[Dr Lancer-X]

any suggestions

[Lachesis]

do a kickstarter and then pay other people to make your game for you

[CJA]

just do the stuff you want to do and don't release it. it's fun

[Dr Lancer-X]

you're right, cja. i should just make shitty shit so i at least get some practice in. that's how i got good at mzx, making lots of shitty shit that never saw the light of day. (actually, everything i worked on i probably intended to finish, it just didn't end up working out that way)

ok, i'll make something

[Bramble]

make a short game

i'm really good at sloppily cranking those out rarely and so can u

don't wait

act now

[CJA]

the thing i'm bad with is that even the SMALLEST NUGGET of inspiration is always some engine or something that's designed to be a small cog in a great 10,000 year clock

got to think smaller

[Bramble]

cja what if you + lancer did engine contest

like one them real-life car shows where experts decide what car built better and has good presentations ect

and finally someone wins

then we will know who is top engine dog

[CJA]

everyone already knows who is the top engine dog.

the only new thing we would know is my shame at even daring to challenge someone who writes engines by writing a scripting language inside of a scripting language inside of mzx

[Bramble]

oh

sorry

[CJA]

well, i'd still do it...

Humans... Humans always want more.

[Bramble]

Humans
A poem by Bramble
Inspired by CJA

Addicted to pain, are we
A befuddling race, are we
We rush into engine competitions
Knowing full well the cost

Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans
Humans

Humans
Humans, in the dark of the night writing fake poems on forums after drinking beer

Hummus

*symbol crash*

[Bramble]

Bramble, on 09 October 2016 - 02:36 AM, said:

*symbol crash*

dictionary

[Verasev]

What kind of beer, bramble? And keep in mind we totally will judge you as a person based on the type of beer you drink.

[Dr Lancer-X]

i reckon bramble brews his own in a bathtub.

[Bramble]

here in the great south, it's about all a boy can do to keep his spirits high. brewing beer is a way of life in such times as these. what, with hillary running for office. my old pappy used to tell me, "ya see sonny, my dad brewed beer in his bathtub, and so can you." that's when i knew i'd be an alcoholic like the rest of my family, and like my dad, and his da, and his dad before his dad his dad before his dad. so i spend morning, noon and night getting drunk, and sometimes i sell it to old maury down the road. just to keep his spirits high like mine. but you've gotta watch out for deer wandering around, what cause i've got a trailer out in the woods and the door's so broke it swings ajar at the slightest breeze. my old pap, yeah. he taught me how to make it. and make it good. that's what i do. that's how it is out here in the woods of tennessee in my broke ass trailer. shee-it.

i guess my name's bramble, and i make the beer. so just call it...Bramble Beer. yeah. has a nice ring to it. "nice ring to it..." heh. reminds me of the time my pappy beat the living daylights out of my ma'ma, and he had me watch because he said she'd been commitin' the sin of coveting her neighbor's husband. and after he got done beatin the shit out of her said, "ahh, her screaming's got a nice ring to it." my pappy. always did have a crazy sense of humor. used to laugh while whippin my behind black for saying the wrong thing.

shee-it.

but here i am talking ya'lls ears off and it's suppertime. s'pose i best be gettin over to the kitchen to see what the miss's is cookin up. she always did cook a mean squirrel carcass, and i mean MEAN. that is, when she's not tryin to poison me with badger or some shit.

ya'll have a good day. and come back now, ya-hear

[astral]

Sit down for 30 honest minutes, decide on minimum deliverables (core experience?). Sit on it for a day. Sit down for another honest 30 minutes or an honest hour and divide those out into reasonable chunks of work. Sit on it for another day. Sit down for another 30 minutes or an hour and fishbone a few of the chunks out into tasks with designated start and stop (specifically a metric for "done", not just a date), designate a long period of work (2 weeks is an ok starting point) and fill up a metaphorical bucket-full of the tasks you think you can get done in that period. Sit down with it as a list and block out a small period of your day (work day? 1 hour? 3?), tell yourself this is what you're working on and don't do other shit while you're doing this, check off boxes. When the long period's up, package it up for a friend to put their hands on it. Let them monkey around with it even if all you have is a title screen, record feedback. Don't push back or bother telling them "well that part's not done" blahblah, just record whatever they say. Then if you have to, re-evaluate your user stories and see if the feedback fits or if it means that you missed the mark on what's fun, or if the person just doesn't like the kind of game you handed them. And then rinse and repeat. A video game is just a software project with a shitload of art.

