In Farcry 2 there's a mid-game climax where you're placed on this custom section of map during a sandstorm in the desert. There's a specific house over some dunes you're supposed to enter, but the map is unbounded by hard geographical constraints (i.e. no cliffs, no guard rail no invisible wall even). Rather than having a physical barrier, if you walk the wrong way the storm gets more and more intense. Eventually your character puts his arms in front of his eyes to shield himself, making it impossible to tell where you're going. It forces you to turn around because you can't see. It was a pretty cool trick, I thought.

[WHO WE ARE]

WHO WE ARE

We are Magnet Hill. The core of Magnet Hill is Elijah O'Rear, a programmer/designer in Portland, and Ari Velazquez, a designer/programmer in San Francisco. We've learned a lot from our time in AAA and mobile games and we're excited to apply those lessons to our experience with VR.

WHAT WE ARE BUILDING

We've been asked to pitch a mobile VR game to a large publisher. We're looking for a 3D environment artist to model and texture production assets while keeping within the strict limitations of the mobile VR platform.

Our current art target is stylized, low-poly model train set. Most assets will be landscape objects and simple town structures. (This isn't final—we expect to further refine this concept.)

Please note, we are currently constructing the pitch for this game for the publisher, this position remaining open depends on the pitch being accepted.

Edit: This game is being built with Unity. The art tool chain is TBD by the art team.

WHO YOU MIGHT BE

3D Environment Artist (full-time, remote, ~10-12 months paid development)

Responsibilities

• Model and texture production assets
• Model and texture art assets for prototypes/tests to assist in defining the art production pipeline
• Understand the strict graphical constraints of mobile VR with guidance from team

If you are interested, please email us at [email protected] with some brief info about yourself. Include a link to your portfolio or work you've done. We will share an in-depth art pitch with you and can then set up a call if it seems like a good fit.

We look forward to meeting you!

[WHO WE ARE]

Edit: The position is now filled! Thanks everyone for your interest. If a mod wants to delete this thread, knock yourself out.

WHO WE ARE

Howdy, TIG, we are Magnet Hill. The core of Magnet Hill is Elijah O'Rear, a programmer/designer in Portland, and Ari Velazquez, a designer/programmer in San Francisco. We've learned a lot from our time in AAA and mobile games and we're excited to apply those lessons to our experience with VR.

WHAT WE ARE BUILDING

We've been asked to pitch a mobile VR game to a large publisher. We're looking for a lead artist who can take the reins on art production and manage the art team. For the pitch, you'll be working with us immediately to define a scope that we can accomplish and to help us understand which additional art roles we'll need to hire. Once in development, you'll manage the art team, learn about the strict graphical constraints of mobile VR, and put on other art hats when necessary.

Our current art target is stylized, low-poly model train set. Most assets will be landscape objects and simple town structures. (This isn't final—we expect to further refine this concept.)

While we're looking to hire an art lead on contract to assist us with the pitch construction immediately, we will be reliant upon the pitch being accepted by the publisher for the long-term position to be available.

Edit: This game is being built with Unity. The art tool chain is TBD by the art team.

WHO YOU MIGHT BE

Lead Artist (full-time, remote, ~10-12 months paid development)

Responsibilities

• Own the art production process as Lead Artist
• Help scope art production for the game
• Determine the need for additional art roles for full development
• Manage the art team (other team members as well as outsourced artists)
• Model and texture art assets for prototypes/tests to define the art production pipeline
• Model and texture production assets
• Discover and adapt to the strict graphical constraints of mobile VR

If you are interested, please email us at [email protected] with some brief info about yourself. Include a link to your portfolio or work you've done. We will share an in-depth art pitch with you and can then set up a call if it seems like a good fit.

We look forward to meeting you!

-Position filled, Closed!-

So politically relevant! There are rare, high value, golden targets worth triple points that appear in the world. Gold houses, gold cars, gold people. Pretty sure gentrifies live in gold palaces.

I've really liked the idea of pooping on something a whole whole lot. Like, keeping in front of a car and just really unloading on it. Or especially a person, where they keep trying to run away and you just keep on them, piling the poop on. I've never been able to figure out quite how to do it, though. You can't actually see what you're pooping on terribly well since it's first person. You line yourself up, strafe the target, and wait to hear if you've hit them, but being able to stick on the target and move with them as they try to escape has always been a struggle to figure out how to do.

[Gameplay]

A charming game where you step into the webbed feet of a seagull that poops uncontrollably and lusts deeply for bread. You fly around an island city, raining poop on its unsuspecting residents.

