Some other people were recommending Udemy to me, but i think i'll pass. It is not really the way i learn. All my GM is basically following a tutorial for a half hour and then googling the crap out of everything else.
This was essentially my experience teaching myself the Objective-C language (and the whole XCode IDE / MacOS development ecosystem) for making Vigil RPG.
I started out reading Apple's Objective-C tutorial articles.
That got boring really fast, so I switched to just jumping into XCode and coding stuff, hitting Google every time I didn't know how to do the next thing I needed to do, e.g. Google for "objective-c iterate array".
Super thankful for StackOverflow.com. Google a concept, get an example >>> read the manual. For me, anyway!
Wolverinejon, you mind if i share your blog post on another forum? The Idle Thumbs community has a game dev slack and a few of them have just gotten past steam greenlight, so they might find it interesting!
What programming experience did you have before starting? i feel like that for me, googling programming issues is the way to go, but i have tons of experience coding all sorts of random crap in different languages which makes it so much easier to jump into a new thing.
dibs, sure, please do!
I'm a professional developer, and I've been doing hobbyist programming since I was 6!
So even though I didn't know Objective-C, it's fair to say without the general programming background with which I went into the project, it wouldn't have gone nearly so well.
From my experience, current engines like Unity and Unreal kind of require real-world scale for accurate physics and lighting. Or rather, they kind of require that you start at real-world scale then deviate from there as necessary. They (Unity especially) assume 1 unit is 1 meter, so altering that too much can cause some unexpected results sometimes.
For architectural modeling everything has to be exactly to scale; I can see where games have to modify things to "feel" right. I expect the parameters (FOV, walking speed, or what else I can only guess at) for a design walkthrough compared to a well tuned game environment are quite different...some of the many things I'll have to figure out along the way!
FOV is part of it, the other part is camera height. Since the camera acts as a surrogate for your eyes, people assume it's eye-height. I could talk about this stuff all day. Some days they pay me to do it.
FOV is part of it, the other part is camera height. Since the camera acts as a surrogate for your eyes, people assume it's eye-height. I could talk about this stuff all day. Some days they pay me to do it.
Yet in many first person games the camera is actually embedded in the upper chest. This leads to issues like in the first Halo game where in the cut scenes Master Chief is way taller than Commander Keyes and other normal humans but in game-play you appear to be looking at them as someone of roughly the same height. Some games that actually place the camera in the head (like Mirror's Edge) seem to cause more incidents of motion sickness for some reason.
Oh, oh, is it time to grab those GIFs of your character in Firewatch looking like a horrific neglected child of God?
Here is an example from Diablo 3. Now since D3 is an 3/4 isometric camera, they should be able to get away with tighter and more real world scale dimensions. But look at the size of Leah's room and note the door size. In fact I went to the act 3 keep to look at the narrowest areas in the game. The door sizes were 2 players wide and about 1.75 players tall. The smallest room in the keep is 5 players wide x 5 players wide.
I also made a Sketchup file of a one bedroom apartment in my area. The standard door size is 80x32 which is about 1.25x1.25 people wide and tall. And the smallest room/hallway is about 2.25 people wide. The size of the whole real world apartment could fit in the upper left room in Leah's house in this picture.
Here is an example from Diablo 3. Now since D3 is an 3/4 isometric camera, they should be able to get away with tighter and more real world scale dimensions. But look at the size of Leah's room and note the door size. In fact I went to the act 3 keep which is the narrowest area in the game. The door sizes were 2 players wide and about 1.75 players tall. The smallest room in the keep is 5 players wide x 5 players wide.
I also made a Sketchup file of a one bedroom apartment in my area. The standard door size is 80x32 which is about 1.25x1.25 people wide and tall. And the smallest room/hallway is about 2.25 people wide. The size of the whole real world apartment could fit in the upper left room in Leah's house in this picture.
Your unit scale of "persons" made me laugh, but in the context it's definitely a useful point of reference. In some ways not that far off from the origins of the English inch and foot.
I wish I could remember the source but this also reminds me of an anecdote I heard or read about having to hack a scale to duplicate the original Diablo scale on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Maybe from Brevik's GDC Diablo postmortem? I confess I haven't yet taken the time to watch it, but I definitely will now that I've been reminded to look it up.
