Human Piñata - A Gdev game on greenlight

Hi, everyone we are here presenting you a small project that we have been working for a while now. Human Piñata was first developed for stencyl’s game jam 2016, it had a overall positive response from people at gamejolt, so when we won a small seed budget in an incubator called Honduras startup we decided to finish the game properly using game develop.

Check out our greenlight page and if you find it interesting please support us so we can reach steam

Steam Greenlight: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=854494394&result=1

Thanks everyone for your support!

Congratulations on your success. :slight_smile:

Thanks for your words! we are still hoping we can pass through greenlight and also improving stuffs that gamers told us as feeedback. We hope you can play our game soon :slight_smile:

During our time on greenlight we have received a lot of feedback and we agree with most of the comments specially the ones that suggest to improve the enviroment of the game in order to match better with the Illustrations. We have made an effort (Since we are over budget by now) to get the help of an artist to help us with this task. and here are the preliminary results

Before:

Now

We are still working in improving it further to make the experience more immersive. If you want to support us on greenlight you can leave us an upvote in this link:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=854494394&result=1

Thanks for the support <3

HI just a small update: we have added new screenshots to show you the progress on the ones that you now and also new scenes. We tweak them everyday so they are still not final. more info on the following links:

Greenlight: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/updates/854494394/1486617191

Game Jolt: http://gamejolt.com/games/human-pinata/195800

Read an article of the game at IndieDB:http://www.indiedb.com/games/human-piata/news/first-week-of-a-piata-at-greenlight

Thanks for supporting the game!

You are really busy with improvements (which is great). May I ask how many of you are working on the game? :slight_smile:

Well in the team we are 3 people: Juan Alvarado who made the note´s script and translation, Daniel Álvarez (Dan Flex) who is in charge of music and SFX and me who conceptualized the game idea, code the game in gdev, do some pixel art(that we can´t afford paying for), do marketing, etc, etc.

Also we got help from a few artist like Martina Fackova who made the illustrations and help us improve the pixelart for the enviroment. Another artist called Keidi made a few assets too.

I was at the office of my current job and I just received this awesome news :cry: : Human PInata was greenlit. I"ll give you the details of why the game has been delayed but please be confident that the game will be soon on the market. Thanks to everyone that have supported us until now and that have been patient with us you are awesome :slight_smile:

Because there is so much that i wanted to share about the game and I already have write it… you can check it here on my devlog at Game Jolt: http://gamejolt.com/games/human_pinata/195800/devlog/important-news-about-the-game-s-release-date-wmhjiumm

Congrats on the greenlit!

Thanks! 0/

To be honest I thought that procedural generation wouldn’t be possible on Gdev and… well this awesome engine never fails in surprise me :mrgreen:

Trying to implement strong game mechanics to the Human Pinata before releasing on steam I ended up with a prototype to quasi procedural generate the house structure for the player to escape opening tons of possibilities for the game. It’s not finished but at this point I’m confident that the engine gives me all the required tools to finish it. Thanks Gdev <3

Here it is the prototype:

As always thanks for supporting the game 0/

You could also use external layouts to design different room layouts and just pick a random one to be created at the beginning. You could even break it up in to walls, floors, furnitures if you want. It would allow you to build more detailed room designs more easily :unamused:

Yeah you are right, I haven’t try it that way but it works too, thanks for the idea :slight_smile:

I used an universal tile map for this one, I feel it gives it more flexibility to do different sizes and shapes to the generated maps.

I’ll continue improving it. Thanks for the advice 0/

Hi everyone 0/

I just wanted to let you know that I won’t longer continue the development for Human Piñata using Gdevelop I’m changing to Unity for the following reasons:

  • Dynamic Audio is a really important part of Human Piñata and even if I can recreate a system similar to Wwise in Gdev I can’t transfer the responsibility of the implementation to a sound designer something that Wwise let me do in an easier way.

  • I feel that Gdevelop has a more educational direction rather than a commercial one and obviously Unity is more commerce orientated which match my direction.

  • I recently entered Nintendo’s developer program because I think the game can benefice from motion controls and having the game on Unity makes easier for me if someday in the future I’m able to publish the game there.

I’ll still be around in the forums and I’ll continue using Gdevelop for quick prototyping but since I’m not using this game engine for development I won’t update this thread anymore, if you want to keep track of the game you can do it at Game Jolt Here https://gamejolt.com/games/human_pinata/195800 or at steam once I create the “Coming soon” page.

You can read the recent updates for the game at Game Jolt too so you can have a better idea why I’m changing the game engine.

[size=150]I always wanted to make a contribution to the community and Gdev and I think it’s time to just that:[/size]

The last 6 moths I have been researching how to make procedural generation systems and I have made 2 using Gdev: one with the tilemap object (Human Piñata) and another with sprites for HTML5 games (Armony Code and Heavens Tea Party) and now that I moved my game to Unity I made one using C# which is a better version of the 2 mentioned above but with the same logic.

I can gladly share how I made the ones using Gdev (Specially the one with tilemaps because it can be improved to be more efficient) but I don’t have time to make a tutorial :cry: but I know there are people here in the community like @ddabrahim and @Jubeliuksen3 that makes tutorials (Let me know if one of you guys are interested) and I can share with them how I made my procedural systems, they only need to mention me on their tutorial or if anyone else is interested in make the tutorial feel free to contact me.

I can’t share the Gdev file with you because is using some assets that I paid for, it has events I haven’t showed yet, a big part of Human Piñata story changes, new mechanics ideas and also since I was learning to make the system it’s messy so it needs to be cleaned in order for someone to use it as a guide.

So thanks to everyone that have followed the thread and I hope you can still follow the development of the game on other platforms ^_^/ and see you around the forums!

