Games Subsideria [RELEASED] - A Modern Reincarnation of the Arcade Classic

How do you think this is for a new background

I need one but im not too sure if this should be it

 

It looks nice to me.
Are you allowed to put up demo builds on the concept page?

I'd word the first part "Cosmos is a modern reincarnation of classic arcade space shooters."

"Unique asteroids that require modified play styles to overcome."
"Destructive power ups"
"Multiple enemies"
"Boss battles"

And if you are posting to get additional feedback - ask for it.
If your just posting to get more eyes on the game - I think leaving mention of feedback out is fine.

 

Thanks for the feedback
Where should i add the request for feedback? at the end? and how should i word it?
That's actually a good question, im not sure. I could probably link it to a dropbox link. but should i?

 

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=681286579

It's live

 

I've been extremely busy lately and will be for another month
Saying this i decided to do a bit of work and show you guys to get your opinion
Im making a bunch of new asteroid textures to let it choose on random for each asteroid. This is what i've currently done
Small

Large

What do you think? Original plan was to make 100 variations but I'll probably get too lazy

 

So i tried implementing them and im not sure if i like or hate it

opinions?

 

I like it! Randomness is always a good thing to add to a game especially in visuals it just makes it more realistic and look polished.

 

So ive done some work to improve the coherency by adding rim lights and AO to my blender setup

I think it looks a lot better now. If everyone agrees that the textures are good now im gonna go ahead and keep churning out more variation

 

Hmm - they almost look too realistic compared to all other visual elements - imo. I think it might be due to the contrast in low saturation of the asteroids compared to everything else. It doesn't look bad - just slightly off.
And this also might only be in stills. I remember playing one of your initial builds - and I didn't get this feeling while playing.

Or - maybe it's the high contrast gasious clouds. idk

 

Here's a vid of it in its current state. Tell me if it still seems off
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4wcf7hw0r0danbq/Asteroids.mp4?dl=0
excuse the ghost asteroids, they use seperate textures so havnt been updated yet

 

I think it looks good. If anything I would maybe make them slightly less "grainy" looking. Possibly give them a random or semi-random color-varition at spawn to keep things interesting graphically.

Edit: If you pardon me butting into the conversation
Edit 2: By random color I mean you could make a programmatical random color picker by changing the albedo of the shader. So not everything depends only on the texture.

 

can you provide a downloadable file type? the mp4 seems not to want to load properly. (not displaying at all after couple minutes waiting)

 

it seems like it hadnt uploaded properly
working now?

 

Are you
psychic?
That was the next thing i was gonna attempt to implement

About the graininess, others say that the old textures werent grainy enough when large so im kinda being tugged to both ends xD

 

Hahaa, isn't that Always the way? The graininess I think depends a bit on the camera distance. But it really is being nitpicky. In action I wouldn't be sitting around thinking "wow that is a grainy/an ungrainy rock". So I think once the colors are slighty varied it will look great.

 

Is the video working now? you should get a better impression with the movement

 

(p.s may want to download the video if you can)

 

Ohh yes, the video worked. It looks goods. I'm still indecisive about the graininess, but in all fairness I think it mostly comes down to a matter of personal taste. I like the particles and the overall use of color.

 

Thanks
Yeah I get what you mean, If it was objectively better or worse i'd follow the advice but since it seems to be sow down to everyones personal opinion is it worth changing?

 

Yep - and Yep.
I was right, the asteroids are slightly more realistic looking than all the other content - Aaanndd it doesn't matter because the game is relatively fun.
Keep it up QSFW - the choices you are selecting for the decisions you have are right. Seems like you have good instinct on the right choices to make. That is something not all of us have - and some of us struggle with.

 

Thanks!
I'm gonna keep at it and I'll eventually look at trying to improve the visual coherency

 

When I get stuck I usually try to convince myself game making is an iterative process, so if it's not up to par now, leave it for later and see where things go. Usually context will tell whether things are good enough or not.

 

I couldn't agree more that game development is an iterative process
As long as it's an improvement and not worse than I'm happy with it

 

Some different news
For whatever reason, I booted up unity and all of my files for cosmos are gone
They are deleted and irrecoverable
I have a back up but it's a few months
I'll either give up or spend months getting back to where I was
Either way, you won't hear any development anytime soon

 

Hmm, did look in the folder itself outside of Unity? You might still have stuff and just need to reconnect all of the D&D stuff and have Unity re-create the database.

 

Yup
I used software to recover deleted files and found them but they had all been overridden with irrecoverable garbage

 

So ive decided to stop moping around, cut my losses, learn from the lesson and move on
I've done some work on Void's Gaze and I think its now complete
https://www.dropbox.com/s/kskd9iuq3bv4kle/Void's Gaze.mp3?dl=0
What do you guys think?

 

Sucks that the project was lost. Gave me a reminder to backup my project.
What is the song for? Very chaotic, but interesting melodies. What will you be working on?

