Author Topic: Game dev chatter  (Read 17356 times)

Jubal

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Game dev chatter
« on: January 04, 2014, 03:47:17 PM »
For discussing the trials, tribulations, and funsies of game design.  :P
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Lizard

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #1 on: April 15, 2014, 08:29:13 PM »
So this board is pretty silent but as a game dev I'd like to spark some chatter - if only to promote my studio/our debut title.

And when I say 'debut title', I mean 'I've only just finished the game design doc'. But y'know, it's progress.
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Jubal

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #2 on: April 15, 2014, 08:43:01 PM »
I might've found people to help get the art done on Adventures of Soros!

And I've said that like five times before, but I'm hopeful this time, the people seem fairly competent. :)

But yeah, we need to get more devs in here. And I'd like to split this forum, or more accurately have a new area for Exilian-affiliated commercial developers, so we have this area to nurture crappy hobbyists like me and then have a separate area for people to go goggle at what the people who know their stuff can come up with.  :)
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Lizard

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #3 on: April 15, 2014, 08:50:20 PM »
This is excite! Hopefully they know their stuff and you get somewhere with them.

Yeah, that honestly seems like a good idea - then the pros can help the hobbyists with their knowledge, and the hobbyists can support the pros with their valuable monies, but both have an area to retreat to. Anything I can do to help, let me know.
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Jubal

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #4 on: July 07, 2014, 11:38:43 PM »
I was thinking of writing a discussion/tutorial/article on what motivates people to play your games - of interest to anyone?
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Lizard

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #5 on: April 12, 2016, 10:37:21 PM »
I'm a dev and I'm here to chatter. Or, more accurately, complain.


I discovered Godot recently, and as free (open source MIT licence) products go, it's amazing. Like Unity, only actually optimised properly and way more extensible. I do, however, find one major issue with it:


The documentation is nearly non-existent.


For example: it tells me I can use an object of type ImmediateGeometry to represent changing, simple geometrics in a 3D game world. So I drag one in and begin setting it up in the code.


NONE of the methods for ImmediateGeometry are documented.


It has a 'begin' method, which I assume I'll need to call first, though nothing tells me this is so. 'Begin' takes a primitive of type 'int' and a texture of type 'Texture'.


Now, I'm a fairly smart lady and a pretty good programmer. I know what a primitive is, in relation to graphics, and I obviously know what an int type is. But there is literally NO WAY for me to figure out what that int is meant to be. Number of sides? Number of points? WHO KNOWS*.


*being a smart lady, I assumed it would be a static constant in another file, which would tell the ImmediateGeometry what it should be in this instance. I was right, as far as I can tell from other people's code examples, but I still can't find a complete list of what those constants are or what they mean.


SO FRUSTRATED.
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Jubal

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #6 on: April 12, 2016, 11:15:18 PM »
If you end up compiling documentation as you go, I'm very happy for Exilian to host any such resources that might lead to people sniffing their way here :P

But yes bad documentation is hell, let alone nonexistent documentation :(
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Son of the King

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #7 on: April 12, 2016, 11:52:16 PM »
I did a bit of digging in the Godot codebase (many open source projects have poor documentation in my experience, because writing code is more fun than writing documentation for most folk, and I find that often reading the code itself is more helpful than the documentation), and it turns out that the method definition is a bit more helpful than the documentation.

A bit more digging based off that led to this set of constants.

If you have the time/inclination, you should consider contributing documentation fixes upstream (this) may be useful). I'm sure they'd be well received!

Lizard

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #8 on: April 14, 2016, 10:54:15 PM »
Being the INCREDIBLY SMART HUMAN I am, it never occurred to me to actually look in the code-base. I actually facepalmed when reading that message and it became apparent to me that I could've done this research myself.


But now you've done it for me, SotK, I guess I'm good :P


(I am probably gonna update the documentation, as I work through this project, for my own sanity if nothing else. So @Jubal - the documentation will have to go to their Github. Any tutorials I decide to write can come here though!)
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Jubal

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #9 on: April 14, 2016, 11:07:18 PM »
Tutorials would make me happy too :)
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waynee

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #10 on: June 08, 2016, 09:14:40 AM »
This is excite!

DeepCandle Games

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #11 on: June 08, 2016, 09:34:33 AM »
at closest i get ideas for games but have no ability to make them ha-ha, so where does that leave me?  :P

but it does interest me a lot! i want to learn python to this end!
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Glaurung

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #12 on: June 08, 2016, 12:59:16 PM »
but it does interest me a lot! i want to learn python to this end!
We have a subforum for programming and game design tutorials, including quite a lot on Python - please feel free to browse through there. Unsurprisingly, there's loads of content elsewhere on the Web, and Python's own website has extensive documentation and training materials. Do you have programming experience with any other languages?

at closest i get ideas for games but have no ability to make them ha-ha, so where does that leave me?  :P
We have quite a lot of game designers active here; I would hope it would be possible to float an idea or game outline, and then say, "How might I go about developing this?". Any thoughts on this from anyone more experienced than me?

Jubal

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #13 on: June 08, 2016, 03:04:47 PM »
Yes, I'm very happy to help teach at least the basics of Python; Son of the King's tutorials are a good start for learning the language, and I'm happy to help on advice for starting writing small parser games etc which are a good place to begin.

There's also the unused but existent "rate my design" board if you want feedback on purely design ideas:
http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?board=203.0
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DeepCandle Games

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Re: Game dev chatter
« Reply #14 on: June 08, 2016, 03:41:16 PM »
cheers!
I write many projects focused around RPGs and rules expansions!

If you'd like to support me you can buy (or download for free) my finished work from https://ko-fi.com/nanoteq_rpg or play-test them with me on my discord!