Exilian
Game Design and Project Resources: The Workshops Quarter => Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley => Topic started by: Jubal on January 04, 2014, 03:47:17 PM
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For discussing the trials, tribulations, and funsies of game design. :P
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/a895e2e372c9df2a9972f38134ae0ea9c8bf45a8/scene/resources/mesh.h#L82) is a bit more helpful than the documentation.
A bit more digging based off that led to this set of constants (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/a895e2e372c9df2a9972f38134ae0ea9c8bf45a8/scene/resources/mesh.h#L82).
If you have the time/inclination, you should consider contributing documentation fixes upstream (this (http://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/contributing/updating_the_class_reference.html)) may be useful). I'm sure they'd be well received!
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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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Tutorials would make me happy too :)
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This is excite!
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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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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 (http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3826.0), 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 (https://www.python.org/) 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?
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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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cheers!
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Here's a bit of update on my progress and plans:
HEADLINER Exhibit at iFest and Release Plans
(http://koobazaur.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/iFest-2017-Headliner-with-Alex-header.jpg)
My next experimental adventure game about controlling the news, swaying public opinion and impacting your family, had its first public showing.
Continue Reading -> (http://koobazaur.com/gamedev/devblog/headliner-exhibit-ifest-plans/)
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@Koob, that looks insanely fun (and like it could cause me to make bad decisions and then feel bad about myself? Is it that sort of game? Because I love that sort of game, in how I like to explore how much of a terrible human being I am)
Speaking of that sort of game, I've been seeing a lot of progress in mixed reality recently - I'd love to see some experiments with people playing VR games about the horrors of humanity (i.e. they make terrible decisions because all humans are terrible things) and then measuring those in-game choices against the reactions of people watching the game take place.
I, on the other hand, have done ZERO game dev recently. Been too busy playing with neural nets and terrible romance novels...
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I'm sure you can combine a neural net and a terrible romance novel into a computer game with a bit of thought :P
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@Koob, that looks insanely fun (and like it could cause me to make bad decisions and then feel bad about myself? Is it that sort of game? Because I love that sort of game, in how I like to explore how much of a terrible human being I am)
Pretty much :) I espouse the Telltale and CD Projet's design ethos of "No good deed goes unpunished" ;D
Whate Game Dev do you do normally, Lizard?
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I sort of like those games but they frustrate me, both in that I'm a) very driven to try and Do The Right Thing and b) really quite machiavellian. I feel rubbish after playing games where the result is either "you were nice and everything ended awfully" or "you were evil and won", because my instinctive feeling is that if I can't win as a good guy, I haven't got the strategy right or I just sit around wondering what I could have done better. (This probably explains a lot about my attitude to life in general).
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armadillo's getting real...
EDIT: the forum replaces sh!t with armadillo? Really now?
Since that's censored, here's the link to the image (NSFW). [size=78%]http://i.imgur.com/kACvGOD.gif (http://i.imgur.com/kACvGOD.gif)[/size] . Still, I find the censoring a bit silly
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You're welcome to use sh!t or space the letters or link to images that use it, in context, we don't have a blanket anti-swearing rule per se we just have a silly word filter. The filter is intentionally silly and we've had it for years so it's sort of just become a running joke now that I quite like having in place :)
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I wrote a one-year retrospective on moving to Seattle for indie game dev:
Considering Moving to Seattle as an Indie Game Dev? My one Year Retrospective
(http://koobazaur.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Seattle-Skyskape-headed-800x300.jpg)
If you want to move to Seattle to pursue indie game development, I’m now you one year into the future. Looking back at my experience, I have attended many more gaming events than before, met countless developers in my shoes, fostered promising business connections, and got a chance to showcase my upcoming game frequently. But there are some disappointments as well, such finding a flourishing social life like I had before. Here are all the pros, cons and what I learned from living in Seattle for a year.
Continue Reading -> (http://koobazaur.com/gamedev/considering-moving-seattle-indie-game-dev-one-year-retrospective/)
Edit by Glaurung: link URL cleaned up
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Nice :) I think a lot of those issues are the case anywhere... I still haven't worked out at all if there's any good indie developing community here in Vienna, though it's a big enough city that there ought to be. In 10 more months maybe I'll do a similar blogpost on my own experiences over here! :)
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I'd be curious to read! I quite liked Vienna (http://koobazaur.com/tag/vienna/) when I visited a bit over a year ago. Austria had the best beers of all the Euro countries I visited on that trek too :p
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I don't drink beer, I'm probably missing out... I gave some of my initial thoughts on the city here if you're interested: http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5239.0
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I wrote a one-year retrospective on moving to Seattle for indie game dev:
Considering Moving to Seattle as an Indie Game Dev? My one Year Retrospective
(http://koobazaur.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Seattle-Skyskape-headed-800x300.jpg)
If you want to move to Seattle to pursue indie game development, I’m now you one year into the future. Looking back at my experience, I have attended many more gaming events than before, met countless developers in my shoes, fostered promising business connections, and got a chance to showcase my upcoming game frequently. But there are some disappointments as well, such finding a flourishing social life like I had before. Here are all the pros, cons and what I learned from living in Seattle for a year.
Continue Reading -> (http://koobazaur.com/gamedev/considering-moving-seattle-indie-game-dev-one-year-retrospective/)
Edit by Glaurung: link URL cleaned up
If its any consolation, I have never managed to make friends in game developer circles apart from the people I work with directly. Then again, I find it difficult to even make business related connections in this game. I have fairly cynical view, that any time I meet another indie dev they must have some sort of agenda - maybe its because of the places I have tended to meet fellow devs. I treat gamedev meetups and events as work outings and always feel like I'm on the clock. Especially if money is tight, its hard to relax.
My first big event was to attend GDC back in 2015. This was before gamedev was anything close to a career and I was still safe in the cradle of academia. I had managed to get a free ticket, along with some other UK devs (all of whom I did not know). We were all in the same boat, everyone had a small project nearing completion. After arriving, only one of the group was interested in meeting up during the event, the rest all had their own plans and seemed to be putting on a facade of business-like self-importance when I tried to chat to them as humans. I assume these people, although fellow nerds deep down, were probably under immense stress and felt they needed to dedicate the precious time at the event towards more influential contacts (they are probably doing it right as my contact network remains impressively insignificant). I left the event feeling like I spent the whole trip in a bubble, just observing everything that was going on.
Since then I have attended a handful of conferences and meetups. The meetups are always fairly awkward. I find myself surrounded by people with the same interests as me, but everyone always seems to be on their best behaviour, very rigid.
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That is a pity - I guess I don't have that experience but I'm very much not a professional dev and I've not often been in circles where everyone's trying to make a go of it professionally. I think that sort of hierarchical networking where people end up encouraged to spend all their time pushing towards the most influential person present is really annoyingly pointless and I hate environments like that; that said, I guess as someone who is still cradled in academia that sort of pressure to perform financially isn't something I've ever had to cope with.