Do any of you code for your jobs?

[Tasty]

Also fwiw in the past I developed most of my unreleased projects using Game Maker (v4-7), Construct 2 and 3, and an obscure now-10-year old-abandonware HTML5 engine called "Akihabara JS."

I did release at least one thing using Construct 3 tho...

[Madrun Badrun]

This thread has made me start looking into game dev for fun.  It seems like it is super easy to actually get into with tools these days compared to a decade ago. 

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

It's never been easier, there's never been more resources available for people who want to, and the tools have never been better or cheaper (there is pretty much an extremely high quality freeware version of anything you might choose to use)

[Bebpo]

This thread has made me start looking into game dev for fun.  It seems like it is super easy to actually get into with tools these days compared to a decade ago.

That's definitely my experience so far.

If you're interested, give it a shot! We get enough devs here we can have our own Bore jam going.

[Uncle]

you hadn't posted in this thread for a while bebpo

are you guys trying to be cagey about what you're working on like a real game company? 

[Bebpo]

Nah, I've been on a coding/design break. Will be getting back to it. Just taking care of other life stuff first.

[Tasty]

are you guys trying to be cagey about what you're working on like a real game company? 

Maybe Square, but unintentionally. 

[Tasty]

This thread has made me start looking into game dev for fun.  It seems like it is super easy to actually get into with tools these days compared to a decade ago. 

It's never been easier, there's never been more resources available for people who want to, and the tools have never been better or cheaper (there is pretty much an extremely high quality freeware version of anything you might choose to use)

I remember being turned onto Game Maker via Game Pro in like 2003. Things have seriously, seeeeeriously come a long ways.

[Uncle]

game maker was so shitty back then 

at the time it was barely graduated from (IIRC) having been a teaching tool a teacher made to teach a class about game creation?

the only way to include background music was to have it in midi format, and whatever engine they were using to play it caused the entire game to freeze for a few frames whenever the music looped 

[Tasty]

game maker was so shitty back then 

at the time it was barely graduated from (IIRC) having been a teaching tool a teacher made to teach a class about game creation?

the only way to include background music was to have it in midi format, and whatever engine they were using to play it caused the entire game to freeze for a few frames whenever the music looped 

100% right. The version I got was like 5, and v1-3 were the college versions. There was no scripting. I think it was nearly impossible to make a decent platformer, it seemed more tuned to top-down shooters and maybe RPGs. Still, I was totally captivated by that and later, "Dark Basic."

Man now I want to dig out my old Game Maker EXEs even though I don't have a way to play them myself.

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

If any of y'all get the game making bug and want unity help, freeware tools or free assets let me know; I'd like to think I'm more useful than "Let's show you how to make a thing, do this, do this, do this, now you know, don't forget to like and subscribe (and don't add anything to this prototype because its made in a fucked up way)"

[Bebpo]

Yeah, you've been super helpful Sage!

[Bebpo]

So I tried getting back to coding today. Always figured a quick way to ease into it was to just make a volume slider for my Entropy-Chan game jam game. Should be a 5-15 min thing.

Since my game doesn't have a pause menu and there's not a great place on the map to put a volume slider I thought I'd add a pause menu first. But uhhhhh, I've completely forgotten everything I learned about coding in Unity having been away from it for two months 

Like I found my gamemanager prefab and added a new canvas called PauseScreen and added a panel and a Resume button. Then I referenced my pause screen in my other projects and copied the code:

[SerializeField] GameObject pauseMenu;

   public void Resume1()
    {
        pauseMenu.SetActive(false);
    }

Like I'll get to the part that makes the pause menu appear in the first place and time scale stops the game next since that is a bit more complex having to grab a key command. The first thing I want to do is just have the pause menu active from the start and test the resume button to make sure it unpauses the game aka sets the pause screen false.

So I go into my Resume button and add the Resume script, turn PauseScreen into a prefab and add it in the serialized field. Put the script into the On Click() and have it call Resume.Resume1 on click.

But...it doesn't work (hitting the button does nothing and I can't remove the pause screen) and this feels like fuck I need to start from scratch and redo all the tutorials from scratch again to remember how to do this stuff properly :|

I looked at my other game with a pause screen and ...it's set up exactly the same way with the pause screen canvas as a prefab which goes into the serializedfield slot on the resume button and uses the resume.resume1 command to just setActive(false).

