An Idea.

edited in Jobs
Hey guys I Have Read the FAQ so please dont ask me to do it again.

just a quick question....

is there any one that lives in JHB that is able to work with me everyday? So far i am doing the Modelling, Texturing ,UVs, Lighting, Animation, Coding, and Concepts.. so yes basically its me, I had a bunch of friends that were with me. but once we all finished highschool we went to study so now that I am done studying.. I have continued to work.. its around 15% completed.

Looking for people wanting to join in

Comments

  • Err well firstly what is your game idea? Without even telling people what it is it's going to be rather hard to even get anyone interested.

    Second is there anything playable? Can you post a video? Are there any screenshots? If you want to get people interested you might want to show us what you have.

    Thirdly what people do you need, programmers, artists, designers, writers, audio people. And getting these people interested requires step two.

    Fourth what are you working in. Some of us are really good at working in certain frameworks and languages (and that's just me speaking as a programmer, I'm not sure what the other field would need to know if they were to commit to a project)

    Fifth have you been to a monthly meetup? It's great place to meet people and talk about games.

    Sixth do they have to be from JHB? The Pixel Boy boys are from SA and Canada, those are two really separate place. And pixel boy is super rad.

    Seventh: you've posted over the forums about work and JHB studios (and even necrod a year old post for a CT job.) So it does make me wonder how committed you are to this game.
  • Yes I am with @Karuji. On makegames we really advocate open development(broforce/death smashers/Bear Chuck) and trust me no one will steal your idea (the guy that does gets slapped) so yeah just post it, you will get a lot more replys that way.
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  • Please please please read this, it's really important because it grounds a lot of the philosophy and things we "preach" at MGSA!

    http://makegamessa.com/discussion/749/read-first-the-makegamessa-faq#Item_1

    Welcome to MGSA! :D
    Thanked by 1Merrik
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    Argh, bloody double post. Let me entertain you with...

    ʕ/ ·ᴥ·ʔ/ 

    a bear!
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  • Oh ok, sorry :) Well then all the thoughts of not posting due to stuff getting stolen and being secretive about ideas and trying to get people to work with you without any context... well, that's all there.

    So, looking forward to seeing the stuff you'll be sharing :)
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  • @Custard: Leigh's pretty damn good and her feedback is often really useful, especially if you're keen on moving into 3D modeling and texturing for movies, like she does. She hadn't worked on game assets the last time I interacted with her, which was some years ago, but there's a big difference between games and movies in terms of what sorts of 3D assets they need.

    But yeah, post your stuff. Only way to get comments and useful feedback :)
  • No need to post everything. You just need to post enough to get people interested, but you can hold back the best parts if you're not comfortable.
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  • So... You've been making art? Where's the game?

    A game is a mechanic, a design, that is fun. What interests us here are games. We are game makers.

    Art makes screenshots. What kind of feedback can we give on art? That alien looks cool. I like the reverse handles on some of the guns... So?

    We can't really give you feedback on a game if there's no game ;)
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  • Well I hope you understand I'm not trying to insult or demean your work. Art is art. Art isn't easy. (I'm an artist/designer first). But when I want to make a game, I'll work with cubes and triangles and as simplistic stuff as I can so I can have gameplay. And test that gameplay. Cos I'm not testing art. And the sooner you can test the sooner you can get feedback the sooner people can see what you're actually doing.
    welll when you play a game like cod? dont you look at what your playing?
    I'm DEADLY SURE that the first COD prototypes were zero art with blender models and crap reticules and terrible smoke effects, etc. But they got to test the balance of their weapons, whether having a tank in the game was a good idea, if recoil was too much or too little, if the Martyr ability was cool or not, etc. They did NOT create the game in one go. They prototyped, tested, and when the gameplay was satisfactory, THEN THEY ADDED GOOD ART. Imagine if they thought they'd put in a tank made tank art x 1000, then when they tested and realised the tank was not fun. WASTED TIME. Or one could argue they MUST work the tank into the game, in which case you could very possibly be polishing a piece of turd. And we don't polish turd.