I’m sorry to see you leave GD, but I need to agree with you on that GD is feels more like an educational tool for people just getting started with game making, Unity suit commercial projects better.

But don’t forget that, Unity is moving toward to become a pay monthly service really and who knows what limitations going to be in the free version. There was a time when core features was not available in the free version including ones allow you to collaborate. Also, it is constantly changing, and this is the reason I always run away from it. Once you get something sorted, you might need to start from scratch in the next version because they change something internally that break the whole thing and you need to keep developing the same thing over and over again if you want to stay up to date with the engine. It is also make it difficult to learn as lot of tutorials are out of date and things no longer works the way they explained.

It is something that I never liked about it but yes at the moment it seems the best choice if you want to make a commercial game from low budget. It is also got WebGL support now that made me recently take a look again but when I saw the error messages when I tried to compile an old Unity game I was making, just made me think …uck this. It is something that I really don’t like about it. As a single developer I find it difficult to keep up with the internal changes happening all the time.

What I decided to take a look instead is CopperCube. The actual engine (CopperLicht) is free and open-source you are buying only the visual editor if you need it. But the nice thing about the editor and the reason made me interested is WebGL and it comes with a room and asset building tool that even allow you to relatively easily generate levels, buildings, terrain and any asset using Js. It is just sounds perfect for making procedural levels. At the moment I’m not too sure how good it is for commercial games, what bugs and limitations are there, probably not as good as Unity but looks a decent and simple tool so far for making 3D WebGL games.

Regarding the procedural system, I think the best would be if you would open a new topic and share the project file without the assets and write a brief description with some key points how it works so anyone interested to implement but not quiet understand something can ask questions.

Good luck with Unity.

Sad but fair, anyway I think Unity is not the best option out there IMHO, Unity only thinks about money as any big company, their move was “Everybody is going free, so we have to do that to keep our buy… users”, and now slowly (not soooo slowly) they are going back step by step, check the pricing list, the free license was almost the same as the premium ones some months ago (except premium support and sources), now it has the same features as 2 years ago: “core engine features”, but with a nice “All” at the beginning to make it sounds generous :frowning:

About suggestion, I know someone can think I’m a double agent, a mole or whatever, but I would suggest Godot, almost unknown (at least for me) a year ago, it’s growing fast, and unlike Unity it has a real 2D engine and not a 3D one flatted in the Z axis, open source, python-like programming language and a nice parent-child object system.

But as I said in the chat, nothing is faster than GD to make little games :smiley:

Maybe some colored polygons as placeholders, things may not work if image sizes are different :neutral_face:

The only thing I dislike in Godot is that it using Emscripten for Web. Compatibility is not that great and also slower in some cases. It may not going to run on devices that otherwise have no problem rendering 2D-3D content in the browser.

But otherwise, I totally agree. Godot is about to become the next big deal. Getting better and better by each day, actively developed, well documented and the new rendering engine coming in v3.0 is going to be amazing.
The only problem is Emscripten don’t really motivate me and the visual scripting is ridiculous in v3 imo. I mean they had a chance to make something that is going to be beginner friendly and offer something to people don’t like to code but instead they made that node based trash that helps only on people who likes to visualize connections between each and every variable, method and shader :frowning:
At least from what I saw it is not going to help much unless we can make specialized methods in GDScript to be used inside that thing and add in-out-enable-disable-tirgger nod connectors as in Leadwerks for example, so I can create a method to close and open doors for example define some node connectors inside the method and simply in a visual way inside this editor connect staff to the relevant node to open-close-trigger the door and select by ID or name which one but I didn’t see anything like that last time I checked. It was super complicated and confusing to me :frowning:

Hi guys 0/

Thanks for your suggestions! @ddabrahim and @Lizard-13 I check them out an looks like interesting options to keep track of and I know that that Unity has its flaws, I have been “toying” with it since the start of this year for a VR project (a diagnostic for TDHA similar to nesplora’s product) for my classes and I have already experienced its flaws (I had to rollback the version because of an update google made) but I think it fills the needs of Human Pinata with it’s new scope and design specially for audio implementation.

Regarding money and the monthly payment… well if you are trying to do business you can’t expect to people to give it for free jajajaja I feel confident with this game, it have been hard for me to give shape to it because I made it for a game jam (and people liked it) and has it’s design flaws but little by little I have been putting the pieces together and I’m not afraid of investing on it for that reason (and also because of all the analysis I made like a business plan, project manual using PMI methodology, etc.), my only problem is that investors at my country (People who can put serious money on the project) bet their money in projects that sound great as an idea but as a Master on Project Management I can say they looks very weak projects to invest (They where offering $4K to invest and the projects they choose according to their creator needed $46K jajaja and according to them their IRR is so high because “obviously if the potential market as a 8 million possible users most of them will like my awesome idea and buy it” and IRR highier than 30% are very likely to be miscalculated because you are basically saying you will recover your investment ridiculously quick) and without external help I can’t get a decent budget to work with but I have literally got extra temporal jobs to gather money to invest on HP and also I totally understand the vision from people about videogames from outside the industry: “videogames are meaningless activities”. Sorry I think I went on a rant about jajajaja soooo moving on

I won’t be leaving GD jajajaja I’ll still will use it and I’m looking forwardfor GD5 but I don’t think I’ll use it for commercial projects just for quick prototyping when I want to show an idea as quickly as possible.

I totally agree!

And thanks for your suggestions about the procedural system file, I guess I’ll put some time at night to clean it and see if I can make it understandable for most people but I think a video will be better and easy to understand because the name of these systems sounds so complex and they are not jajaja specially for a grid based ones (I know there are more complex ones using crazier algorithms) but I’ll see if I can slowly put it together.