What are you making?

[Renzatic]

What's neat is that it's not drawn, but rendered in Blender. All I did to touch it up was add a bloom effect around the screen, and toss in a couple of halftone filters in Affinity Photo.

All the goofing around I did trying to get the perfect comic book look, and it ends up being the simplest thing in the world. It's a bunch of settings called Freestyle. I never paid much attention to it before because, to me, it gave results that looked way too technical to be convincing for anything other than an artificial attempt at a hand drawn look. Then here recently, I found out that you can vary the width, length, and termination of the lines, and learned on my own that guffing up the underlying geometry so things aren't absolutely perfect produces a pretty convincing freehand line art style. Throw some bold colors behind it, and you get something that looks surprisingly like a comic book.

So I did the above. Liked the results. Decided from there to go back to one of my low poly scenes, touch it up so everything isn't entirely flat shaded, then do the above, and...

...boom. Sweet candy.

[WingedKagouti]

and learned on my own that guffing up the underlying geometry so things aren't absolutely perfect produces a pretty convincing freehand line art style.

Arc System Works learned this while making Guilty Gear Xrd and applied it further to Dragon Ball FighterZ.

A 1-hour GDC presentation about GGXrd by one of the devs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E

An animator talking about both games:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZsboyfs-L4

While both of those focus more on the animation aspect, they still touch upon the fundamental aspect of hand drawings usually being "imperfect" as opposed to computer renders usually being "perfect".

[Renzatic]

Why the hell ain't I making money at this? I figure things out by total accident that well trained people who actually know what they're doing spend tons of time sussing up.

I AM SERENDIPITY!

[Nameless Voice]

Not something I'm making, but a huge announcement around game dev: Epic Games have bought Quixel and have made their entire catalogue of photogrammetry scanned assets free for Unreal Engine use.
They're also going to be making Quixel Mixer (something very similar to Substance Painter) free for everyone, regardless of engine.

Announcement is here:

https://quixel.com/blog/2019/11/12/q...ith-epic-games

[Judith]

On one hand, that's awesome, and I'd love to try this stuff out. On the other, haven't they just put down the only competition to Substance? That's not a healthy situation.

Also:

Why the hell ain't I making money at this?

Because working the industry sucks and you're better off having a stable job and this as a hobby?

[Renzatic]

On one hand, that's awesome, and I'd love to try this stuff out. On the other, haven't they just put down the only competition to Substance? That's not a healthy situation.

They're still selling Megascan assets for use in other engines, and at half the price to boot. Provided Quixel is still allowed some autonomy to work outside of UE4, and they use the cash they gained from the accquision to continue building Mixer, I see it as a pretty good thing overall.

edit: Hey! What do you know!

At last, Mixer 2020 now introduces 3D Painting, Real-time 3D Curvature, Smart Materials and much, much more.

And...

But that’s not all. Epic is helping us make the upcoming 2020 versions of Bridge and Mixer 100% free for everyone, with no subscription required and both fully featured.

NICE!

Here's a video showing off all the goods. The new Mixer is demoed around 2:50.



If Quixel/Epic is working on upping Mixer's procedural node game, they'll have a direct competitor to both Substance Painter and Designer all in one package. For free.

Because working the industry sucks and you're better off having a stable job and this as a hobby?

Oh yeah. Good point. Still, I wouldn't mind making the occasional bit of money on the side from it.

[qolelis]

This reminds me of a story from my home town I once heard about two competing petshops. One of them was owned by someone who already had all the money they needed, while the other depended on their shop to stay afloat. The former kept their prices so low that they lost more than they gained, and eventually the other shop went out of business, leaving the already rich to do as they pleased. Now, I don't remember if they then increased prices, with customers having no choice but to comply and pay up, but let's hope that's not what Epic is planning once enough people have switched to Unreal. It seems like what Epic is doing right now benefits all devs, not only themselves, so I'm hopeful.

I have had my doubts about choosing Unreal, but this is clearly not one of them.

[Renzatic]

It's a pretty solid strategy. Epic is dumping money around left and right to open development up to anyone who wants to jump in. With all these high powered, cutting edge tools and assets that usually require a hefty investment to access now available for free, anyone with even a passing interest in working in 3D will be immediately drawn to UE4. They'll play around with it, come to learn it, then likely use it for any big projects they have in mind going forward.

So what about those people who end up screwing around with it all for a little bit, then drop it once their interest wanes? Well, Epic was never going to make any money off those people to begin with, so there's really no harm in allowing them access to all these expensive, cutting edge tools and assets.

End result? Epic garners a big userbase weaned on their tools, ends up netting tons of cash, and everyone has some fun.

