Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Edward Doyle]

Probably better to post here for frequent updates rather than a thread.
The art style is finally finalized and enough content for a demo is almost done. Currently reworking the stealth system and will fine tune the combat as the content development goes on.

The progress of the tileset + UI:

Apparently the art is very inspired by PC98 games, and managed to integrate Fallout-inspired Skilldex in the UI:

But yeah the project is an action RPG that will heavly lean into some CRPG elements.

I REALLY like the look of this. You've done a good job. Is all the art custom made?

Yes it's all custom made, the artist is doing a fantastic job. Although the current build doesn't look like this yet, integrating the new tileset will be among the upcoming tasks.

 

[PompiPompi]

I am trying to recreated first level of Burial Stone, but with more interesting combat.
What do you think?

 

[Hag]

The first developer I hire to help me extend my engine: "Why is there a comment that just says peepee"
View attachment 40817

At some old corporate job I wrote a PHP web interface to ease the thankless job of a Moroccan colleague. One morning, she calls me, her lovely voice concerned, and asked me "why is there written "COIN-COIN" (the French term for duck noises) in every field ?".
I somehow managed to control my laughter and explained her I might have forgotten to remove some test messages. Fixed it in a minute but really made my day.

 

[Twiglard]

I don't think I ever posted a lightmap generated by the shader. It's nothing special, but here you have multiple lights blending into each other.

Spoiler

I had to implement the lightmap based on my own understanding of 2.5D lighting techniques described in online articles, therefore seeing it work with 8+ lights helps my self-confidence a lot.

I forgot to mention that static geometry gets uploaded each frame to get lighting on itself. Some form of caching will be implemented later.

Lights of zero range aren't trimmed on purpose. They're meant to measure slowdowns.

---

Right now I'm implementing pathfinding. Unfortunately, walls go on the sides of the tiles rather than the center, which means that offsets need to be calculated to list passable neighboring tiles. Because of that I'm writing unit tests before plugging it in.

I heard about iterative deepening A* but it turns out it's not well-suited for games. I'm going to start with Dijkstra and add A* type functionality later.

Using a flat heap instead of a full-on priority queue is a good idea that improves memory locality. Here's an already-corrected version. See std::push_heap.

There's also the option of using an existing pooled allocator.

 

[PompiPompi]

 

[beardalaxy]

Never has a rat battle been more intense. I like the idea that you can move the camera around a little bit if you want to instead of it being locked.

I got an ABSURD amount of work done on my game today! Worked for about 9 hours in total, and tore through 2 side quests. 1 quest required me to make nearly an entire town's NPCs, and the other was very dialogue and lore heavy. Those are two huge quests that I managed to take down so I'm very happy!

Not every day is like this, where I have so much motivation to just keep working. In fact, I still kind of feel like that, but I have to know when to take breaks too. I'm just glad I could get as much done as I did today.

 

[Justinian]

sword animation sucks, have a proper slash instead of a silly looking bonk

 

[PompiPompi]

 

[Jaesun]

I liked the green magic staff and fire attack particle effects.

 

[PlayerEmers]

looking good so far
personal opinion: i think all the lights in the game are too bright
i think if you tone brightness down (specially the torch. magic can be a little bit brigther) it can help a little bit more with the atmosphere of a dangerous dungeon

 

[beardalaxy]

I've been on a tear recently. It feels great to be back in the groove of working for several hours a day on game dev. I finished two really complex side quests today, alongside a handful of NPCs that went with them. Now I'm down to only 8 quests left before moving on to the more "filler" NPCs. After that, it's pretty much just all the tileset swapping stuff I've been doing, a little bit of extra story bits, and adding in the voice acting. Then I'll run a test of the game myself before figuring out how to get some sort of beta together.

Absolutely no ETA on that, but it's definitely coming together sooner than I thought. My goal was to finish the side quests by the end of the year, but I've been going ham lately.

 

[Tavernking]

A few more months until I reveal my ancient greek game and make the steam store page, here's a pic of some props I'm testing

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Totally reworking the game art. Not finalized, but this is the direction I'm going. Any suggestions or feedback? I'm going to start adding new characters and working on the main quest.

