Tsa05
Member
"It's not a 3D game Making Tool!"
"Learn 2 Code!"
"Never!"
Ok, but hear me out? I'm not suggesting that GameMaker become more of a 3D game-making tool at the present. This is something different, and wrapped into stuff YYG is doing right now in the editor.
There's so many successful mobile apps out there right now that have no business being 3D as far as the mechanics go (isometrics, card collecting games, and such). But, in order to get that modern flashy graphics look, they all have about a zillion "little" 3D things in them. Hard to describe without specifics, but basically, I'm talking games where the entire point of the 3D is to just "look better."
A shiny bonus item that "spins" in 3D, for example. A card that flips and spins onto the play area. A loot box with a cool rotating piece and a lid that rotates open...
"But you can make all that in a 3D modelling and animating tool, export the animations as image sequences, and bring it all into GameMaker!"
I know. It's what I've been doing, when needed. But when we imagine doing cool things in 2D games, wouldn't it be neat if we didn't immediately think of using a program that's not GameMaker? What if GameMaker had some kind of...sprite editor...that was capable of allowing for "basic" 3D graphics? I could create and manipulate 3D sequences right inside the software!
GameMaker should not become a 3D modelling package. But, then again, Photoshop definitely isn't either. And it's tremendously handy for setting up 3D-looking images by loading model formats, and by generating simple primatives. In other words, when your 2D sets of images have to look like 3D, it's a whole lot easier to be working with 3D.
Here, sample images:
Made entirely in Photoshop using a circle, a small extrusion, a surface texture, and a bump map.
Again, Photoshop, same method.
Again, Photoshop, same method plus sphere and pyramid primative.
There's a ridiculous number of possible things to be made using the most absolutely basic 3D tools:
1) Draw something in 2D, then extrude. Rotate / scale / position the model.
2) Set the diffuse image, opacity map image, bump map image, and reflectivity map image for the front face, back face, and "extrusion face" material.
3) Permit a light source to be rotated around the object and a ground plane to catch shadows.
Everything shown above is done within those basic operations, in a matter of minutes.
Alternately:
1) Load a model format. Rotate / scale / position the model.
2) Permit a light source to be rotated around the object and a ground plane to catch shadows.
Of course, Photshop steps it up from there, with live-painting on textures, merging primatives, and so on, but that's getting too far into using the tools for other stuff (like creating assets for a 3D tool). Not needed.
But I'd argue that GMS2 could benefit very, very greatly from being able to load something simple in 3D, or to generate something from a 2D image into 3D, and to then be able to store basic keyframes.
In this way, it would be trivial for the game designer to load up "realistic," nice-looking, modern graphical assets (3D), and to set them up with basic animations from the sprite editor. It's essentially still a 2D game-making process, but we'd see tons more people using slick-looking assets into GameMaker.
We lose tons of 2D games to U***y simply because modern mobile app players expect a "3D look" while playing a 2D game. It's not like GameMaker can't do it--in fact it'd probably be faster to get the 2D mechanics working in GMS and devs need to see this--but the workload for exporting every frame of every asset doing every "flourish" and then importing all of that into sprites seems absurd when you can just drop native 3D assets into something else and be done.
GameMaker needs to be able to create that look--and to animate it! (Look at those gfx above--think about how hard it would be to make those do a 3D rotation in GMS versus Photoshop or U*i*y). We've got a sprite editor, and an animation timeline--I believe GameMaker would benefit immensely from the ability to add "3D" layer(s) to a sprite with a keyframeable timeline per layer.
The gfx don't even need to be rendered in true 3D during runtime, since the purpose here is to use 3D as a tool for creating better-looking, animated assets rather than to make a 3D game. (But you can see how this would double up as ground work in case yyg ever wants to do additional 3D runtime things, too).
If you've got Photoshop and are familiar with the 3D, think about that style of interface, with just this subset of features:
- 2D extrusion, generating an "extrusion face" and a "back face" in addition to the "front face"
- Primative sphere, rectangle, pyramid, cylinder
- One material per "face", with diffuse, opacity, bump, and reflectivity maps for generated objects
- One or two model formats supported for loading
- Settable lighting and ground plane
If you're not familiar with Photoshop, just imagine GMS generating cool image sequences based on 3D graphics.
