Planetary Annihilation Dev: 'Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets' |
- Planetary Annihilation Dev: 'Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets'
- Today, I coded a level generator for my game. I was unable to solve a puzzle it generated, so I implemented a solver for that puzzle. It provided an awesome eureka moment.
- Package of (urban themed) RPG tiles, over 480 including characters and animations!
- I've recently begun to look into the development of horse themed video games and why so many games in the genre are just not good. This interview was an interesting insight into what went wrong in mid mid 00s contract work.
- Jonathan Blow (game developer of Braid, The Witness) on what would help him make the switch to Linux for developing video games
- A (almost) for year old struggle for a game.
- Time lapse- making a tough monster for my game- ShadowDreams
- Rendering tricks using animated self-updating textures, with interactive HTML5 examples
- Was Doom 3 a technological feat?
- Should I flip burgers?
- A newbie question (Substance Painter and Zbrush)
- Keep it Together: Encouraging Cooperative Behavior During Co-op Play
- The latest release of Diligent Engine enables Vulkan on MacOS (via MoltenVK)
- Ideas for timetravel mechanics for pet-project multiplayer game
- Marketing For Kickstarter
- I'm Pitching My Solo Game to Publishers - Check Out The Demo Trailer!
- Full of doubt
- What Was the Game Dev Thing You Did in 2018 That You're Most Proud Of?
- How do you support aspect ratios for monitors you don't own?
- Should game over music be inspiring to make you want to continue?
- what is best tutorial when use Vs 2017 community and opentk and c#?
- Looking for a C# option for doing simple 2D graphics
- low poly monochromatic/noir style aesthetic game spitballing
- Game asset creation for my game project
| Planetary Annihilation Dev: 'Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets' Posted: 07 Jan 2019 07:46 AM PST |
| Posted: 06 Jan 2019 05:13 PM PST I am feeling great and have no idea where else to share my story. If inappropriate, feel free to delete/report/whatever. A nice and cold Sunday afternoon. What a great time to kick off another project! So, I had this idea for a puzzle game lying around for a while now, and today, I finally got to get it moving. It doesn't really matter how the puzzle works now, but it is a turn-based puzzle on a grid (think Sokoban) with some set initial and goal state. Each level is basically a graph, where vertices are game states, and edges are moves of pieces. Naturally, I thought that the level could consist of two game states which are the furthest in the graph. The graph however turned out to be oriented, meaning there were moves which could not be undone. After a bit of fiddling around, I managed to implement an algorithm based on BFS that after a while found two game states which were pretty far away from each other. Anyway, I got into testing of the algorithm. I tried some 4x4 grids, and the algorithm gave me pretty easy levels which could be solved just by looking at the level. After about 5 generated levels, I got something else. A level that seemed impossible at first. I could not solve it by just looking at it, so I got a pen and paper, scribbled the level on the paper and got some pieces I could move around the paper. And I tried to solve it. I spent well over 15 minutes on it. And I got frustrated. I had to adjust my code to save the progression so I could see how exactly the algorithm finds the game states. Then I ran it and finally got the correct solution on the screen. I followed it move by move, and then finally, it got to a move which I had completely missed. At that point, I had the biggest eureka moment in a while. "How I didn't think of THAT" was all I could say. I think all people that have played any puzzle games got that feeling at some point. After I solved the level, I just sat there looking at the puzzle in amazement. After whole day of work, I finally got a level, and it was beautiful. There are no pictures - it's wip and looks horrible obviously. Just wanted to share my joy. Thanks for reading and sorry for my sloppy English! P.S. Will not reply for a while, as I can finally go to sleep after having the level solved! EDIT: Good morning everyone! Thanks for your awesome reception. Expected 5 upvotes and 1 comment, and all that jazz! You rock guys. [link] [comments]  |
| Package of (urban themed) RPG tiles, over 480 including characters and animations! Posted: 07 Jan 2019 08:44 AM PST Hello everyone! Due to me being an idiot I lost a whole lot of data when a hard drive failed, this means I can't create any 3D assets at the moment and have to stick with 2D. Here's the first; a pixelart package for RPG games set in an urban environment! It includes 480+ tiles plus 6 characters in four directions with walking animations. License: CC0 (public domain), completely free to use in personal, educational and commercial projects (no permission/credit required). Download includes license file. Consider purchasing one of my bundles or making a donation if you plan to use the assets, those are much appreciated and ensure that there will be plenty of more assets in the future (6 years and counting!) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2019 07:44 AM PST |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2019 12:28 PM PST |
