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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperPlaytestingShootin' - Raycaster shooter (Now with redone graphics)
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Author Topic: Shootin' - Raycaster shooter (Now with redone graphics)  (Read 3378 times)
harkme
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« on: August 04, 2014, 09:05:16 PM »


Description:
Simple shooter where you need to reach the goal at the end of the level. Features destructible environments and lots of persistence so you can see the results of your battles.

Screenshots:





Video of first level (Old Graphics):



LINK TO GAME (updated April 12, 2015): http://www.dropbox.com/s/7oe6zb3qr6x4kik/ShootinDemo04122015.zip?dl=0

Okay, so I redid all the graphics except the skyboxes. Are the graphics still horrible? If so, please offer advice with as much specificity as possible. I'm going to be working on improving performance in the mean time. Also, please tell me if you think the game has any worth. I'm planning on releasing this as a budget title, perhaps $5 at most. Linux port may be possible in the future.

Minimum System Requirements:

    Windows XP/Vista/8/8.1
    Dual core 2.4GHz processor
    1.5GBs of RAM
    OpenGL 3.0 compliant GPU with 256MBs of RAM
    Keyboard and Mouse

Recommended Specs:

    Windows XP/Vista/8/8.1
    Quad Core processor
    2GBs of RAM
    OpenGL 3.0 compliant GPU with 386MBs of RAM
    Keyboard and Mouse


Thank you all very, very much!
« Last Edit: April 12, 2015, 07:45:28 PM by harkme » Logged
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« Reply #1 on: August 08, 2014, 08:26:54 PM »

Added video of me playing the first level. I seem to suck at video encoding since it turned out somewhat blurry.


« Last Edit: August 08, 2014, 09:17:55 PM by harkme » Logged
Quicksand-S
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« Reply #2 on: August 08, 2014, 09:46:07 PM »

If you plan to sell this, I hope you're going to completely redo the enemy, weapon and HUD graphics or that you'll make it really, really cheap. It looks slightly better in-game than in screenshots (mainly because of the painted skybox that had a cool look), but still not like anything I'd ever even consider paying for.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is better. I hated it, but it's functional. I found myself really wishing for a crosshair. Also, enemies seemed to come out of nowhere sometimes. Before I knew it, they were attacking me from behind. I was in the tunnel at the start of level 1, so I'm not sure how they got there without going by me. Better-than-expected path-finding, perhaps?

I found the game much too fast and cramped. Most of my deaths were from being knocked out of the level by enemies rather than getting killed directly, which was a bit frustrating.

In level 1 of episode 1, I hated dying because being sent back to the menu every time meant another seven second load time (the other levels loaded much faster). Also, those jumping enemies that make kind of a dragging-chain sound are never on-screen long enough for me to shoot them. I just stayed near edges of the map and hoped they'd jump off.

In level 1 of episode 2, I spent most of my time being knocked back and forth in the air while waiting ages for my stupid weapon to recharge. It's gotta charge at about a fifth of the speed I would've expected.

In level 1 of episode 3, I had octopi shooting streams of ten or so projectiles at me from outside of my optimal firing range and they moved fast enough that I couldn't always get out of the way. Frustrating. I felt unequipped to deal with that. Maybe a double-tap sideways dodge move would be a good idea for those sorts of situations.

My health level doesn't stand out much. I didn't even notice that bar the first couple of times I tried level 1.

I had no idea what the goal of each level was. Do I just have to kill everything? I guess that'd make sense, considering the name of the game.

Enemies often jump off the levels without any action on my part.

I don't think enemies should be able to shoot me from outside of the drawing range.

As far as things I actually like, the paintball-gun sound of the initial pistol is kinda cool, the hand/glove weapon is a nice idea and the shotgun feels like it'd be decent in a level that worked better with it. The menu music is decent. I like the look of the marker skybox in the first level and some of the enemy concepts (not the art but the way they act) are kind of cool, like the one that shrinks when you hit it.

Overall, I didn't get much enjoyment out of it. The enemies bounce around too quickly so I just end up firing wildly and hoping I hit something with my crosshair-less weapon. Getting knocked around so much by enemies made just moving through the levels frustrating. One of the things that makes shooters enjoyable a lot of the time is seeing the results of your actions. When you see an enemy go down in an action game, you sometimes feel a nice sense of accomplishment. In this game, I never see my enemies die because I'm just trying to survive being bounced into the air by a swarm of things as I spin around trying to shoot them. They're also usually right on top of me, too close, or at my feet where I can't see them unless I'm staring down.

I think there's a decent game in here somewhere, but in my opinion it needs a lot of adjustments. Mainly, I think it could really use a crosshair and enemies that are slower and/or stand back a bit.

