A reminder to all new hobbyist developers: start small. |
- A reminder to all new hobbyist developers: start small.
- Ubisoft made a game dev programming tutorial series for people who want to learn the basics of programming and game development. If you've never programmed before but want to get into game dev I recommend checking it out!
- Quick tutorial for working with multiple background music tracks
- Finally launched my iOS/Android game Dizzy Knight! Here's a postmortem for you.
- Aspiring game developer depressed by working conditions
- What kind of soundtrack ca ìn I produce for my late medieval game?
- How to Make a Roguelike, a primer
- Been learning 3d for almost a year nw, would love some feedback on my first fully fledged creature
- steam review rate?
- Is there a community (reddit, forums, etc.) for gamers who like walking simulators and the like?
- VR Design Challenge: Mozilla Hubs Clubhouse w/ Sketchfab
- Being a Programmer without a CS degree
- Why the Defold game engine should be open source
- Substance Painter Stylized Metal Sword
- Gamasutra: Josh Bycer's Blog - The Three Factors of Effective Horror Design
- "No Man's Sky" on PS2 at 60 FPS? Haven Prototype from 2001
- Hobby interest- not sure where to start
- WIP Wednesday #109 - Trick or Treat, give us a WIP to see!
- Save game file-size limits for PS4?
- SpatialOS bringing multi-server scale to Unreal’s built-in networking
- Classic Resident Evil Cameras in Unity #Halloween
- Survey - Work Conditions: A comparison between the Game and VFX industries in Scandinavia.
- Health System (E02) - Adding effects and item dropping! | Unity 2018 C#
- Game development process
| A reminder to all new hobbyist developers: start small. Posted: 31 Oct 2018 07:38 AM PDT Just like the video games you play you don't start on your level one character facing the against the final boss "Murder King Dethmore, The Vanquisher of All Life". You start facing rats and boars and stuff. Your first game should be like tic-tac-toe or hangman. I see a few too many posts saying they are a new developer wanting to make a full fledged "[someGameName] inspired game featuring [someOtherGameName] game influences". Which is totally fine, go make the games you want to make that's great, but if you're new to the game development world make sure you play the tutorial. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2018 08:08 AM PDT |
| Quick tutorial for working with multiple background music tracks Posted: 31 Oct 2018 06:12 AM PDT |
| Finally launched my iOS/Android game Dizzy Knight! Here's a postmortem for you. Posted: 31 Oct 2018 09:47 AM PDT Hi, I wanted to make a post announcing that a game I've worked on for several years is finally available in the iOS and Google Play app store. I did all the design and ~95% of the programming myself. I worked incredibly hard on it and would love it if you'd give it a download and a few minutes to take a look. Instead of just blowing my own horn though, I thought I'd give a little post-mortem in case it's helpful to other devs. I'm just going to put stuff that went right or wrong as I think of it. It mostly went wrong, but at least it got done :) The Game Ok, just a little blowing my own horn. Download and play here: http://www.noodlecake.com/games/dizzy-knight/ https://i.redd.it/ctids81qujv11.png Dizzy Knight is a 2d overhead monster-bashing arena game with the slight... twist... (ugh) that your character is constantly spinning. You have a sword that you swing around, and the goal is simply to hit enemies with the sword while trying to avoid letting them touch your body. There are over 40 levels across four different environments, nine enemy types with a bunch of variations, traps, three big bosses, and a wide variety of weapons, power-ups, and special abilities that unlock by completing simple quests. It's free and ad-driven with currency purchases, although you can get rid of mandatory ads with an in-app purchase for a couple bucks. There's nothing you can buy that you can't earn in-game, and I kept all prices low. https://i.redd.it/gfz1y0brujv11.gif Background I have a career in game dev stretching back to around 2000. I've done production work on games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Halo 4, Republique, Motiga's Gigantic, and Psychonauts 2. I currently work professionally on VR. In 2014, I was feeling burnt out and quit full time work to spend some time trying to be creative on my own. I wanted to learn game development and got Unity to try it out. I have a degree in literature and I think part of it was wanting to prove to myself and others that I could do this kind of thing on my own. I tried to dream up a game concept I could pull off in about six months (lol). At the time, I was playing a lot