My interview experience interviewing with White Elk Studios |
- My interview experience interviewing with White Elk Studios
- Visual Scripting is coming to Unity 2019.2
- Aseprite is gold
- I like how smooth the movement on my character controller is.
- Games aren't magical because people don't know how they're made. They're magical because of talented people doing complex work to make sure the illusion doesn't break.
- What are some of the best post-mortems on this sub?
- Idea Guy vs Game Designer?
- Red Dead Redemption 2 Kotaku review touches upon "extreme work, 'voluntary' overtime, and prolonged period of crunch"
- Suggestions for learning how to make games?
- We are Paul Neurath, Warren Spector and the dev team from OtherSide. AMA about gamedev, teammembers' past projects (Ultima Underworld, Thief, BioShock Infinite, System Shock, Deus Ex, Epic Mickey, etc.) or OtherSide's new game Underworld Ascendant. • r/gaming
- Health System | Unity 2018 C#
- Business analysts & Game designers - what can we learn?
- Was this my fault?
- Are there any bad GDC speeches or incorrect speeches?
- Deciding between 2 reward/progression systems in a non-combat RTS game
- Games with mod support and game engines
- Tips for promoting a crowdfunding campaign
- Horror/FPS development livestreams?
- Lean Startup principles and game development - some thoughts
- How do you make android game video trailers
- Different ways to upscale an image
- How to create UI for all Resolutions using Unity
- how to place markers automatically on a video that has not been recorded by me
| My interview experience interviewing with White Elk Studios Posted: 24 Oct 2018 10:09 PM PDT I'm a senior software engineer with 10 years of experience, 8 of that in the video games industry, 4 in VR. I just wanted to give a heads up to everyone about my interview with White Elk Studios. They're a VR startup with ~7 employees. They sent a ridiculously long coding test that has 17 questions. The instructions for the test are very catch-22, saying they want multiple solutions to a problem but they want concise answers but they don't want essays per answer. After sending in the coding test I got it back with several comments on why I am asking game design questions. They also said they wanted to see code solutions for several problems, when the problems themselves don't ask for a code solution and they were very abstract in nature. For instance they wanted to see actual compilable code for this question:
Does that question to you seem like it asks for compilable code? It sure doesn't to me. How fucking far do you go to produce said code? A unity/unreal project? And doing this for each of the 16 questions that are just equally involved and vague enough? Then how far do you go? Keep in mind they're a VR studio so they're probably looking for high fidelity/sense of resolution for their collision. Does the Design team want "pixel perfect" collision detection of various ground materials/surface modifiers - hard packed snow, knee-deep powder, etc. Like a solution based on the underlying textures that is painted on the geometry? What about if ground materials are blended together? Or are they okay with each object in the world being tagged with said property and the model being more simple? The entire test was supposed to be done in 2 hours, but each question was just like the one above. You could easily spend 2 hours on just one question. They decided to reject me for not writing code for all the problems, despite never asking for code. They could of used the test as an opening to further discussions about a prospective applicant's thought process. I wouldn't waste your time interviewing with them or doing the coding test. I sure dodged a bullet. [link] [comments]  |
| Visual Scripting is coming to Unity 2019.2 Posted: 25 Oct 2018 05:21 AM PDT |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 10:51 AM PDT For pixel art and tile-based gamedev, that is. Been using for a couple weeks now and I'm so impressed I felt like I had to tell everyone about it! For years I had used Photoshop CS3 for making graphics for my games. It works good but its capabilities (and overhead) are much more than I have ever needed for pixel art. It takes a while to start up and slows down my poor 6 year old laptop when its running. I found Aseprite and decided to bite the ($15) bullet. Here's what I like about it: -It loads almost instantly. I love not staring at a splash screen for 30 seconds just to make a couple quick changes to a tileset. -It uses very little CPU, making it so super responsive on my laptop compared to Photoshop -It has all the functionality I have ever needed that Photoshop had, and presents it in a similar way (like even many hotkeys are the same), without all the extra stuff that is irrelevant to tile-based gamedev. -The status bar tells me which tile coordinate I am hovering over when I have the grid turned on. For any other devs that make mostly tile-based or pixel art games, this program is definitely worth checking out. There is a trial version but I'm not sure what its limitations are. Cheers PS. not affiliated with Aseprite; just happy with it and wanted to share! [link] [comments]  |
| I like how smooth the movement on my character controller is. Posted: 25 Oct 2018 06:36 AM PDT |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 08:21 AM PDT |
