GRcade

Tafdolphin wrote:There's already been a full EDGE feature on it

This is how I already knew about Neo Cab, the EDGE write-up was pretty positive and interesting. I can only imagine the frustration at such a coincidence of a similar game being announced!

Still, there must be a certain romanticism to being the industry underdog. There's little more galvanising than trying to beat the competition!

I've already switched allegiance in now being more excited to play Night Call anyway I've kind of got a thing for murder investigations at the moment as I'm currently reading The City & the City, and just hit a side-quest in Elex that's all about solving a murder.

Incidentally, Elex is really interesting from both a quest writing and a world building/immersion perspective, which is kind of relevant to this thread. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy world, and the Berserker faction you are prompted towards at the start of the game are defined by their back-to-nature, anti-technology stance. The menu system (inventory, quests etc.) in game is represented as a holographic display that is built into the main character's arm (think holographic pip-boy), but should you try and use this around members of the Berserkers they will call you out for breaking their laws and threaten you to stop using technology. This has resulted in me hiding behind trees or around corners in order to check my current quest objectives. It's a really cool immersive element of game design imo.

EDIT: Very tempted to jump on that Unity course too. An intern at work has promised to give me a rundown/intro to Unity next week, which hopefully should get me started, as last time I tried to sit down and learn the basic I bounced off the (to me impenetrable) UI.

OrangeRakoon wrote:EDIT: Very tempted to jump on that Unity course too. An intern at work has promised to give me a rundown/intro to Unity next week, which hopefully should get me started, as last time I tried to sit down and learn the basic I bounced off the (to me impenetrable) UI.

I was the same.

I think my problem in the past has been that I have wanted to just dive straight in and "start making games!!!" which usually results in much confusion and trying to keep looking up bits and bobs about how to do things, or reverse engineer my understanding from any examples available.

Even though quite a bit of the course has been in the "teaching your Granny to suck eggs" territory for me I have been approaching it with a degree of discipline as I think the only way I will really get to grips with Unity is if I stop trying to cut corners or jump straight from page 1 to 100!

OrangeRakoon wrote:

Tafdolphin wrote:There's already been a full EDGE feature on it

This is how I already knew about Neo Cab, the EDGE write-up was pretty positive and interesting. I can only imagine the frustration at such a coincidence of a similar game being announced!

Still, there must be a certain romanticism to being the industry underdog. There's little more galvanising than trying to beat the competition!

I've already switched allegiance in now being more excited to play Night Call anyway I've kind of got a thing for murder investigations at the moment as I'm currently reading The City & the City, and just hit a side-quest in Elex that's all about solving a murder.

Ah, the 'residual guilt' market. Excellent!

Without going full conspiracy theory, I imagine the EDGE feature was a result of Leigh Alexander's involvement. She's a long time EDGE contributor and I would have thought a word from her would carry considerable weight. Same with the original RPS piece they carried a while back (which specifically referenced her previous involvement on the site). C'est la vie!

Incidentally, Elex is really interesting from both a quest writing and a world building/immersion perspective, which is kind of relevant to this thread. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy world, and the Berserker faction you are prompted towards at the start of the game are defined by their back-to-nature, anti-technology stance. The menu system (inventory, quests etc.) in game is represented as a holographic display that is built into the main character's arm (think holographic pip-boy), but should you try and use this around members of the Berserkers they will call you out for breaking their laws and threaten you to stop using technology. This has resulted in me hiding behind trees or around corners in order to check my current quest objectives. It's a really cool immersive element of game design imo.

EDIT: Very tempted to jump on that Unity course too. An intern at work has promised to give me a rundown/intro to Unity next week, which hopefully should get me started, as last time I tried to sit down and learn the basic I bounced off the (to me impenetrable) UI.

I've never heard of Elex, but now I have. One to wishlist.

Also, I just DMed the lead of Night Call about that course. From what I can see it's the best Unity course around and very well done, but I wanted a professional opinion. If he says it looks OK I'll grab it. I spent more than 10 euros on lunch yesterday, after all.

Jenuall wrote:

Tafdolphin wrote:

Jenuall wrote:

lex-man wrote:I'm pretty interested in making some games, I'm currently slowly working my way through this course.

https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/learn/v4/overview

I'm currently around 50% of the way through it. Qutie tempted to get the 3D course, physics and Unreal courses but trying to stop myself until I get to the end of this one and put something simple together for myself.

I've been doing this course as well!

Udemy were doing a sale a while back and as I wanted to find out more about Unity and also as I've mainly been a C/C++ and Java programmer in my professional life I was interested in it as a way to get some hands on experience with C#.

I'm not that far through the course but it has been interesting so far and I've been jotting down ideas in a text file for potential games I want to try making once I get to the end of the course. The Unity editor/UI seems a bit, for want of a better word, cheap compared to the limited time I've played with Unreal, but it certainly seems to do the job well enough!

Um, I've just clicked on that link and the course price is €10, down from €195 supposedly) for the next 5 hours. So, two questions.

- Is the 5 hour thing a con or have I just been incredibly fortuitous?
- Is that course worth it for someone with zero programming ability/a complete newbie?

It was discounted when I got it too, I think it's a bit like DFS - there is always a sale on!

I would say it is absolutely suitable for beginners - they start with some real basics. You need to be computer literate and have a fairly methodical mindset but other than that I'd say fill your boots!

