Messages

1

Gameplay & Discussion / Re: Serious fangame making questions

« on: November 25, 2016, 04:42:19 PM »

How much appreciation and support (if any) do fangame creators deserve, and are they currently getting enough?

In general I feel the same way as the other guys in the thread so far, no one is entitled to any appreciation and support. As someone who's been involved in making a few fangames, I don't feel like I deserve any kind of special recognition for doing so, I just had fun doing it! If you're making a fangame (or really, anything) because you want public adoration, 99 out of 100 times you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Is it okay to heavily criticize people’s fangames that they made on their own time for everyone to enjoy?
How much patience and forgiveness (if any) should fangame streamers and players be expected to have?

I believe it's ok for anyone to do whatever they want. You want to make a "happil medley" style fangame because that's what you enjoy? That's your right, you should be able to. Are you playing a "happil medley" style game and hate it? I don't expect you to bottle your feelings and force yourself to pretend you enjoy it. And you can insert whatever genre you want into those quotes, because for every style of game that someone hates, there actually is someone out there who liked it. Sometimes games are heavily railed on-stream, and the opinions of the chat are often just a mirror of the streamer, and so it kinda blows out of control. Sometimes I wish that streamers would be willing to give a game more of a chance, but I certainly don't expect anyone to. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I've experienced my fair share of being criticized, but I don't hold a grudge against people for that. Either they had my best interests at heart, and have helped me grow, and so I'm very appreciative; or they just wanted to shit on me and therefore their opinion didn't matter to begin with

What is the right balance of encouraging quality fangames while not scaring off potentially good creators?

This goes back to my statement above - do what you want to do. If you want to throw together some screens in jtool and release it a couple of days later, go for it. If you want to sit down and plan a storyboard for your game on paper for months before you even open gamemaker, sure! The wiki isn't a zero-sum game; just because someone releases a short needle game it doesn't mean that the slot that an adventure game could have gone in is full now. As far as I'm concerned, all fangames of all types are welcome.

To what extent can you be proud of a fangame that heavily uses other people’s content? (spook jam, medleys, and in general using music+sprites+sounds made by others)

As I've participated in medley projects before I don't think I can give a non-biased opinion here, so I'll leave that one to others.

Is it okay to use the self-made assets of other people’s fangames?

Someone has used one of my self-made assets before, and I'm always releasing code and tutorials to the community, so I feel like I can speak on this point. In my opinion, we grow stronger as a community by pooling together resources and combining them in different ways. When I see things I've made being used by other people, I feel far more proud in those moments than when I see people playing my games. We are constantly borrowing resources from other projects, both commercial and non-commercial, and in my opinion it's a form of praise to want to use something someone else has made.

That being said, if you are taking something someone else has made and trying to play it off as something you made, then you're kinda a scumbag Credit where credit is due.

To what extent (if any) are quality fangames not getting attention they deserve?

I don't think any game deserves attention, it's not an intrinsic property. A game gets attention because the people giving it attention wanted to. If there were people that wanted to give the unrecognized games attention, then they would be getting it. Of course there are games that I wish were more popular, but I'm not about to start streaming and make them popular, so I have to accept things for how they are!

To what extent (if any) are fangame creators limiting their creative growth as opposed to making freeware games for a bigger, more general audience?

Well, I guess it really depends on what you personally as a person want to get out of this. I make fangames as a side hobby, as I already have a secure job in a programming field. However, I was able to leverage some of my experience as talking points in interviews recently, and it always makes for good conversation, so that's been neat. If you are aiming for a strong resume then it's probably good to make some fangames and then move along, because GameMaker experience is not going to land you a job.

That being said, I think that the fangame community is great because I've never seen another place where so many game makers and players have come together with such transparency. Games come out daily, there's always a stream online, commentary flows constantly. The growth potential for an aspiring developer here is incredibly high, higher than anywhere else I could think of, so in my opinion, being active in this community is in no way a waste of time. There's plenty to be learned about being a creator than just the toolset you use.

2

Programming Questions / Re: How much math is actually used when making an avoidance?

« on: November 04, 2016, 01:26:52 AM »

As an example of how calculus is useful in game design, imagine you have an object you want to move into a position. However, instead of just moving at a constant speed and snapping into place, you want it to start out fast and kinda "slide" into place at the end, smoothly.

