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Indie Game Development Discussion Thread | Of Being Professionally Poor
- Thread starter chubigans
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electroflame
Member
I'm not 100% sure (since I use VS Ultimate, and the last express version I used (2008) didn't have this naming scheme) but as an educated guess it probably stands for Windows Desktop.
I got a phone call. It took about three months to hear back after filling in my application in July.
Excellent guess, thanks. There's also a web and/or a Metro version I suppose.
lashman
Steam-GAF's Official Ambassador to Gaming-GAF
can't get more cinematic than that
you should think about adding black bars, though I heard it's all the rage nowadays BlastProcessing
Member
So Jessie Cox did a video on Ephemerid.
After a few months of flat sales and no publicity it feels preeeeeeeeety good. Glimmer of hope and all that.
After a few months of flat sales and no publicity it feels preeeeeeeeety good. Glimmer of hope and all that.
Dude nice! Any tips for us? hehe
BlastProcessing
Member
Not really. We met Jared Rosen last year at Indiecade and he emailed me asking for a build a few days ago. That's about it. Jared is a real mensch.
very cool
hnnngggg, youtube 60 fps support makes me very very happy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MaadgXSSvI
Can finally show off how buttery smooth shwip is!
BlastProcessing
Member
very cool
hnnngggg, youtube 60 fps support makes me very very happy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MaadgXSSvI
Can finally show off how buttery smooth shwip is!
I dunno, it's not very cinematic....
Looks flippin great
Can somebody do me a favor, take a look at my new site, and tell me how and why it's awful?
nethermindgame.com
I guess I should say that the screen shots will be replaced soon, but everything else I'm happy with. Just, if anyone has any comments or concerns, I'd be happy to hear them,
nethermindgame.com
I guess I should say that the screen shots will be replaced soon, but everything else I'm happy with. Just, if anyone has any comments or concerns, I'd be happy to hear them,
anonymous_abc
Member
I cannot open it, so at least it's classified as a gaming related website. That's a plus I guess.
I cannot open it, so at least it's classified as a gaming related website. That's a plus I guess.
Ha! It's probably enough that there's game in the domain name. Thanks for trying, though.
I'm learning Unity and better coding with my little project.
Problem is I am constantly switching mechanics and ideas.
Gamemaker let's me do prototyping much faster but it's not the software I want to stay with because it will be much easier for me in the future with Unity...
What do you fine people think, stick with Unity and climb to the top, or get my first project out faster and have more "fun"?
Problem is I am constantly switching mechanics and ideas.
Gamemaker let's me do prototyping much faster but it's not the software I want to stay with because it will be much easier for me in the future with Unity...
What do you fine people think, stick with Unity and climb to the top, or get my first project out faster and have more "fun"?
Works fine for me - had a quick go on Safari and Firefox - and it looks sweet. Really dig the layout and the colour mood all around.
It's not a critique or anything I believe it needs to be changed, but if that was mine, I'd probably try some different typeface (I feel the bold/rounded one you picked up clashes a little bit with the sharp and angular artstyle of your game).
Much appreciated. Thanks!
A bit late, but thanks for the suggestion - in future I will need to know the collision points, but for now I can just use OnTriggerEnter instead.
Believe it or not, I actually played Diablo II's Baal throne room in that framerate on my old pc.
It was a wonder it even ran on that old machine, but it worked!
Once you get used to Unity, it will be at least as fast.
Imo the page looks great apart being inside a white frame(at least it's how it looks in Opera and Firefox), imo it would be better if everything was black.
I would add a media section with screens, trailers and eventually whatever you want to share(like wallpapers, icons etc).
Okay, thanks. I originally thought it looked a bit too simple set on just black, but now I think you might be right. Good point on a media page. I'll refactor the music tab so it's all forms of media, and put my musician's bio next to mine.
