How to publish mobile game, and avoid making my mistakes |
- How to publish mobile game, and avoid making my mistakes
- Ex-Mobile Gamedev reveals hidden Personal Data Collection Practices that are pervasive within the industry
- Anyone have advice implementing collision detection in 2D Asteroids?
- Any tips on good enemy/boss design ?
- How would you go about marketing a small mobile game?
- Any recommendations for 'social backend' services for games?
- I made a video exploring stylization in games, id love it if you gave it a watch!
- WIP - Fire Bending in VR
- How to pick acceleration and friction for a given max speed?
- What’s the “swear threshold” between T and M rated games?
- early access, patreon and how to support small VR indie projects?
- Designing and developing video game admin system - any tips where to find info?
- Have any of you used Erlang on the back end of your game?
- Survival Game Sounds Pack WIP Feedback
- Request for music and art
- movement in a 2d online game
- New individual game developer looking for insight on a new game idea
- Mobile Game Publishers
- Full Pilot Character speed painting for up coming VR MECH game
- How to pitch a project to publishers?
- How do you guys find game jams?
- Best resources for getting good at level design?
- Tech Tycoon, a business simulation game about the struggles of working in IT and Retail. Has a new dev blog post!
| How to publish mobile game, and avoid making my mistakes Posted: 15 Apr 2019 05:48 AM PDT Hey game devs, I would like to share my story of a game launch. I would like to tell about traps, lie in wait for indie-developer while he works with publisher. So, I'm an indie-developer: during the day I'm a developer in a respected company, and at night I Story of my game has started in 2015 – I've started learning Unity3d, and as a result I made my first (actually, second, which I'm not shy to show) game: Out of Brakes – runner, where player drives a car and must avoid obstacles, while speed constantly increases: Development took about a year. Then I decided to launch it by myself: I thought I made super-duper-awesome game, killer of Crossy Road and so on. I thought I didn't need a publisher and game will be a hit as soon as I press "Publish" button. Well, that was a good experience: I could throw a stone in the ocean storm - the impact would be the same as self-launch. This experience was very helpful, and I started to think more practically: we often hear success stories from here and there, and we think we can repeat them easily, missing a lot of details and complexity by the way, focusing on results - success. Thus, wiping tears from face and analyzing situation I understood 3 things:
I took these points into account while developing next game - Blocky Racing: This time the game was developed by two people, game was based on original Out of Brakes – this allowed us to focus on gameplay, and evolve runner into racing game with tracks, rivals and car's upgrades. When development was done, we started looking for a publisher. Eventually, triumph of indie-developer: after dozens of press-releases, negotiations and rejections the publisher was found, agreement signed, game released and even featured in AppStore - we were over the moon! But, as we soon discovered, fly of ointment awaited us in the future. Few words about publisher: Malaysian publisher NexxStudio (http://www.nexxstudio.com), that specializes on mobile casual games. To all appearances NexxStudio consists from one person - Mr. Ken Neth Wong. After the game launch (January 2018) pace of work increased: work on bugs, work on new features and so on. As well, we were waiting for 2 months period from launch date – approximately at this time publisher should send us first Report about income and expenses, and we could get our first earnings. And from this point the most interesting part has started: publisher began to delay with Reports. At first, he wrote that Ad Networks didn't provide him data about earnings still, then - that he was on game conference and didn't have time to calculate income, then - that he was super busy with launching of another game and so on and so on. At the same time, we actively worked on patch releases: "make haste while the sun shines" - said publisher… we awoke in September of 2018 - we realized we needed help. We found a lawyer, and when she read the contract, she became horrified: neither point of contract defended developer's rights, and on the contrary: 100% points of contract defended publisher against developer. In this situation the lawyer advised us not to make any sudden moves, and try to negotiate. Pace of development started to slowdown: publisher was giving us the runaround about Reports, we were promising him new builds. At the same time NexxStudio got notification from developer of another mobile game: they claimed, that title Blocky Racing breaks their TM of game Blocks Racer, and that we should remove or rename our game. We started work on new patch: we were changing title Blocky Racing to Blocks Racing, and Ken Neth Wong was assuring us that he will prepare all Reports, calculate all earnings and send us our share. He sent us advance $4k as a gesture of goodwill. We listened open-mouthed, launched a patch, after that publisher got in touch with us a few times, and in December of 2018 even wrote, quotation:
