Can't wait for this, could be the solution to the ugly font rendering.

In the meantime, I get good enough results from putting a smooth and a sharpen filter on my text - It's not perfect, but it's more pleasant to look at than the unfiltered text.

The Smart Text Filter doesn't really do anything for me, dunno.

Motion Blur is nice, but it's really just a gimmick. It's not going to make the game any more fun if it's turned on, and it's way too intensive to be played by casual players. Most people get into indie games because they just want the core game play and originality witch was present in earlier eras. IMO most games these days care mostly about graphics and looking as hot as possible.. Just gimme a new n64 Zelda or Snes Mario and i'll probably be playing them a lot longer than Gears of War.. I'm not saying that I loathe all new games, just trying to get the point across that indie games are part of a completely separate universe in which I care nothing for high end graphics. Pixel art, 8 bit sounds and chiptunes ftw.

Dude, it'd be nice if you'd let everyone decide on their own what styles and effects they're relying on to make their project come to life.

I think your way of seeing things is really limited. I don't want to re-do the old games over and over again, I want to see '2d games' going through a revolution in terms of gameplay and visual styles.

If you'd give me the N64 Zelda or the SNES Mario I'd gladly hand them back to you, cause I've played those games 10-20 years ago. That part of gaming is already history and we see too many remakes being done right now already anyway.

I don't think that most gamers get into indie games because of the core gameplay that was presented to them 20 years ago, I think they're in for the innovation and because the chances that we see something completely new are rather high when we're talking about productions that cost under 200k to produce.

Ash already summed it up nicely - MoBlur is a really important effect and is way more than just eye candy.

I suggest using my motion blur effect

Where can I get your motion blur effect?

I'd love that - anything that helps making motion blur faster would be worth researching into, IMO.

MoBlur is one of the things right now that give games a look that we haven't had before in games - most of the devs I showed Sein to loved the MoBlur in it, cause we haven't really seen a lot of 2d games using Post Processing techniques and stuff yet. Most 2d games are still sorta stuck with the 16bit look, cause nobody kept pushing into that area.

But 720p with a lot of pixel shaders and moBlur will be a bit slower even on very powerful machines - Yet, the effect makes quite a bit of difference.

Samus Aran kicks Chun Lis butt, dude.

Glad you guys like it. I definitely had to fight with getting a look that's appealing, yet easy to produce, which was a real challenge. The silhouetted style has been used quite a few times now, but I think the style has its own uniqueness now that doesn't seem (too) cheap or copied.

Going with silhouettes was really more of a compromise going in, cause I knew I'd never finish the game if I'd go with anything more detailed.

Steven: The characters are relatively simple 3d characters, modeled, rigged, animated in Maya and rendered out with a simple lambert shader set to black - so that all that matters are the silhouettes. Then I take them into Photoshop, scale em down, add the bloom effect and save em as png's. The color correction and sharpen in Construct does the rest to achieve that look.

The characters in those screenies are still placeholders, the style of the actual characters is a bit different to better match the environments and the story.

Teh tease!

That's... pretty much what I was getting at.

The guy's art we are talking about was not made in 3D... I, for some weird reason, thought we were talking about painting 2D art, and making games that looked like said 2D art.

Have you read my post before that? I was just thinking about how you could streamline a production in order to work out a project like that and I think it's very possible since todays next-gen projects are far, far more complex in terms of asset creation than anything he does anyway. Creating the character art in 3d would make a lot of sense in order to streamline character animation, but even if you'd decide otherwise...

[quote:1udfhbjj]Of course 3D is far more common.... like I said, it is easier to animate and render images a 3D object, than to draw a 2D object from scratch for every single frame. And yes, if you did make a game that looked as good as those art-works, in 2D, painting them by hand... you WOULD need 200 people (perhaps an exaggeration, but you see the point I am trying to make?) to complete a large project.

What the hey? We're still talking about making a game that looks like the screenshots that guy posted, right? So even if you'd do everything in 2d, even the character animation - for say, that Mario game he re-created, you'd _never_ need 200 people. I don't even know how you're calculating this. 200 people, dude? I think you're highly overestimating that artwork.

Look at this:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48398.html

Here we go. I'd be surprised if their team is larger than 30 people at best.

Huh?

I said it would probably take a day to design and paint a background like that. Not the character animation. We have a lot of good character animation and motion retargeting tools in 3d now - so why wouldn't you make use of that? A week to create an idle animation? What?

Of course it'd take a lot more time to create everything in 2d, that's why I was saying that it'd make sense to create the characters in 3d and use the tools that are out there to make it feasible for production.

Why would you need a 200 man group to create a 2d game like that? o_O Vanillaware is doing some pretty awesome stuff and they're pretty freaking small.

Also, it's not like 3d is easier, but you usually find more people being trained in 3d than in 2d and for a loooong time now, everyone associated 2d with being 'outdated', so everyone jumped on that 3d train. Try to find artists now that are really good 2d artists that can design, paint and are good animators - good luck with that. The industry is always adapting to what's cool right now, to what's making money and 2d hasn't been hot for a long time now.

How does it work? I applied to the effect to the text and tried to change the font rendering in the project itself, but it doesn't seem to do anything at all. It's just as jaggy as it was before.

Yeah, Dave told me about the smart text shader and I have high hopes for it

Are there any examples of the effect online? I'd love to see what it does exactly.

The reason why the font rendering looking cool is so important to me is because the whole game is based on a narrative that runs along with you - imagine a game like 'Another World' and you constantly get hints on the story and what the player has to do when you reach certain points. And right now, everything looks fine, but the moment text pops up... it's so ugly.

QuaZi: It's there It's not totally overdone, but if you look at the tree, for example, you should see it.

Windows 7 is pretty bitchin. Have been using it since Beta 1 on my workstation and never had any bigger trouble. Drivers work, applications are fast and responsive and the system just feels a lot better than Vista, which always felt sorta slow and laggy.