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Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by GarBenjamin, Oct 1, 2016.

  1. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    I've been thinking lately about my next game project. What it will be.

    Yes, I am already working on games but I mean the game after these games.

    This is something I knocked out today

    LEGEND
    • Blue is water (ocean)
    • Darker green is grassy area
    • Lighter green are forests (two different types not sure why exactly)
    • The brown trails are dirt roads
    • The gray areas are rock ground
    • The Light gray with black near center are caves
    • The small back circles near forests are holes in the ground.
    • The little multi-colored things always next to a road are towns.


    Obviously this is a map very similar to the RPG games from long ago. And since we're seeing retro games coming back more and more probably much like some recent Indie games too.

    Anyway, I've been thinking about games and nothing really excites me that much to focus on in and of itself.

    I've realized the reason for this is because I've basically seen it & played it all before.

    What I would like to do is to have this overworld area that works much like an RPG with movement from tile to tile & random encounters. But in addition to that what I would like to do is make a series of mini games.

    Like you travel around and random encounters happen, you battle, you get the loot & xp. Light quests. So this kind of thing is normal.

    But what I personally would find more interesting is when you enter a cave the view changes and you are playing a light action game exploring the cave. It could be a side platformer or it could be top down.

    Same for the holes. If you have the rope and go down you explore the area and then return to the rope and go back up. Of course, if you go down without a rope... enjoy your stay.

    Anyway, I've noticed there don't seem to be any games like this. I do remember hybrid games sort of like this long ago.

    I guess I am wondering if maybe I just an oddball and one of a very few who like the idea of playing a game that combines some arcade action with the depth and experience of playing a simplified RPG style game?

    So anyone who plays such games... roguelikes and such. Dwarf Fortress, etc. What would you think if when you found a cave the game mode switched and you actually played through that cave?

    Maybe @Ryiah is a good person to start with.

    Probably should throw this up on Steam and see what the gamers think.
     
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  2. aer0ace

    aer0ace

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    Sounds like Zelda II.

    Sounds like Undertale.
     
  3. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    This is a standard JRPG stuff. You travel, you swtich view mode, and go to battle screen.

    Erm....
    There was a .... hmm... I think it was a Breath of Fire game that got ported on PC. In the middle of the game you suddenly had to race through the desert/plains on the back of your hores/sheep/whatever-that-thing-was-like mount. You know old school-racing game style, except you could go in any direction. It was the only segment in the game of this kind.

    Now... In final fantasy games minigames were quite common. For example, you could skip the rope with children. There was chocobo racing game (which happened in the middle of off the story). If I remember correctly, quite a lot of those games had something to do with raising chocobos. I also think one of the games (was it FF9) had a strategic segment where you could deploy some soldiers. Not to mention story-like segments where you could participate in a theater play (and mess it up in a ridiculous fashion).

    You mean like this?
    roguelike3d.png

    I played DF for quite a bit. The main feature of DF is that it uses text for things that are hard to represent visually. So as soon as you start switching away from default ascii representation, you'll start sinking in complexity. For example, night creatures and demons in DF are nigh impossible to visualize, because they're randomly generated out of attributes/body parts. Switching perpsectives may work, if you use some sort of a very abstract word, like darwinia.

    That actually might not be a good idea. Among active users, steam has mostly teens and people ever younger than that for active users. They haven't seen half of the game you saw, and will feel strongly about their favorite games. I'll be extremely surprised if you'll be able to have a useful discussion there.
     
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  4. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Thanks for the comments. No, I'm not thinking of something like Undertale really at least as far as I know. I never played it but in the videos I have seen the heart of it is all about venturing around and having unique "battles" with the enemies.

    Zelda 2 would be definitely more along the lines of what I am thinking of. And that's what I mean I have not seen anything even similar to this in a long time now.

    But even Zelda 2 is not exactly it.

    And it's more than just switching to battle screens. That'd be in there and most likely just show player's party at the bottom of screen and low res pixel art monsters in the main view. Standard kind of thing for that.

    What I am thinking of I've never seen before. It may well exist (and I'd grab it if I saw it) but I've never seen it.

    Basically a more balanced game. By more balanced I mean between the overworld gameplay and the action style areas. I expect it will be a niche market and that is fine. The goal even. Anyway, it'd be like you wander around and find a cave, choose to enter and you've entered a level in a sense. Might play sort of like a Metroid game. Or perhaps like a Boulder Dash game. Same for a hole in the ground. Could even be a mini game sort of like Downwell.