| What are some of the best post-mortems on this sub? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 09:37 AM PDT I recently searched for post-mortems sorted by top and got this gem: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/28ir4z/the_game_that_time_forgot_a_postmortem_on_a_game/. Edit: and another blast from the past: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2smesy/super_galaxy_squadron_prepostmortem_or_how_a/ What are some other insightful and interesting (or even entertaining) post-mortems posted to this sub? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 07:19 AM PDT There are various posts, comments, podcasts, and memes dedicated to taking jabs at being the "idea guy" in the context of game development. So I ask what separates an idea guy from a game designer? I'm referring to contributing purely to game design and not other areas such as art, programming, marketing, etc... I would think that a game designer would define the systems and mechanics of a game on a granular level and maintain some form of a game design document. Is there more or something else that distinguishes an idea guy from a game designer? What are your thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 10:25 AM PDT |
| Suggestions for learning how to make games? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 09:08 AM PDT Hello all, I am a semi-lurker on /rGameDev and am finally finding time cut out in my schedule to learn and really get my hands dirty making games! I have a somewhat defined plan on what i would like to do, starting with Step-by-step tutorials and learning the interface of the program i am using (Unity) and plan to, mostly, deal in 2D. That being said, i would LOVE suggestions, tips, tricks, or otherwise helpful advice from anyone who has tried (succeeded or failed, both are great learning tools) to make a game either just for fun or to market. My current plan is as follows: 1) Unity Tutorials on everything applicable, taking notes, and adding them into practice for the projects. 2) ReCreate some classic games. Snake is the biggest for me, Brick Breaker, Space Invaders, the list goes on. very simple and well defined examples. 3) Create a few levels of 2D platforming, focusing on character movement mainly, and working my way (most likely slowly) up to a basic Mario clone. Simple enemies, stage screens (probably 3 or so stages) lives, respawns, win/loss states, the works. 4) Cards and Shuffling. working with random data and making sure i can sort and present it accurately, and some sort of interaction with a simple AI (Go Fish or Texas Hold em or something. ) but focusing almost entirely on the card deck aspect. 5) Match 3. This will have to have a more complicated AI to play against, scan for combinations, and reset the board when there are none. plus selective spawning and trying to do pseudo-random spawning as to try and create matches later instead of board resets every 5 minutes. Like i said, this is my plan knowing very little going in. i have taken some intro coding courses, but most of it will be getting my hands dirty learning as i go. nothing marketable planned yet, just trying to see what i can do. also, sorry for any typos, i am on Mobile atm. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 09:55 AM PDT |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 10:45 AM PDT |
| Business analysts & Game designers - what can we learn? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 07:58 AM PDT Hi all, I'm a BA by profession and a game designer by hobby, and it strikes me that there's a whoooole lot of untapped good working practices, tools and techniques that the game designer can steal from the humble business analyst. These are two roles are so very new and evolving, I think it might be good to stop and have a chat over the fence. I'm thinking about writing a series of articles about my thoughts around this, but as I'm only a hobbiest game designer I want to check that I'm not barking up the wrong tree first. The articles I imagine writing would be 'notes from a Business analyst to game designers' on things like:
Maybe this is just teaching some game designers to suck-eggs, maybe it's useful for others, I'd be keen to know! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 25 Oct 2018 10:10 AM PDT So seeing another post about a bad interview in this industry I wanted to ask for your opinion. I had an interview for a game ads developer position and the take home project was to build an ad for an existing casual game. Off the bat, a few things seemed weird to me in the requirements: "...use in-game assets", "use Three.js for 3D and Pick.js for 2D" and "space limit is 1Mb or(???) 5Mb" How do I access in-game assets? So this can be 2D or 3D? So what is the space limit? Anyway, my approach was to make a 2D implementation of the game and if I have more time, do the 3D. But since it was my first time writing game with JS I only had time to do the 2D, but made the code nice and modular (since one of the requirements on the job application was to write reusable code). After putting a week's time of work, the response I got was "I could not launch the game and had to invite a developer to help me do it" (not a single word was said about expected delivery format), "There must have been a misunderstanding, since we wanted a the game to be 3D...". Ok... I was upset about this kind of back-hand response, so I asked for more details, and the answers in included gems like "it is impossible to represent a 3D game in 2D" (my version was basically the same game, just imagine a shifted camera perspective) and "we asked to use in-game assets"(later pointing out that you can't take assets from the game and have to make your own. So I understand that