Random Gaming Talk Thread

[demi]

Star Ocean First Departure only $9 on Switch/PS4

https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0082-CUSA16913_00-000STAROCEAN1FDR

https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/star-ocean-first-departure-r-switch/

[Bebpo]

Random game things I'm still upset about years later:

Since One Piece/Gundam DW games I wished that one day we'd get a Berserk DW game. Then we finally got it and it was by some D-tier spinoff of the DW games and was like the worst DW game they've ever made and it bombed and that killed the chance of ever getting a good Berserk DW game :|

[Nintex]

Random game things I'm still upset about years later:

Why did every open world game take things from MGSV except the walkman so you can pick a tune when raiding a cave or bandit camp

[Pissy F Benny]

Cuz most pubs are too cheap to pay for rights for some sweet Holland Oates tracks

[Tasty]

Random game things I'm still upset about years later:

Why did every open world game take things from MGSV except the walkman so you can pick a tune when raiding a cave or bandit camp

I thought Death Stranding did. :shhh

[Pissy F Benny]

if it did it didn't have a rad range of licensed tracks iirc

[benjipwns]

? Why? Bad VA?

I played like a few hours of a couple of the Lego games back in the day. They were cute and mostly just enjoyable for the fanservice from whatever license. The gameplay was serviceable but had no depth.

My brother's looking forward to the new Star Wars one. I think he enjoys these Lego games more than me. But he also is a bigger Star Wars fan. If there were doing like a Lego One Piece or Lego Gundam or Lego Stormlight Archives or something I'd be all over it.

Hmm hard to quantify without seeming like a Nintendo hypocrite. Adding voices harms my immersion and makes things seem just a little too childish for my current tastes.

The artifice of enforcing miming for communication can lead to hilarious results despite your own age imo. It's like adding a bunch of dialogue to Wile E. Coyote toons, just unnecessary.

Buuuuut you need a lot more creative involvement from the game development team to make that kind of miming work well for every scene. On the other hand, you can take a shortcut and just dumb down the movie script, and there you go.

It's not a Nintendo thing, the miming was legitimately funnier. Dumb gags were made funnier because they couldn't talk.

[Tasty]

? Why? Bad VA?

I played like a few hours of a couple of the Lego games back in the day. They were cute and mostly just enjoyable for the fanservice from whatever license. The gameplay was serviceable but had no depth.

My brother's looking forward to the new Star Wars one. I think he enjoys these Lego games more than me. But he also is a bigger Star Wars fan. If there were doing like a Lego One Piece or Lego Gundam or Lego Stormlight Archives or something I'd be all over it.

Hmm hard to quantify without seeming like a Nintendo hypocrite. Adding voices harms my immersion and makes things seem just a little too childish for my current tastes.

The artifice of enforcing miming for communication can lead to hilarious results despite your own age imo. It's like adding a bunch of dialogue to Wile E. Coyote toons, just unnecessary.

Buuuuut you need a lot more creative involvement from the game development team to make that kind of miming work well for every scene. On the other hand, you can take a shortcut and just dumb down the movie script, and there you go.

It's not a Nintendo thing, the miming was legitimately funnier. Dumb gags were made funnier because they couldn't talk.

Look R2, Degobah!

[Nintex]

"We played Elden Ring"

https://twitter.com/NintendoAmerica/status/1508806409797963784

[demi]

Meanwhile Xenoblade 3 announced and released in the span of 6 months

[Nintex]

All those Nintendies with their daily 5 hour YouTube analysis and speculation channels and none of them saw this coming 

[Pissy F Benny]

they're probably too busy combing over the last direct frame by frame the 7th time to see if they've missed a hidden clue

[Joe Molotov]

All those Nintendies with their daily 5 hour YouTube analysis and speculation channels and none of them saw this coming 

FACT CHECK:
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1404850474705096705

[Svejk]

"We played Elden Ring"

https://twitter.com/NintendoAmerica/status/1508806409797963784

Exactly what I was thinking...   

"hey... maybe we should put actual dungeons in this thing...  dungeons are so hot right now... remember dungeons?"

