Amateur GameDev General ~ /agdg/ + /vm/

hum dirtmaps seems to relative easy anyway to do as they have a rather basic structure and tends to look brown/grayish and on metallic surfaces some rust/scratches applied. Alright I gonna use the baking function more often then.

I've accomplished very much… that doesn't have to do with game development. Oops
Back to those Godot tutorials.

Been working on this mask.
Was also coding a HUD on Garry's mod and fixing a broken gamemode.

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t-engine or libtcod for a roguelike, /agdg/?
Language does not really matter for me since I'm gonna have to learn lua or c# either way, but which one offers more possibilities?

Okay I have a question. I want to code for Master System as I have an idea I think would work on that console. How hard is assembly? Is c++ harder?

Assembly is literally typing out each CPU instructon
Any programming language ever is to make assembly easier. I read you shouldn't even both with assembly unless you REALLY know what you're doing, because C/C++ compilers can optimize your code better 90% of the time.

There are most likely no C++ compilers for it. There's a couple of C compilers for various Z80-based systems, probably including SMS, but they produce slow as shit code, so you'll have to do critical sections in assembly regardless. SDCC is the most recent of them, if I recall correctly.

Actually, there's a devkit that uses SDCC:
github.com/sverx/devkitSMS

Raw C is useful if your target hardware doesnt have a C++ compiler for it. I would only recommend it to someone who wants to make a game on actual retro hardware like the NES or GB.

If I use this, would it still be possible to dump it into a physical cart? I'd like to produce at least some form of physical media.

There are utilities to form a complete ROM image in there, including the Sega headers and whatnot, so it would probably work. You'd just need a cart flasher or some shit.

You can link native code with C# and use what the fuck ever you want.

Last thread got me thinking about an open world chess rpg, and if you in it, I'd be happy with a little brainstorming and criticism about the core concept.
So the initial idea is the world is an endless chessboard, with chess-patterned everything, and you'd start as a pawn, being able to go only forward from your mother-pawn, as you born. Because of this facts, pawns are the nomads of this world, always moving, but a bit bad hunters, because they can only hunt diagonally from them. They have their own culture, as legends about the end of the world, where any one of them could change into anything one's want to (might even put it into the game with some sort of test, ya know) When you manage to "upgrade" somehow(gotta think a good way for that) You becomes a horse, who are the peasants of the community, then bishops, who are the priest/magician social part of this civilization, then you could choose to be a knight, or a queen for respectively politics or big-ass battles of confusion (real-time chess with every-character on the move at the same time sounds boner-inducing), and the plot would be that in this realtively peaceful civilization, an army of outcasts and failed pieces are practicing forbidden magic, morping together low-cast, and trying to form their own empire, making mutated monsters like in the embed video, and you could choose to be with them, either as a magician, or the biggest, betterest monster ever, or you could side with the good guys, and honorably and quite frankly, boringly could beat them bringing back the usual order.

So… Thoughts? Ideas? Any constructive criticism, or bullying about me drinking too much?

You know, I've never seen a nigger develop vidya before.

good damn it you nigger, that was more or less my idea
i knew i shouldn't have mentioned "chess with rpg mechanics" in the last thread
i'll sue

You wouldn't dare
Or we could work together
Whatever flies yourboat

i need an artist

I started learning Blender a few weeks ago
Give me two weeks after jan 18, and you got one…stupid exams.

my exams start jan 25

Is it for weebshit?

shader magic bro.
Noise functions and stuff. Yeah.

Been doing this stuff for a independent study, but I do have a few ideas on how to apply this stuff to games (I already had used some shader techniques in a game I released)
ninjapretzel.github.io/ProcGen/

Like

said, it's probably just an animated texture, and not procedural. The tiling is a pretty dead give away. (My procedural textures tile over massive distances because my noise fields are based off of a fractalized sin function at extremely high frequencies)

Use genetica viewer if you want procedural textures but have no clue what you are doing.

spiralgraphics.biz/viewer/

Oh well, when you finish, then we could do some actual work! Until then, some ideafagging is in dire need to be done, m8.
My mail is [email protected]/* */, contact me whenever.

i just got the idea from there

So it's literally just this, but in unreal 4? Sounds kinda gay, user. What's your audience, old hipsters?

You damn nazi prestel, this is a lot more different than that, did you even read mine post about it?

I'm thinking of writing a 3D game in Ada with a barebones GL3+ renderer (possibly with GL1/2 fallbacks in the future) and IQM model support. How fucking stupid am I, and should I stick with Irrlicht for making low-poly vidya that doesn't run like ass?

I read your post and it sounds even gayer.

i was thinking more like the harry potter aesthetic, but with extra mechanics like from

Flatsprites and wallsprites are interesting tech.

Why the fuck would you write anything in Ada.

Because of why, you purulent sack of titshit?

Hmm I have seen that Genetica stuff before some time ago but I never bothered myself checking it because most of the result they showed looked rather cheesy to me. Maybe I will give it a shot anyway if I tried one of those method first.

Autism.

Optimized my game engine YUME to heck:
10,000 particles at 200+ fps 🕺

Also spent most of my spare time this week adding juice to Speebot - now there's camera shaking, improved sound, more particles and more effects. It's really cool how you can make your game that much more fun without changing anything gameplay related.

Is your game juicy, /agdg/?

It would be, if I could make that chess-game right now, I watched a shitton of videos from Mark Brown to Gdc

noice

You need to sell me on this. Imagine I was a big publisher and you walk into my office and say I got this great idea about making a chess based open world rpg. The first thing I would ask is "How did you get into my office?" and "Somebody call the police!"

You're kind of opening yourselves to making a pretentious, surreal indie game. Like an rpg game with chess A E S T H E T I C.
That type of game can't rely solely on gameplay to motivate the player, because chess is boring! Unless if it's just an rpg with chess like aesthetic, than why not just make a regular rpg?

I'd say charts like this don't mean much shit in the field of video games.
Whatever floats your boat. I've never written anything in Ada, but I guess as long as it isn't as low-level as C, you shouldn't be too fucked.

fine, i'll add a shitty story that won't matter at all, normalfags will love it and they'll play it because people will think they're smart for playing chess!

If the pieces are cute, I wouldn't mind a pretentious chess RPG.

No he doesn't.
How about you go kill yourself.

(checked)
What engine are you using? Anyways, check out tutorials for water or defense/hologram shield shaders for your respective Engine/Shaderlanguage, because these shaders are rather similar to that.

I think in this case you basically have three textures, one for the wall and one for the disgusting brown rust, and procedural or premade alpha/cloud/wave texture to lerp between the wall and the rust textures.

