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[itisnotlogical]

Shaders will always be black wizard magic to me. I've read probably around a dozen tutorials and guides and I still cannot write one that even works, let alone produces a cool effect.

[Solifuge]

I've started learning about graphics shaders recently, and found this pretty neat site: https://www.shadertoy.com/ .

You can basically write shaders on the fly, and feed them pictures, videos, and apparently even audio as inputs, and it shows the result at the side.  Its been giving me a few ideas, but I figured I'd post two of them I found that were pretty cool:

Seascape:  Renders water graphics with under 200 lines of code. 

Notebook drawings:  Gives video a cool sketch-book visual style.


So far all I've done is turn an image to greyscale, but its kind of interesting.

Speaking of shaders, I'm kind of falling in love with them lately (even though I'm still rubbish at them). They're a great way of blending math and art to create novel visual effects, and really define a visual style from the ground up. The syntax is kinda hard, but I think the hardest part is dreaming up creative or novel ways to use shaders... the possibility space is huge.



This was my first attempt at coding a shader from scratch. It was part of a first-person xenobiology-themed prototype, where I was trying to visualize other ways alien senses might see the world. It hasn't yet gotten a beauty pass, but it was meant to represent Sonar Senses as they reflect off nearby materials. I was hoping to add a "roughness" or "softness" parameter that could be painted on game geometry, which would blur or mute the colors and give objects a sort of audio "Texture". Future plans also included allowing for multiple Sonar sources, sonar permeability through thin objects, and sonar "shadows" that cast out behind objects relative to an emitter. Oh, and maybe giving it a nicer color, like pale blue.

It was written in ShaderLab syntax, which is Unity's native shader language. I could dig up the source if anyone wanted it (it really is super simple), but in a nutshell, what's going on is it highlights pixels that are a certain distance from the viewpoint, fading out based on the offset from that distance. The distance could be configured by outside scripts too, so the width or frequency of the "scans" could be changed, or timed based on keypresses or other scripts.

[Parsely]

Are shaders literally computer sorcery?

[Levi]

Speaking of shaders, I'm kind of falling in love with them lately (even though I'm still rubbish at them). They're a great way of blending math and art to create novel visual effects, and really define a visual style from the ground up. The syntax is kinda hard, but I think the hardest part is dreaming up creative or novel ways to use shaders... the possibility space is huge.



This was my first attempt at coding a shader from scratch. It was part of a first-person xenobiology-themed prototype, where I was trying to visualize other ways alien senses might see the world. It hasn't yet gotten a beauty pass, but it was meant to represent Sonar Senses as they reflect off nearby materials. I was hoping to add a "roughness" or "softness" parameter that could be painted on game geometry, which would blur or mute the colors and give objects a sort of audio "Texture". Future plans also included allowing for multiple Sonar sources, sonar permeability through thin objects, and sonar "shadows" that cast out behind objects relative to an emitter. Oh, and maybe giving it a nicer color, like pale blue.

It was written in ShaderLab syntax, which is Unity's native shader language. I could dig up the source if anyone wanted it (it really is super simple), but in a nutshell, what's going on is it highlights pixels that are a certain distance from the viewpoint, fading out based on the offset from that distance. The distance could be configured by outside scripts too, so the width or frequency of the "scans" could be changed, or timed based on keypresses or other scripts.

That is really cool.  This is exactly why I want to learn this kind of stuff.  I think I'm going to try to force myself to learn some of this every day, it hopes that I eventually can actually do something cool like that.

One thing I'd love to be able to do is to try to make a 3d procedural cave system that actually looks good and isn't slow as hell.  I tried doing this in unity once with voxels and Marching Cubes algorithm, but I just couldn't get it to work quite right, and it was really inefficient.  I'm hoping if I just absorb enough knowledge of computer graphics eventually I could make a proper attempt.


Edit:  Also, speaking of dark magic, I stumbled on this today: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

I have no idea how it works, but it apparently was inspired by Quantum Mechanics. 

