Should I refuse to crunch? |
- Should I refuse to crunch?
- Our game dev group made this kiosk software, and we're opening it up for others!
- Should I be worried about this clause in an indie game competition?
- Common problems when translating games into Japanese
- I'm having trouble with level design
- How to "Sign" your exe? Any ezpz guide out there?
- I'm starting new service for app developers and need your advice
- New SDK to easily add Alexa as a voice controller to Unity games
- First Developer Interview!
- What Are Good Examples Of A "What If" Campaign Mode?
- How Halo 3 Builds Large-Scale AI Battles | AI and Games
- Does Admob Mediation take into account the other adnetworks I am using to determine its stats like ARPU.
- Making 100$ as a hobbyist?
- Thinking about switching to the video game industry. Need advice!
- What would be the best service to host a game server?
- How to set a correct scope?
- What's the right tool for building my village builder AI?
- To look forward, or to look back?
- Downsides to start streaming development early, in general & especially in regards to finding a publisher?
- Music for Games - Pro Bono!
- Hey you game developers. We Created a Landslide sound effect by recording a variety of Doors and processing them! We hope it can inspire you to try some sound design yourself :)
- How to collect a team and get funded VS doing it all on your own?
- Texture rendered correctly on one hardware while it is rendered with neighboring pixels on another.
| Posted: 21 Oct 2018 10:16 PM PDT Long post/rant - this question is circumstantial, but general answers are welcome. I need advice from people more experienced in this industry than me. I came into games over a year ago to work at a small independent studio, owned by our boss and a group of investors behind them. We have a deadline to release the game that we are falling behind on, so the investors demanded that we crunch without any extra pay to "save costs". The plan is that roughly half the time between now and the deadline will be crunch, but I personally think the deadline is too ambitious and will result in more demands closer to the time. Our boss is pretty reasonable and has been nice to work under, except for one thing they said one day - we were discussing crunching to speed things up at a meeting, and I said that I thought it was bad and we should try to avoid it. Later they said, not aimed at anyone directly, something along the lines of "If you're not prepared to make sacrifices, let me know so I can hire someone else. Clearly the indie scene isn't for you" (note this is paraphrasing, but their tone was condescending). We started the crunch period last month, and the investors are offering equity as compensation for our extra hours. However, we are not allowed to sell or get dividends from them until after the investors recover their investment, which could be 2 years time. That means up to 2 years of intermittent crunching without any sort of compensation, and I don't like that. The thing is, our employment contracts only say we're paid for 40 hour work weeks and say nothing about overtime, so I think I'm allowed to refuse to crunch. I also know trying to replace me now would cost them a lot of money and time. But based on what my boss said that one time, I'm worried they'll resent me for it, or worst case, argue that I can't say no or try pressure me to resign so they can hire someone who will crunch. On the other hand they have seemed pretty nice and have been asking us about how we've been handling the crunch so far etc, so really I have no idea how they'll take it. I also worry about what the rest of our studio will think of me, as they all seem okay with doing the extra hours. I'm starting to feel bitter because I know I'm worth more than what I'm currently being paid, yet I'm being asked to give more. Though I could get paid more somewhere else, there's nothing else like this exact project we're working on out there, and I really care about this game. I don't want to do this crunch, to give up my free time and quality of life and health for mostly the company's gain instead of my own. But I do really want to see this game shipped, its something I want to play and see put out in the world. So, do I risk the consequences of saying no and putting myself first? or should I bite the bullet for 1-2 years and hope it pays off? Edit: RE the "the indie scene isn't for you" statement, while they did say it, and it did bother me, most of their other actions in managing us haven't been as brutal as this sounds. They've often been thoughtful. I think they were either just having a bad day, or they're a nice manager that expects sacrifice as the minimum. [link] [comments]  |
