[Downloads]

I'm happy to announce that the beta version of my homebrew port of Lugaru to the Vita is finally released! After tons of optimization work, the game is finally in a playable state and can manage 60 FPS with stock speeds, and even underclocked! (sometimes)

There are still bugs, graphical glitches, and crashes, but I think they're infrequent enough to warrant the release.





Downloads

• Itch.io
• VitaDB
• Gitlab (source + builds)

This looks great! I know how much work goes into building a game off of your own engine, and what you have here is really impressive. The art looks great and everything seems really polished. I'll be sure to keep an eye on this so I can play it once its out.

I think the came from the "project giant robot" that got scrapped for the WiiU. Seeing the kid in the video at 1:37 happily swinging his robot arms, and comparing it with this picture of a depressed Miyamoto being forced to use his elbows to make punching gestures has me convinced of that.

Seems interesting, but I don't think it would work unless you have a voice actually singing the lyrics, and that'd be really hard to do well. Even though combining words that rhyme is easy, there are many different ways to sing the same phrase. Even if you get like a vocaloid to sing the words to an appropriate track, you'd have to add a lot of variety to keep it from getting dull and repetitive.

Not saying it wouldn't work, but it seems like a tough project. If you can do it, I'd definitely want to play it.

I think the game industry is long overdue for some regulation. It could be a big blow to a lot of indie studios, but there are just way too many people out there exploiting others (especially children).

As much as I love to criticize the business decisions of AAA companies, I still respect the reluctance (most of) them seem to have towards adopting full-on gambling business models. They definitely could, and even if they lost most of their customers, they'd be making a shitload more money from the "whales" they could lure in with popular IP licensing deals and ridiculously over-the-top art budgets.

When this recent EA controversy blows over and everyone forgets about it (they will), other companies will likely realize that the cost of pissing off passionate customers is actually very low. That's what worries me.

That's tough. It's rarely a good idea to ask these questions so late into development. Your marketing plans should be a factor when designing/developing it.

For example, if you want to target this game to kids, you might run into some issues with approachability. In your video, I saw a lot of menu options with lots text at ~0:28, which could turn away a lot of younger players that would be intimidated by all the text. If you look at Mario Maker, the UI and entire building system is super approachable to players of all ages and skill levels. Even preschool-age children could have fun playing that.


With that said, your game and art style remind me of my times in the gamemaker community when I was around 10-12 years old. So without any market research to back it up, my nostalgia/personal experiences tell me that you should market this towards 10-12 year olds

Public domain single-file C/C++ libraries https://github.com/nothings/stb

stb_image in particular is very useful

You don't have to specify it manually. A visual workflow would definitely be optimal if you were going to, but depending on the game and bullet mechanics, you could just get cheap with it and assign an angle to each sprite and spawn all the bullets a set distance from the center. Maybe overlay all the frames ontop of each other, mark the desired bullet spawn points with a single pixel, and then connect all the pixels together to make a polygon. With that, you'll be able to pick the best-fitting dimensions for the circle or ellipse you want to use.

People seem to keep forgetting what "virtual reality" is. It's not stereoscopic rendering and motion controllers, it's the illusion that you're in a different reality. VR isn't a bad idea just because you don't like the handful of headsets that are being sold in 2017. The concept itself is great, but the technology is still working to catch up.


I think the problem is that Facebook forgot that these headsets are still only appealing to early adopter types, and they've gone all-in with marketing it to the average consumer who is likely to just lump the tech into the vague "3D" category, like "3D TVs" or "3D graphics".


So when someone without the tolerance of an early adopter clicks a Facebook ad and buys an HMD expecting to wander into a vast OASIS™ filled with magical wonders, and finds out that all they can do is play shooty gun games, they're going to be sorely disappointed and think virtual reality is terrible.


It's like Google Glass. Even though those stupid glasses were NEVER described as a consumer ready product, and you could only buy them by applying to become an "explorer" or whatever they called it, there were still tons of videos on youtube doing unboxings and reviews as if it were just your average piece of tech you could pick up at your neighborhood Walmart.

