kayin's Forum Posts

  • Gotta think about what "succeed" means. HTML5 isn't doing anything Flash wasn't doing, down to the level where the tools certain people are using might not even change. Anyone who says HTML5 won't succeed is being silly. It's the successor to a very well established use case. How big will it be for gaming? Well, I don't think the Scirra team has anything to worry able (if you're product makes content for the thing that's going to supplant flash, you're golden), but I don't think it's the next big paradise of gaming or whatever, in the same way Flash never quite was. They're tools for certain jobs and design spaces that have pros and cons. Are you even making a game appropriate to be a webgame? Is it appropriate for mobile? If you're just going to put the whole thing into an EXE browser wrapper, is it necessarily the best tool? Even if it's not the necessarily best tool, does it still work for your project scope and your skill set?

    You don't just release for every platform for free, even if your platform supports it. Resolution disparities, variation between controls, processor power -- it all matters. You can make a mobile touch app that can be released to all "greater" platforms but it's probably not going to be a particularly enjoyable user experience. I know I took a pass on C2 not because I thought it was bad, or html5 has no future, but because it didn't fit my use case (at least at this point). Plenty of other people are going to find a lot of success there and probably make buttloads of money in that space. :)

    Just some perspective.

  • Hahah, it's not like I don't occasionally post here (okay, maybe not as much as I used to, but whatever). Also shoutouts to Lucid for making the tool that's going to let me even work in unity in 2d to begin with.

    Anyways, thanks a lot! As popular as I Wanna Be the Guy stuff is I'm semi-self conscious about it. Like, I always worry it's going to come off as arbitrary crap to people that anyone can do. Even though I know from experience that I have a good grasp on level design and psychology, I'm always worrying that "the next time I'm going to fail and fall flat on my face".

    Anyways, I can give some advice about level design. Not all of this is universally applicable, but it helps.

    Make your stage look like something

    You don't have to be realistic or worry about little details, but if you look at IWBTG, even though even that is pretty sloppy, it has PLACES. The levels are solid structures and generally not (though not always) just free floating challenge rooms that can be anywhere and those that violate that sensibility exist to be jarring. Now again, IWBTG has a lot of weirdness in it's map layout, but if you compare it to any fangame, it looks a million times more sensible. Look at a Mario game like SMB3 or World and then look at a hack for either. What's the difference? Most SMB stages feel like places. Mountains, hills, coasts, deserts, caves.... and the hacks all have very arbitrary structures like pswitch mazes that don't represent anything and make it feel like... well, a cheap hack.

    There is also more to a stage than the individual changes. How and why you move (even if these movements are ultimately unimportant) is very important. Use things like easy jumps and easy enemies to keep pacing. Pacing is suuuper important. The "shape" the player moves in a particularly level helps them remember the area makes it feel different from other areas. If you're moving only straight, that';s boring, but if you're going all over the place you're engaging all sorts of parts of the brain used for spatial awareness and that's good! It's stimulating to have good, active level design where the player is constantly doing something, even if them doing it is merely a formalit (IE: Jumping over a pipe uncontested).

    Also aesthetics matter. You differentiate areas and help infer what sort of logic an area is going to follow. If a skyscraper level has the geography of a cave, it's going to feel wrong (unless it's some sort of ruined building or something).

    Now this can go as far as you want. If you're making Bomberman, theming and level design are really minor. If you're making a metroidvania, you wanna pay a LOT of attention to even the dumbest details so you can get the maximum immersion possible. Anyways I'd break this down into...

    Consistency

    Flow

    Pacing/Time

    Aesthetic Appeal

    Try and hit those four notes. There are other notes to hit too, but thos are the ones I feel I can talk the best about.

    As for psychology, I can't really share much. I work from the gut on that, but I will say the secret there is to act and predict players with CONFIDENCE. Even if you your self lack confidence, just go with your gut and pray. Second guessing your self can be a curse.

  • Nice plugin. I've been switching to it to get away from xaudio2 due to the crash bugs on layout changes. Mostly like it better anyways, but one concern~

    Is there any easy way to just murder all music channels like you can all sound channels? It'd be nice to not have to babysit all my music channels super carefully!

    I got some plans to make this a little less cumbersome, but again, it would be nice. I find it weird the option is there for sounds but not for music.

  • I always feel people working on construct underestimate the stuff game makers do. I'm a good deal over a thousand events and I'm making an NES Style game. Much less dialog, much simpler bosses, much simpler cutscenes, much simpler enemies and a much simpler engine in general.