of the game Slayin', which had a similar mechanic. It was simple, fun, and mostly system-driven. (A friend gave me some advice for getting things done faster - "Don't make your game depend on level design!") I started to think about how you might do an overhead, Zelda-style Slayin'. I came up with the spinning mechanic and started googling "How to make things spin in Unity." From those humble beginnings, yada yada, here we are. What Went Wrong: Keep It Simple, Stupid I initially decided to try and do a prototype. Typically in games, or really any tech at all, a prototype is very much the bare bones of what it takes to express an idea. For instance the initial prototype gun for Fallout 3 was just a rapid-fire bow from Oblivion with a random animation inserted as a reload. That's all you need to say "guns are fun to use in this kind of game and now we know what tech we need to create to make a gun for the real game." Well for Dizzy Knight, I went WAY past this. I scoured the net for sprites and clobbered together everything from the main player mechanic to particle effects to power-ups to UI including a full main menu and a crappy logo. Take a look at my "prototype": There are benefits to a prototype like this. It got me familiar with UI programming, and forced me to set up the skeleton of architecture for the whole game. It proved out a bunch of the way the game worked. And it showed the people I was cold-calling for art and sound support that I was serious. However, once I got real assets, nearly 100% of this work had to be redone, some from scratch. Sprites didn't fit, we added extra animations, or things got implemented from my artist in a way I hadn't anticipated, forcing a redo. What Went Wrong: You Get What You Pay For, Most Notably in UI Packages In 2014, I was considering UI development. At the time there was no real Unity GUI system. The main package on the Asset Store was nGUI. It had its detractors, but it was well-regarded overall, and had shipped games. nGUI cost $90 at the time. There was also an upstart package called Daikon Forge that was $70 at the time. I think I found one positive comment about it, and I was sold. $20 in savings and one five star review is all it takes to sway me! Daikon Forge turned out to be a mess. It was enough to get UI on the screen, but the devs had focused on feature breadth and were only starting to consider performance and efficiency. Then, something like three or four months later, they announced that it wasn't financially viable to continue and that they were quitting. They open-sourced the code, and it basically immediately died. I considered switching but at that point (2014) I had "put in too much work to change." Whoops. Wrong choice. The code was a bug-riddled performance hog that plagued me right up until launch and beyond. I had to hack in half-implemented features into code I barely understood. Stuff like changing the font during runtime for Chinese and Russian languages, really that should not work. It's probably trashing memory left and right. The whole UI system, it's just a miracle that it works at all. In summary, I estimate that $20 savings likely added a solid year+ to my development timeline, and caused me a LOT of stress trying to figure out bugs in foreign code I didn't understand. Exceptions generated under the hood of Daikon Forge are still among the biggest contributors to errors generated in the wild in the game today. What Went Wrong: Always Be Testing I created the game on my own time in between full-time work and life. The unfortunate reality is that, even though I tried to constrain the scope as much as possible, even this supposedly simple game is much larger than I could reasonably test on my own. The game has 11 languages, three modes not counting a tutorial, three control types, complex menus, lots of text, tons of enemies, and a lot of systems running at once in one single Unity scene. On two separate platforms. To the shock of no one, I had difficulty finding testers for free. I posted on the TouchArcade forums, and I believe I posted here on reddit. But baiting the hook with promises of a broken pre-release game from an unknown developer caught very few fish. I found a few people willing to try iOS, and some of them were so helpful, I included them in the game's special thanks. I was completely unable to find anyone willing to test the game on Android on their own time. In the end, I paid to get a reputable tester to make sure I had coverage over the game. But even that had its challenges with him being on another continent and busy in his own life. In addition, my own bug fixing was not always up to the professional level. I would very often get in the mode of implementing one thing in isolation in a test environment, and