Burnout is something I suffer from very often after competing in a competition of any sort. The whole of last month is just a jumble of memories in my mind, centered around the three games I was working on, late nights spent hunting silly bugs, and later nights spent working on artwork.
I'm glad with what I eventually made; it's the first time I've worked with 3D in this way, and also the first game I've created with Unity. It was an interesting process of learning, and relearning a few things I forgot about C#.Originally, I was planning on silently dropping out; I was feeling pretty down with the work I had to do to pull either Exile 2 or the other game I had into the 'playable demo' phase, so I opted to just do "whatever I felt like" until something happened.And a few nights after that thought, I sat down in a bored manner and decided to model a spaceship. It turned out far better than I anticipated, and I naturally decided to run with what I managed to make. And I'd say it turned out fairly well.I will say that I'm still deciding whether or not to continue working on Project Phoenix in Unity. For starters, it relies heavily on image effects that I can't use in the free version, so if I don't manage to win/loot/buy a copy of the Pro license, the game will look very different.In that case, I'd probably see to porting it to a custom C++ engine; writing a Bloom and Motion Blur shader is elementary. The hardest part of the 'port' would be choosing a good model format and writing a loader for it.Either way, at this juncture I am creating a new from-scratch engine. Or at least, designing one. That's always been a fascinating process to me, and I've been spending a few days studying the Doom, Doom 3 and Vanilla Doom source; Carmack's code is particularly interesting. There's a good article here about it:http://kotaku.com/5975610/the-exceptional-beauty-of-doom-3s-source-codeAnd a more detailed view of the internals (This guy has reviewed most of the source id has produced, as well as the Build engine, and picks apart how these engines got around to doing what they did. Fascinating reads if that's your kinda thing).http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/Anyway, I'm going to be looking into a more data driven model for my new engine. I want all game logic to be handled in an external manner. Either by runtime scripts, precompiled scripts, or just by 'hooking' the game engine into the game logic via a DLL (Which is what the idTech4 does). I'm not actually designing this with a specific game in mind; I'm just making this because I enjoy programming tasks like this immensely. Well, I'll leave you with that. Now to kill time until the competition winners are announced! Addendum: Dark SoulsI did it!
I know that feel. Yeah man, when I was in comp mode, I was hoping the entire time I'd have a shot at the Unity prize just so I could continue working on my game after the month was over. There's a certain emotional investment that builds up as you create something. It stuck with me all month until the last few days when I learned something about game engines that shifted my attitude 90 degrees.
While Unity is cool and all, it's hardly the best bang for your buck nowadays. Now, I would not in the least pass up a free year long subscription, but deciding to purchase it willingly would be another story. Very recently the competition for indie and small-time devs has been rising in the game engine world. Both Epic Games and Crytek have introduced subscription based licenses that hugely favor indies, and both now come out much cheaper than Unity Pro. Unreal Engine is 20 bucks a month plus 5% royalty, and the latest Cryengine can be had for a mere 10 bucks a month, no royalties. These are AAA engines we're talking about for a fraction of what Unity costs. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve jumps on board with their next iteration of Source engine.So yeah, as the more I found out about this the less concerned I was with the pro license prize. I hope it goes to someone who'll value it no doubt, but as for me, exploring these other offerings is a higher priority. The gaming world is constantly changing, and this time it's greatly in our favor.Oh, is Crytek jumping on board too? I must really look into that.
I love UDK, mostly because it's familiar and comfortable. The first two games I played around with in terms of modding and such were Duke 3D and Unreal Tournament. A Unity Pro license would be great; if I had it, I'd find a way to use it. But not having it wouldn't stop me in the least. I can easily utilize one of the other engines, as you say, or create a simple one myself.I like Unity, but when they introduced their Adobe-style subscription for $75/month, I was pretty disappointed. Seeing as you'd basically buy the software in less than two years, it'd be better just to purchase it outright if you plan on long term use. Unity's pricing does piss me off, but I did end up buying it because I like the tool a lot. That doesn't mean I won't check out other engines, though. I've just really enjoyed working in Unity.
I know that a lot of indie developers like to compare tools and choose the one that's best for them, since they can't afford otherwise, and then build up a superiority complex with it. But I'll personally use whatever tool is better for the job at hand, because we've got some pretty excellent tools at our fingertips.I haven't touched Unity (and therefore my comp entry) since the comp ended, but there's quite a bit I want to do with it, and the critical reception it got has given me some good ideas on how to improve it.That, and the only pro features I used were shadows.I'm having fun and you can't stop me.
Noo Mega, you're hurting game maker. :(
Awesome effects though.Game Maker needs to man up. On an old 386SX you could pull off this effect at 640x480, running at a high framerate.
This is a 128x128 resolution, scaled up here to make it a bit easier to see. I'm kinda disappointed that the execution is so slow; almost every other VM based language I've touched is a lot faster. Either way, I've managed to optimize it up to 16FPS. At this point, it's a challenge. :PWell game maker has yoyo compiler which, according to yoyo, runs 300 times faster. It's also 300$ from scratch so :/
That's why I'll be sticking to GCC. It runs on the metal and doesn't cost me a cent :P
Every game I've ever played that was made in unity seems to run really bad for me. Is there a reason people like making games with it?
I can't help but feel that if Rust was made with something else, it would run much better than it currently does.I'm guessing that it's probably really easy to make games in Unity and that performance is the trade off you get in order to make games that easily.Otherwise, I don't really see the benefit of using it…It is easy, I guess, though you often feel you're working against the engine when trying to do certain things. And as one friend of mine says, it's like Unity can't make up its mind as to whether it wants to be a Component based engine or Static engine.
Oh, Dark Souls story.Invaded somebody for the first time ever today. I made the huge mistake on my first playthrough of playing offline. I was really missing the ability to summon/be summoned/invade by the end of the game.Either way, was playing with my new character and was about to fight the Gaping Dragon again. Helped a nice guy out with the battle, he even sent a thank you message to me afterwards. Then I decided to try an invasion out; had a few Cracked Red Eye Orbs. So I managed to get an invasion (Getting summoned and invading seems to be working pretty well for me. Summoning others seems to be a bit trickier).Spent a few minutes hunting the guy down. Eventually saw the edge of his shield near the fog wall at the boss. I bowed to him, to be polite… and he didn't budge. Moved close, and realized I had just bowed to his backside.For some reason, he was AFK and standing with his weapon in both hands. Spent a few minutes waiting. Tried the trusty old ritual where one walks in a circle around the target five times while pulling off a Shrug gesture every time you're in front of him, in order to summon his courage, but he didn't return.Didn't know, at the time, that the black separation crystal could be used to banish myself back to my world… so I backstabbed him in order to get out of things. And there I was expecting a glorious battle like all my other invasion experiences (All of them with me being the subject of the invasion).I'm really hoping that the multiplayer doesn't die out with this. Even with DS2 out, Dark Souls still has value in its own right. Apparently the guys behind DSCfix are working on something that might help when GFWL is shut down for good. Apparently DS just handles a peer list, and sends the address of a suitable peer to the client.