Using people or parts of people is a common short cut for artists trying to maintain correct proportions. You will often here them talk about how a person's torso should be x number of heads high and x number of heads wide where they are referring to the actual character's head. The size of the head doesn't matter as long as the other parts of the character maintain those rough proportions they will look right. Comic artists especially use this and often pointedly break it for certain characters (i.e. musclely guys with super broad shoulders and women with super long legs but short torsos).
When working in the old Unreal Engine stuff I mentioned earlier I remember hearing a tip to set your character size to like .8 or something around there would make it so that door ways etc were better proportioned when using the 1 unit = 1 meter methodology. That actually worked really well in that particular engine.
Your unit scale of "persons" made me laugh, but in the context it's definitely a useful point of reference. In some ways not that far off from the origins of the English inch and foot.
Yeah it is definitely a quirky art thing. (like Rykin mentioned) You often use pencil tips, thumb lengths, character heads and anatomy (like the mid point of the human body is not the waist but the greater trochanter bone where your leg bone joins the hip) You also often do things like holding up a pencil to test if something is co-linear or the same height or width.
It can be a lot more useful for video games because the rule doesn't break if your central game character is the hulk or a power puff girl. The door is 2 players wide as opposed to a 1 meter door that the hulk could barely put his foot through and the power puff girl could stand sideways in.
Other useful video game design tools are things like putting a block in the level that is 1 character jump height high and long. Another trick is minimum/maximum stair height can be exploited to make your character seemingly walk up, cling to or climb a wall. (hair thin steps on a wall)
Maybe from Brevik's GDC Diablo postmortem?
Okay I am halfway through it and it is pretty awesome. I have a whole new respect for Brevik. There are a lot of people who attach their name to Diablo but this is THE guy that programmed it.
The thing that sticks out to me? The fact that I came within spitting distance of greatness. If he had decided to take double the money from 3DO I would have been working for the company that made Diablo. And that is at the very least. I was at 3DO at the time in between Diablo and Diablo2. I could have worked on Diablo2 or Lord of Destruction! I actually played DAOC with Blizzard North and tested the early version of Warcraft 3 a year later.
Ha, I feel like the guy in line one or two behind the guy that bought the winning lottery ticket.
For those doing, or wanting to do, iOS games: a course is going free over WWDC. Reddit Link
Thanks, free is good. I signed up.
I'm into Week 2 in the MIT Programming course, and now that summer is here, I'm hoping to make more progress in skills building. I think I'm going to set a summer goal to build some sort of crappy game, just to start making the transition to making rather than learning about making.
I find "just build it" versus "taking courses/reading books then build it" conversations interesting. I think a lot of it comes down to personal learning preferences, but I've always liked a balance between the two. If I just try building something and looking up stuff as I go I often find that I miss important concepts that would have made the work easier. However, I think it's really easy to get caught up in learning skills to the point that you never build anything. I tend to lean that way, and so the conversation about just making stuff was a good reminder for me to break out of that mindset.
Here is a YouTube Channel to which a level designer posts videos of him making levels in Unreal. Kind of cool to see the process.
@PewPewRobo - Here is a youtube of someone going from Revit to UE4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT8u...
Pretty cool because a lot of the materials are UE shaders so you don't have to worry about UV's and texture maps.
As stated in the "What are you playing this weekend?" thread, I've decided to develop the game in Python, on my iPad using Pythonista. It's a full engine, can call ObjC directly if need be, and compiles in XCode to a native app. I'm using Working Copy for syncing to BitBucket. Here's an image of my working environment, with Working Copy open:
The file you see there is being updated to generate the starting town (in a state of disrepair) and give the starting point for the game. I'm sketching out the menu screens in Procreate,along with a grid for guessing how big I need the town grid to actually be (I'm guessing 100x80 for the moment).
Overall, I'm back to making progress.
Keep it up, athros! Looking good.
I've finished Week 2 in the MIT Python course. It feels good to get back into programming.
And something for the courses section of the first post...
I was poking about on Coursera and stumbled onto a Game Design and Development Specialization from the University of Michigan. The first course, Introduction to Game Design, starts up again on June 27, gets solid reviews (4.8 out of 5), and can be audited for free (no access to graded items, but you can do everything else). Full access is $79. Apparently it focused on the Unity engine. I'm going to join as an auditor to check it out.