immediately deploy it to the main game as production ready. I would also isolate bugs to a single repro case, verify that case was fixed, and then roll the fix into the master repo and call it a night. Sometimes I would just identify a bug in the code that I thought was clear, fix it, and check in without playing the game. Big shock here - This went poorly. I very frequently introduced breaking changes elsewhere in the game, shipped debug builds with testing options left on by accident, or claimed I had fixed things that didn't get fixed at all. I wasted a lot of people's time, not the least of which was my own. What Went Right: Robots Took My QA Job One bright spot in the area of QA and testing was that I invested a good deal of time and effort into automated testing. I was working on controller code and writing a lot of events and callbacks to make sure the controller manager understood what menu it was on. I realized it wouldn't be too hard to write up a class that listened for the same events and reacted by sending press events to the relevant buttons. Once I had that, I wrote a coroutine to search for enemies every second, pick one at random, calculate a point nearby, and move to that point by manipulating the real control values. And just like that I had an incredibly simple bot that could play the game. A couple more weeks of work and I added a number of abilities like looping through the game over and over, picking different menu options, playing different modes, and other options. I could deploy bot builds to multiple devices and dramatically increase my test coverage. https://i.redd.it/4wg2tl2zujv11.jpg This was invaluable to testing, particularly during the end rush where I had to find critical low-repro bugs. I could "set it and forget it" and come back and see that the bot had completed 134 runs (or whatever) and check the error log. However, I still leave QA overall in the "what went wrong category." What the bot never could do though, is play like a real human. For instance, the quests in the game are largely things I thought might be enjoyable, so there's no real logical rhyme or reason to them. So writing a bot that could go through quests would have been a big effort. I also couldn't write a bot that would interact with Google Play or the iOS App Store to test real purchases. You can't really simulate input to those flows through Unity. Lastly, I also over-indexed on bot testing, and used it as a replacement for real human chaos testing more often than not. What Went Right: Surf the Interwebs As mentioned, the game really started with me opening Google and searching for how to make something spin. I had hundreds if not thousands of searches like that. I searched for EVERYTHING, from the basics of whether I should make a rigidbody continuous or discreet, to obscure error messages when trying to debug Android manifest issues. The great thing about using a popular tool like Unity is that you're instantly part of a community of people, and someone else has probably already tackled the same problem as you before. I posted a ton on /r/Unity3d and got so much help, I included the sub in my special thanks section in the game. What Went Right: Pick the Right People I clearly could not do art or sound on my own, and my skills as a programmer are intermediate at absolute best. I never seriously studied math or algorithms and I'm mostly coding to the compiler along with a ton of Googling. I created the slime enemy seen in the screenshots above all on my own, and it took me forever. All the code is in one 800-line file and it's a complete mess. I realized I would have to outsource some of my deficiencies. I can't say enough good things about all my collaborators. Maybe it was my resume or my prototype, but I honestly lucked out that I got my first choices in every case. My artist, Giuseppe Longo (https://twitter.com/mis_bug), has a long mobile game resume including driving a lot of the Nitrome pixel art style. Check out the very first image that Giuseppe sent me when we were talking about how the game might look. It took surprisingly little iteration: https://i.redd.it/csz2cr51vjv11.png I actually contracted Matt Creamer for music and sound, the very person who did music and sound for Slayin' (and is doing it again for Slayin' 2 coming up soon). (BTW here is the Dizzy Knight soundtrack if you're interested https://mattcreameraudio.bandcamp.com/album/dizzy-knight-original-soundtrack). I found a great programmer here on reddit, /u/arigatocat who game me a framework for AI that is still in use in the final game code. And all the folks at Noodlecake were amazing, and probably should have dropped me a couple years ago. What Went Wrong: Spare Time Working on a game in your spare time is incredibly