#godot 4

[wickworks]

mechs go spinny

@gentrigger's mech sprites continue to be the beating heart of the game, so I'm excited to have a new license picker that'll highlight them!

[jovial-thunder]

Lancer Tactics progress update day!

Full post here, ft. a picrew-style portrait maker, recolor system via shaders, our localization pipeline, and an attack fx previewer tool.

[sharb]

So figured I'd post this online since I'm probably not going to work on it any further and I thought it was fun.

I've been working on a Deltarune recreation of the cyber fields part of chapter 2, idea was to finish this and then move onto my own RPG project later down the line.

However I've been taking on too many projects lately and decided I'll put a stop to working on this since there's no real point for me to recreate the whole thing since what I have so far is already fun to share.

But ultimately yeah I had a lot of fun with this and figured people would enjoy seeing it!

[beastinthecave]

Just finished a short game to test a couple mechanics for a larger project I am working on ^_^

Its a narative fiction game inspired by Vermis, Wayfarer and Roadwarden.

[somerandev]

☕ Day 40 of Game Dev for 🫱Teleport Man🫲

Back to working on the title/main menu. Created this fun "breaking" effect for the title text.

The issue is I put in a lot of effort giving each letter rigid-body collision with precise collision boxes for each letter... but it ended up not being that noticeable. The letters fall off-screen long before you can see them collide with each other. Maybe it's for the best; at least they don't move on-top of each other...

[rxbeetle]

Concept art

[sleepy-hart]

So while working through game concepts and deciding what to work on next, I've been refreshing my Godot skills. Wanting to get back into 3D and prepare for doing more narrative heavy games. Made this demo to learn nathanhoad's excellent Dialogue Manager addon and also test drive Kenney's new Godot platformer kit.

I'm really, really enjoying Dialogue Manager so far and feel it has a tonne of potential. Think it covers a lot of things I've been looking for:

Direct engine integration is super useful, as well as using custom resources to store dialogue. They're also text files so can still use external editor to update

Straightforward syntax, reminds me a lot of ink and yarn. As well it's named node approach feels familiar

Able to access global game variables for conditionals, and having conditional based loops and choices is very straightforward

Also able to call methods directly within dialogue, which is super powerful when combined with signals (showing/hiding coin UI mid conversation, playing sound effect)

Lots of options for random dialogue choices - just used the single line ones for now but in docs have seen they also have option for setting custom probabilities, just ncie to add more flavour

Hyped it has a built in approach for translations (create IDs and reference CSVs) that looks like integrates with Godot's localisation tools - a bit of a future thought but glad it has stuff to help built in

Docs you can mention you can create dialogue resources at runtime. Can imagine this being very useful - an example would be creating a record of all lines seen to replicate Ren-py's "log" feature.

The methods for displaying dialogue are super flexible. At the moment just used their example balloons but looks like it should play nicely to let you build custom GUI - and maybe even multiple forms (e.g. dialogue scenes vs flavour barks in main game world). Think next experiments will focus on this.

There's a few more things I'm keen to learn and see if they're feasible with this - "disabled" choices that still appear but can't be accessed would be nice, also looking at how you can integrate this with an audio system for voice acting - I think they have an example that includes voice acting?

Only thing I'm a bit nervous of is it looks like it can only grab variables from autoload/global scripts, so when putting into actual game will need to take care with save systems and methods for loading choice variables into a choice master global so we aren't keeping too much in memory at once. But if I'm wrong on this assumption, or others have approaches, more than happy to be corrected on this!

Also really enjoying Kenney's 3D platformer kit and it's been fun and . Making the shopkeeper bot was super simple. All the details on the original character model are modelled so just adjusted the face and for changing colours just had to move UV islands for limbs and face to different parts of the pallete textures.

Haven't tried this technique for modelling and texturing before but seen it crop up a few times so will definitely experiment with this in the future. Also might help with optimization - I think most of the materials in the pack refer to this single image texture? By default the pack only has the model glbs and a single colormap png so assuming that's how it's working.

Original plan was to fill in the shop with another pack so there's a few little platform challenges within this, but they all needed collisions adding so might add that in future. But main aim was focusing on the dialogue and think we've got a good approch going forward, and highly recommend the add on for other Godot devs making narrative games!

[hyphinett]

Spinnies!

Added spinny things to my marble madness inspired game today, I love how much mileage I can get out of physics hinges and 2 models. I've built some other fun obstacles and a bunch of levels recently which I'll probably share footage of later this week.

[sunrise-game]

It's another Screenshot Saturday!

