An Indie Development Studio's Journey from Concept to Release and the Importance of Early Access |
- An Indie Development Studio's Journey from Concept to Release and the Importance of Early Access
- Started project 5 years ago. Been working on it full time starting 2 years ago. It's shown promise, but I have never felt fully confident it will ultimately be fun. Today the game FINALLY feels fun, FINALLY feels like it could be something.
- Into the Breach Design Postmortem
- Gamedev documentary about the UK North West games industry - A brand new documentary covering the Manchester based games industry was released yesterday and it covers a great insight into the lives of the indie studios such White Paper Games, Odd Bug Studio, and so many more. Open discussion?
- First Ludum Dare Game - Demon Pact
- Can I have feedback on this idea?
- 2D movement like Forager in Unity
- Do you enjoy playing your own games?
- Questions re commissioning -
- 1st Person Field of View Setting for Rendering Realistic Perspectives
- Which of these font 'license types' can be used for free in your game?
- Original publishers shut shop. Can I re-release my game under my own banner?
- Help designing a sudo-rhythm / puzzle game like Tetris Effect
- Sometimes a bullet to the head is the best way to fix your past mistakes. Together with two others, I made a game about time travel at Nordic Game Jam.
- How many classes (of allies, enemies etc) can you put in a game before it's too much?
- Programming Connect 4 with Python and Pygame
- Me and my classmate started learning Unity for 2D games, any tips ?
- Progress of our LD44 Entry "Heart of the Grove"
- I wanted to share some of my experiences with idolizing other games and thinking that mine are worthless. Has this happened to anyone else?
- What kindda game has most user engagement? Arcade v/s Strategy v/s Action?
- any advice on storing item stats and interactions?
- Meet the VIVE 3DSP : Efficient and Accurate Spatial Audio SDK
| An Indie Development Studio's Journey from Concept to Release and the Importance of Early Access Posted: 30 Apr 2019 09:14 AM PDT You can find our previous post here. We've all been developing and publishing our own games for years now, individually releasing our own projects way back to 2000-01. It was in 2015, though, that we all came together to form our own studio under the name of 'Troglobytes Games'. Starting out on the rather ambitious title 'Tenebrae' we would set about creating a Metroidvania style game, although this would soon need to be set aside due to a lack of resources. We needed something different, something with a new and exciting mechanic that would provide a twist on a classic formula. Using our old vintage office arcade cabinet, we would often turn to it for inspiration. This then led to us playing the 1991 Jaleco arcade platformer 'Avenging Spirit'. In it you play as the ghost of a man avenging his own death, as it would use the mechanic of 'possessing' enemies along the way, taking the powers and attacks. Intrigued we then started to think about providing our own twist on this concept, from which the idea of an alien parasite inhabiting hosts would come about. Thinking about our own cultural influences and backgrounds, we soon settled upon the backdrop of the eighties to provide the style (and plenty of fun references). The HyperParasite was born and we had our exciting new project. Creating the Game: Deciding upon a roguelite model for our game, we would come to use a method of procedural generation for each of the game's levels. This would serve to create a more dynamic free-roaming approach for the players, given the intended freedom of the gameplay itself. Combining static and dynamic entities within each of the rooms, allowing for a completely different experience with each playthrough. For the VFX and general look we would go with the shader, as, whilst it didn't need to be realistic, we did want to affect a distinctive visual style. Being developers all from 3D backgrounds, we wanted the look of an older game, whilst excluding pixel-art from the process. This would lead to us downscaling the game, with a degraded colour scheme and limited palette. Giving us a more tactile rounded approach to the visual scheme, we'd then go about refining it to fit in to the overall synthwave 80s/early 90s aesthetic of the game itself. Getting the Word Out: Now we just needed people to hear about our game, and getting the word out on our project was essential to our continuation. Like many indie developers we would initially turn to Kickstarter, but this would only see us some of the way on our journey, not being able to manage the full funding. Undeterred though, we would push past this, as we found the motivation to move ahead and release our game through the Steam Early Access platform instead. Why Early Access? Much has been made of this system of release over the years, with many conflicting ideas of how and why it is useful. Why would people buy an unfinished game (besides the lower price point) and the issue of some developers simply leaving their projects to languish with little to no communication or update for those who supported them. For us though, it has been enormously beneficial, as we have been able to tailor the game to the audience's wants and needs. This has included allowing the