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[IndigoFenix]

I guess I'll drop this here too: I'm rebuilding a new Boundworlds in HTML5.

It's basically a 2D adventure-RPG game maker where you can design your own world and then make "gates" leading to other people's worlds.  It's intended to be "massively single player"; you explore the universe alone but the universe itself a patchwork of other people's creations.

The world builder will be very flexible, with the ability to upload sprite and tile images and write behavior scripts for NPCs and objects.  I'm going to focus on making it more user-friendly, the Flash version had a lot of problems with the world builder interface.  For example, the new version will let you instantly switch between editing and playing, which will make testing your world much easier.

You cannot build new worlds yet but I have a public alpha for testing purposes that will be updated regularly as more features are added.  Looking for feedback on the world editor, which is obviously not complete but I want to know if I'm on the right track with the interface, how hard it is to figure out, etc.

Boundworlds Public Alpha

[itisnotlogical]

So when creating a 3D model of a level, specifically building interiors... how do? Do I use a boolean modifier to cut holes and make doorways? Extrude faces out of cubes to make interior volumes? Build the whole thing out of large, separate building blocks? Is there even one answer that is more preferable than another?

[Solifuge]

Kinda depends on what you're going for! Just making a room a box that you slice openings out of works fine, but I generally prefer to model each wall separately using 2D planar walls or 3D shapes; it gives you a bit more freedom with room shapes, and encourages less boxy, more visually interesting designs!

If you want to avoid having to switch between interior and exterior areas via loading, or if you want to make interiors and exteriors continuous, you might want to model the walls and their openings and all that as 3D rectangular planes with some thickness, and just size them appropriately to one another. If you're just doing interiors, or are peeking into the interior from a camera situated "outside" the room (birds-eye-view, etc.) you might just make walls as planes with the normals / textures only facing inward, so the camera can peek through the invisible back-faces of the walls that would occlude the view if they had both faces visible or were fully 3D. Here's an example of using inward-facing 2D planes instead of full 3D Walls, from Drak Bryant's "Zone Sweet Zone": http://puu.sh/pa0fz/4fc57ac640.gif

Also, one trick, often used in 3D games where they create rooms from walls instead of boxes, is to create pillars or other supports that can go in the corners, and cover the "seams" between the separate walls. It tends to make the shape of the room more visually interesting too, when it's not all just flat planes. Here's an example of some level design done using full 3D assets, which is made entirely out of textured shapes (cubes, rectangles, etc.) Note how pillars and such are used to cover some of the intersections! Linko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djZBeE9yfec&index=14&list=PLA17B3FAA1DA374F3

EDIT: As a quick note, you can also make a cube that has inward-facing planes by inverting it's faces or normals, so you don't have to match up the edges of each wall. Same benefit!

[itisnotlogical]

So assemble the rooms out of separate wall-pieces. That makes a lot more sense for texturing and materials as opposed to having one giant mesh, which is what I tried to do before getting frustrated. Also you can have just one piece that is the standard doorframe, as opposed to having to create a perfect doorframe every time you make an opening.

[Reelya]

PTW, might run some ideas past this group in the future.

[MaximumZero]

PTW. I've got a shitload of content/ideas/story/setting/etc for an RPG, but not the knowledge to make it a video game. I will get there eventually, but I hate learning the basics because of my insane competitiveness.

[Reelya]

Maybe we could collaborate on something? Working with other people is one of the best ways to learn and up your own game.

[Parsely]

I want to develop a mobile game for Android on my Windows desktop computer. Where do I start? Surely there's a desktop IDE that can compile my mobile game so I can do testing/debugging without needing to push the project to a smart phone?

[Reelya]

For that to be the case it would have to be an Android emulator that also runs an unbuilt game instead of a built Android game. Nothing is going to be quite that convenient.

Nope, your best bet is in fact Unity, since you can test it in Windows very quickly, and deploying on Android takes about the same amount of time as deploying for PC. You just need to copy the apk file it makes to your phone and you're done. If you were running an emulator with the apk it would take just as long. Copying the file to the SD card in your phone takes seconds, much less than the build time.

[MaximumZero]

You can also emulate android using bluestacks.

[itisnotlogical]

For that to be the case it would have to be an Android emulator that also runs an unbuilt game instead of a built Android game. Nothing is going to be quite that convenient.

Nope, your best bet is in fact Unity, since you can test it in Windows very quickly, and deploying on Android takes about the same amount of time as deploying for PC. You just need to copy the apk file it makes to your phone and you're done. If you were running an emulator with the apk it would take just as long. Copying the file to the SD card in your phone takes seconds, much less than the build time.

Seconding Unity. I like it quite a lot. If you really want to get crazy and wild, you can also (I believe, never tried it myself) connect the Unity IDE to the app running on your phone via wifi, to log performance and stuff from the real device and see in-depth statistics. I know you can do that with desktop builds.

The Asset Store also has some good free stuff sometimes, whether it's test art, an example or just something you really don't feel like doing yourself. I get shaders from there all the time because I hate writing shaders, never figured it out and doubt I ever will.

[Reelya]

You can also emulate android using bluestacks.

The problem is that you'd still need to build out the game and put it in bluestacks to test it. Which is time-consuming. Might as well just copy the apk to a real phone I think then.

[Parsely]

To be clear, I don't have a smart phone so I wanted to know if it was possible to do development without one. Unity sounds like a good solution. Also, I don't understand why you'd have to build the game to run it in an emulator but you don't if you want to run it on a phone. I think I'm not clear on the difference between compiling and building.

[itisnotlogical]

For the purposes of an Android app there isn't. Building and compiling are interchangeable in this case. You have to create a standalone APK regardless of where you test it, so if you have a real device you might as well test on that rather than an emulator that takes additional setup and might misrepresent your app's performance.

The exception is Unity where you can test the game at any time on your PC in the editor, because Unity is extremely cross platform and (outside of platform specific features) can build any project targeting any platform. It still isn't very useful because your computer likely performs better than a phone, probably doesn't have a tocuh screen and definitely doesn't tell you about battery consumption.

[Reelya]

To be clear, I don't have a smart phone so I wanted to know if it was possible to do development without one. Unity sounds like a good solution. Also, I don't understand why you'd have to build the game to run it in an emulator but you don't if you want to run it on a phone. I think I'm not clear on the difference between compiling and building.

Compiling and building are the same thing. They are the time-consuming part. Unity has it's own "native" mode in which it runs the game you are building, and that doesn't require a build to test it, so you can quickly iterate inside Unity, but to build e.g. a standalone windows EXE or Android APK, that takes at least a few minutes per time, so you only do this every now and again to detect any compatibility issues that Unity missed.

Think of it as the difference between working in a video editor suite, vs having to export the final movie. You can work in realtime inside the editor, but the process of "mastering" the video is going to be slow. It's similar with making games in Unity vs exporting them as completed games. You can completely build a game in Unity with the intention of it being a mobile game without ever exporting it, but you will need to actually put it on a phone one day to test that it actually works as intended. After all, Unity doesn't have the same RAM limitations as a real phone, etc.

Emulators are possible, but you need a beast PC to run one effectively. But they'll never fully replace an actual phone, because testing the touch controls still needs are real phone. An emulator however will let you run the game with various Android versions, CPU and RAM settings so they can give you a better idea of minimum spec without needing multiple phones.

But generally you can break this into phases. (1) build you game for Windows inside Unity, export occasional windows builds and test those (2) tweak the controls / scaling so it would look good on a phone-sized thing (3) stress-test it in an emulator, (4) give the apk to some friends with a phone, test how controls feel.