Get something like Jira to record all this so you can refer back to it periodically and keep track of your work.


source: am a senior software engineer + project manager in a big hospital system now somehow (i no rite)

This post has been edited by astral: 18 October 2016 - 08:06 PM

[CJA]

I've found that the "stay small" approach should be abandoned sometimes. If you really want to make your multi-part RPG, then staying small is sort of out of the question. The problem with making any sort of larger game, for me, usually boils down into two things.

First, your code becomes foreign to you after you leave it cold for about a month. It almost feels like someone else's code, which feels bad. I've found that the best approach (well, I always take this stupid approach) is to complete all of your engine in contiguous days of work. Leave it in a state where you can safely stop working on it except for doing things like adding moves, items, enemies, sounds, whatever. Basically, write each engine or complicated algorithm in a tight burst. Also, almost all of my time is spent testing. Minimize that, especially early on.

What if you have to edit it because your poison system is totally broken or your particle system won't work? I dunno, it's hard.

Second, which builds on the first. After working in the background on a game project for a while, you will be exposed to many cool ideas and be tempted to restart because you want to make the game a different genre. DON'T! This is my Achilles' heel. I'm seriously the world's worst carrier of New Game Disease. Even when PLAYING a game I'll start new games just for the rush. There's something magical about the early stages of games (especially emergent ones like Minecraft or something). They're clean, pure, untouched. And if you do that while developing, your games will remain pristine and untouched because nobody's going to play it, you dummy!

How do I get around this? Well, there are two cases. The first is that I'm working on a non-adventure game (i.e., something with very persistent mechanics like a roguelike, shmup, or platformer). In this case, I probably want to make a game of a different genre. This is the harder option, but you can alleviate it by doing things like BKZXing or trying to program in a different language or something. In the other case, you're working on a more open-world game. In this case, you can just add a segment to your game that's of a different genre. Any adventure game can have pretty much any sort of segment. (Although the MZX trope of a RPG boss battle after a game full of standard MZX combat IS pretty corny...) For example, while working on my current RPG, I was playing TIS-100 and Spacechem and really wanted to try my hand at a programming game. So, I just made a small one and added it in as a side activity in the game. This is awesome because it adds to your game and gives you a feedback loop to keep working on the larger game.

we should legit make a thread that's just, ideas for finishing games.

[Dr Lancer-X]

art. art is too hard. i could feel more motivation to make a game if i didn't have to handle art for it.

i've done some experiments into creating tools to generate art for me but i'm not very happy with the results yet. turns out that 'style transfer' hype aside, turning a machine into a talented graphicker is likely beyond current capabilities

alternatives:

- mak gam with shitty art. yeah, this honestly is probably the best option, but eh. the problem is that humans are such visual creatures and put a lot of their impression of a game into the first exposure they have to it. even in mzx i've always tried to make things look good, to the best of my abilities. outside mzx, when the limitations disappear the expectations rise into infinity.
- mak gam with stolen art. this one is pretty standard now. buy from the unity asset store! download free models here. i mean this would be tempting if i got in before the practice has become so common it's now instantly recognisable and instantly mocked.
- get someone else to draw art. i don't want to do this, because working with other people feels like it's taking on responsibility and i don't really know how much free time i'm going to have in the future or the kind of pace i'll be able to manage.

[Verasev]

Why has the practice of using someone else's premade resources, from an asset store or wherever, become a thing of instant mockery? Why are people so determined to look down on the easy avenues solely because they are easy?

PARDON ME FOR USING A SOCIAL JUSTICE TERM but it seems like a form of classism. Unless you have the free time and talent to put into developing your own art or the money to buy original you're screwed.

This post has been edited by Verasev: 21 October 2016 - 04:06 PM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Verasev, on 22 October 2016 - 02:02 AM, said:

Why has the practice of using someone else's premade resources, from an asset store or wherever, become a thing of instant mockery? Why are people so determined to look down on the easy avenues solely because they are easy?

Because there's a lot of examples of people using this to make really shitty games that are then put up on Steam Greenlight, and as a result people have gotten good at recognising when these assets are used without modification. It's become an instant sign of a bad, poorly thrown together title and it's hard to shake off that first impression.

and yeah, you're right, the solution to this is to just have a lot of money. if i can just pay people to make random shit for me, then see how well it fits in a game, i can just do that and not have to worry about wasting anyone's work because hey, they got paid for it.

i'm pretty happy with where i am financially, for someone that's been a grad student for years, but i don't think i can afford to do that.

Obvious solution is to make something awesome and sell it on Steam or whatever so I can have a ton of money to invest into future projects. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem though.

[Graham]

I think the ideal situation for me would be to have a partner. Another brain to bounce ideas off of and someone to keep me motivated. They can help keep the project from stalling if I'm too busy or don't have the creative motivation. Of course this takes a good deal of trust and I don't have anyone like that at the moment.