maybe I was dumb to think that a 2D representation would be enough for an ad, but honestly the requirements did not specify that clearly. One requirement was to capture the mechanics of the game, which I did, but the simple looks of my ad must have thrown the person off and thus subjected it to little reasoning. The person took days to answer to basic questions so I didn't have time waiting to clarify everything. The game was so basic that remaking it in 3D would have meant remaking 80% of it, especially remaking 3D models yourself. Later in the discussion they had a developer look thought the code and said it was nice and tidy, but that had zero impact. But still, in the end I didn't get to the next stage because someone didn't like the first look of it. That left me feeling sour and cheated for quite some time. Was I the dumb one in this? ( Besides taking a task with wage requirements) [link] [comments]  |
| Are there any bad GDC speeches or incorrect speeches? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 06:07 AM PDT I've seen a lot of them and they all seem to be insightful as you'd hope they would be from game development professionals. So I'm wondering are there any bad speeches or incorrect ones beyond the audio quality being terrible? I'd like to know just how good the good speeches are by comparing them to the bad speeches. I will even accept non GDC speeches as there are a lot of speeches out there on game development. Thanks for any help in advance. [link] [comments]  |
| Deciding between 2 reward/progression systems in a non-combat RTS game Posted: 25 Oct 2018 09:10 AM PDT https://i.redd.it/qkwk2vtmscu11.gif Hello, I'm developing a real time strategy game where you manage and expand a power grid. Your job is to guarantee that the energy production is always higher than the ever changing demand, then you need manage your resources and make smart investments to keep the grid balanced. Right now to progress you need to make new contracts that give you a 1 time money reward (the number shown in the GIF when mouse is hovering), then you use this money to invest in new energy sources. You receive the money one time and then you have to supply energy for that contract until the finish of the level. Before I had another system and I don't know if I should change again, I'm trying to figure what makes more sense. Before you would receive an hourly money reward that would increase each time new contracts were added. The main reason for the change is that I wanted the game score to be focused more on strategy rather than quick action. When the reward is hourly you improve the score by being each time faster expanding the grid quickly to start accumulating more money during game-play and buying more power-plants. Does that make sense? I changed the system so the money is fixed and you can reach a 100% score without trying to be super-fast to gain money quicker. I think it's more focused on making a balanced system that quick action. The problem is that I'm thinking about switching back again as it might be more intuitive for a player to understand since that's the way it works in real life, we pay for the electricity regularly. In other hand in real life an utility company does not make enough profit in some hours to buy a new power-plant I guess. In the 1 time reward system it's like a grant for being able to bring new clients to the grid, not exactly what the consumers are paying. The hourly reward also might be more engaging as you might feel you're build something up as the hourly rewards increase and feel satisfied seeing the numbers pile up. I'm a self taught developer and this my first game and hobby project, going back and forth with features takes a lot of time, so if you have insightful feedback, I would be glad to hear! Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Games with mod support and game engines Posted: 25 Oct 2018 12:45 PM PDT Hi:) I have a couple questions about games with mod support (a la Skyrim) and game engines: Does making a game in a game engine such as Unity or Unreal automatically make it moddable? Those engines are very much Creation Kits, so that would be my assumption. If not, then is it easier to make a game with mod support in one of the popular engines over the others? If so, which one would be the best? Finally, if making custom construction set is necessary, should it be made in the same engine the game is made, or maybe in a different environment, like Visual Studio? [link] [comments]  |
| Tips for promoting a crowdfunding campaign Posted: 25 Oct 2018 08:21 AM PDT Hi! I'm having a hard time promoting the crowdfunding campaign for my game... I'll have a stand in a big event pretty soon but I'm not too sure if this is going to help the campaign and I'd like to see if I could advertise on social media before that. I already have 30% of it funded (in 2 days) but I'm afraid my reach is falling short... I have a personal Twitter account (with like 10 followers) and my Reddit account. Here are my questions: Should I worry? Is it worth it for individuals to spend money on promoted posts/ads? (Reddit) Any tips on how to promote a project on social media? Here's the link to my campaign if anyone has feedback on things to improve or things to add :) I'm not sure if I'm allowed to put the link in this post so please tell me if I need to remove this : https://www.ulule.com/planet-cleaners/ [link] [comments]  |
