• Breaking News

    Tuesday, May 1, 2018

    Home Unlabelled Celeste devs release complete FMOD project (including all sfx and music) for audio mods and personal education

    Celeste devs release complete FMOD project (including all sfx and music) for audio mods and personal education

    May 01, 2018

    Celeste devs release complete FMOD project (including all sfx and music) for audio mods and personal education

    Celeste devs release complete FMOD project (including all sfx and music) for audio mods and personal education

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:05 AM PDT

    ShaderForge (graph-based shader plugin for Unity) is now free and open source

    Posted: 30 Apr 2018 09:18 PM PDT

    A while ago I posted about wanting to build a marketing tool for indies. I now have an MVP. Here is how it works.

    Posted: 01 May 2018 04:29 AM PDT

    Hi everyone, a little while ago I posted about a simple marketing tool that I'm building while working on my own game, out of frustration with the tediousness of the process. A few people said there wasn't enough information for them to give me feedback. I now have an MVP (minimum viable product) up and running and looking for beta testers. It's actually available to go and try now but it would really help if you can actually get in touch with me (private message) so I can understand a bit more about your use case.

     

    Here are the features as of now, and a bit of reasoning why I built them:

     

    1. My primary form of marketing has been looking for content creators (YouTubers specifically) who have previously covered games that are similar to mine. For me, after finding the first couple of dozen channels, it becomes really difficult to find more (smaller) channels. The first few pages of search results typically end up being channels that I have already looked at, but I constantly have to cross reference an excel sheet to see if I have already curated them.

      With this tool, searches are performed on videos, the channels for them are de-duplicated both against this search but all previous searches. That means you are never looking at the same content creator / channel twice. The links are pulled so you can navigate to the channels directly:

      Screenshot 1

       

    2. As a natural extension of the above, I wanted to able to mark a channel is approved or rejected. A rejection might be for any number of reasons: irrelevant channel, content creator no longer being active, too small a channel, etc.

      Screenshot 2

       

    3. As you can see in the above, I also wanted to record notes with dates against content creators, mostly to keep track of my communications with them. I found that spreadsheets and email started to become clunky for this purpose.

       

    4. Assigning review keys to content creators was another tricky one, especially when you are dealing with multiple issued key batches and an ever growing list of YouTubers. The upload feature automatically assigns keys to any approved content creators, ensuring no key is used twice. You can also quickly tell how many keys you might be short by. So just copy, paste, click upload, and feel confident it's all good:

      Screenshot 3

       

    5. YouTube (for good reason) doesn't expose emails via an API; So I added fields for manually entering those as well as a contact name. Often I find a content creators real name which I want to remember to use that in any email communication later.

      Screenshot 4

       

    6. Export to CSV for obvious reasons (Pro tip: please don't do a straight mail-merge... try to personalize emails where you can :P)

      Screenshot 5

       

    7. I have also added a very basic dashboard which I can imagine growing a lot. The idea is to get an overview of how many potential players you may have access to, see if you are reaching certain goals, and seeing if there are any gaps in your effort. Again, early days here.

      Screenshot 6

       

    I know it's still very basic but I'm trying to understand if this foundation actually solves problems for others too, before I build more on it. So please get in touch and give it a try.

     

    Some of the other features I'm currently thinking about

    • Searchable tags on content creators
    • Better statistics on content creators such as average video views or upload frequency
    • Integration with Twitch

     

    Cheers

    submitted by /u/PoyaM
    [link] [comments]

    I Took "The Ultimate Guide to Cinematography with Unity" So You Don't Have To (review)

    Posted: 30 Apr 2018 11:34 PM PDT

    Where to put entity update logic?

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:20 AM PDT

    Hello all,

    I'm well familiar with programming and small game development in general, though I wouldn't call myself a professional, as I do not work in the industry.

    Most of my freetime though is dedicated for making my own small games, and participating in game jams, and I have a kind of phylosophical question for the community.

    Recently in a game jam I created a game that I find to be one of my best creations so far, but didn't have time to make multiplayer for it. I had some freetime in the last couple of weeks, and decided to do some refactoring, and implement local and networked multiplayer.

    While refactoring, I ran into a programming problem: the currently used update logic, and placement of code is not very good for long term maintenance, so I started looking for options to improve the code style. Coming from Java EE, ECS is a very familiar concept, so I started using libGDX Ashley, but quickly ran into far too complicated code for the game. I found out, that I had to duplicate a large amount of code to be able to create single player, multi player, the combination of these (local multiplayer). This was due to the fact that for every piece of data I wanted to send over the network, I had to created a VO class (value object, or in another name DTO).

