How to Design the First Five Minutes of Your Game |
- How to Design the First Five Minutes of Your Game
- Real time pixel arms - [Simple pathfinding/Real-time drawing animation]
- Why Mario Odyssey is NOT like Mario 64 but Mario 3d World (Design Analysis)
- The Foundation of a Third Person Camera
- How to license out our game?
- Let's share our experiences on imgur posts for our games!
- Networked Physics in Virtual Reality: Networking a stack of cubes with Unity and PhysX
- Decent 2d top down Godot Engine tutorials
- Enjoying linux as a part time dev. Just letting you know you may also
- Wishlist ratios before launch on Steam?
- Looking for a good tutorial for 2D character creation like Stardew Valley (customizing hair / clothes / etc)
- The Color of Enlightenment: Defining Shangri-La Within Far Cry 4
- My Game Dev Dilemma
- iOS game back end with PHP and MySQL. Is it viable?
- What legal pre-cautions do I need to take when paying someone to make an asset in my paid game?
- Unity authoritative server
- Show r/gamedev: I wrote a tool to help with localization
- Releasing a Unity game on the Apple mobile store.
- Linux/Win10 Dev Box
- What do you think about Slick2D ?
- What music genre is lacking in many game asset stores? What kind of music do you need? Is there also any game sound effects that you need but can't be found?
- The Nerd Cave: Losing $100,000 Building a Space for Gamers
- Benchmarking with Bunnies: Comparing Languages in Godot
- Looking for some pointers on a Travian-esque game for small groups
| How to Design the First Five Minutes of Your Game Posted: 22 Feb 2018 08:54 AM PST |
| Real time pixel arms - [Simple pathfinding/Real-time drawing animation] Posted: 22 Feb 2018 06:57 AM PST |
| Why Mario Odyssey is NOT like Mario 64 but Mario 3d World (Design Analysis) Posted: 22 Feb 2018 07:47 AM PST |
| The Foundation of a Third Person Camera Posted: 22 Feb 2018 09:33 AM PST |
| Posted: 22 Feb 2018 06:35 AM PST Hey, we're a tiny team of two who have been working in a game together. It's already being sold on Steam but still under active development. Now we have been approached by a company who wants to use our game for educational purposes at universities. For this they would like us to make some minor changes to the game and allow them to use the game at different universities. They are now asking for the price and how much license would be and more importantly what the terms of the license look like. I have no idea. I mean we could probably draft an offer for the customization to the game and ask for a fixed amount of money for that. But how do we then license the game to them? We want to allow them to use our customized game and be paid for our server costs (the more users the heavier the load on our servers), the support we will likely have to provide and of course for the game itself. Do we bill it per installation? How much can we ask for? And how do I draft a proper license agreement? I guess it would be best to have a lawyer draft up an agreement. But that must cost a fortune and we're not exactly swimming in money currently. Does anyone have any experience with this? [link] [comments]  |
| Let's share our experiences on imgur posts for our games! Posted: 22 Feb 2018 01:08 AM PST Hey guys! I'm an active imgurian and as such, I noticed how many game devs are presenting their games on the platform. I love to learn about new games that way, and I also started using it to show off demos of my own games or games of friends. After all, if a post gets viral, it's around 100k clicks, which is a considerable amount for an indie dev. I feel like it is quite hard to find out what makes an imgur post successful and what not, so I thought I'd like to share my findings with you, and I'd love to hear if other devs here use imgur as well and what they found out doing so. So let's dive in: 1) GENRES Generally I feel like typical "manly" posts or games do better on imgur. Stuff with rockets, spaceships, robots and guns worked quite good for me so far, while more artsy and casual games never got past 20 upvotes so far. 2) GIFS I always use a gif, at least for the first picture. And I feel like more gifs are better, posts with more static images don't work as well. Another thing that is important with gifs is their first frame: The gif does not always get animated on imgur (for example on the desktop browsing page), so it is quite important that the first frame of it looks good. 3) TAGS Basically it's the same as for other social media sites: The more a tag gets used, the better it is if you use it for your post. On imgur there is a list of the most popular tags, and I always search those for fitting tags. 4) CONTENT Of course this is the most important thing about imgur posts, but here are the most important things in my opinion: Posts with several images seem to do better than just single images. I try to go for a compelling story, and so far "How I made"-posts or post showing the development process seem to work the best. They even can be quite technical, there are enough coders/tech people on the platform. 5) BE HUMAN As I mentioned, there are more and more game posts on imgur. And some imgurians feel like it is getting too much, especially since a lot of them are marketing posts. So even if you do posts for marketing, try to write posts that show your experiences as a person, and not ads. 6) NEVER EVER USE LINK SHORTENERS Imgur has a spam filter, and if you use link shorteners, you will get caught in it. 7) YIELDS So far I could generate around 100 newsletter subscriptions and 30 Steam wishlists per viral post, which isn't overwhelming, but like I said before: Not bad for small indies. There we are. That's what I found out so far and I hope this will be usefull for other devs. I'm really curious what you experienced! [link] [comments]  |
