Game Development Programmer's Obligations

[mfc]

I am totally going to be subjective:
Game engines are like instant food.
Real men/women program their game from scratch.


Eh there totally is more work in doing 2nd option but you have more control on your engine.
It's a matter of tastes. You would get things done faster with things like unity.

I am working on a game(extreme-low-priority) using SDL2 + C++ and i could recommend it.

[A-Man]

quote Appendix (Click to View)

Maybe it is because you have lack of experience, you are a bit slow, still new to the work as compared to others or MAYBE lazy . It can also be due to that everybody does their work in a hassle and you do it perfectly, slow and steady Maybe you will overcome it when you will keep practicing and get a habit out of your work, just like spriting and dc'ing.
Also, ill go with A-Laboratory  

Well, maybe and maybe not :P. Although I don't think I should be blaming the others about it. Thanks for your vote with the name!

quote YinYin (Click to View)

Starting on an engine is always faster. Unity is full feature free now as well btw.
I'm a little confused though why you would be deciding on the platform/engine?
Your indie teams don't seem to know what they are doing if they don't have that figured out.

That's good news about Unity! Thanks for sharing! Isn't it supposed to be me who decides what I am going to use though? I don't know how it should be, but the rest of the team barely care about what I am using or the code itself.

quote Bamboori (Click to View)

i think you would be well off discussing with your team what the finished game would need and eiter take an existing engine or, seeing your a-engine, make one yourself.

what ive also heard is that a lot of programmers use ready to go engines for prototypes to show to the team how the current game would look like, and later on recode the game in a "proper" way (quotation marks because often an engine suffices).

thats just my general idea of how to work these things out.

oh also im jealous of your productivity xD sounds like you are actually completing games

Making an engine takes a lot of time. Let alone having to do a new one every time you do a game of a different genre. The A-Engine is being written to do beat-em ups; one might be able to build a platformer with that also, but otherwise, it would fail or get extremely tedious.
But yes, it seems like getting into Unity might speed it up with simple projects a little (not that I've worked on any huge projects).
Seriously though, I suck at being productive.

quote bashscrazy (Click to View)

Nah mean? Like right now your engine is being used to make a One Piece game, but it can be used to make a DBZ game. An original brawler, etc. YEYE!

Yeah sure, but all of those would be beat em ups :P.

quote Someone else (Click to View)

I really cannot tell what you are doing wrong, as I have not got the slightest idea of what your code looks like, how it evolves over time etc. If you want you can send me some of your code, and I'll try to review it; other than that the only advice I can give is based on my own experiences, which may be completely different from yours.

One of the most useful things I've learned is to not try to write something that is perfect (or even good) the first time, but instead just try things out, and then fix things later on. In your case you are working on a 2D brawler game and as a result a lot of things do not even have to particularly well optimized, so do not fall into the trap of trying to optimize everything, as you will certainly fail to do so and just end up unproductive.

Thanks for the tips! The thing about getting stuff to "just work" is that all that work seems to accumulate and come back to hunt you down in the few days before the time you're supposed to release something (this is what is happening with me and the A-Engine at the moment. V0.1 is supposed to be released on 20th March, but it looks like I won't be able to make it in time). You're right about doing optimizations the first time being a trap, and I've learnt that the hard way sadly.

I would greatly appreciate a review on my code. I've recently started working on a small Ping Pong project to test out the modern OpenGL stuff. It's short in code, but works and best reflects what my coding is like. I will upload the source in a while. Thanks again XD!

quote Lord Silva (Click to View)

My experience with game engines is pretty bad. Especially Unity. There is too much dragging/dropping/clicking/double clicking in different windows/tabs/views. It took me forever to do anything. If you switch to one of those engine + IDE things, your productivity will most likely drop significantly until you learn where "things" are. I never had patience with such things.

If you are making a 2d game, I would just use something like SDL(2) rather than a full blown game engine. Just my opinion/experience.

Edit:

Looks like this is no longer true according to vv

lol, right. I guess I can get used to these stuff. And yes, I do use SDL2 (together with OpenGL) quite often.

quote Rhino.Freak (Click to View)

As far as I know you, the problem might be the way you organize the codes.. Lol I know I'm not contributing much by this but I have seen your .DAT files and even luffy's .a file was messy.. Might be that it slows you down in general?

