Ladies and gentlemen, I'm proud to announce my first game ever: Shapes of Gray, an action-arcade game inspired by broken arcade cabinets from the 70's and what it means for a video game to be a video game.

I've been secretly working on it for the past couple months in my spare time; there's still a tooooon of work left to do on it, but I really wanted to announce it before the end of the year. I've submitted the game to Steam Greenlight; what this means is that, if I get enough votes from the community, I'll be able to sell my game on Steam!

Of course, getting a game greenlit is a very hard and long process. The one developer I talked to who had worked on a project of similar scale said it took him eight months to finally get his game approved. So, if you like what you see so far, I'd be hugely grateful if you threw a vote my way. You'll need a Steam account to vote, but making one only takes about three minutes.

And did I mention that the music is being done by our very own Zero?

I should thank you all too though; Negative World has been a huge part of my gaming life for the past few years, and you've all given me a ton of inspiration on my path to becoming a game developer. I owe a lot to this chill community for being such an awesome place to talk about games in. Who knows where I'd be if all I had was The IGN Vestibule?

Oh, and go give an upvote to Tadpole Treble as well (even though technically it's competition). Matthew's been so busy with his Kickstarter that he forgot to pimp his Greenlight page as well! What a GOOF!

URL to share (right click and copy)

Looks awesome! I'm at work so I can't turn the audio up, will listen tonight!

@deathly_hallows

The audio is the best part!

I have no idea what to make of your game, therefore I must play it.

@ploot

Exactly what I like to hear!

Voted for both. :)

I always kinda wanna learn how to code so that I can actually give something like this a whirl (Well, technically I just want to be able to build my little JRPG in RPG Maker Ace on Steam... Not looking to get millions, just tell a story I think is good!) but then it always gets really mathy in a way I'm not familiar with and I feel like an idiot. Also does anyone know anything about what scripting/language RPG Maker VX Ace uses? I figure if I found out what it uses then find the bare minimum guide to actually understand what it is I'm looking at when I view the code I've seen. I do not want to use the default battle systems, so I downloaded someone's sprite-based battle system ala Final Fantasy games rather than the default first-person Dragon Quest style battles. It's several thousand lines of code. To get sprites on-screen and animating a little bit. That seems utterly absurd to me. Like... The entire battle system is already there, he just moved the enemies and added sprites and had them do very simple animations.

...That kind of thing is what scares me away from ever even TRYING to finish this thing. I know things will get technical, and I know a lot of it is just hours and hours and hours of your nose to the grindstone (In my case not even for money! If I COULD sell it, great! But that's not my goal!) but soooooo many lines of text for something that BARELY alters the game... It is beyond my comprehension.

This is the battle script I'm talking about. (It may lead to an ad before the actual script, just wait for it to say "skip ad" on the top right if it does.)

That entire novella of text to change this



to this



And that's not even counting his ATB script or myriad other scripts.

To top it all off, this is how he opens his description of the script:

"Read the user manual before asking anything. I won’t give support to lazy faggs that ignore the manual. This script is a complex battle system, so don’t expect a magic copy and paste script."

So you realize the guy who made this is some idiot kid who calls people "lazy faggs," and you just shake your head.

This is why I want to learn how to do it myself. I want to look at that script I linked and not be intimidated by any of it (I understand chunks here and there, obviously.) and be able to dissect it, understand every line, and do it even BETTER. I'm willing to put in the work, but I have no fucking clue where to begin, and to do so I need the utmost basic resources, resources for people who aren't even "beginners," for people who know NOTHING, I want to learn the absolute basics and move my way up.

I've never wanted to make video games, but I've always wanted to tell great (Or give my damnedest to make them great!) video game stories, think up new systems. I don't want to be just the "ideas guy," though, because obviously EVERYONE thinks they're the ideas guy. I want to be able to emulate the man who made To The Moon, aside from art and music, simply make the game myself, tell the story myself, and answer to no one.

@Xbob42

RPG maker uses Ruby for its scripting, and quite a lot can be achieved with its scripts. RM's event system is no slouch either, though, and a lot can be done there.

