Unit maker software

Hi to all the indies

In order to create units very quickly for our games, me and a friend created a unit maker software with openfl. We are already using it but not in an user friendly way (you have to touch the code to use most of the options) so we created a kickstarter in order to turn it into a “real” software.

There is a demo version here and the kickstarter page here

Feel free to post any feedback or questions.

2 Likes

Wow, Cool!
What framework did you use for UI?

Thank you !

I am slowly making my own UI ‘framework’ from game to game.
I guess I could make it available online someday, at least the UI part. It is designed just like Unit Maker : the goal is to create very quickly a generic but effective interface. But it is still messy… and written in french.
It would be a great occasion to begin to use github though, and to create a haxe library even if only for my own use. I should look for tutorials about that. If I do that, I’ll post in that forum.

That is awesome.
There are already a few UI frameworks for OpenFl, and it would be interesting to see how you’ll implement the components.

In my 10 years of flash development, I’ve always got to the conclusion that it would take less effort from me to implement some components that I needed, the way I needed them, instead of relaying of ready made solutions…

I agree with you. But this is also why my own UI system is very specific to my own needs and would probably be useless to most openfl developer. Anyway I will try to improve it and make it available.

By the way we released unit maker here. Without all the improvements announced in the kickstarter obviously, but still useful and cheap.

Great work. However, you should really add some “action” states to your generated spritesheet like “shoot/attack/hit”, “kneel/duck/defend”, “die”, “hurt”, “run”, “jump”, “climb”… Because having unit that can only walk is pretty useless to create a game… So rather than adding new themes, I would focus on expanding existing ones to add some of these new action states if I where you :wink:

You are right and we had a long discussion about it.

We didn’t do it because it is simply impossible to predict all the actions needed by a specific developer and he would need to create some anyway. And in the same time if we add action states we have to add them into all the assets. It takes a very long time, reduce the number of assets that we can do, and very often they would be useless for the developper.

Finally we added action states into the stretch goals of the kickstarter but not in the basic version. We think, according to our own experience, that an artist would be needed anyway. But that he would save a lot of time thanks to the themes and would use the resulting animations as models for his own action states.
I am still not sure that it was the right decision.