As I mentioned in my last post, I am building a web-based game. What does that mean? First and foremost, it means that it is meant to run in your web browser just like any other website. But more importantly, to me it means that it is not meant to be a graphical game. There will be no animations, and you will not be navigating characters through a fictitious world. At least, not in the WASD sense.
What it also means is that just like any other website or web application, I need to pick a stack.
Backend
As I mentioned, Django is the key backend component. It is a Python framework that has been around for years, and is my typical go to choice because of its reliability, flexibility, and huge user base. Just spend 5 minutes Googling "how to build a website with django" and you will get a ton of resources. When leveraged with packages like Channels and DRF, it is an amazing tool. Channels allows me the ability to handle a direct connection from the frontend to the backend over a WebSocket (more on that below). And DRF allows me to effortlessly build a complex web API needed to pass information back and forth between the frontend and backend.
But why this?
Well, I initially was thinking that I would skip the Django root and try out a new VERY promising framework called apistar. It is lean and it is built with some really neat ideas. One of the biggest complaints I hear about Django is that it is a batteries included framework (as opposed to flask, Bottle, or Pyramid). And, apistar is built by the same guy who made DRF. The problem is that it is still a bit new. The reliability has not yet been tested, and I am pretty sure its own development API will change at some point. It is a great project and I plan to continue following it. But for now, Django is in.
Frontend
React? Angular? Vue? Ember? What should I use?
I hate this debate. I really do. I have used a number of JS frameworks, and I really cannot find a best solution. Angular is too ... bloated and restrictive. Ember is inflexible. React is complex. Vue is ... well, maybe I don't have any complaints about it. But we will continue on.
And, to all you out there, I agree that React is not complex to use. In fact, I think it is simple and love its intuitive nature and JSX built right in. I do however take issue with the overwhelming number of packages needed to get up and running. There are a ridiculous number of dependencies. Spend a few minutes Googling "React starter template" and you will see what I mean.
What if I could have everything I wanted in a framework with real simplicity? You know ... like I used to have back in the day when I built my own framework 15+ years ago. Back in the days when I didn't even know what the word framework meant. Hmmm ....
Well, maybe I should just build one then. Take all the ideas I like about modern frameworks and dust off the old stuff. Enter PorterJS. I do not mean for it to be a replacement for anything else. I am not even sure that anyone out there will ever find it useful to build with. But for me and my projects, it does EXACTLY what I need in the way I want it it.
Learn more about the project at dynasties.co.
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Deciding on a Tech Stack
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[Rev-Share] Looking for Programmer for 2d game.
Hi everyone,
We are looking for a programmer that has experience with Unity and C# to join our indie team. We are working on a 2d underwater shooting adventure.
We need someone that is willing to work based from sales after the game is put out into the appstores. We have a full team, including another programmer. We also have a contract that gives everyone working on the game a percentage of the profits.
Basics of what we are looking for:
* Comfortable working with another programmer and code
* Intermediate and up in C#
* Experienced in Unity 4 & 5
* Experienced in creating Mobile and PC game controls
* Someone that can work at least 10 hrs a week
* Experience working with Git Repositories.
* Able to attend weekly meetings with team members
* Update and track assigned work list
* Speak English
If interested please contact me at: charlenesingleton@gmail.com and send us your portfolio or any other work you want to show us, and also any other projects you are working on. We will show you the game and what you would be working on.
Thanks for reading!
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Your thoughts on a Game Dev Podcast
Hi everyone, my name is Tony Chan and I'm creating a new podcast called Game Dev Loadout where I interview experience game developers seven days a week, sharing their journey and empowering listeners to start making great games. I am curious about your thoughts on listening to this type of podcast every single day.
A few questions I ask developers are:
What are your key principles for better game development?
What are common mistakes, even at a pro level?
If people had to teach themselves your expertise, what would you suggest they use?
What is the worst moment of your career?
What was holding you back from becoming a game developer?
I, myself, am a new game developer and so I decided to make this podcast to help people like me get motivated and start off with the right toolkit. Let me know what you think, thanks.
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Lua scripting woes
I need some advice. After I changed my scripting language from in-memory C to Lua I've had numerous problems I've never encountered in other languages.
Prototypes? Type signatures? Calling functions with any number of parameters?
How do you deal with all the random bugs you can get that you have really no way of determining the cause of?
If I call a function with one less parameter than it should have, I might just get a Lua error somewhere else in the script. At a later time.
