Ceberon Gate

Comments

  • edited
    Someone shoot me.
    I thought we were over this.
    If you don't want this topic here, just say so.
    Just because i have been thinking about it for that long.
    It does not mean that i have not been planing and researching.

    Is there any fault for feeling after 4 years of further influences, games played, media watched, ect.. that I still have a fun game idea and a story to tell?
    It also does not mean everything is set in stone.
    And I am fully willing to discuss any aspect of the project with the comunity.


    I understand that you have some sort of fear that the project may fail horridly.
    But you seem negative by nature.

    :edit
    Right now I'm fixing up the engine to be all that it can be.
    I'm adding all the object instances and parameters.
    I'm fixing the lighting system.
    That will shade walls and setup lighting for sprites.
    I'm making the animation system that handles all the frames
    I'm making the Weapons and basic AI structures.
  • edited
    The summary of @dislekcia and co's comments are not "stop making your game" but rather "make it, prototype it, get it to a point where people can play it AS SOON AS POSSIBLE" before anything else.

    They're advocating that you get the gameplay going before trying to sell it on graphics or engine. So I can play a doodle version of your game and tell you if it's fun first.

    Your progress sounds cool, way more than I could muster in my project at the mo. I only have bricks that fall and combine to bigger ones. I'll only even show it after the scoring has been somewhat thought out. Graphics is only a couple of sketches in pencil. So I'm gonna keep getting it to a working point before I show it and ask for comments :)
  • edited
    Calm down?

    What's wrong with saying that phrase scares me? It does. Nothing good has ever come of it... Maybe you'll be first, but you're fighting against a bloody big dataset.

    Just because I don't share your vision due to my experience doesn't mean I'm being negative. It means I'm applying what I know and understand. You can disagree with my advice all you like, that just means I get to evaluate your eventual progress and use that as another data point when I next give advice. It would be seriously great if you did come out with something, which is why I keep saying build something playable.

    -Edit- I'd say Tuism has a lot more progress so far, because he has gameplay. And I wish he'd upload it.
  • No I don't have gameplay yet, well I do, but it's just an engine that looks for blocks around blocks and combines them into bigger blocks... And it's completely rough and has no point yet... But yeah I'll get it to a point where I think it'll express what I want it to first and upload it :)

    Sorry for the thread jack, back to Ceberon Gate :)
  • edited
    @ Tusim
    Interesting project there.
    No worries about thread jack. = )

    Now I guess I should try to provide something playable.
    But right now there is not much to show but half a engine and a object handler.
    So it won't be anytime soon.
    But i was planning on doing quite a few demo's to get outside input.
    I'm just posting progress updates as I'm going because quite a few other people read this too.
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  • edited
    That Chroma Depth vision looks absolutely awesome. If you can get that working in a some rooms and passages or whatever I'd happily wander around... even without the glasses.

    I'm very fond of that super saturated unnatural aesthetic, like that found in antichamber: I'm sure there is a lot you can do just playing around with those sorts of depth/colour algorithms... And from a business stand point I'd suggest that the indie-community is primed for some mind-warping fps visuals (based on the very warm reception for Antichamber).

    Plz make it!

    P.S. An FPS horror, sci-fi RPG does sound like an awful lot of mechanics to develop, and if you get any one of them wrong the whole experience probably fails. I'd suggest as a start, find one thing you really want to do and build an self-contained experience around it. If you succeed at that then try add in another element. I find it is faster and more enjoyable developing in iterations than trying to do the entire project in one go.

    P.P.S Meta mechanics, like RPG elements, are intensely laborious to make fun (because the testing takes so long when the mechanic unfolds over an entire play through). I'd suggest worrying about meta mechanics when you've already got something fun (though I know designing about skill trees is exciting, I LOVE planning skill trees, it's just that they are a nightmare to implement well).

    Anyway, you know my bias. I'm totally into those creative visuals you're suggesting you might make. I'd love to see you pull an interesting experience out of that.

  • Actually.. I figured that it does not really cut it for this game.
    But i have saved your vid for a future project.
  • edited
    reminded me of the first skill tree I tried to make. I think in the end I actually managed to implement about 4 or 5 of these (since It was for a course and I just didn't have the time).

    Baaaack in the day, lol
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  • edited
    I would like to announce a new weapon.

    I use it a lot for balance testing.
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  • So you're just using Doom sprites from here then?

    I guess that shouldn't be a problem if it stays a hobby project... Using other people's art without their permission is generally not a good idea though.
  • edited
    Not all of it is from there... only 20%
    Some of them needed some love and attention.
    I am planning on giving a lot of credit to other factions.
    But I am drawing many of my own sprites too.

    The chicken launcher was a good joke.. ok.
    If I had a option to draw it all myself I think my fingers would be broken.
    But if I had a dedicated sprite artist I would be so stoked, I could make the game more about what I want instead of what I am limited to.

    I really just want to have fun with this project.
    The last one failed because members disbanded and got bored.
    If I'm doing it alone nothing can go wrong that I cannot take responsibility for.


    I'm taking what i have and I'm making it awesome.
  • Another big reason for this project.
    It helps drive development at the QB64 front as well.
  • edited


    Beta engine is finally up to spec.


  • Awesome this week i'm adding weapons and classes
  • It is looking good, I do however recommend you change your crosshair from the Vista/W7 loading pointer.

    Also for the music, you reverse it to loop back (if I am not mistaken) which would sound slightly better in the reversed part if you stored the different "notes" and rather played them in reverse time rather than reversing the actual song.

