57 replies to this topic

[IKSB]

CONCEPT ART: New Art Style
I have been working with the game graphics to come up with something that sort of "clicks together" more. So I wanted to have a more individual style to the graphics. This is sort of an example of what I've come up with: I've decided to make everything look more like a moving painting, so here is an example of what I am going for. The left image is a photo that I manipulated to come up with the style, and the one on the right is my very first attempt to imitate it in a free style image:

Obviously the one on the left has a better color palette, but this is a first attempt. I just want to see what you guys think of this style versus the old, more straight forward style.

This is another attempt at the new style, with a little more detail and refined style in it. It also gives a glimpse into the color palette for Incendia. This is in response to some people asking for more examples of the new style.

CONCEPT ART: Acritar Architecture

Spoiler

Many people have been commenting that Acritar seems empty and lackluster, which is true. However, this is because most of the landscape is made up of old ruins of the city that was there before. So I thought it would be a good idea to show you guys the concept art for the architecture that will be filling up the place:
IMAGE
This is what most of the city looks like when it's whole, but I will make variations of this in different stages of post destruction... so cool.

I would very much appreciate feedback on performance and graphics once again. Thanks for the feedback so far!

Once all of the basic landscapes are done and I have designed the architecture for them, then I will move my complete focus to gameplay, which I've already started. When that happens, I'll make a full, WIP post.


LANDSCAPE ENGINE DETAILS

I am currently working on a long time project called The Elemental, and with this game I didn't want to have the usual cheap graphics that GM games tend to have, so I have gone all out to make the game look as polished as I can make it. However, I am beginning to worry that it will overpower lower end systems or that the end file size will turn people away.

For making it run on lower systems I will have graphics options.
For the file size problem.... well, this example I have of terrain for one of five regions is 8.5-ish MB on its own, so I'm guess around 60+ MB for the whole game. Which is huge. Everyone has made it clear that this isn't a problematic file size. My only concern with it was that it was large when compared with other GM games.

Now that that's been said, I just want to know two things: how fast does this example run on your computers (it should be 100 fps) and would you be willing to deal with a long download time for a game with these graphics? (Because on it's own, the game wouldn't take too much space... but the graphics make the game a lot larger than it needs to be. Granted, this is a clumsy version of the terrain engine that I will streamline over time, but it will still be quite large.)

As a side note, this runs at 100 FPS on my fairly mid level laptop. The FPS is shown by the number hovering around the mouse.


TERRA
The game is divided into 5 worlds, each with a very specific feel. This first one is the Earth world. Terra is supposed to be a vibrant, warm jungle environment that is supposed to feel very alive. I do feel that the colors get a little too basic... the green is very generic, and the brown is very generic... the only really interesting thing about it is the unique color of the sky. I might mix this one up a bit in the future:

SCREENSHOT

DOWNLOAD:
MediaFire

UNDA
The swamp beneath Terra, called Unda. Also in this example I included an example of a character sprite that will be in the game. It is rather small compared to the landscape but this is on purpose. The game is largely about positioning and AoE skills and controlling the environment, so I decided to make the characters small so you can easily see what is around you without feeling crowded in. Plus it adds to the large, open feeling of the landscape. This world is meant to be a very dark, but thriving environment. Sort of life if you life up a tree trunk and its all dark, critters are crawling everywhere, moss and mushrooms and other fungi are growing up at random.... except this is prettier. Real fungi don't glow:

SCREENSHOT

DOWNLOAD:
MediaFire

VENTAS
Ventas is the insectoid realm of air located between Incendia and Terra. It mostly made of large, open canyons, with occasional inner pockets of open "caves" that are host to lush plant life. This example is even MORE tile intensive than the last one, and was the most difficult to optimize. It occasionally dips down to 99-98 for me, so I will have to optimize further... but we'll see. This place is meant to be at a high altitude and is a very dry, warm climate. I tried to get the message across by having sky glowing through the cracks around rock features and by picking a very dull, but bright, palette:
SCREENSHOT:
SCREENSHOT