A working hand-lantern that is waiting for a nice model, and a nostalgic loading screen for moving between areas.

also, a sneak peak at an early cutscene art:

[gaiaxyswitch]

MY GMTK 2023 SUBMISSION IS OUT!!

About 30 minutes before time is up, I released my GMTK Game Jam's submission, The Monster In Your Pocket!

Play as the little guy inside someone's pocket and take care of yourself up until they call you out for battle!

Play it here!

[hairiclilred]

Overworld sprites

[wickworks]

Lancer Tactics dialogue layout crisis of faith

(from this month's backer update)

Every so often, I'll run into something in development that eats away at me until it pushes me to a crisis of faith and I have a breakdown, burn down a bunch of work, and build something better from the ashes. These are moments of transformation and we're almost always able to come out the other side with something much better than what we started with.

This all sounds very dramatic until you take a step back and see the issue in question is just, like, the layout of a menu. But if medieval priests were able to have schisms over angels on pins I can have strong feelings about graphic design, dammit!

This month's episode revolved around how we're doing character dialogue. For reference the plan was to do a standard 4-slot visual-novel talking heads layout. I call it a 4-slot because there's usually four positions that characters can stand; two on the left, two on the right:

I had it ingame, and it was working. But... something felt off. Do you see the difference between every one of the above examples and this?

It's all about perspective, baby.

Answer: all the character art in those examples are drawn at a slight angle so they can be flipped back and forth to be made like they're looking at each other.

Trying to do this with the perspective we chose early — straight on — makes for a chorus line of weirdos who are looking directly into your soul as they ostensibly chat with each other. Credulity is strained; the illusion of these puppets interacting in the same space is paper-thin.

(I was skeptical of choosing this perspective for this reason, but we ultimately went with it to make the customizable assets in the portrait maker easier to fit together)

We tried a bunch of different layouts, but they all at least one of these problems:

they'd stare into your soul while ostensibly directing comments elsewhere.

they felt like text messages; this would be fine if that's what we were going for, but we wanted something that could represent face-to-face conversations. (Tactical Breach Wizards was able to pull this style off because they had little 3D dioramas to go along with it)

or, most damning of all, they felt like zoom calls.

So, my heart aflutter and spirit in want, I spent a day doing a research dive into various dialogue layouts (bless the Game UI Database!) to see if any other games had managed to pull this character art perspective off. I ended up with this massive non-chronological taxonomic tree:

(fullsize here)

The type of layout that particularly caught my eye was this style where each character had their own little box. These layouts borrow a concept from comic books called "closure" where the space and time between characters are left blank. Freed from the constraints of trying to simulate a single space, these layouts allow the reader to fill in the blanks with something that feels more true-to-life than anything we'd be able to render ourselves.

I was especially impressed with the dynamism of Tales of Symphonia and The World Ends With You; rather than sticking to single slots they would animate the entire panels moving around to indicate motion an relative position of characters.

So we threw out the old code and copied them. Here's what we've come up with:

We'll be able to have portraits interact, like smacking each other (I felt like a kid hitting two action figures together, lol)

We can also apply effects like princess-leia-holograms and full-screen "lighting" effects like warning banners:

Carpenter and I came up with a number of arrangements that the portraits can smoothly transition between:

I've also implemented support for choices during a dialogue, potentially leading to branching paths.

Overall, I feel SO much better about this system than our initial designs. It might feel a little more cartoony, but I think we're making a cartoony game so that's not a problem.

Whew. We bit a lot off to chew with this project. I feel like I just made a second visual novel game engine inside of the first. Fingers crossed that it all ends up worth it.

[jovial-thunder]

Working on the Lancer Tactics map editor

I love games with map editors so much. I grew up on the Age of Empires map editor and I am incredibly hyped to now be making one myself.

[joshthewalkingtrainwreck]

Still haven't cracked shaders yet— it's hard for me to figure out if everything i have coded in will work, as I'm still trying to get the basic infrastructure of this fruity little quiz game idea laid out before I try to tackle the logic, but forward momentum has been maintained, including making atlas images to work for the textures for each face.

As a matter of fact, here's the ones I've made-- I've gone through and readjusted a few of the graphics you may have seen me post previously, but it's relatively the same info.

Although I can't actually guarantee if I will get any better at this, feedback is welcomed and encouraged. Details are in the alt text

[beastinthecave]

Havent participated in a game jam for a long time, so I decided to make a short game for the chatsim jam :)

You play as some random person working for a scp like organistion that is talking with an AI that runs the facility your working in. This is the first time I programmed a dialog system so unfortunately the game is very short.

[somerandev]

🌈 Day 43 of Game Dev for 🫱Teleport Man🫲

Added file select hover animations.....

As a great man once said: "i may have gone too far in a few places"