Feedback Friday #173 - July 16-19, 2021

G'day folks!

Do you know what's the best way to spend your game dev time, money and effort with maximum efficiency?

Prototyping.

There's an incredible lot of progress you can make with simple primitive meshes, some code, and a nose for where the fun is at. When you nail the feel and mechanics of your game, all that's left is building the art and beauty on top of it.

Sometimes it's hard to find the right way to go, maybe you've been working on it too long and you can't see the forest for the trees. That's when you need someone else's opinion. Preferably more than one.

I always like to see prototypes from AAA games. Not just because it's a lot of fun to see the difference between the prototype and the final product, but because it shows that even the best game designers use prototypes and get feedback from eachother to improve it.

Here's an awesome video on God of War's development, showing how mechanics and levels were prototyped with simple geometry before committing precious resources to beautifying them.

AAA studios have large teams, different departments, QA teams and all kinds of different people sharing knowledge to improve every aspect of the game. Indies? We just have eachother

Do you think you could benefit from free design feedback for your work in progress project?

Then you've found the right thread! Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week.

What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)
• Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL. If you don't have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Be concise.
• Specify what you want feedback on and what you don't.
• Resist the urge to write an immediate defense. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.

How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. There's something of value in every game.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #172 is here.

 

Since we extend FF to prototyping, I think I would share some of my recent works. It is not a typical FF question today, but still more than welcome post own projects and feedback requests.

One of my recent prototypes was focused on procedural walking, using custom IK and DOTS.

This is conversion of OOP based FastIK https://github.com/ditzel/SimpleIK into DOTS.

I further extended implementation, and having some robots moving.

I am planning in the future (if times allows to) on implementing both constraints and human alike walk.
Obviously robots move rather fast, so they ma look a bit wonky. But that was just for quick video purpose.

1. If you would have relevant project, where would you use DOTS based procedural IK?
2. When would you balance walking animation quality vs, "looking good enough", when considering on many thousands of animations?

Any though are also welcome.

 

I’m looking to have as large of crowds of enemies as possible, but honestly in my instance I’d rather use the processing power for more enemies, and possibly use IK for close up enemies.

I mean, if it’s a net gain for performance might as well, but for me it’s not my biggest priority.

nice work, btw.

Also, let me say nice marching cubes to mess up someone’s search results, lol.

 

Very cool, I like the first video especially of the bugs splitting apart and then coming back together.

Looks good for some kind of bug massacre game.

Or perhaps Ecosystem Tycoon? Mess around with ecosystem parameters, watch bugs do stuff.

 

Yeah this is valid point. In fact, in my latest iteration, far camera desistance disables some, or all bones, depending on their "importance". My ultimate goal is to achieve 10k of such robot units, with culling / LODs and holding 60 fps on average consumer PC.

But yes, many cubes and rendering only IK when close up, I could get man 10s of thousands of such cubes moving.

Ha, that is good one
I thought about spiders or ants more alike. But I like that word play too.

Yeah, it happens to be look a bit fun

If I only had time, that would be fun too.

Tell you what, I was thinking actually, if I could implement this somehow to my other procedural prototype

 

a bug war RTS.

has anybody done that?

did anybody see the ant war scenes from... one of those David Attenborough documentaries. Would be an incredible game.

 

I don't know to be honest. It is a. Interesting concept. RTS as you mentioned with large scale of bugs.

I think 3D remake and Upgrade with features, to ants game, which many of us played nearly 2 decades ago. That could be a thing.

 

25 years ago for me - Bug Justice!

 

Sim Ant?

 

A Bug's Life?

 

Actually that sounds like a very fun and original game idea. Like Ancestors but RTS, and bugs.

Capture the breadcrumb!

 

Yeah that one.

I haven't played these two. Hmm.

 

recently i saw some game where you are tiny like the honey i shrunk the kids movie and i think there is bugs involved. looked pretty cool and was on steam front page for a bit. i think it was more third person though.

i am thinking like you are the queen ant and you click and these lines of ants march out and raise hell. maybe the crux of the game is about strategic positioning and creating chokepoints. like there is leaves you can clip off to shutdown paths and you can send the suicide squads to grab ants and pull them off the tree... you got the grasshopper who is like paratroopers he can leap from above and smash right into the middle of an enemy formation, squishing them into goo.

but like every unit is disposable, its complete war of attrition. meta is who can figure out where to make important sacrifices first and how to save units for the right moment.

and the theme has to be super dramatic - like its the most important war that was ever a war.

 

Was it Grounded?

 

i think so, sounds familiar. i just saw the front page ad and part of a trailer

 

Good evening!
Hope it's ok to post here after July 19

Yesterday I suddenly thought of a game idea about observation station above a planet and the player will have to study alien speices there... Tried to prototype it, but thought that would be kinda too much for my second prototype ever.

And this turned into a game, where there's Earth and asteroids. The player can launch rockets to destroy them. Created a small prototype. Here we go:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1flWBaFUAEeOKDetX4THqncR4bFXK-YJt/view?usp=sharing
(controls: space for launching rockets)

Still wanna make the alien game, and think this prototype may become a first preparatory step
Could anyone, please, provide feedback, thoughts etc?
Thanks in advance!