It depends what you mean by con, the course is really good but Udemy seem to just cycle through sales. They also seem to change the length of their sales depending on the user. I've checked the site on my laptop and the sites appeared at full price and then on my work PC and it's been £9.99.

Jenuall wrote:

lex-man wrote:I'm pretty interested in making some games, I'm currently slowly working my way through this course.

https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/learn/v4/overview

I'm currently around 50% of the way through it. Qutie tempted to get the 3D course, physics and Unreal courses but trying to stop myself until I get to the end of this one and put something simple together for myself.

I've been doing this course as well!

Udemy were doing a sale a while back and as I wanted to find out more about Unity and also as I've mainly been a C/C++ and Java programmer in my professional life I was interested in it as a way to get some hands on experience with C#.

I'm not that far through the course but it has been interesting so far and I've been jotting down ideas in a text file for potential games I want to try making once I get to the end of the course. The Unity editor/UI seems a bit, for want of a better word, cheap compared to the limited time I've played with Unreal, but it certainly seems to do the job well enough!

I really need to start doing some actual game planning. I have some vague ideas for a bunch of games in my head but I think I want to do something really simple for my first game.

My plan is to do a game where you start in the middle of a screen and enemies are spawned in off screen and then walk towards you. You have to shoot them before they reach you and as time goes on the spawn rate gets higher. I think anything more complicated than that and I'd be liable never to finish.

Turns out the Night Call lead is actually friends with Ben who runs the Udemy course. It's recommended so...bought!

We can all be course buddies!

lex-man wrote:My plan is to do a game where you start in the middle of a screen and enemies are spawned in off screen and then walk towards you. You have to shoot them before they reach you and as time goes on the spawn rate gets higher. I think anything more complicated than that and I'd be liable never to finish.

Yeah keeping it simple is the way to go, I'm planning on doing the same.

Once you've got something you will have gained a lot of knowledge from it and will either be able to iterate on it directly or use it as inspiration and "lessons learned" for feeding into the next project!

lex-man wrote:My plan is to do a game where you start in the middle of a screen and enemies are spawned in off screen and then walk towards you. You have to shoot them before they reach you and as time goes on the spawn rate gets higher. I think anything more complicated than that and I'd be liable never to finish.

That's really simple to do in Unity. I made a similar game but in 3D and it only took two weeks for everything. It was a work thing so I probably shouldn't post the link, but if you get stuck I might be able to help.

Yeah, I could probably do it already but I'm kind of just spending all my time working through this course.

So my game is coming together, now. We are still in the process of ‘finding all the fun’, but the base mechanic and hook is in and working. Now ready to start finalising work for a pitch prototype.

I expect things to start moving fast on the design side over the next couple of weeks. We are letting the ‘fun’ guide our direction.

Happy to answer any Unity questions from those looking at courses, by the way.

I'm having a problem getting Unity and Visual studio to play nice. Visual studio keeps moaning that the files are being altered outside of Visual studio and trying to reload them. It's just a bit of a pain really, though nothing that serious.

lex-man wrote:I'm having a problem getting Unity and Visual studio to play nice. Visual studio keeps moaning that the files are being altered outside of Visual studio and trying to reload them. It's just a bit of a pain really, though nothing that serious.

I’m using VS community with Mac and not had an issue. A reinstall of unity might fix?

Also VS Code is integrated well, and almost as good as full VS (and much faster to start up). Might be worth a go if you can’t resolve and it becomes frustrating.

Had a great design session with Huey today. We’re starting to zone in on the final game we are going to make. We have controls nailed and a unique gameplay element in place. A few weeks more and hopefully we’ll have something fun to take to Develop. Exciting!

The reload thing happens when you create new (or move) scripts inside Unity, VS gets a bit funny and has to reload to locate them. You can create your scripts in VS to get around it, but they won't inherit from Monobehaviour automatically, if that bothers you.

To learn JavaScript, I made an adaptation of Stugene's Magnum Opus, "Big Fat Ugly Douglas Adventure".

It's great, and it runs on my old phone as an app (Nokia's Web Run Time why did you die )! Sadly, I haven't touched it in a while, but if anyone wants the code for a visual novel I'd be happy to share.

I'm sure I could have made it much better as currently each line of text is an actual line of code.

smurphy wrote:The reload thing happens when you create new (or move) scripts inside Unity, VS gets a bit funny and has to reload to locate them. You can create your scripts in VS to get around it, but they won't inherit from Monobehaviour automatically, if that bothers you.

I think I'm going to have to try this. Thanks for the advice.

OrangeRakoon wrote:I'm also intending on revisiting Procii briefly to add directionality to the appearance of houses, as the fact they seem to rotate has been a repeated point raised by people I've had play the game.

I did this just before going to bed last night

I'm now getting tempted to start something different and more designed built off Procii's first person ascii display. The speed of art creation and the convenience of everything being right there in the code is quite liberating I think.

I'm also getting an intro to Unity on Friday. Wish me luck!

Currently building an "in-engine" devkit for my "from scratch" C/OpenGL 2D engine so I can design my game Mario Maker style. My simple pixel art drawing tool is done, weighing up whether to do the piano or the level tile placement tool next.

Karl wrote:My simple pixel art drawing tool is done

Any chance of a screenshot or something? I'm a pixel artist at heart from my school days. I made this javascript 8-bit sprite editor a while back: https://www.orangerakoon.uk/canvas.html