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
I understand the self-deprecating humour of saying things like "Why bother to do level design when we can get the computer to do it for us?" and "Yes, this is yet another indie platformer", but given there are people that actually do hold those opinions unironically I personally wouldn't give them negativity ammo from the start as part of your sales pitch (which is what your website is intended to do right? Sell your game?)
I'd also maybe avoid the use of the metroidvania term when you explicitly call out SOTN as not being what you wanted to make, but I get that metroidvania as a genre label is a big selling point for folks, so it's harder to argue against that.
My 2p.
I figured the writing style would be polarizing. I'll probably draft it into something else. Thanks.
MrNyarlathotep
Banned
I 100% understand the self-deprecation, but... well, you know.
Focus on the good stuff, you don't need to be full on car-salesman and can still be drily witty about your descriptions, I would just personally not pre-empt possible negative feedback on the chance that a potential customer might go "Wow, they're right, there are a lot of other indie platformers out there, thansk for saving me $____"
EDIT:
I mean, if it's just anxiety about showing your goods to the public, and not feeling like you 'deserve' to praise it, actually releasing a game is a big deal, and is worth having confidence in it as its own thing. You're not knocking out some flappy bird clone or match 3 puzzler to make a quick buck, you've made something you can - and should - be proud of, so let your website copy reflect that.
MidgarBlowedUp
Member
Are any of you guys still publishing games on Google Play now that they are forcing developers to give up their home/business address? I know it either went live end of last month or the month before, I just figured there would be a lot of push back on google as it's a pretty shit thing to do to indie devs. Not only are you required to list a physical address but Google is now listing developer addresses publicly in the play store. I think it's pretty creepy knowing that anyone could just show up at your doorstep. And no, as far as I understand it you can't use a PO Box, as if some indie devs could afford one anyway.
No, you're right. I'm going to bed 'cause it's just after 3 AM for me, but I'll write something more positive on the morrow.
Thanks again everyone for the help!
Mystic River
Member
Looks ok , nothing flashy, but works, but makes me feel like I am back to the 90's web pages, if you are planning for kickstarter maybe adding more artwork or making the content a little bit more easier to read may help you in the long term, you can take a look at http://www.darkestdungeon.com/ , not super fancy but does the work, and I think you can make something not so flashy and more functional, just my 2c.
I think it looks fine but it lacks content for now. It will be flashier with content and updates I am sure. Also not sure on the writing as the game seems to have a bit of a melancholy touch to it.
Did not know we have you on here. Your pixel-perfect tutorial helped me a lot, so thanks for that I may have questions in the future so bear with me if I shoot you a PM
Did not know we have you on here. Your pixel-perfect tutorial helped me a lot, so thanks for that
I may have questions in the future so bear with me if I shoot you a PM Jacksinthe
Banned
I agree with this. Sound professional and don't tug in heartstrings. As cool as things like metroidvanias are now, everyone wants in in the nostalgia act. I would personally do everything in my power to describe my game in a way that sets it apart from the everything else. I've seen too many Kickstarters and websites use "tug at heartstrings" vernacular by mentioning metroidvanias, dark souls (even though I've yet to see a single person actually describe the invisible hook the game has), love letter, etc.
Stand out, go against that grain. You are doing your game a disservice if you blindly bundle it in with every other indie game that wants to be in the same genre. I say that because your game looks great - Way beyond your standard "I want to make a game" fare - but you come off as if its just another game in the pile, which it isn't.
Please don't. I love the style and what you are doing, there are clearly elements which make your game stand out and describing it in such simple terminology takes away from those efforts that make it special.
Just my .02
Edit: that also doesn't mean its OK to sound pretensious. Don't be "that person" that talks above your own level. Describe what makes your game great, what sets it apart and roll with it.
Good stuff. As someone doing his first baby steps on the scene too, I found it very useful. Thank you.
Wow, you should make a special edition with Jesse Cox singing to all the music with Jared as the pitched background singer!
Lots of clever mechanics in there!
hi smart people.