For example: Take pic related cloud texture and write into your shader that in a greyscale range between 0(black)-1(white), everything below 0.5(grey on the cloud) greyscale is showing texture1, and everything above 0.5 is showing texture2, and in order to lerp around the texture visibiliies, change that 0.5 value to say for example to a 0.2 value, so that texture1 is showing up on the cloud texture from 0(black on the cloud) to 0.2(darkgrey on the cloud), and texture2 on the rest of the greyscale picture from 0.2(darkgrey)-1(white)

This is just one of the many examples of how you could do this shit, but i am only a noob wizard myself so this might be a pretty outdated way to do it, but i hope you understand the principle behind it.

finally someone gets me

Hey guys, what's the best place/program to get your design doc up?

I'd use a physical sketchbook (already have one for art purposes) but I don't have a printer available.

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But who's going to buy it? Patricia Harambe?

shitlords who like rpgs and numales who think playing chess will be impressive

I forget to ask, does your procedural texture support rendering as textures so like .png, .dds for using as regular texture?

Wouldn't it have a bit better survival chance when it is FOSS?

The theme, the story, the feel of it are all everything but an rpg. The chess aesthetic is only one part of it, rpg-s need some renewal, after the teabagging what was Skyrim and FAllout 4. And what do you think, what was that sold those games? Because it was not the gameplay, seriously. It was marketing with a seemingly interesting story and theme to back it up.

Tell me, user, why would I want to go to a big publisher? To get my ass jewed into oblivion (pun not intented)? No. I just want to make a fun game, with something different this time, with interesting setting, quikry story, lore and some humuor based off chess and whatnot. I got the feeling that you kind of misread my intent, sorry if mine is the blame.

You're making games for the money?

see

And about you can't make a game only about gameplay? Have you ever played Downwell? Or Mario? Or whatever, almost half of the games in all-time history?

I'm jealous as hell, that's reeeeeeeeeeeally nice.
Optimization is something that I've always struggled with, partially because I'm a clueless git.

If you want to create PBR realistic textures you will need Substance Painter or Quixel, otherwise you need to texture Albedo,Roughness,Metallic,Specular,DetailNormals etc on your own, which are in the pain in the ass, especially if you are unfamiliar with PBR shading.

Baking is only need for AO and Normalmaps, although you could also paint heightmaps with alpha textures, and then bake them into Normalmaps in Blender, instead of creating highpoly versions for everything, which is a useful technique for sci-fi shit.

trello.com

Do you think you'll make your development money back on just that crowd?

Well, no, but you have to think like a businessman sometimes. Can't be all hobbyist and developer only because then you end up poor and broke like the Hawken team. May they rest in peace.

Where's the fun? How is it fun? What will I physically be doing inside that game that will be fun and I would want to repeat over and over?

But you're missing the point, Mario, Downwell and Whatever especially Whatever 3 are all
FUN
Chess is not.

My strategy for optimization:
1. Make thing
2. Make sure thing works
3. Make code handling the thing pretty/generic/universal/follow a pattern/buzzword
4. Realize that made it slower
5. "Fuck coding patterns" make everything as low level as possible
6. Enjoy the fast

Alright, I managed get Substance Painter running a while ago and it has some nice painting tools as well so I guess I am not totally lost on that one. tfw it doesn't support Ptex

mhm Is it still possible to make textures that feel gamey on that one? Sorry if I described a bit wrong because I don't know the correct term for it, like Unreal 1, Serious Sam TFE/TSE, Half-Life 1 etc, as I like how it looks, it's a little bit comfy.

Witcher 3?

Okay. You had me at the witty remark Whatever 3 is still better than Awesome game 5, but then you lost me. The game is only using chess to make fun of it, except the aesthetic of the chessboard and the figures and their respective moveset, nothing else comes out of chess. It is not turnbased, it is not two person sitting at one place for hours, etc. (besides if what you said about chess would be true, no one would play it, except some autists, or very bored people, but that is not the case with chess). But even if we would want to make a pretentious rpg with only chess A E S T H E T I C, why would you complain so much? I mean, at least it still sounds better then Fallout 4 Or Awesome Game 6

Has anyone here stopped to think about writing for his game?
Where do you even start learning this kind of stuff?

Two things:
>read more (preferably by authors whose writing-style you like)

I stopped there
And you just start doing it. Publish it. Get criticised. Google how to write better. Enroll in an useless academic course. Repeat. After infinite number or repeats, you reap the fruits of your labor.
Or you just have some talent, and skip the whole part.

Honestly, I don't think that writing should be the first part of your game if you ask that kind of question. Make it juicy and well-polished, and it will carry even a mediocre story on it's back

Just use a ramp.

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You could always take one surface in front of a camera, set up lights however you want (or remove them) and then render that to a texture.

I was actually thinking of rendering these shaders to some textures when an object is loaded (of course they'd be batched so objects that share the mesh/material would use the same textures), but haven't started working on that part of this pipeline.

It would be better to render these kinds of textures (if not animated) once on load, rather than every frame like they are now. Either way, the textures I've made so far aren't complex enough to need to be batched, they run fine even on my shitty laptop with integrated intel 4000 or something graphics, but just lose precision faster (when the texture is panned or has lots of fractal octaves applied)

Genetica viewer is free, but if you don't do any postprocessing with the texture, expect other people might recognize the textures.

yay, I'm not the only shader wizard.

Damn you are good when it can even run on a toaster, I have myself a medicore PC by today standards but eh it is most of the time good enough for now as I don't plan playing any of those newer games they are pretty much commie propaganda and poorly made too. well I do played Factorio for a while before which is pretty radical

Thanks for your answer mayne.

Well, I suppose the initial step is understanding that game narratives are fundamentally different than books and movies.
There's too many games out there trying to emulate movies/books imo; games have so much more potential tools than either to tell a story.

I'd figure out, for you, what is the most important part about a game concerning writing.
Then look at sources where this is done well. For me, it's lore, so I look at tabletop games and the like as a rough guide.

I'm not complaining. You can do what you want, it's just that you better be sure that what you make will give you back what you spend on it.

Exchanging time for having better programming and art-making skills for a game I (preferably and probably) will be proud to put out for people to play? Yes, kind user, I'm sure in that.

I was suspecting the same.
Even if the game doesn't contain a single word I guess you still have stuff like building a setting and coherent theme that ties sound visuals and interaction together.

Never considered it, but now that you mention it RPG game masters seem to deal with very similar problems.
I wonder how well those skills translate to gamedev.

You can change the parameters on substances to make them look more stylized, or you can make substances yourself, but substance painter is based upon the idea that you use modern PBR shaders.

