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    Developers share their most memorable dirty coding tricks

    November 29, 2017

    Developers share their most memorable dirty coding tricks

    Developers share their most memorable dirty coding tricks

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 08:54 AM PST

    Raph Koster explains why things are the way they are with microtransactions and loot boxes

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 02:28 AM PST

    How do you guys come up with ideas for your games?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 06:21 AM PST

    I love to program games and the like, but when it comes to coming up with an idea that I would like to pursue, I hit a wall. Coming up with things that are new and fresh is very hard for me. Any suggestions?

    submitted by /u/bugboy2222
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    Places to practice games develop

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 08:48 AM PST

    I'm going to be starting games develop in college next year (hopefully) and I would want to know some places where I can practice skills that would be useful for then Thanks in advance

    submitted by /u/DynamoOfSekot
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    A little text based tutorial for Unity on how to create simple main menu ��

    Posted: 28 Nov 2017 01:37 PM PST

    What do marketing agencies do that I cannot do myself?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 03:17 AM PST

    I know how much it is stressed that dedicating budget to marketing is crucial for a game's success. However, most marketing agencies are focused on US or Europe level of prices, which I won't be able to afford living and working in a third-world country.

    Because of this, I am interested in doing all marketing myself. I see the following possibilities:

    • Creating communities in social networks and posting there regularly. I think there are cheap services for automating the posting.
    • Posting on forums about the progress and updates.
    • Creating and maintaining a simple website.
    • Looking for YouTubers who review or let's play relevant genres and contacting them.
    • Designing icons and banners.
    • Making trailers.
    • Contacting game review websites.

    I think I've got skills in each one of these things. I'm only concerned about the last one (as I understand, it's difficult to get even a good game reviewed anywhere) but on the other hand, I've heard that reviews don't generate lots of sales by themselves, so they may not be as important.

    Considering all of this, which aspects of marketing are missing here? What can a marketing agency do that I can't?

    I'm interested in any thoughts and suggestions.

    Thanks!

    submitted by /u/smthamazing
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    Are non-playable prototypes a trap?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 05:06 AM PST

    tl;dr: can prototyping non playable concepts become a trap to never release a game?

    I am still on the very early stages of learning 2D development, and release a few silly games even while considering it was not exactly what I had in mind, because I learned that never finishing a project seems to be the main problem faced by beginners.

    There were many ideas (NPCs, plausible procgen cities, etc) that I left behind while developing them because I wasn't technically ready, or the code developed so far wouldn't accomodate well those ideas. I took note of them and plan to make different prototypes to each one of them to experiment not with playability in mind, but the technical aspects of it.

    Is this a common trap to never release a game? I see here in there some games under development that has been going on for years, each update is about something fancy, but never get fully released because there is no meaninful gameplay, so I wonder.

    EDIT: I suppose it is a common practice to try a non-playable prototype of a particular idea before working on the playable prototype itself, so please correct me if my assumption is wrong.

    submitted by /u/rlapprentice
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    Things I learned from showing my VR game at an event

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 06:36 AM PST

    Any suggestions for development order?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 07:07 AM PST

    Hello,

    I plan to start making a game soon, or as soon as possible, so I wanted to ask if anyone who's already more experienced has any suggestions or tips with what to start/when i should do which part, for example if I should do background art before character sprites and when the soundtrack should be made etc.

    thank you!

    submitted by /u/eggomilk
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    Using premade assets - what are your criteria?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 05:56 AM PST

    It may be OK to use premade assets which are specifically for the purpose, but would you use them? The way I see it, I would choose an asset pack that probably very few use, if I ever had to use them, because if you use popular assets in your game, then the people playing it would see it and be reminded of another game with the same assets. That may or may not be a good thing; it may also make them think the production is of low quality, or something similar.