| A (almost) for year old struggle for a game. Posted: 07 Jan 2019 11:41 AM PST This was basically the first game idea that brought me to gamedev and later on defined my career. A simple puzzle that took years to complete. I have started it at least 3 times and always something stood in my way. Finally a half a year after quitting my job and going indie I've found enough resolve to complete it and set it free. Feels kinda sad and gratified at the same time. Playable here . And thank you for noticing this post, it means much. [link] [comments]  |
| Time lapse- making a tough monster for my game- ShadowDreams Posted: 07 Jan 2019 10:07 AM PST |
| Rendering tricks using animated self-updating textures, with interactive HTML5 examples Posted: 07 Jan 2019 11:26 AM PST |
| Was Doom 3 a technological feat? Posted: 07 Jan 2019 12:24 PM PST Looking at ID as a company they seem to put a lot of effort into their games, allowing them to run smoothly on the weakest platforms, creating entirely new methods of rendering. Was Doom 3 included in this? I do remember playing it when it was released and it was completely underwhelming, but did it push any new grounds that had not been done before? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2019 10:06 AM PST I run a micro dev studio called Super Icon. We've made quite a few games over the years – perhaps our most successful/well known title is Life of Pixel/Super Life of Pixel. We've never really done very well at promoting the games (or getting sales). Our last couple of Steam titles sold very few copies, but we have always tried hard to make fun games that people enjoy playing – and on the whole the feedback on the games is usually positive. One result of this is that, as a studio, our revenue has been very low for the last few years – there have been periods without wages or income at all – this also causes a lot of stress and worry. We're also not youngsters anymore – I'm 45, with 3 kids, so it is hard to be blasé about things and keep hoping for the best. As I say though, we try to make good games, to make then as good as we can within the resources available. A new project A year ago, I started making a new game called Strange Days – which is a retro 2D RPG. Influences include Earthbound, Zombies Ate My Neighbours, SNES RPGs and for the sub-games; lots of arcade games, and other classic retro games on various systems, movies – specifically horror, and the 80s. Essentially everything I loved growing up. I dislike grinding in RPGs and battling through one dungeon after another, so I have approached the 'dungeons' as sub-games that you play once you find various video tapes, C64 disks, Spectrum tapes and Arcade machines. The idea was to create something with a lot of fun, wonder and cool references/easter eggs literally crammed throughout. Something unique. The is an overview doc you can download here if you fancy a read: http://www.supericon.co.uk/files/StrangeDays.pdf And I also did an early trailer here: Now, I read the forum rules here and hope I'm not off-topic. I'm not promoting the game or discussing its development – more hoping to discuss the wider picture of running a studio and creating a game and trying to keep afloat. For a while I have thought the best approach for Super Icon is working with a publisher who can help with the whole promotion and marketing side, as well as some financial support. Our most recent titles have done this (Super Life of Pixel and PLATAGO) – certainly without the financial support we got on those, I wouldn't be here now as the studio would have folded long ago. We've just about made ends meet the last 12-months. I also planned my timing to take into account that I would sort a deal out with Strange Days towards the tail-end of the above projects. As many of you may know, it is tough to secure publisher interest – it was a battle with Pixel and PLATAGO – but I did think that Strange Days had more potential, a more marketable concept and genre. BUT… I have shown the game to several different publishers, and it hasn't gelled with them at all. Feedback is that it is too small scope/too simple/retro and one or two said that the production quality was not high enough. I am clearly very close to the project – and more, I see the bigger picture in terms of the ongoing development and ultimate goals for the game through to completion. That said though, I was shocked – I thought the production level was pretty good, certainly for a WIP game. I had a lot of faith in the project – I actually think it is the best thing I've done (or will be once completed). Publisher shift? I have also noticed a shift from all of the publishers that I spoke to towards larger scale projects, with 3D stuff becoming much more popular with them than the more retro 2D indie approach of the past few years. They seem to favour larger teams with larger budgets – up to $500k seems quite a common figure. So, I'm thrown! And perhaps for the first time I am very uncertain how to proceed. We've never really generated enough sales for any game we have released to actually run a studio - even one as small as ours – and the complete lack of interest in the new title makes me wonder, is there a future? As mentioned, I considered our main weakness to be poor promotion for the games, hence the plan to partner up with publishers who are geared up to handle that. What next... I'm considering