| Horror/FPS development livestreams? Posted: 25 Oct 2018 11:34 AM PDT Hello guys! Pretty self-explanatory title: I'm looking for livestreams - either actually live or recorded sessions- about horror development in 3D. Alternatively, any such kind of video about FPS or 3D level design for 'realistic' game development will do, but it has to be the actual process, not a generic tutorial. I'm having trouble with some aspects of my game that I'd like to see how they're done by others. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Lean Startup principles and game development - some thoughts Posted: 25 Oct 2018 11:28 AM PDT So I've been thinking a lot about Lean Startup principles as made popular by Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and friends, and thinking how they might be applied to developing a game. I've had a Google around and I haven't found much on the topic - a couple of talks by mobile/Facebook devs, a couple of blog posts on trade sites, but nothing else. And my thoughts have outpaced those articles, so I thought I would share them a bit and see if anyone can help them improve. Some caveats - 1) it's been years since I worked in game development, and I'm certainly not a Lean expert (though I have used the Lean at work), but I do have ideas that turn over in my head and need to escape, so here we are. 2) If you hate all things Lean, I'm not going to argue with you about it. I could do so forever and it's best for both of us if I just not bother. 3) If you reply and greatly misrepresent what Lean is about, forgive me, I'm not going to get into an argument about that either - you can go and look up Eric Ries on YouTube and get a bunch of good videos on the topic quickly and come back with some fresh thoughts. 4) I currently run a small YouTube channel but regularly talk with a half-dozen channels in the 1-3m sub club and, in the same Discord server, another 20 that are in the 100k-1m sub range. We hear a LOT of insider stories about indie dev struggles (success and failures), and so I write this in the hope that perhaps it will inspire some self-learning that will lead to less tragic failures that make the Discord server collectively wince when we hear about them. 5) Oh, finally, if you're a true believer in the idea that My Artistic Vision Shall Never Be Compromised By Paying Customers, please move on before you get really mad.6) I posted this to r/IndieDev last night but a friend asked I post it here for more eyeballs. Anyway, on with the thoughts. So the Lean principles that Ries goes on about a lot are Build, Measure, Learn (let's leave aside the business model canvas and value proposition canvas and other tools of the Lean movement for this post). As you may know, the BML principles are that you figure out your assumptions (people will like my product, for example) and you try and test these assumptions using experiments to determine product market fit. Many experiments lead to a ton of learning, and that leads to better products. Ries goes on about this at length - go look his books or vids up if you're new to the topic. I know that some devs are aggressive about beta testing and accepting feedback for their games at that point in the dev cycle, and some might feel that they've hit the peak of BML by engaging in such rigorous testing. I know that there are mobile/Facbeook-type devs who will spit out a half-dozen prototypes in a day-or-five and then test them and push the one that works, giving it more polish. But in the first example BML experimenting way too late in the development cycle, I believe, and the later example (broadly) doesn't work for anything beyond the lightest of game experiences (eg, an indie game taking 1-2 years to develop). If you've read about Lean and game dev and seen these example shared up as good models of how to do things, you may have felt the same. So here are some ideas developers could try to apply Lean principles right from the very start of game development. Let me know what you think, or if you've tried these yourself, and what you found! First. Start running experiments for product market fit before you've even announced a new game. Let's imagine you're developing a new base-building game based on the topic of running a refugee camp (no, seriously, this is a fascinating topic. Check out how quickly these places can pop up and how big they get - imagine the logistical and system challenges!). Here are some Lean experiment ideas you could use right from the start, before you've even opened a compiler. Pre-Development
I should note that all of these experiments are testing assumptions that should be falsifiable. For example, you might decide that anything less than a 10% (total pluck) conversion to a newsletter sign-up on ANY a/b test indicates your core idea is perhaps bad and should maybe be thrown away. Obviously, tests that reveal that A is more popular than B should be believed and the lessons learned, and so on. Ries goes on about falsifiable experiments a lot in his work - go revise. I really believe there's so much developers could learn about what will work and not work for a game concept well before serious money and time has been invested. How much better would it be to figure that out three weeks into development rather than three years? I can think of several games where this kind of testing might have led to a change of theme or style that I'm convinced would have significantly boosted their (in the end) terrible performance at launch. Early Development Once you're in early development there's room to start promoting your game among the various indie-loving websites (you've got a name, theme, top features, etc, relatively set in stone at this point).
