The Hub isn't terribly big, it's about 3 normal levels stacked on top each other. Time to complete is going to vary wildly due to the nature of puzzle games. I'd hope it'd be at least an hour to finish the game, if that's what you meant?
Made a hub level and have an idea for final game length.
The Hub level is another puzzle in itself and will connect all other levels in loops. Each loop will gain some kind of item required to continue and hopefully mid way there will be some choice in the order of levels. I've completed my first loop in which the player gains the Pistol, the first weapon on the game. This loop is 4 levels long with 17 puzzles. There are 7 (two got axed) guns in the game, so I guess roughly a loop per gun, with 3 to 4 levels each loop. Plus an intro and escape. I'm thinking about 8 - 9 loops in total. After a lot of reading and thinking on the subject of game length, this feels right to me. It's the point where I've explored the concepts a level they deserve.
Here is an image on 4 levels shown next to each other. The red dots indicate a loading screen.
I'm currently working with a friend on an RTS game with destructible environments. You play as a band of space pirates raiding enemy ships, all the combat takes place on board the enemy space ship you're raiding. You can do things like disable the enemies shield generator to then be able to ship to ship missiles or storm the security control room to remove fog of war (cus you can see out the ships CCTV). We're hoping for highly emergent gameplay by trying to simulate the workings of a ship as well as offering dynamically destructible terrain.
Onto the issue we're facing. We're creating the destructible walls using pixel perfect collision in a worms style geomodding. We've got the path finding implemented but processing diagonal walls is effecting the frame rate. I feel we should limit walls to vertical and horizontal only and move to a more grid based system but my friend feels thats too large a sacrifice.
Do you feel it's right to change the design to cut time out of development (or increase time for other areas)? Or should we never compromise the original vision?
PS. I don't want to get too into the nitty gritty details on the technical side. Lets assume we can get it working fine, but it'll take 2 months of upkeep, or we simplify the game layout to save those 2 months. Thoughts?
I thought this would be a game perfect for an Xbox controller. No analogue movement makes it impossible on a controller, having to constantly flick the thumbstick to make tiny adjustments and then when it comes to aiming, you can't aim at all angles, it seems to have 16 directions to aim in, rather than 360. I don't get how it can be released with such a core thing being broken.
I've always wanted to make an FPS with super deep gun customization. Things like putting in wider barrels to support shotgun rounds, etc. All guns would be made from two pistols, a Beretta style and revolver style. So if you made a sniper, the one from the revolver style would be bigger, stronger, bolt action. The other would be smaller, faster, clip based. MMO would really make it perfect. On youtube there's amazing clip of a Glock with a drum barrel mag and wire frame stock.
If anyone is interested (and have a windows installation ) and wanna try, gimme a shout and i will make the latest stable .exe (and source if you are baws nerd) and some instructions for how to use the program available for download.
I know there's a lot of empty space at the top, but I decided against cropping to show just how tall the vertical levels will be. In this one you have to get to the top with a series of C4/Rocket jumps. I'm not 100% sure if this will be in the 'campaign' or as a additional set of challenge maps. Probably a mixture. I don't want Trash TV to become too much platforming, more as a palette cleanser between puzzles.
Love the atmosphere and art style, gameplay looks really interesting too. Would be awesome if you showed how a typical scene is built/works, the lighting basically- i have no clue how to do stuff like that, but it really brings the scene together!
On page 3 you can see a screenshot from inside Ogmo (Free level editor). The lights are really simple actually, in XNA I render everything to a texture without lights, which looks like my old screenshots
Then I render all my lights to a single texture. I simply combine the two, with a custom shader, that multiplies one by the other. So anywhere there isn't a light ends up multiplied by 0 and returning black. I've done this for individual colour channels too so that a red light will make everything red.
I have an update too, cross posted from screenshot saturday
To have people play my games longer than I've been alive. Currently I'm at 1.5/23 years.
...How can you even keep track of that...?
If 1200 people play your games for 1 month each, would that count as people playing your games for 100 years?
Yea. Although one month is a huge amount of play time.
The in game ad software I used kept track for me. I'd like to just know I'd smashed it without having to log each moment played. Like Notch, must be into the thousands of years.
Something I want to do more of with my next title is to better catalog my progress. I remember back when I was in art school, feeling as if I'd never make it (I guess I was right but whatever). Then when I looked back at my work from the start of the year, it was almost as if I'd been drawing with my left hand. I think it's easy to forget how far a project has come and how much we've learnt and grown as a person.
Also, I dedicate a little bit of time each week to cooking a fancy meal. It's a project I can start and finish in an hour, and unlike a game jam, it won't tempt me into quitting my project and starting a different one.
I work part time in a factory, so I'm up at 7am for that half the week. The rest I'm up and working by around 9 - 9:30. I get a good solid 4 hours of really productive work in, then I usually break for lunch and get distracted till about 3. Finish work around 8pm most days. I keep a spreadsheet of all hours I work each day where I won't look at twitter and actually do stuff. I aim for 7 and a half of these non-research hours worked, usually getting around 7. I also have a running total of the last 7 days and get upset if it drops below 20 hours.
Contact details! How embarrassing that I forgot. Later I'll have screenshots, additional trailers, demo download button, purchase button. Probably appearing in that order as the game gets closer to completion.
I've ran into this problem a few times. Usually it's because people start arguing over an idea before seeing it implemented and playable. I usually try and get everyone to create all their ideas, then we cull back, removing ones that clash or turn out to not flow as well as we'd imagined.
That being said, my main solution has been not to work with those people. I now only with people I know will let me lead the design. I think it's important that a game is mostly one persons vision. Being able to sell your vision and state why your idea is good is key too, keep it fairly vague, specifics can be picked apart by pedantic team mates.
Put together a little website for the game. Needs a bit of tweaking in areas as I'm totally new to web development. I gave up trying to use blogs and not have them look terrible, grabbed notepad++ and started smashing code together.
I've been a bit quiet lately, busy with a hundred birthday celebrations including my own but I've got a little trailer of what I've been working on.
I feel the field effect needs to look more violent, but I'm nearly happy with it.
Next week I'll be working on weapon select. Currently each gun replaces the previous, with no way to switch back. Now I'm think a weapon select could just add that extra level of depth, having puzzle requiring a switch.
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) and wanna try, gimme a shout and i will make the latest stable .exe (and source if you are baws nerd) and some instructions for how to use the program available for download.