You can always play the latest build of Sploot here.

http://edgeofprophecy.itch.io/sploot

Gameplay

This game was designed to be a VR game (Oculus Rift specifically), but does also work without VR.

You steer by looking around. Your body will always turn in the direction you're looking, so to stop turning you need to move your head (or mouse) back to a neutral position. It lets the VR controls be totally hands free, save for menu interaction.

You poop uncontrollably in a heavy, fire-hose like stream. Pooping on a target grants points, pooping on gold targets grants even more points, and eating slices of bread gives you a stacking score multiplier for that round.

Dev History

I'm making this thread when the game is pretty well underway, so a lot of the early progress is out of the way.

This is a game that grew out of a jam game, started February 18th. It seemed to go well, so I never stopped working on it. I just kept going and realized I could have something ready to submit to Indiecade, so I went for it and did manage to submit the game. I'm not really sure if the game's done or not, I sort of waffled over whether or not I should post it here, but I figured a mod can move it or something if they think it shouldn't be part of DevLogs.

The Future

Man, I don't really know. I plan on modeling a seagull next (there actually isn't one in the game, oddly enough). After that I'll probably make some additional models for the town, trees, garbage bags, general town clutter.

I'm mostly in a phase now of making some polish stuff and gathering feedback. Then I'm going to decide if there will be any further major developments for this title, or if I'm just going to leave it be and move on to the next game.

Tool Stack

Game itself is made in Unity. All the modeling, rigging, etc was done with Blender. Audacity to edit sound clips (I didn't foley stuff myself, though). I'm not an artist by trade, so this low-poly stuff was good for me. Very much reduced the dexterity burden of art.

The only engine I ever used with C++ was C4, and it was godawful.

Unity's my go to engine nowadays.  It's in C# (or Javascript if that's your thing), but it is pretty feature rich and very capable.  Unless you're doing something really zany, I doubt you'll run into irreconcilable performance issues with it.  Even if you had to switch to learning C#, it very well might be faster to pick it up than try to roll your own engine on the back of frameworks.

It does matter what's most important to you, and your goals for the project.  If you really want to learn C++, then Unity's not going to work.  If you want to finish the game quickly as possible, it'd be a strong contender.  If you have a change of heart and want to do something in 2D, maybe gamemaker or Flixel, or even SFML would be better.

Do you have any platforms in mind that you want to make the game for?

(Fun fact: most of the magic of A* is in using the priority queue for the open set. If you use the same algorithm but use a regular queue, you get breadth-first search. If you implement open set using a stack, you get depth-first search.)

Try reversing your priority queue for fun effects. I once did that by accident, and watched in amazement as my enemies took the longest possible valid path to get to me.

That might actually be cool as a powerup effect in a game, like confusion or something.

Unity just got updated to 4.2, adds some shadowing support to the free version  (one-directional light only; hard shadows only) and NavMesh baking, for what it's worth.

More importantly (for me, at least), it makes text-based serialization of assets free, rather than a pro feature.  Nice for source control.

If you guys have OpenGL tutorials, tips or advice I'm sure comma would appreciate them too, but I doubt he needs some wank fest of people going back and forth on whether D3D is shit or not.

Running at max FPS is not normal. Even if your computer can take it, you can't assume that that others can. You also can't assume that your game is the only thing running on a normal computer (I guess non-multitasking phones are different?). You can have an FPS unlock option if you want to, but it should definitely not be set as default.

If a program races (locking a CPU) you can get problems with:

• Bad response times form everything else, especially on a 1/2-CPU, the OS and other programs get unresponsive
• Lots of heating
• Massive noise from fans

It's the normal behavior if you're running it in an unbridled (or scarcely bridled) while loop.  Certainly, you can be a considerate programmer and sleep the thread like you described, but it doesn't really fall under the category of performance issue in my mind (like your game chugging from poor collision detection code).  I just don't want the poor guy diving into a profiler and tearing his game apart thinking there's something heinously wrong in there.  Go ahead and sleep your main thread so it runs at 60 hz, you'll have to do it at some point before you finish the game.

I'm guessing it's a monitor hardware issue, in which case, I wouldn't worry about it.

I really want to go, but I'm getting sick so I better not.  Sad times.

What are you making this game in?  This should not be a tangible problem unless there's some bug with whatever rendering library/engine you're using.

Just wrapped up an animation frame index generator for my Unity sprite system that generates the frame indicies from a TexturePacker sprite sheet.  Sure beats punching in frame numbers by hand.

Two things.

