The definitive guide to marketing |
- The definitive guide to marketing
- Will It ever end? — Behind The Music of an Interactive Story
- Behaviour tree logic structure
- Lesson 2 on my series on how to use Vroid Studio is up. Includes the face editor and basic UV editing.
- Technical debt… or investment? (why messy code is sometimes better left as it is)
- An Open Letter To Game Developers From America's Largest Labor Organization
- Basic shader questions.
- Beginner looking for advice
- RPG Themed Sound Effects - CC BY 4.0
- Screenshot Saturday #420 - Hidden Gems
- Tips on how to make 2d platformer graphics/ ground platforms that are arched, irregular shapes
- Your software Recommendations for making trailers (preferably free)?
- Kickstarter or direct to Steam Early Access?
- My game's alpha is on!
- Blender 2.8 Addon Development Tutorial for Beginners
- Freelance sites?
- Am I In It For The Wrong Reasons?
- I made a video about what I learned while making a short shooter. I talk about feedback loops, combining obstacles and some other stuff too!
- This is an experimental version of a feature I implemented.. "TraumaMode"
- Where Utility AI and finite state machines meet, and diverge
- I need your feedback! I host a website where I help indie devs market their games!
- Is there a way to get marketing budget loans for self publishing mobile games?
- What are some good tutorial you guys recommended for kids with absolutely no experience?
- Marketing always seems to be the hard part
| The definitive guide to marketing Posted: 16 Feb 2019 05:24 AM PST |
| Will It ever end? — Behind The Music of an Interactive Story Posted: 16 Feb 2019 05:48 AM PST Hi! It's me again! A couple of days ago I told you about how I made an interactive story for iOS and got feature by App Store. Today I'd like you to meet Ivan Sysoev — the composer who made this beautiful soundtrack for my story. Now he's gonna share some insights about music production. https://i.redd.it/wbwpbdnizqg21.png When you are listening to a soundtrack of a great movie you may think: "Yeah, that music fits the movie perfectly, nothing can be better than this, this is exactly how it should sound like". But when the things come to you and someone asks you to create a sound of a story, all you have is a blank stave.Interactive story "Will it ever end?" is a really interesting project from a composer's perspective. Deep storyline, no text or voiceover, combined with a player's unpredictability. Sounds like a good challenge for a composer, isn't it? Working with a good game director make your days much easier.Christophe did an amazing job. It's not only about an idea of a project or getting it featured by Apple. It's also about how he explained to me every little thing.He didn't talk a lot about what he wants to hear, but about emotions the music should create. He described a story, showed me some concepts and told me: "Do something".Of course he gave a couple of references to think about, but he didn't ask me to copy anything. He wanted me to tell the same story in a way I see it.As a player you can do whatever you want — the music will adapt. It was very important to make both music and game work together. I wanted music to respond to any sentence the game tells to a player. One of the first things I did on this project was a music scenario. I took all episodes of the game and matched them to pieces of the music. When the game goes on the music changes too.The problem was that the player is unpredictable. You never know if he wants to stay in current scene to look at something. Or to run as fast as possible making scenes switch rapidly. To solve this problem I scored transitions for every single episode. So when narration takes a step, the transition starts to play and the music takes a step too.That was pretty easy to do with the Routine theme because it consists of short musical phrases. But every phrase of the Love theme was too long. So I made several transitions for every phrase: no matter if episode switches at the middle of a phrase or at the beginning, music changes smoothly. These tricks made the music feel much more responsive to the storytelling.Tasks Christophe gave me were both easiest and hardest I've ever gotten When the main character meets a girl he becomes a spectator of his own life. To experience the best and brightest moments all he needs to do is to go forward. We wanted Love theme to sound cinematic, even a bit naive. Jazz was the answer, I didn't even need to think about something else. With strings and flutes Love theme began to sound like a 30's movie soundtrack, like a musical. Routine theme was a really tricky task. Task I've been given went something like this: music should be repetitive and put a pressure on a player. So Christophe asked me to do things I thought were unacceptable for a game soundtrack. I didn't know what to do, so I recorded some sad piano cheesy