shmups.system11.org

Hey,

my name is Jon and I run a very small indie company called SKN3. I am posting some information here about our new app called Objecty. We have just released an alpha demo for people to try and would like to get as much feedback as possible. I think that Object could be perfect to help make shoot-em-ups...




Objecty is an app for all game developers regardless of engine, language or framework. Object makes game artwork and asset related tasks a breeze. We can pack textures to improve game performance; Animate characters using a skeletal structure to produce efficient and fluid graphics; Create game objects that allow us to organise things without manually editing data files, and a whole lot more!

Basically if you have ever made a game at some point you would have needed to make an editor, manually edited some text files or generally just do some grunt work in a pretty inflexible way. With Objecty our mission is to change that, without changing what you make games in!

So that's the blurb and I hope this interests you guys so go check it out!

Click to view the project page

(The download link can be found at the top of the introduction )

Thanks!

YES. A MILLION TIMES YES.

A kickstarter with an actual downloadable demo too! The world is slowly being put to rights...

This looks far more intuitive than some of the vector based stuff and honestly, despite the "cardboard cutout" look - I actually have uses for this. If I had the spare cash right now - I'd even make that £500 pledge. Sadly, I'm moving house and all my projects are on hold along with my wallet. Bah!

I will definately pledge though, if you can answer a few questions:

Using Unity - I assume that I can take an approach of having one of my custom character controllers in place and simply have an asset created by your package sitting as a child of that, then have an external script tell it which animations etc to play?

Fairly easy to talk to it from a C# script? Can you provide a short example of this? Even if it's just ObjectyObject.PlayAnim("Wiggle");

Cheers!
Steve

Hey there the approach you describe is the general approach we would like to take on all targets. Either attach the actor an existing entity or make it is own entity (depending on platform). You would then have control to lookup certain bones positions; look up hotspot positions, set animations, scale, etc.

We do not have any specifics yet for unity as we are looking for the kickstarter to fund part of this. It is a high priority to make this work on different platforms so once the campaign finishes we will be looking to get this done.

I hope that answers your queries and is not to generic

Slightly. Got a few concerns though..

Being able to separate the "physical" game world from what actually gets rendered is something anybody making games should really have a handle on anyway. If I've got an object in my game world regardless of language, it has its own collision code and is entirely seperate from anything that actually gets rendered in relation to it.


Your project page comes across as proudly boasting that you have (or will have) Unity support. I really want to support your tool - it looks incredibly useful. But I am unfortunately hesitant to back things on a promise that they will deliver a specific feature.

If I make a pledge, can I approach you via email to collaborate with you on Unity integration with a full license before you go live?

Even if that's just providing PDF going "Here's how you can do it" initially.

Totally get that its kinda of backing something that doesn't exist. I tried to explain in the video and whatnot that this is one of the parts that doesn't fully exist yet and will be funded by the campaign, so totally get that people will have concerns. I would be more then happy to discuss unity integration with you. Infact it would be incredibly helpful to speak with someone who is going to have a vested interest in it. What kind of involvement were you thinking?

jon@skn3.com

Heya,

Please don't take my concern too harshly - this is just a general sense of apprehension most people feel regarding kickstarter projects. There's also been cases in the past where a product has been so massively overhyped by the media that they've actually given a product that is somewhat lacking incredibly high reviews on features that the product promises to deliver.

I'll drop you an email shortly - level of involvement - I'll leave that up to you to decide. I'm really just interested in being able to easily mockup 2D sprites with full animation to facilitate my workflow so that I can not be sitting around waiting on artists. Since I'll be switching pretty much all of my stuff over to Unity as I migrate away from XBLIG (sad times) -- this is a feature I'd basically need, so I'm more than happy to pledge - help you get off the ground and work closely with you to get the unity side of things working.