| Networked Physics in Virtual Reality: Networking a stack of cubes with Unity and PhysX Posted: 21 Feb 2018 06:36 PM PST |
| Decent 2d top down Godot Engine tutorials Posted: 22 Feb 2018 07:20 AM PST I ve been wanting to pick up godot engine for quite some time now. I ve an idea of an Undertale like game and believe that godot would be my best choice. So can I ask the GameDev community to guide me to the right direction for getting some 2d tutorials on top down rpg mechanics . P.S. I am new to godot (like only opened godot once .. new ) [link] [comments]  |
| Enjoying linux as a part time dev. Just letting you know you may also Posted: 21 Feb 2018 08:20 PM PST Hi all, I'm not going to rant on about what is best, just that it can be done. I use Windows when I have to. I have a Mac and use that when I have to also but the last maybe 4-6 months I've moved to Ubuntu as my daily driver. I thought I'd drop a note here to let you know, depending on your requirements that you can too (if you've been thinking about it). To keep things simple this is the kind of tools I use and they all work flawlessly:
There are probably others also but that's at the top of my head. So nothing particularly deep and meaningful here. Just providing some encouragement if you're thinking of Linux and wondering if it's something you can do. I can't vouch for other engines, I'll leave that for anyone else to comment on. NOTE: I loaded up Ubuntu and a world of other distros on my mac first in VirtualBox and destroyed quite a few virtual systems to get comfortable before loading onto a real computer. Life is good, I'm productive and happy. /encouragement [link] [comments]  |
| Wishlist ratios before launch on Steam? Posted: 22 Feb 2018 06:04 AM PST What is your experience on wishlisting ratio (wishlist adds divided by visits) on Steam game page before launch? We've seen around 10-13% lately when there's no big external traffic or other noise - quiet times if you will. It fluctuates a bit between games. Traffic from streamers or other good sources usually elevates the ratio. Mobile traffic may lower it since people usually do not bother signing in for wishlisting on mobile. Mainly looking for more data points on this to learn what is a good ratio. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Feb 2018 05:51 AM PST Hi guys, I am looking a good tutorial on how to do a character creation like in stardew valley / starbound where you can customize your character.... So I am looking for a good tutorial on how to make a character out of many different sprites. [link] [comments]  |
| The Color of Enlightenment: Defining Shangri-La Within Far Cry 4 Posted: 22 Feb 2018 07:42 AM PST |
| Posted: 22 Feb 2018 05:15 AM PST I don't know if this is the right place to share this, but I'll just post anyway. Feel free to mod this or delete this if this isn't the right place. Let me tell you a story before anything else. Before entering college in 2012, I had the freedom to choose my preferred course or degree that I'm going to pursue. My parents were very supportive and they gave me what I needed during my college years. A high end PC (at that time) allowances, unconditional love and morale support. So I chose what I wanted to be, or at least I wanted to explore. Which is being a game developer. Before entering a college that offered this course, I had no second thoughts about entering this career since I thought being a hardcore gamer was enough. So I jumped the gun. During those years, everything that was handed to me I took it for granted. Like not actually understand what a game developer is, how does game programming work, and just game development in general. I was like a spoiled kid, which is true. Me and a bunch of friends are just screwing around, playing games and whatnot. Fast forward to my last year where I had my thesis and other requirements before graduating. Only at that time I kinda had the grasp of game development. I had to not because of the sake of learning, but just for the sake I could graduate. Then came the groupings for our thesis. I got paired with a very talented person who was very experienced in the world of game development. At that point in my life, I learned a lot. Like a lot. I should return the favor because of this guy I got paired with. It's like my eye opened widely and I kinda get the gist of this whole track. Also to be honest I was insecure because there's a person younger than me who's had way more experiences than me. Fast forward again, since none of us can't do any art assets for our final project, I stood up and told him that I'll learn to create 3D art assets for our