[Polident Hive]

Yeah. More locations like hyrule castle are what I wanted out of sequel.

What's going on with Switch HD, Switch U, Switch Pro, Switch 2 rumors? 2023, we're talking six years since the first game and Switch launch. Do the BOTW or Twilight Princess thing and dual release it.

[Let's Cyber]

Me in 2019: "Damn they're using the same engine and artstyle! They'll get this out really quick like they did with Majora's Mask."

Me in 2022: 

[demi]

Aonuma is finished, and not just at Nintendo

Is BOTW2 Aonuma's Balan Wonderland?

[Pissy F Benny]

BOTW 2 being terrible would be hilarious tbf, the nintendie cope would be off the scale, an autisty army rising up against reviewers and youtubers worldwide

[Bebpo]

BOTW 2 being terrible would be hilarious tbf, the nintendie cope would be off the scale, an autisty army rising up against reviewers and youtubers worldwide

I mean...Skyward Sword...

[bork]

Might actually play this now.

[Nintex]

Aonuma is finished, and not just at Nintendo

Is BOTW2 Aonuma's Balan Wonderland?

He's pretty much the executive producer at this point and always considered himself not up to the task of developing Zelda games.
(which is why Iwata considered him perfect for the job)

BOTW 2 being terrible would be hilarious tbf, the nintendie cope would be off the scale, an autisty army rising up against reviewers and youtubers worldwide

Overall Nintendo will have the same problem they had after OOT. No matter what they release, chances are they won't catch lightning in a bottle again like they did with BOTW.
BOTW released before an avalanche of 'next gen' open world games and popularized a bunch of mechanics that are now used in other games (even more so by 2023).
Plus the graphics will look pretty dated by 2023 as BOTW already taxed Switch to the max basically. It won't be terrible but not ground breaking either.

Anyhow with the Mario movie releasing this holiday (and I would be shocked if there's no Mario Movie Game (iOdyssey 2)) I always found it unlikely that BOTW2 would release holiday 2022.
It doesn't rule out a re-release of some other Zelda-games for Switch though, maybe TWWHD and TPHD or perhaps a remake of Seasons/Ages as a sequel to the Links Awakening remake.

[tiesto]

Why did nobody ever tell me about this game? Looks really cool, nice art style. No word of a US release yet but I'd be shocked if we didn't get it. Maybe at the NG+ expo?

[Potato]

Aonuma is finished, and not just at Nintendo

Is BOTW2 Aonuma's Balan Wonderland?

Isn't it Wonderworld?

Not sure why they didn't go with Wonderland. It sounds so much better.

[Pissy F Benny]

BOTW 2 being terrible would be hilarious tbf, the nintendie cope would be off the scale, an autisty army rising up against reviewers and youtubers worldwide

I mean...Skyward Sword...

I suppose, but people weren't as stoked on Zelda when that came out like they are now post BOTW.

[Beezy]

https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1509156821822451712

Lol so random. I don't know how it did sales wise, but I thought we would've got another Child of Light by now.

[paprikastaude]

[MMaRsu]

https://twitter.com/Wario64/status/1509156821822451712

Lol so random. I don't know how it did sales wise, but I thought we would've got another Child of Light by now.

Another good Ubisoft game...? Doubtful

[Nintex]

https://twitter.com/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/1509505031115993097

https://twitter.com/Kojima_Hideo/status/1509505171004735491

Did he shut down or is he just moving offices or something

[Svejk]

Hideo's next game is about moving on; confirmed. 

[Polident Hive]

rip to the Ludens hallway

[bork]

Random game things I'm still upset about years later:

Since One Piece/Gundam DW games I wished that one day we'd get a Berserk DW game. Then we finally got it and it was by some D-tier spinoff of the DW games and was like the worst DW game they've ever made and it bombed and that killed the chance of ever getting a good Berserk DW game :|

I thought it was OK, just incredibly average and lacking in character selection (and I also don't know much about Berserk, so it didn't appeal much to me).  Not the worst DW game they've made.  You want to talk about bad?  Play the Heroic Legend Of Arslan game they did.  That anime series felt so much like a musou in anime form at times, and when they announced the game, I got pretty hyped for it..and it sucked really bad.   

