Is it a bad idea to just remake an existing game in order to develop Programming and Gamedev skills? |
- Is it a bad idea to just remake an existing game in order to develop Programming and Gamedev skills?
- Collision is a bitch, and I hate it with a passion.
- Dove down the rabbit hole researching for a game...
- Here are 5 things I learned after 9 months of Game Development that I want to share with you.
- How many times have you changed engines and realized it was the wrong move?
- Lack of motivation in University.
- Improve pathfinding performance when goal is inside a wall?
- Determining ores using perlin noise
- Can game with opengameart.org assets compete in Google Play Indie Games Contest?
- What are some informative resources for creating and orthographic 2D engine
- How to design meaningful choice in video games?
- Best way to teach kids game dev?
- How can I️ legally and most easily implement a virtual instrument/synth?
- Gamee?
- Using gamelift
- The North American Conference in Video Game Music - January 13-14, 2018
- Math : make an object move from target to target in a constant speed.
- Thoughts on mid-gen refreshes and forwards compatibility?
- Does my game have potential?
- I created my first visual novel game with Javascript. I know it's short and awful. Please let me know how I could improve my future games. Thanks.
- Do you really need a game publisher?
- Handling public expectations of game art as an independent dev
- Steam's 'Curator Connect' overhaul is now live
| Is it a bad idea to just remake an existing game in order to develop Programming and Gamedev skills? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 05:37 AM PST Hey guys, Year 2 Games Programming Student here, So during uni we've been working on various small scale games for our assignments which do challenge me and my ability however most of the time we're told what the game should be etc. Essentially I have an urge to work on something on a larger scale than individual assignment work that I can work on for say maybe over a year in my own time however the problem I have is a lack of creativity when it comes to the of designing new concepts in both story and game mechanics. As a solution to this I've had the idea of working on remaking a similar style game to ones such as Crash Bandicoot, Legends of Grimrock, or even a simple strategy game based on Army Men RTS. The project would be solely educational purposes and for an addition to my portfolio but I want something to challenge me and that I don't feel pressured to work on constantly, just something to enjoy working on now and then. Is this a good idea or would I be better off somehow scrubbing my brain in an attempt to come up with something new and original. If so are there any techniques you do in order to spark ideas etc. [link] [comments]  |
| Collision is a bitch, and I hate it with a passion. Posted: 11 Dec 2017 02:06 AM PST I've been following this: It's just not working smoothly. Here's my code: https://github.com/Ratstail91/zelda The character keeps getting caught on blocks, the movement screws up, etc. I've also tried Box2D, but I couldn't figure it out at all. I think the main problem is in ExampleScene::Update(), but I just can't figure it out. Feel free to ask any questions. Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| Dove down the rabbit hole researching for a game... Posted: 11 Dec 2017 07:56 AM PST In doing some research for a game I'm planning, I ended up more or less going from knowing nothing about the operation of blast furnaces, to being quite well versed (IMO) in the process. What are some topics or objects that you've learned way more about than you ever thought you would, all due to necessary research and reference? [link] [comments]  |
| Here are 5 things I learned after 9 months of Game Development that I want to share with you. Posted: 10 Dec 2017 01:11 PM PST During the last 9 months, I've been developing a VR game as part of a team of two. The game is currently on Steam Early Access - and we're still working hard on it. But besides the technical stuff, I learned some more "high-level" things about what it's like to spend your life working on a game. And since I'm always enjoying similar posts from other fellow developers, I wanted to share my own experience too. So, here are 5 things that I learned about Game Development during (almost) my first year doing it. I hope you find them useful or interesting and I'm waiting for your thoughts in the comments. 1. Game development is hard. Harder than you expect. Studying Computer Science in the University can be a pretty tough thing. I know first hand. But at least, from a technical side, you end up knowing enough things to make your life easier (as a Game Developer). Or not? Well, it depends. Having a good university background is by no means bad. But unless your Game Development job is making custom Graphical Engines and Shaders, you'll mostly deal with very specific stuff about your game engine of choice, knowledge that's going to be aquired "out in the field". Even the programming patterns that you learn in a University course, have much less meaning when you do Game Development. You'll have to learn to do things in a much different way, sometimes in the "wrong" way. And that's just the programming part. Making a game is so much more things. My point is that, if you already have some skills, that's good for you. But unless you have already shipped a (good) game, you are still a beginner. On the other hand, if you have NO skills at all, expect to have a mount Everest to climb in front of you. 2. You have to say no to (more) features. This part is similar to the previous one, in the fact that imagining that you're able to do something is very different than really being able to do it. What makes Game Development so much more complicated than, say, making a website, is that, in a game, you have to think about every consequence of any small addition. