Some "pre-sales" questions...
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Hi! I'm a programmer by trade, but I've never done any game programming other than some tutorials in Unity. I'm really interested in Fuze and I think it might be perfect for me.
My wife and I play a lot of Dr. Mario on Switch Online. We love the game so much, but we feel there are so many improvements to be made that we (mostly me to be honest) want to make our own. We feel that making a Dr. Mario clone that incorporated some new features would be tons of fun to play and to code.
Unity was my first choice, but having Fuze available and being able to play on pro controllers on the TV easily seems more ideal.
My perfect scenario is being able to work on the game together with my wife and doing some "couch co-op" programming with her. If I just added a wireless USB key/mouse and used our 55 inch tv (from 6 feet away) will this be an acceptable dev environment for us? Any thoughts on couch-style development?
Is there anything else anyone can think of that might limit what I want to do with the game? I'm hoping to add more customization (controlling the garbage drops, skill balancing, etc.) and some metrics (tracking game histories, win/loss, etc.). Really I want to build a base clone that is pretty accurate, but then start adding in crazy features to make it more fun for us.
Thanks in advance!!!
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@plarpco Hi I am a programmer myself but only dabble in game programming. My first thought about the idea of coop programming is that it might be tricky on Fuze. Although you can share code using a friend code there is (currently) no built in source code control so managing code merges could be difficult.
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Fuze doesn't support the mouse incidentally...
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@Martin You can tell we are not sales people!
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@pianofire Thanks! I was thinking more of "pair programming" where we work together to develop sitting on the couch together. I just don't really know if people are mostly docking their switches to a monitor on their desk as a dev environment, or just coding while sitting in front of the TV. I see you can mess with font-size, so maybe that would work.
Just trying to get a feel for how stabby trying to code on the couch while looking at the TV 6 feet away will be.
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@pianofire said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
@Martin You can tell we are not sales people!
True that :D
Of course Fuze is a LOT of fun however!! And you should consider it an investment. Mike is very fond of saying that the Fuze we have now will be very different to the one we have in 6 to 12 months time and I tend to agree...
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@plarpco Oh OK. Well I do it both ways. If I am typing a lot of code I use the dock and USB keyboard but for tinkering it is fine on the virtual keyboard
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
Just trying to get a feel for how stabby trying to code on the couch while looking at the TV 6 feet away will be.
It's perfectly do-able. Most of the time I use a dock on my desk and a 27" gaming monitor but sometimes I'll just kick back on the sofa in handheld mode. Obviously typing is not as quick on the virtual keyboard but it's perfectly possible.
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@Martin Thanks. I didn't realize that about mouse support. Maybe it's not important! I'm really just looking for a good environment to code in, and keep my wife interested so she just doesn't totally tune out.
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If you can get your wife interested in coding then you are about 10 steps ahead of me!! Fuze is a great, easy environment though - although you could really do with someone from outside of TeamFuze to chime in though :D
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@Martin At the moment, she's pretty apathetic about it, but I'm hoping that watching our code come to life as a playable game that is actually fun will get her excited about programming. Plus, I have little kids that I would love to see participate as well.
I've been reading through some of the forums, and everyone seems super nice and helpful. That is very important when learning a new dev process! Cheers!
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
@pianofire Thanks! I was thinking more of "pair programming" where we work together to develop sitting on the couch together.
This is exactly what I do with my son.
We have the Switch hooked up to our fifty inch television, and hand the USB keyboard back and forth. For a "mouse", we keep our Pro Controller sitting between us, so we can reach the left analog stick, which scrolls the code up and down.
F5 on the keyboard toggles the running of the program. There's a thread somewhere on the forum with a full list of keyboard shortcuts.
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@Spacemario Thanks! Glad that setup is working. I'll give it a try. Purchasing tonight!
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@plarpco Glad I was able to help!
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
Purchasing tonight!
Thank you for your support. I hope you have a great time and we get to see some cool creations :)
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@plarpco said in Some "pre-sales" questions...:
@Spacemario Thanks! Glad that setup is working. I'll give it a try. Purchasing tonight!
Be aware this is ultra addictive and it will absorb your time like no other Switch software. (I've already got 315hrs on it. it's just soooooooo much fun)
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@SteveZX81 HI Steve! Thanks for the warning! I've seen your posts a lot of the forums here -- I'm glad to see you asking all the right questions, and getting answers and support from everyone. I think I have a few of your posts bookmarked already. Cheers!
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@plarpco One thing which really helped me out when I started was going through the tutorials one-by-one, and manually typing the code for at least parts of them, until I really understood the concepts.
Once you get to the actual "game" tutorials though, you might want to consider leaping right into the docs for the map editor and do things that way, versus the "hard way" of manually looping to draw tiles, and calculating your own collision detection (which is what the "game" tutorials have you do).
I'm of mixed opinions how valuable that exercise is, I waffle on it-- at least examine the code both ways, and make up your mind where you invest your time.
Anyway, just figured I'd throw this out there as a possible good way to get started.
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@Spacemario Thanks! I've been going through the tutorials and getting code to run. So far so good! I haven't hit the game tutorials yet, that will happen tonight (hopefully).
Without knowing much about game programming, I figured that a Dr. Mario type game would work like:
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Draw some background, or border around the playing field. I don't know if this would be sprites, or a map, or shapes. Anything else it could be?
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Have sprites for all of the pieces (pills), and have sprites for all of the "viruses".
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Write code to place the initial set of viruses based on some rules.
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Write code to generate random pieces
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Handle piece movement, including player movement (rotation, side-to-side, dropping, etc.) and falling pieces.
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Write code to handle end game.
Once I perfect the base game, I was hoping to add cool features. One thing I really want is some metrics after a game. What was the players virus count over time, virus clearing rate, biggest combo, etc. I figured I would almost need to store a history of every piece played, every virus cleared, etc. Is that something Fuze will be able to tolerate? Storing a huge history table, and then crunching some numbers?
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@plarpco It sounds like you have a really good handle on this already-- those are more or less exactly the steps I would follow!
For the background, I'd just draw one or more stylish backgrounds in the image editor, and use the "load image" function to display them; may as well not over-complicate things on that front!
The metrics idea sounds really cool! Having played some Dr. Mario in the past myself, each individual match isn't really that long-- I don't see why you couldn't just store the move data into an array of structs.
Then if you wanted lifetime metrics for a given player, you could write the structs to a file, and re-load it when the player visits your "stats" screen.