[Joe Molotov]

Kojima is the OG homo luden

[Tasty]

Kojima is the OG homo luden

And Raiden is the OG homo

[Svejk]

Kojima is the OG homo luden

And Raiden is the OG homo

Thanks to the American VO.  The Japanese voice actor at least sounded off like he had a pair.

[Bebpo]

Please be better than the 4th one and the first MI remake.

[HardcoreRetro]

Should be fine with Ron Gilbert at the helm. Thimbleweed Park was good.

[Coffee Dog]

I beat monkey island 1 and 2 last year, this news is amazing!! The triple threat of
-ron and Dave
-the music team coming back (!!!)
-guybrush's VA

Has left me very excited! I'd actually forgotten about thimbleweed as well, so I'm sure I'll play that before this comes out.

[MMaRsu]

Eh id be more excited if it was more like 3 aka best monkey island

[Svejk]

I need to up and play through those already.

[Joe Molotov]

Eh id be more excited if it was more like 3 aka best monkey island

Even though Curse of Monkey Island didn't have Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman or Tim Schafer, it'll always be my favorite. The animation blew my mind back then, and the VA for Guybrush was great.

[Bebpo]

Yeah, I love MI 1/2 (the all I got was a t-shirt bit, chicken bit, monkey bits, the opening of MI2 are all great), but playing them sequentially as they came out MI3 with it's film animation look blew me away and has always been my favorite.

4 was ugly and bad and I don't think I even finished it.
Tales of Monkey Island was pretty zzz Telltale. I think I got through 3 of the 5 eps before falling off and I don't remember one moment of the three I finished.

Didn't play the MI1/2 remakes, the first because it was ugly as sin, the second I just never got around to.

[HardcoreRetro]

The remakes had toggles for the artstyle. Could've just played it with the original art.

[Bebpo]

The remakes had toggles for the artstyle. Could've just played it with the original art.

But then...they are the same as playing the original? Like there's zero reason to replay them unless you just want to replay MI1/2 which you could do at any time prior anyhow.

[Coffee Dog]

It's worth it for the voice cast, imo. You can mod special edition monkey island 1 to play old graphics + voice acting, and it's an option in special edition 2.

There's parts of monkey island 2 where it's really obvious that they crammed in a shitload of dialogue because text is free, and when it's all voice acted it just makes the joke funnier. The one that comes to mind is having Phil Lamar read like 30 different variants of forbidden shapes when you click on invalid parts of the sea chart.

[Polident Hive]

This is the weirdest remake/remaster maybe ever. In brief, it’s a late life PS2 game never released outside Japan, with no cult following, loosely connected to the niche Way of the Samurai/Shinobido series. The only US release of Shinobido was the sequel as a Vita launch game. Way of the Samurai hasn’t had a main entry in a decade, since the PS3. The company moved on when they seemed to find success with those Akihabara vampire pervert games.

I know it because I bought a copy for about 400 yen at some Book Off in Osaka years ago.

[MMaRsu]

The remakes had toggles for the artstyle. Could've just played it with the original art.

But then...they are the same as playing the original? Like there's zero reason to replay them unless you just want to replay MI1/2 which you could do at any time prior anyhow.

It has voice acting

[Bebpo]

Posted in the other thread, but for people not reading that thread I've bumped 10 times a day for the last two weeks, I made my first crummy Unity game. This is the 1.0 release. Has stuff that absolutely could be improved and there are some bugs if you jump around with level select, so don't do that,

also recommend playing windowed mode because I couldn't get the text scaling right for full-screen and there's one text bit that's like half off-screen (and still in the wrong spot a bit in windowed).

https://dkclassdesign.itch.io/the-task

You can tell the progression of my Unity learning because stage 1 was like FIRST UNITY ROOM, stage 2 was like a little more going on and stage 3 where I got to in my first month of taking a Unity class.

I may come back to it later on and fix up some stuff but I'm super burnt out and sick of this so I'm gonna move to my next project now.