To start out, you might want to plot its position as a function of time, and a semi parabola works perfectly for us. In addition, you know that its speed will start out at some value, and decrease to zero at the final point. Understanding that velocity is the derivative of position (stick with me), you can link these two functions together and with some set conditions like distance and desired time to complete, you can calculate the initial speed and acceleration you should give your object to reach the target with your desired movement. To apply this in gamemaker, you would calculate the initial speed and gravity using the above method, and then set an alarm to stop it after the number of ticks you want, and the math handles the rest! (And did I mention it looks real neat!)

This is what you learn in the 100-level math course "Calculus I with Analytic Geometry", which is the study of functions and how you can shape them to have desired properties. Very neat stuff, and incredibly helpful when dealing with physics calculations.

Additionaly, if you're interested in learning more about math and how it applies to game design, TJ's doing some on-stream math lessons! Here's his first one, Distances, Triangles, and Trig: For Game Makers!

3

Announcements / Re: The Wannabes auto hosting discussion

« on: September 28, 2016, 10:52:23 AM »

There's been some rumor and speculation flying around, so I'd like clarification on a couple of points:

1) Does the Twitch Auto-Host override a manual host you perform? If you are hosting a non-wannabe, in my mind it is not ok for the auto-host bot to decide when that host period ends. The only time it should be allowed to switch your host is when you are offline, and you have not chosen to host anyone, as that is literally dead time.

2) Can people be added to auto-host lists that are not on the team? If someone decides that sometimes they want to auto-host their friend who is not on the wannabes, should that be allowed?

Otherwise, I'm generally in agreement, except for a couple of points:

1) No follower alerts. I totally agree that they aren't necessary, and a lot of times I've not followed a stream to avoid the alert, but if someone wants a follower alert I don't think it should preclude them from being on the team.

2) English only. I agree with the general consensus that having non-English-speaking streamers on the team can only widen our audience. If you're concerned about language barriers, maybe ask that those streamers mark the languages in their title as most do, and also remember that you can specify your stream language on twitch itself, which handily notifies viewers what language they can expect in the stream.

The concept sounds good! I truly hope the introduction of this feature brings back some of the value offered by twitch teams.

4

User-Made Creations / Re: I wanna get Cultured 2

« on: September 03, 2016, 06:19:03 PM »

Also there is a vine in the 2nd I wanna see the moon screen in the bottom left corner I got stuck in many, many times. I had to mash shift pretty rapidly to get out. Maybe the boshy costume was the problem though, dunno.

That's normal vine behavior in fangames as far as I know. We were reluctant to try to fix it in case it broke anything else, since we didn't have a lot of time to test. We're looking into it, but like you said, if it happens you can get out if you struggle a bit.

5

User-Made Creations / Re: I wanna get Cultured 2

« on: September 03, 2016, 02:49:20 PM »

• If you get savelocked somewhere, backspace out (returns you to the hub). If you are unable to do so, please PM one of us with your save file and we will help unstick you.
• If you rebind keys and break the game, delete your GlobalData file in the C2 folder to reset your controls (there is no progress-related information in there, just settings)
• If you're unable to save your progress, please make sure you have unzipped the game (never play from the zip file). Also ensure the save files are being created in the game directory.

6

Tools & Software / Fangame OBS Reader

« on: August 26, 2016, 01:35:12 AM »

Stinky was doing roulette today, and mentioned it would be nice if there was a program that could detect when a fangame was open and write the name to a text file for display in OBS. So I made one! This should hopefully be helpful if you're doing roulette streaks and don't feel like copying the name to a text field in OBS.

It operates in a very basic way, by checking all the process open on your computer, sorting them by date, and then going through the list and grabbing the name of the latest-opened process that has "i wanna" in its name. The name is displayed in the console window, and written to a file in the same directory named game.txt. It updates every 15 seconds. Just leave it on in the background, add the txt file to OBS, and you're done!

Because of the "i wanna" requirement, it won't work for fangames that don't have that. Not sure if there's a better way. It was also triggering when he opened a delfruit page, so I told it to ignore chrome's processes. If an error occurs, it will show you in the console, but not on stream (in case there's anything personal in the message). To quit the program, just press enter on the window, or use the red X.

It was written in C#, so you'll need the .NET framework for it to run. Just google ".NET framework download" and get it from Microsoft if you don't have it.

If you have any bug reports or feature requests, let me know and I'll see what I can do!

Download version 1 here

7

Programming Questions / Re: 2 Questions

« on: August 15, 2016, 09:25:42 AM »

Sorry, I don't have time to write your code for you, someone else might be able to.