| Our game dev group made this kiosk software, and we're opening it up for others! Posted: 22 Oct 2018 11:03 AM PDT We're currently getting ready to present our group's games to thousands of attendees at an upcoming comic con. To facilitate this we've developed a small 'kiosk' program to present our games, and get feedback. The software's currently in alpha, and its on github! More info: http://tucsongamedev.com/?p=718 The Github page: https://github.com/ajseward/TGDKiosk We are interested in hearing any tips or ideas. This is our biggest event we've done and if any other groups have done similar things we'd love to hear your experience! [link] [comments]  |
| Should I be worried about this clause in an indie game competition? Posted: 22 Oct 2018 06:37 AM PDT From the Fun & Serious Game Festival which used to be called AzPlay: " Participation in this event implies the transfer of the right to distribute the selected video games for an unlimited period of time on whatever media and format Fun&Serious Game Festival may choose or to showcase them at festival events. " This to me means that the game festival can, from here on out, distribute our game for whatever reason, for the rest of time. And transfer of right would imply we are forfeiting our own right to do so? Surely not right? I thought maybe the 'transfer of rights' is a legal term which doesn't take away those rights from the original owner, but Googling seems to imply exactly that. I feel like we should be giving "a non-exclusive license to distribute media related to the game" and "license to distribute the game to judges of the festival", rather than this clause. Should I be worried? [link] [comments]  |
| Common problems when translating games into Japanese Posted: 22 Oct 2018 12:04 PM PDT |
| I'm having trouble with level design Posted: 22 Oct 2018 02:30 AM PDT Hello, fellow devs. I'm afraid this is going to devolve into a rant, as I've been fighting with this issue for the last couple of weeks and I'm frustrated, so I'd like to share it with people who can understand. Thus, I'm flairing it as a discussion, because the answers are inevitably going to be open-ended and subjective. Excuse me if this post is inappropriate and tangential, but I will discuss real, practical issues if you'd like to skip ahead to Paragraph 3. I'm making a horror game in Unity 3D - how original, eh. It's something I've always wanted to do and kept a few ideas in the drawer up until I had the necessary skill to make it half decent and not of shovelware quality. 5 years later, my modeling is passable, my programming works, and I have invested in Substance Painter to compensate for my sorry hand texturing skills. Since this is the first time I'm going out of my comfort zone and trying to complete a full game, I want everything to be as perfect as it can be coming from a solo dev. Thus, before I even opened up the engine, I spent a few months planning, writing some documents and testing mechanics. Gameplay wise, it's a 'walking sim with Silent Hill-esque backtracking and puzzles'. I have finished most of the coding part that is essential for making it playable, and I have written a good part of the story. I'm now writing a freeform storyboard that reads a bit like a walkthrough, so I can make my levels and test the game in action. And it's proving quite difficult. I'm going for a modular workflow - parts of the level are going to change and I want to be able to do this easily - so for the first pass, I'm prototyping my levels with Probuilder. The first level consists of an apartment building, with 2 apartments, 2 floors, a stairwell and a basement being enterable, along with an elevator that's more of a special case. The player will have to go back and forth for a while, gathering items and solving puzzles, before they enter the elevator and get transferred to a different scene. The issues I'm running into are deciding on dimensions and perfecting the level. DimensionsSo far, I've only built levels with arbitrary scales, as I was designing non-realistic games. Naive as I was, I went and gathered real-life building measurements, and built according to 1 unit = 1 meter on the grid. I started out with my room as a test, which is around 4x3x4 m. In real-life, it feels spacious. In game, it feels like solitary confinement. My character avatar also has humanline dimensions and a height of 1.8 m, but even if I adjust his walk speed to a crawl, it still feels small and tight. Pushing through my OCD, I just made his apartment - which is supposed to be small - around 100 square meters. It works in practice, but it just feels wrong to me as a designer. Level LayoutI thought I had a live imagination, but apparently level design wants to shatter my dreams. I just can't decide how to layout each individual room. I'm aware that this is influenced by the gameplay and the story, yet I don't really know what to make of that. For example, I'm putting a lot of effort on the basement, as it is a central place in the plot. It obviously has to be dark and menacing, however I can't achieve this feel at the greyboxing level. A specific part of the story