players to 'save' host bodies in containers in the shop, essentially allowing them to come back to them on later games, a great innovation that was made in the Steam forum. Working with complete transparency, we have felt this to be an entirely collaborative process between us and the players, allowing creative ideas that we may not otherwise have had to develop. We've done this through weekly updates, clearing up any bugs, whilst always adapting and improving wherever possible. This has allowed us to strengthen our vision and, whilst it may not be the right approach for everyone here, we can see this has worked for us. Evidence of this is clear through our increase in wishlisting and sales, bringing an enormous amount of interest to the game that we would otherwise not have had. Thanks for reading! If you have any questions on the above or regarding our case for early access, then please feel free to ask us in the comments. See you around guys! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2019 01:20 AM PDT Been treading water putting out videos and trying to get exposure. Kicked me on my ass, had to reevaluate everything. It's been humbling, but I've had to really take a step back and wonder if some of the design was ill-fated. It was. Made some big changes, did some amputations, and now everything is FINALLY falling into place. That's all! Keep keepin' on everyone. Don't get tunnel vision, don't keep things just because you invested tons of time into it. Is it cancerous? Does it draw time and resources without making the game better? Is it a huge consideration stopping you from making the game good in the here and now? Depth can ALWAYS be added later, don't let your big ideas stop you from developing the fun core out of the gate. [link] [comments]  |
| Into the Breach Design Postmortem Posted: 30 Apr 2019 09:20 AM PDT |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2019 04:06 AM PDT |
| First Ludum Dare Game - Demon Pact Posted: 30 Apr 2019 08:54 AM PDT |
| Can I have feedback on this idea? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 09:41 AM PDT I read that wave-based games are an easy mistake to make. This got me worried. I'd like to pitch my idea for critical review to this sub to see if I really am on the wrong track here. I'm about 1 year into part-time development of the game and friends and family so far have said positive things about playing prototypes. anyway... The game description: Safebase is a multiplayer tower defense game with typical 3/4 top-down RTS camera view and mouse controls. Each player has a quantity of Money, and Inspiration. You start the game with 1 point of inspiration which is used to purchase your theme. Metalurgy, wizard magic, Alien technology, zerg-like organic structures, druid-like nature magic etc This puts you on your path to what upgrades you get. Players inhabit the sides of the map, enemies spawn in the center and attack each player's base. You earn money and a bit of healing for surviving. Money is spent to buy upgrades. There are 5 upgrades per tier. Players must choose their upgrade order carefully and have opportunities later in the match to acquire another point of Inspiration, which unlocks a theme to add in combination with your current one. The main goal of the game is not die. Enemies are fairly unique and have their own set of challenges. Each set number of attacks before they're defeated. A wolf may have 2 attacks for 6 damage, but a robot destroyer may have 10 attacks of 1 before defeated. Enemies use damage types which the players can select upgrades to defense against. Players may also purchase upgrades which improves a statistic called Rebuild. Each point of Rebuild heals you at the end of a round. You have a small amount of Rebuild by default. The enemies are themed after wildlife, bandits, robots, and even weather effects. If your base is destroyed, you choose to either distribute your resources and quit, or you can choose to build a new base near a surviving player and start from tier 1, but you also share your upgrades with each other. They get your benefits, and you get theirs. If all players die, you lose. If you survive to the maximum designated number of waves, base on your difficulty setting, you win and earn achievements which unlocks new themes to spend your inspiration point on next time. [link] [comments]  |
| 2D movement like Forager in Unity Posted: 30 Apr 2019 08:37 AM PDT |
| Do you enjoy playing your own games? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 11:33 AM PDT |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2019 05:31 AM PDT Hi to all on /gamedev, I'm posting to ask some general decisions around commissioning a gamedev for a project. I will start by saying from the outset this isn't a "do the work to get your name known / % of profit / raise your profile" post as I appreciate how offensive and unrealistic that is. My aim is to create an MVP (minimal viable product) to gauge market and consumer interest and use this to seek further funding for the project. A brief overview of the game would be a top down space exploration game using real (and hypothetical) astrological phenomena. If I reach the stage of commissioning I will happily (and obviously) go into more detail but for now I hope this generic description is of some help. My questions are.