In my defense, "luffy.a" is the result of the changes the A-Engine has gone through.
I do admit this is a problem with how I work however, but I might as well say that I have been doing much better with organization lately.

quote Ariel (Click to View)

I know nothing about programming
But what I can understand from ur problem is that u don't get excited enough to work(I think so)
For my painting when I get bored sketching people and faces I go and try some thing new
Maybe environments

My point is, if u just get less excited to work on anything , leave it for a while and try something new, than come back to it if u want to
So yes, try this Unity thing it might change ur attitude

Oh, in fact, being distracted seems to play a huge factor in holding me back sometimes, especially when the stuff starts compiling. I figured the best solution is to switch off the internet while working all together. Another thing that helped me a bit is keeping track of time while working; basically made a primitive timer program which stays always on top of the other windows, and I could toggle the timer with a "Working/NotWorking" button.
http://prntscr.com/6hj8h5
Thanks for your suggestions nevertheless!


Edit:

quote mfc (Click to View)

I am totally going to be subjective:
Game engines are like instant food.
Real men/women program their game from scratch.


Eh there totally is more work in doing 2nd option but you have more control on your engine.
It's a matter of tastes. You would get things done faster with things like unity.

I am working on a game(extreme-low-priority) using SDL2 + C++ and i could recommend it.

lol true, but it really sucks when you're always behind with speed.


Edit:
@Someone else: https://www.mediafire.com/?fodu912hsplbtmy
If you wanted to compile:

Code:

#linker options
-lmingw32 -lSDL2main -lSDL2 -lSDL2_image -lOpenGL32 -lglu32 -lglew32s -lSDL2_mixer -lSDL2_ttf

[YinYin]

quote YinYin (Click to View)

Starting on an engine is always faster. Unity is full feature free now as well btw.
I'm a little confused though why you would be deciding on the platform/engine?
Your indie teams don't seem to know what they are doing if they don't have that figured out.

That's good news about Unity! Thanks for sharing! Isn't it supposed to be me who decides what I am going to use though? I don't know how it should be, but the rest of the team barely care about what I am using or the code itself.

There is no how it should be. But I would expect whoever has the lead on a project to have enough knowledge on every front to make a potent decision in that regard. Else you pretty much have a huge lead and if your output cannot keep up with how fast you want the team to progress you may simply need more programmers or scale the project down.

[A-Man]

Might be. But I'd prefer to avoid jumping to conclusions until I make sure I am not the main cause of the problem.

[YinYin]

Your best bet to really test yourself would be participating in timed game jams :)
Create something playable within a day/weekend/week - then compare it to what others managed to do in that time.

[A-Man]

That is brilliant XD. It looks like it's going to be really fun also. I think I will try my luck with this one: http://jams.gamejolt.io/codeagame
Thanks a bunch!!

[mfc]

I made some research.
And I surrendered to an awesome engine.
http://www.waveengine.net/
It is 100% free and it only wants to show splash screen for 2 secs. And you can modify it to your game theme.
But i guess other engines require it too.
You code in friendly c# platform and it ports your game automatically to most used operating systems such as:

OS list (Click to View)

   Android Mobile & Tablet
   OUYA
   KindleFire (Amazon)
   iOS iPad & iPhone
   Windows Phone, Windows Store
   Windows Desktop
   MacOS
   Linux

And it has a great libraries, and working sample programs(this is awesome): https://github.com/WaveEngine/
You just double click and everything works.

If you like c#, then this is the best thing I can ever recommend

And since I like c# more than c++ and this is very crossplatform and awesome, I am switching to it. And working examples are great way to copy stuff from^^

unity and unreal engine both want your money at some points
https://store.unity3d.com/products/pricing

https://www.unrealengine.com/faq (Click to View)

Once you ship your game or application, you pay Epic 5% of gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product per calendar quarter. For a more detailed explanation of how that works, see the EULA and our product release page.

nope, all the way back to sdl2

[YinYin]

unity and unreal engine both want your money at some points
https://store.unity3d.com/products/pricing

https://www.unrealengine.com/faq (Click to View)

Once you ship your game or application, you pay Epic 5% of gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product per calendar quarter. For a more detailed explanation of how that works, see the EULA and our product release page.

True that - it's a laughable share only once you can afford it anyway though.

[A-Man]

That looks really cool! Only problem is its popularity, which means that if I am to work with a game team with programmers other than myself, it's less likely they will know how to use it. Unity, on the other hand, seems to be the most popular and common for all. If you have already managed to use Wave, that game jam to which I linked above might be the perfect chance to test it out :P (still 2 days left, but the theme is quite awkward).

And yes, that revenue % they're asking for is trivial. One might just get the license once he reaches the 1500$ if he's sure the game would sell good enough.

[A-Man]

Just submitted my entry for that game jam! Theme was awkward (GEMSTONES 0_o), but managed to come up with something, and ITS 4 AM GUTEN NACHT

http://www.mediafire.com/download/u3ccw8...iamond.rar

Edit:
Comments would be cool. Not sure if this is worth a topic by itself.
Screenie: http://gamejolt.com/games/category/game/...hot-107141