    And that's why we say prototype a game. Not art.
    when i have everything to do by myself takes longer...
    Of course. And it's taking even longer cos you're making things that are 1) potentially not going into your final game 2) not helpful to you actually showing your game off. Which is your GAME. Not art.


    Sorry if I sound harsh, I'm pretty straight up, and I promise you my intention is to help you get where you want to be quicker!
    Thanked by 1dammit
  • People will often say they love a game because it has such awesome weapons and because the interactions with the world are cool. Or they'll say the love the game because they got to drive a tank or be an alien.

    What they're really saying is that they enjoyed playing the game long enough to notice those things. A lot of very very crap games have beautiful art and cool weapons and tanks and aliens, but they lack fun. And that's not actually any of those things.
  • The watermark cracks me up. :P When ridiculously strong artists and dev studios release wip and production shots all over the net with just a little logo or site url in the corner somewhere, why would you ruin your shots as if someone is going to steal it?

    Cartoony is not more difficult than realism. Copying realism is (somewhat) easy. Designing appealing realism is hard. They just try to solve different problems. Stylisation emphasises certain things, whether it's life, or action, or appeal. It has a focus. It has beauty in simplifying things to show what is and isn't important.

    I feel your models don't have that yet. They lack structure and flow. The barn is very static. What if it had more flow, that you could feel gesture in a sagging roof, or walls that aren't a consistent height? What if the characters had a more coherent design, with structure and purpose? Right now, they feel as if they're separate bits mishmashed together. A head, arms and legs for the sake of having a head, arms and legs. Blobs.

    Successful stylisation to me is Team Fortress 2, or Rayman, or old school Disney or Tex Avery. In Up, Carl is box-shaped, where Russell is round and bouncy. In great stylisation, each character (and prop) has an overall shape that reveals their personality, their quirks, their archetypes, before you even see a frame if animation.

    I'd suggest designing your stuff in 2d first, solve these visual problems asap, if you're doing art.

    If you're making a game, use cubes and cylinders until you've got something worth making pretty.
    Thanked by 2DarkRa88iT dislekcia
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  • Custard said:
    yet everything atm on this forum is negative.
    I think a lot of the tone is being lost in the text here. That's why the monthly meetups are so important (The next one is Tuesday 12 Nov in JHB, afaik). What reads as negative here is actually people trying to give good advice based on the mistakes they've made. If only you could see their facial expressions, you'd see that they're all really excited and just want to see you making awesome games.
    Thanked by 1Bensonance
  • I understand your coming from a different angle... but let me assure you there is more than one way to do something.. this isnt my first game. I dont ever remember saying that is was...
    Of course there are more than one way to do anything. But are you considering yourself? The *fact* is that you're making art, not a game, which can only make the game part slower, and fact is also that half of what you make now WON'T make it into the final game, because you don't know what's going into the final game, because you don't have gameplay tested or locked down, because there's no gameplay to test.
    I thank you for sharing but i simply was looking for people willing to give more ideas or help develop..
    Oh so if you're just looking for more ideas then why didn't you just say "hey please give me your game ideas". Goodness.
    Firstly.. putting my name accross it not because i think its worthy of being stolen because twice in the past my shit has been stolen. my IDEA. no need to be immature.
    I'm really sorry, but seriously, look at it. is anyone going to do with stealing a jpg of greyscale truck model? Or a few bits of fence? Or some malformed WIP monkey thing? I detected no immaturity in @Elyaradine's comment. It is utterly legit. If I wanted a truck's image I'll go google it. And steal ones that are coloured or actually 3D models.


    --------------------

    Most people here will likely not even bother reading another 100 ideas post. We can ALL come up with 100 ideas. We all HAVE 100 ideas. Therefore we care very little about someone else with "I have 100 ideas" comes along.
    You know what we will care about?

    A game with blocks and cylinders put together in a weekend that explores the mechancis in those 100 ideas.
    Those ideas are... Ideas. I have no idea if they'll be fun or balanced. Do you? Nope. So what feedback can we give you?

    Seriously, think about it. What feedback can we give?

    I LOVE IT!

    or

    I HATE IT!

    and then?
  • yet everything atm on this forum is negative.
    If all you care about is "woohoo! Continue doing what you do!" You can get that from friends and family.