DOWNLOAD:
MediaFire

ACRITAR
Acritar was once the realm of pure elemental energy, a central hub of all of the elemental nations where a council met comprised of members of every element. It was the capital city that unified the nations by standing as a symbol of their commitment to harmony and interdependence after a war years before. Due to an unexplained calamity, the entire city was destroy and the entire area around it was turned into a wasteland, void of all life. Most of the landscape in this area will be ruins and old buildings, so the landscape as it is now feels slightly empty. There are no plants and no wildlife here. This realm has no color in it at all; completely black and white.

SCREENSHOT

DOWNLOAD:
MediaFire


And more will be added as I make them. Thanks for the feedback!

Edited by IKSB, 15 February 2012 - 09:34 PM.

[Psycle]

I am running on a laptop with two graphics chips, one being integrated and one being discrete. I'm using a Quad Core Phenom rated at 2.2GHz so the integrated graphics results are likely somewhat higher than what you'd usually expect from the chip, but either way these are the results I have obtained.

Mobility Radeon HD 6470M: 90-100fps

Mobility Radeon HD 4250: 50-90fps

The discrete card as you can see has better performance. I noticed a large drop in frame rates near the water with the integrated solution, it averaged at about 85fps away from the water, and 60fps with the water visible. This looks really smooth and is very nice on the eyes so I hope you keep this up. But I have to ask, why are you aiming for 100fps? Or is that just for the purpose of this test?

[IKSB]

I'm going for 100 fps because I like how it makes everything in a game feel much smoother and crisper. Though I will be having graphic options for lower end computers so that they can handle the more graphic intensive things such as the water graphics.

[Psycle]

I'm going for 100 fps because I like how it makes everything in a game feel much smoother and crisper. Though I will be having graphic options for lower end computers so that they can handle the more graphic intensive things such as the water graphics.

Okay I understand. To answer your other question, I'd be perfectly fine downloading a large game if it's clear that it's large for a good reason. If you can promote the game well, by providing eye-candy like you did here then I'm sure people wouldn't take much notice to the file size.

[beatson]

The worst card I have in any of my systems is a NVIDIA GTX560, which ran at 100fps throughout.

As for the file size question. Where I live (UK), and the area I now live in, I struggle to get more than 200kb/s when downloading anything, so a 60+mb file could take some time to download for me (especially at peak times) - putting me off. My advice would be to (obviously) try and bring the file size down as much as possible - but if the game looks like its worth downloading (good screenshots and reviews), then I'd set aside some time to do so.

[lmbarns]

Ran at 100 consistently on my comp. I'd just be sure to optimize images as much as acceptable, where possible, even if not really needed at the time. Sometimes a 20% reduction on something you don't really look at that hard can cut it's size in half.

But it looks good for the size as it is.

[kburkhart84]

It gave me a d3d.CreateDevice Error. I'm running on a laptop with 2.3Ghz i5 processor, but the graphics card is the integrated chip with the processor. My resolution is set at 1366x768.

The error mentioned to lower my resolution, and I didn't want to, so I can't confirm how it performs, assuming it would run.

I'm able to play most commercial games, though some have to have lower settings to work, but a couple don't run full-speed, even on lower settings, like Star Wars-The Force Unleashed 2, because they simply do too much, even on lower settings.

I'd recommend you figure out a way around that error if possible. If it can't start at a higher resolution, a user probably wouldn't mind if you temporarily changed to a lower resolution to run the game, as long as they know that the game can't run at the higher resolution.

About the download size...people download several gigabytes of games all the time. Usually, those are known games such as Skyrim, but if your game shows the good graphics, and a video of it(proof, as it were) than people probably can deal with 60+ MB. I know some people have slower connections, but you can't please everybody anyway. I would never put a limit on a game, if the cost is lower quality. If it something you can get away with, do it, but if it changes the actual appeal of the game, leave it higher quality.