    Yeah that is what I am thinking of @neginfinity even the other modes would all use low res pixel art so I can take advantage of the the abstract look and not be buried in graphics work.

    Like each of these would be real games or real game levels I mean. By that I mean not super simple stuff like "catch the falling apples" and you slide a bucket back and forth. Although I think you could do a similar thing by using a lot of super simple mini games like that it is not what I thinking of.

    Maybe I should just build a prototype. I think I just did what I have done in the past and thrown out something without any way to really illustrate what I am thinking. :)

    @neginfinity well I don't want to have a fear of the Steam audience. Worst thing they can do is type at me. I could always throw up a Dev Log over at GameJolt to test it.

    Maybe that is the way to do it. Once I get to the point where I can put some time on this I'll work on the game and post dev logs to GameJolt and see what kind of reaction I get.

    Thanks for all of the input you guys.
     
  5. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    For some reason the idea seems familiar but I can't remember most of the games I've played and Zelda II definitely wasn't one of them (never had those consoles). I would be up for giving it a shot but rather than Steam I'd upload it to Itch.io or a similar site. If you need a community other than this one to discuss it you might want to try Reddit instead of Steam.

    That unforgiving nature might win you some points with the roguelite communities. :p
     
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  6. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Thanks @Ryiah. That is the same case with me. I don't think there actually has been one really doing it like this. But I remember some things that... well I think I expected that is what they would be like... but in reality they weren't. The closest thing I can think of right now is the old Cinemaware games. Again though those were a long time ago and still not the same.
     
  7. sfssddff

    sfssddff

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    Sounds like ghostbusers that mixes up the gameplay.
     
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  8. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Yeah this is a good example of the kind of diverse gameplay we used to see back then. Not always of course but there were a good number of games that had different modes like this.

    Darkman is a good example too:


    I definitely would like to see a return to even this kind of diverse gameplay experience. It helps to keep things fresh. And I am sure I saw some modern Indie games doing this kind of thing.

    But this is only the arcade action part. What I would like is a game that combines both the top down roam around the land rpg / roguelike game play modes with these arcade action plays through certain environments such as exploring caves and holes in the ground.

    The Cinemaware games are the closest to what I am thinking of but again the action sequences are incredibly simple. Still it all worked well overall because the overall game experience of combining the strategy gameplay with the very light action gameplay made it something more than the sum of its parts.





    But this is like a shallow example of what I am thinking of. Same general idea but they are watered down. And again all of these games were released about 25 to 30 years ago.

    The reason this concept appeals to me so much is because I enjoy arcade action gameplay and I enjoy the depth that is generally found only in the more text-based RPG style games.
     
    Last edited: Oct 2, 2016
  9. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    I'd be wary of making two games at once. Inevitably one will be better then the other, and end up detracting from the experience.
     
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  10. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    You know it's funny Dwarf Fortress was mentioned in the initial post because technically it has two games in one. For a while there adventure mode was pretty neglected but it's gotten to where both modes are very enjoyable experiences. I don't see why it couldn't work out. You'd just have twice as many mechanics to make sense of and hope the game isn't boring. :p
     
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  11. sicga123

    sicga123

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    Possibly you could simply make a series of small arcade games and link them loosely with an overall theme. Make it something like the Quantam Leap TV show. Then you could do a series of small arcade games and create an internal logic for going from one to the other. I suppose the Rick & Morty cartoon is another example of that sort of framing. then you can still have your text based RPG and jump out of that into a variety of arcade type games and make each game link into an overall puzzle that drives the text narrative. That would allow you to use as many different art styles as you wish to experiment with, it might also mean you can use any art you have as the differences can be explained away, you wouldn't need to build the sort of RPG level illustrated above and create the mechanics for it. Basically you would be creating a game compendium and could make any number of small games for it.
     
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  12. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    The other thing that comes to mind is Sakura Wars series.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakura_Wars

    Basically, you had your standard visual novel stuff.
    Then you had a portion of the game where you had to fight in mechs in some sort of tactcial view.
    The reason why I remembered the series is because in visual novel mode you occasionally suddenly had to do a mini-game that usually involved some sort of button mashing, turning controller's sticks around ,etc. A more advanced quick-time event, pretty much.

    They can also kill what's left of your faith in humanity, along with desire to build anything.

