Game Creation/Design Catch All

Continued working on the Tetris Clone today. Made it part way through the Particle System part (Section 11). I found a capture option that seems to work okay to get both video and audio called OBS. Turns out it has more features than just for streaming stuff. It is a bit of a pain to get setup but it does seem very powerful and it is cross-platform and free. This video was done at the end of Section 10 I think. I am not a great Tetris player and I don't think my code to increase the speed is working correctly. I could probably be further along with this but I keep going off on side ideas like controller support and tweaking some of the colors and slight interface tweaks. For instance I got it working with both the analog sticks today and I think I can streamline the PlayerInput function a bit.

Ho ho! That's looking awesome! Nice work. That looks really slick.

I hope to finally finish Section 6 this evening, and maybe make some headway in Section 7.

Game Design Level Up Day 11

My game isn't as far along as Rykin's, but it's getting more "game-like" by the day. Today I got in full player movement and a starting set of variables for movement delays and drop rates. I'll probably tweak these as I go along.

I also tried out the Giphy Capture app, which worked great. Soooo much easier than what I was doing before. Thanks!

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/QlfGNcL.gif)

Hows the feature set on Giphy capture?

I've been using ScreenToGif for the capture and editing and ezgif.com for if I need to do compression or conversion like for the Steam store/news pages. Apparently .png can contain animation data and all browsers (including Steam which is essentially a browser) can play it. On ezgif you can convert a gif to .apng with all the animation data intact and then you can just rename it to .png

Its a weird process but it worked great.

Example:
IMAGE(https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/926870/extras/updownshooting.png)

Finished the tutorial (or at least as much as I am planning on finishing) today. I decided not to implement some of the FX and I have no plans to do the mobile stuff at this time. I did add a keyboard/controller button to change the audio track though. Sort of lost track of time while recording this, was just having fun playing it.

Congrats, Rykin, on finishing up! That looks fantastic! Are you going to try something next?

polypusher wrote:

Hows the feature set on Giphy capture?

In the 10 minutes I've used it so far, it seems pretty robust as far as editing and what not. I'll take a closer look when I make another one.

That's good to know about the .png files. I had no idea!

@Rykin - download links or it didn't happen

polypusher wrote:

Hows the feature set on Giphy capture?

"The essentials" - capture via keypress, for editing you can change the start/end points and add captions, and publish I think supports gif or mp4. Pretty basic publish options, "framerate: low/med/high", etc. Nothing fancy but it covers the bases.

Ironically I'm now locked out of the silly thing because I upgraded macos to see the native capture fangblackbone was talking about. For some reason Apple decided to lock the account I was using and I can't recover it, and I'd installed Giphy through the app store with that account. I guess I'll need to convince the store app to switch to a fresh account, but I'm not sure if that can be done without some kind of data reset. Yecch.

Game Design Level Up Day 13

Well, I missed my first day on Friday. No excuses, I just didn't get it done. I bounced back yesterday with a good session where I added in row clearing to the Tetris clone. At this point it's pretty much a functional game. I hope to get in two good sessions today, one to make up for Friday's miss.

It's interesting to see how this designer approaches the features in the game. I was thinking that clearing levels would be extraordinarily complex, but he put the whole thing together with 4-5 simple functions, with just a handful of lines in each row. It's this part of game design that I feel these sorts of tutorials don't get at very well. It's one thing to follow along and learn the skills, but it's another to conceptualize the execution of a series of events in a game and design a system that works efficiently to accomplish the task. The up-front thinking is so important.

Going forward, I think I'm going to try to figure out how I might handle the upcoming task, then watch his videos showing how he did it. I think that'd be more beneficial to me.

So I started the Learn To Code By Making a 2D Platformer in Unity thing today. I am at section 5 and I don't like it as much as the Tetris one so far. The guy does a few things that are just done wrong (he makes almost every variable public even if there is no reason it should be public for instance). It is overall a very beginner tutorial so far and he did go into the animation system which I have never used so that is cool.

Rykin wrote:

So I started the Learn To Code By Making a 2D Platformer in Unity thing today. I am at section 5 and I don't like it as much as the Tetris one so far. The guy does a few things that are just done wrong (he makes almost every variable public even if there is no reason it should be public for instance). It is overall a very beginner tutorial so far and he did go into the animation system which I have never used so that is cool.

