Found a fully functional rally game with pace note callouts, damage, functional windshield wipers, and cool turbo sounds.
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Anyone know what “BNZ” means? I’ve seen a lot of dreams have “(BNZ)” in their names. I figured out that ones with “(PDP)” were trending for a while because pewdiepie did a video on dreams and told people to tag him in new creations and he might play them in the future. Is BNZ something similar? I can’t find anything on it.
It’s extremely versatile, and doing certain things (e.g. animated cutscenes) is actually pretty slick and relatively “easy” (although you may need to do a few hours of tutorials to get there). All the in-game tutorials are rather well put together, so it’s very learnable if you have patience.
Making DoDonPachi would be considerably harder, and is probably only possible if you’re already a programmer.
Even as a programmer, it’s kind of a puzzle to get the logic to do what you want because they provide you logical pieces that are meant for very specific tasks. Doing something that isn’t explicitly supported is about cobbling logic together in unique ways to take advantage of side-effects and corner cases.
EDIT: I’m also not sure I would call the UI simple. It’s learnable, but it’s definitely… involved.
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I revisited your game the other night when a friend was visiting and realized that I had been playing it wrong (I think). It flows a lot better when I hold down the grapple button rather than constantly trying to time it.
Last night, I learned key frames and timelines. Those things sure open up a lot of possibilities.
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Yeah keyframes are super powerful. And they’re useful just to avoid polluting everything with wires.
They’re single handedly the reason complex animations are doable in the engine.
Re: grapple – at a high skill level you kind of do a mix of inputs, but allowing you to hold so that you can swipe across surfaces or grab exactly when you’re in range was definitely intentional to make it flow better.
As Gate88 said, the system is easy to use but you can’t (or at least I couldn’t) just jump in and grasp the more complex parts without going through some of the tutorials.
I would love to see more creations from SB people.
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So this was a giant pain in the ass, largely because it’s hard to “stick” objects to other objects, but I finally got it working (and in a generic way so that it supports multiplayer!)
God implementing this was like “beating a Zachtronics puzzle game” levels of difficulty. I’m not even sure I can make a good game out of this, but hey here we are.
Let me know if you want the broad strokes on how I did it, but it’s probably not worth describing if no one cares!
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And there’s still one last corner case – it doesn’t handle picking up multiple boxes well, so I need a way to prevent that. It feels doable though, after getting what I think was the hardest part out of the way.
Dang that’s sick. Is the logic for “thing sticking to other thing” the kind of thing that someone can share or is it too use case specific?
Tonight I think I’m going to finally go past the beginner tutorial set and get into the real stuff so I can get to creating, a thing I haven’t done yet.
Oh I should share some stuff I’ve played. The trending section is actually pretty good at picking out good stuff. Not necessarily the more experimental but they can be inspiring in their polish.
I really liked the visual design of Lulu Baba.
Twilight Ghost was kind of interesting too. It hits that small scope game design and works for the type of horror game it is (maze where you’re being chased), though it could probably use some more variety in the environment design.
Animal Pro Skater was surprising in how fleshed out the onboarding is. It’s got a character creator and skateboard creator before you actually play! The skateboarding is solid for a WIP but a bit finnicky and doesn’t have a sense of weight yet. Still really impressive dream overall.
One thing I’ve noticed about FPSes is the lack of auto-aim makes aiming difficult on a controller. I wonder if anyone has been able to program that logic in yet because it’s sorely needed.
The simple version is “constantly teleport an object to a tag that is grouped inside a player controlled object”.
Since it’s grouped with the player, the tag will move relative to the player when the player moves, so it solves all the rotation & movement cases.
My specific case was much more complicated for two reasons:
- I wanted the box to still have collision with both the player and other boxes
- I didn’t want to snap the box to a fixed position on the forklift; I wanted the box to keep whatever orientation it was relative to the forklift when picked up.
The first point is a problem, because if you keep collision on for the box, then when the player moves forward they constantly make small collisions with it and slow down considerably. If you turn off player collisions with the box, then when the box hits another box or wall it will stop but the player will keep going.
The second point is also hard, because if you use movement logic chips on things inside an object, they essentially ungroup and keep their own movement. Also the teleport command literally only will take tags as an input, so you can’t just do math to place it correctly.
My solution was then this:
- Make a copy of the box, and group it with the player
- Make this copy invisible and have no collision
- Add a tag to the box so you can use its position.
- When the player lifts the fork, do the following:
- Teleport the invisible block grouped with the player onto the real block (which you’ve also placed a tag on)
- Turn off collision for the real block
- Turn on collision for the invisible block (since it’s grouped with you, it won’t affect your own movement)
- Now constantly teleport the real block to the fake block that is grouped with you until you drop it.
The fact the the grouped invisible block will still stay grouped to you after teleporting it was the real magic of this trick I think, and that took a lot of trial and error to figure out.
I’m sort of glossing over how to detect which player is which player, how to communicate to the block you’re picking up, etc, but that’s the general algorithm.
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reads as hacky as real game programming to me
have y’all seen that one that’s like a >ffxv caliber breakfast plate?
oh i see it is a thing by a dev
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A few more creations that impressed me:
A Layers of Fear-type thing.
The best combat I have seen in Dreams so far.
Amusing, though the second half drags a little.
He’s inspired lots of other people to make realistic food pictures too though. I think there was a Food Jam where you can find a lot of that kind of stuff in the archive.
This is what I was thinking as I was reading it! I watched Giant Bomb’s quick (2 hours) look for Dreams and Vinny was explaining how there was this one particular part where he wanted a cutscene where you watch a panda to walk somewhere, get crushed, and explode, but the panda kept respawning back at its starting location. His eventual solution was to make the panda turn invisible after it explodes so even though it’s still there the player won’t see it, and I am pretty sure I’ve seen this exact programming trick discussed (and exploited) on an AGDQ.
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I remember trying this out but I never got far enough to actually do the combat. I always died in the extended platforming part and eventually quit out, so I went back I tried it now. I’m not completely sure I get how the hitboxes work, but it’s loose enough that it works well enough with the vast area and fast movement speed the game has. The other day I tried that Project Ikelos and I thought the combat in that was particularly well developed compared to most games. It has animated combat strings, branching combo paths, and animation canceling into and out of dodges. It lacks oomph but everything about it hit a real PS2 b-game atmosphere. It must have taken a ton of work. Almost all of its elements are private but I’d love to take a peak at the logic and animations.
I played this FPS dream just now and it’s probably the most solid gamefeel I’ve had so far for an FPS.
Ok this video is actually nuts though. So many really creative techniques to get a lot out of the engine.
A year from now there is going to be so much sick ass stuff being done with this thing.
I bought this last week but haven’t had a chance to play it yet. No idea what I’m going to make yet. Thinking about recreating places from actual dreams I’ve had.
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I’ve googled around and couldn’t find the answer on this, but are animations and puppets separate entities? Is it possible to create animations that can be saved and utilized in other puppets and sculpts you make later? Or are animations locked to whatever you made them on?
I’m thinking about stuff like movement animations or attack animations, and if you could just pull people’s existing animations and tweak them for your own use, like you can logic and everything else.