What do you do to make your code (which isn't bottlenecked at all, so there is tons of room to add checks and balances) more correct and more sane?
If I scripted sanely in C I would rarely have these issues. For example any pointers passed between the engine and the script goes through a sanitizing stage where it actually checks if the pointer points to an actual valid existing entity. If it sounds like I am regretting the change, I don't know how to answer that. Lua can construct tables and pass them around, which is very nice, unlike C where I would have to malloc (and that is just not going to happen).
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Copyright question regarding programs
Hey,so i'm working on a game which i intend to one day publish and sell online.I was wondering if i would have to pay some sort of fee or something to the creators of the programs that i use for the creation of the assets for my game.For example i use GraphicsGale for the creation of my sprites,do i have to pay some fee to them because i used that program when i sell my game? The same goes for FL studio which i use for making the music.Please if someone can help me with this reply,thanks in advance!
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Most obsessive you've been about a game?, flip side of grumpyOldDude's question.
I'm sure this question has been asked before, but in grumpyOldDude's post about growing out of games I kinda felt like talking about the time I've been the most obsessive about a game and am curious to know what you all consider to be the most obsessive you've been about a game.
So, what' the most obsessive you've been over a game?
for me that title easily goes to counter-strike ~1.3 to 1.6. I bought my first computer to... that's right, play counter-strike. I bought surround sound speakers and built a little hole in my basement to immerse myself in counter-strike. I've lost more hours to counter-strike than probably any other game. And it was hard, I remember when I first started playing I would just die endlessly and maybe get a kill every now and then. I so badly wanted to be like the guys at #1 in a match. Then slowly I got better and better and have my own domination stories I'm still fond of to this day. I lived and breathed cs_italy, that was my map. hahaha
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High Socres
Farkle Friends now supports local and online high scores. It will keep track of your personal top ten scores locally on your device and also gives you the option to share your score on an online leader board.
The online high scores will only keep track of your highest score submitted and will allow you to see in game a quick glance at the top 10 scores overall.
In game you will see this dialog asking you to input your account information to submit your score to the leader board.
I am currently using the GameJolt API to manage the online high scores. So you will need an account there in order to submit a score to the leader board. All in all its coming along nicely.
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Current Wasteful DirectX Calls - DX11
Before you read, apologies for the wall of text!
I'm looking to leverage efficiencies in DirectX 11 calls, to improve performance and throughput of my game. I have a number of bad decisions I am going to remedy, but before I do, I am just wanting to get input into I should put effort into doing these.
I've been running for a while with a high frame rate in my game, but as I add assets, its obviously dipping (its a bit of an n squared issue). I'm fully aware of the current architecture, and I'm looking to take care of some severe vertex buffer thrashing i'm doing at the moment.
Keep in mind, the game engine has evolved over the past year so some decisions made at that time in hindsight are considered bad, but were logical at the time.
The scenarios:
Current: my game world is broken up by quad tree. I'm rendering the terrain geometry and water geometry separately and in different vertex buffers. Currently I am using Raw Draw Calls which means that I am very wasteful on computational power.
Goal: Use Index buffers to reduce vertices by 80%, compress my index buffers and vertex buffers into one index buffer and vertex buffer. I can't reduce the number of draw calls as its per leaf.
Current: Static assets such as trees etc are bound to each leaf of my quad tree, as I traverse the tree to see whats in view/out of view, I trim the leaf which in turn trims all the static assets. This means there is an instance buffer for each node AND for each mesh.
Goal: Compress the instance Buffers into one instance buffer per mesh (Ie, even if 10 meshes are in 1 vertex buffer, I need 10 instance buffers), for all meshes, compress the meshes into 1 index buffer and 1 vertex buffer. I can not reduce the number of draw calls.
Current: My unlimited sea function reuses the same tile mesh and just remaps with a constant buffer. This means, if there are 10 tiles, there are 10 draw calls and 10 constant buffer updates.
Goal: Simple, Use an instance buffer and remove the constant buffer updates (I was lazy and wanted to do this quick :)). Reduces it to 1 draw call, 1 instance buffer bind and 1 vertex buffer bind.
Current: Each shader, i'm rebinding the same constant buffers, these buffers only change at the start of a new scene (shadow AND rendered).
Goal: Create a map of buffers to be bound once per context, use consistent registers. Combine wasteful buffer structures into 1 buffer. Reduce number of constant changes. More negligible for deferred contexts but still worth it.