tracks and send it to Christophe. He told me: "Maybe you should think of a different way, eh?" It was a polite form of "Go be sentimental somewhere else" i guess. https://i.redd.it/s5ym1kirzqg21.png Mick Gordon said: "Change the process — change the outcome". That's exactly what I didI decided to change the process and find a different way. If I can't convey routine and depression with melody, I should find a sound for them and improvise.I took a default synth preset and stared to stack effects. I didn't know what would happen if I touch a keyboard — and the result was extraordinary awful. But somehow I've noticed something interesting in this sonic disaster. I continued to turn knobs and stack effects till I picked crackling and clicking sounds out of this chaos. I added simple bass and drum lines and send the result to Christophe. "Ye, that's cool, much better" he said.After that I scored some synth lines. But the thing is — I scored them in different time signatures. One line was three-eight, other one — two-four and so on. That made music much more interesting to listen to: you can focus on one synth line and hear "one-two-three-one-two-three" rhythm, or focus on another one and hear a "one-two-one-two". As a result Routine theme sounds repetitive and depressing, just like the author wanted. But it's not boring or hard to perceive because the core of the music is not a melody or a harmony, It's a bunch of weird sounds placed in different time signatures. Mixing unmixable things was the main goal of a musical storytelling. The music tells an interesting thing about character's path back to the routine. When the character starts to live with his wife and gets back to his daily tasks the Love theme is still playing. In these scenes he doesn't even hear surrounding sounds, all he can hear and think about is Love.As a routine comes back and graphics become more and more pixelated, the Love theme starts to transform. Instruments stop playing one after another and weird sounds from Routine theme are sneaking from behind. We don't hear full Routine — only the core of it. It becomes more and more noticeable while the Love theme moves to the background. When the routine finally comes back, every bit of animation, every color disappears. All we can hear now is a core of the Routine. At this point nothing else exists for the character. We felt the story deeply. And we wanted the player to do the same I like the way Christophe hid the message. You should do something different to find it. To break the cycle of the game you should break your own gameplay cycle. If you make the character go backwards, he finds a balloon — a symbol of relationship between the character and his wife. He inflates the balloon and gives it to her. And the things become a bit better, just a bit. This story is not actually about love and routine. It's about working on your own life. Sometimes you should behave differently just to see your own life in color. These are the things that keep life bright.From my side, I expressed it with music that plays when both the character and a player make a right decision. When they find that balloon, routine theme disappears and the Love theme starts to play, but in a melancholic, nostalgic way.To achieve real success you have to work togetherWhile I worked on this project I used everything to tell the story: creating interactive music design, building emotions, experimenting with a sound, live recording and synthesis. I'm grateful to the artist for creating concept art which helped me to find a sound that fits the atmosphere and to Christophe, who let me retell his story with a music. It's really amazing to work with a team in which everyone feels the way you feel. Thank you! [link] [comments]  |
| Behaviour tree logic structure Posted: 16 Feb 2019 10:08 AM PST Hi all, Currently I'm a full time software dev who's dabbled in developing games over the years as there's always been that desire lingering in my mind but recently I've tried to commit to it a bit more. I work full time with .NET so always made sense to go with Unity and I wrote my dissertation in XNA. I'm currently using Behaviour Designer for unity and struggling to understand a decent pattern for separating certain aspects of transform logic. One thing I feel like is severely lacking is code examples from more complex implementations. For instance, currently transform logic is handled inside the behaviour tree tasks themselves which works really well at isolating logic to only the task that is currently running but struggles when you incorporate reactive logic - for example movement that is calculated as a result of a collision. For a simple example: A characters movement is controlled within a task to move towards an enemy While still moving an enemy attacks the player and causes knockback, changing his position Now you're in a situation where two different places are trying to modify a objects transform, one in the behaviour task and one in what's reacting to collision. If I move each of these so they're both controlled from the same place I then loose the separation of concern I thought was relatively neat. Anyone know any best practices with this stuff? I could definitely hack it in communicating the gameobjects state (hasKnockback etc etc..) but that just feels like a recipe for a big mess. Any help or a point in the right direction will be much appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2019 07:18 AM PST |
