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XCVG5 years ago

While the faux-retro isn't perfect, it's fine for a jam game. Getting a perfect look takes a lot of time, and this was a one-week jam. Downgrading graphics can be difficult. I'm quite familiar with Unity and I wasn't able to get Beach Defend 2000 to look quite the way I wanted it in the time I had.

I tend to like really bizarre, weird games, especially in this jam. The epitome of a "so bad it's good" game, in my mind, is one that makes me go "WTF did I just play" but also "let's do that again". I actually feel that every game I've made for SBIG Jam, including this year's entry, has been too conventional. I think next year I'll try to do something really weird.

How is Unreal's UI system? I have mixed feelings about the one in Unity.

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cubehero5 years ago

I imagine look-wise it might be better to just go for older engines from the start, but most of those are so unwieldy, inefficient and sometimes just straight up horrible to use. I actually tried manually setting a low resolution in UE4 first, but since that always screws with monitor layouts and the like when fullscreen, I thought the postprocessing option was preferable.

Yeah... I still fondly remember things like "I am the Intergalactic Wizards", just really bizarre stuff. I'd currently like to try something more out there for 2020, but who knows how I'm feeling next time the jam hopefully rolls around. While I learned a ton both with Cyberpunk Helpdesk and this game, it should be an interesting experience to just try to do something as weird as we can muster.

I have little Unity experience and don't actually know how to even do a healthbar in Unreal without looking it up, but from what I've seen, the UI system in Unreal actually seemed pretty robust. I've just not learned how to use it yet, which made me skip a UI entirely!

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XCVG5 years ago

I've built some games in GZDoom (my entry last year, TWAT, was one of them) but I'm moving away from that engine for exactly that reason. What I've found is that with retro engines, there are hard limits on what you can do, at least while maintaining your sanity. GZDoom is about as flexible as it gets, but it still doesn't support (for example) skeletal animation, video playback, or a robust custom GUI (ZScript might have changed the last one). If you need any of those you're straight up out of luck. It could be an interesting challenge but it's not my thing.

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cubehero5 years ago

Oh yes, I remember TWAT, I played it and the final boss killed me as I ran out of ammo (it must have been very close to death itself). :D

I also experienced older engines to be a lot more prone to parts of your project just disintegrating (map data, mostly), kind of, or simple things taking forever to do. Though using something like the Build engine (if there's even a "generic" version of that around, I haven't looked) for a jam game might be a fun change some time!

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