[itisnotlogical]

I'm working on an Android game, and while it's not playable per se all of the mechanics function fine on their own.

It's a roguelite thing that's one part Zelda, two parts Final Fantasy and has a dash of VN thrown in for added flavor.

[eerr]

Itsnotlogical, are you ever going to make that platformer with the spikes? It was shaping up to be a really great game.

[itisnotlogical]

Probably not. I was out of ideas for it, to be honest. I might revisit it in the future though.

[Vilanat]

There's a cute game jam over at Itch.io called Fishing Jam 2 and i decided to participate for the fun of it.

My entry is inspired by bears fishing at rivers, only instead of a bear you play a girl with a fish bat that swings fish out of water, and try to land them on dry land and hitting sneaky animals that try to steal you of your precious fish.



I also created a random fish generator for the game:

[Solifuge]

Vilanat, I love this premise, and the Procedural Fish technology.

Let me know when you finish, and/or share a link. It looks like a lot of fun! I dig the way you did the water animation too.

[Vilanat]

Thanks!

I will, definitely

I also recommend going to the Jam page, there are some interesting dev blogs there as well.

[Solifuge]

The Ludum Dare game jam starts this evening, and runs until December 12 for the Solo/Team Jam (or December 11th for the Solo Competition). Anyone else planning to make an entry for either?

If you're on the fence about making games at all, it's a good excuse to try! No engines or mediums are off-limits. If you want to make a Twine Text Adventure, a Renpy visual novel, a Gamemaker platformer, or code something from scratch, that's fine. People even make card and board games! The community are welcoming, and the feedback is generally pretty constructive. The hard time limit also means it doesn't have to be a big commitment, and you don't have to worry as much about the quality; everyone just does whatever they can manage in a short time.

P.S. This Dare's keynote video was pretty cute.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

It's been a while since I tried my hand at game development, but I've had an idea for a magic-based roguelike.

Basically I was thinking there are 'X' number of elements, for now, let's say we have these three:

Heat, Life, and Time.

There would be various methods of directing these elements--such as your standard projectile, directional, and AoE (and combinations thereof)--there would also be "ambient" casting and the stacking of effects on summonable objects to create emergent spell casting and schools of magic. The goal being to distill your stock spells that you encounter in every RPG into their smallest parts for the purpose of creating and entirely customizable magic user experience.

Let's say each of those elements can manipulate a variable contained by an object. Heat->Temperature. Life->Hit Points. Time->Turn Counter. And let's also say that all objects, whether inanimate furniture, deceased monsters, or living creatures all contain the same variables. Their behavior is determined by a tagging system which automatically updates an instance of an object's tags upon checking that instance's variables. Manipulating elements essentially allows you to--on a code level--increase, decrease, set, or hold one or more variable's value(s)--depending on the element being used to cast spells.

Example 1: Necromancy and Resurrection and unintended side effects.

In a normal RPG you may know how to resurrect someone or how to raise their corpse as a shambling undead. In this game, they're two sides of the same coin.

Simplified, when an object's health is a negative value it is undead, if it's zero it's just dead, and if it's positive it's alive.

So, you kill a goblin. You want to fight it again. You've got several options. You could manipulate it's HP with a life spell and resurrect it--it'll be confused and angry and probably start hitting you--or you could bring back as a Zomblin--devoid of emotion, but it'll probably start hitting you anyways so it can consume your flesh. A third option would be to rewind it's turn counter with a directed time spell, bring it back to whichever state of living it was in X number of turns ago, and then regardless of whether you kill it or not, Y turns later it reverts back to the shape it was in before you used a time spell to bring it back to life (or not, it's your time spell you continuum-shattering disaster).

Now you may recall that ALL objects have HP--because they're objects. Inanimate ones just start with 0. If you want to create living armor or a hat that talks well...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

... Just make sure you remembered to imbue them with positive life force rather than negative.

Example 2: Combining elements to kill stuff in new and interesting ways.