dictates that, when the player descends using the stairs and opens the basement door, they see an inset in the wall across. Director-wise, it has to grab their attention. All I can think when I walk through the level is that it takes 5 steps to reach it. Which takes me back to the problem with dimensions. I play and watch all those nice horror games like Visage, with interesting level layouts, where it seems like everything was planned and executed to perfection. I'm too afraid that I will prototype and build my level, only for it to be boring and dull. To close up, I'm aware that the issues I'm facing might not stem from practical problems, however I genuinely am disheartened by my inability to move forward. As in, it is literally ruining my day as I type. I'm extremely enthusiastic about this project and, while it's not an original endeavor by any means, there's a story I want to share with people through this game. As such, I want it to be, if not perfect, a satisfying experience. Thank you for reading! [link] [comments]  |
| How to "Sign" your exe? Any ezpz guide out there? Posted: 21 Oct 2018 09:42 PM PDT Signing your exe shows it's legit and doesn't give people hard time opening it - and it doesn't trigger antiviruses (well, less chance), it seems. Anyone have a good guide out there? The ones I initially found on Google were confusing AF, low-level, and dated. I could use a nice high-level guide with simple instructions. [link] [comments]  |
| I'm starting new service for app developers and need your advice Posted: 22 Oct 2018 12:12 PM PDT Hello! A few years ago we launched a service called FewReview that allows to buy reviews for App Store and Google Play. Since this business is "grey" we decided to make a pivot (change the business model but use things that we learned). We've been thinking about different services to create. Since we have lots of users who are doing tasks (review apps and write reviews) we thought we can do business like Human Intelligence Tasks (like Amazon MTurk or Figure Eight) or services that help to test apps (like User Testing or test IO) After considering the options we decided to go with another alternative. We decided to make a service that allows developers to outsource replying to reviews and analyzing them. We decided to build this service because we have the biggest expertise. We have launched recently and signed up a few clients. Now we are working hard to make the best possible service. More information on how it is working can be here. I would very much appreciate your feedback on our service. Do you need it? If yes will you use us? If you don't need it or you don't want to use us please tell me why? I would really love to hear your feedback. It will help us grow. [link] [comments]  |
| New SDK to easily add Alexa as a voice controller to Unity games Posted: 22 Oct 2018 12:04 PM PDT |
| Posted: 21 Oct 2018 05:39 PM PDT Hey all! I am going to have an interview in over one week for a Unity Developer position, it is my first interview for a game dev position and I am very nervous. What kind of questions or tasks should I expect to answer or do? [link] [comments]  |
| What Are Good Examples Of A "What If" Campaign Mode? Posted: 22 Oct 2018 11:53 AM PDT And are the changes big and/or small? I kind of need inspiration as I might want to do one. I want to avoid making a lazy one like "Nightmares Mode" from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. And is there a point to include one even if it's not canon? [link] [comments]  |
| How Halo 3 Builds Large-Scale AI Battles | AI and Games Posted: 22 Oct 2018 11:49 AM PDT |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2018 11:42 AM PDT I am using firebase with admob mediation however one thing that is not clear to me is that data that firebase and admob will show. Do they show the ARPU and other stats based on all the networks that I am using? or does it just use its own network to calculate those stats? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2018 11:36 AM PDT Hey all, Please let me ask this question which is nagging me for a while. I've started creating little toys ~4 years ago, participated a number of game jams and contributed to some open-source projects. Problem is, that as I am an engineer, during these projects I usually became obsessed with some engineering problem, instead of working on the actual game - which never gets finished. Familiar phenomenon to many I suppose. So the idea would be to move away from this approach, and define success on the economic field, rather than the engineering side. Obviously, not to make a living on it, but a nominal amount, let's say 100$ worth of a game. For that, some yet non-existent skills of entrepreneurship and marketing needed to be developed, which is quite a valuable experience and exciting in itself. As I'm a student on the 1st world periphery, there's not a whole lot of funds at disposal. My art skills are bearable with some simple styles, music is the other hobby, coding professionally, so no need to pay for those. I could dedicate the same sum (100$) to marketing/ads, and still consider the endeavour successful if I can break even. The whole project ideally would not take more than 4 months, with around 10-15 dedicated hours a week. I would like to ask your opinion on the matter. Is this possible with the current game market circumstances? Which are the optimal genres for something like this? And most importantly, did you have similar experience? How does a 100$ net income game look like? Thank you for reading :) [link] [comments]  |
