Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#201

Post by nnq » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 11:34 AM UTC

ItsFirefly wrote: post #169

nnq wrote: post #167

The graphic style - oh, my eyes!!! Please team up with a designer, or with a different designer! ...I don't mean the quality, it's understandable resources are constrained. I mean the actual artistic decisions ... it burns your visual cortex with all those colors and textures fighting each other. What's the theme, "kindergardeners on acid meeting Elvis"?! or "South Park but in Fortnite drawn while drunk"?

Oof! I'm the designer and art director myself. Please elaborate a bit as "colors and textures fighting each other" doesn't give me the slightest clue as to what you perceive as problematic. Can you post annotated screenshots so I can learn from this? Then I'll go and fire myself! I've been playing the game in both the "Cartoon" and "3D" visual style for years and it's been a very pleasant and eye-pleasing experience…

Heh, sorry, I've been to harsh with the comment I guess... it's probably just me personally being "highly allergic" to this particular toony-style. I think it sort of falls in some "uncanny valley" of design, being neither stylized/abstract/low-poly-ish enough, nor realistic enough, nor fully-pixelated/blocky/minecrafty, but just in-between.

In general I like styles that either:

- just go all the way in the stylized direction, like Bad North [1], The Witness [2] or even Clash of Clans [3] (to be honest I also dislike CoC-style popular with mobile games nowadays, but at least it's consistent/harmonious in its candy-plasticky look)

- OR they actually try to do the realistic-style part, like the classic Age of Empires, or toony-ish-ralisticky like more modern Northgard [4]

- OR they fully embrace the blocky style like Minecraft, or the 8-bit/pixelated style of clearly retro-style games

"In between" styles just look... annoying, giving a "sand in your eye" mental sensation of the early 90s games that were too shallow and childish. It lacks some "higher harmony" thing that I can't describe any better. I get this "allergic" reaction also when I see this style in clothing or architecture or whatever.

Anyway, keep up the work if you and others enjoy it, don't be discouraged by people that just prefer smth else!

I'm just a bit sad bc I probably would've liked the game mechanics, but the style totally turns me off.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/688420/Bad_North_Jotunn_E...

[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.supercell....

[4] https://store.steampowered.com/app/466560/Northgard/

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#202

Post by ItsFirefly » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

nnq wrote: post #201

ItsFirefly wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oof! I'm the designer and art director myself. Please elaborate a bit as "colors and textures fighting each other" doesn't give me the slightest clue as to what you perceive as problematic. Can you post annotated screenshots so I can learn from this? Then I'll go and fire myself! I've been playing the game in both the "Cartoon" and "3D" visual style for years and it's been a very pleasant and eye-pleasing experience…

Heh, sorry, I've been to harsh with the comment I guess... it's probably just me personally being "highly allergic" to this particular toony-style. I think it sort of falls in some "uncanny valley" of design, being neither stylized/abstract/low-poly-ish enough, nor realistic enough, nor fully-pixelated/blocky/minecrafty, but just in-between. In general I like styles that either: - just go all the way in the stylized…

Thanks for the elaboration, I get that the design just doesn't do it for you personally. Did you already see that the game's also available in a highly abstract "Cartoon" visual style featuring hand-drawn, 2D animated sprites à la Paper Mario 64? Here's the trailer in the "Cartoon" visual style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7LK0s8LgmQ

Maybe this style appeals more to you?

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#203

Post by jammygit » Tue, Dec 31, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

ItsFirefly wrote: post #200

jammygit wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all that counts. I guess I’m just tempted to make a game engine as a hobby project. I made an OpenGL renderer in uni once (it was fun), but I don’t really know what the scope would be to extend it substantially - obviously, not to “unreal” levels or anything even close

Go for it! If you already have OpenGL experience—doesn't matter what level—you "only" have to add a bit of basic 3D world math and input handling. I found SDL ( http://libsdl.org ) to be a very good core framework to build upon regarding input handling. For the 3D world, start with a checkerboard pattern or so. In fact, this is almost exactly what I did to start Angeldust. I once showed off some early game prototypes…

Any other resources you would recommend? I read that physics is particularly time consuming for example. Thanks for the replies so far; it’s very fun to see your work

Re: Show HN: Angeldust – a fast and efficient video game

#204

Post by ItsFirefly » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 10:00 AM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #203

ItsFirefly wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for it! If you already have OpenGL experience—doesn't matter what level—you "only" have to add a bit of basic 3D world math and input handling. I found SDL ( http://libsdl.org ) to be a very good core framework to build upon regarding input handling. For the 3D world, start with a checkerboard pattern or so. In fact, this is almost exactly what I did to start Angeldust. I once showed off some early game prototypes…

Any other resources you would recommend? I read that physics is particularly time consuming for example. Thanks for the replies so far; it’s very fun to see your work

I didn't really use many external resources during development, most of the time I'm just "winging it" and acting towards a goal that I have in my mind. Coming up with a naive solution first, then trying to optimize it a bit in my head, then writing the code for it.

Angeldust's physics are relatively straightforward since it's based on a voxel grid. All game world intersections are approximated using axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs). I wrote the physics engine myself from scratch to reduce the number of game world data lookups, because that's pretty much the hot path in the code.

In the YouTube video from my earlier comment you can see that initially I started out with just game world boundary clipping and simple plane physics on the checkerboard. As I expanded my game world model, the physics engine grew along. So my advice would be (again) to start simple and grow from there. You'll do fine!