I didn't encounter any noticeable technical issues. It ran at a very fast speed and everything seemed to look the way it should.


Edit: I decided to watch your video. I think the game is running faster on my computer than on yours. Maybe it's my imagination but your framerate seems much more manageable. Also, the shotgun looks like it makes level 1 a lot easier but there's no way I ever would've expected to be able to destroy that ground. It really doesn't look explosive or weakened in any way.
« Last Edit: August 08, 2014, 10:08:12 PM by Quicksand-S » Logged

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harkme
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« Reply #3 on: August 10, 2014, 06:57:08 PM »

Thank you so much for your feedback!

In terms of graphics, I have no ability. Yeah, I should get someone to do art, but was planning on going the low-price route anyway. Maybe for my next project I'll go the pixel art route. Should be more manageable at a low resolution.

I'm used to Unreal Tournament-like twitch shooting games. I think the reason the game might look more manageable in the video is because youtube downsampled the framerate to 30FPS. I will definitely need to make lots of adjustments, speed included. A huge mistake I realize I've made is not getting continuous feedback along the game's development. Something to keep in mind for my next project.

Thank you again for your feedback. I've been working at taking your advice in account and making changes. So far I've slowed things down and put the objective of the level as a message in the beginning of each map. I have an idea of reducing load times. The starting weapon in level 1 episode 2 is definitely slow to charge. Because I know the features of the level, I tend to run to the other weapons placed about, which makes balancing tricky. Yet another reason to get continuous feedback during development.
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« Reply #4 on: August 10, 2014, 07:23:16 PM »

Well, I played a lot of Unreal Tournament (the original, 2004 and a bit of UT3) and enjoyed it a fair amount. This reminds me more of Quake III Arena, which I always hated. The thing about UT was that it was fast, but you were usually at a decent distance from enemies. I mean, I could hit things with slow-moving rockets or get headshots with the sniper rifle. There's no chance of me having that sort of precision here. In UT, there was none of this frantic "GYAH! WHY IS THIS ENEMY RIGHT ON TOP OF ME!" stuff either, and nobody was constantly flying back and forth over my head. In Shootin', pretty much everything is up-close (except for the things that shoot me before they're even in view).

In terms of the art, I don't think it's a question of ability. It's that it looks like you didn't put any effort into certain things. The actual designs aren't absolutely terrible (although they could be improved), but the lines that should be straight but are instead crooked look really bad. If you clean up that sort of thing, maybe it'll be fine.
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« Reply #5 on: August 11, 2014, 02:52:02 PM »

True, levels can get cramped, partially due to some technical constraints I've run into and then it gets amplified since I've designed the levels, so I know where they're coming from and didn't realize that wouldn't be true to players who have never played the game before. The weapons are not really designed for precision, which is why I put in regenerating infinite ammo, so it gets frantic and can feel all over the place. Very spammy. Once again, the importance of continuous testing during development shows up again... this is a great learning experience in many ways.

The sloppy lines were actually a style decision on my part. I wanted to give off somewhat of a child-like drawing style, which the skyboxes usually follow, but for those, some neat brush styles from mspaint were used, which give a different feel, however the lines are just as sloppily applied. For a style that looks like little effort was put in, I did a lot of erasing and reapplying, which I think where my lack of ability comes in.
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« Reply #6 on: February 16, 2015, 07:49:31 PM »

I hope I'm not committing a faux pas by reviving this months old thread, but I feel like I've given up too quickly with this game. I shopped it around a bit and it doesn't seem like anyone cares to carry this game. I was naive to think my paint skills could pass as graphics that the more reputable stores would put on their store fronts, even if I was willing to sell for $2. It's somewhat of a bummer that the custom engine and all the technical aspects mean absolutely nothing when the pixels aren't pretty enough, but that's life I guess.

Anyway, I'm going to try out some art style changes and I am super open to any suggestions regarding that. To start, I have a screenshot where I simply dropped in a nice sprite (taken from http://opengameart.org/content/minotaur-0). This is what it looks like with the one enemy replaced:



I have no artistic sense though I think it may be clashing. Perhaps I should go for a lower resolution look? I think one mistake I made was trying to go for too high of a resolution for my skills, which made me go with loose mspaint work. Perhaps an "8-bit" style will fit in with the blocky worlds more. I'll have to try that out when I get the time. I know the process will be slow since it takes me forever to draw up graphics, but I've spent quite some time with the game and I'd hate to see it just die. Or hey, maybe I should just give up and go onto making my next game (and let that flop as well, but I still enjoy making games). I dunno, what do you all think?
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« Reply #7 on: February 16, 2015, 08:08:39 PM »

Well, I think the problem with your game's visuals is just that at first glance it looks like something you spent very little time on and don't care about at all.