Any idea what I fucked up? I want to get a working pause menu that just has a resume button and below it a volume slider. I'll learn how to code the volume slider bit next if I can just figure out how to unpause and then pause all over again.

[chronovore]

All I can say is: I hear you.

I started Blender tutorials and stepped away for a couple months. I'm as puzzled as a newborn child.

[Bebpo]

All I can say is: I hear you.

I started Blender tutorials and stepped away for a couple months. I'm as puzzled as a newborn child.

Yeah, did not expect to forget this stuff so fast. Hoping it'll come back to me once I get some stuff going again.

May just need to run a couple of short early tutorials to get the gears in my brain clicking again.

[Bebpo]

So trying it today, it turns out I had nothing wrong. It was just bugged and it worked fine today 


Made the pause menu with placeholders and it worked. Added a volume slider and spent way too much time trying to figure out how to adjust the AudioListener since like everyone result on google was about changing individual audiosources or audiomixer but I just wanted an overall volume control.

Turns out audiolistener is default static so you don't make [privateSerialized] private AudioListener Audio like I was trying.
Instead my entire code for my audio volume slider is literally:

Code: [Select]

public class VolumeSlider : MonoBehaviour
{
    public void Volume(float vol)
    {
        AudioListener.volume = vol;
    }
 
}


Anyhow, it worked. I can hit the placeholder pause button in the upper right corner and it'll pause the game and bring up the pause screen and can adjust the overall volume and unpause. Since it's attached to the gamemanager static, it works in both stages.

Very, very, very slowly starting to refresh on how to do things.

Should probably clean up the pause screen visually. I couldn't remember how to make an image that said Volume so I just made a button that says Volume and does nothing on click for placeholder lazyiness.

And I should probably try to make a new stage for the game to remember how to make things. Honestly it feels like it's harder going back to an old project and adding things vs like just starting on an all new project fresh. Because with the former you have to remember how to do things whereas with the latter you can just start with a blank slate and do things one at a time looking up how to do each thing.

But yeah, overall this really sucks how much I've already forgotten. I'm like uhhh how do I make a top part of a script correctly to make a variable? How do I get getcomponent? 

I guess if I can pull myself back into this I need to make sure I never take more than like a week or two off without doing some coding, just to keep it in the brain.

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

But uhhhhh, I've completely forgotten everything I learned about coding in Unity having been away from it for two months 

IKR?

It's more common than you think;

If I take time off from coding, its not even a motivation thing, I legit forget actual coding and get back and look at stuff and go "what the fuck is a boolean?  " 

this is why we leave ourselves comments if it starts getting even remotely tricksy 

Made the pause menu with placeholders and it worked. Added a volume slider and spent way too much time trying to figure out how to adjust the AudioListener since like everyone result on google was about changing individual audiosources or audiomixer but I just wanted an overall volume control.

Yeah, prebuilt UI components like sliders / text inputs / fill bars are nice and easy to use.

For a volume control, I have a couple of suggestions beyond just setting via slider;

• Set your master volume control to start at ~70% or so instead of 100 so starting it up isnt ear rape
• use a static variable for audio volume instead of writing direct to it, so you can add a audiolistener volume = savedvolume or whatever in a setup class and keep audio levels consistent between scenes

also worth seperating music and sfx volumes out too, and letting people set them individually

[Tasty]

Sooooo I got the bug and I got more ideas and I'm gonna proceed on my little RPG project on my own, with the hope to collab with Bebpo in the future. My skills will only be sharper after doing this project, even if I don't finish it I think.

Should I start my own thread? Or just post stuff here, either way is cool. Thanks for the inspiration bebps.