game. Which I did and I'm very proud that I actually learned something. I made 3D assets for our game (mostly environments) and at that point, I actually liked what I did. It feels so rewarding and I'm starting to really like game development. After that, I really got close with my thesis mate, he introduced me to various groups on where I could learn a thing or two, introduced me to his friends which I also became close with and introduced my friends to them so we became a group. Lastly, he introduced us to game jams and ludum dares. So we participated and it was fun since I really learned a lot! Will never forget those experiences. After all those things, I graduated with a rewarding feeling. I'm glad to have met those people and also wanted to thank my adviser because he wanted us to be grouped randomly for our final project. However, I feel like it went downhill from there. I was unemployed for nearly a year and my biggest regret was not really motivating myself to study further during those countless free time. I still don't know how to code properly till this day. I can't even make my own game. I'm thinking that I am getting nowhere while my friends are up there. It feels like pre-thesis college days all over again. Now I feel like it's too late because I got a full-time job, and no time to start at all. I wanted to do this, I wanted to start over again for the nth time. I wanted to create my own game using my own art assets. I feel like I'm making excuses and just looking for sympathy or whatever. I don't know where to find inspirations, motivation, and a "push" to do this. I feel like I'm lost and don't know where to go. TL;DR: I was a game dev student, took it for granted. Then met some experienced people in this field and my eyes widened so I learned a lot. After graduating, it went downhill since I kinda lost everything I learned including motivation. Now, wanting to create my own game using my own assets, but don't know how to do it, where/what to start on since I feel it's too late because I have a full time job and dunno how to manage that. [link] [comments]  |
| iOS game back end with PHP and MySQL. Is it viable? Posted: 22 Feb 2018 10:04 AM PST I am posting this as a way to see what the community says. A friend is making a multiplayer semi-turn based mobile game. In the game, he plans to make calls to a URL on a web server running PHP. The page is supposed to accept a couple parameters in the URL and respond with some JSON or something that the iOS app can understand. The database he will using will be MySQL. He claims that it will work because of the game is slower and turned based and if there is any lag, only one person would see it, if at all. I asked him about a server client type of build and he is determined that this will work. He doesn't have a large following, but will there be any web based limitations that he should worry about. I mentioned client connections could be an issue if too many people play the game at once, he does not seemed bothered as most request will be quick. He said something like "text in and text out." I am interested in this and I will share this post with him to see if he wants to chime in. [link] [comments]  |
| What legal pre-cautions do I need to take when paying someone to make an asset in my paid game? Posted: 22 Feb 2018 06:10 AM PST I've recently been getting more into the little indie game I've been making, and I want to start commissioning music composers and such for my game. Are their any certain pre-cautions or special things I should do in order to safely have someone else's music in my paid game? I will pay the composer their requested amount, give proper credit, and will keep the chat logs/emails of us working this out, but is that enough? Do I need to get them to sign some sort of digital contract? How do I go about that? Do I need to get something in writing? Do I need to fill a form somewhere or something? These might seem like stupid questions, but I'd like 100% certainty that the composer can't just one day say "I don't want my song in your game anymore" or lie and say I've never has permission in the first place. I know very little about the legal side of all this so apologies if the answer is actually super easy, any help is appreciated!! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Feb 2018 04:52 AM PST Hi guys I did some research over the last few weeks to find the solution that is the best aproch for a unity multiplayer game with server side collision and hitdetection. The game i am making is "kinda" physic heavy, there are spaceship flying around with people inside them (imagine something like FTL with multiplayer). So i know that i need physics on the server side for example when two ships crash in each other or in any other thing. I found different server solutions, Photon, Smartfox and Node. The problem i had with all of these is that the serverside collsion is pretty limited. At the end i chose to use Unity itself as the server. But now i have some questions i cant find anything on the interwebs for. I allready wrote the basic networking part, i open and tcp connection from my client to the server, i also use udp for data that isnt that importand, movement input for example.
