/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

Where's that link that explains what happened to the agdg community after the exodus? About splitting into groups and whatnot?
I can't find it.

>>2743
Story:
- Cade and Paxton enter a single-planet system in a desperate wormhole jump in a dogfight with mercs. Their ship, a 2-seater fighter, is badly damaged and comes down hard on the planet's surface. They eject at the last moment. [basic gameplay tutorial and first level here]
- After Cade and Paxton explore area around their crash site, they find an ancient structure. There they meet the only sapient life form on the planet so far: Amethyst, who seems to be a princess of the planet and an immortal, ageless heir to it.
- Amethyst and Cade make first contact, and she helps the stranded men form a plan to repair their ship and take off again. The planet has abundant natural resources and advanced facilities, but they are all buried deep beneath the surface layer.
- This was not visible from space, but much of the planet's interior is a network of water-filled tunnels and caves that descend deep towards the unknown core.

- [first act: collect materials to repair ship while befriending Amethyst and learning how to swim/acquiring something to breathe underwater]
- [underwater exploration is done with flares and sonar pings, which can affect fauna in different ways]

- [Cade is introduced to several regions, including at least one underwater biome and traversal highway. While being shown around by Amethyst, he notices a deep tunnel going into murky depths.]
- - C: "What's that place?"
- - A: "That leads to the sunless depths, where no light has ever touched. It is a bad place."
- - C: "Does anything live down there?"
- - A: "Anything that does would need to live without air and without sunlight. I do not enjoy thinking of it."

>>2744
- second act: fighting mercs and scuttling their ships. acquiring new weapons and techniques.
- When Cade returns with the final material, the merc leader and his second-in-command have arrived at the ancient structure. A great fight ensues with the mercs sustaining injuries and leaving no ship intact except for the merc leader's.
- Merc leader, having found another structure elsewhere, has learned of the planet's true capabilities. He wounds Amethyst to distract Cade and descends into the structure, sealing it behind him.
[The planet's true nature has been hidden from the player until this point, though Paxton has speculated the abundance of metal and the odd life forms on the surface indicate life has not evolved entirely naturally.]


FINAL ACT:
- Amethyst is not worried about her fate, comforting Cade and Paxton before falling comatose. The two examine her injuries and find that her body is only partially organic, with much of her fur, skin, muscle tissue, and skeleton being synthetic fibers.
- Cade and Paxton determine that the only way they can help Amethyst is by descending into the sunless depths to find a rare material. Cade vows to do it, by this point more for personal reasons than practical.
- The sunless depths are finally explored, which is the highlight of the game. Featuring:
- - blind shark-man cave dwellers with hypersensitive ears. they are by far the most threatening enemies underwater, moving slowly and silently towards Cade and inflicting great chunks of damage with each tearing bite.
- - there are pockets of stale air within the sunless depths, and the shark-men can follow Cade there as well. they fight in a feral, uncanny manner and do not follow the same tells as other enemies. they are immune to any visual tricks (if that's relevant).
- - extended combat encounters against hordes of shark-men that crawl out of darkness towards the light of Cade's flares and the sound of his footsteps.

>>2745
Gameplay:
- 3rd person melee combat with varying movesets: sword, knife, staff, hammer
- 1st person aiming and shooting, WHILE STATIONARY. used to interact with puzzle elements and strike weak points of enemies that would otherwise resist strikes.
- there must absolutely be the Halo 2 sword lunge as some kind of finishing move.
- I'd like there to be 1st person melee and shooting, perhaps with a 2-weapon system that allows guns and melee weapons to be used simultaneously, but it would be very unwieldy to combine tight action combat with long periods of isolated exploration.
- first-person aiming with mouselook also presents problems in balance and player disparity based on sensitivity and general awareness.

So there it all is. Any details or questions that jump out at you would be greatly appreciated so I can view it from different angles and keep up the creative pressure to do something with my ideas, even if I don't get to this point until many years from now once I actually know how to make and finish games.

I had been thinking how to balance the nature of a planet mostly made of metal and artificial resources with the gameplay in the same way that Halo 1 had subtle details about the Covenant in their weapons: elites used plasma rifles, which were hard to aim but had heavy damage; jackals had exclusively plasma pistols because they could use charge shots to strip Master Chief's shields; grunts used needlers (and whatever else was lying around) because grunts were bad at aiming and needed a weapon that could support the elites and jackals.

The notion of metal-eating rust beetles occurred to me, as well as the notion of harvesting their hives for "live ammo" like in Oddworld Stranger's Wrath. Perhaps having to manage the beetles' population in each hive and keeping it above a certain level lest the nest fall fallow and deprive the player of a refill point. Could be good, could be bad, dunno.

>>2743
>>2744
>>2745
>>2746
>>2747
I don't have any questions myself (being just a lurker). But I must say this is an impressive collection of ideas. GG.

>>2735
I wouldn't let crap like that stop you, Anon. May as well find another hobby if you're going to worry about that kind of thing, IMO.

>>2736
Oh I won't let that stop me, I'll just wind up showing progress when I got most of the game done, or at least enough to showcase something that can be released fairly soon-ish

>>2737
Glad to hear it, Anon. Gambatte!