[PetzI]

Runs at 100 FPS on my 3-4 year old machine. How can something that fits in those 30 year-old floppy disks be considered huge?

[Drandula]

ASUS Eee PC PX 1001 netbook. 1,6GHz Intel atom, 2GB RAM (upgraded, normally only 1GB), Intel GMA 3150.
Runs 37-42fps.

[IKSB]

It gave me a d3d.CreateDevice Error.

...I haven't the slightest clue what that is.... at the moment it is set to "keep aspect ratio" and I have the game view set to fit a widescreen monitor like my laptop has. (1000x563) Is there any way something like that could cause a problem like that? I don't know enough about this to guess how to fix it.

Runs at 100 FPS on my 3-4 year old machine. How can something that fits in those 30 year-old floppy disks be considered huge?

Well, it's not that it's "huge" but that most GM games usually range from a few MB to MAYBE 15-20 MB. Most people don't bother spending the time to even download the tiny games because they figure that it's badly made and a waste of time, which many of the GM games out there are badly made. So It's just a matter of somehow convincing people that this game is worth a 60MB+ download.

ASUS Eee PC PX 1001 netbook. 1,6GHz Intel atom, 2GB RAM (upgraded, normally only 1GB), Intel GMA 3150.
Runs 37-42fps.

I actually know someone who owns the same computer, and I'm sorry to say that it can barely run anything usually... I'll try to come up with graphical settings later on that make it possible to run on your netbook, so I'll probably just test it against my friends computer.

EDIT: If I scared anyone about that 60gb thing I meant mb, so I changed that now.... just to clarify, sorry for that rather dramatic mistake.

Edited by IKSB, 16 January 2012 - 04:36 PM.

[bannanawalrus]

For me it ran at around 55-65 fps consistently but my laptop is really old and it was bad even when it was new, so you should get around 100 on most people's hardware. And yeah, I'd totally download a 60mb game if it looked like it had a few hours good content. I've been known to download games around 100MB before, but then where my laptop is terrible my internet is great so download speeds for me really aren't an issue anyway.

[dark dan21]

I reckon that is really worth it.

100 fps the whole time, but it's a pretty high end PC.

And the download really isn't that much of a problem.

Most commercial games are always a matter of GB's, no matter how good/bad the graphics are.

With those graphics, you'll have no problem getting downloads!

[kburkhart84]

It gave me a d3d.CreateDevice Error.

...I haven't the slightest clue what that is.... at the moment it is set to "keep aspect ratio" and I have the game view set to fit a widescreen monitor like my laptop has. (1000x563) Is there any way something like that could cause a problem like that? I don't know enough about this to guess how to fix it.

It is possible that this has something to do with it. If you want to, I'll can try to fix the problem, since I've got the machine that gives it. I may not be the only one though, but it seems I'm the only one so far...

If you are interested, give me the gm81/gmk file, and I'll see what I can do. I make no promises though, except that I won't use or steal the game code.

EDIT** Nevermind. I just tested it again, and got 100 FPS the whole time. I got to thinking that if it was running on a NETBOOK, then no way that it shouldn't run on my laptop, which is way more powerful than the average netbook. I mean, sure, it's integrated graphics, but still it should be enough. I've restarted the thing since then, so I'm guessing that is what fixed the problem.

Sorry about that.

It's an ACER laptop, dual-core i5 processor at 2.3Ghz, 4GB RAM, and the non-dedicated intel graphics chip that goes with the i5 processor line, running Windows 7 64-bit.

Edited by kburkhart84, 15 January 2012 - 10:48 PM.

[IKSB]

It's an ACER laptop, dual-core i5 processor at 2.3Ghz, 4GB RAM, and the non-dedicated intel graphics chip that goes with the i5 processor line, running Windows 7 64-bit.

Well, hey, we have almost identical specs. Well, the game will be optimized for you... in an indirect sort of way.

[Yal]

Runs at 100 FPS on my 3-4 year old machine. How can something that fits in those 30 year-old floppy disks be considered huge?