I understand I could of googled these questions, and for most I have but I'm posting as I would prefer to engage and hopefully gain some greater understanding and knowledge in this area. Thanks for reading :) [link] [comments]  |
| 1st Person Field of View Setting for Rendering Realistic Perspectives Posted: 30 Apr 2019 03:12 AM PDT What setting do you go with for 1st person games? It can make a huge difference and I think it gets overlooked a lot. Tanks are a good example. When you walk up to a tank in a FPS game vs that same tank in real life you instantly realize how deceptive the game perspective was. Tanks are huge in real life and you don't feel that at all in games because the field of view settings are so high. Most games have a FOV of like 80-100 degrees and this obviously isn't right even though it corresponds roughly with what a human FOV is. They clearly can't be compared. I did some testing in Sketchup. I loaded a '92 ford explorer and an Abrams tank and scaled them perfectly using real world specs. Then I positioned the camera as if you were standing next to each one and changed the FOV. Here's the Abrams with 90 degree FOV Now here it is with a 45 degree FOV The 45 degree FOV feels much closer to the actual feeling of standing next to a tank with respect to how much of your FOV it occupies in real life. Here is the Explorer SUV for something more familiar So obviously the 90 degree one looks tiny. The 45 degree one feels like its the right size but you lose all the peripheral vision you have in real life. The best solution is a 45 degree FOV with with added peripheral vision.. how could this be accomplished? [link] [comments]  |
| Which of these font 'license types' can be used for free in your game? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 03:58 AM PDT On dafont.com there are a number of different 'license types' for the fonts:
So I imagine 1, 2, 4 can be used without credit 100% free in a commercial game? All the others you have to pay for use in a commercial game? [link] [comments]  |
| Original publishers shut shop. Can I re-release my game under my own banner? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 12:14 AM PDT As the title says. I made a game long back and was released by a publisher name Bulkypix in late 2014. Around mid 2016 the shut down their publishing company and removed all games from the app stores. I want to know if I can re-release my game under my own banner or a new publisher? Will this cause any legal issues. Also, I tried contacting the original publisher to transfer my game to my apple dev account. But the mails bounced back and no other means of contact with them after they shut down. [link] [comments]  |
| Help designing a sudo-rhythm / puzzle game like Tetris Effect Posted: 30 Apr 2019 10:14 AM PDT I'm looking to build a prototype for puzzle game that contains rhythm elements, similar to Tetris Effect and Lumines. For those that have played these games I'm more or less trying to put together a list of crutial gameplay elements that add together to immerse the player and make them feel like they're always on beat with the music, and could use your help. What I've observed: 1) In Tetris Effect, every button press is tied to a sound effect that matches the flavor of the music that is playing 2) a stage has multiple "movements" and it looks like the background and music progress to a new loop once you've cleared a certain number of lines 3) In luminos I think the clear bar moves at a speed tied to the current song's BPM. I could be wrong here though. Does anyone else know of other elements that could help a puzzle/rhythm game feel more on beat? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2019 05:20 AM PDT Name: Player vs Self [link] [comments]  |
| How many classes (of allies, enemies etc) can you put in a game before it's too much? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 09:48 AM PDT This came to my mind while I was playing Pokemon. Does each pokemon have their own class, which is a child of a generic Pokemon class? For example, would Cubones be objects of a "Cubone" class, that inherits from the "Pokémon" class, and has its own unique properties, such as learnset, animations, evolutionary path etc? Wouldn't the code become too bloated at a certain point? [link] [comments]  |
| Programming Connect 4 with Python and Pygame Posted: 30 Apr 2019 12:21 PM PDT |
| Me and my classmate started learning Unity for 2D games, any tips ? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 12:07 PM PDT We decided to learn unity as a first step of becoming gamedev, we are very familiar with 3D modeling though we have a little background in programming object oriented languages like C#.we dont know exactly where to start and how to proceed with the information we get along the way. Any advice? [link] [comments]  |
| Progress of our LD44 Entry "Heart of the Grove" Posted: 30 Apr 2019 11:04 AM PDT |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2019 10:14 AM PDT |
| What kindda game has most user engagement? Arcade v/s Strategy v/s Action? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 01:46 AM PDT |
| any advice on storing item stats and interactions? Posted: 30 Apr 2019 08:34 AM PDT I am currently working on a game that has a ton of item interactions. For instance with a wooden axe you can cut down different trees to get various types of woods, berries, ect. With those berries you can brew different potions. I started with a JSON file with the various stats for each item but I find the file getting more and more complex even with just the few test items that I have and tbh it has turned into spaghetti. I was just wondering if anyone had a better idea for storing the stats and interactions? [link] [comments]  |
| Meet the VIVE 3DSP : Efficient and Accurate Spatial Audio SDK Posted: 30 Apr 2019 07:58 AM PDT VIVE 3DSP is a spatial audio SDK, which creates efficient, realistic, and immersive audio for 3D environment, especially for virtual reality contents. You can download freely from: https://developer.vive.com/resources/knowledgebase/vive-3dsp-sdk-2/. If there is any comments and thoughts, please leave messages at our forum: https://community.viveport.com/t5/Vive-Audio-SDKs/bd-p/vive-audio-sdk?_ga=2.259336010.1128888402.1556548058-1095742714.1542207524&__woopraid=vbSl49sIZStB [link] [comments]  |
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