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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsStarDiver - Scifi Space Romp[PC,Mac,Linux, Consoles]
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Author Topic: StarDiver - Scifi Space Romp[PC,Mac,Linux, Consoles]  (Read 30972 times)
friken
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« Reply #120 on: July 02, 2014, 09:38:26 AM »



Steam.... love them or not, they are the 800 lb gorilla us indie developers need to impress to ensure wide distribution of our games. We are planning a Greenlight, hopefully in the near future, once we are far enough along to create a compelling promo video.

We did put up a Steam Green Concept page a while back and would like to share the stats of that with other developers. Overall, we found it useful for:

1. Validation that what we are making is of interest to our target audience. 97% yes/no on the concept. Note: this is a largely different stat than the full greenlight yes/no as users are FAR more kind to concepts. Also the wording of yes/no is different "do you like this concept" is very different than "would you buy this game".
2. A few kudos (all indie devs loves a pat on the back now and then)
3. More insight into comparing what we are working on to other indie projects.

What we did not get from it:

1. Much exposure. There is not all that much traffic going to the greenlight concept area. (see stats below)
2. As much conversation as I would have liked. We did get comments mostly "looks good" or "keep going", but I had hoped to create more conversation and maybe even use it to get some feedback as we continue dev.
3. Traffic falls off very quickly. The vast majority of traffic you will get is in the first week. Steam's system for concepts seems to have a negative bias of placement w/ age of the concept. We peaked at #2 "Most Popular this week" but the project had little traffic after about 2 weeks.

Stats:
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Toastie Republic
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« Reply #121 on: July 02, 2014, 10:10:30 AM »

Nice to see this coming along

Ever get anything figured out for keeping track of dialogue? (saw you at igda eons ago)
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friken
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« Reply #122 on: July 02, 2014, 10:13:16 AM »

Yep, we have our dialogue system mostly sorted out. Just need to finish up the story arc and start getting the trees all filled out.
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friken
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« Reply #123 on: July 10, 2014, 10:02:49 AM »

Feeling good!!!! We have hit a major milestone for StarDiver. We now have 20 alien races and 20 alien ships designed and art assets ready for animation and implementation. Now for the fun part -- getting them all in-game and FUN! I suspect we will add another 5-10 alien races and ships along the way, but it feels great to have hit our target minimum needed to fill out of universe and story arc.

Pardon the small images, click image for larger:














































« Last Edit: July 10, 2014, 10:33:45 AM by friken » Logged

JobLeonard
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« Reply #124 on: July 10, 2014, 10:26:12 AM »

I like your solution to putting them all in one screen.

Also, PeaZIP is a open source superior alternative to WinRAR. Just so you know.
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friken
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« Reply #125 on: July 10, 2014, 11:41:30 AM »

I like your solution to putting them all in one screen.

Also, PeaZIP is a open source superior alternative to WinRAR. Just so you know.

but I can't do without Winrar Smiley pc without winrar would be.... wrong... just wrong
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #126 on: July 10, 2014, 02:55:00 PM »

Hahaha, fair enough. Traditions count for something Smiley

EDIT: You can still install them side-by-side for all the formats WinRAR can't handle.
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friken
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« Reply #127 on: September 23, 2014, 02:20:22 PM »

We were using smoothmoves in unity for animation of our 2D aliens. It worked but the workflow was very slow. example of an idle animation using it:



The results were workable but it took a lot of art tweaking to cut up the characters just right to not notice the seams when animating. Also because of only being able to scale or rotate each body part, we were very limited w amount of movement before seams were obvious. I picked up puppet2D for unity and it supports bones/IK and mesh deformation. Great I thought... well after two days of messing with it I just couldn't get it to do what I really wanted, which was to speed up my workflow. I spent forever with a single rig trying to get the IK system to work right w more than two bones and then when I got that sorted I spent forever manually setting per vertex bone weights. The end result... a bit more funky than what I already had but just in different ways. I was about ready to go back to smoothmoves but saw uni2D... so tried it and within 10 minutes or so of rigging I had something I liked a lot. It will also speed up the workflow a lot since we won't need to cutup anything that doesn't overlap another sprite. It has a great system to make a mesh sprite and auto grid the mesh w #vert/horiz points. then you can simply click some bones on top and it morphs the mesh very well.

This is an exaggerated example of a quick animation so you can see how it warps the mesh feeling very organic. We couldn't have moved the neck/arms/face nearly as much with the old system without seams showing. 

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Thomas Finch
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« Reply #128 on: September 23, 2014, 02:23:01 PM »

Wow that looks a lot better and took less time? Great job!
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friken
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« Reply #129 on: September 23, 2014, 06:23:08 PM »

Started playing w another of our aliens in the new rig/animation system. I'm impressed w the new workflow. Not perfect, but a lot less tedious. The biggest plus is less cutups are needed. For example in this sample, only the one tentacle that is on top of the body is a cutup. The rest of the body and tentacles are a single image.

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JobLeonard
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« Reply #130 on: September 24, 2014, 01:41:01 AM »

Great!
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friken
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« Reply #131 on: September 24, 2014, 01:21:52 PM »

Added fog/clouds to the Khaodra scene/animation. Added a lot of depth I think.

video here: http://gravityride.com/?p=533

still:
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #132 on: September 24, 2014, 11:36:44 PM »

Very nice!
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Brainswitch
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« Reply #133 on: September 25, 2014, 06:58:00 AM »

I like your solution to putting them all in one screen.

Also, PeaZIP is a open source superior alternative to WinRAR. Just so you know.

but I can't do without Winrar Smiley pc without winrar would be.... wrong... just wrong

I recommend 7zip, it's more lean (which means somewhat less features but I find PeaZIP a bit bloated).
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friken
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« Reply #134 on: September 27, 2014, 10:42:44 AM »

Animated the Veelow race:

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JobLeonard
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« Reply #135 on: September 28, 2014, 04:39:01 AM »

I was about to complain that chests don't ex[and like that, but then I realised they might with aliens.
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friken
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« Reply #136 on: October 16, 2014, 05:55:03 AM »

Still hard at work this last week on things. The majority of the work has been in code restructuring some things that were becoming unmanageable -- I know not not fun AND not much visual to show off for all the hard work.

We did added some more visual detail to a few of our ships though:




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JobLeonard
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« Reply #137 on: October 16, 2014, 06:15:14 AM »

Looks great! I get the impression the shadows have improved too, did you change anything there?
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friken
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« Reply #138 on: October 16, 2014, 06:31:34 AM »

no changes to the lighting/shadows, likely just the higher detailing tricking the eye
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #139 on: October 16, 2014, 07:39:58 AM »

Guess it is, nice!
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