Anyhow, enjoy it, hate it, troll it, whatever you wanna do. There you go.

[Tasty]

- Wasn't on board with the creepy text at first but it works, the writing is consistent (important) and snappy
- Enjoyed mixing up the gameplay styles per level
- Good spritework, great music, fun SFX, ugly HUD/UI but that's usually the case for alphas/betas so no worries
- Rock solid framerate and satisfying pew pew gameplay, other indie shooters could learn something from this
- The fact I played this and it had this amount of content and didn't crash is pretty applause-able, great job bebps!
- This is far, far beyond even my first 10 attempts at making a game, congrats on making something!





Was the last level a "supposed to lose" mindfuck? Cause I couldn't move or aim lol. I took it as a cool creative choice.

[Bebpo]

Thanks Tasty,


Oh, also worth noting I haven't updated the downloadable build in days. So if anyone is gonna try, use the web embedded version. I should build the exe again and update the downloadable.

Was the last level a "supposed to lose" mindfuck? Cause I couldn't move or aim lol. I took it as a cool creative choice.

Uhhhh, can you elaborate? Not sure if something glitched.

The last level is supposed to go like this:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

-can't move/shoot do anything while the tentacles come down
-can't move but can shoot left/right radius during the long level of stuff
-can't move/shoot when the giant pink bomb is coming down until the mysterious stranger says "I'll help you move" and then your controls unlock and you can move out of the way
-should be able to move and shoot during the big tentacle fight
-should be able to move and shoot during the final boss fight
-can't do anything during the boss death scene
-in the credits you can move and shoot but nothing reacts to it

[close]

[Bebpo]

Also I should add this is less of a game (it's like 5 mins) and more of prototyping with a short story because I feel weird making stuff that doesn't have a story from start to end.

Everything in the game is ADHD because was just a learning thing of going "I wonder if I can do that?" and then I spend half a day and do it and go cool! and then move on to the next thing I wanna try. Tried to do a lot of different techniques to learn some Unity basics and how to potentially do some cool stuff in future projects.


My current goal is to basically spend most of 2022 just doing lots of these prototype kind of games in every genre imaginable so I can get a feel for how to make different genres of games while getting the basics of coding/art/music/Unity down and figuring out my strengths and weaknesses. I wanna try to do that for 2022 and then pick a genre I really enjoyed making (probably an rpg) and then spend 2023 on just one actual few hours long indie game that I can maybe sell for $1 or something and put in these itch.io bundles.

Mostly just depends on not getting burnt out and not giving up. So gonna keep at it. Working on this got me out of long depression because I had something to be passionate about again. So that's good! But crunching for days on end is also bad! So just gotta do it with a decent balance.

[chronovore]

Played it, had fun.
Wasn't sure what the Eye's win condition was. If there's an HP bar, I missed it.
You should be proud that you started a project, finished it, and published it. That's so much more than most people can manage.

[archnemesis]

I've made about a dozen tutorial games in Unity and a handful of unfinished prototypes. I agree with Tasty, it is a very good first game. It definitely needs some refinement but you have a really solid foundation to continue build upon.

It's the same for most developers. John Romero made ~90 games before Wolf3D. Keep at it and I'm sure you can come up with something great after a few iterations.

[Bebpo]

Thanks, yeah, will keep at it. Do you have a page with your tutorial games you made?

Played it, had fun.
Wasn't sure what the Eye's win condition was. If there's an HP bar, I missed it.
You should be proud that you started a project, finished it, and published it. That's so much more than most people can manage.

Yeah Eye just has mid-boss esque HP. Didn't get around to lifebars, mostly because the sprites tended to hang around the top of the screen and I couldn't think of a good place to put an HP bar and was also worried it might look tacky if I couldn't get it pixely to match.

Everything goes down fast enough that I wasn't too worried about not having lifebars but it's definitely something I'll try to implement in my next game for bosses. Or like glowy hit animations if they die in 3-6 jumps or zelda energy balls hit back at them.

I thought about doing a zelda energy tennis ball thing between bullet phases with the final boss but that's a bit above my paygrade at the moment on a time deadline.