"Learn 2 Code!"
"Never!"
Ok, but hear me out? I'm not suggesting that GameMaker become more of a 3D game-making tool at the present. This is something different, and wrapped into stuff YYG is doing right now in the editor.
There's so many successful mobile apps out there right now that have no business being 3D as far as the mechanics go (isometrics, card collecting games, and such). But, in order to get that modern flashy graphics look, they all have about a zillion "little" 3D things in them. Hard to describe without specifics, but basically, I'm talking games where the entire point of the 3D is to just "look better."
A shiny bonus item that "spins" in 3D, for example. A card that flips and spins onto the play area. A loot box with a cool rotating piece and a lid that rotates open...
"But you can make all that in a 3D modelling and animating tool, export the animations as image sequences, and bring it all into GameMaker!"
I know. It's what I've been doing, when needed. But when we imagine doing cool things in 2D games, wouldn't it be neat if we didn't immediately think of using a program that's not GameMaker? What if GameMaker had some kind of...sprite editor...that was capable of allowing for "basic" 3D graphics? I could create and manipulate 3D sequences right inside the software!
GameMaker should not become a 3D modelling package. But, then again, Photoshop definitely isn't either. And it's tremendously handy for setting up 3D-looking images by loading model formats, and by generating simple primatives. In other words, when your 2D sets of images have to look like 3D, it's a whole lot easier to be working with 3D.
Here, sample images:
Made entirely in Photoshop using a circle, a small extrusion, a surface texture, and a bump map.
Again, Photoshop, same method.
Again, Photoshop, same method plus sphere and pyramid primative.
There's a ridiculous number of possible things to be made using the most absolutely basic 3D tools:
1) Draw something in 2D, then extrude. Rotate / scale / position the model.
2) Set the diffuse image, opacity map image, bump map image, and reflectivity map image for the front face, back face, and "extrusion face" material.
3) Permit a light source to be rotated around the object and a ground plane to catch shadows.
Everything shown above is done within those basic operations, in a matter of minutes.
Alternately:
1) Load a model format. Rotate / scale / position the model.
2) Permit a light source to be rotated around the object and a ground plane to catch shadows.
Of course, Photshop steps it up from there, with live-painting on textures, merging primatives, and so on, but that's getting too far into using the tools for other stuff (like creating assets for a 3D tool). Not needed.
But I'd argue that GMS2 could benefit very, very greatly from being able to load something simple in 3D, or to generate something from a 2D image into 3D, and to then be able to store basic keyframes.
In this way, it would be trivial for the game designer to load up "realistic," nice-looking, modern graphical assets (3D), and to set them up with basic animations from the sprite editor. It's essentially still a 2D game-making process, but we'd see tons more people using slick-looking assets into GameMaker.
We lose tons of 2D games to U***y simply because modern mobile app players expect a "3D look" while playing a 2D game. It's not like GameMaker can't do it--in fact it'd probably be faster to get the 2D mechanics working in GMS and devs need to see this--but the workload for exporting every frame of every asset doing every "flourish" and then importing all of that into sprites seems absurd when you can just drop native 3D assets into something else and be done.
GameMaker needs to be able to create that look--and to animate it! (Look at those gfx above--think about how hard it would be to make those do a 3D rotation in GMS versus Photoshop or U*i*y). We've got a sprite editor, and an animation timeline--I believe GameMaker would benefit immensely from the ability to add "3D" layer(s) to a sprite with a keyframeable timeline per layer.
The gfx don't even need to be rendered in true 3D during runtime, since the purpose here is to use 3D as a tool for creating better-looking, animated assets rather than to make a 3D game. (But you can see how this would double up as ground work in case yyg ever wants to do additional 3D runtime things, too).
If you've got Photoshop and are familiar with the 3D, think about that style of interface, with just this subset of features:
- 2D extrusion, generating an "extrusion face" and a "back face" in addition to the "front face"
- Primative sphere, rectangle, pyramid, cylinder
- One material per "face", with diffuse, opacity, bump, and reflectivity maps for generated objects
- One or two model formats supported for loading
- Settable lighting and ground plane
If you're not familiar with Photoshop, just imagine GMS generating cool image sequences based on 3D graphics.