It's still kinda vague what you want though, do you just want oldschool textures? Or old shaders? Or oldschool models too?
If you want the exact looks from the 90s/early2000s, go and look at some really old 3d texturing tutorials, and try to reproduce those steps in newer programs.

pls no bully
But isn't the cloud the ramp in this case? Last time i touched a shader was like 3 years ago so i don't completely remember

Thaenks. It turns out even old graphics cards have more than enough power to sample sin() (which is the heart of the noise function) even like 30-50 times per pixel per frame. Of course I could always make low-quality versions of the shaders that lack the heightmap/parallax and normal-map samples for improved performance.

I think in that one the 'ur a faget' is the ramp

I just write in Markdown for all my documentation, using pandoc to convert it to a pdf or whatever if I want it as something other than plaintext.
But maybe I love that command line a little too much.

I am interested in oldschool Textures as I already know the idea for doing that in model format by just using lower polygon count like around 1k polygons or so. Through having one for making nice looking human models wouldn't be too bad either, hmm maybe I just use one of those opengameart models and learn it from those somehow.

Through in case for Substance Painter it might be sufficient to use a lower texture resolution and work from there which is pretty much the same minus a few fancy stuff, I guess.

Very noice, engine/code optimization is rarely done nowadays from what I have read here.

Can you recommend any good literature that has especially well written dialogue (not comical)?

Wheel of time. Huge read though. Depends on what sort of thing you're looking for.

but that is exactly the case with chess

Seen shaders do fucking magic, man. Post more cool stuff

>almost a million people registered at the US Chess Federeation ( new.us chess.org/players/search/?search=&rating_type=regular&rating_min=0&rating_max=3000 ), and not to mention about the others who just like to play chess sometimes, and this is only in the USA, with the western world's worst education.

I think you have some unrelated problems with chess. Is it that your chess-teacher molested you? Or your father dressed as a rook?

I'm pretty sure there's well over a million autists in the US
Also I hate chess but that doesn't mean I'm wrong

Well then, let's just not derail the thread anymore, hm?

Fuck THIS guy

Sorry, none that I can think of. Thing is that what I look for in books (and stories in general) is world-building. So while it's entirely possible that one of the books I liked does have "especially well written dialogue", it's not something I paid a lot of attention to. The only book I read recently that I really did like the dialogues in, is a comedy ironically.

Which one?

Has anyone ever written how various games handle their text and fonts?
any godot anons have any more tips and tricks?

So any recommendations in general?

I think what's going on is that someone is playing chess at higher dimensions in this thread.

Hope not the young Barron is practicing around here…

What do you mean which one? Chessman.EXE

He's got stupid pawns that nig your squares and tell you to fuck off, while preventing you from taking tiles, and knights that jump everywhere forcing you to keep moving. Oh you ruined his pieces with break chips? Well fuck you too, now he has a rook and two knights, better keep fucking moving now you cunt. He also sits in the back making it hard to hit him unless you use specialized chip folders, and if you somehow get caught where you can't move, nigga stomps on you for like 500 damage.

I'll post a few tomorrow since it's late and I only have my phone now.

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That's actually moldy bread.
Stale bread would look the same, only be firmer.

It is firm. ANd this bread is also moldy, so my picturistic analogy stands on its crumbs.

One day I'll understand all this and won't hate myself

I realized that it looks "fine" if I had the depth buffer disabled, OR enabled and read-only (eg blank), OR didn't have a depth buffer format set (eg invalid). Basically, the depth buffer was never actually doing anything, so I got all these sorting and clipping fuckups.

With last pic, the black regions are actually a transparent quad being rendered and fucking things up, even though alpha blending is on. For some reason, it doesn't like the idea of a 100% transparent texture region.

So what I'm going to do is make a bool[] and when I periodically update my vertex buffer (eg when movement happens) I'll only move quads that are set to true. That way I can ignore specific quads and build actual geometry.

I still think I should be able to just draw transparent things and throw as much geometry at the engine and just have it work and sort things, but apparently this is too much to ask

Oh no, replacing the empty texture with a partial one didn't solve my "transparency" issue.

AGDG threads are generally slowburning but survive until posting cap

i would just like the Tetrachrome dev to be aware i have fapped to the character multiple times now

Anyone recommend a good JS game engine for 2d shit, or should I just get into raw canvas rendering with my own game loops and entities and collision

Godot exports to HTML5 :^)

According to its issue tracker though, there are some performance issues

I'm having a hard time understanding everything related to 3d modeling import and export formats, it seems on Irrlicht you can use a lot of formats but the peole who made supertuxkart seems to disagree on that. Is Irrlicht just too old ?

are you also going to tell the whole world that you are gay.

you must be new, this is how /agdg/ threads go

JUST

Time to use IK?

Time to beat your head against the wall implementing an IK algorithm.
Personally I've used the Cyclic-Coordinate Descent (CCD) method, works really great but don't forget to have a pole target for your IK chain

Also, implementing IK can be a BITCH especially if you use an iterative method, be prepared to spend lots of time building up a debugging framework so you can see what the algorithm is doing to each bone for each iteration, step by step.

It's not IK, that's actually working.
It's just one of the thousand edge cases for player collision. Look at the line traced by the position.

The speed bug in Mario 64 exists because of shit like this, because of the hundreds of workarounds you need to come up with to handle slopes, stairs and anything in between.

fixed it with a bigger collider

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This looks fantastic, user

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looks like a position that i relish.

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c'mon nigga step up

For your checking pleasure.

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such a semen demon

Okay, here are a two recommendations I enjoy/-ed to get you started.
Aside from being very relevant in this day and age, it's excellently written. Especially the image of the world it creates in your head, the pacing and the ending. No game/movie/book had an ending with such an impact on me. Again, that might just be because it's so relevant.
Ignore all the shitty indie horror games that are called "lovecraftian" by the "developers". Excellent world-building. Rather difficult reads though, especially if you're not a native English speaker (such as myself). The English language has changed substantially over the years. The best thing is that a sizable chunk of his work is now public domain, so you won't have any trouble getting your hands on them for free. You're well advised to not only read his most popular books (At the mountains of madness, etc.) though. Some of his older stuff is good too.