Due to the way I've sorted things, you're not really in the market of casting fireballs in this game. Let's add a fourth element: Matter. This doesn't effect variables like the other three--most elements will, some will not--instead you can generate and degenerate matter.

Now lets say that in addition to being able to cast single-element spells, you can save multi-part incantations and invoke them all at once to achieve the desired effects.

You meet another gobline--you've just killed, then re-killed his brother--whoops. Guess you'll have to kill this guy now too. There's a lot of ways to do that luckily. If you're strong enough, you can simply heat him up until he melts or cool him down until he freezes or degenerate him entirely--but that'll take a lot of raw magical power (not sure how spell cost will be measured yet, but probably just a mana pool of some sort). Instead, let's make a quick incantation.

Matter: Generate 1lb stone ball.

Time: Freeze stone ball's time for X turns.

Heat: Increase stone ball's temperature to 3000°F

Great. You invoke your spell. Now you have a stone ball that's gonna turn into lava in X number of turns. You throw it at the Goblin, and because you're so fuckin' fly, you dumb wizard, you time it perfectly and he catches a heaping pile of molten stone to the face--instantly killing him. Nice job.

But you're a sick fuck so you resurrect him. Let's make another multi=part incantation for a more powerful wizard.

Time: You freeze the goblin for X turns.

Life: You decrease  goblin's health by Y for X turns.

If you're powerful enough to sustain it, you'll kill him, and by the time he's unfrozen he'll just collapse into a heap. If you really want to engage in some overkill you can up the life element and either turn him into a zombie instantly--useful for distracting groups of other concerned goblins--or take his health down past -100, turning him into a pile of dust. Well done, Hero.

Example 3: Blinging yourself out.

Now that you've killed a few goblins you're feeling' pretty good about yourself. You know what you need now? A flaming sword. Don't worry there's a multi-part incantation for that. First though, we need to have a sword so we can apply the effects.

Matter: generate oil on sword for X turns. (applied probably as a tag to the sword, magic can cause material to generate from objects in several amounts going from insubstantial [like oil dripping off the sword, but not creating puddle or anything] to torrential [like flooding a room moments after someone touches an enchanted pebble]).

Heat: increase temperature of sword to 350°F for X turns.

There you go. I hope you brought some insulated gloves, otherwise you just lost your hands. Wooo!

I think I've made my point here. The goal would be to be able to have ~50-100 elements that could combine in interesting ways. Variables would just be dependent on the physics necessary to make stuff happen and track character skills. (casting spells to increase your concentration to increase your ability to cast spells? Aw yis.)

I hope that in many cases what you can accomplish is ridiculously OP as long as you have the mana reserves. Thoughts, concerns, good idea, bad idea? I'm not sure how quickly the game could run tracking potentially dozens of variables for hundreds or thousands of objects at a time. The hardest part would definitely be the non-standard elements like Time and Matter that don't just apply to one variable of an object or tile and keeping track stuff like every object's last 10 turns and etc.

[Parsely]

Sounds like a pain in the ass to code. Plus, there are games that have sort of already done this, like Magic Maker, but people love a good old spell making simulator so I don't think it would be unpopular just based on the premise. If you think you'd have fun making it, then go for it.

[Nirur Torir]

The most recent Humble Book Bundle is "Code Your Own Games."

[Shook]

On one hand, that's a slammin' bunch of good material for a very small price. On the other, i know myself well enough to say that it's unlikely that i'll ever actually look in them. :v

Also on an entirely different note, allow me to introduce you lot to MURDER OF CROWS. You can thank GUNIN for that title. (also if it isn't obvious, dash to avoid crossbow shots)
I can't be arsed to get a good new screenshot so here's an old one:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's been developed to that point over three weeks, chiefly during the game design classes in that week. Once i've finished it up, i intend to port it to Android, if GameMaker will let me. Who knows, maybe it'll earn me a few dorrers?? It's a rare case of me having done everything with tools that don't choke up your potential sales, so for once, there's no risk of legal issues. Well, not from that part, at least. :U

Edit: also old gameplay video for the lazy