>>2735
That's a real problem that you actually need to worry about now. People could always copy your shit so it was always a problem, but it took actual time and effort and even some skill, so there was a limit to how much it could be done. But now there's 5 billion indians ready to prompt clones of your game with AI. Depending on the size of your game, they can beat you to market even if you only release a trailer 1 month before release.

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>about 2/3rds of my demo stage are done
>last part missing requires about one or two new enemies, maybe weapon handling, and a new grapple feature to be able to throw enemies around
<don't know what to pick up
<making an enemy would require me to either make a new sprite sheet out of a cheap model, figure out the mechanics (kinda have them thought up), and new ways to balance the stage for the upcoming last segment
<adding a grapple may take up some time, already made a very poor spritesheet out of the resources I got, but now there is handling grunts while grabbed, and other features like punching them when grabbed, and throwing them around
<weapon handling has been on the back burner, since I am designing the level "fist focused"
Is this that "drowning in a glass of water" i heard about

Sad the only active project thread is this fetish shit.

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Kasha's an innocent game series.

GigaMaidens is decidedly more mature, but they take place in the same universe.

Progress on both is happening concurrently. I have a team  of local devs helping on GM now. Stuff's happening and I'm feeling good.

Here's something I drew recently.

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>>2724

>>2727
Fuck off dude I am not stalking Dingdong. I don't care.
I'm aware of the recent OneyPlays drama, and his schizo meltdown, but I don't have  or want anything to do with him.

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GigaMaidens has most of my creative energy right now, so I have begun the model of the second character Drarin.

Drarin's a destroyer goddess who fights with metal gauntlets from which she can deploy a variety of weapons in a manner similar to a swiss army knife.  She also uses destroyer goddess magic themed around cosmic anomalies and catastrophes. 

Her proportions are similar to Sachi's in a quick check, so that's good, although her model is presently larger than Sachi.

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>>2638

I implemented a max-area circle generator >>1398

uint get_max_area_circle_indexcount_for_vertexcount (uint vertexcount) {
	return (vertexcount-2)*3; // vertcount-2 = number of triangles.
}
void build_max_area_circle (uint vertexcount, Vec2f* vertices, uint indexcount, u32* indices) {
	assert(vertcount >= 3);
	assert(indexcount == (vertexcount-2)*3);
	
	u32* ibuilder = temp_alloc(vertexcount*sizeof(u32));
	uint ibuilder_count = vertexcount;
	for (uint i=0; i<vertexcount; i++) {
		f32 angle = (MATH_PI * 2.0f * (f32)i) / (f32)vertexcount;
		vertices[i].x = cosf(angle);
		vertices[i].y = sinf(angle);

>>2680
Congrats Anon! Looks very cool tbh.

>The Method of Exhaustion
Based old Greek dudes used just this approach to accurately determine Pi.

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After 7 thousand years I'm working on things again, kind of. To start with, I made one of my program's UI DPI-aware (you can resize it).

I discovered that you can cache font glyphs and still get subpixel positions, so now my text rendering looks way more smooth without extra performance cost. On hindsight I was dumb for not thinking of it before: just cache different graphics at about 4-10 different subpixel positions, then use the closest one when drawing glyphs. Pic uses 8, though it's almost indistinguishable from 4.

There's still something odd about the transparency values from stb_truetype, the text looks faded out so I'm manipulating the pixels to make them a bit more opaque, but I think that might make the glyphs a bit uneven (for example the top of "C" looks thicker than the bottom, and the bottom of "w" looks too dense). Maybe I'm blending colors wrong, or maybe that's just how it is at this size.

I can't record videos because I'm on Linux now and my recording tool doesn't work, a static image will have to do.

>>2732
Congratz Anon, on both counts. GG.

>>2693
Interesting! My first thought was some kind of star map.

>>2693
Just think: you could give your players subconscious deja-vu every time the sky flashes during an in-game thunderstorm.

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I'm in post-processing hell

Those character designs look amazing tbh.

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>>2715
thank you!

>>2701
>plays animations and stuff only when the server says so
Shiggydiggy, do you realized how slow that would be? Keep your server side code small and simple as possible anon. You don't need a signal from a server just to play animation. A game server should be managing players connection, provide coordinate of players and monsters and spawn enamy monsters, That's it. Everything else is gameplay runs in computer of players side.

>>2702
Yup, agreed.

>>2703
>how slow that would be
When you attack an enemy in Runescape, you need to play 2 animations.
2 bytes = message ID
4 bytes = entity ID
1 byte = animation ID
This happens around once per second unless you use a particularly fast weapon, *2 since the enemy fights back. Of course you also need a message for the health modification.
2 bytes = message ID
4 bytes = entity ID
2 bytes = health modified
1 byte = some flags like whether to show a damage number (eating a potion would not show up but a healing spell would)
That's about 23 bytes of data for all of it combined.

This sentence is 26 bytes.