It always bothers me to see people willfully ignoring history. When has a monopolized platform ever worked out for consumers and indie developers? Even Android, which promised to be a free and open platform, is now nearly impossible to find without Google in it. The promise of being able to choose which store you get your software from is bullshit if one store comes preinstalled and preferred by the underlying operating system (third party stores need to prompt the user to install or update an app, but Google Play can do it quietly in the background), and other stores are blocked unless you know how to search for the option to unblock them.


I think the reason people get excited about stores like these is because they're focused on the short term profits right in front of them. If you know that Microsoft can block third party stores in the future, and force people to get their software from the Windows store, then you know that having your game on there early is going to be profitable.

But what about 10 years down the line when hundreds of thousands of candy crush and flappy bird clones are flooding the store, and that passion project you worked so hard on is no longer appealing to the ranking algorithm, or you can't afford to bid for a spot on the front page because Zynga and King have bought them all up for Flappy Rescue Kingdom Saga III (that's not even mentioning the bundle of games like these that come pre-installed with Windows 10)? You can't really go to another store because those other stores are no longer competitive. Look at the Amazon appstore on Android. Amazon had to manufacture their own devices for the store to have a chance. That actually might be a reason why Valve is trying so hard to support Linux; they're preparing for what they see as a legitimate threat to their business.


Sure, Steam is owned by Valve (which isn't even a public company), but who cares? Valve doesn't own Windows. They can't prevent consumers from going to another store. Steam is not the only software distributor on Windows, and that's a good thing. That's why PC gaming in particular has been so great for indie developers in particular. Proprietary platforms are why consoles have always been so damn hard for the little guys to break into.


And about portability, controls are a part of that. Making your game portable doesn't just mean writing the software so it builds on different platforms, it means writing it so it can be played on different platforms. That's why the game is portable, not the engine. Of course, not every game is a good candidate for this, but then again, we weren't talking about any specific game here. Nowadays it's usually a good idea to approach game design with portability in mind because there are a lot of consumers and a lot of platforms.

I don't think it's a good idea to be supporting the Windows 10 store. It just gives Microsoft more power in the future to pull the kind of bullshit that's so common on mobile nowadays. If everyone is using the Windows 10 store, Microsoft will be able to prevent you from installing software from "Unknown sources" by default for "security reasons", and eventually they'll hide that option to enable unknown sources in some obscure menu or the registry. With that, every single software distributor/store will need to throw more money into their marketing communications in order to educate consumers on how to enable "unknown sources". Plus, Microsoft will have 100% control over what appears on the front page of their store, so good luck with that race to the bottom and/or bidding war and an indie dev who actually cares about what they're making.


I don't wear my tin foil hat often, but when I do, it's usually because of tech giants.


And besides, even if porting to Mac/Linux doesn't make much financial sense, having a portable game is useful if you ever want to sell on consoles, which is a bigger market for gaming than Windows (especially the Switch, which I hear is starving for content)

Not sure about the games industry in particular, but Japanese businesses (and a lot of Asian culture in general) tend to prefer home-country employees to foreign ones. I've heard the term "bamboo ceiling" used to describe the barriers that foreigners face when trying to advance in an Asian company. It's less about racism/discrimination, and more about trust. Business culture in Asia generally revolves around trust (as opposed to the West where businesses expect explicit written contracts for everything), and trusting someone from your hometown is easier than trusting a foreigner. That's just human nature.


Of course, this doesn't apply to every company in every Asian country and every position. It is something to keep in mind though, even if you manage to secure a visa that lets you live and work in the country you want.


But at the end of the day, business is business, and if you can offer a company something that they need (be it skills, insights, whatever), they'll have to hire you. The difficulty is finding a company to apply for, and do research on.

Naturally, you'd probably look towards international firms that you are familiar with as a foreigner, like Sony or Nintendo. However, those mega corporations don't usually hire random people for headquarter positions, and any job openings you find will likely be outside of Japan.


What I suggest is that you save up some money, and take a trip to Japan to get a feel for it (assuming you haven't already done so). You could look for game development companies to potentially work for (or a related business, like a digital design or software development firm). I don't know anything specific about Japan, but I suspect that a small business might be hesitant to hire a foreigner if there are a lot of legal/immigration hoops to jump though, unless you are really that valuable an asset. So definitely do your research on immigration laws and what it takes to get a work visa.

Yeah, but it's hard to re-skin that one. I'd like to have something more concrete and extensible, and preferably not an imgui style framework. Imguis are great for a game loop, but a bit inappropriate when you don't need one.