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING that happens in the game, every small detail, sound and reaction, are all put there by someone that spent time to design and implement it. And planning for lots of features and stuff, is the first step to creating an unmanageable big mess. It's not a matter of technical skill. You may really be able to program or design all of the features. But you probably won't be able to make all of them together, in your specified time and without bugs. Hopefully, we understood this before we began with our own game and started to build on just a small, very specific gameplay idea: Just play music with vinyls. You can't go wrong with that, right? Again, maybe. Because, even with that small scope, we ended up wanting to add more and more features. During those months, I learned that there can be a million good ideas, but it's better if you have only a few, that work good together. So, what's the gist? Keep your scope as small as possible. Make a damn Flappy Bird - and then add stuff when you think they're needed. Just don't start with 10 big features in mind. 3. Life/Work balance comes first. And you have to keep it proactively. Making a game can be a lot of things, but most of all, it can be very fun. Sometimes, whole days can pass without understanding it. We were like that in the first months of development. In the beginning everything was great. Our passion kept us going, everyday. But after a while, we started feeling weird. Like the passion was lost somewhere. One night, I remember getting a message from a friend: "Hey man. Wanna go for a beer?". I politely declined, telling him that I was working. "But it's Saturday night" he told me. That's when I understood that I was doing something wrong. In my team, there were no Saturdays, no days and nights. Every hour, if we wanted to, was work time. And we did want to. Because of all that grinding, in the end of July, we managed to have one important thing: The first version of the game was released. An alpha, early-access one, but still a fully playable one. On the other hand, we, as a team, were burned out. After a month back in our home country (living the Greek summer) we returned together with our lost passion for making games. But this time, we knew better: Life balance should come first. Weekends are for relaxing and socializing, and late nights are for sleeping. And all of these, must be totally proactive decisions. In the end, the basic reason that we're doing this job, is exactly because we want to be happy with our lives. 4. To "Ship Fast" you should stop "trying to be perfect". Even if you keep your scope small, and have a good schedule, there are going to be times when you fall behind. You will then be tempted to either work more (and break the life/work balance) or delay your release. Now, I'm only talking about a low-stakes, small team like us. But, we're on Early Access. Shipping fast and iterating is much more important that making a feature perfect, especially when it's going to probably change again. There are stories of close friends, that had something "good enough" developed, but it never ended up in front of players just because they were obsessing with small and really unimportant details. I believe that this is just a way to postpone a possible "embarrassment". I mean, everyone feels embarrassed when they show their work for the first time. And, many times, the comments can be unflattering. But, this is how the process works. This is how you become better. One should learn to be brave, and give more importance to "failing fast" if something is meant to fail. And on the other hand, your not-yet-perfect game, could be really fun already, despite its imperfections. What I learned is that, most of the times, some details that you think are important, don't matter at all. Nobody cares for the small details in a game that's just not fun in the first place. And if it's fun, they won't care much either. And the sooner you know that, the better for your game. 5. Nobody cares about your game - until they do. The result of the indie games boom of the last years, is more people like all of us, forming small, independent teams, trying to create something meaningful, all by ourselves. But the impact of "making an indie game" is easily misunderstandable. Especially concerning the expected audience. It's only normal to believe that your own game is great or important. It's your own creation. You spent all your days and nights for this. You may even