Highwire4

I think the reason most people don't end up including this in their game is less about not knowing what perspective is and more about not knowing how to actually create that kind of effect. Like seriously how do you even make that happen.

I really like how there is a kind of depth of field going on with this. I'd have to say that the colors are what need to be worked on. The vibrancy of the ocean really throws off the whole thing and I think that the colors of the greenery in the distance and closer to the foreground should be the same. Other than that it looks great. Well...I personally wouldn't make grassy that...odd looking but if thats what you're using make the characters stand behind the grass, they look like they're clipping through the ground right now. Also just as a side note, I'd suggest going for a different grass design. The one you have right now covers too much of the character and is't very clear about where the actual platform surface is. It doesn't look like you should be able to stand on it honestly. Its pretty cool to see yet another person on here making an original game, and yours sounds pretty cool. While I do think your protagonist looks pretty cool, something about her design bothers me though. Something about it feels visually unbalanced. It could be that maybe shes a little too top heavy, or the uneven distribution of visual information across her figure (having small and more complex shapes going on in her shoes than compared to the rest of her along with yellow only appearing on that part of her body while she's rather monotone everywhere else for example.). The sprites you've made though are very nice and I'd love to see what they look like animated. The sonic recreations enemies look nice as well, though I'm not sure how the tanks are supposed to fit on a 2D surface given their perspective.

If I wasn't busy working on my own game I would offer my skills to a project like this in a heart beat. Sounds very cool on paper and those are some nice screenshots, I hope this goes somewhere.

Good lord those are awesome. I love the shapes you have going on with these and the overall designs are pretty effective. They convey their in-game function very well. The only one that looks weird to me is the one on the right. It looks like a mashed together mess of just stuff and other robots and stuff which may or may not be intentional, but it looks the most confusing and vague in function out of all of them. As for sprite quality god damn they're awesome, very well done. I like the vivid colors as well.

Since you updated with something rather substantial relating to game dev progress it doesn't count as a double post so no worries. Also holy crup that looks awesome. Sonic actually fits really nicely into the sprite based background. This is actually reminding me of Sonic Rush now that I think about it, and thats pretty awesome. A few things you may want to get sorted before you make the final version for this to unify some of the visual elements. You've got two totally different palm trees going on there, which I'm sure you're aware of, but you'll want to have things like that look similar. Also nice HUD, I'm diggin that new boost bar. Nice job on the mock up man, I hope the game actually looks this good in the final release.

Oh wow, this is actually pretty cool. Its kinda refreshing to see a fan game feature characters that are other wise ignored AND bringing in completely original mechanics at the same time. I watched all of the game play videos and I think you guys have done a great job on it. A few of the mechanics were pretty interesting too and I liked how each character did play differently than the others, it kept things fresh and interesting. The only thing I saw that left me a little concerned was that I couldn't tell how much health the player had. I don't know if I was just blind and didn't see a bar or number or something but I'm not sure how you're supposed to know how close you are to dieing. As for looking for a place to upload it there are a few places you can upload something large like that, at least in terms of english websites. I'm not aware of any big japanese file hosting sites so I can't help you there, but for english sites I recommend either www.mediafire.com or mega.co.nz since I think they are rather flexible. I'd love to play this sometime though, possibly lets play it.

Thanks man! The animated cutscenes are going to be very minimal, basically just a static picture like the sketch up above. I guess the ambitious part of it would come into coloring it but eh. I'm not fond of the HUD right now either. It doesn't draw enough attention to itself right now. I'm going to try out a few things (making the hearts bigger, have the weapon slots spread out next to each other super metroid style rather than just a single graphic, etc) so we'll see how it goes. As for making it bigger, the game needs a good amount of screen space to show as much of the level as possible. This is necessary due to the game being a puzzle game and it helps if you can see most or all of the puzzle onscreen, but I'll see what I can do. Its basically completely different from the game you played a few months ago. Its gone over a complete overhaul in the past week and its been for the better. But thanks man lol. Thanks man! As for the gun, its literally floating over her sprite for now and its definitely the most derpiest fucking thing I've ever seen. God you should see it when it aims in different directions the thing basically windmills like crazy its hilarious. Its not passable for the final game or even a demo but its code is a precursor to something better down the line. It works, and thats what matters right now, but I will work on making it well....work lol. As for her.. well, thats not really relevant anymore. I'm giving her a specialized hazard suit that she'll wear throughout the whole game. This is to solve various design issues with her that I don't have time to solve (her hair doesn't work in a 2d space, she'd be an orange blob if she started walking left for example) so fuck it I'm giving her a suit to cover up the design flaws and it fits better with the new story. The sprites and design isn't totally trashed though, maybe she'll pull a samus at the end and take off her suit and pose or something. But yeah I'll work on the poses and designs and stuff.