difficult. It will eat up 100% of the time you give to it and demand more. Obviously it took me ~four years while making a ton of mistakes on the way. I think even if I did everything right, it still would have been a solid two years of nights and weekends. It is easy to lose sight of the border between what is enough work and what is too much. It's a thin line, and you can usually only see it in the rear view. The problem with being the only person working on something is that nothing happens unless you actively work on it. The game wasn't getting any closer to shipping unless I sat in my chair and wrote code. If that wasn't happening, this big goal in my life was totally stalled out. Most people see nights and weekends as free time to fill with something they enjoy. I only saw it as an opportunity for game development. And there are definitely many, many times when I got frustrated when this time got taken away from me for other commitments, professional or social. This isn't an easy one to get over, but you have to always keep in mind prioritization, and realize that your spare-time Unity game is probably not something that will change the world, even if you find it an important goal to achieve in your own life. The people in your life are (hopefully) there for good, whereas even a major game is a time-limited thing. I did make an effort to make time - always have dinner with my SO whenever possible for instance, and I still went on big trips and gave my best at my full time job. You don't have to choose all or nothing, but do your best to keep a balance. Nothing good comes out of you trying to care for a relationship while you're frustrated, and neither is clean code often the product of someone who's social relationships are falling apart around them. Take a day off here and there, and don't take your dev laptop on your Italian vacation like I did. Shipping and What's Next We shipped the game out on October 11th, and it's been good. We got a little featuring from Apple, and Noodlecake pushed the game on their own channels, which got us a nice spike of users the first day. I did not invest a tremendous amount in retention features, or nag messages, or promotional tools, or anything like that to try and keep people coming back again and again. And that's reflected in the data. At this point, my goal of shipping something on my own has been achieved. I want the game to be successful now for the sake of my collaborators, to make sure Noodlecake and others' investments of time and energy are justified. We should have another patch coming out in the next week or two to take care of some lingering bugs and improve controller support in the game. After that, it's really up to Noodlecake and the players as far as what's next. If they think it's worthwhile, I'd love to expand the game with a new character or two with unique abilities, a couple new monsters, and maybe a new environment. At least! But we'll have to see some kind of push in the data for that to happen I think. In the meantime, I'm around to answer questions so feel free to AMA (although I'm finally posting this on the way to work, so give me a bit to get back to you if you ask!). I hope this was useful or interesting if you stuck it out this far. Good luck on your own projects. And if you enjoyed it, the best thing you could do is pick up the game and give it a shot. It's free after all! http://www.noodlecake.com/games/dizzy-knight/ [link] [comments]  |
| Aspiring game developer depressed by working conditions Posted: 30 Oct 2018 12:31 PM PDT I have wanted to be a video game developer since I was a kid, but the news I keep hearing about the working conditions, and the apathy that seems to be expressed by others is really depressing. Since RDR2 is starting to make it's rounds on the gaming subs, I've been commenting with the article about Rockstar's treatment of their devs (https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-10-25-the-human-cost-of-red-dead-redemption-2?fbclid=IwAR1zm8QTNHBvBWyfJ93GvCsgNVCarsNvCCH8Xu_-jjxD-fQJvy-FtgM9eIk) on posts about the game, trying to raise awareness about the issue. Every time, the comment has gotten downvoted, and if I get any replies it's that the devs shouldn't complain cuz they're working in a AAA company and if they have a problem they should quit. Even a friend of mine said that since they're getting paid and the average developer salary is pretty good he doesn't particularly care. It seems horrible to think that I might have to decide between a career I want and a career that treats me well, and that no one seems to be willing to change the problem, or even acknowledge that it exists. [link] [comments]  |