All these changes are not difficult as I have layered my graphics engine in such a way that it doesn't disturb the lower levels. Ie. Instance management is not bound to mesh directly, mesh management allows for compression easily. All static buffers are set immutable in my game, so vertex, index and most index buffers are immutable.
So the questions:
- Are some or all changes worth it? Or am I going to just suffer from draw calls?
- I am assuming at the moment that Setting vertex buffers, index buffers, instance buffers are part of the command buffer? Is this correct, i'm looking to reduce the number of calls pushed through it.
- I assume in a deferred context world, that constant buffers when set are not persistent across contexts when I execute command lists.
- Lastly, should I look into Draw Indexed instanced indirect to accumulate draw calls? And would I get any benefit from the GPU side doing this?
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continuous 2D edge-edge collisions.
I'm having trouble programming a collision system, I had one working reasonably well when only velocity was being handled, or only rotation is being handled, by using light casting algorithms at the verticies, treating one object as stationary, and the other with the sum of the movements. But I can't figure out how have velocity, scaling, rotation, and bounding box changes due to the frame of the sprite changing. Typically, when I find some instructions there isn't any obvious way to apply it to the bounding box changing.
I'm also unsure if GJK is applicable to this situation, because the objects are meant to stay inside the level geometry, rather than outside of it (this makes visibility testing faster). More specifically, the level is comprised of convex quads, where each edge has a permeability, if that permeability is higher than the object solidity the object doesn't check for collision against it.
So essentially, for each side of the object's bounding box, I have a line segment S1 representing the edge of the object at the start of the tick, and a line segment S2 representing the end of the tick, and a line segment R representing the edge of the level geometry to test collision against.
It occurred to me that I could look for intersections between the face formed by S1 and S2, and the plane formed by R, but that turned out to not be all that helpful.
What's a good way to handle this?
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Gamelab Barcelona 2017
Gamelab Barcelona 2017 Hotel Hesperia Tower, Barcelona, Spain
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DevGAMM Summit 2017
DevGAMM Summit 2017 The Triple Door, Seattle, Washington, United States
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PixelPop Festival 2017
PixelPop Festival 2017 Saint Louis University Busch Student Center, St. Louis, Missouri, United States
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Growth in the UK creative industries and priorities for the industrial strategy
Growth in the UK creative industries and priorities for the industrial strategy TBA, London, United Kingdom
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Busan Indie Connect Festival (BIC) 2017
Busan Indie Connect Festival (BIC) 2017 Busan Cinema Center, Busan, South Korea
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Music/SFX for your games
Hi everyone,
I'm JK. I has been working with game developers for several years. I have written music in many styles for a wide range of games: Arcade, Action, Adventure, Casual, Puzzle, 8bit/chiptune. I'd like to share my music/sfx collection and gigs.
My Royalty Free Music/SFX collection here. https://www.pond5.com/artist/jaksanapong#1/collections
***How does Royalty Free work?
It's easy. You just buy them for one time and then you can use them for all of your commercial project without any additional fee.
Here is my portfolio
Need a custom music/sfx? you can hire me here
1. For a short-term project (music and sfx will be finished in 3 - 10 days) https://www.fiverr.com/jaksanapong/create-original-music-loop-for-your-game-or-video
2. For a long -term project (longer than 10 days for a work) https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~01918be5a203a10faa/
https://soundcloud.com/rockman154-1
PS. If you're not comfortable with hiring me through a platform, you can directly message me or email me here jaksanapong@gmail.com and we'll figure out the best way to work together
I'm really excited to work with you guys
Thanks
JK
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3D fighting game In Unity5
Hi, this is a fighting project that im making for a month now.
The game mechanics work like this:
- There are 3 stances, low, mid and high, each one starts a combo, it also blocks any attack coming from the same stance.
- Special Attacks are unblockable unless a Special Defense (dashes or parries) is engaged -(Not yet properly implemented)
- Special moves have a 5 second cooldown
- I intend on having 3 characters with distinct weapons and fighting styles based on Historical/Mithical personalities
Tell me what do you think
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Why do games tend to limit their form?
Why is it that games tend to rarely vary their form? You start with a set of activities-- running, jumping, shooting-- and while they may deepen and expand, they almost never change significantly through the entirety of the experience. By (very flawed) contrast, consider how much more malleable as a medium books and movies can be: They can switch genres, alter perspective and even change subject matter entirely. A movie like Good Morning, Vietnam, for example, starts out as a comedy but ranges into romance, drama, suspenseful action and even tragedy (Hancock, From Dusk Til Dawn, Vanilla Sky, District 9 and Click are movies that could also fit this example).