| Thinking about switching to the video game industry. Need advice! Posted: 22 Oct 2018 11:19 AM PDT This is a copy of what I posted in r/cscareerquestions, but I wanted to see your opinions and advice on this. I am currently a software developer at a non-gaming company, working in Java. I've been thinking about switching to the video game industry as that was my passion that got me into computer science in the first place. My plan is to spend the next two or three years working at my current company, while on the side study video game concepts and programming, such as developing in Unreal Engine, character modelling, level design, etc. As said before, video games are what got me into computer science. I have developed small app games in Java, Android Studio, and Unity. I am currently learning how to develop in Unreal Engine with C++ and creating models in Blender. My question is, how difficult would it be to get a job as a software engineer in the video game industry if my experience is in non-gaming software development and with possibly one Unreal Engine game (C++) and one Android game (Java) in my portfolio? Thanks! Note: This is in the US. [link] [comments]  |
| What would be the best service to host a game server? Posted: 22 Oct 2018 10:26 AM PDT I'm an indie dev and I really want to get into multiplayer games. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2018 04:11 AM PDT What are general guidelines when setting up scope of your project. Is it better to set yourself time in which you want to finish the project and constrain the scope around it or do you go in way of finding what is the minimum of the game you would be satisfied with and estimate time by guessing how long each part would take. [link] [comments]  |
| What's the right tool for building my village builder AI? Posted: 21 Oct 2018 06:45 PM PDT Hi, I'm currently playing around with writing code for a village builder game. I don't plan to make a finished game, I just enjoy the task of implementing concepts of it. One part I'm stuck with now, due to lack of experience, is how I want to structure my AI code that controls workers and NPCs and monsters later on. Initially, I just had a class Building needs resource This is a good example of a task because it has a bunch of things that make it difficult. I read about state machines, behavior trees (they seem awesome), command stacks and so on and I opted to try the simpler concepts first but they don't seem to work. The most recent attempt was using a command stack, and very low-level commands broken into all the single steps, think The first problem: If I break down tasks into actions, I can't easily cancel task sequences. If the initial The next problem: My storage system is a bit more complex, so before doing the task at all, a worker will reserve resources from the wood storage for example so he can be sure there is some resource when he gets there, and he also promises the target building the delivery, so no other worker tries to do the same task. But that means I have state that outlives any single I then thought about just storing a stack of All in all, it seems more like I need behavior trees but searching this subreddit brought some topics where the advice was to avoid them unless really necessary because they are overkill and tedious to use. So finally my question then - is the above task an example for a situation where behavior trees are the best tool? Am I missing an obvious simple way to cleanly solve this? [link] [comments]  |
| To look forward, or to look back? Posted: 22 Oct 2018 05:52 AM PDT Hello. I'm currently at a crossroads. I released my first commercial game 5 years ago and it's been one hell of a hard slog, but I'm finally at a point where financially I'm doing well. During those 5 years I think a lot of the direction for my game dev decisions was financial because I was flat broke for most of those years. I would make new games to increase my revenue, and update my old games to stem the negative reviews. But now I guess I don't have to look back and update my old games any more because their reviews are decent, but there is something within me that I do want to update them, make them better, make them something I can be more proud of. Financially though there's no incentive for me to do