    Thoughts?

    submitted by /u/GimmickNG
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    Just need help being put in the right direction for resources for Unreal

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 07:49 AM PST

    I'm not very good with game dev but I've spent a lot of time building on Second Life. I've been writing stories and RP'ing in my game's universe for over a decade now and just want to put it all down on paper so to speak.

    Basically what I'm looking for are:

    plug ins for Unreal to help me terraform, build buildings, etc

    free sample textures just to get a rough draft

    maybe even cheap character models

    I'm not looking for anything serious right now. I'm just really itching to build my cities and terraform instead of doing it on Minecraft. Please help me out here

    submitted by /u/redheadedgutterslut
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    Released my first JRPG game - GoblinQuest

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 07:40 AM PST

    I'm happy to announce that I've completed and released my first JRPG game, Goblin Quest.

    It took me about 4 months of dedicated work. I am a perfectionist and did not want to release this game short of being a polished product. But I realized I was spending far too much time on it, and it was becoming too emotionally draining. I decided to just release it in its unpolished state.

    I am mainly a programmer, but a majority of the time was spent on non-programming tasks, such as UI, map design, game design, scenario creation, sprite editing, selecting the art, balancing and play-testing.

    I built it using JavaScript and the game development framework Phaser. This was not built using RPG Maker. A lot of the programming was hard-coded such as collision detection, map-region detection, and the battle engine.

    This game is 24MB?, broken down as follows

    • PhaserJS Script (1MB)
    • Audio (19.8MB)
    • TileMaps (3.8MB)
    • Images (16.2MB)

    Please be patient as it might take a while to load at first. But as the data is all stored in the cache, this will load faster later.

    ** Controls**

    • Main Menu (You can press the up and down arrows to navigate between options and the enter key to select an option. You can also click on an option)

    • Maps (Press the arrow keys to move your character. Enter Key opens up a menu and the C key talks to other characters and opens chests.)

    • Game Menu (The controls are listed on the screen for convenience)

    You can play it for free here

    https://greendragon.itch.io/goblin-quest

    I put my heart and soul into making this game as good as possible. I spent countless hours on it, and have published it for free. While you are not required to, I would greatly appreciate a donation in Patreon

    https://www.patreon.com/green_dragon

    Features

    • More than 140 unique enemies, all with unique attributes

    • Visit 10 different towns and 4 castles, all with original layouts

    • Explore a vast world filled with many different terrains. This world has mountains, caves, forests, a pyramid and even a volcano!

    • There are 26 spells you can learn along your journey, all with relevant names.

    • Defeat monsters to level up, earning gold and experience. Use your hard earned gold to upgrade your equipment at shops

    • Earn medals for completing tasks

    The highest attention to detail was used in making this game.

    • I hand-drew all 100+ maps, taking great care to making them look unique. A lot of attention was given to the layout and visual appeal of them.

    • The enemies were chosen very carefully. I went to great lengths to make the art style look similar, and constantly adjusted the sprite's height and width to make them look good.

    • I even went so far as to give all enemies a natural terrain. Wolves appear in grasslands, bats appear in caves, etc. I wanted stronger looking enemies to appear later in the game.

    • I maintain a spreadsheet for all of the enemies, listing their stat attributes, experience points, gold, items dropped, spells, location and image size. I worked hard on balancing the game, placing easier enemies earlier, and progressively making enemies harder.

    • The overworld is segmented into multiple regions, a collection of x-y coordinates that delineate the regions. Each region contains a different group of monsters. The further you progress in the overworld, the stronger the monsters will be.

    • The same logic applies to the caves, forests, mountains which are not part of the overworld map. These locations each have their own unique group of monsters. Each group has between 3 and 5 monsters

    • I kept track of the NPCs in each town, and made counts on which sprite I used. I tried to vary the sprites to increase variety. I gave each of them at least one set of messages, sometimes 2 depending on the outcome of in-game events.

    • As mentioned before, I created a list of events needed to advance the story. All of these had flags, which I looked for a boolean value. This affects what you can do with the game

    • I cared about the user interface, and worked on optimizing it to provide the best visuals.