Yeah, it's definitely for beginners. I've been doing that on and off for over a year, when I have the time, and most of the time, I've written whole systems in the time he takes to copy/paste/rewrite some basic stuff, so I may just watch it in the background to get the concepts.

Based on the recommendations here, picked up the Tetris course and the same author's Match-3 Game course for $19.98 together, and looking forward to those.

Actually working on my first game in GameMaker Studio for a hackathon at work this week with trueheart78 and some coworkers. Making a LTTP-alike for training new employees how the different parts of the company work.

Unity 2018.3 is out with nested prefabs, terrain improvements (finally!) and other goodies.

Unity has been pissing me off lately saying that code that I am using is obsolete and that it needs to update it and then it makes a change to the code and stuff doesn't work anymore because it is changing a reference to the component of another object into a reference to that component on the current object which doesn't even have that component.

Still working on that 2D tutorial and the guy really isn't doing stuff correctly in some places, but I am still trying to follow along without changing the code too much. I feel that for every 20 minutes of content I am getting about 2 minutes of knowledge and spending 5 minutes facepalming because of how he decided to do something.

Rykin wrote:

Unity has been pissing me off lately saying that code that I am using is obsolete and that it needs to update it and then it makes a change to the code and stuff doesn't work anymore because it is changing a reference to the component of another object into a reference to that component on the current object which doesn't even have that component.

I updated mid-project once for a course I was taking and it created enough headaches that generally for shorter projects I don't update mid-project. I realize things shouldn't probably be that way, but it's made the learning easier for me than to have to rework the broken things.

Rykin wrote:

Still working on that 2D tutorial and the guy really isn't doing stuff correctly in some places, but I am still trying to follow along without changing the code too much. I feel that for every 20 minutes of content I am getting about 2 minutes of knowledge and spending 5 minutes facepalming because of how he decided to do something.

I don't know enough to recognize when someone's doing something improperly.

I've done enough now to notice some patterns between coders. They almost fall into two camps, the self-taught, patch things together in a way that works coders, and the ones that approach the project from a highly efficient systemic perspective, where they've really thought through how they're going to build something beforehand.

I'd be curious to hear if there are a couple of places in the 2D platformer course where you think that building something that way is a really bad idea, and that he should have done it a different way.

Game Design Level Up Day 11

After utterly failing the past few days to move forward with this, I got in a good 45 minutes this evening and finished up the core gameplay with the Tetris clone. Sounds tomorrow!

It felt good to jump back in!

This week I have implemented pixel crushers dialogue / quest / item system into our space game so now I can start writing dialogues for all those alien races I painted before. I haven't done any animations yet for the aliens, but as the player clicks different options, my plan is to have animations that fire off.

Here's the a very basic test I did to learn how the asset works.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1074002488070758401

Sorry for twitter link. I don't think you can embed twitter video into gwj's forums.

That's looking sharp, nice work!

Game Design Level Up Day 12

Got a good hour's work done on the Tetris clone tonight, despite having a few drinks at a Christmas party before working on it.

I have concluded that alcohol and coding go together! I made many fewer mistakes than I normally do. This seems like scientific proof to me. Who knew!?!

Background music in!

Tomorrow starts on sound effects.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Game Design Level Up Day 12

Got a good hour's work done on the Tetris clone tonight, despite having a few drinks at a Christmas party before working on it.

I have concluded that alcohol and coding go together! I made many fewer mistakes than I normally do. This seems like scientific proof to me. Who knew!?!

IMAGE(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ballmer_peak.png)

Hahaha. The Ballmer Peak, that's hilarious.

And I thought I invented this, oh well.

That works for story/novel writing as well.

Doesn't look like I am going to be able to spend this week getting paid to program. We are building a new wing onto the building I work in and the construction crew caused an electrical fire over the weekend so we have no power in our building. I am sitting in the lobby of the building next door on a laptop wondering if they will just let me use my leave since there isn't much for me to do this week.

I've been so behind on this thread! My own project has been languishing, but I hope to get some good things done next week while I'm off work for the holidays. I really need to follow the "do something every day, even if it's only a tiny amount" creed.

