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@dudacles: Thanks a ton for the lengthy reply! The feedback is great.

I agree with most of what you said, Rocket League is also one of my favorite games of all time. The depth allowed for by the analog and physics based nature of RL is what I am also aiming for here.

It is quite strange that you got such poor performance, although it may have to do with what browser you used. I have been targeting chrome, and for me and friends I have sent it to I get 60fps with a 1080 and friends with higher refresh rate monitors are getting 140fps.

I think your feedback about the controls being difficult might be possible to address with some training modes that I am thinking of implementing. As you can see from the trailer I have gotten quite good at it, so it is definitely possible to learn how to play it well, the question is if people will be willing to invest the time in order to do it.

With regards to the weight of the ball and so on, there are many parameters to play with in the physics settings, although in the final game this obviously shouldn't be up to the user to find good settings.

I think the issue of shadows not being changable is an issue I also had when trying in firefox, but as I said and should have mentioned before I am targeting chrome and will optimize for other browsers later. Would be awesome if you could check and see if it works better in chrome! The phong lighting setting is currently broken, that's the one that caused the lock-up.

Would you mind letting me know your other specs if you have time to test it in chrome and it still performs badly? If you don't have time of course I already appreciate the response.

Thanks!

Hey fellow bombers!

Thought you might be interested to check out my Rocket League inspired, analog-controlled, physics based stick footballer! It's got style, groovy sounds, fast gameplay and passionately modeled physics! I think I'm onto something unique that I'm very surprised that I haven't seen others do before in terms of control scheme. It's a bit challenging at first but there's a lot of depth there.

Been working on the game for a little over a month, and it's my first game. It's still in an early stage so I would really really appreciate any feedback you have, positive or negative!

Oh and the name is inspired by the legendary Wind Jammers, which I am ashamed to say I have not yet tried! Haha.

Use chrome on a desktop (or laptop, just not mobile) and a dual analog stick controller. The reson to use chrome is that it is the only browser I have properly tested it on now. I know there are issues with frame rate and sound when I tried firefox, and I have yet to address this!

If you're on an unperformant computer there are graphics settings by pressing start (option on ds4).

Hope y'all like it! Thanks for any feedback!

Greetings from Sweden,

Gustaf

https://www.stickballers.com

Cool!

crank it

@jonny_anonymous: Ah cool, I hadn't seen that. Nice to see that they have been thinking about these exact things.

I think from what I understood of the video they probably went with the right approach, thinking realistically. It's hard to know exactly what they're doing from the conversation but it's possible to get an idea. I think I was probably considering something a bit radical, but their discussions in the video sound promising!

@mezza: True

I'm talking about actually procedurally generated music, not just dynamically swapping pre-composed parts depending on the situation in the game (fight music, space flying music etc.).

With ambient type music it is actually not too difficult to produce pleasing stuff procedurally. Even playing notes totally at random within for example a pentatonic scale sounds quite pleasing to most ears, since all the notes in a regular pentatonic scale resonate so well together. I agree that procedurally generating music that has a clear motif and harmonic progression etc. is very difficult, but for more ambient type of stuff it is definitely doable. Most music that we enjoy has logical patterns in the way it is composed, for example you could take a given scale or modality and wander up or down it in thirds or fourths or whatever you want. Depending on the intervals used it'll create different moods. I'm not saying the music would be something I'd enjoy listening to for the sake of listening to it, but as a supplement to a game like this might be cool.

Personally I have experimented with using procedurally generated melodies within a given scale to give me ideas for creating music. Generating some random melodies within a selection of notes, then listening back and picking out cool things that happened to be generated to build something hand-crafted from. Though this is different of course, and requires a human curation of the generated material.

For a game like No Man's Sky I feel like an ambient kind of soundtrack is fitting, but sure it wouldn't be trivial to get it sounding good and at the same time varied. I guess it's the same kind of issues you come up against with all the other types of procedural generation. I just love the idea of each place having it's own music, and the possibility of discovering some crazy music no one has heard just by playing the game.

Watching some of the streams of No Man's Sky got me thinking about the music. I thought the music sounds pretty cool but got to thinking that I really would've loved for it to have procedurally generated music. Music does so much to convey the mood of a particular place and it would be awesome if each planet had it's own unique soundtrack. I mean you could use different modalities that would "match" the planet's level of hostility, using diminished type of stuff for hostile and toxic planets which would contribute to the sense of tension. Or for example a kind of oasis planet full of life and vegetation could have some lush major ambient stuff. You could vary the rhythm perhaps having a more straight feel for lifeless planets and more swing, or triplet feel for planets with life, which may feel more organic.

Not saying it would be easy or that I have the right to expect it. Merely saying that I think it would be pretty cool!

Thoughts?

@mezza: This may be mostly the case at this time. But this doesn't necessarily mean it's always going to be the case. Though I agree that it seems to be the case for No Man's Sky.

@alistercat: True that about the compromise you have to make between scale and fidelity. I still think procedural generation techniques will eventually get to the point where they may even surpass the quality of hand crafted stuff. Looking back at a game like Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall from my youth, No Man's Sky looks incredibly by comparison. In Daggerfall the world was gigantic but it seemed in actuality there were like 5 different cities with swapped around textures :).

I feel like the potential is there for mathematics to generate really awe inspiring stuff. I am the type of person who can spend hours exploring the mandelbrot set which "generates" infinitely detailed and beautiful images, from as simple an iteration as f(z) = z^2 + c for each pixel in the image. I'm not saying that the mandelbrot set has any direct application in generating video game worlds or creatures, just saying there is a possibility of generating genuinely (imo :)) beautiful stuff through math and algorithms. Given the current popularity of the video game industry, the assumed increase in computer power and the cost of hand crafting, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect procedural stuff to get more and more interesting.

As for No Man's Sky I guess I've only seen a few snippets of some streams, and perhaps there will actually be some awesome stuff lurking in there in that game world. As always it's best to have low expectations that way you won't be dissapointed but may be pleasantly surprised!

:)