| Technical debt… or investment? (why messy code is sometimes better left as it is) Posted: 16 Feb 2019 08:33 AM PST |
| An Open Letter To Game Developers From America's Largest Labor Organization Posted: 15 Feb 2019 12:52 PM PST |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2019 03:26 AM PST I'm having some trouble visualising how shaders work. A shader in most engines is a component on a material renderer on the object, but from a programming perspective in the vertex and fragment shader you write code as if you were the camera processing a scene. How are shaders treated if they're bound to objects? Are objects with different shaders processed individually by each camera and layered together into the final camera image? I'm sorry to sound like a twat and asking what sounds like a nonsense question but I think I have a big missunderstanding about how shaders behave. Another question I have is what form is the GPU expecting vertex data in, I understand you need to pass vertex world positions through a matrix that transforms them to have the correct depth and position but what does that really mean? Are verticies normalised to match the viewport or something else entirely? I don't really have enough information to ask the right questions in the right way so I hope you guys will bare with me. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2019 08:36 AM PST Hello! I am currently developing a video game that I plan to use Unreal 4 with. I have read in some forums that Nvidia Hair works is available with this engine, however I am an absolute beginner in this matter and can't make heads or tails of the tutorials. I was curious what kind of assets I would need in order to render realistic hair in a game engine. I already have a fully textured model, with removable hair (just in case the Hair Works thing backfires) . Should I model the hair in something like Maya or Blender, apply physics to it and then import it into the game engine? Or does the game engine render it on its own? Some very detailed (like, complete-idiot detailed) tutorials would be very welcome. [link] [comments]  |
| RPG Themed Sound Effects - CC BY 4.0 Posted: 16 Feb 2019 10:28 AM PST Howdy game developers! If any of you are working on a role playing themed video game, maybe you can find use for some of these sound effects. This pack includes 55+ sounds such as spells, coins, item equipping, swords and more! Creative Commons BY 4.0. Link: [link] [comments]  |
| Screenshot Saturday #420 - Hidden Gems Posted: 15 Feb 2019 08:01 PM PST Share your progress since last time in a form of screenshots, animations and videos. Tell us all about your project and make us interested! The hashtag for Twitter is of course #screenshotsaturday. Note: Using url shorteners is discouraged as it may get you caught by Reddit's spam filter. Bonus question: Do you believe the quality of storytelling in video games has improved over the last decade? [link] [comments]  |
| Tips on how to make 2d platformer graphics/ ground platforms that are arched, irregular shapes Posted: 16 Feb 2019 06:49 AM PST Hello Devs, I'm an indie game developer and I typically do all my own graphics on games. I'm no artist, so it tends to take up a lot of my time to build out graphics that I'm satisfied with. I love platformers, but I'm not a fan of tile based style with flat platforms, I like to add rounded slopes and irregular shapes when possible. Curious what other game developers do to build efficient graphics for these different shapes. Any tips would be hugely appreciated!!! I'm a Unity developer also if anyone has any specific strategies for that engine. Thank you and happy Dev'ing! [link] [comments]  |
| Your software Recommendations for making trailers (preferably free)? Posted: 16 Feb 2019 12:34 PM PST I would like to make my small marketing vids a bit more polished and will need to sort out doing a trailer soon and I'm curious what software people recommend here for recording footage and then editing it into a trailer? I've been using Camtasia for a while now and the framerate of the recordings and when publishing the vids seems to be all over the place at times and can't record at 60fps so I'd just like something a little more pro looking. [link] [comments]  |