I know this is pretty broad, i could ask many more questions since networking is such a deep topic. At the end i just wanna know if the unity as a server aproach can work or if its determined to fail. Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Show r/gamedev: I wrote a tool to help with localization Posted: 22 Feb 2018 12:18 PM PST |
| Releasing a Unity game on the Apple mobile store. Posted: 22 Feb 2018 12:16 PM PST Hello everyone! I'm just about done with all of the new features for my game and am ready to have it released to the public. I have previously released this for Android successfully but wasn't able to release for Apple as I did not have any Apple hardware at the time. I believe I now have a work around for that but now I have some questions about the whole process. Most things I'm finding online are at least 2 years old and I assume are out of date, I'm hoping someone here with more recent experience for at least Unity 2017 can explain things. 1) The biggest hurdle is going to be if my work around will work. I have a friend who has a macbook and iphone, if I send him the files and have him build for me, will I still be allowed to upload the result to the apple store under my name? Or is Apple so stingy that I HAVE to build with a device under my name? I'll also likely be remoting into his macbook through something like teamviewer so he doesn't have to figure out how to build on his own. 2) I believe I'm going to need to purchase a $100 developer license for Apple. This is similar to the license I had to buy for Android so I'm not too surprised. Are there any other licenses/fees I will have to pay before my final product can hit the market? In general, what website will I need to sign up on to be registered as a developer? I assume this is also where I'm going to be managing the releases and what not. 3) Can someone explain to me or link me to an up to date process on the whole build process? For Android it's as simple as building an .apk file and uploading this to the publishing website. Is it as simple as building a .X file (X being whatever iPhones use) from Unity and uploading this to Apple's publishing site? 4) Before I upload the .X file I'll of course want to test it out on a device. I assume it's a similar process where my friend will have to go into his phone, enable debugging/developer mode and then plug it into his macbook and build to it from Unity. Are there any other hoops we'll need to jump through for this to work? In conclusion my ideal scenario goes like this: Get all registered and setup on Apple's developer website. Send my Unity project to my friend where he'll build it to his phone and give it a test to make sure everything is working. Build the final .X file, and then upload that to the developer website. I'll fill in all the final details required for the app, publish it, and hopefully have it available on the market. Now's the part where you tell me how horribly wrong this is all going to go haha. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Feb 2018 12:14 PM PST Hey guys. Tough question here, I could use some advice from the veterans before I pull the trigger on any purchases. Tl;dr I've been dabbling with C++ and C# on my laptop for a month or so now, but I'm severely limited by the fact that it's not powerful enough to run Visual Studio without consistently crashing, and Unity is so slow it's painful. I'm upgrading to a desktop PC, and I want to run Ubuntu latest stable branch and Windows 10. Since I'm working in 2D retro games, I'm not at all concerned about a powerful video card, so some budget money and heat output can be saved there. I'm just not sure what CPU, Mobo, RAM combo would be A) Sufficient for running Visual Studio and Unity effectively, and B) Not bankrupt me with unnecessary purchases. I tried asking on a tech forum I frequent, but everyone was pushing gaming builds, GTX cards and high-end I7's, which I really don't think I need. I'm willing to spend up to about $1000, but prefer to spend as little as possible! Any help would be greatly appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| What do you think about Slick2D ? Posted: 22 Feb 2018 12:14 PM PST So, I work as a java developer in a bank. Long story short, our current project is completely messed up, and I'm left with nothing to do most of the time. Since I have all the tools to code in java, I decided to use this time for learning game development, something that I always wanted to do but never really had the self discipline to get started. I can't really install anything and I'm a beginner, so I decided to start learning to use Slick2D (along with tiled). I'm now halfway through my first tutorial. I have a small map with working collisions, an animated character that can move around and a camera that follows the character until it reach the end of the map. This tool seem very useful for absolute beginners and I really appreciate the simplicity, but I'm wondering about it's limitations, so I can properly set the scope of a project once I'm done learning the basics and fooling around. Since it is mainly made for simple 2D graphics that most computers can handle today, I'm expecting to be able to design more demanding games (a lot of enemies on the screen for example). In short my question is : how well does it perform in more demanding situations. Also, I know that it's simply a graphic engine and that I'm probably too much of a beginner to think those things are related but : Does it handle multiplayer properly or is it too limited ? Does it handle more complex things such as : procedural map generation, vehicles (player driven boats for example), and others ? Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to overcomplicate things. I'm somewhat experienced in coding and I can handle spending time on thinking about a solution. But I like to plan ahead, define a scope and specification, and sticking to them when I code something. I don't want to go halfway through a project and realise that my objective can't be done in Slick2D. TL;DR : I want to know what Slick2D is capable of before I start doing anything serious with it. PS : I'm completely aware that I probably won't be able to monetise my work if done during my work hours and with my company's hardware. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Feb 2018 01:27 AM PST As game developers, do you guys use stock music from game asset stores such as Unity asset store or Unreal Marketplace? What kind of music do you usually look for? What genre of music you think would be great to have in such asset stores? For game sound effects, what type of sound effects are lacking in these asset stores? Would like to know your thoughts! [link] [comments]  |