Where might a brand new upcoming scripting babby learn some Ruby basics? Every time I try to Google this stuff it's like reading a foreign language, everyone assumes you always know some other language already or that you're familiar with it!

@Xbob42

As someone who isn't a "programmer," I think it would be really easy to make an RPG in Game Maker. I mean, everyone says that Game Maker is mainly just for hobby projects, but Gunpoint and Hotline Miami used it...

Game Maker has some great built-in tutorials. Go download it, take three hours to do the tutorials (after doing the "My First Game," "Drag and Drop," and "Scrolling Shooter" tutorials you should have a good grasp on it), make a couple simple games, a Breakout clone, whatever, then take a crack at it.

@Secret_Tunnel Hmm, that sounds like a great idea, actually! Thanks! Like with my shot at Youtube videos, I just need to get out there and friggin' do it! (If I still had my awesome mic I'd still be making those videos, viewers-or-not be damned! So much fun even if they take a lot of time!)

Voted!

kriswright said:

@Zero

Also, not enough people these days know how to clean a fish.

Or whittle.

Whittling is the past, old man! Scrimshaw! Scrimshaw is the future!

@Anand

Thank you, sir!

@Xbob42

I enjoyed them! The first time I ever saw Dishonored was on your channel. It looked like a pretty basic medieval explore-the-castle-and-don't-get-caught-and-there's-rats sort of game with arrows and swords and stuff, and then a few months later I saw some footage of it at the VGA's game and there were these crazy superpowers, and I was like... WAIT. I NEED TO PLAY THIS GAME.

And now I'm finally going to play it! Soon. I have my copy.

@Secret_Tunnel Haha, yeah, Dishonored was a lot of fun, still playing through it myself! I did the very first tutorial of Game Maker Studio last night and it seemed easy enough, but they don't seem to be quite the best at describing concepts to newbies, it took me a while to understand what they meant by "instances" contrasted with "objects," and even their metaphor about a chair in a house didn't quite do it. Then I did it myself and I was like "Oh, an object is just the rule sets of any given item that I'm going to use, when I actually place it in the world, that is an instance of it. It doesn't "exist" until I create an instance."

I just played Samurai Gunn with some people, which is a Chicago-developed indie game and was apparently made in Game Maker. It's pretty awesome, kind of a Smash Brothers / Super Mario Wars type 4 player brawler. You can do all kinds of things in Game Maker. Although I prefer being able to do HARDCORE CODE.

I'd say the only real negative is that it isn't online so... 4 player local only brawler. The guy whose place we played at had 4 Xbox controllers hooked up to his PC but not everyone is going to have a set-up like that.

Oh, also, I'll give you a dollar if you can work the Friend-Shapes into the game somehow.

@Zero

It's such a simple idea, too! Really goes to show that, as long as you can pull off clever design, you'll at least get a niche of indies who'll stand behind your game.

@kriswright

...I have no idea what the Friend-Shapes are, lol.

@Secret_Tunnel

You need to read more Kristopher Wright Tests Your Patience.

@kriswright

Oh, of course! How did that reference go over my head?

I should have called my game Shapes of Wrath.

I haven't posted in this thread, but just wanted to say how cool it is that you're working on a game, @Secret_Tunnel!

I'm trying to support your game. I've never used Steam before, so I created a new account. However, when I tried to click 'Yes' where it says 'Would you buy this game if it were available in Steam?" I get the following pop-up:

Your account does not have sufficient privileges to perform this action. To access all features of Steam, simply purchase a game from the Steam store, redeem a Gift on Steam, complete a microtransaction, or activate a retail game on Steam.

I'm trying to download a free-to-play game. I'll let install, and hopefully that will allow me to give you my vote.

Anyway, also just wanted to say Good luck!

@roykoopa64

Thank you! Huh, I didn't realize you had to have a verified account to vote for a Greenlight game. That makes a lot of sense, actually. I wonder if a free-to-play game would be enough? Guess we'll find out!