Indie devs that had a failed launch, what did you learn? |
- Indie devs that had a failed launch, what did you learn?
- Here's what we learned from having a fairly successful game on Steam and how we are improving for our next release.
- Creating hand-painted textures for a Cartoon Character | PS | Blender 2.79 | Tutorial
- The making of Hollow Knight
- When talking about polycount, are we talking about tris or quads ?
- They Want A Percentage Of My Game Sales?
- Hey /r/gamedev! We created an Ice Spell sound effect only using an Aluminum Can! We hope you all can find it informative :)
- Procedural Generation of Tracks for Racing Games with Houdini
- How can I replicate this style of game art? The game is so old the devtools are lost.
- Are there any large drawbacks of not making your own 3d models?
- I had a talk about worldbuilding and storytelling in VR and thought you guys might find my findings useful..
- How to handle save game incompatibility during Early Access?
- Does adding a foreign language to a game have a significant impact on sales?
- Help me brainstorm ideas for getting high school students interested in game development?
- Where can I learn more about rts AI?
- Turn-based strategy game - Ilenar
- Questions on marketing first-game
- It's Time for Video Game Makers to Unionize
- Critical look at Super Paper Mario and Color Splash, and how they could improve
- Need Help Picking between 4 Logos for a Hamster Arena Shooter
- Making Games the Italian Way
- How long does Steam take to 'learn about a game'?
| Indie devs that had a failed launch, what did you learn? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 04:05 AM PDT I made a a game for android/iOS that was basically words with friends but with Mario-party type games instead of scrabble, I had 14 mini-games player could choose from to challenge their friends. I spent 2 years on this game and got around 150 downloads, all reviews were 5-star. Now one year later the game is more or less dead and I have no motivation to try and revive it. The game works great and the graphics looks super nice (my friend that made them is now working for Disney). I made a huge mistake during development; I thought the game would spread by itself, since it was multiplayer people would invite friends to play, right? I literally spent > 1000 hours developing this game, and less than 1 hour marketing it. Looking back I feel foolish, but maybe someone out there can learn from my mistake. Don't get lost in how great you think your game is, if nobody notices that it exists, then none of that will matter. Market your game from the beginning. Would love to hear if someone else has learned similar lessons from failed releases. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2018 08:42 AM PDT Around four years ago me and a couple friends released our first game, Salt on Steam Early Access. It did surprisingly well and over the next few years generated enough revenue to fund us until release. We've now moved on to a new project called Wild West and Wizards and I feel like we've learned a ton and have already been able to improve dramatically through the development process. I'm always obsessed with what makes a game successful and how we can take those things, improve upon them, and put them into our future projects. So here are some things we did wrong with Salt and how we're improving on it for our new game. We took far too long and didn't plan aheadThe number one mistake I think we made was not having a clear design going forward and therefore spending far too long on the project. We kind of just had a basic idea for the game, implemented that, and went from there. We didn't have a detailed plan for each and every feature that needed to be implemented, how long it would take, etc. We had a general roadmap and we actually stuck to it and finished it, but we had very little concept of how long each piece of content would take to implement and therefore spent a lot more time and money than we ever intended. For our new game, we spent a month at the beginning of development going over everything we planned, what was top priority out of those planned features, and how long each piece of content would take. Our goal with our new project is to get to early access within one year, with 3 to 6 months after that for full release. And we are actually on schedule! Just because of better planning and design up front, we are getting more done with our new project in less than half the time. We didn't market early on.My main job at the beginning of Salt's development was marketing and audio. While we did market Salt well enough to get in the hands of some larger YouTubers, we didn't spend enough time before we actually released marketing the game. We should have been building our community and marketing the development process much earlier. We've already dramatically improved that and are marketing our new game much earlier garnering interest and hype before release. We didn't plan post-launch updates.One thing that kind of caught me off guard was the expectation for continued updates even after the game was officially released and the roadmap was completed. I think in today's gaming culture we have kind of gotten use to a lot of free updates even after a game releases. In our mind, we planned on releasing in early access, and then doing all the updates during that process until full release before moving on to another project. However, after we released the game there was definitely a lot of requests for more updates. Unfortunately we had spent pretty much all our resources getting to full release and therefore couldn't do more any updates. Had we planned ahead (back to point number 1) we could have avoided this problem. Surprisingly, even doing things wrong we still had a successful game. Here are some things I think we actually did right with Salt. We had a niche idea and made the game open world.As we all know the pool of games on Steam is huge and you have to find ways to stand out. I firmly believe that us creating a somewhat unique theme (pirates and sailing) and making the game first person and open world really helped us have