Of course, the weeks went by - no more actions from publisher's side, and he stopped communicating with us at all. From this situation we draw a few conclusions:
Thus, it's been over a year from the launch date. The game hasn't been updated for a long time, monthly earnings drop to $1.5k. It has been an apathy period, I thought I need to condone with failure, and move forward: do the things I like, develop new games and choose publisher smartly next time. Gross income, based on data from App Annie is about $50k. This is not the amount of money to go to Court - I thought. But, at some point of time I realized, that this is MY game, MY intellectual property and MY wasted time, and I realized it's worth fighting for. I want to achieve next:
Our lawyer worked up next strategy:
Two first points of strategy are already done, and didn't give any result. I would not like to apply this affair to the Court, because it could take a lot of time and money, but I want to get what I have fairly earned. And I want to stop NexxStudio from making money on developers, like me. I'm convinced of one thing: the worst scenario, that could be - is doing nothing. I hope this post will draw attention of developers, like me. I'm asking you to help me spread this information. I think, this experience could be helpful for everyone. Thank you all very much! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2019 11:44 PM PDT |
| Anyone have advice implementing collision detection in 2D Asteroids? Posted: 14 Apr 2019 08:23 PM PDT I've been working on an asteroids clone in C on Win32 for a while as a hobby/side project. I'm doing everything from scratch a la Handmade Hero -- it's more an excuse to learn low level dev and some basic engine concepts than anything else, and it's a fun challenge. But I'm running into a block with collision detection. I've implemented screen-wrapping just like regular asteroids, but I'm having a hell of a time figuring out CD with said screen wrapping. The whole toroidal thing is making it hard! I've googled and googled and googled some more, but I haven't been able to find anything that's on point. Most tutorial-esque asteroids codebases use walls at screen-edge to simplify, so they've been no help. My approach so far has been to basically make the world a 3x3 grid of spaces, with the central rectangle the actual 'on-camera' space. Each of the spots surrounding the middle holds clones of the on-screen entities; collisions would have to be detected against each clone, not just those on screen, to handle cases where small chunks of the objects intersect at screen corners. But this approach has been a PITA to implement and it just feels hacky. Does anyone have any better ideas? I'd appreciate any advice. I've been especially curious how original asteroids handled it. [link] [comments]  |
| Any tips on good enemy/boss design ? Posted: 14 Apr 2019 09:28 PM PDT What goes into creating enemy mechanics for attacks, defense and balancing difficulty? Any tips on how to go about cresting a run, yet challenging boss? [link] [comments]  |
| How would you go about marketing a small mobile game? Posted: 15 Apr 2019 03:12 AM PDT Hey all. I've recently launched an update for my iOS adventure game Planet Life. The game has gotten a lot of good reviews, and the few people that play it seems to like it. Does anyone have any experience with gaining visibility for mobile games? [link] [comments]  |
| Any recommendations for 'social backend' services for games? Posted: 14 Apr 2019 11:45 PM PDT Howdy, we are working on a multiplayer mobile game. Currently using Photon for the multiplayer portion, but we are looking for a service that covers some of the social features of the game. Primarily user authentication, clans/groups, live chat. Bonus would be matchmaking service with support for group matchmaking. We've looked into Playfab which seems pretty excellent but we are not in a position to take advantage of all the features they offer so we will be 'wasting' a lot of money on things we will not be using. Their new matchmaker is fantastic but has really low polling limits (6x per minute to check the status of a matchmaking request) with no clear way to increase it other than going 'enterprise'. We've also tried Nakama in the past which checks most of the boxes but we want to find an alternative. We're happy to pay for a BAAS that fits the bill, or host our own 'social server' if anyone can recommend a cool open source bit of software that we can use. We're developing our game in Unity, so we'd need the backend to be compatible with it. Cheers [link] [comments]  |
| I made a video exploring stylization in games, id love it if you gave it a watch! Posted: 15 Apr 2019 11:47 AM PDT |
