Lou Bagel's Forum Posts

  • Great blog, thanks for sharing all the details, nice concept and it looks great in action.

    One suggestion when it comes to color tint, use a two color tint. One color that effects the lighter colors and one that effects the darker colors. It offers a lot of versatility. (If this effect does not already exist, I am going to look into creating one). Then, you can use a base grayscale image that will be tinted.

    Example of the concept (from Spine.)

    Thanks for the comment and tip!

    Great pro tip there. Do you want to explain it a bit more, just so I am clear on the benefit?

    I was planning on doing a replaceColor, but was indeed going to have to replace two colors for the shading. But the way you propose you basically are removing the color (saturation) so is grayscale and can use one tint on the whole sprite? Therefore the tint adds the color and the shading is already in place?

    I will keep an eye out for that when looking through the effects. Though I might not be able to do that as I have outlines on certain things that I don't want to tint the outline color (it is not a true black). But might experiment with that, tinted outlines could look better!

  • I have the loop structured like this. When I try to preview it or open it in debug it wont load.

    Do you realize what you are doing here? Everytime you call the function it calls itself 90 more times. Each of those 90 calls will call itself 90 more times, so 8,100 times so far, and will go on for infinity.

    This is why your browser will lag then crash.

    If you put a for loop by itself it will run every tick. Tick being dependent on framerate, but that could be between 40-60 times per second. So it will repeat on its own.

    If you want less than that then use every X seconds or put it in the function like you have it, just don't have it call itself for eternity.

  • Blog Post 2 is out: Dynamic Walk Cycles

    Wish I could easily upload a GIF or Video for you as an image doesn't do it justice.

    As I explain in the blog post, I uploaded one walk cycle and it serves as the body for 25 different characters. Needs some polish but way more efficient and will scale faster.

    Check out the project in the blog post as you can have them chase donuts or dance, just for fun. The real experiment was looking at the walk cycles, but that was kind of boring on it's own.

    Next I want to work on colors using Replace Color Effect. Hoping to make a mini Character Creator where you can choose hair color, skin color, tie color, and pants color.

  • I don't understand how Spine would help me here as the issue is not creating the initial animation

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  • I've created a ton of characters over time but only animated a few, such as in walking animations. So I'm working towards a more dynamic solution so I don't have to create the same animations for each character.

    I got started here with 3 heads, 2 bodies, and a couple of different tie colors:

    loubagel.com/blog/dev-blog-starting-with-dynamic-characters

    The project is uploaded there with screenshots of the events and explanation.

    It is only a start but wanted to try and document as I went along.

  • Hey there,

    A bit ago I completed and released my first commercially-released game, Dave-Man. My goal was just that: to finish and release a game. No dreams of riches and fame.

    Finishing a game is hard work. Releasing a game also takes work (a lot more goes into it than meets the eye, trust me). So with all that hard work I was crunching all the time and didn't spend much time promoting my game.

    After the release, a bit of rest time, and making some updates I found a bit more time on my hands. Sales had also leveled off (meaning zero sales a day unless it was promoted in some manner). So just releasing this first game was a learning process I'd figure I'd go through different marketing and promotion aspects to learn as well. Better late than never!

    Since sales were stagnant I'm hoping to do one tactic at a time to easily track the results.

    Note, which I will state in the blogs as well, please take the results with a grain of salt. This was my first game and being so retro and 1bit there is not great curb appeal. A more desirable product should yield better results.

    The promoting I did first was simply a 9 day campaign on social media. I posted 3-5 times a day and posted to 9 different social media platforms. All organic, not paid, and I tracked the results, both traffic to store pages and sales.

    Now, this wasn't the first time posting about my game on social media and the time period is very short. But the analysis was still interesting to me and gave me things to think about. I do provide a lot of thoughts and draw conclusions in the article but my goal was to give you the raw data to take a look at.

    The first post is up on my blog:

    Analysis of Promoting my Indie Game on Social Media

    I am just providing a link to it, instead of posting it all or even summarizing it here, as it is a very long, in-depth article. I also plan to post future articles here as well so I figure it would be good to keep it a clean thread to browse through.

    Feel free to ask me any questions, link to similar articles on indie game marketing, or give any of your own thoughts or responses.

    Lou Bagel Out!

  • Sounds like such clickbait, haha, I know. It is simply a one minute tutorial on getting started.

    The point of making this wasn't in attempts to cram a full tutorial in one minute or create an amazing game. I just see a lot of comments on forums or Q&A type of places like forums where people say "I have been wanting to start learning game development" and go on to say they have been doing research or reading a lot on what engine is the best or how to get started... etc etc etc . . . but they don't just get started!