| Kickstarter or direct to Steam Early Access? Posted: 16 Feb 2019 12:27 PM PST I've been making this game for close to 9 months now and it's close to being fully playable. It's a 3d farming game, sort of a cross between Farming Simulator, Stardew Valley (not as 'cutesy') and the original Sim Farm game. I've been a hardcore gamer all my life and in my own biased opinion I think it's going to be one fun game. I plan for it to be THE best farming game out there. The question now is - should I make my own Kickstarter campaign or just sell directly on Steam Early Access? I have no fan community or anything like that. I'm not exactly a first time developer, having made a dozen plus games for mobile platforms (they were profitable but not super famous), and now I'm moving to PC and console platforms because I want to make more serious games. I will be putting my game up on Steam sooner or later but I'm just thinking about whether diverting any of my time and effort towards a Kickstarter campaign would be worth it. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2019 12:26 PM PST Hello guys. After a little bit more than a year, my game's "Project Aeon" alpha version is out! If you are willing to try, please, donwload it from the link below. It was made entirely by myself, both programming and pixel art. My friend made all the songs. Also, if you wanna see more about the progress, the game's facebook page is @projectaeongame. Thank you for the time to read this! [link] [comments]  |
| Blender 2.8 Addon Development Tutorial for Beginners Posted: 16 Feb 2019 10:08 AM PST |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2019 09:17 AM PST Sorry for the silly question as this probably has been already asked multiple times, but I was wondering if anybody here happens to know of any good sites where one might be able to some freelance programming work. The "usual" freelance sites I've seen usually have pretty low pay or rather small projects like helping somebody with their prototype / homework ^_^" Was wondering if there's any sort of professional / specific site for such things somebody here might be aware of ? [link] [comments]  |
| Am I In It For The Wrong Reasons? Posted: 15 Feb 2019 04:41 PM PST Why do you make the games you make? I used to be in a band, and would occasionally write lyrics, and a good part of the music. When I was writing music and lyrics, making a song, I wrote lyrics that meant something to me, and put it to music I thought people would enjoy. I didn't DISLIKE our music per se, but having created it, I never felt like I enjoyed it quite as much as our fans. Do you think I'll run into that weird limbo of, when the game is finished, I won't enjoy it, because I created it? The magician isn't amazed by his own trick, because he knows how it works, y'know? Do you ever, for fun or casual enjoyment, play your games? Should I give up? Should I make this game in case other people might enjoy it? Am I just experiencing creative stress and looking for a reason to quit? Jesus Christ, development isn't even the hardest part of developing a game so far, it's all these crippling, invasive thoughts. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2019 10:47 AM PST |
| This is an experimental version of a feature I implemented.. "TraumaMode" Posted: 16 Feb 2019 06:44 AM PST |
| Where Utility AI and finite state machines meet, and diverge Posted: 16 Feb 2019 05:30 AM PST Hi hi, I'm experimenting with utility AIs, mostly because general wisdom seems to be pointing me to them. I really like what I've done with them so far, and they seem like a cool solution to produce (even really simple) dynamic behaviour. But I just have this question which is probably a few steps simpler than the nitty-gritty - most discussions, analyses, and tutorials I've read treat the concept of utility AI as basically a fuzzy rating system for a finite state machine's next choice of state. Is that either too grandiose or too oversimplified an explanation? It seems like it would fit that description in a casual example - say, The Sims, where an AI is following the billboard for hunger - but then is interrupted by a fire, and putting that out is rated as a higher utility source. So the Sim switches into the fire-solving state. However, it's usually categorised - and I'm slightly aware that this might be an essentially meaningless linguistic question - together, or contrasted with FSMs, Goal Oriented Action Programming, and Action Trees as more-or-less discrete AI models. It seems to me the whole point of utility is that it's a novel way for AIs to understand the game state, while the other three things are tools you might use to implement the behaviour you want. Can anyone with more experience shed some light on this? [link] [comments]  |