Kickstarting the game later this month, although as we don't have much of a community in place, I don't anticipate that to be successful. Realistically, I anticipate having to do two Kickstarter rounds – the first one to almost kickstart(!) a community. We'd do a demo and try and gauge what people actually think to the game. I guess the purpose of this long post is to get a little discussion going, to help me figure out what to do next or perhaps even to be told that I make shit games and go and flip burgers in a café or something instead! The last few years have been so incredibly tough, stressful and damaging – is there actually really a future in games for a slightly burned out, approaching middle age indie game developer, or am I kidding myself and it just is never going to work out. Last thing - if anyone would like to try Strange Days, let me know and I can send over a PC build! Thanks for listening! Richard Hill-Whittall [link] [comments]  |
| A newbie question (Substance Painter and Zbrush) Posted: 07 Jan 2019 06:12 AM PST So I am about to finish my human/monster, and I really want to use substance painter (have the program and all) I have a question for those who use both programs. 1: Do you finish your mesh, UV it and import it to Substance Painter to add the colors and details. 2: Or do you add some basic colors and details in ZBrush to finish the rest in substance painter, I know there aren't any right way to do it, it is a personal preference. I think what I want to do is the first method, but will I have troubles painting humanlike skin? I found it quite easy to do in ZBrush. but I want to know if its durable in substance painter? Does substance painter have more possibilities in terms of depths? sorry for this confusing question. [link] [comments]  |
| Keep it Together: Encouraging Cooperative Behavior During Co-op Play Posted: 07 Jan 2019 10:53 AM PST |
| The latest release of Diligent Engine enables Vulkan on MacOS (via MoltenVK) Posted: 07 Jan 2019 08:30 AM PST |
| Ideas for timetravel mechanics for pet-project multiplayer game Posted: 07 Jan 2019 09:31 AM PST I'm a programmer by trade, but I don't normally work on games. I just built a few small ones over the years for personal use, since I always enjoy the technical problems I encounter as I'm building the games, for instance I might built a small prototype because I have a cool idea for procedural generation, or maybe for an AI. Lately, I've been building a game to play with my nephews, as I live far away and don't get to see them very often. The basic game concept I'm working on is that it's a cooperative game with a top down view where you play a character that can walk around, build up walls and shoot hordes of "zombies" (or insects, or some other random simple enemy). I'm thinking of maybe having some sort of upgrade path where you can specialize your character over time, and make it some sort of wave defense game. The "killer" feature of this game is the way I'm handling game state. Game state in this game is an immutable object that gets updated every tick, and in response to user actions. I keep the historical game state in a linked list, and each action in a separate storage. I don't think I have to delve too deeply into the technical details about this, but I don't need to store every frame of the game, instead I just keep some of the frames around, and all of the actions. This allows me to re-create any frame of the game at will, because all the updates are pure functions on an immutable game state. The cool thing about this, is that I have full access to the historical game state of the game. It's equivalent to a quick save on every frame. The main thing I'm using this for now is networking. If I received an action that was supposed to hit frame 350 but I'm currently at frame 400. I can rewind to frame 350, apply the action, and forward back to frame 400, which keeps the clients in sync. In reality, because you'd drop frames if you re-ran 50 actions in a single tick I actually process this "branch" in the background and apply it when it's ready. The reason I'm posting here is because I wanted to hear if anyone has any cool ideas for game mechanics you'd build if you had full access to past gamestates. Here's some ideas I've had so far:
As far as I know, this is somewhat uncharted territory in games. I know some games have implemented limited rewinds, and some games like Braid have a more extensive rewind system, however I don't know any of them that do it in a multiplayer environment, so I'm looking to you for some more inspiration :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2019 10:59 AM PST Hey guys! Recently a colleague and I decided to pick up a shelved prototype of ours, a sort of jousting party game, and to polish it up for release. Because we had it shelved we never really got around to properly marketing it all, but we've gotten very positive feedback from those who do know of the game. We've gotten a lot of awesome ideas from the small community we have, and we'd love to expand the idea further, but before we spend a lot more time on it that we want to gauge interest. To do that, we're now planning to launch a Kickstarter. If it doesn't work, there's no major loss aside from some time, and if it does work we have finding and an audience. The problem is that we have to somehow get an audience to that Kickstarter page in the first