    Everything is working semi good on my end (all my assets and stuff are so small that I've never noticed a memory leak issue. Just crashes), but I'm always find it a little strange when people are surprised by this stuff. When you make an engine, it's easy to make nice, clean, reusable code, but when when you make a game you WILL want to do things your engine doesn't expressly support. Any decent game designer is, more often than not, going to muck with and grow their codebase rather than stifle their creativity.

    That said, you guys are great and always accommodating. I just always found this funny, even when Ashley and co. were still heading C1 development.

    You just gotta always assume we're doing way more than toy expect. :)

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  • Sadly I can't even contribute much to the bug hunt because it's far too intermittent for me to test accurately. But trying to pause everything between transitions might be the best option. It'll be a long while until I can be sure it helped any though.

  • I get it rather randomly while testing my game, either when the player dies (and the layout is reloaded) or when occasionally switching. I haven't noticed any patterns, but I know smashing the Q key to restart for a minute almost NEVER makes it crash.

  • So far virtually every project I've worked on has bottlenecked on logic and not graphics. It's hard to tax the GPU without doing stuff that is obviously stupid and wasteful unless you're REALLY pushing the graphics that hard. I could be happy with CC for a lot of stuff if it wasn't for the fact that what I made was permanently tied to windows. Bugs in the editor aside, I'm extremely happy working with it.

    So one related question and one unrelated question. Lucid, can you give any sort of feature/fix previews? Since I'm deep in a project right now, knowing what changes might concern or benefit me would be nice so I can plan accordingly.

    Also unrelatedly but since we're posting about bugs in CC, what steps can I take to prevent crashes when switching layouts? I remember reading a lot on the topic but can't quite find any. Those are a set of problems I'd like to stamp out.

  • If the animation is complex, I do it as a series of rough liney sketches and put that into photoshop. Once the animation looks smooth like that, I'll lay down an actual figure and build up from there.

  • Hey, if anyone was trying to use INIs with Input System, I got this covered. Okay so this is what you gotta do.

    Okay if you look at the strings that the plugin exports, they look like this..

    attack,1,{CC909B30-8BD8-11DF-8001-444553540000},1,Button 3special,1,{CC909B30-8B... etc etc etc

    Whats really going on is there is a line break in there that doesn't display properly in note pad (though if you use something decent, it'll show up correctly). Anyways, there are linebreaks.

    attack,1,{CC909B30-8BD8-11DF-8001-444553540000},1,Button 3 (LINEBREAK HERE) special,1,{CC909B30-8B... etc etc etc

    In notepad, it won't look like anything, but you if you move your arrow keys through the string, you'll notice you'll need to press an arrow twice where the linebreak is (it's like an invisible character that doesn't behave well when importing ini values.

    Either way, SELECT THAT (shift+Arrow) and copy it.

    Basically then, when you save the input string to the ini file, do...

    replace(global('InputSystem.GetControlConfigData'), "
", "*")

    Paste that linebreak character where the code jumps a line and it'll look like that. It looks dumb, it works. When you load the ini file value, just do the opposite replace and shazam, you bypassed the troublesome character. Now you won't have to use the binary object and the ini object or deal with the binary objects glitchy behavior.

    I know this isn't the best explanation, so if someone needs help, I'll try and make an example.

  • <img src="http://kayin.pyoko.org/beplogo.gif" border="0">

    <img src="http://kayin.pyoko.org/sss4.png" border="0">

    <img src="http://kayin.pyoko.org/sss7.png" border="0">

    <img src="http://kayin.pyoko.org/sss8.png" border="0">

    <img src="http://kayin.pyoko.org/sss9.png" border="0">

    Brave Earth: Prologue is coming along nicely. Hopefully when it's done, C2 will be in a state that I can work with and then I can move on to using that.

    I try and do Screenshot Saturdays on my twitter when I can.

  • Difficulty is all a matter of what your goal is. Games tend to be easier these days because that is more accessible and they design their games around different psychological hooks than things like flow. Big Triple A games tend to focus on the experience. The game shouldn't usually be hard because that only stops you from seeing their best work -- their highlyc cinematic action set pieces.

    Free to Play to Play games on facebook rely on psychological addiction hooks to keep people playing (and hopefully convert them into paying customers). For their purposes, difficulty is not necessary and if it exists, it should be a fake type of difficulty meant to trick the player into thinking they're being clever (which is a very very strong psychological hook when done right).