I've had an elusive crash that occurs on scene switches when playing my game (scenes are basically the "active game right now" in a stencyl project -- I typically separate each room of the map into a different scene) that is entirely unpredictable. It just happens sometimes. You may have no crashes at all for 6 hours of collective play, or you may get 3 in a row. There seems to be no pattern about where or what in the game you're doing when it happens, except that it happens during room transitions.
GPU shaders are established with each scene change, so this being related to that seemed like a good guess.
I have really no idea what I'm doing on any really technical stuff, but I remembered backstep mentioned an openGL debugger called GDEBugger.
So I got that -- and I have no idea what most of it means, but I ran the game from it until I eventually got the crash to happen.
It doesn't (seem) to have a great deal of info (unless there's a way to delve deeper that I'm not seeing) but this is the event that came up when the crash occurred.
The event that came up when it crashed was "Second chance exception" and in the description it says "the thread tried to read or write a virtual address it doesn't have access to".
I was curious if anyone knew what any of this meant or if there's a way for me to use this program to get more info. It has tons of doohickies, none of which I have any idea how to use.
I'm just an artist!
I've had an elusive crash that occurs on scene switches when playing my game (scenes are basically the "active game right now" in a stencyl project -- I typically separate each room of the map into a different scene) that is entirely unpredictable. It just happens sometimes. You may have no crashes at all for 6 hours of collective play, or you may get 3 in a row. There seems to be no pattern about where or what in the game you're doing when it happens, except that it happens during room transitions.
GPU shaders are established with each scene change, so this being related to that seemed like a good guess.
I have really no idea what I'm doing on any really technical stuff, but I remembered backstep mentioned an openGL debugger called GDEBugger.
So I got that -- and I have no idea what most of it means, but I ran the game from it until I eventually got the crash to happen.
It doesn't (seem) to have a great deal of info (unless there's a way to delve deeper that I'm not seeing) but this is the event that came up when the crash occurred.
The event that came up when it crashed was "Second chance exception" and in the description it says "the thread tried to read or write a virtual address it doesn't have access to".
I was curious if anyone knew what any of this meant or if there's a way for me to use this program to get more info. It has tons of doohickies, none of which I have any idea how to use.
I'm just an artist!
I only have one other person really testing with frequency so far, and he also has had it. he ran the debugger and caught the same event.
I'm on a radeon hd 7900 and he's on geforce 660 ti.
I was going to say a driver bug would be one of the two main possibilities, but that seems to rule that out.
You're doing this entirely in an engine (Stencyl), correct? I'm afraid that probably means it's an engine bug. What it LOOKS like to me with the virtual address error is that a pointer has an invalid value and is being dereferenced. Like, if some sort of object or data had been deleted/destroyed appropriately, but then something tried to use it anyway, and that memory is no longer available.
Since I would GUESS your access is at a scripting language or graphical programming level rather than something like C++, that's why I say engine bug. There might be some way you can work around it, especially if you're cleaning up stuff during room transitions, and maybe some other sequence hasn't finished when data gets deleted out of under it.
*edit* I forgot you used Stencyl.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Jobs:
Windows Exception
Are you running any stencyl addons or custom script? (I'm unsure how stencyl works) and do you write to debug logs so you can see what actions are carried out and when? I would debug every element of the scene swap and set up 2 scenes and just go back and forth constantly until you throw an exception, then see what your last few debug lines are to see what is happening and when. Compare it to working scene swaps to see what is different, what isn't executing, what could be throwing an exception.
If something is throwing a second exception, something broke either in Stencyl or some custom script or add-on for stencyl. If you only use Stencyl built in tools and don't use external addons or custom scripts then the error lies in Stencyl somewhere and needs to be addressed there.
Edit: Beaten. Slow ass mobile typing grrrr. Blizz said it more eloquently anyhow.