Alpha through to Beta At this point you are pretty sure of your path and it's a matter of smashing through code. But often you will still not be 100% sure if the game is fun. Now, there are articles and videos out there where people talk about how you might conduct tests at this stage - here's a good one. In addition to that article I think one can still experiment with ad words and other forms of paid eyeballs just to see what is or isn't working (I'm assuming you don't have a large, existing community to test with) - especially if you need to cut your scope and want to figure out where to wield the scalpel with the least impact on gamer interest (oh, Facebook ads, while kinda terrible, can give you an extremely focused target set of people to deliver an ad experiment to, just so you know). I should note that you could even extend your a/b testing to a demo of the game, offering two slightly different demos randomly to site visitors and, using call-backs from the demo, checking how far people got, how long they played, if they came back to the demo, and so on. Such a test could help you determine whether your UI, tutorial, early game experience, etc, are compelling. Release Once the game is out learning can continue. Every sale or significant news bump is an opportunity to bring on a new cohort of gamers to mess with and to test whether your improvements to XYZ really did lead to longer playtimes and more engagement. How did this cohort do things differently compared to the last cohort? Of course, you can't easily a/b test in parallel at this point, but you can build up a body of knowledge around what did or didn't work for your title and this might help provide data for further development efforts, or a sequel, or DLC ideas. The End That's probably enough for now. And I've almost certainly missed out other, interesting experiments developers could conduct (obviously, testing/focus groups and feedback forms and so-on, for example). I'd be happy to hear more ideas for game development experiments you've heard of or could imagine. I'm also keen to hear if anyone has tried to use Lean ideas in game development and how it worked for their studio and titles (and what those were). And again, I'm only an amateur with an interest. Thanks for reading, I hope this was helpful? [link] [comments]  |
| How do you make android game video trailers Posted: 25 Oct 2018 03:44 AM PDT Hi I'm trying to make a video of my new game that i can use in Google Play Store. I have tried recording directly from my phone using some screen recorders but the video/audio quality is bad and i want something professional . I saw something about using computer programs but i have no idea how to go about it, Im using a windows computer. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| Different ways to upscale an image Posted: 25 Oct 2018 03:02 AM PDT Hey, so I have seen an article about image size upscaling a while ago, that showcased a few ways to do it - for example, you could stretch it to wanted size, you could tile it, or you could just center it with a colored background - and there was some way involving 'splitting' the image to regions and scaling only some of them, so for example the border parts would remain unchanged while center is stretched or vise versa. Unfortunately, I've lost it and was unable to find it for the whole evening :( Maybe someone is familiar with that method? I would love to read something about it! (or some other way to scale for example health bars so the single-pixel lines on edges don't get scaled) [link] [comments]  |
| How to create UI for all Resolutions using Unity Posted: 25 Oct 2018 10:22 AM PDT |
| how to place markers automatically on a video that has not been recorded by me Posted: 25 Oct 2018 10:20 AM PDT Hello, Let's say that I have a pre-recorded video of someone,like one of my friend,who is moving mouth,head,eyes and so on and I want to place the markers on the face,where the movements are created ; do you know a tool that make this ? Instead,without this tool,I should place the markers by myself,one by one for each frame of the video ? It will take a lot of time. Possibly,if you can suggest to me a free and open source tool that does it. thanks. [link] [comments]  |
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