    I tried to keep game logic code away from my model classes, but the decoupling of these components made the game slow, and resulted in a much larger codebase in general. I looked at a few multiplayer game examples, and noticed, that almost in every game tutorial and example, the model classes contain their own update and rendering code. In other words, if I have a Player class, it has a render and update function that refreshes its own state and draws it onto the screen.

    I would like to ask your opinion, as currently I'm kind of stuck between the two approaches.

    Is it a generally good and rewarding way to "make it work, not beautiful", and do the refactoring afterwards, when it is absolutely necessary?

    submitted by /u/_TThe
    [link] [comments]

    Marketing Presentation From ECGC 2018

    Posted: 01 May 2018 08:06 AM PDT

    Any good examples of games that run entirely in the browser without plugins?

    Posted: 01 May 2018 08:01 AM PDT

    I'm developing an RPG platform that is entirely browser native (HTML5 & Javascript, backend is Rails but maybe I could make this a Node app in the future and let people use it as their own standalone program) and was wondering if you know of any good examples of games that run entirely in the browser.

    I don't mean with Flash or Java, absolute no plugins, only browser-native HTML5/CSS3/etc, particularly any that are graphics heavy or have RPG elements. The only browser-native games I know of are the simple ones like agar.io.

    I particularly want to see how well games with open worlds that may have large images rendered in the background fare on a browser these days. My platform is currently working fine, but I want to know what future limitations might be.

    submitted by /u/ryankopf
    [link] [comments]

    I talked (again) about the stylized VFX of RIME but extended the talk about the Water of the game.

    Posted: 01 May 2018 04:59 AM PDT

    This is an updated version of the stylized VFX of Rime talk from 2017 - Now with water!

    Video on Youtube: https://youtu.be/4FIDBeF_4SI

    Blog Post (with additional Information): https://simonschreibt.de/gat/stylized-vfx-in-rime-water-edition/

    submitted by /u/simonschreibt
    [link] [comments]

    Does anyone know a list of indie games' contests still happening nowadays ?

    Posted: 01 May 2018 02:57 AM PDT

    Hey guys! >

    We just finished our indie game, and I'm currently looking for opportunities to enter some contests and see if what we've done is cool :)

    I found this very useful list by PixelProspector : http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-game-competitions/

    But some are outdated, and I was wondering if any dev out there would be able to help. It seems like they've been a lot of contests, but lot disappeared too. I spent hours on Google, bit of a nightmare.

    Thanks in advance!

    submitted by /u/WhiskyGolem
    [link] [comments]

    Blender Hardsurface Modeling and Booleans

    Posted: 01 May 2018 05:04 AM PDT

    Automatic Stylization for Realistic Assets

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:28 AM PDT

    Alternative for Overlap2D

    Posted: 01 May 2018 09:41 AM PDT

    It seems like the project is dead and is no longer maintained. Since I'm working on a project/game right now which imports the exported json from Overlap, I have to search for an alternative software. Do anybody know something like that?

    submitted by /u/MarcManhart
    [link] [comments]

    Valve Has A Serious Curation Problem, And It Could Ruin Steam For Everyone

    Posted: 01 May 2018 12:00 PM PDT

    Enhance My App • The Podcast!

    Posted: 01 May 2018 11:29 AM PDT

    Partnering up with a total stranger to create a commercial game?

    Posted: 01 May 2018 05:17 AM PDT

    I've always wanted to make a game, I'm a somewhat decent programmer, a decent 3d modeler (in the sense that I can replicate things I see, but lack creativity to design something unique and actually look good). Where I struggle is making textures, unwrapping models, and can not model a humanoid or even animate anything. I want to work on a game with someone that can do everything 3D related and I just handle the programming side of things. I have no friends that can 3D model, so I've been considering asking someone online to partner up with me and work on a project. Since it will be a commercial title, I'm worried about a few things, such as the person claiming to not get paid, or taking our ideas and working with someone else. Is this the sort of thing that can be handled with a simple contract or am I just being too paranoid?

    submitted by /u/KangoBangoBongo
    [link] [comments]

    Why I believe Musical Influence and Genre Links between games created the Five Nights, Bendy, and more craze! (Discuss in comments)

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:31 AM PDT

    Disturbing players with unsettling camerawork in Paratopic

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:30 AM PDT

    Public relations who'll work with an indie dev for a share of the profits?