What is it about games that so limit their form? Is it the maturity of the medium? The strict genre expectations of the audience? Or is it possible that one of the medium's greatest strengths-- interactivity and the process of engaging with it, which is basically learning-- is simultaneously a weakness of sorts? I lean toward this. Maybe the process of learning and mastering mechanics sets a kind of upper limit to what a game can depict and the sum of what experiences it can convey. Card games and board games seem to share this limit-- chess does not morph into poker, for instance, and it would be hard to see it do so (I wouldn't count playing both at the same time).
Or maybe the whole question is flawed and the comparison to books and movies essentially apples to oranges. You might argue the bulk of movies & books fall into well defined genre categories, for instance, varying similar plotlines maybe much like a shooter or platform jumper or racing game varies levels.
But I can't shake the idea of how most games can't really even switch genres let alone their overall form. When you start most, you know you'll be doing basically at the end what you started at the beginning, just maybe with different permutations and contexts. Imagine the howls of going from a shooter to a match-3 game, or from an RTS to a racing game, even if it was a smooth transition. Games that have attempted this, like Spore (or the little known Gordon Alliance decades before it), often run afoul of the problem of sacrificing depth for breadth or suffering from mechanics that just don't cohere well together.
What do you think?
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China’s mobile gaming market growing clout
With the country boasting a billion potential players, major companies stuffed with cash and increasingly talented developers to call upon, the Chinese scene is well placed to dominate the mobile gaming globe.
In 2012, mobile accounted for just 5.4% of all gaming in China. Last year, it accounted for a whopping 36.6%. In fact, according to Newzoo’s senior market analyst Shanshan Cao, the Chinese mobile gaming market has over-placed US to become the largest in the world with 183 million gamers, in which approximately 71% of them are an (occasional) online gamer, whereas US has around 139 million mobile gamers.
As the growth seems certain to continue, it is especially exciting to those into marketing and advertising. Paid games are certainly one of the sources to generate revenue, but Cao reassures that commercial power of free mobile games should not be underestimated.
“For instance, brand could make their products extra appealing by giving away in-game rewards. In this way, one would not only buy a shampoo, but also get extra lives or other in-game rewards with it, making both a product and a game more attractive for gamers,” she suggested.
Which means brands could collaborate with developers and gaming companies to increase the product’s attractiveness. By now, biggest players in the market are Netease, Tencent, and independent company iDreamsky.
Mobile-game
Meanwhile, non-Chinese companies are desperately getting into the tempting market, though many face difficulties. Kown Young-Shik, the CEO of a giant Korean games publisher named Netmarble, described the power of the Chinese mobile games industry as “threatening”.
“Chinese game providers are far more competitive in terms of human resources as a greater number of developers is being poured into the development process. They are rising in terms of mobile game development capabilities,” he said.
He added that a recent visit to China Joy had also made him feel uneasy about the technical clout of Chinese mobile games. “I have seen many virtual reality-based games and quality MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) by Chinese developers. I felt threatened and thought we need to improve our development systems to survive challenges by Chinese competitors.”
Though it might seem obvious to many in the industry that China is a powerful player in the sector, the fact that a CEO of a major mobile gaming power has vocalised this should focus minds of executives around the world.
Launch your app in China now.
Tips & Resources: Quick Tips for Resources Download Quick Tips before App Submission Technical Knowledge Base Partner Resources Portal FAQ
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Billboarding between two points
Some time ago I implemented a particle system using billboarding techniques to ensure that the particles are always facing the viewer. These billboards are always centered on one 3d coordinate.
I would like to build on this and use billboarding as the basis for things like laser bolts and gunshots. Here the difference is that instead of a single point particle I now have to draw a billboard between two points - the start and end of the laser bolt for example. I appreciate that having two end points places limits on how much the billboard can be rotated to face the viewer, but I'm looking to code a best effort solution. For the moment I am struggling to work out how to do this or find any tutorials / code examples that explain how to draw a billboard between two points ... can anyone help?
Thanks.
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Need a programer for a simplistic 2D platformer
Hello! I'd like to find a programer to help with a small game titled "Medrew's Elogy".
It's a lite, somewhat prescision platformer, with a focus on story and platforming.
I want to build the game using GameMaker Studio 2, as it's what I'm familliar with.
I specificly want help with collision, physics, and graphics. But any other assistance would be appreciated. I want to learn to be a better programmer by making things.
if you're interested, please reply here.
Thanks! <3
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