Been getting loads of work done on Project Estate. Everything is very much a work in progress. Whole bunch of new stuff in this. I'll let you infer upon what's what. I've started sketching cutscenes too: They'll be single shot frames with subtle animation in them (like the helicopter blades spinning for example.) in a style similar to cutscenes on old snes and genesis games. I'm doing it this way to save dev time and get to the game as soon as possible with just a basic introduction. Feedback would be cool.

Stuff from Project ESTATE. The game has undergone a complete overhaul lately in terms of story, setting, and gameplay and I'm finally a little comfortable to start showing more of it off. None of the colors here are final, along with the shading. I've been pumping out beta graphics for my 2D game graphics class which is what these are for, so I'm going for quantity over quality right now. I'll touch em up later, for now, I'm just happy to have graphics of some kind. And yes there is a new mechanic in these screenshots.

Yes thats what I was getting at, something like that works much better than what you had going before. You can still have a little bit of visual flair in your hud if you want to help give your game its own identity, but I'd keep it minimalistic.

Its looking alright so far. The HUD still kinda bothers me though, specifically the bar on the bottom and the placement of the score and lives. I think your placement of the bar on the bottom is fine, but its the chaos emerald bar thing above it that I'm not liking too much. There's an awful lot of unneeded empty space separating the two bars from each other which pushes the emerald's bar a bit too much into the middle space of the frame. Its pushed up even further due to its visual design which also adds a lot of unnecessary visual information to the frame in my opinion. The large gap between the two bars kind of makes both bars vague as to what their use is, I mean are they separate bars that gauge different things? Is the Chaos Emerald bar not even a bar at all and is instead some kind of visual item equip that has nothing to do with the bottom bar? Or is the bottom bar part of the top bar? I don't know and I probably wouldn't know unless the game told me. I'd focus on streamlining your HUD and take away visual flair and stylized graphics in favor of clearer information. As for the score counter and lives counter, their placement kind of creates a frame for the game and makes the middle of the frame a focal point as a result due to the visual balance you have going on for each side of the screen. While that's nice and all, I don't think this kind of orientation works for this kind of game. In a fast paced precision platformer like sonic, you'll want as little distracting elements fighting for the player's attention as possible and you'll want the important information oriented in a way that the player can just glance at it once without much consequence. The way you have your HUD oriented at the moment requires the player to kind of "search" around the screen a little bit or basically they have to divert their attention away from the game more than once to find the information they want to see since its now divided up to the two opposite sides of the screen, meaning they're going to be spending more time looking at the HUD than they probably should be. This also makes it feel slightly cluttered and could be distracting given the situation. This kind of HUD would work well for an MMO, strategy, or simulation game where grouping similar player options to one side of a screen makes sense since it helps mentally divide up mechanics and information and feels more organized to the player, making it easier for them to manage various things. I suggest moving them over to the left side of the screen with the time counter and ring counter. I think your counters suffer from the same visual problem that the Chaos Emerald bar did in that there seems to be this focus on visual flair and stylized graphics over functionality. I think each counter's independent graphic takes up a bit too much space and reaches a bit too much into the middle of the frame. Looking at how much screen space they take up I can see why you put the score and lives on the other side of the screen since they just wouldn't fit all together on one side in their current state. I suggest trimming the fat off of the graphics and streamlining the HUD even further. With a HUD the most important thing for it to do is to convey specific information efficiently and quickly without distracting from the main game, so put the flashy HUD graphics to a minimum. As for the stylized look of the HUD graphics, they do look quiet cool and I think that they would work out very well if the game's resolution were bigger, but the screen resolution is just too small for HUD graphics that big. Sorry about the long critique, I hope I'm not coming off as overly critical. Good progress on everything you've done so far though.

Yeah after that Nin Direct I'm convinced this is going to be the best smash so far. I'm especially curious about custom move sets and the hint at cross-platform play. Greninja seems like an odd choice to bring in but he looks fun to play so I've got no problems with him. Also good lord is Zero suit samus beyond shiny like good lord she's just as shiny as sonic was in SA1 and he was basically a dinner plate.

Hello again guys, I'm looking for volunteers. Specifically volunteers who had a rather unpleasant experience playing SLA due to bugs out the whazoo. Did you periodically just run through springs or dash rings for no reason and fell to your death? Did you get stuck in a 2D section or straight up fell out of said 2D section? Well Xaklse has been working on fixing bugs like those since mid march and now I'm looking for people to test it out to see if those fixes have worked. If you had problems like the ones I've stated when you played SLA, give me a pm and I'll send an exe of this new version over to you and you can tell me if sonic actually goes through dash rings or not now. As someone who also experienced these bugs on a regular basis, I have yet to encounter this bug again, but I'd love to know if its actually solved or not. So please, send me a pm if you're interested.