Windows Exception
Are you running any stencyl addons or custom script? (I'm unsure how stencyl works) and do you write to debug logs so you can see what actions are carried out and when? I would debug every element of the scene swap and set up 2 scenes and just go back and forth constantly until you throw an exception, then see what your last few debug lines are to see what is happening and when. Compare it to working scene swaps to see what is different, what isn't executing, what could be throwing an exception.
If something is throwing a second exception, something broke either in Stencyl or some custom script or add-on for stencyl. If you only use Stencyl built in tools and don't use external addons or custom scripts then the error lies in Stencyl somewhere and needs to be addressed there.
Edit: Beaten. Slow ass mobile typing grrrr. Blizz said it more eloquently anyhow.
Mystic River
Member
May I guess?
just by looking at the error message I think you have the same error I have that I haven't patched yet, if you are running in threads it may be possible that one of those threads is trying to access or cached some data that was cleared by another thread, so it may happen when you clean up memory when moving between screens, at the time of cleaning you have to make sure no one else is using the memory allocations you want to re-use or clean, so you need to make all other non essential threads to finish their job and put them on-hold, then your main thread cleans everything and restarts all other threads, you can do this by either use a variable that when enable will force any other thread to do nothing until it is set to true, that way I solved one of the bugs, then the other is locking all objects that are shared.
Hope it is something related to the thing above. It still happens in my game in some areas that I haven't either locked or stopped some threads but adding a few try/catch in those specific areas allowed me to skip those errors there when clearing objects.
Good luck with your game, by the way, I am thinking to put an easter egg from your game in mine
Well it's hard to debug from just that but given the situation it's most likely something that's not getting properly cleaned up in the scene transition.
A 'second chance exception' just means the debugger saw a problem, threw it back to execution to see if your program had a catch for the problem (like you knew it may try to divide by zero and put in code to keep it from happening), but you program did not have an internal fix, so now we're crashing.
Most likely there's still some thread running that was in the middle of working on something from the old scene that now no longer exists and it's had the rug pulled from under it.
I'm not sure how your middleware works but just double check that you're manually deleting everything in the scene you're using before it all goes away, and if all that looks good try adding a delay to the scene transition (250 to 500 milliseconds) where you waiting for garbage cleanup to finish.
Anything in your code with a timer can be a culprit as well. If some function fires off every X seconds and you delete the scene while the timer is still running it'll try to operate on something that no longer exits.
A 'second chance exception' just means the debugger saw a problem, threw it back to execution to see if your program had a catch for the problem (like you knew it may try to divide by zero and put in code to keep it from happening), but you program did not have an internal fix, so now we're crashing.
Most likely there's still some thread running that was in the middle of working on something from the old scene that now no longer exists and it's had the rug pulled from under it.
I'm not sure how your middleware works but just double check that you're manually deleting everything in the scene you're using before it all goes away, and if all that looks good try adding a delay to the scene transition (250 to 500 milliseconds) where you waiting for garbage cleanup to finish.
Anything in your code with a timer can be a culprit as well. If some function fires off every X seconds and you delete the scene while the timer is still running it'll try to operate on something that no longer exits.
thanks guys. to answer the question, no, I haven't modified stencyl, and fully expect it to be needed to be fixed on their end. I am just trying to find out what to tell them to fix. they are shorthanded and can't dedicate all their time to troubleshooting me.
This has been happening for months. A very long time.
The interesting thing is that JUST going back and forth between the same two scenes *seems* to never produce the issue. You need to run around more of the map. This is not concrete, since the crash is elusive, but it certainly seems to be easier to get it to happen if you run around a variety of scenes.
thank you you ran circles around me but it sounds possibly insightful due to the fact that the crash seems to happen more when you've explored more as opposed ot just going back and forth between two small scenes -- more going on seems to make the crash more likely.
This has been happening for months. A very long time.
The interesting thing is that JUST going back and forth between the same two scenes *seems* to never produce the issue. You need to run around more of the map. This is not concrete, since the crash is elusive, but it certainly seems to be easier to get it to happen if you run around a variety of scenes.
