Spring RTS Engine

I'll be doing a presentation on the 4th of June, and I'm currently in the process of preparing the materials.
The length of the talk is still undecided, but it'll be in the range of 30 - 90 minutes.

The audience is a group of young (Japanese) game developers at my university. There's about 50-80 people, and most of them are rather inexperienced. I haven't had the chance to talk to everyone, but it seems most of them want to make visual novel-like games, with very little gameplay/interaction and mostly story reading. Even older students there haven't heard of Starcraft or the RTS genre in general (they keep referring to it as "Tower Defense"). Maybe comparing Spring's capabilities in terms of RenPy may be interesting in that regard, KingRaptor? What's the status of that project? Any screens/examples that can be shared?

It's important to note that the goal is not to have new Spring developers, but simply show alternative tools. I don't plan to trick people by pushing the idea that Spring is somehow superior to Unity or other engines, which it clearly isn't for most cases.

My plan for the presentation so far is:
- Ludum Dare 32 (our experience, conclusions and similar)
- Spring game development and existing game showcase
- My work (Scened, Chili lobby + server, AI, etc.), and general open source practices in the community

If you have anything you'd want me to present leave a note. I may need some help in preparing the materials in that case if I'm not familiar with the topic.

Show them NOTA action trailer. I play it on the background without sound on my university presentations. It works quite well.

I'll be happy to assist regarding the LD or anything else you may want.

hokomoko wrote:I'll be happy to assist regarding the LD or anything else you may want.

I'll take you upon your offer
For starters, could you describe how you made audio and music for LD? What software did you use, and how did the process look like (e.g. how did you make the first versions, how did realize what wasn't good with it and how that improved, etc.)?
Just write it informally here and I'll transform that into slides. Maybe useful if you have the older versions present as well that you can describe how they improved.

PepeAmpere wrote:Show them NOTA action trailer. I play it on the background without sound on my university presentations. It works quite well.

That does look good, is there any download link available? I don't think I'll have internet available.
It might be a bit too long though if I want to showcase a few Spring games, but maybe it's usable as a background during the Q/A or something. Will think about it still.

I think the nota video is neat but I also never liked it because they use a bunch of post processing and spring looks nothing like that.

dat NOTA video looks pretty good.

Hope it goes well :)

Mmm, highlighting Spring's (unofficial, at that) Ren'Py compatibility might be more relevant if we had a single quarter-completed project that used the capability. To my knowledge there is currently exactly one actual Spring game that uses Ren'Py (mine), it's like 4% done, and uses someone else's IP (including stolen art assets) to boot (although the Japanese practices here are different anyway; c.f. doujinshi). That last bit probably kills it even as a concept demonstrator, alas.

well, lets go science on it then.. we got nothing to show.. lets talk about why telling storys in rtses is so difficult, why players especially in mulitplayer resent storylines.. and how to improves them.. how to story is actually a play downtime, and can thus be used to break up intense action.
How you neeed good voice actors and so on and so forth..

KingRaptor wrote:Mmm, highlighting Spring's (unofficial, at that) Ren'Py compatibility might be more relevant if we had a single quarter-completed project that used the capability. To my knowledge there is currently exactly one actual Spring game that uses Ren'Py (mine), it's like 4% done, and uses someone else's IP (including stolen art assets) to boot (although the Japanese practices here are different anyway; c.f. doujinshi). That last bit probably kills it even as a concept demonstrator, alas.

Is it at least possible to show anything that might give people the idea that it's in the realm of possibility, albeit still WIP?
I think the legality isn't that big of a deal since we're not distributing it, and I'll probably showcase one game at least that infringes on TA art.

PicassoCT wrote:lets talk about why telling storys in rtses is so difficult

It's not actually that hard if your game has RPG elements (like Warcraft 3), with good/well defined characters. That's actually one of the more memorable stories to me.
OTOH you have TA/Sup com which has story in comparison since it has no real characters.

Its a lot more then that.. its closeness of camera - aka scale..
If you are on the ISS, the storys of ants struggling after a birdroppings impact just doesent care the punch, no matter how dramatically presented.

Which is why such communication style, would actually made more sense in spring like games, if the drama were among the generals. standing around the maptable.
Also wc3 forced you to use the heroe, where in all other rts games, he gets usually parked in the base,so that he doesent get volunteered all over the battlefield by accident..

Finally, in games where every thing comes in huge numbers and is by definition replaceable, to have a unit suddenly irreplaceable, thats just- mechanics clashing with story.

Btw, my second experience is what beat nerds from IT-realted schools is Kernel Panic.

It has two advantages:

* Shows completely visually different project (it says by few images or video that Spring is not only one game engine)
* It makes people wet.

Everyone just ask questions about that cool Tron game.

Use http://www.clipconverter.cc/ to get video from YouTube, i was told by autohor of that trailer (MasterZh)

Feel free to edit the following:

Audio - The vision
When talking about audio in games, I like to think of three major alternatives:
1) No audio - No music or no sound effects.
2) Minimal audio - The music isn't in focus, it's probably quiet and doesn't have a prevalent melody. Some sound effects are there and some aren't. For instance there are sfx for shots but not for steps.
3) Good audio - What you usually see in commercial games. Music that complements the game and sound effects for each and every thing happening on screen.

The first alternative is terrible, try to play your favourite game with no sound and you'll notice a lot of the experience is gone. That's even more significant when it's a flawed game you've never played before (like 95% of the LD games).
The third alternative is great if you have enough resources which usually aren't available in 72 hours, not to mention I'm not a professional musician/audio engineer.
So the only real option is to make minimal audio, where the main goal is to prevent this uneasy feeling people get when they play games with no audio. A key principle is minimum effort for maximum gain.