    So that is the idea behind this - just get started!

    Obviously, if you are already here this probably isn't for you! You probably already got started! But if you have a friend that sounds like that above (or a stranger on a forum) just send this video their way!

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    Link to Video

    I am considering making some Construct tutorials. Definitely not planning on having them this fast paced but at the same time I am not a fan of watching long tutorial videos. So I was considering a somewhat faster paced tutorial, where maybe not everything is explained in full but just overviewed, but accompanied with a text tutorial that explains in full. That way you watch the video to get the idea and go try yourself. When you get stuck you review the text as that is easier to find/search.

    Tagged:

  • Are those resting on a immovable physics object? Or the bottom and sides of the screen?

    I believe using the confine to layout behavior on physics objects restrains them in a non-physics way, if that makes sense.

    If not, did you try increasing any of the following:

    • friction
    • linear damping
    • angular damping

    I don't believe it is a bug. Though not desired it just looks like physics objects looking to find resting spots. There is probably something not allowing them to do so.

  • I have received the following screenshot from a player of my game:

    I am not sure where to begin the investigation for this. I don't believe I even use Z Elevation in my entire project.

    At this time I am not able to reproduce the error. Just curious if anyone has any ideas what this might come from or what to look for.

    Thanks

    Tagged:

  • Nice! I like this game, glad it's on Steam now.

    Thanks!

    Feel free to join my Discord Server if you have comments, questions, or encounter any bugs!

    ...that goes for anyone that is playing, of course!

  • I started dabbling with Construct about 6 years ago - was my intro to game dev and gateway to pixel art.

    Today I released my first commercial game on Steam: Dave-Man

    I love using Construct - it has been a great experience. Looking forward to the next one!

    ...though I do still have some work to do on this one!

    Subscribe to Construct videos now

    Other links

  • > In what format should they be reported?

    >

    > I believe most bug tickets require the project to be uploaded. I don't feel comfortable doing that as I am releasing this game commercially.

    If you can experience performance regressions at some parts of the game. You should isolate those parts and try to reproduce them in a separate project. If this doesn't work, you could try to run the built-in performance tests and compare performance between Windows and Mac in NWjs. (Search for "performance" on start page.)

    You generally want to debug your project and see what's causing poor performance. The C3 debugger should be good enough for that.

    The game runs perfectly on Mac when in preview/Debug mode. It is only when exported for NWJS (on specific versions) that the game has issues.

    I'm unaware how to find the root of the issues in an exported NWJS build.

  • > Off topic - but I'm using v78 of Chromium as the newest version is completely laggy and unplayable. Not sure why (posted here about it) but I just had to test random versions until I found a couple that worked. The last compatible version with Greenworks (the 0.33 or whatever) was horrible as well. So if it wasn't for your site I wouldn't be able to have Greensworks on mac at all. So thanks!

    Performance regressions like that should be reported to Scirra.

    I have a roundup of several workarounds for issues with Steam here. I update it periodically with possible workarounds and progress on external bug reports.

    In what format should they be reported?

    I believe most bug tickets require the project to be uploaded. I don't feel comfortable doing that as I am releasing this game commercially.

  • Silly me!

    I was navigating in terminal and didn't realize that it was just a folder called app.nw! Not used to seeing folders/directory names with a period. So thanks Mikal as that helped guide me.

    So yes, I can get it to work now! Have Steam working on Mac. The Steam Overlay doesn't pop up and the achievements don't pop up either, but at least they register. I think I can live with that.

    Off topic - but I'm using v78 of Chromium as the newest version is completely laggy and unplayable. Not sure why (posted here about it) but I just had to test random versions until I found a couple that worked. The last compatible version with Greenworks (the 0.33 or whatever) was horrible as well. So if it wasn't for your site I wouldn't be able to have Greensworks on mac at all. So thanks!

  • > Everything works great for me on windows - and thank you very much for that! A Lifesaver! - but on my Mac if I change the package.nw to package.zip to unzip, add files, rezip, change back to package.nw then the game doesn't load - it loads the generic NWJS screen. Therefore it ruins the build.

    >

    > Did I miss something? Is the process different on Mac for opening the package.nw?

    >

    > Any tips on how to start troubleshooting this would be great! And thanks again!

    Sorry I have no experience with Mac at all. It might be caused by the Mac permission and signing process. You could try to not generate a package.nw for Mac releases only.

    Totally understandable - not expecting you to be an expert at all things Mac!

    I will look into it as I really don't have any experience with nw files, Mac stuff of this nature, or NWJS.

    When exporting without "packaging assets" on Mac it seems this package.nw is still created.