Haha thanks man. I'm currently making the engine ambidextrous between working on an ouya and working on a pc and that's going surprisingly well. Man developing for this console is way easier than I thought it would be, I'm probably going to keep making games for it in the future. As for playing it, I'm planning on having a short demo ready for SAGE act 2 (and another for SAGE 2015) on both ouya and pc (so that if you just so happen to own an ouya you can play it on there as well) so you will be able to play that if you don't own an ouya. However, the full completed game will be ouya exclusive for a while, but if sales suck or if it gets steam greenlit I'll release the pc/mac version. So you might have to wait a bit if you don't have an ouya. Holy crap that 3D effect you have going on with the ground tile is fantastic. I've never really seen anyone actually distort the size of the shapes in the pattern before but wow is it worth it. Great job on that man. The chameleon robot does blend a little bit too much into the palm tree though for my liking. Maybe red instead?

@Potato: Wow thats pretty nice! I like how consistant the shaping is on the rotations. So I've just made a pretty big advancement in development on my indie game. After literally hours of toiling, frustration, and tears, I finally got the game to work on my ouya console. I am so damn excited about this you have no idea. Some pics that show it is on the ouya and not just me streaming my comp into the tele: The random numbers keep track of analog stick and button inputs and they're extremely buggy(some buttons straight up aren't recognized or it thinks one button is actually two. Its weird) and thats cause I don't know how buttons work yet with this. But oh man this finally works. I am not happy with how the ouya blew up the resolution though. I was expecting it to perfectly resize all the pixels since the resolution is exactly 4x smaller than 1080p but instead it went for the soft anti-alias resizing. I'll have to come up with a way to fix this soon.

I'm confused and concerned about that post lol. As for the animations, that walk is odd. His feet stay in front of him when he walks like they can't make up wheather or not they want to go forward or backward. Go back and look over your frames again and smooth that out. As for your character design, I understand that this was your original idea for him to look, but I seriously just think you need to redesign him from scratch to fix him.

If you can actually get that code to work, you should talk to Xaklse about it since he hasn't been planning on porting it to UE4. At the least, you should make it public for others to use if Xaklse still won't port it over even if you manage to get it to work. Yup thats me. Using default assets for an original project didn't make any sense and I refuse to let any of my work fall in and dissapear with the rest of the rabble. I just hope Lost Adventure sets a standard of visual quality for GDK games and gets more people into using the engine.

GDK doesn't work in UE4 so you'd have to completely recode the GDK engine from scratch if you moved it over to UE4. as for the level thats a pretty good looking prototype you have there, hopefully you'll be able to cover up the terrain tool stuff with assets.

welp. I've found a new game to play on my channel xD. This one should be pretty entertaining.

@Jassbec: I'm really digging the visual style you have going on for the game. While the green hill zone asthetic is kinda forgettable, I think your unique visual style will make it stand it from the millions of others. I'm also diggin that color pallet as well. @Potato: Oh man those new sprites look amazing. Great job on em!

Well, if I had to describe her around 3 or so words, it'd be something like "Agile, Serious, Curious, Cool" or something like that. I want her to be kind of relate able as well, so I don't want her to look too ridiculous but I do still want her to have a definitive look. What she does in the game is run, jump, pick up/put down objects, and shoot things. She's a scientist so she's serious about her work, smart, resourceful, and curious about everything. If that helps at all. Also thanks a lot for your input guys, its really helping me figure out what to go with. @Alex: Its hosted on dA so I don't know what your computer's problem is but here's a link to the actual page: http://sonicbommer.deviantart.com/art/ProjESTATE-Beta-Alt-Designs-01-441292565 @SonicFan2010: I think XG is still alive.

Oh god this looks like that Rollercoaster Ville game on facebook or whatever its called. It looks so different visually that I wonder how much the internal structure and workings have changed. I dunno, I'm gonna watch this one cautiously as well, especially given the atrocity that was RTC 3D.

Well I'm kinda stuck on something guys, and I'd love your input on it. I've gone back to the drawing board with Beta's design due to a few problems the current one has, and I'm not sure which direction to go in. What do you guys think? The sprite in the top left is her current design. Thoughts?

Goodness, so many gorgeous screenshot lately, I'll have to post some stuff soon to keep up. @SuperBliz: I'm not digging the second font that much, but P3DR0 makes just about every point I was going to make. You do need an outline or something to make the text stand out as much as possible so anyone can read it. Some people with visibility disabilities or a reading disability like dyslexia will have a crazy hard time reading the 1st one. The 1st one's font does look better though, it just needs and outline of some sort. @Candescene: Not bad for a simple walk cycle, though it is a little janky. I think the bounce is just slightly uneven. I think its good for a beta animation to have in the game until you develop one with more personality. I'm currently doing the same thing with my character right now and its pretty difficult, so good luck on that. @Alex: Oh snap is that a boss? Sweet.

oh. I had no idea it was full lol. Fixed that issue.