Started learning unity at the weekend to prototype my next game. Then i realized i was probably going to have to relearn Blender...and C#...oh dear^^
Looks like fun though! I really like some of the features they have going on there, like dragging scripts and materials onto physical game objects.
I was poking about on Coursera and stumbled onto a Game Design and Development Specialization from the University of Michigan. The first course, Introduction to Game Design, starts up again on June 27, gets solid reviews (4.8 out of 5), and can be audited for free (no access to graded items, but you can do everything else). Full access is $79. Apparently it focused on the Unity engine. I'm going to join as an auditor to check it out.
Go Blue! Too bad that course wasn't offered when I was at Michigan; I'd have been all over it!
@PewPewRobo - Here is a youtube of someone going from Revit to UE4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT8u...
Pretty cool because a lot of the materials are UE shaders so you don't have to worry about UV's and texture maps.
Thanks Fang, I'll check it out. My main workflow is probably going to be from SketchUp in the near term, but my broader goal is to not fall too far behind the architecture technology curve while I'm away from practice, so Revit is definitely relevant. Not that I have a license lying around, but 3DS Max (or Viz or whatever it's being called these days) might end up being a more familiar intermediate step.
I got a borrowed Oculus DK2 up and running over the weekend...fun stuff! (Mainly messed around with some of the free experiences out there, like Lucky's Tale.)
[edit] Wait a second...did it take me this long to realize your tag is an Appleseed reference? Loved that manga. I have tried in vain to find a suitably good (i.e. not terribly serious) Briarios pic for my icon.
[edit] Wait a second...did it take me this long to realize your tag is an Appleseed reference? Loved that manga.
Haha, yeah, it was probably confusing since my avatar is from Mospeada/Robotech part #3 (masamune shirow is one of my favorite artists and the Guges-d is one of my favorite mech or power armor designs)
And as per Revit I figured you would be at least familiar with it. But the main thing in the video is pretty much drag and drop import of assets and then apply brick, plaster or wood shaders. (aside from the furniture that is more than likely downloaded stock 3d models)
Athros, how are things going with your game? Anyone else building something?
I'm still focused on skill development. I'm doing pretty well with the MIT Python course. I'm right on pace, working on Week 4 content now. This is the farthest I've made it in the course in two or three previous attempts. Concept-wise, it's been a good review, with a few new things tossed in. Practice-wise, it's been very helpful, as the problems have been good exercises in code-writing for me. And I guess I did technically "build something" as the last problem set was building a functional hangman game. The current problem set is on creating a Scrabble variant.
I'm seriously considering Udacity's Beginning iOS App Development Nanodegree. It's about 87 hours of work, which I think I can do in a month, two at the most. If that is a good experience, I'd think about shifting to their iOS Developer Nanodegree degree, where you dig into more in-depth App Development. It's pricey stuff, though, at $200/month, with half back if you complete the degree in less than a year.
Difficulty-wise, I'd think the first nanodegree would be pretty straightforward, as I feel comfortable with basic programming concepts, and much of the course looks to be learning those concepts in Swift.
Athros, how are things going with your game?
It's moving in the right direction. I'm about halfway done with the initial town generator. It correctly generates the main roads and correctly zones things for housing, shops, and the like. I'm running into issues with sprite placement, sprite overlapping and ownership of the sprite (via a Building object - so I can track several states on the building) because technically, it's a grid on the back end and a lot of these sprites are in multiple tiles.
Unfortunately, the more I play with the real time movement and combat, the less I like it. So, I've started mapping out what something turn based would look like. It needs more work. I haven't really settled on whether it's my lack of reflexes, or that real time sucks, or if I just miss good traditional JRPG's 
I'm still focused on skill development. I'm doing pretty well with the MIT Python course. I'm right on pace, working on Week 4 content now. This is the farthest I've made it in the course in two or three previous attempts. Concept-wise, it's been a good review, with a few new things tossed in. Practice-wise, it's been very helpful, as the problems have been good exercises in code-writing for me. And I guess I did technically "build something" as the last problem set was building a functional hangman game. The current problem set is on creating a Scrabble variant.
Polish up that hangman game until it shines. Scrabble should be interesting! Next, tackle a roguelike.
