Game Development

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Alexandre Vaillancourt

00:31

@ChrisMcFarland Have your kids mentally prepared for that :P

Chris McFarland

Nahhh, too young

Alexandre Vaillancourt

@ChrisMcFarland I don't know if bosses can realize this though.

Chris McFarland

haha, maybe not

really like, in the land of needing to install new Unity versions when an OS update breaks stuff, let alone verifying email stuff, renewing contracts, sometimes manually writing out invoices to receive royalties, two-factor passwords requiring phone access...

it's somewhat a liability writing this stuff down, unless you put it into a safe deposit box with a bank

someone in the know, eg an existing Unity developer, could probably figure it out though, but I would not expect it easy enough to write out every damn step for a non-Unity-based programmer

and for my case, probably needing something in my will to transfer copyrights and trademarks, I mean things can go to my "estate" but bleh

probably easiest to write something in a contract with a publisher lol

Alexandre Vaillancourt

Yeah, what will your estate do with it?

Chris McFarland

exactly. there's too much technical knowledge to keep up to date with things to keep receiving income. And not quite at JK Rowling nor JRR Tolkien estate levels yet either when it comes to paying someone to administer and manage this stuff lol

one day I might form of a company if it's worth hiring a programmer

til then, I just treat it like a job

Alexandre Vaillancourt

00:46

Yeah, and then a different stress will kick in. You'll need to make enough to pay them.

2 hours later…

Chris McFarland

03:11

yea. good advice I've read is, "don't hire until it hurts"

10 hours later…

GDSE Meta

13:36

Q: "Modifier" tag?

I noticed we have quite a few questions about architecting systems that can add/remove temporary buffs/debuffs/localized exceptions to rules layered on top of the normal behaviour of a game actor. This includes eg. gaining stat increases or special abilities from equipping an item in an RPG (los...

Jimmy

13:50

hmm, I'd like to call it an "effect" but that word is too overloaded

DMGregory

@Jimmy I was thinking similarly.

7 hours later…

coffeemancer

21:20

Hello is this for unity?

i got fucked up trying to code my own game engine in C++

Chris McFarland

21:43

yeah can talk game development here

coffeemancer

okay just opened Unity for the first time I"m watching Brackey's videos

Pikalek

22:02

@ChrisMcFarland Did you approach Teyon for release on Switch or vice versa?

Chris McFarland

@Pikalek Teyon approached me

Well, they approached me for a Wii U version for Japan

so then down the line, we got to talking about the Switch

Pikalek

@ChrisMcFarland was PC your first release platform?

Chris McFarland

Yeah, Steam was first release in 2015, did iOS and Google Play a few months after

Pikalek

@ChrisMcFarland Did you do EA on Steam or go straight to full release?

Chris McFarland

I was selling alpha versions on my own website throughout 2014, was on indiegamestand.com (now defuct) for a bit too, but then thought eh I'm done, let's just do Steam full release. This was back in the Greenlight days too, where not everyone could just publish on a whim, had to get approved first

Pikalek

22:11

@ChrisMcFarland Do you plan to do alpha release or EA the sequel or are you sticking with your previous strategy of full release?

Chris McFarland

I'm 99% sure I'll do Steam Early Access, possibly even Google Play BETA in tandem. I expect lots of networking bugs lol. Also want to gradually add new items too... but really just want user feedback and be able to tweak stuff without annoying too many customers with the "you changed the final product! /rage" mentality

Pikalek

@ChrisMcFarland Did you encounter much change log rage with the first game?

Chris McFarland

my biggest one was adding an enemy, the Feeler, which could pull you across the room with its tongue if you failed to have your shield raised

new weapons and things that actually helped the player were welcomed though lol

but at the same time, the new stuff that was added post-launch is now just the base game as far as new customers are aware

life goes on ¯_(ツ)_/¯

but even stuff like potentially breaking savefiles.... doing that to a "final" product is pretty risky. almost need to go through beta branches for customers willing to test

whereas EA, I can just say, "yep savefiles are wiped this patch, big changes happened under the hood"

Pikalek

@ChrisMcFarland That makes sense. Backwards compatibility on save files can be tough - hard to know when you're about to paint yourself into a corner.

Chris McFarland

Yeah... For my sequel I've coded things well enough that I think backward compatibility should be fine, but you never know

PC is also the easiest to debug for

mobile and console can be a nightmare

I've also learned that, while having a huge launch can be fun, long-tail playerbase (with sales and updates later on) is fine for me

so like, I no longer feel this huge pressure to have a "successful" launch, or need giant press coverage or youtubers or fanfare and whatnot

Pikalek

22:26

@ChrisMcFarland That's interesting to hear. In the post-greenlight era, the sense I get is that the signal to noise ratio for indie PC release is a huge challenge.

Chris McFarland

yeah, doom and gloom stories are pretty common

Pikalek

Well, I suppose it's inevitable - as the barrier to entry drops, participation increases. It's interesting to me though that the suspension of disbelief is so strong in game dev though. I wonder if it's the same in music - i.e. the ratio of indies with days jobs vs. those that make enough to to do it full time, etc.

@ChrisMcFarland At any rate, thanks for your time & some insight into your process.

Chris McFarland

that's okay :) tbh, I don't hear stories of gore-filled roguelike platformers failing lol. I mean I'm not making enough to establish a studio, rent some office space and start hiring employees, but it pays my own bills, and that's good enough for me

It does sound like Steam is no longer the automatic golden ticket from yesteryears though

1 hour later…

coffeemancer

23:52

why do my tiles look fucked up in game but not in scene

DMGregory

@coffeemancer Can you define "f***ed up" a bit more precisely? ;)

coffeemancer

pixels look wrong

DMGregory

There are a lot of ways for pixels to look wrong. I'm not asking to be obtuse - the specific symptoms can tell us a lot about what's happening, and lead us toward solutions.

coffeemancer

gyazo.com/8813463fcde557bde10efbfbc8bfd13d

that's what it looks like in game,

DMGregory

Ah, yes, I know what that is. :)

One moment...

coffeemancer

23:54

gyazo.com/51003e86ce47fe5550bf46030a76bacf

supposed to look like this

DMGregory

A: What makes scaling pixel art different than other images?

Scaling by Whole Numbers Scaling by 2x, 3x...nx is simple - each pixel just becomes an nxn square of pixels, and the look of the original sprite is perfectly preserved (including all the sharp lines, corners, and staircase zig-zags). We run into trouble though when scaling pixel art by a fracti...

coffeemancer

also (i'm in unity forgot to mention)

DMGregory

This comes from scaling pixel art by a non-integer scaling factor.

The Mario example in this answer looks a lot like the artifacts you're seeing

A: Scaling my pixel art platformer from 720p to 1080p

For anyone wondering why this is an issue for pixel art, here's a quick example using a scene from Super Mario World: If we just scale a pixel art game from 720 to 1080 at runtime (the way a typical game camera might), we get artifacts because of the non-integer ratio of screen pixels per sour...

coffeemancer

i scale 32px tiles by 2

DMGregory

Remember, there's also the scaling that happens when your camera's view area is mapped onto the screen.

coffeemancer

23:58

true but how I set my camera to be the same as the level like 800x600 res

DMGregory

Let's say I have a beautiful, crisp, 1:1 ratio between my source sprites and my screen pixels. Now I grab the window and drag the edge so it's 50% taller. Now my ratio is 1.5 screen pixels per sprite texel.

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