    It is not about "fear", it is just that talking there would almost certainly be a waste of time. Your choice, of course, but pretty much ANY resource will be better than steam community.
     
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  13. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    You have an over world then random encounters which could be a minigame you could even have a unique minigame for every enemy with hp battle . Imagine Jrpg being but you ran a into a bowling the more pins you knock over the more damage you do, Or now it's a great guy golf minigame and the less strokes it takes the more damage you do, or maybe it's a match3 (see sf puzzle) or Tetris type get the most combos/lines in a cretinous time period
     
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  14. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    That's (what you are describing; not that arcade game) more along the lines of what I am thinking. Like in the context of this game I was thinking I'd (using me as the player here) wander around the map view jumping one tile per move and the normal stuff would be going on for such games. Random encounters, random discoveries. When I enter the caves and holes would switch to action gameplay and there'd be a purpose to it of course provided by the overall game story / quests. I'd be in there looking for a specific thing or things.

    So I'd be searching for something exploring those caves. And finding it would advance things along. Basically it becomes like an open world kind of environment where I can go whereever (for the most part) whenever I want. Could even revisit the same cave a hundred times. These caves would be restocked over time with various random inhabitants. And one of them might just bring something of value inside the cave with them.

    I've explored this general idea before. Last year I worked on a Christmas game that featured the North Pole Village and surrounding landscape. That area served as the Central Hub and various events created missions for the player to go on.

    The Central Hub was a top down view:


    And the elves would give the player quests as the events occurred.


    Here player is following the footprints leading away from where the toys were stolen


    When they walk to the right they leave the Central Hub and enter a cavern and the game becomes a platformer.



    It was all very rough because I was still figuring out the best way to develop with Monkey X but it actually worked out quite well I think.

    In this case, it was just combining a top down action adventure with other mini games. The player leaves the hub to complete the quests and then returns to the hub where a new event occurs. I only worked on this for about 5 weeks so didn't have time to do any more than 2 events and 2 mini games. Both platformers. One wide one moving primarily horizontally and one tall one moving primarily vertically.

    But what I wanted to do was have several different mini games of different kinds and different perspectives.

    I think this kind of thing is probably where my efforts will be focused in the future.

    For this RPG concept I am toying around with it is the same basic idea with that area I showed in my first post. That area would be what I call the Central Hub. This is the main part of the game that drives everything (visiting towns, random encounters, events/quests, etc). The other areas are there to enhance the overall experience and inject some diversity into the gameplay. Help keep things fresh.
     
    Last edited: Oct 2, 2016
  15. BeefSupreme

    BeefSupreme

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    Sounds cool. Always been a fan of games that use different perspectives to do different things.

    For example:

    Demon's Crest

    Overworld


    Platforming


    Valkyrie Profile

    Overworld


    Platforming


    Battle Screen (when an enemy touches you while platforming)


    Akalabeth

    Overworld


    Dungeon
     
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  16. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Me too. And I just don't see it anymore. I'm sure they are out there but I mean certainly it is not something to count on from the latest Indie hit.

    And very nicely done to include Akalabeth! I'd like to make a line-based game like that one of these days.
     
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  17. BeefSupreme

    BeefSupreme

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    You're right, I really can't think of anything recent that does it. Maybe it's the current push for everything to be persistent/open world?

    Akalabeth was the first computer game I was exposed to. It blew my mind at the time with the first person dungeons!

    Might try my hand at a dirt simple RPG if I can ever finish up my current project =P
     
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  18. MV10

    MV10

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    XCOM series... it's generally a remake, of course, but they definitely have both sides of the overworld / detail equation.
     
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  19. derf

    derf

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    While there is "some" interest in the game play styles of the days of yore to us old timers, I would not also attempt to replicate the actual "look" of those games.

    Make use of Unity in its entirety, BUT follow along with those game play elements.

    An updated looking It Came From the Desert would be very cool now and days. Really show'em an old school survival horror. I'm getting tired from all the FNAF clones, the jump scare clones and every other clone out there.

    Maybe a new rendition of Ultima is in order or a redux of something like Dragon Warrior or how about the Deja Vu or Shadowgate styles?
     
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  20. Dave-Carlile

    Dave-Carlile

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    I'm picturing one of those "carry your spouse" races here. :p
     
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  21. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    I'm not worried about the look of my games. If I can find enough readily available HD art then I'd use it. If not I'll use low res pixel art to keep the graphics workload under control.