Audio - Music
My microphone has very low quality and I don't have any instrument you can plug to a computer.
Fortunately there are many applications that allow you to compose music. The one I used is named sunvox ( http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ ) which belongs to the tracker family. I like to think of these as "composing for programmers", since they have a very sensible design of patterns and instruments.

Audio - Sound
I usually prefer to record sound effects myself and not use automatic generators like bfxr ( http://www.bfxr.net/ ), but these are worth a mention since they are quite popular and anyone can use them to achieve high quality results after some practice.
My approach is using my terrible microphone to record myself throwing stuff, hitting other stuff, making funny noises etc. (it is called foley - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_%28filmmaking%29 )
After recording several attempts I take the ones I like and edit/mix them in Audacity ( http://web.audacityteam.org/ although any other audio editor will do just fine) until I'm happy with the result.


Audio - Feedback
The most important thing in the composing/recording process is getting feedback, for two reasons:
1) You may have a slightly different vision of the game than the rest of the team, your audio may just not fit it too well. In the jam, I was asked to make a gate opening sound, and I tried to record a mechanical "clinging" noise (link). After checking with the rest of the team, I recorded a new pneumatic version which fits the game much better (link)
2) Different speakers/headphones may cause the same music to sound either good or bad. It's very important to see that your music is balanced for a variety of systems and not just your own. In the jam the earlier music versions had a bass track that was too loud which was fixed in the final version.

Other stuff that may be of interest:
- Sound doesn't live in a world of its own, the weapon sounds were timed perfectly with the first version of the gravity beam, but after it was changed, the sound effect became obnoxious and was never fixed. (That's also a message to coders - if you break something in the sound department, say so!)
- If you're both coding and making sound it's hard to find a good balance of how much time to spend on each. Don't neglect audio, at the very least spend an hour to make a semi-adequate music track and put it in the game in a low volume and an hour making silly sound effects. These 2 hours will have an enormous positive effect on the players' experience.




Anything else?

PepeAmpere wrote:Use http://www.clipconverter.cc/ to get video from YouTube, i was told by autohor of that trailer (MasterZh)

Cool, seems to work well!

PepeAmpere wrote:Btw, my second experience is what beat nerds from IT-realted schools is Kernel Panic.

It has two advantages:

* Shows completely visually different project (it says by few images or video that Spring is not only one game engine)
* It makes people wet.

Everyone just ask questions about that cool Tron game.

I'll show it as an example of what can be done, but I won't go into great detail for two reasons:
- This isn't an IT school, which became apparent by the huge number of girls (~50%) present unlike what one might expect to find in an IT setting. It seems that the actual programmers are all males (as usual), while the girls are doing something called "elasto" or "erasto". I have no idea what that is, despite asking a few times. Their terminology is a bit different than what you might expect in the west, and the best guess I have is that this is similar to a story/art/graphics role.
- This is Japan, and the games they play here are completely different. At this point I am actually (positively) surprised to see them play a game that's popular in the west. It's mostly visual novels or games for PS/PSP.

KP is great to show diversity though.

@hokomoko:
Wow, that's awesome, thanks!
That'll be all for now. I'll try to make some slides during the weekend and I'll post the English version here so you (and anyone willing) could give some feedback here.

Posting my old project for gajop:

Galaxy Angel: Starcrossed Lovers is a hybrid VN/RTT (visual novel/real-time tactics) game with a bishoujo anime style, serving as a concept demonstrator for the combination of the Ren'Py and Spring engines. It was originally created as a planned fan sequel for the Galaxy Angel game series by Broccoli.

The game can be divided into two components. The visual novel part is a typical example of its type, with linear dialogue and the occasional decision to make. The original games also featured segments where the protagonist was free to go around interacting with other characters, although this has not yet been implemented in GA:SL. Meanwhile, in the combat phase, the player is given a fixed set of spacecraft and must accomplish the objective with them, usually by completely destroying the enemy force. The units will fly about and engage the enemy with weapons such as lasers, machine guns and missiles. Currently, there is only one level in the game.

Links:
Download for Linux (tar.bz2)
Screenshots
Github repo (Spring game)
Github repo (Ren'Py + misc. stuff)


PS: gajop, I probably won't be in lobby most of the time, so send me a PM if something comes up (it'll send me an email and I can respond).

Cool, thanks. Your work is really appreciated!
They've yet to inform me about the length of the presentation, but now I have everything I need so I'll start making something.

Just a slight update to everyone concerned, especially Picasso.
They've delayed the presentation to next Wednesday (10th of June), so I've also subsequently pushed it down the TODO list
Should be done during this weekend though! I promise

This is the presentation I made: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9FQjb ... EyNTA/view
Not included is the gate comparison video I made for the old and new gate sounds hokomoko provided, as well as a demonstration of scenario editor usage.

All included it was about 1h so I decided not to use the XTA video example or give any really detailed explanation of how to make Spring games. While the slides were in English, I made them some notes and talked in my broken Japanese, so they probably understood something.

hokomoko wrote: 7:57:50 PM ooh, gajop presentation looks cool
7:57:56 PM how did it go?

I think it wasn't that bad, half of the 20 people that came were actively listening, with a few playing on their laptops and one guy trying real hard not to fall asleep.
Unfortunately (?), most of them were freshmen (with only 1 actually experienced guy), so they might've not really grasped all the concepts. I like to think that it served as an inspiration at least.

What's really unfortunate is that despite being told this talk would include non-programming stuff as well, they seem to have misrepresented it and in the end no girls showed up which was disappointing for me as well.