place without an existing community. We're good at making visually interesting projects and communicating in a way that gets people to engage, so once people are there, I've got faith in that we can pull it off, but we just don't know how to get people to our page. I was wondering how you'd propose handling this? We don't really want to spend extensive time just marketing the game, because then we'd rather spend that time just working on our longer-term goals, but in all likelihood a Kickstarter without marketing and existing audience is likely to not do great. We're currently looking to gather eight to ten thousand euros, and we have development and Kickstarter experience, but we've always had our existing communities and a larger team. Should we just start trying to drive as much traffic as we can to our Facebook page and my Twitter account? Or should we just do a massive marketing push once the Kickstarter is actually up and running? I'd love to hear your thoughts! [link] [comments]  |
| I'm Pitching My Solo Game to Publishers - Check Out The Demo Trailer! Posted: 07 Jan 2019 08:39 AM PST |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2019 05:38 AM PST Hello there, I'm a quite new developer in Games, and i've published my first Android Game last month (an simple arcade game). To be honest, the results in term of downloads is pretty far from what I expected, but as i've read a couple of posts in this forum, it seems to be a classical situation... By the way, my main problem for now is a silly question that keeps hitting my mind : is my game a good one ? Is it interesting ? I've played a lot with this game while developing it, but since it's published, I'm not playing it anymore ! I can't figure if it's because I'm afraid of bugs I should find or it's because I've already played to much with it, or... it's because it's a bad game ! My relatives find it good, they actually play it, but, you know, they're closed to me and want to please me... Have you ever had the same feeling as a game dev, or it's just me ? [link] [comments]  |
| What Was the Game Dev Thing You Did in 2018 That You're Most Proud Of? Posted: 07 Jan 2019 10:25 AM PST Title says it all- share the part of game development you did in 2018 that you're proud of! I want to see what people accomplished in 2018 and what they're looking forward to for this year. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you support aspect ratios for monitors you don't own? Posted: 07 Jan 2019 05:05 AM PST This is probably a really silly question, but I'm currently developing a game and I want to support as many aspect ratios as possible (it's pixel art so not so much a resolution issue) but I'm really struggling to test them. Is there any workaround other than literally buying a monitor with every aspect ratio I'm trying to support? I can't really afford multiple ultra wides just for the purpose of making sure the UI looks good. [link] [comments]  |
| Should game over music be inspiring to make you want to continue? Posted: 06 Jan 2019 11:10 PM PST I know game overs should be unique like for example. In the Batman Arkham games, you get a villain who taunts you when you get a game over. Then some game over's are generic that just asks you to continue if you want to. Should the game over screen be motivating with you to continue or how should it be used in the game, besides getting a game over? [link] [comments]  |
| what is best tutorial when use Vs 2017 community and opentk and c#? Posted: 07 Jan 2019 01:13 PM PST i can not found tutorial for me. i want make generator of 3d model. [link] [comments]  |
| Looking for a C# option for doing simple 2D graphics Posted: 07 Jan 2019 05:34 AM PST So I'm aware of MonoGame, SharpDx, etc, but these are all significant overkill for what I need, and what's more, none of them work over the remote desktop protocol. I'm just wanting to do some very simple 2D graphics, and it doesn't even have to run at a particularly high frame rate (even 20FPS is fine). But most importantly, it has to work over the RDP, which means it has to be software rendering. I have played with a WritableBitmap with some degree of success, but was wondering if anyone had any other ideas? Obviously, this isn't for any sort of "real" game or anything. Just basically an exercise to keep me from forgetting how to use C#. [link] [comments]  |
| low poly monochromatic/noir style aesthetic game spitballing Posted: 07 Jan 2019 12:59 PM PST I'll be working a game over the course of the upcoming semester and I can use some help to figure out the "game". I have bite-sized ideas but nothing cohesive in terms of gameplay or narrative and I would like to spitball some ideas. I'm thinking about it being some sort of cat and mouse catch the bad guy type of thing. -the game would be black in white -you could play as an investigator -characters can be created with the use of non-animated-still silhouettes, other objects/props would be low poly -dialog could be displayed using speech or thought bubbles any ideas for a game spring to mind? https://i.redd.it/p3r5g3p1d2921.png [link] [comments]  |
| Game asset creation for my game project Posted: 07 Jan 2019 12:55 PM PST Hello, I'm a 3D artist creating an epic dungeon crawler, working title "Project DV", here some asset creation for the game made with Blender 2.8: [link] [comments]  |
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