more success. Simply by making a game that is open world and fairly large, you put yourself a much smaller pool of titles and therefore have less competition. And while games like this can be a lot more work, I'm glad we spent the time doing it as I think it paid off. We did a lot of marketing.While I did mention that we failed to market early on, I spent a lot of time during development trying to learn how to effectively market the game. And while not everything worked, we did do a good job in a few different areas. The big one for us was influencer marketing and getting YouTubers to play the game early on. We had multiple large YouTubers play the game and that really helped to spread the word. In addition to that I had multiple front page reddit posts that helped a bit as well. Every day throughout the week I consistently used social media and other methods to connect with our audience and reach out to potential influencers. I think that made a huge different in keeping the game afloat over the years. For our new game we have already improved on so many areas and I'm excited to see how it pays off going forward. I think game development is always risky and we're never 100% sure how to make a successful product, but I feel like we've learned enough to make good decisions and increase our chances of success. [link] [comments]  |
| Creating hand-painted textures for a Cartoon Character | PS | Blender 2.79 | Tutorial Posted: 16 Oct 2018 06:21 AM PDT |
| Posted: 15 Oct 2018 07:58 PM PDT |
| When talking about polycount, are we talking about tris or quads ? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 04:30 AM PDT Hey guys, Let's say you need to make a 3D object with a budget of 2k polygons, does that mean 2k tris or 2k quads ? I know that the engine converts everything to tris, but I'm not sure what polycount means in the vocabulary of gamedev. [link] [comments]  |
| They Want A Percentage Of My Game Sales? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 11:41 AM PDT Hey guys, I'm in a bind here. So I'm making a small visual novel for PC (think Doki Doki Literature Club), and I want to use a licensed song for the game's intro. The Studio says they are cool with me getting a license but on top of paying $1,100 for it, they say they'd like a "percentage of the game sales". Should I give that too them? If so, how much of a percentage should I offer them? I have zero experience in stuff like this. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2018 07:40 AM PDT |
| Procedural Generation of Tracks for Racing Games with Houdini Posted: 16 Oct 2018 08:17 AM PDT One of my colleagues has given an interview to 80.lv on how we created our procedural tracks for the Offroad Heat mobile game with Houdini. https://80.lv/articles/using-houdini-for-large-terrains-006sdf/ [link] [comments]  |
| How can I replicate this style of game art? The game is so old the devtools are lost. Posted: 16 Oct 2018 06:34 AM PDT https://myth-of-soma.com/Gallery/ This is an abandoned game from the 2000s which still runs via a private server. Unfortunately no one is able to produce new in-game weapons because the devtools don't exist anymore. Is there a way to replicate how these designs were made? [link] [comments]  |
| Are there any large drawbacks of not making your own 3d models? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 09:24 AM PDT I've been trying to work with blender for a while now, and I'm not getting even close to the results I'm looking for for my project. Can someone run down the pros and cons to either commissioning or simply buying 3d models from the store and tweaking them myself? Additionally, what about buying certain pieces, such as feet/hands/etc and trying to workout the rest ? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2018 03:22 AM PDT .. so I wrote an article on our blog about it: http://blog.sycoforge.com/worldbuilding-and-storytelling-in-vr/ please feel free to comment and share your thoughts! [link] [comments]  |
| How to handle save game incompatibility during Early Access? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 07:03 AM PDT My game enters Early Access in a little over a month. It is an open-world RPG where quite a lot of information is stored in a save and non-trivial updates will not be compatible with previous saves. Since Steam automatically updates games with new versions, some players are going to lose their progress half-way through the game and start over. Options I can think of are:
Is it just accepted that Early Access games may suddenly break your saves mid game? How have other games with open world content in EA handled this? Edit: A couple people suggested developing an incremental save game converter. I considered this but dismissed it for the following reasons:
Thanks for any input! [link] [comments]  |
| Does adding a foreign language to a game have a significant impact on sales? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 09:14 AM PDT Can anyone share their experience with launching an indie game with foreign language choices on Steam? Was the time it took to translate the game worth the increase in exposure/sales? I realize a crappy game in any language will have crappy sales, but can a percentage increase be roughly determined and averaged? [link] [comments]  |
| Help me brainstorm ideas for getting high school students interested in game development? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 09:09 AM PDT You might think it would be easy to make students show up for a lesson in how to make computer games for fun and profit, but you'd be wrong. At least if the only available time is after their last regular lesson on a friday afternoon... Some have expressed interest when told about the opportunity, but when it's finally time on friday, staying in school for two more hours is apparently a tough sell as it competes with the fact that they are actually free to just go home. I need a more convincing pitch. Or perhaps a more persistant campaign. Maybe some posters to put up everywhere? I'm suddenly unsure about how to communicate with my target audience. I feel ignorant for thinking that the idea of game developement would sell itself. At least enough for convincing people to stick around for a few hours more. Dear reddit, do you have any thoughts on how to approach this? What got you hooked on learning to code? How would you try to spark an interest in game creation? As for a poster, do you have any favourite quotes or fun facts you think might help with the intrigue? [link] [comments]  |
