"Tonight We Riot" is a brutal 8-bit side scroller about worker liberation

[lastchance]

Not to digress, but

@Shuck

Unreal, where you have to do everything in C++

Not quite.

You can do quite a bit with just ‘blueprints’. Behold:

UE4 Blueprints From Hell

UE4 Blueprints From Hell

UE4 Blueprints From Hell

UE4 Blueprints From Hell

[McGreens]

@Shuck

Absolutely massive numbers of images. This is a problem with 2D sprite-based games. The game uses something like 1000 frames of animation for each character, at fairly high resolutions (at least compared to earlier games in the series),and that adds up. 3D is fairly compact in comparison - one model, one texture set, and a relatively tiny amount of animation data - which is one of the reasons why 3D became popular with developers of certain types of games even at a time when it didn’t look that great. Games that rely on a lot of sprite-based animations are an absolute beast to work with.

Interesting. Is it not possible to create 2D games with 3D techniques?

As for 3D games being more compact, Gears of War 4 was something like 140Gb. Presumably without the constraints of physical media, developers don’t need to optimise games as much any more.

[Shuck]

@lastchance

You can do quite a bit with just ‘blueprints’.

Ha ha, I was trying to qualify my statement a bit to side-step that… nightmare.

@McGreens

As for 3D games being more compact

I mean, for something like a fighting game (where you have a ton of high-frame-rate animations), or Diablo-style RPG (where you have a ton of character permuations), 3D is much more compact. And cheaper - hand-drawn fighting games require huge amounts of labor to draw each frame compared to animating a 3D character.

@McGreens

Is it not possible to create 2D games with 3D techniques?

Depends what you mean by that.

If you mean using a 3D workflow but ending up as 2D, that’s a problem. To go back to Diablo I and II, which were sprite-based, each playable character was an assembly of individual equipment pieces composited together in the display. Everything was actually built as 3D models, but since the engine wasn’t capable of 3D, each character and equipment set had to be rendered separately for all animations, in every direction the character could face. Total nightmare. The artists wanted to move to a 3D engine so they could just take the 3D models and use them in the game. The sequels and other games of that type saved huge amounts of labor by moving to 3D, as they not only didn’t have the nightmare of working with a massive number of sprites, but they could swap out a texture here and there and get a completely new equipment set or a completely new monster without having to do any other work.

If you mean using 3D models and rendering them as if they were 2D images, that’s very popular - a lot of fighting games have gone that route because it’s so much cheaper to do.

@McGreens

Presumably without the constraints of physical media, developers don’t need to optimise games as much any more.

There’s still limits as to the number of polygons or texture sizes games (and the hardware) can work with. Unreal is automating the process by which large amounts of data get turned into processable chunks, but the limits are still there. There are also still limits in terms of internet speeds and hard drive sizes.

[74hc595]

Those “blueprints” look like Labview programs, but with curved instead of straight lines. (and are about as unreadable)

[fuzzyfungus]

I have to wonder if the dog in this game is a homage to the adorable good boy of the Greek austerity riots.

[fuzzyfungus]

It seems like every mechanism for doing programming-type stuff visually succumbs to the fact that programming-type stuff is often hideously complex; and a picture is worth way less than a thousand words when the words are being used to lay out things like describing iteration and recursion.