Unless you've read them already, they should keep you occupied for a while. Here are some additional honorable mentions:
First thing: I only bought this book for its art. The author/artist did the art for Half-Life 2 and Dishonered, which are two games I greatly enjoyed the art direction of. The story is rather short and the book is expensive because of the high quality paper and print. So it's more of a collector's thing. I'd love there to be a video game adaptation of it though, because the story was really, really cool. The bad news is that haven't found a pdf online. I would try to scan my copy, if you »really« want to.
I greatly enjoyed the first BioShock for its atmosphere, setting and writing (not so much for the gameplay though). It's nowhere near as good as a 1894 or some of Lovecraft's better stuff, but if you liked the atmosphere, etc. of the first BioShock too, it's well worth your time.
Yahtzee's first book. I haven't finished it yet though, but after being 1/4 through, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. So far it's been great. It has some really neat dialogues, but it's obviously comedy.

Thank you.

Finishing fermentation recipes this weekend
Im progressing faster than expected

Will there be puzzles in this game? That animation for putting your hands on the wall would be perfect for pushing objects or revealing hidden passages.

There will be, but I never planned on using this.
Now that you mentioned it, there could be a trigger entity that responds to this, just like Doom's secret doors.
Might add that if I find a use for it.

Well here I go now, it fucking works properly now and its even loonix native. The mesh multiplication trick works as well that means I can even create seamless texture. I guess I need to find my way around this thing to make okayish looking texture.

Is it going to be something like DMC?

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certified 100% pachinko free

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fast

Tell me SpeebotAnon, will there be permanent upgrades to Speebot? Will they affect his appearance?

Gambling should be optional. Every game, except purely luck based games like roulette etc., should be beatable by skill only, otherwise it's just in the pain in the ass.

hmm I like it where it is going too bad that it seems to be kinda laggy for me and I cannot use the physic enabled painting at all as it will really fuck up my framerate. Is there a way to select polys so that only these can be painted unto? Blender has this function.

Can't you do this with the baked texture data instead of the highpoly?

high polys? The "model" I am working on has 594 polygons right now so idk mang, my aim was to create several HD Textures.

I haven't thought about that, but maybe I should add some sort of unlockable skin/hat system. What would you like to see?

If he has a double jump, maybe start him with just a single. Have him find a little rocket belt or something on his adventures that unlocks it.

A dash or something? same deal. Have something to overspin his tires and launch him.

Oh, that's already a mechanic, but the items are reset when you die or move to the next level. I thought you suggested some sort of permanent cosmetic upgrades.

hello world

D&D monsters?

take your homoeroticism elsewhere

No, just same old marching cubes.
Octrees are too slow and I needed some way to cut up the terrain to keep meshing performance up, so I decided to go with good ol' chunks.
To make it easier to work with, I gave it a "virtual space" kind of system, which means it saves only the cells that contain data and it can be extended forever rather than having a fixed size. This is the first cell generated with the new system.

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I miss Spiral Knights.

is that robot wants kitty?

can you make her bent down on a wall so birds poop on her butt

I accidentally visited /agdg/
never again

ur welcom

Eh I managed to import it into Blender now, it doesn't look too shabby but all those noises seems to remove those fine details.

If i cant figure out this fucking Z buffering tonight then im going to start a new project

Do the other tiles say MALE on them?

doesn't the z buffer just determine the order in which things are drawn

Oh you cheeky cunt m8

Nice dubs.

Yes and when its disabled I get strange clipping errors because some things are sorted anyways. But if I enable it, it still doesnt sort shit properly and I end up with huge black triangles in unusual places and still get sorting errors

are you trying to implement to sorting yourself or just passing it to opengl?
Also how are you calculating the z buffer?

I am using XNA and shitting geometry via draw calls. It is sorting it itself because I have no options besides enabling or disabling the depth buffer or making it read only.

so you calculating the depth buffer yourself and if so how?

No im not

I literally enable it and get black triangle shit everywhere. Theres literally no option for me to calculate it myself

I can enable depth stenciling on the same buffer but no combination of things seemed to affect the render output

Robot wants crystals.

Maybe if you render the depth buffer you'll be able to visually see where the problem is?

May I ask how you accomplish the distorted swoosh effect that follows the swords? Please explain the process in simple terms, or give me the name of this effect so I can look up an implementation.

so then XNA is fucked up somehow?
My advice is use a better framework
Anything made by microsoft should be clear warning sign
Especially if it's part .NET that whole thing is convoluted bloated mess

I understand your hateboner for Microsoft but this is a problem that stems from my understanding the framework and math behind it. Dropping it for another one wont solve shit

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why?

To make it less complex as it doesn't make the system any deeper or more fun in any way
Complexity is bad, depth is good

What's the plan with the cooking system?
You making a simulator for cooking, or is it going to be in an actual game?

quoted wrong post

Im making a harvest moon-like game, the cooking system will be the flagship feature, so im focusing on it before anything else

ah, makes sense

For all the fun people make of your cooking system stuff as a standalone, once weaved into a harvest-moon like game (and assuming it's executed well) people might change their minds.

Maybe I should go check out the cooker myself sometime soon… Can you point me to latest build?

over there
>>>/agdg/28168

Just from glancing at OP:
Biggest issue/bottleneck I see on the path you're headed is the 3D character models.

I came up with what I think are some revolutionary ideas for a fighting game, but I've shelved them for the time being because while I can make decent quality models, because I'm not a professional modeler it just takes more time for me to make a character model of decent quality. To the point that it would just take too much time to make a game requiring 12 fighters (character models).

That being said I'm probably being too picky on the quality of my character models. You could make models more along the lines of what games like 3DS Pokemon, Harvest Moon 3D, Rune Factory 4, etc. have done much faster than the level of quality I'm looking to achieve, which would at least somewhat help alleviate the effort required to make the mass quantity of models you're looking to make.

But games like Harvest Moon and Rune Factory make up for their poor-quality 3D models by supplementing them with beautiful 2D illustrations during conversations…To be blunt, I think all of that work alone (forget all the other work of programming, environments, etc.) is unrealistic for a two-man team, unless one of you is a professional modeler who can crank out a model a day or something.

My recommendation would be to, sooner rather than later, attempt to make a vertical slice of your game, a small but high-quality snippet of what the final game would be like, with at least one production-quality character model done in a small test environment. Doing that will tell you a lot of things about how realistic the plan you're attempting is. If the one character model takes you a month, and you want 20 characters in your game, you can estimate 20 months of dev just to get all the character models done. (Or if you cut corners and re-use the same base mesh for all models, perhaps less than that, but probably still at least 12 months).

Once you made that high-quality vertical slice of your game, if you determined your current plan is unrealistic…Just off the top of my head, you could re-work your ideas into a survival game instead of a farming game.

That would remove the need for a town, and thus the need for massive numbers of NPCs. If a certain NPC element such as love interest seemed like a must-have, it seems like with a bit of creativity you could work that into the survival setting one way or another.