    Tilesets

    The game uses the following tile-sets which were accessed from OpenGameArt

    Enemies

    The enemies were taken from the following Open Game Art packages

    And some more OGA sets

    Game Mechanics

    • Random Battles: If a random number between 1 and 1000 is greater than 995, a random battle occurs. This check is made 60 times every second in Phaser's Update function.

    • The damage formula is Max(1, PlayerAttack - EnemyDefense). Or Max (1, (PlayerMagicAttack * MagicMultplier) - EnemyMagicDefense

    • If a random number between 1 and 100 is greater than 90, the player gets a critical attack, which will result in the damage doubling.

    • Monsters with spells use them 75% of the time and a random number determines which spell they use. The formula is the same as the magic formula I mentioned above.

    • As a character, you start out with 30 HP and 10 MP. You can't actually use magic until you reach level 2. As you level up, you will learn more and more spells. The character is also provided with 3 Medical Herbs (recover 30 HP), 2 Antidote Herbs (Recover from Poison) and 2 Magic Potions (Recover 10 MP). This is to ease the player into the game.

    • Each town consists of an inn which is used for resting and saving your game. Doing so will cost a price in gold (which increases as you reach new towns) and will recover your HP and MP. Every town also has an armor shop and weapon shop. Some towns have main houses, where events occur. Some towns have bars.

    I did extensive play testing for quality assurance. Are there bugs in this game? No doubt about it. Can you crash the game, walk through walls, or get stuck? Yes. But the game is huge, and I simply do not have the time to playtest all of it. Basically, do not try to break the game, do not walk on the edges, etc.

    Is the story bad? Yes, but I do not know how to write. I tried my best with it. The dialog might sound bad, but I tried to give characters relevant things to say.

    I am primarily a programmer

    Here are the spreadsheets I've used in the game

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QVwxGTk_VlmJ9GNJ0UCebLD5HVhTVjWXqQwRWkXC5wg/edit#gid=0

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HkMfDo7EGHvLV44VpKP58SSLCCqz9Q67Q_bZD33GShg/edit#gid=0

    I plan on posting this onto some other subreddits such as r/snes, r/jrpg and r/rpgmaker

    Edit:

    I developed this locally using Python's SimpleHTTPServer. Apparently filenames there are not case-sensitive, whereas files on an actual website are. Changing the names of my audio files to reflect their exact names fixed the sound problem.

    The music now works.

    submitted by /u/Intoxicatedalien
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    The Poor Man's 3D Camera · Evan Todd

    Posted: 28 Nov 2017 01:57 PM PST

    What locations in Canada are rich with game studios?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 10:25 AM PST

    I'm selecting universities In Canada to apply to for computer science. Other than the academic reputation and employment reputation of the university, I'm particularly concerned about the location. I'd like to be in a region where I can get good job opportunities for game dev. What locations would you suggest I look at?

    submitted by /u/Paranoid-Glitch
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    Developers, how do you decide what to name your project iterations?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 09:39 AM PST

    What I mean is, what constitutes increasing the version number like 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 etc? I have a hard time deciding when I've done enough work to stop, save, create a new version and what not. I know this is important for many reasons but I find it infinitely easier to just save consistently instead of creating different versions.

    submitted by /u/Ghosty989
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    Join Jenn Sandercock from Inquisiment as she discusses good game design, Edible Games, the consequence of baking cake at work, and much more.

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 07:10 AM PST

    Free 2D Pixel Art Graphic Pack for your Game Dev project

    Posted: 28 Nov 2017 08:24 PM PST

    Hello people! New here :D

    I'm a pixel artist and I decided to give away some of my work for free. I used to sell it on marketplaces, but I realized there may be a better way to go about it, so I just created a page in Patreon where I will be uploading some stuff for everybody to download. I think it may be a better way to grow an audience, for it seems more sincere and it gets me closer to the people that will be using my designs.