expect that, when you release it, people will see this amazing creation and flock to download it in thousands, that it will be the next Minecraft. The bitter truth is that nobody cares about your game. Not because it's bad or anything, but, mostly, because they just don't know it exists. Like you don't know about thousands of other indie games, good or bad, released or not. There is a reason that Apple spends million to fill our cities with advertisements for their new iPhone. Even an absolute icon of a product, needs costly marketing to create awareness. It's a matter of scarcity of resources: We're small teams, sometimes two, sometimes four people, never nearly enough to cover every aspect of making a good game. And the Marketing part of Game Development is one that we usually leave for last. But, as expected, when we release our game, after months or years of hard work, people won't be able to know about it. It will be such a big and important day for you, but for the audience, no - unless, you already had a big one built. I don't really have an answer on how to built an audience for your indie game. I'm also learning, like many of you here, but I already know that:
And the second tip has two parts. One, try to be active and engaging with your community, either on Steam or wherever they are. Everyone probably understands that. Especially when it's so satisfying to talk with the players of your game. The second part, and the one that needs some preparation, is Analytics. You should really test your game with real people in front of you, but since most of them will be worldwide, sitting in their rooms, you should implement some analytics solution and try to have meaningful metrics that answer things like:
Knowledge is power, and the biggest asset to create true knowledge is data. Don't make decisions based on pure intuition. Intuition is good for the seed of an idea, but then, you have to be able to prove if anything works. We're developers, we're gamers, we're many, many things, just because we don't want to be Product Managers, or Marketers, or CEOs and accountants. But, for the success of what we do, we have to wear many kinds of hats. As a last word, if I were to say just one thing about what I learned from my first 9 months as a Game Developer, is that making a game is much more difficult than someone can expect, but this is also what makes it so rewarding. Thanks for taking your time to read my thoughts - and I would like to hear yours also, especially from people much more experienced than me. Regards, Alex [link] [comments]  |
| How many times have you changed engines and realized it was the wrong move? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 12:57 AM PST It's been five years since I first started learning to develop games. In that time I've yet to release a game even though I've been working consistently on them for much of that time. Throughout the years I've noticed a pattern of sabotage, not only with my own progress but that of fellow game devs. That is, each time I've got to the point where the game starts to become heavy with code and things are starting to connect and intermingle into a complex web - that's the time I start to think "This would be so much easier in 'X' engine" or "This game should be 3D" or "This game should be 2D" etc. Often this ends up with me starting again from scratch thinking "This will be the one!". After going down this path a number of times I've realized that once the game gets to that heavy state mentioned above that's when the real work begins. I think it's at this time when subconsciously the magnitude of the work that needs to be done dawns on me and it's no longer the fun easy stuff. That's when it's easy to start wanting a way out and to get back to working in a clean and empty project. Anyone else dealt with this same issue of commitment? How did you get through it? [link] [comments]  |
| Lack of motivation in University. Posted: 11 Dec 2017 07:06 AM PST A while back I made a post about whether I should go to university or not. I decided that it's better to just do it to be safe. However right now I'm in a position where everything being taught is something I already know. We are going at such a slow pace and I feel I'm getting nothing out of it. In my year off I had an idea for a game and I made it and it was great. Right now I have so many games in mind that I want to make, one that's already at the start of its development. But university is just halting that. All University really does is validate that I am good at this and it's what I was meant to be doing as a career but I don't really need that. I need to continue. I've only really attended about 40% of my classes. I feel kind of bad but not even that bad. I mean every single thing being taught is taught in the book I bought a year ago, but in a worse way. The only thing I may get is meeting people from the industry but is that even true. The students aren't really working together that much except a few. There is just nothing really there I see worth doing. But I can't just drop out. I know I'll probably have to continue until I either finish or find somewhere I can make enough money without my degree. What is your guys' advise with this? What would you do and how was your experience with a games design course in University. [link] [comments]  |