A)  Are you noticing performance problems?  Ignore CPU useage in Task Manager or whatever.  Are you actually experiencing low framerates?  If you're not, don't worry about it.

B)  Use a profiler.  A profiler will break down which functions are consuming how much of your total CPU usage.  Very helpful in tracking down something super heavy weight.

However!  Don't profile if you're not experiencing performance issues or have a real reason to suspect you are.  Otherwise, you're chasing phantoms.  If your game is running in a big while loop, it can consume all the resources the OS is willing to give it, thus pushing a CPU core to max, while also running at like 500000 FPS.  This is not a problem, it's normal.

Interesting game, this could go in a neat direction.  At the moment, it is very Zelda II (particularly the enemies), but my impression is that you'll be expanding upon that base to have a game that's a bit more distinguished.  I hope it gets there.

Vertical scrolling on the camera as you jump up platforms seems sluggish to me, like the player could easily outpace it.  Even if they can't, it still looks slower than I'd be comfortable with.  A fast paced game like this deserves a snappy camera.

I like the boomerang, love how you can dodge it and it will orbit around you for a bit.  I'd definitely try to showboat with it and kill bats or something sneaking up behind me.

Shields, shields could be a really interesting component to the game,  Do you have a particular vision for the combat in the game?  Right now it's fast and seems pretty straightforward (this is not at all bad), like a sped up Castlevania.  If I recall, in Zelda the shielding system is passive, like if you're not attacking your shield can block ranged attacks automatically.  This is not a bad system, it doesn't overcomplicate the game, but it does give you a rhythm and risk to attacking.  Still, I'm curious what else could be done with a shield.  Perhaps some form of active blocking with a shield button, or the ability to switch between blocking low/high (ducking could also serve this function).

Since you are coming from a C++ background, you will probably want to stick to C# for programming in Unity. Thankfully, C# is well-supported in Unity as a scripting language. The syntax is closer to traditional C++ than either javascript or boo.

You can use Unity's built-in GUI system if you want to. It can be a bit difficult to get into, but is quite capable when it comes to basic GUI structure. I would recommend using Coroutines to implement basic GUI transitions and state machines.

2D isn't what Unity is built for, but is still quite possible. I would also recommend the approach of simply using textured quads for your in-game graphics. This will give you some of the best performance. I'm currently working on a basic "sprite" component that constructs quads for you using Unity's built-in Mesh component.

You'll need to specify your own quad, the default Unity plane has a ton of vertices in it.

Unity gets a bad and truly undeserved rep for 2D.  Honestly, it's perfectly fine for 2D.  I will second that you'll probably want to use a library if you want a lot of intricate GUI pieces, NGui is pretty good.  For basic stuff, you can use the built in GUI layouts, but I actually prefer to make my own components and avoid the GUI system entirely.  Historically, it's been really performance heavy (especially compared to just using textured quads), but I don't know if that's ever been improved.

If you want to use a library for other things 2D (sprites and such), I'd recommend Sprite Manager 2.  It's not that expensive, and pretty good.  It's really easy to get sprites rendering and animating on screen, but it has a nice set of extra goodies (automatic texture atlas generation, for instance).

Take some time to get comfortable with the component based architecture.  Embrace it, love it, it's really nice to use when you get used to it.  Yes, you can technically shove all of your code into one GameObject and have it manage the entire game and have your big old centralized game loop, but Unity's going to fight you every step of the way.  It's really not worth it, in my opinion.

C# is great, it's kind of like Java but made by humans and not terse demons.  Stay away from Javascript and Boo.

Swept casting/raycasting is fast in Unity, I wouldn't worry about performance unless your game starts to perform very poorly.

You have two basic methods of using ray/sweeptcasts to resolve collisions.  Proactive and Reactive.

For proactive casting, you figure out what your position will be at the end of the current physics step (taking into account your current velocity and forces that are being applied this frame), and sweep to that position.  If you hit something, you should resolve the collision (put the character in the right spot based on the collision, figure out what damping occurred if any, etc), figure out how much distance you've traveled, then sweep again in your new direction based on the collision.  Repeat until you're no longer colliding with stuff.

For reactive casting, you take your position last frame, and sweep to your position this frame.  It's simpler to do, but sometimes results in the character visually jittering a bit as they penetrate through something then get corrected back to their original position.

I've been working on a character controller replacement that's better and can be used with rigidbodies, but it's at the bottom of my project queue.  If I ever get around to finishing it I'll let you know.

Ah man, this thread really rekindled my love for VS.  I'm ditching my mac for doing Unity development, it's strictly an Xcode and build deployment box now (and, you know, a laptop).