In your previous reply, you wrote, "The sloppy lines were actually a style decision on my part. I wanted to give off somewhat of a child-like drawing style". The thing is that it probably isn't clear to potential players/buyers that the style is intentional. It just looks messy.

Anyway, I think sprites in a style similar to the minotaur could potentially work well, but yeah, it clashes with everything else at the moment. If you're going to change the style so drastically, you'll have to change pretty much everything else about the visuals as well.

Personally, I think the tone of the original version fine and stood out from all the darker, more violent-looking first-person shooters out there. If you took that same idea and just cleaned up the art, or found someone to "reinterpret" it for you, I think that could possibly be pretty good.
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« Reply #8 on: February 17, 2015, 03:11:47 PM »

Yeah, my art does look sloppy. It was intentional in that I know my artistic abilities are severely limited and getting it to look better is a real struggle. I probably didn't spend enough time on the art, but it felt like an eternity to me. I wouldn't even know where to start, so throwing down lines in paint helped me along. I might attempt cleaning up the art that's already there. All of the art definitely needs to be cleaned/redone.

For now, though, I threw together a small 16x16 sprite (highly subject to change) to see how that would look in-game. I like how it meshes with the blockiness of the world itself and if this works out, it'll save a lot of time because honestly, drawing the graphics is my least-favourite part of game development. I don't know what it is, but I have a deep-seated feeling of not wanting to collaborate unless I personally know the other person, however you're right, I really should find a real artist.

Anyway, here is a screenshot with the substitution:

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« Reply #9 on: February 17, 2015, 05:04:43 PM »

Animation has always been my least-favourite part of game development, so I can kinda relate. Yeah, that sprite does fit better than the previous one but with so many low-res games around these days, I'm not sure art like that will appeal to people either. That said, well-made art will probably appeal to a lot of people no matter what resolution it is in. Personally, my main issue has always been the weapons, not the enemies. Naturally, I can't speak for everyone who has decided not to try your game, but I think that in an FPS weapons almost always have to be appealing in some way because they're such an important part of the game and are always on-screen.

Something you can fix that has nothing to do with artistic talent is the quality of the actual images for some of the weapons. That blurry grey outline around the hand "weapon", for example, looks terrible. It's not a matter of artistic value. It just looks like you didn't feel like cleaning up the image and ensuring that the transparency was set up properly.

Anyway, I can relate to the whole "not wanting to collaborate" thing. I like helping people with their work, but when it comes to my own, it's nice to have complete control over the project and not have to rely on others and their schedules. Since you seem to care a lot about this game, have you considered just taking some time to learn a bit about art? Everything you could ever need to know is available online, and anything you learn could be applicable to all sorts of things you might do in the future.


Edit: Have you heard of "The Adventures of Square" (http://adventuresofsquare.com)? I just found out about it tonight. It's a nice example of a game that has pretty simple graphics but still looks quite good because the style is mostly consistent and the visuals don't have technical issues (like aliasing).
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« Reply #10 on: February 17, 2015, 10:17:41 PM »

I think the aesthetic shown in your first screenshots up there could actually work, you'd just have to make it all consistent and clean up some of the details (like the weird aliasing in the second image's hand) .

For an example of that aesthetic done well see this old cartoon from the 90s:



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« Reply #11 on: February 18, 2015, 07:46:02 PM »

I had bilinear filtering enabled on GUI sprites, which introduced that outline where the opaque pixels meet the transparent space since I'm clueless about the proper formatting of the image. This is how it looks without the filtering:



I took a look at the "The Adventures of Square" game and that does look nice. It certainly does make a difference with how clean the art is, the basic shading in that art already greatly surpasses my artistic abilities. I think maybe I should go with straight lines to get that clean look. Now I'm having trouble deciding between lower-res and higher-res art. On one hand, the low-res meshes better. On the other hand, the higher-res will pop out more from the level geometry, which may be a good or bad thing. I guess I could try the lower-res first since that'll take less time.
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« Reply #12 on: February 18, 2015, 09:46:13 PM »

In a game with pixel art, I'm not a fan of anything that blurs the pixels anyway, so I think it looks much, much better without the filtering. It makes sense, too, since the game is mostly blocky so the sprites looking blocky helps things mesh.

(On a related note, if you ever did want to use anti-aliased sprites in a game, it would probably be a good idea to do set up a nice alpha channel in the image before using it in the game. A proper alpha channel could smoothly blend between opaque and transparent, so when you do anything with it in the game, the transparency will hopefully keep weird things from showing up. This sort of thing shouldn't be necessary for pixel art, though.)