it. If anything I'd be losing money because I could spend that time making a new game. In fact I have so many games out now that I could easily see myself spending 50% of my time just updating my old games rather than making new ones. But I have a lot of ideas for new games and to some extent feel my old games are an anchor holding me back. Focusing on new games may also allow me to try making games I would never normally make because they most probably wouldn't sell. I guess the problem is one of time, but I simply like making games by myself instead of a team. It is a conundrum that's been haunting me this past year. Whenever I'm working on updating an old game I'm thinking I should be working on a new game instead, but when I'm working on a new game I'm thinking about how much better my old games would be if I spent some more time working on them. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2018 09:26 AM PDT Hey there! Some quick facts for context:
It looks like many indies try to start streaming and getting the word out there as soon as possible. I've also heard about starting too early being detrimental, as any initial interest is soon wearing off when something playable is too far away (which might be compensated to a degree when doing early access?). I wonder how Indie Game Publishers might see this and I'd like to hear your general thoughts on and experiences with that topic. Thanks! Edit: Typo [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2018 09:22 AM PDT Hey all, I'm a multi-instrumentalist with more than 10 years experience in playing live shows to radio programming to technical video background music. I'd really love to get involved with an indie game and add some music to it (my specialty is funk/jazz but versatile!). I'm not looking for anything besides name credit in the game and the chance to support an indie dev project. Does anyone know how I could get involved with this/any resources to peruse? I feel like there have got to be some really talented game developers who just don't have the time, experience or $ to put together a high-quality sound. Thanks very much! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Oct 2018 09:12 AM PDT |
| How to collect a team and get funded VS doing it all on your own? Posted: 22 Oct 2018 08:59 AM PDT So I come to you all for advice. If anyone could help, it would be fantastic. I'm currently on my last semester, graduating with an undergrad degree in New Media (I double majored with Psychology, but I already have that diploma). I want to make a game. Talking about the specifics would take a while - it's not a game that easily fits in categories, either. I call it a "mechanical story game"....either way, for the purpose of this question, just know it's a 3d environment (not open world), story-driven, with a new talking mechanic, as well as some puzzles. I've got a website coded up with the specifics of the plot, characters, world, gameplay, design, etc. The scope of the project isn't ridiculous, but it's also not small either. Myself, I have skills in 3d modeling, animation, design, and script writing. I have really minimal programming knowledge, and having tried Unreal's Blueprints, I'm still at a loss. I want to make this game. I want to make it something fierce. I'll do whatever it takes, and I'll make the sacrifices. I've made some small demo games before with game maker and some basic stuff in unreal, but nothing on this scale. The thing is, I don't think I can really do it alone. I'd really like to collect a team together. But my attempts to rally some talent from my college haven't worked. I'm not an experienced game developer. I don't have a studio, other talent, or money. I just have myself, a ton of design documents and my own basic concept art, 3d models of characters, scripts and level designs. I know it sounds silly, but this game means a lot to me. I want to see it finished and I'll do whatever it takes. But I don't know where to start. How do I recruit anyone without a company and money? How do I get a company and money without any team? Any help would be incredibly appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Texture rendered correctly on one hardware while it is rendered with neighboring pixels on another. Posted: 22 Oct 2018 08:34 AM PDT Hi there... I made a 2d game using libgdx. I am just rendering TextureRegions on the screen. The game renders perfectly fine on my machine and many others without any problem. However on an old machine, the textures seems to be shifted by one pixel to the left and upwords. This results in artifacts appearing with every sprite in the game. For example: https://imgur.com/a/zBsv1qL you see a line next to the far star appearing which belongs to an adjacent sprite. The code is exactly the same, on both machines. Any idea why I am getting this issue? yours sincerely [link] [comments]  |
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