 

Thats for the boss Oculus Impetus
I'm still gonna work on this game cos I had a 3 month old backup, it was just disheartening to have to do a lot again
next ill be rewriting the boss scripts
for the second time

 

Ohh, good. Misunderstood cutting of lossing Well, an opportunity to make it twice as good then.
I managed to delete a folder holding some scripts once, but luckily had a BUP that was fairly recent, so only ended up rewriting some smaller stuff.
Good luck getting back to where you were and keep us updated

 

Thanks! Will do
Im hoping to make this a positive experience, as Im getting a second shot at doing the same things so they should come out better

 

So since I lost the last few months of work ( ) I've had to do the new background again
This one is using a slightly different photograph as it was higher res
how does this background look?

 

I have had the same thing happen to me. Loosing work is the worst feeling ever. I now almost back my project up every night. I like the background though, it looks better than the old one.

 

Awesome!
The back scene of the game at the moment is very static and flat and lacks depth
Parallax is out of the question due to it being a static camera
One idea i thought of it randomly spawning off screen comets, which I could reciprocate the random distance variable for the speed and size, giving the illusion of perspective vision
does that sound like a good idea?

 

Depends on how its done I'd say. If it adds clutter that could be confusing when you play, then no. Otherwise it could work. Just make them discrete.
If your idea is to make the background slightly more "lively" and your camera is static you could just ramp a sprite or something to make it look like a star changes brightness slightly, or something similar. If that makes sense.

 

yeah that makes sense, im constantly looking for ways to add a bit of depth

 

If it doesn't look too odd in terms of lighting, making them darker could probably work.

 

Bit of a side note

I used to have a survey for this game back when it was called Asteroids. I collected about 20 responses from friends and the data was actually very useful and lead to a lot of improvement
Given the data is so old its useless now Ive created a new survey thats up to date with the game to collect some fresh data
If anyone would have the time to play the latest build and do the survey I would appreciate that
http://goo.gl/forms/TMC4oN4FL5rEc7ur1

 

Alright so I've gotten back on track and done 10/120 asteroid variations

What do you think?

 

Quick fix

 

So you are just rendering the roids from 3d models? If you are using Blender, I have a pretty good technique(you may already be using it though). If you model the roid from a cube with subsurf modifier, and then use some cloud textures and displacement modifiers(one for large detail, one for smaller detail), you can get pretty convincing rocks. Then, you can simply move around the original 8 points of the cube for variation(though you have to recenter the model).

 

are you psychic
the combination of subsurfs and cloud texture based displacement maps is EXACTLY what I did, but on a sphere
These 10 have just been different angles, what im doing after is sticking two together to make a compound rock, with a bunch of different rotations for different shapes. Then 3, then 4

 

I'm not psychic(I wish sometimes, sometimes I'm glad to be ignorant).

The good thing about doing the cube is that you get the same sphere, but with the subsurf on it. I learned a few tricks like this because I used primarily with with GMStudio and 2d graphics, but I can't pixel or even do vector graphics, but I know how to make 3d models, etc... Combining more spheres works too. In my case though, I actually rendered out rotations, so the sprites took up some more space but they would look nice.

One thing I really like about pre-rendering graphics is that you can do tons of things that you can't do in just a 3d model. Blender has so much crap between the simulations, the materials with so many ways to combine textures, freestyle rendering, etc... but you can't use a great majority of that in Unity as only the model gets sent over pretty much.

Another thing I've learned that works for GMStudio and could likely work for Unity as well is taking full advantage of shaders and 3d. So I render the model in Blender but with 2 different materials. The first is literally only color, flat diffuse, no lighting. So the rocks could could be kind of a cloud texture between lighter and darker brown. But the actual color wouldn't be affected by lighting, and if you only make it brown, it comes out as a single color blob. That's OK. The other material is a "normal" material. It basically renders out a normal map from the camera view of the model. Then in GMStudio I have a shader that renders that sprite as basically a normal-mapped quad using that normal. I'm sure it could be done in Unity as well.

I used the above trick a few times to get around lighting problems with pre-rendered sprites. If you want to rotate top-down sprites and get the lighting right, you have to render a ton of frames unless you want the lighting to only be top-down. But with the above technique you don't, because the blob has no lighting, and the lighting and quad's rotation is done as part of the drawing process. The normal gets rotated along with the blob.

 

I've done another batch of 10

 

Got another 10 going, more exotic looking this time round
Btw, since i lost my work and had to do it again this time around I've attempted to make them more coherent with the art style; opinions?

 

In game

 

I like them alot! I'm no artist or at all good at art, but I think they look better than the old ones!

 

Thanks! I'm glad theyre coming out well
Only 90 more to go
It sounds horrible but im doing them in batches of 10 and each batch only takes half an hour

 

Done some more

 

Okay, so i'm up to 80 now and tbh I've gotten pretty drained from looking at rocks for hours. I think I might just finish of at 80

What do you guys think?
p.s the image was too big so i had to take screenshot