Anyways, just thinking out loud, I just really enjoy thinking through the production side of game dev, how to realistically turn ideas for a game into reality.

This crossed my mind, in my current state i can only make stuff like cars and rigid objects, but iam aiming at 3DS pokemon character detail.
I will try 3~4 models to see how fast and well i can do it, but only after i finish the cooking system integrated with the faerie village to make a feature demo minigame.

That's actually kind of a cool aspect. Maybe use the HarvestMoon mechanics to grow your own garden and lifestock, buying new seeds and creatures, creating and testing new reciepes, expanding your restaurant, while having adventurers as restaurant guests. Your assistents cook for the average folk, which will be your basic daily side-income, and your main missions will be cooking specific orders, for example adventurers who want to go to an ice cavern, which is why they need food that warms them up, and the more your cooking endresult is to their needs, the more fame and money you recieve at the end of the cooking-"quest". And this way you keep expanding your business.

now that actually sounds really neat, I think I'd play that

There will be festivals with cooking competitions literal shokugeki's
Also every NPC will have their own food score evaluation, which means each has different tastes and tasty food will be the best gift for increasing friendship, so you have to learn how to cook for each NPC if you want to rush relationships, no giving generic flowers every day like in most games of the genre
Two more uses of cooking will be the expeditions and faeries
The expeditions are planned for the second expansion, there you will be able to find and tame different farm animals and rare crops, you will need to take food with you that can last for several days, so you have to use recipes with slow spoiling time
The faerie village will be this game "harvest gnomes", they will work for you if you cook them some tasty stuff
Oh yeah, and your character will have to eat every day or faint, also good food is the main way of restoring stamina, my game will be more based on stamina management than time management (time will run VERY slowly comparing to other games) and stamina will be hard to restore.

It's your project, so of course you're free to do as you like.
Dunno how long finishing the cooking system and integrating it will take you, but again, hopefully that's sooner rather than later.

The goal is to fail faster so you can reach the point where you succeed sooner.
Failing sucks, but for a given plan and dev team to execute said plan it can often be inevitable that you will fail, either because the plan has an issue or the team can't execute part of it- in which case, it's best to get the failure over with as soon as possible so you can start a new attempt to succeed (whether that's a modification of your previous plan or something new altogether).

Not that I'm saying you're doomed for failure, but I do think there's a reasonable chance you'll end up needing to re-work your plans to get the NPC count down to something your team can handle (and draw them, again depending on model quality 2D illustrations might be necessary to get players interested/engaged with your characters) in a reasonable timeframe.

I meant 'your team can model' (and draw them), sorry, pretty late over here, about to sleep

i understand the fail faster philosophy, thats why im going to release a feature demo with both the cooking system and the faerie village, together they will work as a minigame, the faeries will supply ingredients and you will feed them with the cooking system, there won't be any 3D models in this part, will be UI based
I expect to finish this in 3 months, the release and get feedback to improve both systems while i work on the 3D models for the actual game

I'm narrowing down the issue.

Each tile in the map has inward-facing faces. Pic related is how my level is set up. When I give textures to the hidden cell, this is when the conflicts happen. If I strip away all the textures (especially the floor and ceiling), it looks great.

Unfortunately, this isn't a realistic way to fix it because there will definitely be one-cell rooms like this in the actual game, but it gives me a little more insight into the problem.

Just going to leave this here to remind people the number of NPCs these sorts of games typically have…

The gameplay, environments, programming, music, etc., perhaps even all the writing/text isn't beyond what a small dev team could handle, but the large cast of characters is a huge undertaking on the production side.

I've already said what ought to be said, just be wary, try to fail fast and you ought to be able to figure something out.

i plan to have 20 NPCs on release, then add more on the expansions

Alright I think i got finally the hang out of it now, for Substance Painter I need to use PBR-Spec-Gloss and then I had to get 2 other files one is a plugin and the other is the PBR materials set (I used PBR Standard v3 in this case).

I need to redo my texture again as it was quite messy to get the result right and with this setup it seems to be almost 1:1, Here have those files for anybody interested which includes a tutorial for setting it up: Blender_v2.77_PBR_Set.zip my.mixtape.moe/jwwvkb.zip

How many of you guys are gunna shill on cuckchan when your game is done?

I'll just post it here and wait for their lurkers to shill it for me

I wouldn't go there to shill. You can barely go there for criticism because only bit of it will be legit like here, while everything else is absolute shit, and most of what is left are people who don't appreciate selfmade games or will be jealous and downvote your steamrating to hell and kill your marketing for lelz, doesn't matter if your game is good or not. Even their AGDG is more about dev celebrities and shitposting than games anymore.

I would rather shill on plebbit for your first game, people will upvote steamratings on default and freely market your shit among steamfriends and other places. But on the downside, you cannot recieve good criticm on reddit because it's a pseudo-safespace where they don't want to hurt your feelings.

Pretty much my thoughts exactly

I'm never going back to that place. If I ever get around to actually doing shit, youtube is free to use and so is social media. I'm definitely going to post here too.

i left that shithole forever

The dude just spent the last two months on what appears to be a text or bare-bones graphical implementation of a giga-autistic, "deep" cooking system for a mini-game or some shit. Plus shit like this makes me think there's no end to the feature creep of just that aspect of it. Take a guess as to how long it'll take to finish. My guess is: never ever

This. It's not that people on cuckchan would hurt my feefees, it's that you can barely hold a conversation anymore with how many people post there now. Not worth the effort.
I follow a few AGDG devs on tumblr and they get plenty of fair criticisms and questions. Reddit-tier dicksucking seems to be kept to a minimum since people can just hit the like/reblog buttons.

Never understood why people hate reddit so much. I mean, I dislike the idea of massive super forums because normalfags can into multiple websites, but /r/gamedev is miles better than anything a fuckin chan offers

...

It's a hugbox. Any dissenting opinions are silenced, which becomes apparent when you see what shit taste reddit tends to have.

whatever, I come to places like this for the bantz and humor, but the ephemeral nature kinda hurts when you're trying to build a knowledge base. How many zillions of times are the same questions asked?

That may be true, but there is a wealth of information there. I've learned a ton of stuff there over the years.

About gamedev? I haven't seen that happen.

It's not a hugbox, it's a meme.
Nobody here even has ever gone there I think.
It's like 9gag, just a scary word.

Removing any non popular opinions or basically anyone who disagrees with special snowflakes like stereotypical commies.

I mean, I've lurked there a bit to see what it's like. The smaller boards aren't as bad, but that can be said about any community.
I'm sure if you were to call a dev that reddit loves an incompetent asshole you'd get downvoted into oblivion, until your post disappears. The whole voting system is fucking stupid and inherently flawed.