    My view on it is sure there will be people who skip the games simply because of the art style they use and that's fine. I'll focus on making the game better for the people who didn't have a problem with the graphics style. I don't need everyone to like my games (not even possible for any game anyway) I just need "enough" people to like the games.

    Basically I'll be the bottom feeder kind of Indie. One who other than rambling here just does his thing and for most part doesn't exist on any radar of the Indie of the month. :)
     
  22. BeefSupreme

    BeefSupreme

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    I only played a few a few missions of Enemy Unknown so far. Do you mean the base -> mission transition, or does it split up the gameplay somehow on later missions? Just asking because I'm probably looking for an excuse to reinstall it.
     
  23. MV10

    MV10

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    Just base/mission, although I guess there isn't really a direct tie between locations in the base and the mission locations, so on second thought it's not really the same.

    I'm a big fan of turn-based war games, and I've been thinking about doing something with a strategy game at the world-map level, but doing a detailed tactical game to resolve conflicts. I was trying to decide if I would post about that and XCOM popped into my head (since it also pairs strategy/tactics) so I posted that without really thinking it through.

    I finished XCOM:EU ... it gets pretty repetitious, enemy starting positions aren't randomized (which is sort of appalling) and it could stand to have more maps. I still enjoyed it though.
     
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  24. tiggus

    tiggus

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    Reminds me of Archon, strategy game like chess except you have to play action fighting game to actually kill the pieces. Conceivably if you were really good at the action part you could stage some upsets.
     
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  25. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    I agree - I have seen a lot of game hearken back to these games - Dragon Warrior / Ultima / FF 1-3, but they seem to be kinda - same-ol same-ol to me. I could boot up my old systems and play these original games, that are (imo) better, maybe with a bit more grind than recent renditions.
    It'd be more interesting to create something in the vein of these older awesome games, but remove the self imposed limitations that the older games HAD to adhere to. Remember some of the mechanics of those games were pretty cumbersome.
    I've not seen a low-res NEW rendition of Shadowgate or Deja Vu lately. I really loved those games all around, the music, visuals, mechanics. That'd be really interesting.

    Look up Nobunaga's Ambition 1 & 2 for reference if you haven't. In my opinion - one of the best examples of tactical turn based strategy games from 8 and 16 bit era.
     
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  26. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    I figure the worst LOOKING stuff I make will be something along these lines:


    The advantage being I can actually complete the games. Whereas if I approached this from an HD angle they would simply be more unfinished projects sitting on my hard drive.
     
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  27. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Pitfall! :p

    Seriously though that's not bad at all.
     
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  28. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Very similiar scenery except for weapon.

    I figure in all of this world I only need to find 1,000 people happy to pay $5 to play a game with graphics like this as long as the game itself is very good. Then I not only get to make some cool games that I otherwise would never be able to make but also I get to make a great income from this work as well.
     
  29. Dave-Carlile

    Dave-Carlile

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    My first thought was "heavy metal guitarist". Might be a fun game.
     
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  30. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    I only knocked out the character. The background is one of the abundant HD backgrounds on Asset Store. I just converted to low res pixel art and adjusted colors on it all to blend in.

    Thanks though! I think it is very workable. Especially when I want to make 1/2 screen size characters and things. HD would kill such projects. But when even massive objects are only like 64x64 pixels in size I can handle that.
     
  31. tiggus

    tiggus

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    Would you mind sharing your workflow on that? HD -> Pixel?
     
  32. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    I'm also interested in exploring some slight (read quick n easy) enhancements to low res pixel art to get a distinct look. Things like outlining characters and objects with a single width HD pixel, using circles or triangles for the pixels, etc. Of course, this means actually prescaling up all of the art but it may just produce something interesting.
     
  33. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Sure. That whole scene took maybe 7 to 8 minutes for character and background.

    Find background on store. I chose a free one and just copied the image off the web page. Importing it would make it better quality.

    I use Paint Shop Pro (PSP). All I've used besides sprite editors for about 15 years now. I think Photoshop or any other paint program should have same or better features.

    So I bring the HD image into PSP.

    For this scene I didn't do this but normally do....
    Do a color reduction. I'd probably use 16 or 32 colors for this background. This makes the scaling do a much better job of keeping the original quality.

    Clicked on resize, selected Pixel Resize method and scaled the background down to 64 pixels high with the width scaled as needed to preserve the width/height ratio. The pixel resize method is very important.

