Ed, have you thought about attacking a big project targeting desktops? It’s a bit of an all-or-nothing approach, but for example there’s no reason why something of the scale of say Prison Architect couldn’t be done in Corona, especially with your talents.
My mobile indie game (which was just a pet project at the start) is doing over $1,000 per day in revenue now. Yeah, it takes a lot of time and effort but I do not consider it to be work. It is what I love doing!
I’ve finally gone part time at work now to allocate time and resources to it - still not brave enough to fully quite the 9-5 just in case. What is given can so easily be taken!
I have thought about it, but haven’t come up with any good ideas. I’m a great problem solver, except for the problem of what to make. :wacko:
@adrianm, Per-day or per-month? Either way, congrats and hats off to you.
per day Ed…
OK, now I’m jealous. :) Congrats again!
I’ve got about six years worth of projects lined up, too many ideas not enough hours in the day. They might turn out to be terrible ideas but I’m passionate about making them happen. One is along the lines of Prison Architect but on a different theme, but I haven’t had time to even think about starting.
Oh so true!
Ed, I think a bunch of your game ideas and templates I’ve seen over the years are solid ideas. If you can punch up the graphics and sound and maybe package them like @Rob Miracle suggested, you could end up with something unique. I’m imagining a game where the central character goes through various side adventures (mini games) while on a quest of some sort like Machinarium or SunDog (old school Start ST - with lots of little side puzzles).
If you think of those old Monte Python “animations” that barely moved but felt alive because of clever sound design or “Inside” (by the same people who made Limbo) which has light gameplay but a captivating atmosphere, you can see that a boost in visuals and sound gives you a lot of bang for your buck. My shading plugin works on that principle. Pop in a couple shadows and some depth and the viewers become more attentive and committed to the game environment and characters.
Ed, I’ve benefitted tremendously from your help online. If I can return the favor sometime by helping you brainstorm graphics or sound - shoot me a personal message.
Jonathan
Thanks for wanting to help me out. I’ve got a ton of game ideas too, but I have trouble getting beyond the ‘interesting mechanic’ to complete, beautiful, and engaging game.
I have a short attention span in some ways. I love solving problems, but spending time on polish, tweak, improve repeat, not so much.
This is part of why you seem me answering a lot of forums posts. I want to help folks, but I also enjoy solving the questions that are asked.
I hear what you’re saying about incremental improvements to get from flat and boring to better and more interesting. My current (long running) challenge is to settle on an art style I can handle producing on my own that is in a send mine or associated with my work.
Cheers,
Ed
Hey Ed, I have a challenge for you (not sure this can actually be done in Corona).
What I am trying to do is show a coverage map of my game of certain game parameters. What I would like to achieve is something like this
I’ve tried making buildings greyscale and then applying a setFillColor but this doesn’t work on greyscale! If I just use setFillColor then the results look like this
The problem is buildings without coverage basically are filled with {0,0,0} when ideally they should be filled with white - but filling with {1,1,1} just removes the fill.
Ideally the steps should be something like
-
convert all assets to greyscale
-
ramp up the gamma so buildings are in the range 0.75 - 1 as opposed to 0-1
-
then apply a varying fill colour between 0 and 1 depending on coverage. 0 for no coverage, 1 for max coverage. So zero coverage would almost be white and full coverage would be a solid colour
I can’t use a snapshot or anything like that as the player can pan and zoom to see the enitre playing area which is much bigger than the view port dimensions and with the game using upwards of 200MB texture memory I can’t double it either. It has to be able to operate on the existing display objects!
Dilemma time…
@Jonathan, you cannot colour fill a grayscale filter so that option is out…
filter.colorMatrix is better but buildings without colour still tend towards black and not white
What I need is to apply multiple fills… one to turn into white and then a second pass to colour them. But unless I am mistaken, Corona only supports a single filter once.
Nothing received… try @adrianm
Does this looks fine?
Simply done with color matrix:
[lua]
local default = display.newImage( “archery.png”, 85, 90 )
local grayed = display.newImage( “archery.png”, 160, 220 )
local active = display.newImage( “archery.png”, 235, 350 )
grayed.fill.effect = “filter.colorMatrix”
grayed.fill.effect.coefficients =
{
0.299, 0.587, 0.114, 0,
0.299, 0.587, 0.114, 0,
0.299, 0.587, 0.114, 0,
0, 0, 0, 1
}
active.fill.effect = “filter.colorMatrix”
active.fill.effect.coefficients =
{
0.299, 0.587, 0.114, 0.6,
0.299, 0.587, 0.114, 0,
0.299, 0.587, 0.114, 0,
0, 0, 0, 1
}
[/lua]
EDIT:
You can adjusting redness by changing that 0.6 coefficient. 0.2 would give you just a little tint, 1 would bake it all-red.
EDIT 2:
you can also animate it: https://gist.github.com/Shchvova/9991fa5dab6bc653274eec8492fc4a21
Just for fun, made a gif http://i.imgur.com/sEaKaIv.gifv of the gist
Alternative: https://giphy.com/gifs/3ohzdNTp6E0HXQQOxW/html5
Curious… how did you come up with these values? 0.299, 0.587, 0.114
Brilliant! I really must play around with colorMatrix!
This is how you get “true” grayscale. Eye have different sensitivity to different light, etc. Read more - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayscale#Luma_coding_in_video_systems
EDIT: Here’s comparison. Left one is just 0.5 for coefficients, right one - 0.299, 0.587, 0.114
Must say it is not quite what I wanted but it is certainly good enough… thanks Vlad