[Uncle]

what kind of game are you thinking?

an RPG where your main character is a low level mage who languished in his studies and just became an enchanted hot dog vendor, he conjures up hot dogs and sells them on the street corner, and everyone likes his hot dogs and he doesn't really have much ambition

but then his condiment supplier is interrupted due to a war and tariffs and sanctions so he is forced to buy black market condiments, which have been sabotaged by an agent on the other side of the war who knows the royalty have a penchant for hot dogs

so his latest batch of hot dogs transform people into actual dogs, and he gets blamed for it and is forced to flee the city, and this is the impetus for his adventure, to uncover who has framed him and restore his good name

and you attack by flinging enchanted hot dogs at your enemies which are augmented by various spell effects

 

[Tasty]

what kind of game are you thinking?

an RPG where your main character is a low level mage who languished in his studies and just became an enchanted hot dog vendor, he conjures up hot dogs and sells them on the street corner, and everyone likes his hot dogs and he doesn't really have much ambition

but then his condiment supplier is interrupted due to a war and tariffs and sanctions so he is forced to buy black market condiments, which have been sabotaged by an agent on the other side of the war who knows the royalty have a penchant for hot dogs

so his latest batch of hot dogs transform people into actual dogs, and he gets blamed for it and is forced to flee the city, and this is the impetus for his adventure, to uncover who has framed him and restore his good name

and you attack by flinging enchanted hot dogs at your enemies which are augmented by various spell effects

 

I don't have much at the moment but I'm diving into the battle system since I have that pretty fleshed out, and I think it's about as offbeat as your ideas.

It combines a turn-based system and first-person view with a cooldown timer and randomized menu items. I think my influences are Tetris and WarioWare.

I don't play a lot of JRPGs so there could be prior art, but I'm doing this in GB Studio with the intention of writing it to actual physical cartridges and giving them to friends.

[Tasty]

I do think the story will involve robots... and maybe a dog.

Maybe a robot dog.

[Uncle]

first person RPG like wizardry GB?

[Tasty]

first person RPG like wizardry GB?

Yup, except I haven't played that while I have played Earthbound Beginnings and Omori.

[Bebpo]

I started learning html for a work thing. I've never looked into it before.
I'm like what's a .css file? What's a </div>? etc...

Spent an hour reading some online starter tutorials and crapped out an empty page with an image, link, background and wrote a .css style file to put hover text over the image. Was kinda fun. Don't really need to learn anything beyond like very basic stuff like this for what I'm doing for this client. I'm not writing code, I just need to be able to read some basic stuff like where the img sources are in a website and the alt text.

But wouldn't mind spending a couple of weeks actually learning how this stuff works just to have that knowledge since I work with a lot of websites at work.

[Tasty]

I started learning html for a work thing. I've never looked into it before.
I'm like what's a .css file? What's a </div>? etc...

[Tasty]

HTML is super easy.

Some people say CSS is hard but it's actually pretty easy.

JavaScript is just awesome.

[Nintex]

Vertically align your div in another div
WITHOUT FLEX BOX CHEATING 

Custom style your checkbox
without Javascript

Fix the Firefox font aliasing

No seriously, fix it.

[Tasty]

Vertically align your div in another div
WITHOUT FLEX BOX CHEATING 

display: table-cell;
vertical-align: middle;

You can also use the CSS units vw and vh to vertically align a div you already know the height of.

I think. Grid Layout is the new hotness now anyways, flexbox is "old" (aka popularized 2011-2014).

Custom style your checkbox
without Javascript

Will try when I get home. CSS shadow parts, or even combining background with CSS shapes, could work...

Fix the Firefox font aliasing

No seriously, fix it.

Use Linux. :trollface

[Nintex]

That's a good v-align hack you could also do top: 50%; and transform:translateY(-50%);


For Firefox

Code: [Select]

-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;


Code: [Select]

@-moz-document url-prefix() {
  body {
    font-weight: lighter !important;
  }
}
why font-rendering is forever broken in Firefox

[therealdeal]

Yeah I prefer grid to flex box but let’s be real for what I do it’s mostly “throw bootstrap at it”

[GreatSageEqualOfHeaven]

Bumping for a couple of Good Deals on Humble if Bepbos got that itch again

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/unity-art-software

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/unity-tools-software

[Bebpo]

Yeah it’s tempting. Some of the ones I looked at on the store are in those.

But I definitely regret the ~$300 I dropped during the Unity sale on tons of stuff I’ll probably never end up using even if I get back to making things. At my level of skill I just like hands on making all the stuff so I know how it works.