| Posted: 14 Apr 2019 07:18 PM PDT WARNING: The Sound May Be Too Loud - my bad.. So for the past year, I've been developing a VR game where the player is given the ability to control elements. Right now I'm developing the framework, before the artwork, by creating a free demo that only features Fire. But the final game will include Earth and Water. What you're seeing is certainly more than just a "button click shooter with no gun". It's actually Gesture based. In that you have to throw a punch, in order to throw a fireball. And the speed of the punch, determines how fast the fireball is thrown. I plan on adding additional moves as well, that will require the player to "Perform the Gesture" in order to execute the move. I am using the same fighting styles as the The Last Air Bender and Legend of Korra for inspiration, so just imagine being able to perform the same moves as the Fire Nation. This is my first time posting here on Reddit, so I'm looking forward to any comments, questions, and harsh criticisms. Follow me on Instagram or YouTube for periodic updates. Or check out my demo reel here. https://reddit.com/link/bdardh/video/t26gpg9g8cs21/player [link] [comments]  |
| How to pick acceleration and friction for a given max speed? Posted: 14 Apr 2019 08:22 PM PDT Hi. I'm wondering, if anyone has a tool or formula where you punch in a maximum speed, and time to reach maximum speed, and what you get are 2 values: acceleration and friction. To give a short example, an acceleration of 4, but a friction multiplier of 0.9 yields a max speed of about 36. (it will technically never reach 36) Or at the very least, just tell me know what kind of problem this is so I can study up on the maths. Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| What’s the “swear threshold” between T and M rated games? Posted: 15 Apr 2019 06:01 AM PDT I realize the answer probably isn't as simple as the ESRB having a swear jar, that it's likely up to the interpretation of the individual/group rating the game, and that different words probably count towards the game's "swear score" if such a thing exists, but it's always a good thing to know when writing a game's script. My game in particular has a bad-mouthed character, but I want to convey that without raising the game's rating above T. Advice for Non-US rating systems is also appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| early access, patreon and how to support small VR indie projects? Posted: 15 Apr 2019 09:24 AM PDT Im just starting out making a multiplayer VR game (few months of development so far) and once I have enough to put together a trailer or even a very early vertical slice demo, I'll be ready to start "showing off" the game and building a website and that fun stuff, hopfully drum up some interest. But this has me thinking, when (if) I reach a point where I can offically release somthing, what would be the best method to consider as a means of supporting myself to do this full time? early access? patreon? kickstarter? As a VR title i expect the user base would likely be quite niche so I'd like to hear if anyone has had any experience in this (specifically small 1 or 2 people teams) or if theres some stats or info that I could be directed to? thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| Designing and developing video game admin system - any tips where to find info? Posted: 14 Apr 2019 10:48 PM PDT Hello, I am writing a course project on designing admin system for video game and trying to research what is common in this field, how existing solutions are implemented, what functionality is usually there and so on. Would be thankful for any recommendations on where I can find literature/articles/tutorials on basically everything in this topic: From how it was done on legacy arcade machines (like, technician comes to service it - what they see? A light with couple of switches? Console, text terminal, gui? What functionality did these earlier systems have?) To modern MMO - how support agents manage user profiles, inventories, payments and so on. How server admins add scripts, handle profanity, enforce rules, add/remove ban, kick players, manage tech side? Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
| Have any of you used Erlang on the back end of your game? Posted: 15 Apr 2019 05:20 AM PDT If so what did you use it for and how was the experience? [link] [comments]  |
| Survival Game Sounds Pack WIP Feedback Posted: 15 Apr 2019 12:31 PM PDT Hey people... would love to gather some feedback from you I'm working on a Survival Game Sounds pack for including crafting, gathering resources, wood/metal, punches/bow/stabs and much more. I'd like to gather feedback on what do you guys expect to see in this package. Currently, there are 570 sounds, including some bonus, like footstep. I'm accepting suggestions to include new sounds. The package is structured to cost $12, with updates (every 3-6 months). What do you guys think about this price? Here you can find a small preview of the sounds, with a music watermark on background: https://drive.google.com/open?id=120hIgHIbfoQpStmlApiEcJGFg31eiQ1A And you can find the current file list here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dSAFZyfqbKQzNR2hnfISWn__4tAtS3Eb [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2019 12:18 PM PDT Hi guys! I'm videogame programmer student, and I will have to develop a first person prototype for my desing assignment, but need