8

Programming Questions / Re: 2 Questions

« on: August 13, 2016, 10:01:17 PM »

For #2,

I guess you're using gm8/8.1 since you mention the yuuutu engine. When you die, use the sound_volume function on your current BGM to set the volume to zero, but let it keep playing in the background. Then you can sound_play your death music. On restart, use sound_volume again to turn the music back on. It's a little bit of a complex change if you're not familiar with how the engine tracks the currently playing BGM or where all the scripts are that handle these functions, but otherwise it's as simple as muting the BGM instead of outright stopping it. There's also a sound_fade function you could use if you want the BGM to fade out a little slower instead of an abrupt stop.

For #1 I haven't really looked at the new yuuutu since moving to studio, but if I were in your position I would get a copy of the old engine and compare the player physics code to see if I could spot the differences, particularly where the jump is performed.

9

Game Design / Re: Post your Code Snippets

« on: August 01, 2016, 10:27:59 PM »

Easy Spotlight Shader - This one's a gmz because it comes with a sprite, shader, script, and example object and room! Shows a super easy method of creating spotlights without needing a huge sprite with a cutout, crazy blend modes, or any other complicated hacks - Just a function called "draw_spotlight"!

10

Programming Questions / Re: How to make jump refreshers accumulate the amount of remaining jumps?

« on: July 10, 2016, 02:43:07 PM »

Normally, when you press the jump key while in midair, the engine will check if djump==1, then set djump=0. And when you touch a jump refresher or land on a block/platform, it will set djump=1. Looking at this, we see djump is treated as a true/false condition, rather than as a counter. Luckily it's fairly straightforward to change this from a boolean true/false to a counter: every time you touch a jump refresher, ADD one to djump. When you jump in midair, check if djump is GREATER than zero, and if so, jump and SUBTRACT one. If you land on the floor, do you want to reset your counter so you only have one jump again? if so, set djump=1. Otherwise, if you want to keep your counter, only set it back to one if it's zero.

Depending on the engine you are using, your experience may differ slightly, but the concept is the same. I wrote an example for adding triplejump to the yoyoyo studio engine here - you won't want to copy that exactly since it's not the effect you're looking for, but it should help you find all the places where djump is referenced (it also might be outdated since the engine has changed since I wrote it). If you're not using the yoyoyo engine, just go to Scripts > Search in Scripts up in the menu bar, and search for djump and it will show you everywhere in your engine that it is used.

11

Programming Questions / Re: Area name display (Like I Dun wanna be anything 2)

« on: July 10, 2016, 02:33:46 PM »

I'd put the check code in a room start event instead of a step event since you only need to check when you actually change rooms (and the room start event will fire when you do that) but otherwise what Sudnep suggested should work perfectly!

12

Meet and Greet! / Re: Ahoy!

« on: July 02, 2016, 12:05:18 AM »

 

13

Game Design / Re: [UPDATED] Tutorial: Getting Started With Fangame Development

« on: June 01, 2016, 12:11:17 AM »

That's a pretty neat CSS feature, Den! I've added that to the stylesheet, hopefully that makes it a bit easier to read. And thanks for the tips Lavos, those are certainly some concepts I'd be interested in going into detail with.

I've also updated the tutorial to include a section on Hit Points, both for the enemy and for the kid. That'll probably be the last of the additions for a bit, I need to get to work on setting up for the marathon!

14

Game Design / Re: [UPDATED] Tutorial: Getting Started With Fangame Development

« on: May 31, 2016, 09:29:59 AM »

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm practicing my web design skills and wanted the page to look nice on mobile, so I was avoiding a set width. I've changed the layout to have a max width of 1024px, so it should still take up all the space on a small screen, while not expanding so much you have to turn your head on a large screen. Hope that helps!

15

Game Design / Re: [UPDATED] Tutorial: Getting Started With Fangame Development

« on: May 31, 2016, 02:01:03 AM »

Over two years since I made the original tutorial... time sure flies! While the tutorial as I've written it is still pretty useful, a bunch has changed since then, like our recent move to GMStudio! In order to stay with the times, I've overhauled everything. Because there's just so much to tell, I felt that using a separate webpage gives me better control over the whole structure, so I've moved it off the forums onto my website.

Even if you're well versed in the fangame creation process, I invite you to take a look at the new and improved tutorial! There's some sections in there based on common questions I get asked from newbies and professionals alike. If you've got a question that isn't covered but think is something everyone should know, please post a reply and let me know! It's not finished yet, but since all the basics are covered, I'm going ahead and releasing it. There may be some glitches and typos (there's over 110,000 characters in the document, my fingers are tired), so let me know if you find any of those too. Stay tuned for updates, maybe more after Fangame Marathon 2016 is over...

Version 2.0 of the Fangame Development Tutorial can be found here!