mid_gen's Launch a Game Studio Thread

[Rroff]

people weren't joking when they said indie development was 90% UI work

I somehow sooner or later seem to come back to coding UI stuff whatever I'm doing - though partly that is down to being unhappy with an existing UI implementation.

I pretty much know the structure and flow of implementing UI element types, case statements, alignment offsets, events, etc. off by heart

My latest one is really messed up - repurposing the pitch and yaw input (while freezing the view angle updates) from the player server side in my Quake 2 mod to do a simple HUD based mouse driven UI - won't mean much to most people who've never coded for Quake 2 and the limitations of an engine that old but it is in equal measures hideous and awesome.

 

[TNA]

No slop here

Although I do look at the millions being raked in by friendslop stuff and wonder if I shouldn’t just make some janky multiplayer nonsense instead of slaving away at my game aiming for some degree of quality!

But no, I know what I want to make. I’m counting on there being enough middle aged sci-fi nerds out there that like the same stuff as me. So I’ll just make a game I want to play and hope the rest sorts itself out.

Haha. Yeah, AI stuff doesn't bother me anyway.

Based on what you have shown so far you can count me in.

I have set aside a fiver @Noxia

 

[mid_gen]

New vlog up. My bloody house move saga has been dominating things recently but while that festers I have got back to doing lots of work on the game.

 

[mid_gen]

Have had fun times building a deterministic headless combat simulation. Basically taking the main combat simulation which was already in ECS and fashioning a harness for it so I can run the combat loop without actually doing any of the rendering or physics sim. Means I can now do balancing runs with accelerated time simulation so the usual ~60second combat loop is done in ~5seconds of real elapsed time (although as far as the simulation is aware it ran at realtime). Verified with side by side runs and added deterministic seeds to the sim so can reliably be re-run and analysed.

This is something I'd been wanting to do for year while working on AAA stuff, but couldn't justify the time to production. I've been able to engineer the game so far with this always in teh back of my mind as an end goal....and last night I was able to instruct Claude Fable 5 to go and complete the loop and get it all working while I slept.

Now doing some work take this the next step, as we can now simulate a single core combat loop, now extend it to be able to run the entire game with the map and planning loops and run full gameplay simulations end to end at accelerated time, headless. Fun stuff!

Oh and I've got a Steam Deck arriving today I bought off MM, going to target that for performance....obviously with ray-tracing and shiny shenanigans for more powerful PC hardware.

 

[mid_gen]

Well, pleasantly surprised with Steam Deck performance. 45fps in combat without adding and scalability controls. 18fps on the map though, that black hole shader is rough on a weak GPU. Good enough for now though.

The Deck will remain my low-end target. I might look at getting it to 60fps, but isn't a high priority. Want a nice top-end visuals option....but the current ship assets don't hold up to close scrutiny at high res. Going to be a big decision on the art side of things.

 

[Scotty123]

Is this native or through wine and vkd3d ie proton? I did a fair bit of work on Death Stranding 2 to help it run on the Steam Deck.

 

[mid_gen]

Is this native or through wine and vkd3d ie proton? I did a fair bit of work on Death Stranding 2 to help it run on the Steam Deck.

This is just a proton build. When I get some time I’ll set up a Linux build agent and sort a native build.

 

[NickK]

How have you found the performance of AI written GPU shaders? Did you specifically state that the system needs to maintain a certain frame rate and/or a certain platform to optimise for?

 

[mid_gen]

How have you found the performance of AI written GPU shaders? Did you specifically state that the system needs to maintain a certain frame rate and/or a certain platform to optimise for?

You don't write shaders per se in Unreal. It's all material graphs, I've only written one of any significance, the rest are just simple texture maps. The black hole and star assets are the only expensive materials.

Haha if only you just specify a framerate and let the AI figure it out.....we're a long way from that being a reality. AI models can't do that part, understanding where and when you can get away with smoke and mirrors....their visual cognition isn't up to that, not by a long shot.

Game studio stuff is all on hold for now with the imminent collapse of my house move. Going it as a solo dev was all predicated on moving back to a city so I had some human contact to keep me sane. Probably a week or two before the chain definitively collapses....but either way it'll be nice to have some certainty on the future.

 

[Dr Jack]

How have you found the performance of AI written GPU shaders? Did you specifically state that the system needs to maintain a certain frame rate and/or a certain platform to optimise for?

IME, they do okay but you really need to go in and do so hand clean-up. Same as any code where performance matters. AI does some really egregiously slow stuff sometimes and will cheerfully hamstring a well chosen algorithm with some dumb decisions around data access.

 

[mid_gen]

IME, they do okay but you really need to go in and do so hand clean-up. Same as any code where performance matters. AI does some really egregiously slow stuff sometimes and will cheerfully hamstring a well chosen algorithm with some dumb decisions around data access.

