This is a somewhat disheartening post, Ive been away from FPSC for a while now, I was working on a game which Id posted some update info
for a while back and had got nothing but glowing responses and constructional criticism, and on my first read through of this post my heart
sank a little, This community used to be so supportive and always offering ways to make things better and rarely ever just piling on negativity
for the sake of it, and since a lot of this wasnt neccesarily aimed at the guys game but more the shit surrounding the indie/greenlight industry
it reads like this guys getting tarred for everyone elses shit. o.0. Doesnt seem fair to me.
In my games I used the celshader as stated here to hide imperfections, I used cartoony graphics so I didnt have to mess with _N, _S,_I, _R maps and
spending literally hours trying to get basic shaders to work properly in game, like for example I once bricked an FPSC installation because I was
trying EVERYTHING to get ONE object lit right, despite sharing shaders, texture maps and all the other things with objects that WERE lit right
there was no seeming reason it shouldnt be lit other than it was a door, part of a segment not an entity put in the world directly as an entity, so I changed
the shader and texture files for the Door segment fpe, lit perfect, wouldnt open, well it did, you can see it from the other side, but the door wasnt getting
punched out properly to walk thru..
My point is this, with the sheer amount of effort it takes to get to a semi finished product, with a semi acceptable level of polish on it then when a
game does reach that point at least critique it on its flaws directly and not on the actions of cheap/rip off devs who came before them.
I too used stock assets, why? Because sketchup no longer supports .x exporters, you have to buy it as well, so I cant make my own models anymore
unless i take the time to learn a new modellers and I dont have that time with FPSC because small things can require huge amounts of effort.
I wanted an animated mouse cursor, So i had to painstakingly make 5 images, define each as a hud in the titlepage.fpi of the finished game, (so
yeah I had to COMPILE THE GAME TO MAKE A MOUSE CURSOR) , set up a timer and hide and show the mouse pointer hud elements one after the
other 5 times a second, other engines let u load in an animated gif, or series of frames and specify animation rates, transparancies, effects etc,
all in a few clicks, with FPSC it is literally 2 hours work.
So will I be lambasted for my use of stock assets? FPSC has limited functionality, and always will. What makes a good FPSC product to me is working
in and around these limitations in clever ways, Im not making a shooter, frankly FPSC as a FIRST PERSON SHOOOTER creator, is awful at its namesake,
Everygame ive ever attempted has left the shooting element out because the sheer monumental effort of building assets, levels, entities, huds, scripts,
writing dialogue, creating gameplay loops, testing, applying lighting, maintaining variables, just leaves me feeling like I dont have time to take all the same
amount of time to get a shooting experience that at best feels wonky and underimplemented.
Here are a few screens from my 'Asset Flip'
Yes Ive used stock assets, but mainly because this started as an experiment and with the amount of effort FPSC requires of you to do the simplest of things it seemed
prudent to test with ready made media, So I manually edited each and every texture I used, created N maps where none were there same with S, re did the textures over
and over til i got a semi good looking black and white comic noir experience, then ideas came, a noir detective novel! No better yet a noir detective comic!
I can do speech bubbles! those speech bubbles look good, lets animate them so they move! and the pointer too!
Do you see what I mean? By having such unintuitive ways to accomplish those things the actual game itself gets pushed aside,
and with how unstable builds can be I find it much more beneficial to have a mechanical skeleton of a working game before I actually
start building the game, if im basing hiding loading screens with videos, I need that to work before I build 64 levels around the concept,
i can simply copy and paste the original load file and change the video address and image address, If I create an animated pointer once,
I can copy that code over where ever a pointer is needed, etc and etc, the pause screen, the quit screen, all of these things need to be
in place or at least iterated for me because otherwish theres not much point building sweet ass levels and gameplay if your UI and
intro screen, title screen and all that background jazz make your game look cheap and ineffectual, and when one man development teams
are concerned It becomes even more difficult to balance those things.
The game takes a back seat many times to simply creating an interface that doesnt suck, draws in the player and helps disguise its origin as an FPSC game due to the
exact stigma this thread raises.
I also tried to attach the compiled game Ive been working around but i cant tell if it got attached or not, well its not even a game tbh its the room from the screen shots, Ive changed the story so the level narrative
doesnt really make sense tbh, but thats not the point of it, the point is I have to work on a Compiled version of the game because this is where I can easily access, iterate,
and test the ACTUAL game functions, intro videos, main menu, pause menu, loading etc.
Getting a faily decent looking package overall to me is very important so altho this demo isnt even really a demo, it shows the various stages of animated buttons, pointers
hud overlays when examining objects, and dialogue, placeholder video over the first loading screen, transitioning into a hud overlay (since if u cancel the video it just glitches
on previous frame of the video til it finishes loading so i had to mask that with an image, then seamlessly run into that image when the level has loaded, checking for a mouse click
to unshow it, then a slow fade in based on 20 transparent black huds being shown at once then removed one at a time)
Do you see my point here?
Games require effort, and wether or not the end product is exactly how you imagined, as long as you are working hard, trying to do something new, and doing it to the best you can
then You should be recognized for that and to get a game onto steam NOW, after DH, after Jim Sterlin and totalbiscuit says to me there must be something there people want for it
to be able to stand out amongst the trash.
I'll be interested to see what you guys think, I used to have massive respect for the senior members of this community and is why I keep coming back, I tend to get burntout on my ideas
and bring them up here from time to time to see if I should continue with the project BECAUSE of the sheer effort and less than optimal FPSC, but I I always do because the community is usually
behind me.
smoke em if you got em