    And then.... oh that's it for that conversion.

    Then I drew the character in a new 16x16 image.

    Plopped the character onto the background.
    Clicked on Adjust Brightness & and Contrast and "blended" the scene together a bit more by slightly decreasing contrast and adjusting brightness as needed to keep same basic level of brightness as originally had.

    Then did a Pixel Resize up to height of 720. This was just something knocked out for the post above. Normally I'd pay attention to size so scaling is always a whole number like 3x, 6x or 8x etc.

    That's it. Longest part was finding an asset on store.
     
    Last edited: Oct 5, 2016
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  34. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    Look at you - giving programmer art tutorials! :D haha I jest.
    But really maybe there should be a dedicated thread for programmer art tutorials? Could be valuable place to provide some guidance and motivation to people who are new to solo indie dev - coming from a strict programming background.
    Some artists could chime in also to give some help on improving visuals when asked.

    Make suggestion as he eeks his way towards the door - then RUNS!
     
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  35. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    I'm getting similar results using Irfanview. Only instead of "pixel resize" I just resized the entire image down and up again.
     
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  36. MV10

    MV10

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    Looks a bit more like Civilization with battles on a separate map. Interesting. (They're still making new ones too.)


    1.gif
    2.gif
     
  37. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Oh yeah just scaling down does it for the most part. The reason I choose Pixel Resize in PSP is because the other modes such as Smart Resize perform anti-aliasing when resizing either up or down. And that's a bad thing when scaling down to produce low res pixel art. Pixel Resize does not apply any "smoothing".

    It's also why I normally reduce the # of colors before scaling down. For HD image tens of (even hundreds of) thousands of colors are fine. But that is way too many to have crammed into a lowres image. Dropping down to something in the 4 to 80 range depending on target size makes a big difference in the quality.

    I never heard of Irfanview before. I'll have to check it out!
     
  38. RockoDyne

    RockoDyne

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    In irfanview, it's the difference of choosing resize image versus resample image. It'll probably give you a dozen different algorithms for the operation. It's that kind of software.
     
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  39. BeefSupreme

    BeefSupreme

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    Have you read this blog post from the guy doing Owlboy? Talks about a new trend for pixel art of targeting 640x360 (which they call Hi-Bit) that scales in integers to 720p, 1280p & 4k.

    Made me think of this thread.
     
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  40. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    No, I hadn't read that but makes sense. It is what I do. Not targeting Hi-Bit as they are saying but definitely making the scaling in integers. Atlantic Crisis used a resolution of 256x144 which was scaled up to (4x) 1024 x 576 for web version and (5x) 1280 x 720 for desktop version. Treasures of Ali-Gar used the same resolution and was scaled up to (3x) 768 x 432 for the web version (hoping it might increase performance of the WebGL build for those suffering from it) and (5x) 1280x720 for desktop builds.

    Current game is using 320 x 180 resolution. Which is a quarter of what these guys are using. So basically we are doing the same kind of thing just the exact resolution differs. My current game will be slightly higher resolution than the last two. Enough I can pack a bit more detail in.

    This is current game scaled up (2x) to 640 x 360. It is a remake of an old game so I am also keeping color count very low. Only 2 colors per object. And this entire game screen only has 12 colors.


    I don't think I will go any higher though. Because the greater the resolution the greater the workload increases for the graphics. I am considering actually going in the opposite direction dropping down to 160x90 for the next game and not setting any limit on colors.
     
    Last edited: Oct 5, 2016
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  41. theANMATOR2b

    theANMATOR2b

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    I know it's kinda crazy. They remade the original game, it only had (I think) 17 fiefdoms then expanded to include more historical accurate at the height of conflict of that era - 50 fiefdoms.
    Ported to SNES the same game, although I'd say it was a much more stable version, with some added animations.
    The last one I purchased was on PS2 and it was a quasi-turn based tactical / RTS with a little romance of the 3 kingdoms mixed in. Was pretty complicated - about 1.5 hour long intro tutorial. It didn't hold my attention enough to get into it.
    But I still enjoy playing the 16 bit version. Very tough on anything but normal setting.
     
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  42. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    13,554
    Actually, it is available on steam for PC platform.
    http://store.steampowered.com/app/392470/


    It is one of the games I have but never had time to properly play. It has more personal approach than Civ and Total war. IIRC you can mess with history in it too, like with crusader kings.
     