This is fine where you are dealing with some deterministic systems code with well defined inputs and outputs....have done lots of optimisations with the fintech work I've been doing on the side, you can just leave a model like Fable iterating with a performance testing harness and it'll make good progress.

Doesn't really work with games, as you're not dealing with deterministic simulation with clear inputs and outputs, as the AI has no concept or understand of the 'feel' of a game or any real nous when it comes to analysing screen captures....and definitely can't comprehend a video stream to actually see what's happening in realtime.

 

[Dr Jack]

Doesn't really work with games, as you're not dealing with deterministic simulation with clear inputs and outputs, as the AI has no concept or understand of the 'feel' of a game or any real nous when it comes to analysing screen captures....and definitely can't comprehend a video stream to actually see what's happening in realtime.

I was talking about shaders, in particular, for games. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I've actually been pretty impressed at how well Claude does creating test rigs and analysing the results for shaders but it did make a couple of howlers when it came to performance. I've not been doing anything particularly out there though so I don't know how well it'd perform if you wanted it to do something really complicated and, personally, the more complicated stuff is probably the stuff I want to do myself anyway so I can get that "feel" you talk about exactly how I want it.

 

[mid_gen]

Dished out the first steam keys to some lucky testers. Been good to get some eyes on the game.

Had the opportunity to bank some more freelance work the last couple weeks so took that. Back to the game now.

It’s looking pretty cool now, a lot of balancing and content to build now. And I really need to bite the bullet and start adding some audio.

 

[mid_gen]

Too frazzled atm to record any proper videos, but thought I'd do a little recording of some current gameplay, since it's been a fair while since I've shown any on here. This is just unlisted so not meant for public consumption, an OCUK exclusive!

Quite a few little bugs visible, but the main mechanics and whatnot are starting to come together.

 

[TrojanWhore]

Looks cool, it's not really my style of game but for the style it is, I'd suggest that solid performance on a deck level device should be the target (even if that means dropping detail a bit).
Also, personally, not a huge fan of the sound (maybe just a placeholder) - both the laser sound effects being a bit 'in your face' and the 'cyber'/synthwave music being a bit much (especially in the out-of-combat scenes) - I'd personally go with something a bit more 'ethereal'/ambient (like the music on Kerbal Space Program... which is royalty free, but has been done to death in that game and a million YouTube vids!)

What you've done is impressive though, I mean this only in a constructive feedback sort of way

 

[mid_gen]

Looks cool, it's not really my style of game but for the style it is, I'd suggest that solid performance on a deck level device should be the target (even if that means dropping detail a bit).
Also, personally, not a huge fan of the sound (maybe just a placeholder) - both the laser sound effects being a bit 'in your face' and the 'cyber'/synthwave music being a bit much (especially in the out-of-combat scenes) - I'd personally go with something a bit more 'ethereal'/ambient (like the music on Kerbal Space Program... which is royalty free, but has been done to death in that game and a million YouTube vids!)

What you've done is impressive though, I mean this only in a constructive feedback sort of way

All feedback appreciated! I agree with the audio, most it comes from a cinematic SFX pack I had which isn't really suitable for games....and the 'music' I knocked up in Ableton in literally 10 minutes All placeholder at the moment to just explore different look and feels. The SFX are all too punchy and in your face to listen to for long, and yeah the music is also too punchy and muddies the audio mix in combat too much.

Audio is one of those things I've taken for granted in the past having separate teams to handle that part! Thankfully Metasounds is really solid

I would do some audio work today actually but I need to be able to hear my phone, trying to exchange contracts on house move today! Think I'll concentrate on just building out some more variety, ships, mods etc.

How much time/effort/money I get to spend on the artwork, audio etc is going to massively depend on what, if any, funding I get. That's all waiting on getting moved though....

 

[throwaway4372]

First thing I do in most indie games is turn the master volume down to 50% and the music volume down to 10%.

IMO space is silent so a space game doesn't need a background jingle, just something subtle to break the silence.

 

[mid_gen]

First thing I do in most indie games is turn the master volume down to 50% and the music volume down to 10%.

IMO space is silent so a space game doesn't need a background jingle, just something subtle to break the silence.

Yes I think I need to reign in my ambitions a bit when it comes to certain aspects like audio, music, art. Reality is I have very limited funds and I need to focus on the parts of the game that are in my wheelhouse like the main gameplay mechanics. Going to focus on content next week.

Was going to do a pass on the music this afternoon but I’m now in a solicitor-induced rage and not feeling very ‘ambient’

 

[TNA]

Can't you just do ai generated music or would that be an issue with the audience when released you think? Seems to be cool shifting on anything that has been made with ai these days.

You could do sound much later anyway. Gameplay much more important imo.

 

[SimonRigga]

I thought the game was set in space??? so wot sound