Sheesh, haven't you ever used one of these? A 3.5 inch floppy has 1.3 MEGAbyte of space, that is 0.0013 gig. In case you're interested, the GM8 runner is 2.2 meg for an empty game, which means you cannot get a GM game onto a floppy what so ever.

So It's just a matter of somehow convincing people that this game is worth a 60GB+ download.

Now that is likely the biggest GM game file size I've ever seen.

[Thirt33n_37]

On the computer at my college, it runs at a pretty comfy 100 frames per second. Pretty damned snazzy effects, if you ask me. But you didn't, so I'm not going to tell you that. Ah well.

EDIT: The graphics are lovely, and so long as the wait time wasn't hours long and the gameplay looked good enough to me, then I'd certainly consider giving it a go.

Specs:
Intel i5 @ 2.80Ghz
2.81 GHz 2GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series

Edited by Thirt33n_37, 16 January 2012 - 03:52 PM.

[IKSB]

So It's just a matter of somehow convincing people that this game is worth a 60GB+ download.

Now that is likely the biggest GM game file size I've ever seen.

Wow.... oops. I meant 60mb, not gb..... slip of the brain, my bad.... that would be crazy to have it that huge.

EDIT: oh, and to everyone complimenting the graphics, thanks! It's taken me a long time to streamline the graphics to where they are now, so I appreciate the positive feedback! (Lot's of photoshop..... so much photoshop........)

Edited by IKSB, 16 January 2012 - 04:38 PM.

[speedchuck]

This is awesome. It runs at 100 fps almost constantly for me... Seriously, I would download a 60 mb game just for the graphics being this good... I hope the gameplay is at least decent!

[IKSB]

This is awesome. It runs at 100 fps almost constantly for me... Seriously, I would download a 60 mb game just for the graphics being this good... I hope the gameplay is at least decent!

Well, gameplay is something that has been melting and moving and being reshaped constantly over the course of the years I've spent dreaming up this game and the world I am designing. I have it down to a very specific style. It's a sort of platform-action-strategy game. The game's central mechanic is your ability to literally absorb elements from the world around you to change your combat styles and abilities.There are five elements, each element fulfilling a classic RPG role. Each element has 5 skills and a normal attack that can be charged for a different effect. (Example: for air element, normal attacking just fires a long range bolt of air energy. If you charge it, it does a short range, shotgun-like burst.)

Upgrades that affect how the game is played and upgrade your stats are found around the world in a very Metroidvania style. Upgrades include things like giving air element a double jump, letting water element breath underwater forever, and letting fire element pass through natural fire without being damaged. However, the game is plot driven, and the plot sections will be set in their own sections of the world separate from the explorable sections. They would be things like a cave system which you couldn't access until that point in the story for whatever reason and now you go in, complete the mission, and the area is then either closed off, or becomes a continuation of the explorable area.

Hope it sounds interesting. PLUS I just added a new map which I need more feedback on - it uses a heck of a lot more tiles and objects than the previous example, but it also doesn't have water in it.

Edited by IKSB, 19 January 2012 - 01:34 AM.

[gamereality]

For the file size problem.... well, this example I have of terrain for one of five regions is 8.5-ish MB on its own, so I'm guess around 60+ MB for the whole game. Which is huge.

No. The filesize is as large as the game is worth. Unless 90% of the GMC are still on a dial-up internet plan, I highly doubt this would be too much to ask. You could push it to around 200 MB with no trouble, apart from the odd user complaining.

Having a large filesize is a great sacrifice to make for quality. Remember that most games on large distribution platforms (like Steam) are larger than 100 MB; it's just something we're all used to by now. Being scared of filesize is just going to cause problems for you, because you'll start cutting things you wanted to put in.

The framerate was fine for me. Stable 100 FPS, running on a mid-grade laptop with an NVIDIA 330M Graphics Adaptor. The game looks a bit stretched in fullscreen, though. That was probably my res.

Edited by gamereality, 19 January 2012 - 03:32 AM.