| What kind of soundtrack ca ìn I produce for my late medieval game? Posted: 31 Oct 2018 09:15 AM PDT My game is set in Rome between 1500s and 1700s. It's an open world rpg, obviously it'll never see light, it's a personal project like many of us do. That being said one can dream so I decided to use a soundtrack which consists mostly of 1500s-1600s music. Problem is that it's either religious (so the classical post gregorian polyphony) or sounds extremely "medievalish". It always sounds repetitive tho and I say that as holy and profane music lover. The problem is that I wanted to give my game a feel of "post medieval", but I don't really know how to recreate such a music style without using instruments from later eras. Like, take lute, extremely common instrument at that time, in Rome plenty of composers used it too. But it ends up sounding so much "spanish" to anybody who listens to it. [link] [comments]  |
| How to Make a Roguelike, a primer Posted: 30 Oct 2018 04:55 PM PDT Early this month I attended this year's Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco and gave the opening talk on How to Make a Roguelike. It came out pretty well and serves as a general guide for getting into development, covering a wide range of topics including language, scope, core mechanics, 7DRLs, resources, hooks, and general tips. A number of the roguelikes mentioned, and suggested resources, come from the r/RoguelikeDev community here on Reddit as well. In addition to the video I've published the same talk in written form, so that if you prefer you can skim through the words and images rather than listen to the whole 27 minutes ;). It's pretty similar to the video version. I'm happy to answer any questions! Even though I came in under time, since I was the first talk and the event was running late there wasn't time to take questions that day. [link] [comments]  |
| Been learning 3d for almost a year nw, would love some feedback on my first fully fledged creature Posted: 31 Oct 2018 11:12 AM PDT |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2018 03:19 AM PDT I know games are different, but I'm curious, what rate is considered low? For example, only less than 3% who bought my game left a review. There are people post in the forums asking questions, but don't care to review :\ [link] [comments]  |
| Is there a community (reddit, forums, etc.) for gamers who like walking simulators and the like? Posted: 31 Oct 2018 09:27 AM PDT I've been making a game that is heavily focused on the narrative, with very few mechanics. Is there an established community on the internet that talks about that? It would be really good to be able to chat with them. [link] [comments]  |
| VR Design Challenge: Mozilla Hubs Clubhouse w/ Sketchfab Posted: 31 Oct 2018 09:09 AM PDT For those of you creating or working with 3D models, Sketchfab is running a design challenge for Mozilla's VR social platform Hubs. Their last challenge created some pretty great low-poly assets. Ends Nov 27th. [link] [comments]  |
| Being a Programmer without a CS degree Posted: 31 Oct 2018 12:39 PM PDT My situation is a little unusual so sorry if I'm long winded I'm currently a student attempting to get a B.A and a minor in CS. I discovered I liked programming and enjoy it quite a bit. However I can't get a B.A. in CS because my school won't let me change majors, so it might be too hard for me to get a job programming en. Aside from helping to make a game engine, how else could programming knowledge help me in creating games or should I redirect my efforts and attempt to acquire different skill sets for game development. I would appreciate any advice anyone could offer. [link] [comments]  |
| Why the Defold game engine should be open source Posted: 31 Oct 2018 12:11 PM PDT |
| Substance Painter Stylized Metal Sword Posted: 31 Oct 2018 11:40 AM PDT |
| Gamasutra: Josh Bycer's Blog - The Three Factors of Effective Horror Design Posted: 31 Oct 2018 10:54 AM PDT |
| "No Man's Sky" on PS2 at 60 FPS? Haven Prototype from 2001 Posted: 31 Oct 2018 01:09 AM PDT |
| Hobby interest- not sure where to start Posted: 31 Oct 2018 10:52 AM PDT Hi all, I'm an avid gamer and I'm actually a UX designer by day. I'm super inspired by games made by one person- undertale, stardew, etc. I don't intend on making anything as complex as those, but I do want to do something related to games as a hobby besides just playing them. I know there are different parts of a game like dev, art, music, etc. The issue is I'm not a programmer and for some reason my brain doesn't work that way. I have learned some HTML and CSS in the past but C# gets away from me. I've dabbled in Unity with some tutorials but it hasn't clicked for me yet. Is there a way I can contribute to the community still? I have ideas and I can imagine what I want something to work/look like but actually creating it is where I fall flat at this point. Any advice is appreciated- whether its start with tabletop or learn coding first or focus on the art and ideas. Thank you and happy halloween! [link] [comments]  |
