Apothecary

[Arkhan]

Isn't msx.org a euro run site?  It was their dev contest and Inferno to which I was referring.

1) MSX.org is run by retards
2) The contest Inferno was in was #msxdev's compo, run by some highly intelligent sonsaf*cks.

They were helpful in some initial MML stuff which led to Squirrel happening, so, MSX is srs bidniss.

[Opethian]

srs bsns

[Necromancer]

You mean srs ghey.

OBEY or GTFO! 

[sunteam_paul]

As people have been asking, here's the final update on Apothecary, or more of a history of the progress:

First it was at Aetherbyte, until we decided that it was a big project and would just be too long before we started and finished it given all the other stuff we had planned.

So we decided to can it on the PCE, as PCE development is tortuous. Arkhan was thinking about using Unity for some PC projects so we decided to take the main elements from Apothecary and make it in retro style on PC under the name Grelox, with more features (the PCE version was designed to strip the gameplay down to the very basics to make it quicker to develop).

Part way through intial Grelox planning, Orion came along and said 'I can do Apothecary.' So I had several builds from him, general movement and mapping was done-ish, and he started on enemy movement and collisions and the object screen. At that point he seemed to have misunderstood the concept of the how the puzzles were going to work in the game and felt that he might have problems with it. I'm always open to stripping things down just to get it done, but after a few emails and a couple of months I was getting to response from him any more.

So Arkhan steps back in and we plan to start it up again at Aetherbyte. By now, I've done a lot more mapping and art on Apoothecary, but I also have a bunch of planning done for Grelox which is a very similar game (only better). Again the thought of the complexity of developing it on PCE arose and the nagging feeling that the design for Grelox was better anyway...well instead of spending years on two games almost the same (one being a worse/simpler version) I decided to just combine all the maps into Grelox and make the better of the two games.

Grelox was going to originally have a larger screen area, but I've spent so long on all the mapping that I'm not going to throw that all away. The art itself will be converted into the NES style palette along with new stuff so it won't all go to waste. So Apothecary had basically been merged with Grelox and we should be able to get a result perhaps years sooner than we would if we continued developing it on PCE. Besides, we also have Saber Rider to be getting on with soon.

So there you have it.

[ParanoiaDragon]

Ah, that's right, forgot about Orion getting involved, didn't know that didn't work out though, bummer.

[Arkhan]

Yeah, as soon as I finish Infernoing, Grelox is top life-goal.

I have some basics of it in Unity.

I expect all of you to play it even though it's not on PCE.

[Necromancer]

I expect all of you to play it even though it's not on PCE.

Sorry, no chance in robot hell.

[elmer]

Yeah, as soon as I finish Infernoing, Grelox is top life-goal.

Still no word from the "Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs" guy then?

I would have thought that that would be your next priority after their successful KickStarter.

I have some basics of it in Unity.

Sorry to hear that you're moving over to the Dark Side and LEGO-block programming ... but it seems to be the primary choice these days for so many developers, and you'll like the easy availability of so much almost-free code and assets in the Unity Store.

[sunteam_paul]

Saber Rider is priority #1 as soon as we get more information to be able to make a start. Until then, our next major project is Grelox (after Inferno is done).

[Gredler]

Sorry to hear that you're moving over to the Dark Side and LEGO-block programming ... but it seems to be the primary choice these days for so many developers, and you'll like the easy availability of so much almost-free code and assets in the Unity Store.

A couple years back I worked on a couple unity games, and the flexibility had the in house programmers salivating. Being able to control so much of the engine made them prefer it over unreal when looking at a package to help quickly get games onto a mobile platform at a console level quality - prior to that they had been using purely in house tools, but unity eventually won them over. From an artists perspective it's the best tool I've used in a professional capacity, and would be stoked if my team were choosing it for their project. I would not do a personal project in unity, but for a professional product it saves so much time and allows for such customization I would completely understand its use.

[Arkhan]

Yeah, as soon as I finish Infernoing, Grelox is top life-goal.

Still no word from the "Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs" guy then?

I would have thought that that would be your next priority after their successful KickStarter.

I have some basics of it in Unity.

Sorry to hear that you're moving over to the Dark Side and LEGO-block programming ... but it seems to be the primary choice these days for so many developers, and you'll like the easy availability of so much almost-free code and assets in the Unity Store.

The other multi-platform engines are crap, honestly.

I don't use any of the freeby asset crap either really.   It's mostly just been the built-ins.

I looked at some other people's scripts for control and physics.

They are dumbasses.

[johnnykonami]

How do you feel about Unreal Engine?  I had so many problems with Unity crashing I gave up on it.  The crashes were ridiculous, too.  I'm talking about blank, new projects just idling for a couple of minutes in the background (again, doing nothing, no game objects yet, no scripts, nada) and having the whole app take a dump.  Could be my hardware setup in part, but I found a ton of people talking about it over at the forums.  After some unfruitful troubleshooting, downloading a 3 different versions at super slow speed (large files!) and having them all behave the same, I decided to try out Unreal Engine.  I have only messed around with it a little, but it doesn't crash indiscriminately.  I ended up spending more time doing a C++ tutorial so far, but I am feeling more confident about it overall in comparison to Unity once I'm done with that.

[Gredler]

How do you feel about Unreal Engine?  I had so many problems with Unity crashing I gave up on it.  The crashes were ridiculous, too.  I'm talking about blank, new projects just idling for a couple of minutes in the background (again, doing nothing, no game objects yet, no scripts, nada) and having the whole app take a dump.  Could be my hardware setup in part, but I found a ton of people talking about it over at the forums.  After some unfruitful troubleshooting, downloading a 3 different versions at super slow speed (large files!) and having them all behave the same, I decided to try out Unreal Engine.  I have only messed around with it a little, but it doesn't crash indiscriminately.  I ended up spending more time doing a C++ tutorial so far, but I am feeling more confident about it overall in comparison to Unity once I'm done with that.

Unreal's renderer blows the Unity options out of the water imo, but Unity's a lot more open, and cheaper. Which version of UDK were you using? I've used their engines from 2004 until the recent UE4 releases and have had few issues compared to most toolsets, typically it's very easy to get up and running in UE

[Arkhan]

Unreal Engine's interface blows, it requires DX11 (and fails silently if you don't).

Unity is a bit goony.   It's like Photoshop for games.

But, because it uses C#, it's easy to just belt out what you want and be done with it.

It also has better 2D support than Unreal at the moment.

If Unreal would not be lame about requiring DirectX11, I'd use it.

My dev machine is older, because I make games for 30 year old machines.  lol

[johnnykonami]

I want to make games for the Turbo too, but I think that might be a bit out of my skill level!  I didn't realize Unreal used DX11, my current video card isn't compatible.  That might put a damper in those plans until I can get that upgraded to something newer.  As for Unity, I wanted to use it and was totally prepared to learn some C#, but like I said, I couldn't stop it from crashing so what could I do?  I just moved onto the next viable alternative.  I have a game idea or two I'd love to start working on and get out of my head, but I just can't seem to get rolling.