Yeah, lower res seems like a good place to start for now. You can always redraw the sprites in high-res if you start to feel more comfortable with drawing and feel the need for more resolution later. Personally, I think it'd be good to go for a resolution that makes it so the pixels in the enemy sprites are the same size as the ground blocks at the same position.
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« Reply #13 on: February 21, 2015, 02:09:55 PM »

I tried playing the demo posted in the OP, but the game lagged the hell out of my computer. It started out okay, but gradually got worse to the point where it was just a slideshow with sound effects. I had to ctrl+alt+del out of it.

For the record, I'm running Windows 7 32-bit.
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« Reply #14 on: February 21, 2015, 09:52:19 PM »

In a game with pixel art, I'm not a fan of anything that blurs the pixels anyway, so I think it looks much, much better without the filtering. It makes sense, too, since the game is mostly blocky so the sprites looking blocky helps things mesh.

(On a related note, if you ever did want to use anti-aliased sprites in a game, it would probably be a good idea to do set up a nice alpha channel in the image before using it in the game. A proper alpha channel could smoothly blend between opaque and transparent, so when you do anything with it in the game, the transparency will hopefully keep weird things from showing up. This sort of thing shouldn't be necessary for pixel art, though.)

Yeah, lower res seems like a good place to start for now. You can always redraw the sprites in high-res if you start to feel more comfortable with drawing and feel the need for more resolution later. Personally, I think it'd be good to go for a resolution that makes it so the pixels in the enemy sprites are the same size as the ground blocks at the same position.

I usually don't like pixel art with filtering either, though I mainly did it for the horrendous font I drew, which I think looks somewhat better with filtering. I put the font in the same texture as the rest of the interface. Thanks for the tip on the alpha channel, I had no idea about how it blended transparent and non-transparent pixels, though considering how shaders work, it makes sense. I'll likely just keep the textures at nearest neighbour.

I'm in the middle of redrawing all the objects. I probably should have started with the GUI elements such as weapons and the font, but I felt like doing objects first, so I might as well ride that momentum.

I tried playing the demo posted in the OP, but the game lagged the hell out of my computer. It started out okay, but gradually got worse to the point where it was just a slideshow with sound effects. I had to ctrl+alt+del out of it.

For the record, I'm running Windows 7 32-bit.

I was afraid that was going to happen since I do some nasty things with threads. I have a good idea on how to improve performance though, so that'll be what's up next after redoing the graphics. What are the rest of your specs, by the way (CPU, GPU, perhaps RAM(system and GPU))?
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« Reply #15 on: February 28, 2015, 09:20:45 PM »

So I've spent time redoing the graphics. I did most of the objects/enemies and now I'm doing the interface graphics. Here is a screenshot showing a redone object and enemy, plus somewhat redone HUD and a redone weapon. I drew the basic shape I wanted for the weapon, I'll add some patterning to it later:

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« Reply #16 on: March 08, 2015, 02:25:25 PM »

Updated first post with new screenshots. The graphics have all been redone except skyboxes. I don't know if I'll redo skyboxes. Going to work on performance improvements now.
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« Reply #17 on: March 22, 2015, 08:10:02 PM »

I got sidetracked from improving performance and I created a logo which I have updated the opening post with. I have also redone the menu windows. Instead of simple semi-transparent black rectangles, I have put in blue semi-transparent rounded rectangular windows. Here is a comparison:

Before:


After:


Dang, I just noticed f.lux gave the screenshots a bluish tint. Ah well, it gives a general idea of the look. I'll be reworking the threading model to improve performance and reduce strain on system resources.
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« Reply #18 on: March 22, 2015, 08:36:07 PM »

I mostly like the logo. It's a bit weird that the bottom of the S doesn't reach the side of the box, but doesn't bug me too much. I'm not sure why the black pixels are around the top left part of the S, though. Those look out of place and unnecessary to me.

Anyway, the only major issue I see with this redesign is the color choices. Red text on a blue background doesn't work particularly well. The text just doesn't stand out at all.

A fairly useful (although certainly not perfect) way to check that sort of thing is to make the image greyscale and see if you can clearly see the text. Another way is to shrink it a bit and then squint and see if the text stands out. Personally, I'd recommend using a light color from your existing palette for the text. The window's background color should also likely be chosen from one of those existing colors too, rather than using a new shade that doesn't quite fit with everything.
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« Reply #19 on: April 03, 2015, 07:31:58 AM »

The logo has those extra pixels to represent the hammer and trigger, since the top part of the S is supposed to look like a gun. Looks like I failed at that, heh.

I'm not sure if the accidental tinting has affected the look of the menu, but here it is untinted:


and I did the greyscale thing which I think passes, though perhaps could be more distinct:



I don't know if it's because I already know what they say, but I can also read them squished (with some difficulty thanks to the compression artifacts):

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