Too many times, a project will fall apart because one partner or the other has personal issues that they let get in the way. But I still think that might be the best way to go. I think my brother may be a good partner to do a game with one day, we have a good relationship and a shared interest in games. He has a young son and a demanding job in San Francisco right now, but maybe one day that could happen.

[Exophase]

Dr Lancer-X, on 21 October 2016 - 04:46 PM, said:

Obvious solution is to make something awesome and sell it on Steam or whatever so I can have a ton of money to invest into future projects. Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem though.

I still think your best MZX games could sell decently for a couple dollars a pop on Steam. Like Red. The graphics may even be taken as a stylistic flavor instead of the limitations of the engine you used.

There's the issue that you'd be selling games that people could be playing for free, but just being able to get them on Steam makes that more convenient than having to get them through MZX. Not sure if you'd also run into problems with any of the music though..

Your work is good enough that I think you could most likely find good enough graphics and music people to help you, especially if you do the framework of a game first using stand-in material. You could sign into a profit sharing agreement upfront. Or you could bring them in for a Kickstarter pitch. You could probably use MZX for the first run of a game, then write something to convert the assets for use in something custom that you could enhance beyond MZX if you need to.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I wonder what changes would be needed to MZX to make it suitable for a standalone game. Probably not many... the main thing that comes to mind is doing something about the UI for SMZX mode games (so we don't get this).

Obviously a potential solution is to just port red, using the original data. Most of the game is specified in those data files, although there's a bunch of things that were scripted directly in the .MZX because they were too weird / tricky to pull off within the scripting language. The idea of doing that feels really silly to me, given how much time I spent just on making the graphics fit in SMZX 3, but there's no reason to not do it. Certainly easier to just make whatever changes are necessary to MZX and use that though.

red's music (and certain sound effects) can be replaced - most of the tunes are already free, although I'd need to re-check their conditions to make sure commercial use is OK, but there's a bunch that are very much not okay.

I kind of like the idea of doing something with throwaway assets to use as a pitch to gather interest for a project, hmm.

[Baby Bonnie Hood]

Dr Lancer-X, on 21 October 2016 - 05:12 AM, said:

art. art is too hard.

I'm on a similar roadblock right now. I can't draw anything better than a stick figure, and I did dabble a little into sprite work but that took far too long for only subpar results.

So I thought about making 3D models for graphics. And so far, my only progress in that is trying to figure out how to even do anything in this Blender thingy. But I feel that if I want graphics, this is the only way left for me to go. So I'm gonna keep at it, no matter how long it takes me.

[Graham]

Lancer, do you use PC or Mac?

[Graham]

Anyone with a PC can try this file out.
install red game

An installer could be created using a Mac too, but I don't own one. This may be the coolest way to zip up a MegaZeux game for mass distribution. It's called Install Simple.
Also, I would upload your games to itch.io you can create a profile for free and release games for free, then ask for a donation if you wish. This would be a really good platform for MegaZeux games. Of course Steam would be great too, and would get you more exposure. But itch.io is a good platform for small indie games.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 24 October 2016 - 04:49 AM, said:

Anyone with a PC can try this file out.
install red game

An installer could be created using a Mac too, but I don't own one. This may be the coolest way to zip up a MegaZeux game for mass distribution. It's called Install Simple.
Also, I would upload your games to itch.io you can create a profile for free and release games for free, then ask for a donation if you wish. This would be a really good platform for MegaZeux games. Of course Steam would be great too, and would get you more exposure. But itch.io is a good platform for small indie games.

Yeah, that's not bad. Also I hadn't realised that I never put a 'press P to play' on red's title screen... that might be an idea, since it might confuse some people. Then it's just a matter of fixing the UI and replacing a bit of music.

[Graham]

Dr Lancer-X, on 23 October 2016 - 12:15 PM, said:

Yeah, that's not bad. Also I hadn't realised that I never put a 'press P to play' on red's title screen... that might be an idea, since it might confuse some people. Then it's just a matter of fixing the UI and replacing a bit of music.

I'd love to see you get red up on itch.io or GOG or steam

[Graham]

Also, isn't Meritous a game you made? so you've got experience making and releasing a game outside of the MZX community, no?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 24 October 2016 - 02:46 PM, said:

Also, isn't Meritous a game you made? so you've got experience making and releasing a game outside of the MZX community, no?

sure, but I'm looking to move up a few levels in terms of the level of product. although meritous was a lot of fun to make... and the general idea there (start with a very simple design, iterate on it) is one that's probably still applicable.