 

[NoMoneyNoFameNoDame]

View attachment 41532
Totally reworking the game art. Not finalized, but this is the direction I'm going. Any suggestions or feedback? I'm going to start adding new characters and working on the main quest.

Their faces are too clean. They should look like better if they just washed up in a dirty lake.
They are also missing japanese letter tattooes. The males are looking a tad soy, so you'll want to give them random scars.
The females need animal-themed head gear or braids/ties made from animal/plant parts.

Even though you appear to be going for heads in a pure white mist look, your macroscopic shadowing work could be improved.
I'd recommend have shadows casted on their faces from unseen objects in the scene in a final pass.

The septaroad voyager font is fine but you could probably afford to stylize it by hanging ornaments off of it.

 

[Hag]

View attachment 41532
Totally reworking the game art. Not finalized, but this is the direction I'm going. Any suggestions or feedback? I'm going to start adding new characters and working on the main quest.

Not bad but kind of bland right now. Font could be hand-drawn for more personality, it's very non-plussing as is. Faces are ok to good, the redhead one is kind of weird (her right eye in particular is fucked up), and all could use more color such as rosy cheeks or a tad more contrast.
Did you draw it yourself ? there are some issues with nose position in 3/4 perspective (it should be further out, hiding the inside of the rearmost eye).
Do you plan on using it on another background ? Since it is very clear, it may look better on a darker one, with maybe a white halo around the faces too. Or put them in some geometric shape, like some seven-pointed compass-like.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Hag I really don't know anything about lettering. I wouldn't even know where to start with custom text. Are there any game logos that you like that have hand-drawn lettering?

I drew the faces in Photoshop, but with some AI in my workflow. I start with a sketch, or a screenshot, or something. Then I use Stable Diffusion's img2img to get closer to what I want. I load that into Photoshop, make adjustments, send it back to Stable Diffusion. After a few rounds of that, when I'm mostly satisfied with the result, I load it back into Photoshop to rework the line art and the eyes (which always end up weird for me), and then I'm done. The final composite is all of the faces I made, layered, and then I create a mask using a watercolor brush to get the cloudy effect around the edges.

I can work on the redhead's eyes more. The 3/4 perspective is a little weird here because I tried mixing realistic and anime styles. With anime characters, there's usually not a lot of face depth. And now that I'm looking at it, the girl at the bottom of the circle has this really creepy stare. I think I need to blend her eyes in better, so the line art isn't so separate from the face.

I hadn't tried with any other backgrounds yet. I'll give it a try and see how it looks.

 

[Zanzoken]

View attachment 41532
Totally reworking the game art. Not finalized, but this is the direction I'm going. Any suggestions or feedback? I'm going to start adding new characters and working on the main quest.

I like some of the portraits but there is a noticeable inconsistency in style, which I think is actually worse than if they were just consistently subpar.

Qualitatively I like the dark-haired girl on the lower left the best, especially for a JRPG. Worst is probably the girl on the top right because she looks fake and lifeless, like a doll.

I know you are a solo dev and resources are limited, but I feel like this is one of those cases where it makes sense to hire a freelancer to do it right. It's a pretty vital piece of your game's identity and something every player will immediately see when they hit your Steam page. I don't think you have to go crazy but having a few nice pieces of concept art for things like cover art, title screen, load screens, etc adds a lot of polish to your game and your store page.

You might even be able to then use that concept art to train the AI to create in-game portraits in the same style (just speculating here, since my experience with AI models is nil at this point).

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

View attachment 41532
Totally reworking the game art. Not finalized, but this is the direction I'm going. Any suggestions or feedback? I'm going to start adding new characters and working on the main quest.

The thing that strikes out to me the most is that none of these characters look like they were drawn by the same person. While it doesn't necessarily strike me as AI off-hand, the visual inconsistency, as Zanzoken noted, makes this look bizarre to someone just coming across it. Like you copy and pasted a bunch of images you got from difference sources together. I think it's bad enough that most people are going to notice.

 

[MalcolmR]

Any suggestions or feedback?