| Where can I learn more about rts AI? Posted: 16 Oct 2018 06:51 AM PDT I am not working on an rts right now but may in the future. I work with true AI quite often using neural nets but the AI used in rts games just boggle me since they actually seem to have forward looking strategy and there are just so many variables. I know they are using decisions trees and not NN but would love to read more on this subject. [link] [comments]  |
| Turn-based strategy game - Ilenar Posted: 16 Oct 2018 04:43 AM PDT Me and my friend had five to six years ago an idea that we wanted to play a very good TBS game, but we were not really excited about the actual games in the genre and bored with the old titles. Then came the enlightenment that we should make a game ... Which eventually made an action RPG, but after four years of development, we stopped it all, even though it was so close to the goal. But this is another story. But how would we offer more than those on the market? Will it be better? Will it be like Heroes of Might & Magic 3? Or will it be better? We are not interested in them. We had one that we were creating and what it would be like we wanted. From the engine to the last drawn pixel. We had a lot of ideas we wanted to put in years ago. We thought about HOMM3, but we wanted a whole new one. In this phase of the game, we want to share the game with you. This is just a pre-alpha version, so there are a lot of gaps in it. - The Heroes can not yet intervene in the battle, but they are in the same line, then they have to be passed. - The items are DOESN'T have stats, although they can be obtain and worn. - The passive perks of the heroes are recorded at their hiring, however currently they have NO influence on the gameplay. - The Power Plant and Research Buildings have no function yet. - Sometimes subtitles, descriptions are incomplete, incorrect or inaccurat. - Some menu points (upgrades, statistics, world map) are NOT functional yet. - Graphics settings will NOT remain after exit and restart. - Apart from Faction Buildings and Mines, other buildings appearing on the adventure map there is no actual function. - The game currently DOES NOT HAVE play music or sound effects. We would be happy to accept positive and negative reviews and we are curious to how do you like the game so far. The game have English subtitles. https://i.redd.it/q63ox1vwcjs11.jpg Download Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jbYWFiuSc7DmsEHVDb5Kn7r_GvwyFiaO Our Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/ilenar_official/?hl=hu [link] [comments]  |
| Questions on marketing first-game Posted: 16 Oct 2018 11:33 AM PDT Background: I'm a solo dev working on my first game which I plan to publish on Steam. I'm 2 months into development and realistically expect to spend another 12-18 months before publishing. Half of the posts from indie devs on here talk about how they failed to market their game and/or how they should have started marketing from the very beginning. My question is, do you really start marketing from the very first day you start development? Or do you wait until you have a reasonable MVP that demonstrates the majority of the features of the game? The current state of my game is very rough: there is a lot of placeholder art and messy debug info that I feel would turn people away. Also, what is the best way to market in the early stages of development? Should I create a web page and add a developer diary blog? Should I create a YouTube channel where I talk through features I'm adding? I'm curious what has worked well for other people. [link] [comments]  |
| It's Time for Video Game Makers to Unionize Posted: 16 Oct 2018 11:31 AM PDT |
| Critical look at Super Paper Mario and Color Splash, and how they could improve Posted: 16 Oct 2018 11:20 AM PDT |
| Need Help Picking between 4 Logos for a Hamster Arena Shooter Posted: 16 Oct 2018 11:15 AM PDT Hey Guys, my name is Nabil and I'm a junior at UCF and working on my first indie game. Me and the small team I'm working with alas cannot decide on which logo to go with. I figured why not call upon my peers and seniors in the industry for advice, I'd love to hear what ya'll think about these logos. A little context on the game: Super Hamster Havoc is an 4-8 Player Local Multiplayer fight for survival in a world where hamsters are now the dominant form of life on earth for Xbox & Nintendo Switch [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Oct 2018 10:36 AM PDT |
| How long does Steam take to 'learn about a game'? Posted: 15 Oct 2018 10:31 PM PDT I'm seeing a lot of reasonably successful new Indie games that still have 'Steam is learning about this game' on their store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/514500/Atomic_Society/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/809440/Protolife/ Protolife for example, has generated $80,000 of gross revenue (with a simplistic reviews * 50 * RRP calculation) Whilst Steam is learning about a game, the following is in effect:
Which can be anticipated to have a negative impact on sales, particularly in the crucial launch period. The question is - how long does Steam take to learn about a game? Why isn't there an option to bypass this, such as by paying a $500 launch fee (recoupable) instead of the standard Steam Direct $100? What more does Steam want from games like Protolife, which has 136 reviews and a rating of 'mostly positive'? I would suggest that these two games represented the upper tier of Indie launches - successful, profitable, and well-received. What more can be done by Indies, and will they always be subjected to 'learning about this game' unless they launch with a publisher? [link] [comments]  |
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