We have >>>/agdg/ and some anons make guides that get saved and reposted, plus you can always LURK MOAR
Why don't you go back there then, and spare my screen real estate from your retarded spacing. The problem is the voting system, people that aren't sycophantic dicksuckers for a work that people "like" get buried and mocked (see Yandev's legion of retards), or everyone hates the dev's guts and thinks they can into game design, dicksucking each other with their "great" ideas (see any survival game ever, but especially DayZ).
Not to mention the fact that there is no quality control, even the shittiest memegames get hordes of autists doing one of the above.

Reddit's shit because if someone has a dissenting opinion it can just be downvoted and hidden as a result(or outright deleted if the mods on the subreddit are cunts).
It's the whole "you have free speech but not freedom from consequence" thing libcucks constantly preach.

Maybe shill it here and on a small subleddit to get some decent feedback. Maybe get a few friends to test it out. I could shill it here but I would probably get plenty of
>>>/reddit/
>>>/cuckchan/

The thing about leddit is that it has the options to give you decent feedback but it's inconvient to switch them unless the subleddit owner(?) changes the defaults. Smaller/more niche subleddits are better than the bigger shittier ones filled with normalfags and autismos.

2/10 bait

personally, I've found that reddit is only really good for reading, or finding information as it's a great hub of information.
Discussion… ho' boy no fucking way. The encouraged group think mentally instilled via upboating is shit for discussion (unless it's a small sub, then I suppose).
Although, having an "identity" tied to ones shit is a pia, and not worth the effort.
The procgen subwhatever is quality thou (smaller userbase), but the gamedev one is a circlejerk general (that is to say, especially so compared to here, most I see is anons sucking robowaifus dick from time to time).

read above about the voting.
If it's a medium to big sub it always happens, but smaller subs aren't always afflicted with this.

Though as this user mentioned, it's an inherently flawed system once you reach a certain threshold of users.

Also…
you have to go back, it's calling u

You could replace reddit with youtube and it would mean about the same thing.
I've never been there, I just imagine it's some average non-imageboard forum.

Youtube comments are utter shit and non-imageboard forums tend to turn into circlejerks as well. So you're not wrong.

In my experience if you're just posting "lolfag", yes you'll get downvoted, but if you present a reasoned argument, you're not likely to get downvoted. That being said, if you're in /r/gamedev, you should be talking about game development. Most of the subs devoted to getting shit done are fine if you're there to get shit done.

Yes, reddit's voting system is retarded, in fact reddit is retarded on multiple level but I find imageboard style post sorting to be pretty fucking terrible. It's not a big of a problem on a low traffic board like Holla Forums, but cuckchan is a horrible

Whenever there is a good viable alternative to a sub-forum on reddit, that's obviously preferable. E.g. polycount is far superior to anything on reddit for modeling.

It's been quite a while since I visited reddit so I just went over and looked through the first page of /r/gamedev. Complete shit. Someone blogging about performance issues with html/js game. 3/4 of the posts just open begging to be spoon fed. Someone giving away shit blend/obj models. I didn't find a single useful post.

Since every faggot hipster and their dog now wants to be le indie game developer, there's undeniably a lot of shit. I don't read it every day, I just search for things I'm curious about. That being said, it's usefulness really depends on your skill level and what you're doing.

I'm not saying it's the best place to discus game dev, but it's retarded to rule it out as a resource and it's undeniably more active than /agdg

The CEO of reddit recently edited some comments that basically amounted to "fuck you" to "fuck the mods of this subreddit", leaving no sign that the comments were edited, or who had edited them. He later fessed up, and promised it wouldn't happen again, but didn't apologize.
On top of this there's uneven support for different subreddits. /r/SRS gets away with a lot of stuff that other subreddits have been banned for (doxing, brigading, etc.), and hasn't been banned, quarantined, or punished in any way.
On top of this, as stated by and the voting system is flawed when it reaches a certain threshold of users. Stupid jokes and reposts get upvoted and anything that goes against the general consensus gets downvoted. This means that certain viewpoints are seen more than others, and so that's what people post and upvote, which exacerbates the problem even more. What exactly the threshold this happens at is differs from one subreddit to the next, but it's always there unless the mods step in with extremely strict guidelines (/r/science and /r/AskHistorians are prime examples, all jokes or off topic comments are removed). Every default subreddit is trash. Every. Single. One. It's because once a sub is a default it literally gets all of the newfags, forever.
A subreddit can be good as long as it's specific and geared towards a well defined purpose. /r/Crossview, for example. Small for a subreddit, well defined purpose, everyone sticks with it, and it's not shit. /r/Unixporn, well defined purpose, everyone sticks with it, not shit provided you like looking at other peoples GNU/Linux desktop configurations.

Yeah, pretty much. subreddits like /r/gamedev are mainly good for searching for information and getting free stuff. Checking in every day just means you'll be wading through a bunch of shit before you get to something good.

If Brianna Wu can make a game what if your excuse for not being a best seller

I know it's bait, but this is pretty depressing actually. Another jackass who rides off the work of his devs and takes all the credit. Although in his case, the only thing he's even known for is cutting his dick off and false flagging.

but she is the godzilla of feminists game devs
her game peaked a total of 10 people playing it at once

How do we know he cut it off? I thought most people preferred having a benis over a gaping open wound

Do these look like the eyes of a sane man?

So because I'm too lazy to make more enemies with full animation sets, I've decided on mechanical enemies that can easily be animated within blueprints.

Just testing the [relatively loose] AI this one has. The train that has no brakes.

Sorry to say, but to make a memorable game, there's no shortcuts when it comes to enemy animations.

There is a fun way to do it though.

Record yourself doing idle/attack/death animations and pick the best ones. Use them on humanoid enemies and add the most basic elements to non-humanoid enemies. Best-selling games have personality oozing out of every crack, so take your time.

Aside from that, I know the way the hair clips inside the model will be a much bigger issue, so you should probably solve that first.

...

fug all these nice things make me want to start up my old projects again… i never did anything super special but i miss that feeling of c r e a t i o n… maybe i'll work on my super mario world recreation i posted way back…

I hope you listen to what this guy says>>11324413
Honestly, it looks good. If your running out of ideas for mechanics for enemies to have, i highly suggest you use six arm puncher. Make his idle attack punching shit, and his special attack where he spreads out his arms in all directions and rolls around like a ball.

I hope i get to play this one day

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Yeah, she definitely needs a cool mask option.

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Don't you talk about my waifu like that. Let me imagine his stinking, hairy crotch armpit in peace

...