I think it looks pretty good, but there's a lot of room for improvement. While most of the criticism so far has been related to the style/consistency of the faces, if I zoom out and look at it as a whole, I actually think the weakest part is the text in the center. There's nothing interesting or videogamey about the text. Almost every JRPG logo out there has an interesting typeface and at least some level of complexity in the text style/effects (gradient, outline, inner/outer glow, drop shadow, etc.). If I were you, I'd collect a bunch of JRPG logos as reference and copy the parts you like from their text styles.

If I were hired to redo the logo (don't hire me!), I'd make the text way bigger with a JRPG style, and then I'd convert the circle of faces to a more abstract monochromatic line art logo. It would function as one of those JRPG background logos behind the title text. As an example of what I mean, see Last Story, Edge of Eternity, Threads of Time, etc. Right now, the heads are the point of focus and the title is effectively in the background. What I'm suggesting would flip it around. This is just one of many ways you could make a more professional-looking logo.

If you want to keep it as is, I'd recommend shifting the positions of the heads so that the bottom girl (probably the best one) is perfectly in the center horizontally, and then the other heads can shift around slightly clockwise to make the whole thing more symmetrical. I'd also experiment with different head orders. Finally, I'd experiment with a map paper/parchment background instead of the current solid white, but that assumes the background isn't intended to be transparent.

As for the faces themselves, they look fine to me, especially in the context of in-game portraits. The only parts that jump out at me at first glance are the blond guy's left eye and the eye spacing of the girl at the top. While the shading styles aren't perfectly consistent, the overall style is consistent enough, especially if they are on separate panels/screens.

 

[Cohesion]

What do you think about C standard library / breaking ABI ?
https://thephd.dev/binary-banshees-digital-demons-abi-c-c++-help-me-god-please

 

[Bad Sector]

What do you think about C standard library / breaking ABI ?

Breaking working libraries and programs is never a good thing, especially in the modern world where you can at least depend on the C library to work as expected. Pretty much everything old and modern is built on top of some C ABI (with often direct dependency on the C stdlib ABI), wanting to break that is wanting to break one of the few remaining stable foundations that computers have.

 

[Bad Sector]

I haven't worked on Little Immersive Engine for several weeks now (i don't have much motivation these days :-P) but decided to try and spend some time doing something somewhat minor (though very useful): object cloning by shift+dragging the transformation manipulator parts. This works for any sort of transformation (translation, rotation, scaling) and for both entities and elements, though in the example above i only clone three elements twice via translation (moving them).

I was avoiding for quite some time, but up next is making box elements, a prerequisite for making sectors so i can separate the world in various areas. This will be useful for generating portals between the sectors (for visibility - right now the engine attempts to render everything and only used a grid of occlusion queries to avoid that, but those only work for the main viewport and not, e.g., for shadows which try to render all objects inside a light's range regardless of if they'd be visible or not), defining "environments" (rendering settings and other stuff, see the environments in Aurora engine or Witcher 2's REDkit for examples) and at some point later used for audio propagation (and perhaps for gameplay data like, e.g. smells).

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Released Der Geist trilogy on GOG, five years after the first game got rejected. This means they're good games now.

https://af.gog.com/en/game/das_geisterschiff_the_ghost_ship?as=1649904300
https://af.gog.com/en/game/der_geisterturm_the_ghost_tower?as=1649904300
https://af.gog.com/en/game/der_geisterjager_the_ghost_hunter?as=1649904300

 

[pumpkinteractive]

Probably better to post here for frequent updates rather than a thread.
The art style is finally finalized and enough content for a demo is almost done. Currently reworking the stealth system and will fine tune the combat as the content development goes on.

The progress of the tileset + UI:

Apparently the art is very inspired by PC98 games, and managed to integrate Fallout-inspired Skilldex in the UI:

But yeah the project is an action RPG that will heavly lean into some CRPG elements.

Nice! Color pallete is great, reminds me a little of bitmap brothers games.

 

[pumpkinteractive]

I'm working on this C64 styled fantasy adventure game.
Let me know what you think.