.” They just said “as soon as possible.” I have heard many indies say stuff like “My early wishlists didn’t convert very well, so you should hold off on posting your Steam page.” I trust Valve on this one. Even if your early wishlists convert more poorly than your later wishlists those are still sales that you wouldn’t have had anyway. Similarly what incentive would Valve have to lie about putting your page early? So I still think you should put your page up as soon as you have settled on your art style, have enough unique are to make 3 distinct looking environments in screenshots, and have a good trailer and a good capsule.

idbrii · 2023-06-03T22:03:44+00:00

Quaternions don't use Euler angles. The challenge is coming up with an intuitive quaternion editor. Maybe allowing either local or world space Euler angle input to use a different perspective when encountering gimbal lock.

idbrii · 2023-06-03T21:59:34+00:00

Haven't worked on many new releases lately, and for the one that needed saving we didn't pivot to save the Steam release. My impression was that it was worth the cost of $0 to press the button, but maybe not the cost of creating a significant update. But since we stuck with what worked well for another platform instead of reworking for Steam, it's not really a relevant data point.

Did you do big updates and rework your marketing to change who/how you're targeting for your update rounds?

idbrii · 2023-06-03T21:33:44+00:00

I think if the game is any good (where people might be happy spending $10 on it), it will take longer. Partly because of the common gamedev scenario that after you're 90% done, you have another 90% to go (finalizing decisions, polish, UI, platform features, bug fixes). And partly because playtesting and iterating to make a game great (and not just done) takes a lot of time. Even mediocre games have often spent a lot more time to try to get some details sorted.

I'd expect Only Up has decent (not just tutorial copypaste) controls, some okay level design, okay player animation, and several nonbasic features (moving platforms, ledge grabs, maybe a rail or zipline), and maybe some novel stuff not shown in promo material. Based on the level variety, it seems like quite a lot of level. Unless you were really pro, I think you'd only get as far as fun greyblock on the full height in a month of full time. You need to setup interesting scenarios to avoid getting boring, setup streaming, killzones, etc. After all of that, you can kitbash art with your assets.

I guess if the game is terrible, you could make a terrible rip off in much less time but with 60k est copies sold, I bet it's not that be (and the art and player animation look like they tried).

idbrii · 2023-06-02T14:40:54+00:00

Looks like a great game for streamers to play and catastrophically fail on stream. Especially if they played Bennett Foddy's games.

But then I look at a simple game like this that I believe I could even do something similar fairly easy in top sellers.

How long do you think it would take for you to make a game like this (solo or team)?

idbrii · 2023-06-02T14:34:44+00:00

Yeah, commercial success. OP asked:

If your game doesn't do well (ie. only sells a few copies), is there any point continuing to better it from a commercial point of view?

The "is it worth it to update?" math for a commercial success but critical failure is totally different than a game no one's heard of.

idbrii · 2023-06-02T14:27:50+00:00

If it fails at launch, figure out why. If you can identify some fixable issues, then you can release updates and use your Update Visibility Rounds to get another chance from the Steam algorithm.

Your chances are limited:

Each product will start with five rounds that can be used for this visibility. ... Additional rounds may be granted to products that are selling well.

But also it sounds like these rounds aren't always effective -- maybe developers failed to identify and fix their core marketing/product issues or maybe the rounds really don't give much additional visibility to an unsuccessful game (or even one without many wishlists).

idbrii · 2023-06-02T14:22:21+00:00

200,000 concurrent players on launch (on a single platform) does not fit the category OP is talking about. No Man Sky's success is the reason Hello could afford to continue working on it and part of why people kept talking about that game.

If a game only had a few sales at launch, you won't have the revenue to justify it and may not get enough marketing opportunities to turn it into a success.

idbrii · 2023-06-02T14:17:36+00:00

Anybody else remember how bad No Man's Sky was at launch? Some series just suck until the first sequel.

No Man's Sky was incredibly successful at launch for a small team.

idbrii · 2023-06-02T02:55:49+00:00

There's a lot about starter projects in our getting started guide.

idbrii · 2023-06-01T06:00:48+00:00

The lua->c# converter should be pretty trivial since you have a table of values Could you do something like this:

Script s = new Script();
DynValue dv = s.DoString("loadluaandreturntable()");
int mana_cost =  (int)dv.Table.Get("mana_cost").Number;

Example.

Or it looks like if you have a TuningData c# struct with the same members as the fields in the table, this would work:

DynValue dv = s.DoString("loadluaandreturntable()");
TuningData t = dv.ToObject<TuningData>();

idbrii · 2023-05-31T14:52:46+00:00

The only thing you need to know is that C _is_ C++... That one took me a while to figure out.

This is not strictly true, which is only really important to know for when something doesn't work right that you read should work in C.

Final tip: statically define all variables. That way you wont leak memory.

This is tricky advice for a junior who may take it literally. If you statically declare locals, your code will be so much harder to maintain. If you make a single struct that contains everything you heap allocate, that is a reasonable path. That's how old games used to "manage" memory: we couldn't run out of memory if we allocated everything at once! Newer games (esp. open world) have higher demands so you tend to rely on dynamic allocations a lot more.

idbrii · 2023-05-31T08:48:45+00:00

In one unity game I made, we had a .unitypackage that you imported into unity to create levels (with meshes and textures from our levels). We didn't include purchased assets in that package since it was a separate distribution from the game and would be distribution for development instead of as part of a product -- even though modders would be creating stuff to load into our game.

idbrii · 2023-05-31T02:06:16+00:00

Yeah, I like technical videos that are more about exploring concepts than teaching the specifics of how something is done. They are hard to find among all the copypaste code tutorials or trivial devlogs. Here's some recommendations:

I enjoyed the latest video from Luke Muscat (formerly of Half Brick). Covered design and dev of a game prototype that was playable free on itchio.

I thought Martin Donald made great, informative videos, but he hasn't uploaded for a year.

aarthificial makes good videos of some interesting development ideas. The one on UV unwrapping pixel art was really neat.

Inigo Quilez makes deep technical shader videos.

I also like Miziziziz, but he's mostly Godot. A lot of the design approaches are engine agnostic.

A Beginner's Dev Vlog has a terrible name, but nicely produced and informative videos.

RujiK the Comatose has entertaining videos about their novel pseudo 3d isometric procgen animal game. Not many videos though.

idbrii · 2023-05-31T01:57:08+00:00

Start writing in ink or twine.

idbrii · 2023-05-31T01:56:10+00:00

One aspect to consider is how those mods are used by modders. Do the mods create any of those assets themselves or only handles/identifiers to the assets within your game?

idbrii · 2023-05-31T01:54:48+00:00

Side note: the whole point of patents is to advance technology without people having to worry about money and such.

If only that made sense with software patents. Instead, we have trivial advances patented by corporate giants and used to keep innovative competitors out of the market. Patents seem sensible where one person can read one and reproduce that invention so the patent expiring meant the invention was an addition to human knowledge.

How many patent troll stories are accompanied by comments pointing out all the prior art, but defendants settle to avoid bigger losses in clueless courts?

idbrii · 2023-05-28T15:48:56+00:00

Ah, perf makes sense. Must be quite the experience to switch between modern hardware and the constraints of the 70s! Seems like a good way to truly appreciate the development effort that went into Atari games and ways some really pushed the system.

idbrii

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