| Improve pathfinding performance when goal is inside a wall? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 07:09 AM PST I use A* for pathfinding in my game. Sometimes, the goal of pathfinding is inside a wall (right at the edge of the area blocked by walls), and this cannot be changed. I do not assign infinite costs to walls, but very large ones (like 1000x cost of regular tile movement). Obviously, when the algorithm gets near the goal, the goal tile ends up at the bottom of the open heap, and the algorithm takes a lot of time to complete. I tried to make my heuristic function return a big negative value if a tile is directly near the goal. This totally fixes the performance issue, but then the last segment of the path looks weird. This negative value overwheighs some additional checks performed by the cost function, like the cost of extra turns and diagonal movement, while I only need it to suppress the cost of movement through walls. Is there a common solution to this problem? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Determining ores using perlin noise Posted: 11 Dec 2017 04:48 AM PST So I'm making a Minecraft type game to try and improve my perlin noise skills. I have some basic terrain generation done using 2d perlin noise, but I'm stuck on figuring out ore placement. Right now what I have is a single perlin noise function that takes 3 numbers, the x, y and z coordinate of the block. This works but not very well. The function generates a number between -1 and 1 (should be -0.5 and 0.5 but it sometimes goes outside that range) and if the number is in the middle 5%, it'll generate an ore there. The problem is I can't set what % of the blocks are ore, it's all a ballpark guess. I do math.noise(x0.833, y0.833, z*0.833) but there's no way for me to say "make 5% of all blocks mined ore". What are your suggestions for this? Are there any other functions I could use or how could I improve this one? [link] [comments]  |
| Can game with opengameart.org assets compete in Google Play Indie Games Contest? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 08:52 AM PST In the section 8.2 of their terms and conditions Google state:
By this I think it is not possible to participate in contest if your game contains assets from opengameart.org because even though people who publish on opengameart.org give me rights to use their assets, these rights are not exclusive because they give them to anyone. What do you thing? [link] [comments]  |
| What are some informative resources for creating and orthographic 2D engine Posted: 11 Dec 2017 04:27 AM PST I have a goal of creating an 2D ARPG but I have come up to a crossroads. I have a few resources in the form of books and videos but they are either too basic or so advanced that they skip what could be informative parts.I've learned that most game engines are written in C++ which is fine because I would consider myself an intermediate in this language but I'm trying to not let that hold me back from other options. I was wondering if anyone with experience in this area could point me to some learning resources. Basically looking to make up a good read or video suggestion thread [link] [comments]  |
| How to design meaningful choice in video games? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 11:48 AM PST |
| Best way to teach kids game dev? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 12:46 AM PST I was thinking about using Scratch, it looks easy to learn / use. And a kid at GDC 2017 actually won an award for his game made via Scratch. o_o My little sister Age:8 really likes to play games. And me being the older sibling studying game design, was hoping to help her make her very 1st game. I think it'll be a good experience for her. I also wanted to get her started on a career path? For example building up a resume and learning things early. Of course she can always do whatever she wants, but I wanted to introduce her into game designing. I was hoping for an easy program to pick up and teach her? I've tried Roblox, but I think the program is a little too complicated for her age. She's still awkward using a mouse, and I only know the basics of Lua (language Roblox uses). I can probably code and she can probably model objects. Edit: trying out Scratch rn! Game design is my passion. [link] [comments]  |
| How can I️ legally and most easily implement a virtual instrument/synth? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 11:10 AM PST I'm asking here because I thought this sub might have more experience dealing with sound, but if you know a better place to ask let me know. I'm writing an application using C++ and SDL2 (because I want to learn these things for making games) that will have an onscreen musical keyboard you can trigger by using your computer or midi keyboard (like in GarageBand/Reason or any music/synth software). It will be a teaching tool, so I don't necessarily want to develop my own synth or DAW and don't really know where to start with that. It will also ideally have different real instrument sounds like piano, bass, drums, as well as synths, and needs to work well with sustain (long or short notes, does that require midi instruments?). I looked into using Reason for this but it looks like I can't repackage their sounds to develop my own application, and it's probably similar with other software. Does anyone have any ideas how I can implement this with quality sounds legally? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Dec 2017 10:54 AM PST Hello, /r/gamedev! What do you think about Gamee platform for publishing HTML5-games? If someone has work experience with it — share, please. All, what I could to find about this framework: [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Dec 2017 06:39 AM PST Anyone have experience with gamelift? I'm working on a game to be released free for awhile and curious what kinda cost it might be for a ue4 multiplayer game with 4v4 play. It's been pretty light weight for server cpu and round 1 gig mem per instance. I'd like be keeping one instance per region live and spin up a new one when the previous has players But I'm going to look to kickstart funds for initial launch of the game. Not sure what I should shoot for that is fair. [link] [comments]  |
| The North American Conference in Video Game Music - January 13-14, 2018 Posted: 11 Dec 2017 10:17 AM PST I'm new to this sub but I'd thought I'd share - the University of Michigan is hosting NACVGM 2018 and my company is going to be helping with conference logistics. I'm excited as it should be a cool two days of presentations. More info here with contacts to register. http://smtd.umich.edu/performances_events/nacvgm/ [link] [comments]  |
| Math : make an object move from target to target in a constant speed. Posted: 11 Dec 2017 06:27 AM PST Hello, say you have an Array of Floats, and you move through that array using Right arrow (you can just go forward) keys and save the current "selected" element in a TargetPosition variable. What is the best way to make an object (Camera in my case) go from one position to another Considering the player input speed ? To put all this in perspective, please take a look at the game here. More game specific info (it's in unity btw)( :
Currently am doing this : That code is in a script attached to the camera and running on a LateUpdate(), it's giving me the best result compared to FixedUpdate and Update. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Thoughts on mid-gen refreshes and forwards compatibility? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 10:03 AM PST I've had a developer tell me before that they don't like having to optimise for mid-gen refreshes such as the PS4 Pro or Xbox One X, but I'd like to get a slightly larger sample. Having done some coding myself, I would imagine it's not fun busywork. I ask this because speculation about the next generation of consoles is ramping up, and forwards compatibility and further mid gen refreshes are a main topic of conversation. For what it's worth, I don't think either or those things are going to happen. The Pro and X seem to be on the market to cash in on the niche 4K market a little early. And next gen, there isn't gonna be a buzzword like '4K' to sell people on another multi-hundred dollar purchase. Forwards compatibility seems too unpractical, but correct me if I'm wrong. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Dec 2017 09:19 AM PST Hi, I'm new to reddit. This is my first reddit post so I apologize if I broke the guideline I have a game in the making. The game is about creating a machine that you can use to defend from a robot attack. It's a 2D game made in Unity. I'm having doubts about its's potential, I feel like it has a boring concept. So, I want to see how people would react to my game and if they have the same feeling about it. I created a really early demo version of it which you can download here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16pqguJBlZuJqbDp_LRnhGZzEPYcEiyze (currently the game is called defend) Inside the folder of the game there's an instruction text that you should read before playing the game. Finally, tell me what you think a bout the game, any comment would be appriciated Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 11 Dec 2017 09:18 AM PST |
| Do you really need a game publisher? Posted: 11 Dec 2017 09:17 AM PST Let say I made an amazing game and want to publish it on steam , what is the difference between publishing it on my own and asking a publisher to do it? And how exactly does the process goes. And what about mobile games is it the same thing ? And also what if the publisher stole your idea? I really need some explanation on this matter. Thank you [link] [comments]  |
| Handling public expectations of game art as an independent dev Posted: 11 Dec 2017 05:25 AM PST A lot of you have probably seen memes like this. Now, I'm doubtful that many of us are creating art as detailed as what's on the right. Aside from whether or not the sentiments expressed by this image (which I don't think much of, personally) are valid how do you personally deal with these kinds of public expectations, aside from ignoring them? [link] [comments]  |
| Steam's 'Curator Connect' overhaul is now live Posted: 11 Dec 2017 08:53 AM PST |
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