    Of course, in the triple A, you got games like Bayonetta, or even more extremely, Demon's and Dark Souls. Dark Souls, despite it's crazy difficulty, sold an ass-ton of copies, because both games new how to craft an amazingly challenging and rewarding experience (See: the psychological state of flow again). I personally don't find those games to be as absurdly hard and soul crushing as people make them out to be (though they are still very hard), the idea that players THINK that adds to their mental reward after they succeed at a task. If you can get a player into Flow and have him leave Flow to pump his fist give a victory scream, well, you've done good. That's part of what made I Wanna Be the Guy work.

    Another bit on this is, by definition, you are an indie/small tiem developer. Wide appeal is not always the most optimal course of action. Often focused niche appeal can give a piece of work the eyes it needs to get noticed. And if a game flourishes in a niche, it gets exposure to the mass market.

    So basically, there is no right answer for difficulty, but you should be deliberate in your decision. If you want to do something hard, just make sure it is fundamentally enjoyable. Because even if dying wasn't the player's fault (like what happens in the Souls games of IWBTG at times), if the player is sold on the experience, they won't care. In fact, they might even laugh about it.

  • I've been trying to do saving and loading through the ini plugin with no luck. I get one control working and that's it.

  • I agree with a desire for multiple collision masks. It's not entirely great to take a complex character, make 3-5 copies and then form various collision boxes like that. It works, but theres a lot of annoying crap involved (optimally I'd wanna be able to play collision masks over transparent version of the normal original sprite).

    I C1 I'm working with 4 different characters, each each with anywhere from 6 to 10 attacks, and it gets pretty cumbersome. If I had something liek this as an option, I would not only just use it for what I'm doing now, but probably do even more complex things in games.

    I'm pretty sure Gamma is right. You'll be hearing this request again.

  • Hahah, I don't want to hate on anyone who cares about web games. It is the future and the direction most people are working in! But my ideas and thought processes do not lend themselves to the whole 'web' thing. Having people play a 50-100 megabyte game online (Especially one you sorta wanna just sell on steam or something) can be logistically obnoxious and lead to poor user experiences with load times and the like.

    So I don't want to say web games are bad. I'm just saying that I don't have a horse in this race.

  • To put some perspective on the Flash/HTML5 thing (mostly for Vicu, but some of you might might enough this), Flash and HTML5 are not equivalent platforms. HTML5 isn't a 'thing' or discrete entity like Flash is. HTML5 standards for browsers just bring together a combination of features (Canvas element, faster javascript) that allow for flash like features.

    To say HTML5 can go down the same dark path flash did in the realm of performance and bloat is sorta a silly misunderstanding. It would be like someone saying "Oh well C++ has gotten so bloated over the years". Adobe makes a product and authoring tools for that product. They expand it and they add new features to their authoring tool that makes the fast majority of Flash content.

    HTML5 is just a bunch of tools. No one is controlling javascript. You have unlimited potential there, you just need implementation. Flash's advantage currently is it has a well developed authoring tool. HTML5, just being a collection of standards and a real programming language is something that is, at this point, potential Construct has the benefit of being one of the first tools help make HTML5 content, especially for games. That's both big for Scirra and great for developers. Flash WILL die. Even adobe knows this, which is why Adobe Flash Professional has HTML5 export abilities (or at least some sort of converter, I don't remember). Even if their platform dies, they can still monetize their tool. It's hard to compete with an open standard that has many advantages and very few drawbacks, it's just a matter of time. When enough folks in the content creation market are skiled in HTML5 and it's deployment and when things become more cost effective, things will change. HTML5 will only improve as content creation tools are made to support it and as browsers improve performance.

    Flash still has some advantages now. They come in discrete, independent files which can be used as standalone executables, for example. You know things will behave the same on any platform. But since html5 is a very open standard, as soon as someone comes up with a good way to package something made in html5 as a single, easily embedded, clean entity, it'll happen. People will want this to make it easier to upload games to places like kongregate easily and more securely. But if I were to guess, I'd say there are probably ways to do it right now. The question is more about which implementations will end up being the most popular and well supported.

    So while Flash and HTML5 cover a lot of similar functionality they are very much NOT analogous platforms and there is little reason to expect them to share similar histories. HTML5 is a specification, flash is NOT. Flash has a single vendor, HTML5 either has no vendor or many vendors depending on how you look at it. It would be like saying HTML4 and PDF are similar "Things" with similar histories.

    But anyways, I hate webgames! So whats the vague timeline for exe-export? If it's anywhere within the next year I'll be thrilled.