    This time I'm releasing a complete pack of graphics to create a platformer game. There's no need to pledge or even sign-up into my Patreon page.

    DOWNLOAD Platformer Dungeon Kit

    LICENSE: CC BY 4.0

    And of course if you want you can support me in my Patreon page. I will be uploading assets regularly.

    Patreon

    Enjoy!

    submitted by /u/squareaddictgames
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    Assuming time and money weren't an issue, what is your dream game to make?

    Posted: 28 Nov 2017 08:35 PM PST

    Been lurking about a year now, and I haven't yet seen a post asking about what you aspire to as a dream game. Let's fix that. :)

    So,

    What game idea keeps you up at night, what story do you want to tell, what mechanic is underutilized? What is your dream game? I'd love to hear!

    submitted by /u/Arxiis
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    Game development website

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 11:32 AM PST

    Today we launched our official website, and we couldn't be more proud. Still, we always strive to do better so we were hoping to get some feedback on our game's website. We are still really early in our development proces, but we've heard it's important to market early on. Right now there's little content, so there's that, but what could we do better? Thank you in advance!

    www.beggarstudios.com

    submitted by /u/Joost_Kivits
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    3D Root Bone Issue

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 11:26 AM PST

    About a year into development of our 3D third person game. Our main character is using animations to drive his movement, based on his hips movement. The issue is that the main character doesn't have a Root Bone, which means our animator is running into issues with having additive animations play that have hip movement. IE Player running, an interact animation plays that has hip movement, players movement gets messed up because of it. A similar issue happens anytime we want to snap the character into an animation pose without moving the player position in the game world.

    We have been thinking about putting a root bone in on the character, but we think that would involve rexporting tons of animations and resetting up a bunch of our animation controllers, so a pretty painful process. Does anyone have any advice on the subject before we go done that path? Thanks!

    submitted by /u/IanBeckman
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    Educational trivia game - question about questions

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 03:34 AM PST

    I am working on the development of an educational quiz about my country.

    The thing is, the game, or more specifically, the questions need to contain statistical data about the country (this condition needs to be met to get the money).

    Does anyone have any idea how to prepare questions that would meet the conditions? Maybe even a specific question type?

    Currently the idea is the following:

    Around 80 % of the questions are going to be general questions about the country (the fun part).

    The statistical questions are going to be introduced as questions with a slider, where the player would have to guess the right value. Doing so they would get double points. Each game round will have one or maximum of two slider questions (again, so the player wouldn't get bored).

    So, yeah, I need more ideas to make the game more dynamic, so if anyone has something to chip-in... I would really really appreciate.

    Thank you!

    submitted by /u/phantomeye
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    Redesigning the Save Slot Selection Menu in Reynald's Expedition!

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 11:03 AM PST

    How Doom influenced my abstract shooter: D.O.T

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 11:00 AM PST

    Any hints or experiences, regarding the ratios between In-Game-Currency, In-App-Purchases and rewarded Videos?

    Posted: 29 Nov 2017 06:49 AM PST

    Hi everyone,

    maybe I'm just googling wrong (keywords), but somehow I wasn't able to find valuable input. I'm currently working on a quiz game for iOS in which you can buy second tries for in-game currency. I'm currently working on my economics and am wondering: Are there any experiences or good reads/talks about mainly the ratio between the reward for a rewarded video and an in-app purchase.

    So basically I'm asking myself: If a user gets 20 coins/diamonds/... awarded for watching a rewarded video, what would be a reasonable amount of coins/diamonds/... for spending 1 US$/1€. (The problem escalates further, as the exchange rate between US$ and in-game currency is not fixed, but depending on the IAP price.)

    Bottom line: I want neither the IAP, nor the rewarded video to feel invaluable for the user.

    I'm open to all suggestions and available guides / talks that I may not have found.

    submitted by /u/looking_eye
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