[archnemesis]

Thanks, yeah, will keep at it. Do you have a page with your tutorial games you made?

No. I don't need them for my portfolio and they are not interesting to anyone else. I typically don't change design or art since it's the programming parts that I want to learn.

For my own prototypes I've spent no effort on art or music. I prefer using basic geometric shapes until I've found a fun game mechanic. I can share a link in the future if I make something worth publishing.

[who is ted danson?]

https://twitter.com/remedygames/status/1511808969165185035

[Bebpo]

Thanks, yeah, will keep at it. Do you have a page with your tutorial games you made?

No. I don't need them for my portfolio and they are not interesting to anyone else. I typically don't change design or art since it's the programming parts that I want to learn.

For my own prototypes I've spent no effort on art or music. I prefer using basic geometric shapes until I've found a fun game mechanic. I can share a link in the future if I make something worth publishing.

That makes sense. I think for my next project I should go that direction of making the game  & levels with basic shapes first to establish the "game" part and then work on the art/music and then work on the effects.

[tiesto]

Posted in the other thread, but for people not reading that thread I've bumped 10 times a day for the last two weeks, I made my first crummy Unity game. This is the 1.0 release. Has stuff that absolutely could be improved and there are some bugs if you jump around with level select, so don't do that,

also recommend playing windowed mode because I couldn't get the text scaling right for full-screen and there's one text bit that's like half off-screen (and still in the wrong spot a bit in windowed).

https://dkclassdesign.itch.io/the-task

You can tell the progression of my Unity learning because stage 1 was like FIRST UNITY ROOM, stage 2 was like a little more going on and stage 3 where I got to in my first month of taking a Unity class.

I may come back to it later on and fix up some stuff but I'm super burnt out and sick of this so I'm gonna move to my next project now.

Anyhow, enjoy it, hate it, troll it, whatever you wanna do. There you go.

Damn, extremely impressive first game release! Really fun and some very nice graphics and effects. Was it easy putting in the bullet patterns?

[benjipwns]

Since Nintex has stepped back from being an active member he's not here to admit he was wrong and share that Unreal Engine 5 is now available: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/unreal-engine-5

Complete with a bunch of trademarked buzzwords:

NANITE & VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS
Massively detailed
Create games and worlds with massive amounts of geometric detail with Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and a new Virtual Shadow Map system.

Directly import and replicate multi-million-polygon meshes while maintaining a real-time frame rate without any noticeable loss of fidelity.

These systems intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing poly count and draw call constraints.

LUMEN
Dynamic global illumination and reflections
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflections solution that enables indirect lighting to adapt on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day or opening an exterior door.

With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; what you see inside the Unreal Editor is what you get on console.

TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION
Quality or performance? Why choose?
Players of next-generation consoles expect frame rates of 60 fps or more on high-resolution displays, putting an enormous strain on rendering resources.

Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), a built-in, platform-independent, high-quality upsampling system, enables the engine to render at much lower resolution but with similar output pixel fidelity to frames rendered at a higher resolution.

WORLD PARTITION
Bigger, better Open Worlds
With Unreal Engine 5, a new World Partition system changes how levels are managed and streamed, automatically dividing the world into a grid and streaming the necessary cells.

Team members can now also simultaneously work on the same region of the same World, thanks to a new One File Per Actor system, while with Data Layers, you can create different variations of the same World—such as day and night versions—as layers that exist in the same space.

Also they're expanding the game templates into a full fledged game thing:

Lyra Starter Game
Lyra Starter Game is a sample gameplay project built alongside Unreal Engine 5 development to serve as an excellent starting point for creating new games, as well as a hands-on learning resource. We plan to continue to upgrade this living project with future releases to demonstrate our latest best practices.

And they've made the city from the Matrix thing available:

City Sample
The City Sample is a free downloadable sample project that reveals how the city scene from The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience was built. The project—which consists of a complete city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters—demonstrates how we used new and improved systems in Unreal Engine 5 to create the experience.