| The Nerd Cave: Losing $100,000 Building a Space for Gamers Posted: 22 Feb 2018 11:58 AM PST |
| Benchmarking with Bunnies: Comparing Languages in Godot Posted: 22 Feb 2018 11:40 AM PST |
| Looking for some pointers on a Travian-esque game for small groups Posted: 22 Feb 2018 03:50 AM PST Greetings, kind people! Long time lurker, first time poster. I'm designing a slow strategy game for small groups of people, inspired by games like Neptune's Pride and Travian and would like to gather some input on the best way to proceed forward. Now, I've always wanted to get into game development but, for various different reasons at different times, always got sidetracked. I'm currently ending my internship at a web development company, and am fully expecting to be able to hold down a job at the same company after that time is up. I deal mostly in front end but also have some experience with backend. So I am confortable enough (as in I'm not terrible) at html, css and javascript (with JQuery) on the client side, and with PHP and MySQL on the server side. I also got some knowledge and experience with C# on my forays into the Unity engine. My university course was actually very broad in scope and I have some good bases in image, sound and video editing , as well as marketing, project planning and creative writing. I would say, and I may be very wrong here, that I have a lot of what you could consider basic tools to get working on my own solo game dev career. And I think it's worth pointing out that for now I'm not really bothered about making a dime in this endeavour, I just want to make games that might give other people some memorable experiences and learn as much as I can in the process. With that out of the way, I've always wanted to craft an experience for a small group of friends, say 6-10 people, that would get them to engage and interact with each other in way not usually provided by most games. That's when I learned about Neptune's Pride, which has a reputation for encouraging backstabbing and careful planning over a rather long period of time. That might look like a horrible premise for a game between friends, but I think the game's reviews, diaries and popularity speak volumes about the players' actual experience of it. And I've also played several mmo browser games like Travian, Ogame, Utopia and the like, but these always struck me like a giant numbers game in which most players don't really get a worthwhile, enticing story out of and that makes them want to discuss passionately with their friends around the coffee table. So my idea would consist of a game with a bit more complex combat system, of which I already have a good gist of written down, some mechanics to encourage a more serious and relevant diplomacy system, a player-driven economy in which a player may a huge impact on, based on certain conditions, a nice little sci-fi setting and a lot of meaningful choice in the way the player set up their strategies. Each game would last between 2-4 weeks and the information regarding map movements, enemy composition and dealings would be rather limited (although not so much as to take out the strategy element of the game out the equation. I understand in this genre players do need to be able to plan ahead and be satisfied that their plans are not being completely wrecked by randomness or egregious misinformation at every turn). Unlike the aforementioned games, I'd like to implement actual army existence and interaction on the map, as opposed to just selecting an enemy city and setting a timer for their trip and return, with no way to intercept other player's armies in mid trip and so on. Making the terrain matter in terms of army movement and pathing and making it so the battles actually take a while to resolve instead of being instant calculations, opening up the possibility for mid battle reinforcements, for example. I would also like to implement an army formation system to allow players to organise their units within the army and be able to min-max their strategy to their heart's content. So, I'm here asking for advice on a few general points. Namely: 1 - I'm torn between doing this as an actual browser game or an app for all the most popular devices. I'm mostly worried about the amount of server interactions that the game logic might require to implement most of the features (mainly the army movement and combat) and also how feasible it is to contemplate a system like that on a mix of javascript and PHP. My other option would be using Unity. Either way, I'd like for players to be able to access the game from most devices, do whatever actions they would like quickly enough and pop out. Thoughts? 2 - Would a regular (30-40$ annually) server be enough for several players to test the game in terms of performance? I know it depends on the server load of each game, but would it be reasonable to assume it would be enough for just a few playtesting games to run simultaneously? 3 - Might the army movement and combat (including formation) system be too complex, instead of deep? I don't want it to just be a spreadsheet mess or for the units that you unlock to just make the previous ones instantly obsolete. Unit's attributes in my combat system include things like HP, physical and elemental attack power, range, movement, initiative to determine combat fighting order, physical and elemental defenses, as well as a few perks to maybe change the way they behave in battle (which they would either have or not) like flying, healing, etc. 4 - What other tech should I consider looking into in order to make it easier to implement my design? I'm sorry for the long wall of text, didn't mean to make it this long. I also know the information I gave about the game are pretty vague, as well as some of the questions, but I didn't want to burden you with too much information, as the post was already getting way longer than I first envisioned. I'd also like to add that I fully expect this to be a long project to undertake and I certainly don't plan on trying to implement it all in one go. I'm considering developing it one system at a time, starting with the combat simulator, adding the resource management system afterwards, research, then the map related system, etc. Try to turn it into several small projects instead of a big one. Any input or suggestion is welcome and I appreciate you just taking the time to read all of this, let alone actually responding to it. Cheers! [link] [comments]  |
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