    Keep us up to date on your progress. :)
  • I'm trying to sort out lighting now.
    But comparing lumanance value's has got me stumped
  • edited
    Lighting working well.
    Next sorting out particle engine.

    I'll only be posting updates from now on.
    Later everyone.
  • Would be cool to be able to try a playable build so we can jump in and gawk :)
  • edited
    Working my butt off to provide something playable.
    I think I will do a small demo of the first 2 sectors playing as engineer class.
    Will provide more demo's as I progress to fine tune and collect input as we go.

    Wish me luck.

    on a side note.
    http://www.nag.co.za/forums/showthread.php?18834-Project-Ultra-cheap-media-centre-completed
    Little something I did today.
  • Well you guys can delete this.
    After a deeper intervention I was told that everything is hated.
    And have decided to scrap the project for something i can prototype faster.

    : (
  • edited
    Everything is hated? (Was that part of that very demoralizing argument?)

    I've shelved countless attempts at games (even games that I've worked on for 6 months full time while paying salaries, and that really sucks). But if you've learnt something, and if you're wiser for the next attempt then you're on the path to success (it takes a LOT of tries and failures in my experience).

    (I hope that doesn't sound condescending or anything.)
  • edited
    Dude, I've started learning about making games for 2 months (pushing 3) and I got like 3 scrapped things already. And before this I was making (am making?) t-shirt designs, and even of the decent ones I "finished" only about 10% make it to print.

    Like @黑天贓艦 said, if you learn from something, it's already worth it from that point of view.

    So I feel ya! I'm still trying to not scrap the one I'm working on at the moment, and every time I think stuff like "maybe I should animate his jump frame differently so it looks cooler" I try to remember "FUCKING WORK ON GAMEPLAY STOP MESSING AROUND WITH ANIMATION!!!".

    In any case, it would be awesome to see if you could put up some kind of playable build, I find that's often the best thing, even if you've decided that it's gone to dead-end land :)
  • edited
    Yeah dude it happens. Currently I am working on something larger as well. Some people may like it, some may not. I'm probably doing it more for the learning process rather than to make a fully working game, but you should always be prepared for something like this. I'm sure you learnt a lot, even though the game itself didn't turn out to be a success.

    Heck, I once spent an entire holiday programming a space/gravity game... then decided myself that it was the most boring then ever, and scrapped it :P

    Like you've been told here countless times, keep trying, but make something you can develop in shorter cycles. I know it's not always the easiest thing. Big ideas don't always fit well in a prototype, but it pretty much is the only way as a solo/indie developer. Even in a bigger company I imagine you still need to prototype, but then it may be easier to prototype "bigger" ideas. I dunno, maybe everyone doesn't agree, but that's just the idea I have been getting.

    Edit: Making prototypes is definitely a skill to be learnt in itself!
  • So what happened, exactly? Often I find that talking over feedback that I think is super-negative helps me figure out what it's really about and then learning from it is much easier.

    Those crucial "Aha!" moments are much easier to have when you're trying to figure out things as a group :)
  • I found that I'm too retro with the project.
    game idea's are great.. but the tools I am using is making it a issue for the project to really grow.



  • any post longer than this wont work.
    wtf is going on..
  • edited
    Anyway.

    I felt that the game was gameplay less.
    And my tools were not fully up to the task.

    I was being arogant and have seen my errors.
    Yes it runs in a pc the size of a postage stamp.
    But how many of us have that postage stamp.

    So much fail i did.
  • And I'm sorry I owe you all a big apology.

    Sorry for the multi posts firefox is acting up on this site.
  • I rather enjoyed seeing what you were doing, even though I was sad I didn't get to try anything playable. Glad you learnt stuff! :)

    Any thoughts on your (way lower scope!) next game prototype? :D
  • Yeah! Looking forward to it!
  • Well I'm thinking of picking up GM to quickly prototype idea's.

    And if it's any good Unity for when the graphics come to play.

    I always wanted to do a fps but it's a very difficult genre break into.

    I'm thinking something small, so that i can gain trust and perhaps build a team.

  • edited
    FPS's are SUPER tough. So much of the distinction between the successful FPS titles is in the content. Meaning to stand out in that marketplace you've got to outspend the competitors and produce more and better content.

    (There are obviously innovative FPS's out there that get away with minimalist graphics... like Steve Swink's Scale, but these games really shouldn't even be called FPS's, because the core experience isn't shooting enemies, via Extra Creditz)

    Although:
  • Very true.
    At rage I met some really interesting people "toxic bunny"
    After what turned into a 20min discussion.
    I realized that I'm not going to make this project work as well.
    I would need resources to actually get the best from it.

    I was hoping to try break in by doing a few smaller games first, hopefully make a name for myself.
    : )

    Thanked by 1Karuji
  • We're all trying for that here, really :) And for me I'm understanding more and more that... The only real way to do that is to get something fun to play, not looking good.

    My dwarf looks cool but I haven't got the fun part figured out yet - everything that sounds good coming out of my mouth isn't that easily articulated in actual playing. Only when I sit down and build it do I realise "but that's not fun", or "how do I achieve what I think is fun in numbers", and to me that's much more valuable to figure out on my own than building something technical or pretty.

    Your thinking is right - do small games! Keep it small - only way to do that is to keep it fun! :)
  • @Legion,

    my current pet project is the jozi crime spree thing floating around. But like Tuism , I haven't quite found a way to make it fun yet so I'm working on another prototype atm. Just keep on keeping on...
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