>>2703
>Shiggydiggy, do you realized how slow that would be? Keep your server side code small and simple as possible anon. You don't need a signal from a server just to play animation. A game server should be managing players connection, provide coordinate of players and monsters and spawn enamy monsters, That's it. Everything else is gameplay runs in computer of players side.
You're 100% retarded.

I've seen a couple neat games that have a lot more potential for improvement left, but the developer just calls it quits relatively "early". At least one of them stopped because they're making a sequel.

That got me thinking about post-release content, many games get seemingly infinite post-release updates, and that's seen as a good and even an expected thing. Games in the past basically never did this, instead they got sequels, or expansion packs that were often treated a bit like spinoffs.

So I wonder if instead of post-release content being a "good way to keep an audience", it's actually just robbing yourself of the opportunity to make and sell a sequel. People tend to get mad if the game doesn't get more content post-release, but as long as you don't leave it a broken mess, people will probably accept that a sequel is where the updates are, maybe even be more excited about it than they would about a content update. It's also a more economically reasonable plan for you as a developer. Of course some people just want free shit and get mad at anything other than infinite free content updates, there's no appeasing those anyway.

Apparently if you put the sequel into a Steam bundle with the previous game and then give the bundle a discount, if someone who already owns the first game buys it, they'll only have to pay for the second game but still get the discount for it. So it's kind of like a discount on the second game that only applies to owners of the first game.

>>2706
The model might make a little more sense for multiplayer games if the dev is worried about his last game competing with his new one, or if all he really has are incremental improvements. Then again, I guess it's probably also the current proliferation of game updaters that enables this business model.

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>>2572
Depends on what you're looking for. Immediate mode UIs for dev tools? More general game GUI libraries? A widget toolkit that isn't GTK+?
I have zero experience with doing GUIs in C myself (my only experience with the field is fucking around in Godot), but the Suckless.org guys recommend https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear as an immediate UI library. https://wiki.musl-libc.org/alternatives has a number of different recommendations, some of which look pretty cool, and I've heard good things about Tk. Perhaps someone else here could recommend you something else from his experience, but I figured I'd toss these at you in case any of them look like something you'd want to fuck around with.

>>2573
NTA. Nice post, Anon. Thanks for the information.

>>2572
If you want to do it yourself, making a simple immediate mode UI is very easy. Here's a pretty good article about it: https://www.dgtlgrove.com/p/ui-part-2-build-it-every-frame-immediate

It looks something like this:
struct Contex {
	Vec2i origin;
	Vec2i pos;
	Vec2i size;
	int row_height;
	int row_spacing;
};
void maybe_wrap_to_new_line (Context* context, int width) {
	if (context->pos.x + width > context->origin.x + context->size.width) {
		context->pos.x = context->origin.x;
		context->pos.y += context->row_height + context->row_spacing;

>>2575
That's good-looking code, Anon.

>>2572
If you want to do your own from scratch, Clay is a good reference and the author has a video explaining it works.

>>2238
This is him is you don't recognize the posting style: 
>>2236
>>2237

>>2238
>>2239
Thanks for the headsup, Anon. Yes, he's been abusing Trashchan for a few days now.

>>2238
I still find it baffling they refused to do anything about it.

>>2244
It's appreciated.

>>2247
>I still find it baffling they refused to do anything about it.
I remember seeing that guy in the zzz/v/ /agdg/ threads and his posts were promptly deleted almost every time they appeared. Did I miss something?
I figured those threads slowed down due to the autist posting his DA-tier scribbles of uncanny women.

MeriKuri, /agdg/!

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>>1587
Are you trying to invent cataclysm:dark days ahead?

>backpacks
Why not just make everything into a storage? All existing items have to be stored somewhere, and a lot of items are both storages and "items". So simply register every item, by ID/pointer into its storage space. On loading, recursively load all used storages, starting from "the world". 
Its actually important part of the interface. Depending on number of items/buttons, game might start lagging, if every button pressed checks every other button location against it. You will need to separate them into containers anyway. 
And with everything being a container of their own, you can have "hidden" part, where item stores materials its made of.  

>how to ID
You either use half assed system, or make a proper all encompassing item ID system. 
> I want to refer to the inventory by it's name
You dont mean, you literally search all existing items via std::string or something like that?

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>>1587
>>1588
>create_item()
>create_inventory() 
I just realized that the way I explained it doesn't make any sense because I left out context. Those functions in reality are create_iteminfo() and create_inventoryinfo().

The way my stuff is organized is that I have objects and infos. The info represents the object's type and has all the static information about it, like name and description and sprite, you only modify those at game startup. The object has per-object information, like how many items are in an item stack, they are actual objects that exist in the world.

Pic related are the actual, un-edited data structures for my items. What I'm talking about is creating an Iteminfo, and connecting the relevant Inventoryinfoid into it. I don't need or want to store the inventory info's string ID into the item info, I just want the numerical ID, but the item info may be created before the inventory info so the numerical ID wouldn't exist yet.

>Are you trying to invent cataclysm:dark days ahead?
Not sure what makes you think that.

Test.

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New bread.
>>1605
>>1605
>>1605

>>1587
You need a better vision of what your game should be about, what is it called?