| WIP Wednesday #109 - Trick or Treat, give us a WIP to see! Posted: 30 Oct 2018 09:25 PM PDT What is WIP Wednesday? Share your work-in-progress (WIP) prototype, feature, art, model or work-in-progress game here and get early feedback from, and give early feedback to, other game developers. RULES
Remember to use #WIPWednesday on social media for additional feedback and exposure! Note: Using url shorteners is discouraged as it may get you caught by Reddit's spam filter. [link] [comments]  |
| Save game file-size limits for PS4? Posted: 31 Oct 2018 09:18 AM PDT Does Sony impose any artificial file-size restrictions on developers for PS4 games? For example, do they require files to be under a certain size? Or charge devs extra per MB beyond a certain size? SteamI know Steam limits saves stored in their cloud service to 100MB per file, and 1GB per game per user. XboxI know Xbox One gives cloud storage to all users who have an Xbox Live account (even if they're not gold). The file-size quota is determined by what kind of developer it is:
All XBOX developers' games additionally get a quota of 256 MB of cloud space for user-independent game storage—a way to persist the some cache files across consoles, I guess. But this cannot be used for game saves. PS4Also, Sony says PS Plus provides each consumer account with 10 GB of online storage space for uploaded game saves. However, as I am not a PS4 Dev (yet), I cannot look up their developer materials. And searching google has not yielded any details about whatever restrictions Sony might impose on games. So... does anyone know? I am working on will have pretty large saves, and I do not want to bother signing up for a PS4 dev account if it has a crappy 256 MB limit per game like XBOX :/ I want users to be able to decide for themselves if they want to upload a big save file to the cloud. [link] [comments]  |
| SpatialOS bringing multi-server scale to Unreal’s built-in networking Posted: 31 Oct 2018 08:53 AM PDT Hey all! A quick word for anyone interested in using SpatialOS. We wanted to let you know that we have just launched our Game Development Kit for Unreal. This package helps you scale your game's resources beyond a single server while using Unreal's familiar workflows and built-in replication features. If you want more information, head over to our blog post for an in-depth technical look at what the GDK can do right now. Marketplace Link: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/spatialos-game-development-kit GitHub Link: https://github.com/spatialos/UnrealGDK [link] [comments]  |
| Classic Resident Evil Cameras in Unity #Halloween Posted: 31 Oct 2018 04:33 AM PDT |
| Survey - Work Conditions: A comparison between the Game and VFX industries in Scandinavia. Posted: 31 Oct 2018 04:03 AM PDT I am a current student of Hyper Islands motion design programme, and at the moment I am conducting some research around work conditions in the industry for the sake of an essay. The purpose with this survey is to compare these two industries. I have heard loads about the crappy conditions working in Hollywood, and I also see many of my former colleagues and friends migrating from the film industry to work with games. On the other hand, I have also read threads here in r/gamedev like "Aspiring game developer depressed by working conditions" by TheBob427. I have heard many good things about the game industry in general, but that may not be the case if - like in this example - crunch is such a common thing. Since I'm Swedish, I want to explore if things as bad here in Scandinavia as they are in the US, as far as offering an attractive workplace goes. If there are any Games professionals active in Scandinavia here, I would love to hear your voice! The survey takes one minute, see link below: If this is in any way inappropriate, I'll make sure to remove the post immediately. Regards / Douglas [link] [comments]  |
| Health System (E02) - Adding effects and item dropping! | Unity 2018 C# Posted: 31 Oct 2018 06:39 AM PDT |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2018 09:52 AM PDT I've made flash games and sold them to armor games and y8(more than a year ago). I used to get stuck at some stages because I didn't got everything planned and I'm self taught so don't have that much knowledge. What is the actual process from idea to finished product so that things go fine. I'm planning to make a sequel of one of my flash game for android and IOS. Please explain me in detail. [link] [comments]  |
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