Then, you want a multiple layer approach to the terrain. Ideally your texture won't have baked in lighting, and you'll use a mesh and light the terrain. You want lots of little flashes to bring out the shape, so every time something blows up it will have a brief light that will light that patch of ground. That brings variety.
I think terrain is hard in this sort of game for a bunch of reasons. The first is that the texels on the terrain always look big compared to the hard edges of the polys of the objects on it, meaning it looks blurry. You can soften the edges of objects with blobby shadows to try and reduce the contrast. Depth of field wasn't a thing when I did this, but maybe you could try that on the tanks.
Hi MNDV! I am not after your commission, but I have some experience with this. First your screen shot is nice and I don't know what you dislike about it! As someone who did this a very long time ago here is my opinion.
@withthelove That's exactly what I used it for! We put it up on github, here (and @Spring was kind enough to give some feedback, which I still haven't done). #3 son is still badgering me to do some more level design. If you want, DM me, and I can give you a brain dump of what worked and what didn't for us (and PRs very welcome!)
@Xom Adept: So my strong suggestion is you take it nice and slow. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Play with a couple of different things, and write your own version of a classic (asteroids, worm, pong) in a couple of engines, just to get a feel for it all. It's really nice to go from one engine to another, and look at how, say, Tiled integrates with each one of them, because it gives you a grounding in some of the core concepts. At the end of the day, there are a whole bunch of common themes (like collision detection, shaders, draw order, game state, path following, update loops, and so and so on) that you find over and over again, and each time you relearn them in a different infra, you get a bit better, until eventually you will be able to pick up any game engine and get going quickly. So, in conclusion, don't stress about the engine or language right now, pick anything that you think looks fun and is well documented.
Hey, late to the party, but you should try Love2D for 2D games. It is super quick to get going and can actually be used for commercial games, although I guess you'd probably prefer sthing like Unity when you hit the big time. I have had a huge amount of fun just messing around with it.
Oh, you said not in the public domain. Still, check out those guys, the quality is amazing. I think people download and adapt them, and give appropriate credit.
We all know that the most successful coding site is stack overflow, and that basically works as you describe, if you add in bounties. Is that where you are going with this?
Then, you want a multiple layer approach to the terrain. Ideally your texture won't have baked in lighting, and you'll use a mesh and light the terrain. You want lots of little flashes to bring out the shape, so every time something blows up it will have a brief light that will light that patch of ground. That brings variety.
I think terrain is hard in this sort of game for a bunch of reasons. The first is that the texels on the terrain always look big compared to the hard edges of the polys of the objects on it, meaning it looks blurry. You can soften the edges of objects with blobby shadows to try and reduce the contrast. Depth of field wasn't a thing when I did this, but maybe you could try that on the tanks.
Hi MNDV! I am not after your commission, but I have some experience with this. First your screen shot is nice and I don't know what you dislike about it! As someone who did this a very long time ago here is my opinion.
OK posting this is killing me, it keeps blowing up. I am going to do it para by para to see what is wrong.
Edit: I found it! sorry for all the spam. I posted the problem in the feedback forum.
Looks like Lua to me
@withthelove That's exactly what I used it for! We put it up on github, here (and @Spring was kind enough to give some feedback, which I still haven't done). #3 son is still badgering me to do some more level design. If you want, DM me, and I can give you a brain dump of what worked and what didn't for us (and PRs very welcome!)
@Xom Adept: So my strong suggestion is you take it nice and slow. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Play with a couple of different things, and write your own version of a classic (asteroids, worm, pong) in a couple of engines, just to get a feel for it all. It's really nice to go from one engine to another, and look at how, say, Tiled integrates with each one of them, because it gives you a grounding in some of the core concepts. At the end of the day, there are a whole bunch of common themes (like collision detection, shaders, draw order, game state, path following, update loops, and so and so on) that you find over and over again, and each time you relearn them in a different infra, you get a bit better, until eventually you will be able to pick up any game engine and get going quickly. So, in conclusion, don't stress about the engine or language right now, pick anything that you think looks fun and is well documented.
Hey, late to the party, but you should try Love2D for 2D games. It is super quick to get going and can actually be used for commercial games, although I guess you'd probably prefer sthing like Unity when you hit the big time. I have had a huge amount of fun just messing around with it.
Oh, you said not in the public domain. Still, check out those guys, the quality is amazing. I think people download and adapt them, and give appropriate credit.
A really good place to look is http://game-icons.net/
I think that is a good idea.
We all know that the most successful coding site is stack overflow, and that basically works as you describe, if you add in bounties. Is that where you are going with this?
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