I'm seriously considering Udacity's Beginning iOS App Development Nanodegree. It's about 87 hours of work, which I think I can do in a month, two at the most. If that is a good experience, I'd think about shifting to their iOS Developer Nanodegree degree, where you dig into more in-depth App Development. It's pricey stuff, though, at $200/month, with half back if you complete the degree in less than a year.
Difficulty-wise, I'd think the first nanodegree would be pretty straightforward, as I feel comfortable with basic programming concepts, and much of the course looks to be learning those concepts in Swift.
Are you looking to change careers into something coding? Or is it more, since it's a professional course with that kind of guarantee you expect it to be better overall? Those courses look pretty good overall!
Godzilla Blitz wrote:Athros, how are things going with your game?
It's moving in the right direction. I'm about halfway done with the initial town generator. It correctly generates the main roads and correctly zones things for housing, shops, and the like. I'm running into issues with sprite placement, sprite overlapping and ownership of the sprite (via a Building object - so I can track several states on the building) because technically, it's a grid on the back end and a lot of these sprites are in multiple tiles.
Unfortunately, the more I play with the real time movement and combat, the less I like it. So, I've started mapping out what something turn based would look like. It needs more work. I haven't really settled on whether it's my lack of reflexes, or that real time sucks, or if I just miss good traditional JRPG's ;)
It sounds like you've been busy. Good stuff. Is it a major shift to move from real time to turn-based?
Polish up that hangman game until it shines. Scrabble should be interesting! Next, tackle a roguelike.
Oh, that roguelike tutorial looks interesting. Thanks!
Are you looking to change careers into something coding? Or is it more, since it's a professional course with that kind of guarantee you expect it to be better overall? Those courses look pretty good overall!
My main goal is to get to a point where I could create simple apps. It's mainly for personal growth, just to feed a curiosity, although there are likely professional opportunities available if I could get efficient at it. I've been considering Udacity because of perceived quality. It looks ... thorough. I'd try the free week first though and decide after that.
It sounds like you've been busy. Good stuff. Is it a major shift to move from real time to turn-based?
A whole lot of mechanics would need to be rethought (how I was going to model skills vs weapon skills vs magic skills for one, town attacks, quests, exploration), along with how I'd want to model the combat (on the map? Different screen ala most JRPG's? Some combo of the 2 like Chrono Trigger? Show the enemies on the main map vs hide the enemies and have random encounters). So it would be a pretty big shift, which is why I'm still sketching it out. I thought something like Bastion's combat would be more fun overall, but I'm not really feeling it - and that could be my inexperience with real time systems, rather than an actual problem.
Oh, that roguelike tutorial looks interesting. Thanks!
You're welcome! It's a solid start for most people looking at roguelikes (and games) - it has been converted into many many different languages, minus libtcod, which only works for a few.
My main goal is to get to a point where I could create simple apps. It's mainly for personal growth, just to feed a curiosity, although there are likely professional opportunities available if I could get efficient at it. I've been considering Udacity because of perceived quality. It looks ... thorough. I'd try the free week first though and decide after that.
That's fair.
Finished section 4 of the Udemy Unity course last night. I have read a lot of programming books and taken a few classes, but I have to say they had one of the best explanations for what classes and objects are that I have seen to date.
Damn, I will have to check that out then. I really struggle with that.
I am going to change it a little bit but this is how they put it:
Basically think of a Lego block as an object/instance.
The specifics of the block (color, shape, size, etc) are the properties/variables.
What the block can do are it's methods/functions.
This is part I am changing from their explanation:
The class is the machine used to make the block and the class instantiation method (classes can have multiple instantiation methods to create different variations on an object, they completely skipped over this) is the mold used to create a specific block.
The terms I slash-separated are pretty interchangeable it just depends on which is the preferred term for a given language/person.
How are folks dealing with the balance between playing/developing? I've been working on several games the past few years, and will get into situations where I make great progress on things, working an hour or two before/after my day job then just reach a "I need a break" point (usually after a stressful week or two at my day job). I'll jump in hard into the latest RPG, and that'll eat up all my development time. I'll play the game for a while, feel guilty about not working on my game, and end up unsatisfied as I never finish either the game I'm playing or the game I'm working on. Rinse/Repeat with new games to make/new games to play, and the cycle goes on.
Pages