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:29 AM PDT

    Hey Reddit, quick question. I've been looking around for PR firms, but alas, a lot of them are out of reach (out of budget). Does anyone know a PR firm or indie publisher renown in the sense of helping a game for a cut of the sales? Thanks! ;)

    submitted by /u/BunnyB_Games
    [link] [comments]

    Going Viral By Accident: Stories of Unconventional Indie Marketing Success

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:20 AM PDT

    GDEX 2018 applications for exhibiting and speaking are now open!

    Posted: 01 May 2018 10:07 AM PDT

    When do you think about server scaling?

    Posted: 30 Apr 2018 09:29 PM PDT

    I'm working on an online multiplayer game that gets played in your web browser. The back end is written in Python using the bottle library and gevent for websockets. For testing with friends, it's running on a t2.micro instance, but some basic testing indicates that because the game doesn't require a lot of web traffic, even that t2.micro might be able to handle 100 concurrent players or more before beginning to consume CPU credits.

    Eventually though, if this game does end up becoming popular, I'll need to expand. Moving it to a c4 instance would be a good start, but eventually I might need to come up with a scheme for scaling horizontally. I have an idea in my head how it would work, but I don't want to invest time (and money) to implement scaling too soon.

    I'm also considering a rewrite of the back end in node.js, since benchmarks tend to show node.js significantly outperforming Python. Though I might also gain a good amount of performance by switching to an async framework like tornado. Right now, I'm running a new thread for every websocket, which I know can create a lot of overhead.

    When is a good time to begin thinking of this? When I'm ready to truly go live? When I think I'll actually need it? I'd hate to wait too long and end up losing players because the server starts to get laggy.

    EDIT: Adding a task on my tracker to write a script to do serious stress testing. I wonder how many players and game instances I can actually handle...

    submitted by /u/Sohcahtoa82
    [link] [comments]

    Maze Frenzy - First Android game release + solo dev story

    Posted: 01 May 2018 09:22 AM PDT

    Maze Frenzy

    Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kylebyte.mazegame

    Gameplay Clip: https://i.imgur.com/UJxEnv6.mp4

    About eight months ago, against the advice of most people on this sub, I quit my software dev job to try pursuing solo indie game development. In that time, there's been a lot of false starts, abandoned ideas, and wasted time - but here at the end I finally have a released game.

    Lessons learned

    Use old builds as motivation

    It's really easy to stop seeing the cohesive whole of the changes you're making and to start feeling like you aren't making any worthwhile improvements. If you ever feel that way, I highly recommend pulling an old build of your game and messing around with it. I didn't realize how much work I'd actually done in the last few months until I looked back at a build from earlier this year. It's crazy how much a little refinement and polish can completely change a game, even when no single change is mind blowing, and comparing to an earlier build helps put the progress you've made in focus.

    Don't do your dream halfway

    If you ever quit your job to pursue your dream, make sure you're actually pursuing your dream. When I first started, I had a game idea I was really passionate about, but once I scoped it out I let fear get the better of me and turned to simpler, easier ideas I thought were more doable. While this was probably the right idea from a time perspective, when passion is your only motivator on a project, you need to treat it the same as any other resource. Once I jumped to an idea that I still really liked but didn't necessarily love, I lost a lot of that drive and ended up wasting more time than I think I would have if I'd stuck with the idea I really cared about.

    Making freemium mobile games hurts my soul

    In the last month or so of development, I decided to strip all advertisement from the game and use it solely to build my portfolio now that I'm back on the job hunt. Once that weight was off my shoulders, motivation got a lot easier. Throughout development, I had to keep making decisions based on where I could show ads and how I could keep users looking at them, but once my goals changed I got to make decisions based on what I thought was fun again. I didn't realize how much the monetization decisions were taking the wind out of my sails until I wasn't making them anymore.

    Would you do this again?

    Probably some day, but I'm definitely going to want more experience managing a project (and enough money to last more than a year), and I would go all the way and build the game I want to - complications be damned. Even if this wasn't the best idea and I feel ready to move on, I wouldn't trade the experience of the last eight months for anything.

    Please let me know if you like the game, and consider leaving a review for it!

    submitted by /u/kylechu
    [link] [comments]

    C++ data structures designed for constant time insertion, erasure, lookup and fastest possible iteration.

    Posted: 01 May 2018 08:47 AM PDT

    Requiring Xbox-style Controllers for a PC Game

    Posted: 01 May 2018 08:46 AM PDT

    I've been developing a 2D shooter that uses Xbox-style controllers. The right joystick is very nice for aiming and I would like to stick with this controller style, but I also want to release the game for the PC.

    Is requiring such controllers for a PC game reasonable?

    Could I have a good player base?

    An article on my control system

    submitted by /u/DevJamesB
    [link] [comments]
    Read more
    at

    No comments:

    Post a Comment