    If you care about learning from other people, it will involve having your own beliefs challenged.

    If you don't understand constructive criticism from other people with experience in the better way to do things, or just plain REASON, then you'll take very good input as "negative". Which will prevent you from learning.
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  • I think we should add a section to the FAQ: "Criticism: a guide to giving and taking". The best lecturer I ever had had no qualms in calling me colourblind and labeling my work as "utter kak" (when it was). What I valued was her direct attitude and no-holds-barred manner of doing things to get my work as good as possible as quickly as possible.

    To the critters: constructive criticism pinpoints flaws and makes suggestions about how to fix it, all this done in a professional, objective and ideally supportive tone (yeah, people need to toughen up a bit but seriously, we all endure so much crappy attitude and it isn't actually necessary IMO).
    To the critiqued: for the duration of you reading or listening to critique and for half an hour after, your project is NOT your project, so you need to not defend your child with the learning disability and defend it's flaws like a lioness. You hear the person out, objectively evaluate the statements (whether they are presented professionally or border on a personal attack), decide what you can use, say thanks (even if you don't mean it), and apply what you can back to your project.

    This all comes from a design background, but I firmly believe it can be applied anywhere. Crit is an opportunity for both parties to learn. Suck it up, be civil, and most importantly revel in the exchange of information, absorb as much as you can.
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    @custard
    as to my work.. its a WIP.. its not done its not polished is place holders. which for some reason no one can seem to comprehend. yet its what your all speaking about..
    You've COMPLETELY missed the point of what we've said. We WANT to see placeholders we WANT to see WIP. However you've not shown us placeholders, you've shown us pictures.

    We want to see GAME. A prototype where we can PLAY it and not TALK about it. Talking about a game is just make-belief. I could write pages and pages of make-belief mechanics and be no closer to actually having a game, because we can't test it.

    Testing is important.

    Oh and yeah, if you're showing of CG work CG Society would be great, they'd love to crit CG stuff. I dunno if they'll get you closer to actually making a game, though :)
  • @Custard, I'm not sure what you were expecting.

    We are indeed MakeGamesSA. So we are interested in everything that has to do with making games. So far however, you have given us two things: 1) Art, 2) A list of ideas. Neither of those are games.

    I don't think that anyone here thinks that your idea doesn't have merit or that you are not dedicated/competent enough to execute on it, what we are saying is that you haven't given us anything that we can give you feedback on. The only thing you have given us to interact with is your art, and after receiving some constructive criticism on it, you proceed to call the people immature. It makes no sense.

    [quote = Custard]-in UDK i have managed to get +- 600 zombies walking around with no lag... or frame lag.
    -Placing the spawns behind plants. so that waves can increase continuously with the feel of it being 10000s of zombies..
    -player controls.[/quote]
    Give us this...then we can get a good feel for what you are going for and give some critique on the game.

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  • @Custard: Chill. You have a lot of stuff in your head that you haven't shown people here - of course that's going to lead to dissonance when you expect responses in light of stuff you haven't shown. Nobody here knows what you've done before if you don't explicitly show it - if you've worked on another game, link to it and say so up front, not as a defense against useful crits ;)

    And those crits really are useful. @Elyaradine's comments about style and visible movement in a model/silhouette are golden. I could instantly imagine a more interesting barn after he'd pointed that out, I'm sad that you chose to get upset at an imagined slight instead. I'm also really surprised that you got annoyed at crits here, but have been chatting to onona in the past - did her feedback annoy you at all? I remember her being pretty caustic sometimes.

    Good luck with your plans. I guess that's all anyone can say.
    Thanked by 1DarkRa88iT
  • @Custard calm down a bit what they are saying that you haven't given them something they can really connect to from a game makers perspective, have a look at my other discussion and read through it a bit, it goes a bit of track near the end of page 1 (which why I stopped replying there btw) but from what they said I have changed how my system worked, e.g. Instead of drawing a quad it now uses two triangles so that the CPU doesn't have to calculate it, it checks for dubble creation of textures, etc
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