theeliasfrost.bsky.social
Former pixelartist. Developing unnamed RPG for funsies. I like ⌨️ programming, 🔧 3D modeling, 🎨 painting, 📖 reading and ✏️ writing. 🎹 music on the side. Proud AI-luddite
📚 Studying to become a teacher of history and literature.
Stockholm, Sweden
211 posts
247 followers
174 following
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I've never had as much fun playing a ttrpg as when I and a bunch of friends got together and played Fiasco. The collaborative "yes-and" nature of it lends itself to some outlandish and extremely funny storytelling.
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Me too, I can't recall any game at the top of my head. The first time I remember being somewhat impressed by it was propably fallout 3 of all things. This is not even displacement though, it's just giving the impression of it using refraction on an animated sprite.
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Thanks! Yeah I'm pretty happy with it. I used this method for controlling the density of clouds in my skybox material as well. It's a very versatile thing.
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Then I did some coding for spawning the effects and aligning to the surface and such but that was pretty easy.
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So what happens is that as the particle is increasing the color over time. Think of it like raising the floor until the texture is all white because the clamp is trending towards 1.
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The clamp has a max value of 1 and the min value is controlled by the color scalar on a particle effect. Over time the texture trends towards a value of one (all white) and that's how I fade out the effect.
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I created a texture that is black and white. Where white = 1 and black = 0. I multiplied it by a value in order to raise the white values (to create a stronger effect). I then reverted the output and put that into a clamp.
It helps to think of the texture almost like a height map (sorta).
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Sure! The material is quite simple really but working out the maths was the hard part.
The ripple is a particle that spawns on the water surface.
On the material you have the refraction value, I wanted to control that in order to fade out the effect. A refraction value of 1 means no refraction.
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Thanks! Do you mean the texture resolution? It's 1024x1024.
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The most important advice I can give is to be curious, play a lot (as in just try things and have fun), think "what if..." and let loose. Consulting tutorials should be used for when you're trying to understand something, not to unstuck yourself.
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That's describing a problem that has occured to some, but it's important not to interpret it as a prescription. If you're smart about it you will quickly start making things without tutorials. Learn things and most importanty try solving problems yourself before consulting tutorials.
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Make a bunch of small prototype-y games, get into actually *making* something without the intention of releasing or even showing it, just learn. I think you're coming at it from the wrong end.
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But in order to write down the details you need to understand what the details are. If you've never made a game before I would actually say it's for the better to not worry about documentation. Start making, play around and learn.
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I spend a lot of time documenting and organizing because the game is rather big but for a smaller game it's not necessarilly needed. I never wrote anything for my older, smaller games.
I think the question to ask is: what's it for? Does the complexity of the game warrant it?
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There were just too many things that I could conceivably see on the horizon that I decided to skip it for now. I want to qualify this by saying that the engine is terrific and I'm gonna use it someday in the future but not for now.
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That's what I gathered from testing the engine not more than a year ago. There were certain features that were either incomplete or missing. Those features have found it's way into the engine now (reworking UIDs, real-time testing, expanding the profiler, etc.).
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This is why learning to love the process is so important when making games. If the end result is at the top of the list of things you care about then you're going to have a bad time.
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The gameplay only becomes a story after the fact. Not during actual play. Just like how you living your life is not a story but you can choose to narrativize life events after the fact. It's a bit complicated but I think I make sense. All that's to say, I agree that Tetris is a game with no story.
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But games as a package can have elements of a story no doubt. Like written text, moving pictures, even characters in the game flat out telling you a story. But I see that as different (but not entirely seperate) from actually interacting with the gameplay.
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I would personally go so far as to say that the interactive part of a game (what we generally consider "the gameplay") necessarilly don't have a story because a story is told after the fact. When interacting, you're engaging in the here and now, there's no story "to be told" yet.
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I generally refute the idea that games are akin to both text and moving pictures because the way that you interact with games as a medium is so vastly different from both of them that it becomes a problem trying to compare and contrast.
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I think this stems from a disagreement of what games are "supposed" to be. Is it a medium like the written word and moving pictures? Or is it a vehicle for storytelling like novels and movies? Your example puts things into focus because Tetris clearly doesn't have a story but it's a game nonetheless
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What I mean to say is that very process is usually dismissed as you say. Or in most cases people are unaware. The thinking goes that "This design is bad, they should've done it like X or Y", without understaing the context that went into the design in the first place.
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It's about context, as another commenter puts it. A "good idea" is only good insofar that you're able to actually extract the "good" from it and fit it into a greater structure (the rest of the game). If you can't do that, the idea probably wasn't very "good" (see: compatible), in the first place.
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I agree. I mean, thinking about game design and implementing specific ones are totally different things. What seems good in your head very rarely translates 1-to-1 to a design that is actually good in practice.
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I love the process and the problem solving opportunities that game development provides. It's a never-ending well of interesting work, whether it's game design, art, animation, sound, music, writing. All of it.
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Alright :)
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It's actually pretty funny because a lot of games today that is praised for it's systems and freedom are following in the same footsteps of heavily overambitious systems-heavy games from the 80/90s.
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I'm not sure I follow. What about that makes the design modern? Games from way back had lots of freedom even in scripted sequences. My point is, if the design works for the intended purpose then it's the correct choice.
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Since you made the distinction, what would be considered modern design? Spittballing here based on the criteria (time), wouldn't Baldurs Gate 3 be even more outdated because it heavily emulate games like Ultima 7?