I've been looking for a good cross platform UI toolkit (just simple widgets with inputs) for tooling and stuff, but there doesn't appear to be anything lightweight and reliable.

So I was thinking of just hacking together something simple with SDL, Cairo and Pango. I noticed though that Pango depends on glib from GTK+, which makes me wonder if that'll cause problems on Windows. Namely, I'm worried about the size of dependencies I'll have to bundle. I once saw a taskbar widget made with Electron, at almost 200mb. That has had me paranoid ever since.


But whatever, before I get into building a bunch of widgets, does anyone know of an existing solution? I'd prefer something with the technologies I've listed because it'd be easier to integrate with my engine. I'm also interested in making it skinnable, so no wxWidgets or anything that abstracts the native OS widgets.

I don't know anything about art school, but if I had an art school, I'd accept you. I think your stuff looks awesome.

Only negative thing I can think of is that you don't have a lot of stuff on there, and what you have is all the same style (except the pixel art, which is honestly a little meh). That may or may not be a bad thing.

I'm a bit confused by your description of the problem. What are you trying to accomplish here? A camera system that will always keep the game within view and at the edges of the screen? Because there are better ways to approach this problem than what you've described (unless I misunderstood).

You could just use a `lookat` type function to have the camera point to the center of the bounds at all times, while `orbiting` the camera around the bounds. Then all you have to do to keep it perfectly aligned with the frustum is calculate the zoom distance (or change the frustum itself).

One simple way I can think to calculate it would be to calculate the angle of the vectors from the camera to all the individual points of the bounds, then using the two with the most extreme angles, calculate the difference in the angle between those two and the camera's frustum. With that distance you can adjust the zoom (or the frustum).


This is of course assuming the `orbit` control scheme works for whatever you're trying to do.

Why can't you use a cracked version? You did buy a license, which doesn't expire. The only barrier in front of you right now is a technical one due to their servers shutting down. You can overcome that through piracy, but you technically aren't doing anything illegal since you technically already bought a license. That's what I've been doing to work on old gamemaker projects of mine.

So it seems these devkits aren't actually indie friendly. The entry barrier is significantly reduced, but it's still nothing like an Android tablet for example, where you can use it as a platform to just play/hack around in developing software. Unless you've got an existing commercial game, or an idea with a viable business plan and funding, applying for a Switch devkit may not end well.


So I guess for most people, they'll just have to wait for the homebrew (and inevitable piracy) scene to start. That's how I was able to start developing for my Playstation Vita.

[DISCLAIMER:]

This isn't really a new game or anything. I made this with gamemaker way back when I was still in middle school lol before Obama was even president.

I was setting up a server for something completely unrelated, and I got the random idea to start hosting this again.

To play, just download the game's standalone executables from GameJolt here: http://gamejolt.com/games/ralios-mmorpg/300

And start the Ralios.exe client (also works under Linux with Wine). When you're at the server selection screen, pick "Other" and for the ip address enter "aramallo.com", and for the port leave the default number (14804).


Again...I made this when I was like 12-13 y/o, so don't expect much. I took heavy inspiration from Maplestory if that isn't obvious.

There's somewhat more info here: http://gamejolt.com/games/ralios-mmorpg/300/devlog/servers-are-back-up-temporarily-mkatnwzj


DISCLAIMER:
DON’T PUT IN YOUR REAL PASSWORDS FOR OTHER SITES/GAMES! MAKE UP A FAKE PASSWORD BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS STORED AS PLAINTEXT ON THE SERVER!!!!!


So that's it. If you do play, I'd be interested to know what your connection quality is like. Was it slow, was it fast, was it unstable, did it simply not work? Also please let me know what country/region you tried to connect from as that would be useful info.



And if you manage to take down King Ping (the name of the giant penguin boss at the end of the map...) without cheating, then I'll buy you a beer .
And if you don't drink alcohol, don't worry; you're not going to be able to kill it anyways.

This is ridiculous, and I will not buy a Switch now because of Nintendo's incompetence. They're such an old and outdated company and don't know what customers want. This is seriously the biggest fuck up of all time.

If Nintendo wants my money, they better start selling non-bitter game cartridges. Until then, I'm going to keep licking my Wii U and its pleasant plastic disks.