I've sniffed around Godot a little, but don't think I've ever even installed it.  Probably should be porting across though lol.  More importantly though it would be nice if I had a fresh idea rather than a decade-old one...

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Evening all. Just popping a minor update here, I see there seems to be something in the air these days about getting back to building games. Ive got Unity running and Im going to build up a game Ive had on my mind for a few years now. I've made a start, got a super basic hex based level generating and basic camera controls. Stalled at the point of getting the hexes neighbors (Im following a tutorial and the guy doesnt show all code). 
Anyway the game will sort of be mainly about base building and exploration. Roguelike of course. It will have a top down RTS style presentation. Part of the game will be aping that Assassins Creed 2 mechanic. You build up a pool of people and send them on missions to explore etc. The missions will be hands off, equip and send out your troops to do a specific task and wait and see what happens. You build up your base, the usual 4x kinda stuff. Im toying with the idea of making it for Android and the missions you send troops on take a number of real world hours to resolve, with the goal of it being the kind of game you slowly progress through and play for a few minutes once a day. Not sure might totally scrap that.

i've refined the process to skip the step of installing unity and checking any code, which does save a bit of time.
it is usually about this time of year though that the urge resurfaces. i think it's to do with the new footy games coming out - i play them, decide they're rubbish, think about remaking my footy game...then decide obviously that's a daft idea.

gamerluke wrote:

What I've been working on:

I've been working on a 2D game whose concept originally stemmed from The Edge's magazine's 'Do Not Harm' competition. I only had the idea after the competition had closed so didn't work on it for a while, and I also knew the amount and quality of graphical and audio artefacts would be too much for me to do.

I keep going back to it to try to find an approach that is within my capabilities and not too time consuming.  So I went back to it last year and also thought that turning it into a racing game would reduce the landscape required (keep going round in laps and as focussed more on the other racers scenary could take a back seat). Whilst I enjoyed working on the AI having got a lap working it became clear it was too slow and therefore not enjoyable. 

Then after playing Minecraft I wondered whether a blocky approach to the graphics may be possible. I'm still working on it and as expected it is taking time, and may be too much/too hard (also trying to fit at least a semblance of narrative to it). Still I have a tutorial (too hard at the mo) and some limited gameplay.

New Game:

Whilst playing on my iPad an advert for a simple but fun looking game appeared, which I downloaded (I think it may have been called Color Bump). It was fun but so many adverts. It also seemed like it would be easy to make. So as a quick distraction I started to try and recreate it, but found it boring and decided maybe the game I'd played had kept interest as the prevalence of adverts always left me wanting/waiting for another level to try.

Anyways, I changed the game to a puzzle type affair, whilst keeping the concept of pushing cubes that I appreciated in the game.

It just uses cubes, spheres, lighting and the default physics engine so wasn't too hard to do (I would guess at a few months - but looking at the date I created the initial project the first attempt was started in December last year - however I was predominantly working on the 'do not harm' game in my free time and only recently got into working on this new one).

Initial plan was for it to be released on just Android as I wasn't too sure how original the concept is and thought maybe it would get rejected in the review process. But this week it has been approved on iOS and today on Android so here are the links:

Promo Vid:


As it was a small pleasant distraction -currently free, with no adverts, no analytics or tracking.

iOS:
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/red-white-and-blue-blocks/id1580281463

Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bleatbleat.redwhiteandblueblocks

Loving this little game Luke. Very impressed someone here has made something like this. Well done. Definitely has a great core mechanic.

Whoever wrote it should fuckoh wait it's me

My itch for game making has been surfacing lately, but Ive no time right now. Ive a metric ton of photos I need to process in lightroom before I do anything else. Bah. Still have so many ideas I want to pursue. I miss the glory days of the Edge competitions.

You want something BASIC?

Unreal has All-Of-The-Things though.

Without any skin in the game or recent knowledge I'd say the choice is unreal if you plan something 3d/complex and/or commercial release

Decided I need to make a thing, exploration of concrete megastructures with some Steam Audio sound design magic basically. Been going a ton of testing with the technology going back and forth between Unity and Unreal, think I've pretty much settled for Unity for now, the general UI experience is just much much better and it seems less CPU heavy. Obviously the recent BS with Unity has me a little concerned, but I guess it's probably not going to affect me either way in the short term and a good user experience is more important for a first project.

I'd also like to try out Godot but the Steam Audio plugin isn't quite there AFAICT so that's eliminated for now. With Unity I still need to do some testing and a little 'vertical slice' to figure out the whole HDRP rendering thing and see how easy/a pain in the ass it's going to be to do what I want, but I'm hopeful that it won't be too difficult considering that what I want to make is relatively sparse in geometric detail and variation. Maybe Unreal would end up being easier to work with in terms of the visual side, but things like the apparent total lack of a proper audio mixer panel with metering means it can do one tbh.

Steam Audio is fucking great, it saddens me that amazing spatial/acoustics tech like this doesn't get more attention. There's such little content made with/about it and it seems like only a handful of people are working on it, meanwhile visual tech like RT gets a tremendous amount of fanfare and money chucked at it.

I also tried out Microsoft's Project Acoustics, which sounds very nice and is great for portalling but lacks a proper simulation of acoustic reflections which is something I'm really wanting. It also requires lengthy bake times which isn't great for rapid prototyping. I was almost able to integrate both Project Acoustics and Steam Audio into a demo, but I think PA kind of overrides the SA reflections' HRTF direction which is no good. Probably fixable but the coding required is beyond me for now.

Anyway I highly recommend having a play with Steam Audio, it's shockingly easy to get it going on Unity even for a total newbie. When I tried it initially a few years ago I got good results implementing it in a sample project in a couple of hours. It's also not bad getting it going in Unreal though the UI makes it substantially more confusing and awkward to get your head around.

If anyone happens to have a scene, like a room or hall or whatever that has some sounds playing in it and would like to hear what it's like when you simulate the acoustics in there maybe give Steam Audio a try. Or send a zip of it my way and I'll set it up, I'd be quite happy to experiment with spaces other than the empty boxy places I'm only able to make right now.

acemuzzy wrote:

It's that time of year again!  Load Unity; download newer version; upgrade code to be compatible by fixing shitty little compilation errors I don't understand; check game vaguely works; think of two ways it could be better; realise I don't have the mental capacity to make it so; close Unity.  

This, basically

And so history repeats.  I'm sure the code becomes that bit more impenetrable each time.  Or my brain less capable.  Or both.

Yeah each time I refactor a little, mainly cos in the six months since the last time I looked unity had reworked how UI is done.