Hi, this is my very first writing on IndieDB, I hope it will be interesting enough for you (and sorry for my bad English by the way…)
I'm making an action platformer, with zero knowledge about OpenGL (and very little on game making, memories from adolescence). I'm a software programmer, since 10 years.
Back in December, I was writing it with pygame (SDL, in Python). Really soon, it started to be obvious that SDL (version 1 with pygame, so no hardware acceleration) wasn't enough. Then I learned the minimum about OpenGL (fixed pipeline). Not enough again… Then vertex array, then VBOs, etc. I plan to learn shaders and all, but my graphic card and drivers aren't really good at it, so most examples don't work (hopefully I will replace my computer soon).
This lead us here. One week ago, I've proposed to some people of my family (the young nephews who asked me after learning my job "is it hard for you to make a game ?") to test No Man's Space. They tested it quite often, but for the first time my game was able to propose a 'complete' party : start, fight enemies with a purpose, and die.
They tested the wave mode (survival). On wave 5, the night comes. And here is my interrogation : one of them tells me that it's really hard to see bullets coming from enemies (shuriken, here) and it's frustrating. Indeed, it's hard. But I thought it was a good idea to not 'light' them since it was… the night.
After some times, I started to think that he was right, and maybe I should disable lighting (thus, ironically, showing clearly) for the bullets.
Here is the result, 'after' - without lighting on bullets, less realistic, but much more comfortable :
And here 'before' - with lighting on bullets (and no light), more realistic but harder and maybe more frustrating :
May I ask you what do you think ?
Here are two other examples, in the wave mode :
And a video :
gml.