When i need information I use stackoverflow
But the thing that annoys me most about reddit is that it's just boring

DAS IST HIER KEIN SPASSPLATZ! LOSS HÄNDE HOCH AN DIE WAND!

bread is stale, here some
MOTIVATION

(checked)
noice

I'm using a matrix to represent the rotation and position of my camera. How can I clamp it so you can't look more than 90 degrees up/down?

You could just keep the camera/object coordinates as an XYZ position and then transform it into a matrix as needed

Grab life by the pussy

Welp enough with the fuckery, time for some texture recreation in HD. It's a bit hard making those patterns more close to 1:1 as I have constantly switch the windows and there doesn't seem to be a option anywhere to have some kind of a overlay.

Don't worry user, I'm sure the Germans will fix it.

Thomas?

Is unity good for making a hack and slash game?

Unreal Engine 3 or bust

I just checked their site and they said that new projects should use unreal engine 4 instead of 3.

Is 4 any good? How does the license system look like, will I pay a portion of my revenue to them?

...

It's like right there. In their front page.
unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4

You will pay 5% of every dollar of your gross income past the initial $3,000.
unrealengine.com/release
However if you're like me and your first couple of games are going to be released for free that's not a problem Which is why I use UE4. If your main issue is money go with CryEngine. However you really need to know C++ before you get into it.

I use unity, and I like it.

UE has too much bloat for me, in addition to be less "generic" compared to unity (tools are built in a fashion to recreate their flagship games), and the main feature a lot of people are drawn to is the blueprint system (don't want to use em, for either shaders or otherwise; i prefer to do both by hand).
It is sorta open source w/some stipulations, but the EULA is shit compared to unity imo; so the cons outweigh the pros for me.
Though, it may be different for you, and even with these qualms UE is a fine engine; though know that every engine is in relative terms "shit" if you only use the tools they provide for you… build your own tools, and such to specialize the engine for your game/usage need (that's where pre-built engines shine, is giving u the foundation to built your own specialized toolset for your game w/o having to do major low-level shit to even get started on your toolset).

>(UE* tools are built in a fashion to recreate their flagship games)

correction

Thanks for the input.

I want perfectly honest when I said I wanted to make a hack and slash game; the game usa also going to feature third person shooter mechanics as well as NPC allies. I didn't mention these since I thought that pretty much any engine could work for a shooter and NPC allies are so common that they should also be a given.

Would unity work better for this?

I was only shitposting, there is literally nothing wrong with Unity. as long as you can code

But unreal can make anything look beautiful and Unity can make beautiful things look shitty. Why is this a fact?

Well, both engines can do that tbh, and both provide the basic tools to do so (up to a certain extent).

I'd do some independent research, and note what I've mentioned thus far (about EULA differences, payment model comparing UE to Unity, etc), because you're the only one that can really decide in the end.
Quick overview… so I'd look at which features are available in one engine that's not in another engine (i.e. what you have to make by hand, or have a template tool for), and note the differences in each approach/feature/tool available; while figure out what is your pros/cons for each engine.
Such as… coding language(s) used by engine, quality of docs (unity is leagues better heh), community quality, EULA comparison, payment/revenue model, open source/not open source, low-level features, template toolkits available, blueprints vs no default blueprint tool (in unity u can purchase essentially a 1:1 blueprint tool… compared to unreal), etc.
In essence, the point is to invest some time now so you don't decide later on to switch to some other engine; or at least that's how I did it ages ago.

I didn't know Unreal was a graphics API.

Neither did I. huehuehuehueheuheuhue

As far as functionality either engine would work for that. Just install both engines and try them out, check out the community and API for both, then pick the one you like better.

Both use the same exact shit tbh, but they have different approaches to the default features available in the toolset.

Unreal has a blueprint system for their shaders, and it makes it a lot easier to provide a nice shader that "just werks" w/easy customization for newbs; i.e. better overall quality for all levels of experience.
While in Unity you have to do it all by hand (or buy assets if one can't code shaders worth shit + they don't want to learn how2 code shaders).
So, if most of the people using unity lack the ability to code shaders… as expected most pajeet-tier devs end up using the shitty default shaders without any special sauce to make it look perrty; while also more than likely lacking the knowledge to be able to properly utilize the default PBR shaders as that requires learning how shaders work.

so… what you're saying is…
unity
is
shit
right?

More items.

Still not a good artist.

no thanks

NEW VERSION
>>>/agdg/28193

Fermenter is unlocked, you can now make booze and shit

hell yeah

Ask Mike12 to stop watching shitty horrors and draw you some assets.

I have to admit it's not perfect looking but a start I guess, It fucking pisses me off that Skullfuck decides to slap a doom palette on it for some reason, this is just stupid.

It would be better if the mapping was uniform.

like all the faces have the same texture or something?

If you notice on the different parts of the tank the textures are either scrunched or stretched.
So, it's more like: each part of the tank needs to have uniformly scaled textures (UV coors); thus it'll appear seamless/uniform.

I have.

Last I checked he was working on a pistol.
That was about three months ago.

I'm desperately trying to avoid the realization that soon I'll have nothing left to code/map/write/whatever and I'll have an entire valley of fun guns and neat tech with no proper sprites or textures or art assets at all.
At that point, the one true path will open up, and I'll tearfully walk the brown road of pixelshit with single-pixel limbs.

Oh, it's a little bit hard if not impossible to do so when I am using a Atlas texture, when Blender finally supports Ptex I could try adding a seamless Hi-Res texture support instead one way or another since HD textures already exist for various doom source ports. I know the basic concept of unwrapping but to be frank it is for me boring and tedious to work with and its not very flexible especially when the engine I work with only tends to support 1 materials/textures for each model.

It might be already possible using Ptex already on Blender with Renderman but for me it constantly fails to install due to some bullshit network related error I asked on their support forum what's the cause for that and nobody found a solution. At least I am bothering with texturing shit for this mod as my Factorio mod rendered sprites doesn't have at all.

Not that I'm going to finish anything, ever, but I'll probably shill kinda shamelessly if I do. The last few years have really hammered home just how much any attention is good attention, even if I wish that weren't the case.

*shill elsewhere, I should say
I don't like to shit where I eat

you can do it user, belive in me that believes in you

Are you doing it entirely in Windows forms? I hope your game won't be one big .NET form.

Thats why I kinda asked. I personally was planning on doing at least a hit and run OP for free advertising.

Im using WPF for the feature demo, forms is obsolete at this point
The actual game will be in Unity, since im using C# i will be able to adapt most code easily

I forgot about what you were doing. My pessimism is getting the better of me.

listen to this

in a loop
over and over and over
all pessimism goes away
you can do it user, THINK BIG

Thanks. I'll also believe in those dubs.