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  43. MV10

    MV10

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    1,889
    In an attempt to build a smaller-scoped, faster-to-complete game (while my wife and I continue to slog through our other bigger project), I've decided I'm going to tackle the two-games-in-one strategy/tactical pairing I mentioned earlier. This general game concept has been knocking around in the back of my head since my XNA days. I'm going to (loosely) pattern the strategy side on this solo sci-fi board game:

    https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41612/struggle-galactic-empire
    https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1521237/fall-rome-meets-asimovs-foundation

    I never played it, but a friend talked about it all the time. It can't really be called a strategy game, and it has a lot of other problems (primarily, far too much randomness), but it has elements that I want to study and it has the flavor I want. Unfortunately my friend passed away, so I ordered a copy last night. I don't know yet how I'm going to represent the ship-to-ship tactical end, but it'll also be turn based.

    So, @GarBenjamin , thanks for the inspiring thread. :)
     
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  44. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

    Joined:
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    4,835
    Did you not play brutal legend. It had beatem up, racing, RTS. The problem is your going to have flesh out these mini games to make them fun enough and make sure each game mode is equally fun.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2016
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  45. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Yep Brutual Legend was great.
     
  46. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    @MV10 glad to know that some of my rambling is helpful in some way.

    Looking forward to seeing the game!
     
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  47. MV10

    MV10

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    A week later, I have a decent (written) plan for tackling both the strategic and tactical gameplay, although I still haven't completely worked out how to tie the two systems together. I spent much of my spare time this week fighting the funky math needed to curve TextMeshPro meshes to arbitrary circular arcs (everything out there is for Bezier curves which is great if you're drawing your curves by hand, not so great if they're code-generated).

    So a maybe-fun glance at the test-project for the strategic galaxy map's text, border lines and highlighting, etc. Looks cooler live with the galaxy slowly spinning. I love prototyping like this. I had a version where the play grid itself rotated, too -- it was obvious it would get disorienting quickly. Had another version where the sectors were arranged randomly -- too chaotic, just distracting.

    Eventually I'll do a WIP thread, I think.

    1.jpg
     
  48. MV10

    MV10

    Joined:
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    Today we get planets, statistics, and a bit of that polish I said I wouldn't work on yet...

    http://imgur.com/a/iv7O3

    (Interestingly, imgur changed my huge 66mb GIF into an MP4... wonder when they started doing that...)

    1.jpg
     
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  49. sb944

    sb944

    Joined:
    Sep 9, 2016
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    I'm not sure this is really what you are after, but I'll throw an idea out there anyway, as it may help somewhat. The overall theme is to gain the skills to become a great future leader(?) for your tribe, but the elders tell you you need to face a series of challenges before you are the one. The map itself would need some purpose, like you need a set of tools for some challenges, some you buy/barter, some you win, so you have to remember where different things are on the map, and how it might work together. Perhaps some challenges are possible without some tool, but made much easier once you have it. Then once you qualify for a challenge and take it on, it's a mix of arcade like games sometimes, and puzzle games other times. The owner of the puzzle game can be different people/group of people, who have their own unique characteristic that make them more likely to enjoy a test of strength/arcade run/puzzle to solve. They show off their character a bit, then explain their challenge to you, and what you stand to win from it. Just look over the popular mobile games, as any number of those are just a single mini-game, without much more than a 5 minute game time to them. If the whole thing was 80's graphics, you'd be hard pressed to be called for copyrighting any game, even if it is recent. And a good part of that is people will feel a sense of familiarity rather than feeling like they are in a completely new game every 5 minutes, I think they'd like going "oh, this is kind of like XY, I know how this works".
     
  50. MV10

    MV10

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    Finished all the galaxy-map math and functions for positioning various bits of text and sprites. Now I'm working on the informational UI. I wanted to do the stereotypical "sci fi" thing to the left and right of the map, but Photo Shop and I are not close friends and I've never learned to use Illustrator. Then I remembered Visio and it's working out pretty well so far. I'll make a couple of geometric overlays, then some bitmaps to animate. Just eye-candy but it's fun to do. This is still at the test-project stage so once I'm done planning the UI, I'll hit the code to plan out my state machines and save-game structure. I'm not going to touch the "other level" (the tactical game) at all until this part of the game is somewhat working. This level will provide the setup for each tactical game session, and the outcome will feed back to this level, but other than that they're basically separate efforts.

    1.jpg
     
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