I thought I'd mention real quick that there were a couple comments about using a Transform instead of a GameObject for some stuff. In many cases it's a better way to go because it can make things more efficient under the hood, and that's why it's done that way. It's also simpler too, because getting to the data you want is easier. Also, in case you didn't know, you can always get to the GameObject by calling transform.gameObject. You can do that with any component actually - just add ".gameObject" to the end of it and you'll be at the top of the hierarchy.

d4m0 wrote:

I've been so behind on this thread! My own project has been languishing, but I hope to get some good things done next week while I'm off work for the holidays. I really need to follow the "do something every day, even if it's only a tiny amount" creed.

Yeah, it's amazing how quickly you can get momentum once you get a few days in a row. Share here if you can make some progress!

I should update as well. Although I didn't post over the weekend, I made some progress.

Game Design Level Up Days 15 & 16
I'm done with Section 6 in the Tetris clone tutorial. So all the sound effects are in. The game sounds quite nice now, with background music and sounds when something happens. It makes things feel much more alive.

The next step in the course appears to be some UI tweaks. Tonight was switching the icon image depending on whether the music was on or off, and likewise with the sound effects.

On a motivation scale, I had a number of days where I missed in the past week or so, but I tried to limit the damage to not missing two days in a row. I seem to be back to a place where it's easier to work on this every day now. I look forward to it, actually. So I'm hopeful that I'm past the hard part of the habit building stuff.

Had an epiphany today where I hope that I solved a month long problem I've had with my space game and the answer was right there the whole time. I just need to figure out how to access a certain parameter in an asset and boom shakalaka, done and done. Can't wait to go home and see if it works.

So one of the big things I wanted to learn from the Learn To Code By Making a 2D Platformer in Unity tutorial was how to move data between scenes and I have finally made it to that part and the guy who created the tutorial is using PlayerPrefs, which is probably not the best way to do it and is a method I am already familiar with. I was hoping he might use a Singleton for it as I have never really wrapped my head around them.

I've picked up the Tetris tutorial again, and am in the back half now. Got the Pause function working yesterday and a screen fade on restart working tonight. Next up is coding the scoring in the game. I'm really enjoying this tutorial, although there have been a few times when the guy has lost me as to why he's doing something a particular way.

I am finished with Learn To Code By Making a 2D Platformer in Unity. Not a horrible tutorial series overall, but I guess I am more of a mid level user with some gaps in my knowledge than a beginner. I have a degree in programming and I took every C# class offered plus some ASP.NET classes, but that was mostly just desktop apps and database focused stuff and I haven't used it much since graduating 6 years ago.

I like Udemy as a learning platform. I also like how they almost always have a sale going on. They remind me of this one furniture store I used to live/work by that was having a going out of business sale for like 5 years. I was super surprised when they actually closed the place down

Next up I think I am going to do Create a SHMUP with Unity 3D since a shmup is one of the types of games I want to make.

Congrats on finishing the course, Rykin!

I like Udemy a lot too, and yeah, I don't think I've paid more than $12 for a course, ever. Even that's desperate times. Most all the time you can get stuff for $10.

I do wish more Udemy instructors put the cognitive load on students, rather than just explaining things. It's one thing to follow along with an instructor while he shows you what to do. It's a whole different thing to know what tool to use, and be able to put something together on your own. Good instruction shifts the load onto students after explaining something, and few Udemy courses do that. I've found that the university-based MOOCs do a better job of that.

With the Tetris course, I've taken at times to stopping the video once he talks about what he's going to do, then thinking through how I'd approach things, then trying it on my own. Then I go back and watch how he did it. It's slowing me down and is much harder, but I feel like I'm learning better.

I've been working with Monogame and have a pretty good handle on the basics. I have some pretty full featured POCs created and have exhausted all of the "Beginning game programming with Monogame" type tutorials and articles I could find and I'm looking where to go next.

I'm finding that my biggest problems* are generally around things like organizing code and game logic as well as the tools and tricks that are probably pretty well known to people with experience in game making.

Does anyone have any resource suggestions or tips on how to get information and examples on some of these more intermediate topics, Monogame specific or not?

* - actually my biggest problems are all art and asset related. I don't know the first thing about how to create sprites or game art and I have very little artistic talent if I did. I'm pulling most of my art off of places like OpenGameArt so far, but's hard to find what I'm looking for a lot of the time and next to impossible to get a cohesive set of assets.

cls33 wrote:

Does anyone have any resource suggestions or tips on how to get information and examples on some of these more intermediate topics, Monogame specific or not?

Have you seen Game Programming Patterns before? It's the first thing that came to mind.