someone who create assets like 3D models (something eassy) and music. Are anyone interested? PD: I can't use the free content in internet because my teacher demand that we need work together with a other people who don't are programmers... [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2019 12:15 PM PDT I'm making a simple online rpg game as a learning project, and I'm stuck at the idea of handling player movement. The game is a 2D top-down view game, and players can move in 4 directions (front, back, left, right) and they can also rotate (allowing complete freedom of movement in the 2D space). My first attempt at implementing this movement was by just sending a packet of data from the client to the server each time the position was updated client-side. This worked, but the amount of packets sent was huge. My current idea is to only send a packet of data when the player's velocity is to change (this means that they either start moving, change direction or stop moving). This should decrease the amount of packets being sent by a lot. My problem is that I'm unsure of how exactly to implement this. I tried to do it this way:
the backend also calculates where the player should be (based on the player's velocity) every 1/30th of a second. Of course, this didn't work. There's probably many huge problems with this approach. The biggest one I can see is that the frontend and backend aren't in sync. This means that the calculations done in the client and on the server will begin to differ over time. I got this while testing this approach (left is frontend position, right is backend position dpos stands for velocity): https://i.imgur.com/AE9s1uK.png How would you implement this idea? [link] [comments]  |
| New individual game developer looking for insight on a new game idea Posted: 15 Apr 2019 12:14 PM PDT Hello reddit, I am a newer game developer looking to create a game as a summer project. I have an idea of what I want to make but I am lost as to what engine I should use, as well as a few other minor challenges. My game idea is a mix between text based (like the cheesy dating simulators) and mystery dungeon (like the pokemon mystery dungeon games). However, I don't know what I should use to develop the game on. Here's some background about me: - I am in college for a computer science degree in the end of my sophomore year. - I have made 3 small games in gamemaker using GML. - I am in college, so it can't be too pricey. - I am completely open to learning new languages. - I utilize the internet for pretty much all of my problems to a large community is nice. I am thinking of using gamemaker but I am looking for other options as well if they could possibly work better By the way this is my first post so go easy on me :P [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2019 12:11 PM PDT Hey guys, I had a look over the App Store top publishers (voodoo, Good Job Games, tastypill, playgendary...) and I was wondering if it's worth launching your game with one of them and what will be the percentage cut for both parties if the the developer is taking the decision to launch his game with a publisher. What would be a fair split? Here is what I heard so far: Some publishers have fixed payments. ( I think that was voodoo) Others will give you percentage from "Profit" || this one seems pretty weird || While others are splitting the revenue. 20%-80% (with the bigger cut for them). [link] [comments]  |
| Full Pilot Character speed painting for up coming VR MECH game Posted: 15 Apr 2019 11:32 AM PDT |
| How to pitch a project to publishers? Posted: 15 Apr 2019 11:22 AM PDT |
| How do you guys find game jams? Posted: 15 Apr 2019 05:19 AM PDT Hi, I would like to start participating in more and more game jams, because i think the deadlines and creative rules would help me, well, actually finish a game lol. But how do you find them? The perfect game jam for me would be one that i can work on by myself and over the internet. Thanks guys! [link] [comments]  |
| Best resources for getting good at level design? Posted: 15 Apr 2019 11:12 AM PDT Hi! I want to get good at designing levels, specifically battlemaps, the cool locations for players to fight at and explore. My dream is to be able to do the kind of stuff Divinity developers did. I'm already alright at 3D, so I don't want tutorials about specific software, what buttons to push, how to model, stuff like that. I want to learn the general fundamental principles of level design, and tips on making levels extra awesome. What are some great online resources that will help me to learn that? P.S. Also, is there a subreddit or some kind of online colection of great level designs? Where are you looking for references/inspiration? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 15 Apr 2019 11:00 AM PDT Tech Tycoon's UI artist and I talk about making UI decisions and introduce some mechanics of the game! We introduce The Manager, a playable character of upmost importance to your business's success, as well as the Time System that brings the world of Tech Tycoon to life. I hope you enjoy! -Turner [link] [comments]  |
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