Given how people react to threads I'm thinking just making some gameplay webms or images and dropping them into relevant threads very occasionally might work even better. I haven't really thought about it very hard though, I'm just not there yet. But in general, I'd encourage you to go ahead and do it one way or the other.
I feel my nose growing just making these posts

Keep up with that, maybe you will be known around here as Buratino :^)

I WILL!

you forgot to thank me you ungrateful little cunt

Compiled the latest version of aseprite.

Thank me later, faggots.

filedropper.com/119_1

(checked)
noice

IT WORKS

What did the trick?

Are there any good 2D platformers that focus on combat like Valdis Story or Muramasa do but still have fun platforming?
There seems to be a conflict between having fast responsive controls for combat and weighty, momentum based movement for platforming.
Similarly level design favoring platforming can be detrimental for the sake of combat.
Any idea how you could resolve these issues if you can't think of a game that did it well?
You could obviously divide the levels into combat and platforming sections to deal with the latter, but I don't know if it's a good idea to do something like switch between 2 different control methods to deal with the former.

THANK YOU FATHER
ARE YOU PROUD OF WHAT I HAVE DONE!?
ARE YOU FINALLY PROUD OF ME!?

None of you fucking losers, that's for sure. :^)

No but I just disabled the depth sorting and changed the way I ordered the map cells being drawn. Incidentally, the settings I have for depth sorting don't matter now, and I don't get any weird artifacting with it enabled or disabled.

I do still have issues with multiple passes, though, such as if I drew a wall, then a transparent texture over top of it. For now, this is easily done by just putting the two calls into one geometry array and doing it all at once, but this might not work with more dynamic objects.

Anyways, I basically divided the cells into three draw groups. There's the "left side", the "right side" and the middle. It starts on the furthest cells, then draws them going from outside to inside, skipping the middle row (where the player is standing). Then, after it renders all that, goes from back to front down the middle. Basically, every tile that gets drawn is guaranteed to be in front, with the middle acting as a special "merge" case.

Any fags here that have dealt with directx9??

Which reminds me I need to add a shader for that later

Behold the Lord of Darkness. Wherever he goes, darkness surrounds him.

I was thinking that a "blind" status effect to do that would be cool, basically making it harder to see around you. But then, "fog tiles" in game might be naturally darker, so maybe I could invert the fog rendering to do this when you're inside one.

Also is this light flicker too intense/fast/obvious? All I'm doing is changing the fog start depth and not using actual lighting.

I think the flicker looks good, not too obtrusive while not being too in your face.

Hell yeaaaahhh, nigga.
Checked and double-checked, thanks very much for this.

Which one of these is most correct?

I realized that instead of having a simple quad for my walls, I should use 2x2 quads, because I have more control over the texture coordinates and should be able to do eg animated textures via a shader (I'm using a texture atlas so I don't get the luxury of wraparound textures) and also limited height blending

It would be ideal to have my one method able to create an NxM field of quads and properly tessellate them. However, only the top left one at this specific resolution is able to be used as a triangle strip (everything else is at best a triangle list)

Yes personality is very important that's why I'm stuffing as much action->reaction. I don't have the means for custom animations (I use mocap + animation blending which surprised me by giving me new animations I didn't think possible).

I can't do much about clipping, though, that was the third iteration / revision for the hair. I realize my game is going to be Clipping Central but I'll try to make it up elsewhere.

Thanks bro. I'm now thinking of an enemy that has hedgehog features… rolling over the player with spikes.

Good insight. I'm actually a super noob developer (was making only visual novels before), the whole blueprints shader and animation system just clicked with me. Yeah, people say use C++, but BP is also about the setup of the components, which I find very intuitive. I also make sure not to overload Event Tick, and follow the principle of the best code to run is one that doesn't need to run at all to begin with.

The best calculation they demonstrated is this:

Say, you have 400 sales of a 10 dollar game in 3 months

4000 gross - 3000 leeway = 1000

5% of 1000 = you just pay $50 to Epic.

Oh wait hold on, I forgot how triangle strips worked. The top left doesn't work that way, it'd be a triangle fan.

WELCOME TO GAME DEV

wew why do I even try with these open sauce engines

...

i never saw the sauce of this

the video degrade was accidental, or some in-show joke?

Speaking of .obj's
I have all my models in .obj's so far, but I'm eventually gunna move all the loading to a seperate program that will turn the .objs into a binary file that can just be sent straight to the buffer, so no wasting time parsing them. Will this shit fuck me over, like with animations (which obj's have no support for)

I know, been hopping between Irrlicht and Torque3D. I know Godot is really good, but is really lacking on the 3D side. Waiting for the 3.0 update in early 2017.

i still haven't figured out how to reinstall visual studio without having to reinstall winblows
at this point i think i'm just gonna install codeblocks or something for school and use monodevelop for unity

Ow.

You've basically described serialization

Ok, so I've hit a bit of a rut. A friend of mine whose a bit more experienced recommended not using the default physics in Unity to handle collisions in the game I'm working on.

Can anyone recommend any good tutorials for how to code custom collision handling into a 2d, topdown game? Specifically, player or NPC colliding against solid surfaces

Well, I'd recommend you use an open source library for that; as collisions n such can turn into a complicated topic once you get into optimizing it.
There's more than likely a few different libraries you can use.
It's best to look for the "unity" version (u can generally find one on git), which can been made compatible with unity to a certain extent (less work you have2 do).
I'd then run performance tests, and figure out if said library is even faster than unity's 2D physics.

Don't use their physics =/= don't use their collisions.
That aside, collision implementation depends entirely on your specific needs. Very basic AABB collision is very different than polygon collision and every basic shape combination tends to have their own implementations too.

great, but did you make it fun yet? Is it more fun because you can make booze?

To honor the revolutionary patch of the best game ever made - No Man's Sky - I made a simple 2D clone called No Man's Laid where you can explore over 64 gorillion procedurally generated galaxies with over over 32 bazillion procedurally generated planets, 16 helallion procedurally generated space station and interact with over 8 dollarion procedurally generated civilizations and to make the game more promoting of much desired racemixing, you can initiate over 4 antllion procedurally generated sex scenes, all of that through grand total of 2 nullion of procedurally generated events.
Where do I apply for Sony money?

nothke.itch.io/normans-sky

Unlike my version it doesn't have gratuitous amounts of procedurally generated sex, user.

...

What site can I get free textures from?

NEW BREAD
KEK WILLS IT TO BE GREAT