[Bebpo]

Posted in the other thread, but for people not reading that thread I've bumped 10 times a day for the last two weeks, I made my first crummy Unity game. This is the 1.0 release. Has stuff that absolutely could be improved and there are some bugs if you jump around with level select, so don't do that,

also recommend playing windowed mode because I couldn't get the text scaling right for full-screen and there's one text bit that's like half off-screen (and still in the wrong spot a bit in windowed).

https://dkclassdesign.itch.io/the-task

You can tell the progression of my Unity learning because stage 1 was like FIRST UNITY ROOM, stage 2 was like a little more going on and stage 3 where I got to in my first month of taking a Unity class.

I may come back to it later on and fix up some stuff but I'm super burnt out and sick of this so I'm gonna move to my next project now.

Anyhow, enjoy it, hate it, troll it, whatever you wanna do. There you go.

Damn, extremely impressive first game release! Really fun and some very nice graphics and effects. Was it easy putting in the bullet patterns?

Thanks! Yeah, the bullet patterns weren't bad or too time consuming. There are a lot of good online tutorials about writing short sets of math code to spawn different bullet patterns. I suck at math so the actual math is a bit hard for me to grasp, but I understand the code that gets to the calculations so it's easy enough to tweak the patterns in shape and speed to get the results I wanted. Turns out most bullet patterns in shmup are simply just math. Even enemies like Gradius and stuff come out in sine waves, which is just a math formula. The math can get pretty complex for crazy patterns, which I didn't try.

Also a lot of online tutorials use particles for bullet patterns which is a completely different direction than I went, but that might be even better/easier to implement.

Or if you're using Unity you can pay $25 for a pack of a ton of already written bullet patterns to add to your game. If I do another shmup in the future I will just use this:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/integration/uni-bullet-hell-19088

[chronovore]

Since Nintex has stepped back from being an active member he's not here to admit he was wrong and share that Unreal Engine 5 is now available: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/unreal-engine-5

Complete with a bunch of trademarked buzzwords:

NANITE & VIRTUAL SHADOW MAPS
Massively detailed
Create games and worlds with massive amounts of geometric detail with Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and a new Virtual Shadow Map system.

Directly import and replicate multi-million-polygon meshes while maintaining a real-time frame rate without any noticeable loss of fidelity.

These systems intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing poly count and draw call constraints.

LUMEN
Dynamic global illumination and reflections
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination and reflections solution that enables indirect lighting to adapt on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day or opening an exterior door.

With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; what you see inside the Unreal Editor is what you get on console.

TEMPORAL SUPER RESOLUTION
Quality or performance? Why choose?
Players of next-generation consoles expect frame rates of 60 fps or more on high-resolution displays, putting an enormous strain on rendering resources.

Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), a built-in, platform-independent, high-quality upsampling system, enables the engine to render at much lower resolution but with similar output pixel fidelity to frames rendered at a higher resolution.

WORLD PARTITION
Bigger, better Open Worlds
With Unreal Engine 5, a new World Partition system changes how levels are managed and streamed, automatically dividing the world into a grid and streaming the necessary cells.

Team members can now also simultaneously work on the same region of the same World, thanks to a new One File Per Actor system, while with Data Layers, you can create different variations of the same World—such as day and night versions—as layers that exist in the same space.

Also they're expanding the game templates into a full fledged game thing:

Lyra Starter Game
Lyra Starter Game is a sample gameplay project built alongside Unreal Engine 5 development to serve as an excellent starting point for creating new games, as well as a hands-on learning resource. We plan to continue to upgrade this living project with future releases to demonstrate our latest best practices.

And they've made the city from the Matrix thing available:

City Sample
The City Sample is a free downloadable sample project that reveals how the city scene from The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience was built. The project—which consists of a complete city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters—demonstrates how we used new and improved systems in Unreal Engine 5 to create the experience.

Yes, pretty much everything about UE5 is amazing, and their push to keep Unity in the backseat by offering stunning resources and learning opportunities is just overwhelming.

Saw that Crystal Dynamics is even moving off their proprietary engine to UE5 now. Next Tomb Raider will be UE.