[Renzatic]

Okay, so they're going entirely on the trust system here. I was expecting Epic to lock all the free assets to UE4 specifically, without any option to export them out to an editor to screw around with. The way it's actually set up, once you link your Epic Store/Unreal Engine account to Quixel's, you can just download whatever you see on the Megascan Marketplace, and export it to wherever, with the only caveat being that you TOTALLY SWEAR TO GOD you won't use them in any public projects outside of UE4.

Once I figured out how to use Bridge to export stuff into Unreal, I whipped this up in just three minutes. It's so simple to do. You click a button, and the model shows up in your scene. Cool as all hell naw.

FOGGY FOGGY TREE 'N FERN!

[WingedKagouti]

Humble has an interesting bundle for anyone looking to get into Unreal Engine or learn more about it:
https://www.humblebundle.com/softwar...pment-software
A couple of games (Q.U.B.E. & QUBE2), some asset packs and several lengthy tutorials by GameDev.tv.

[Renzatic]

Here's a video showing how to use Megascan assets to build a grungy Silent Hill 2 bathroom environment. It's neat seeing just how easy it all is.

[icemann]

It's just not the same without the music.

[Sulphur]

That's pretty cool. At the same time, it also means we're going to get more low-effort single-apartment horror games with all of these ready assets available for people to remix and put out onto the market. But hey, if it brings more creative power to people, good on Epic for it.

[Renzatic]

It's just not the same without the music.

Then mix and match. Mute the tutorial, play this video, and get lost in the ambience.

[demagogue]

It's not the assets, it's how you use them. I think the relevant metaphor is, if you want more jewels, you want to open the sluice gates as much as possible. I'm talking about free/low cost, powerful, and easy-to-understand-and-use assets and tools and tutorials, etc.

Yes you'll also get a lot more sludge in the process, but you'll get more jewels buried in the sludge. Or so the theory goes. But I would buy it. Itch, to take one example, is a fascinating study in how games get made and released from the grassroots level, a ton of sludge, but a lot of hidden emeralds and diamonds too if you're willing to dig into it.

[Judith]

IMO this will bring more spotlight on level designers again. In the old days, when making content was relatively easy, an LD was this kind of jack of all trades, as it was feasible to make almost all the content yourself. Nowadays, if you want to show off your LD skills or lighting skills, you need all that content, since its fidelity skyrocketed over the years and noone is really making that stuff on their own (unless they have tons of time on their hands).

[Sulphur]

It's not the assets, it's how you use them.

That's the entire point. I look forward to seeing creative use of them, but not to trudging through hundreds of asset flip showcases to get to said jewels. I think we're going to need more powerful filter tools now more than ever in an open market like Steam.

[demagogue]

I'll admit wading through sludge is a young man's/woman's game. Ratings systems and top rated narrative ratings are doing a decent job of that job, or to some extent.

[henke]

Humble Music & Sound Effect Bundle

This bundle came along at the right time, just as I'm fleshing out the audio for Stilt Fella.

Is it possible I have just found my leading man?

[henke]

I made a game this weekend!



It's playable in-browser, check it out!

https://henke.itch.io/jumpy-car-prototype

[Pyrian]

Got 1164. 'Tis alright. I like the "skate"-like mechanics. I don't feel like the charging mechanic adds much: it's like instead of pressing jump to jump you hold down jump and lift it up to jump, which is obnoxious. There's not much reason to prefer a smaller jump, and there doesn't seem to be a way to cancel a jump to get one anyway if you're going to have a longer jump ready.

[henke]

As much as I love having my games compared to skate, I'm not sure what you mean by that!

About the jump, I wanted to have it variable in case you ever needed a smaller jump, but then the levels ended up in a way that you never really did. When you're airborne the drag does slow you down tho, so a smaller jump lets you keep your speed up, not that there's ever much need for that.

[henke]

Opened up Steam and it was recommending me this:



Yeah I think I might've heard of this one.

[Renzatic]

I just saw a video of Yak's cloud game on Facebook where Happy Cloud Guy was raining fire down upon a bunch of dinosaurs.

Dunno why he hasn't posted it here yet. It's beautiful!

[Yakoob]

@henke - muahah yess, yess, algorithms, do your thingggggggg!

Also apparently we were featured in PGGamer in "Five new Steam games you probably missed" with Fulfillment so that probably helped, tho most of trffic comes from Steam's "free to play" hub. We got almost 5k downloads on on Steam since it launched (waaay better than Itch/Gamejolt, unsurprisingly)

@Renz Ask and ye shall receive!