May I guess?
just by looking at the error message I think you have the same error I have that I haven't patched yet, if you are running in threads it may be possible that one of those threads is trying to access or cached some data that was cleared by another thread, so it may happen when you clean up memory when moving between screens, at the time of cleaning you have to make sure no one else is using the memory allocations you want to re-use or clean, so you need to make all other non essential threads to finish their job and put them on-hold, then your main thread cleans everything and restarts all other threads, you can do this by either use a variable that when enable will force any other thread to do nothing until it is set to true, that way I solved one of the bugs, then the other is locking all objects that are shared.
Hope it is something related to the thing above. It still happens in my game in some areas that I haven't either locked or stopped some threads but adding a few try/catch in those specific areas allowed me to skip those errors there when clearing objects.
Good luck with your game, by the way, I am thinking to put an easter egg from your game in mine
thank you
you ran circles around me but it sounds possibly insightful due to the fact that the crash seems to happen more when you've explored more as opposed ot just going back and forth between two small scenes -- more going on seems to make the crash more likely.Jacksinthe
Banned
Thanks, man! Any questions just shoot. I'm not pro with Unity but there are a lot of "huh, no shit?" moments when learning it I had ha! 5 should be uber fun with its new audio system. Drooling profusely hereDid not know we have you on here. Your pixel-perfect tutorial helped me a lot, so thanks for that
electroflame
Member
I have no idea if it's correct, but it seems like that's the most likely candidate due to having (at least) a Metro version.
I would also throw my hat into the "threading issue" ring. I would find it suspicious that you have two "Thread Created" messages right before the crash, and then at least seven "Thread Terminated" messages after it.
This would make me think that either a thread was created that shouldn't've been, or something was done on a thread that shouldn't've been done, leading to a crash and immediate thread cleanup (which terminated all of the other threads, including the two that were started prior to the crash).
The tricky part will be finding the threading problem, but that's probably on the engine and not on you.
Note: I have absolutely no idea if any of that's what happened, so take that with a grain of salt.
I gave the game to backstep, maybe he'll find something. XD
I believe the thread closed messages were a result of the subsequent crash/closing of the application.
I believe the thread closed messages were a result of the subsequent crash/closing of the application.
Jacksinthe
Banned
Welp, PC is taken apart. Replacement parts coming in but I decided to build a development rig. Didn't spend much. I'll fix my current rig and donate it to a friend then go on going on with my new newness. Nothing major for development. A 4690 with 8gb, GTX 760 and my most sought after upgrade: SSD. I still have my local and off site storage but the SSD ought to make the whole thing snappier. Also decided to finally jump on the Win8.1 bandwagon.
All in all it should be a nice setup for 2D development. Parts come in tomorrow so I jumped the gun and shut her down tonight. I have off Wednesday for another post surgery follow up and ultrasound so I have all day off after that
All in all it should be a nice setup for 2D development. Parts come in tomorrow so I jumped the gun and shut her down tonight. I have off Wednesday for another post surgery follow up and ultrasound so I have all day off after that
An SSD just makes so many things in life amazing.Welp, PC is taken apart. Replacement parts coming in but I decided to build a development rig. Didn't spend much. I'll fix my current rig and donate it to a friend then go on going on with my new newness. Nothing major for development. A 4690 with 8gb, GTX 760 and my most sought after upgrade: SSD. I still have my local and off site storage but the SSD ought to make the whole thing snappier. Also decided to finally jump on the Win8.1 bandwagon.
All in all it should be a nice setup for 2D development. Parts come in tomorrow so I jumped the gun and shut her down tonight. I have off Wednesday for another post surgery follow up and ultrasound so I have all day off after that
Congrats on the upgrade.
Conkersbadfurday
Member
Not centered, and that's my bad. The idea here is since we have a card game, you should be able to get packs of cards like you can with Pokemon or Yu Gi Oh or what have you. So we have that in the game, though the card pack in question is a tome instead of plastic that's easily ripped apart. Continuity and whatnot.
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