| I need your feedback! I host a website where I help indie devs market their games! Posted: 15 Feb 2019 03:31 PM PST Hey there! I'm Luke, I'm an ex-indie game developer from Melbourne, Australia (https://twitter.com/LukeWillAU). I've been running the website GameFeatured (https://gamefeatured.com) for almost 2 years now, where I've been trying to offer 100% free marketing advice and resources to indie game devs that don't go with a publisher. I've got to admit, it's hard to keep going... I've been constantly providing interviews from other developers/studios and learning resources on the basics of indie game marketing but nobody seems to be actually showing any sort of interest in the material. I understand that as a developer, marketing is so boring and uninteresting - but I also understand that it's 100% necessary to get any traffic to your game and make any sales/downloads. I'm asking this community, if I could simply just get a few of you to provide me feedback on what I could do to improve GameFeatured as a free marketing resource, that may actually save it from being laid to rest. I'm so passionate about video game production for independent developers/studios and I feel like I'm running out of runway to support themselves and their games. Thank you all so much <3 -Luke [link] [comments]  |
| Is there a way to get marketing budget loans for self publishing mobile games? Posted: 15 Feb 2019 09:07 PM PST I'm not gonna name any names, but this is getting out of hands. Many of you who have tried to publish with any major mobile publisher right now know exactly what they do. Things you have to do:
Things the (mobile) publishers do:
Now I'm not saying their work is completely expendable, in the old days the risk they were taking was significantly higher. But now with a lot of giant ad networks, the risks for publishers are totally minimized to the point that they know they're gonna make their money back in the specified amount of time (weeks to months). All that is fine, they're still paying for the testing and UA I suppose but what really gets me is the amount they take from you. Most of the major publishers I've contacted usually have ridiculous profit sharing like 80 (pubs)-20(devs) or a fixed amount value and it's obvious they're making 10x that or a 50-50 profit share with an upper cap per month for the devs (What?). Since it's gotten to this point, we might as well say to hell with these publishers, we can pretty much do most of what they do ourselves. The only thing most of us can't do is spend millions on UA. So, back to my original question, is there a way for developers to get marketing budget loans or get funded easily based on the mobile game prototype stats. [link] [comments]  |
| What are some good tutorial you guys recommended for kids with absolutely no experience? Posted: 16 Feb 2019 10:33 AM PST So something interesting happened today. I got contacted on discord by a 10 years old kid through a game jam server. He has no experience with gamedev, programming, or art. I suggested unity to him (not sure if it's the most beginner friendly options), and tried to look up some beginner tutorials. I am trying to find something that doesn't go too much into coding, and actually produce a complete game in the end. It could be a really simple game. I just want to get this kid's feet wet. Any suggestions? [link] [comments]  |
| Marketing always seems to be the hard part Posted: 15 Feb 2019 09:51 PM PST I just read a post on gaming about how a developer rejected offer from 12 publishers. He said that they either wanted control over the direction of his game, wanted a large cut of his profit, and said that he couldn't do it alone...Obviously not true as the game seems to be coming along fine, but this all sounded familiar... I actually don't make games myself, i can't wrap my head around coding or how the software programs work; I make music...But again, he claims the devs wanted to shift his work to what they said or take a cut of his profit...Sounds kind of similar to music production to me, in that big labels will either take away some of your creative and/or large sums of money... These days its not entirely impossible to make a game entirely by yourself or with a small team. Its not impossible to make a great EP by yourself or with a small team either, the hard part always seems to be marketing it though, right? Sure you could post it on steam or itch.io but it'll get lost in the cesspool (possibly). You can post it on youtube, soundcloud, or bandcamp but it might get lost in that cesspool as well...its always marketing lol. I imagine its the same way with games as it is with music, building up your portfolio of your best work and hopping that at least one blog, website, or youtube reviewer/curator will pick it up. If money/funding isn't an issue, and you can post directly to steam ,then all you need is marketing? I'm starting to think your efforts are better spent hiring a social media marketeer or something to help get your name out there? What are your guys thoughts? [link] [comments]  |
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