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    Home Unlabelled I've made 1,024 tiles for RPG/roguelike and now they're yours, for free.

    I've made 1,024 tiles for RPG/roguelike and now they're yours, for free.

    May 06, 2019

    I've made 1,024 tiles for RPG/roguelike and now they're yours, for free.

    I've made 1,024 tiles for RPG/roguelike and now they're yours, for free.

    Posted: 06 May 2019 08:31 AM PDT

    Hey everyone! This took a while to create and now I've got a backache and my eyes hurt. This package includes 1,024 different tiles, characters, objects and items. It's perfect for roguelike and RPG in any setting (fantasy, feudal Japan, modern, sci-fi etc.) and even comes with tiles for UI, platformers and puzzle games. Perfect for prototyping!

    License: CC0 (public domain), completely free to use in personal, educational and commercial projects (no permission/credit required). Download includes license file.

    If you can, consider purchasing one of my bundles or doing a donation, those are greatly appreciated and ensure that there will be plenty of more assets in the future (6 years and counting!)

    submitted by /u/KenNL
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    How to Make Your Game Look Good if You're Not a Good Artist

    Posted: 05 May 2019 08:45 PM PDT

    Prince of Persia in MagicaVoxel

    Posted: 06 May 2019 07:40 AM PDT

    3 months ago I released my first game - was it worth quitting my job to go indie? [+ detailed earnings report]

    Posted: 06 May 2019 11:09 AM PDT

    I wrote a couple of posts on this sub about quitting my job to go full time indie, and then another announcing the release of the game 2 years after that. The game, Rainswept, was released on Feb 1st.

    ​

    Getting straight to the important question - Was it quitting my job worth the risk/ Did it work out?

    ​

    Yes - but it might not work for everyone. One of the major things to consider that makes this work is the very low cost of living where I live.

    ​

    The numbers

    ​

    Before I get into that, let's discuss the fun stuff. Here are the numbers (1st Feb - 6th May, 3 months since release)

    ​

    Total units sold: 1249 (Steam - 978; GOG - 271)

    Gross income: $12,248 ($9,736 + $2512)

    Net income: $6422 ($4955+$1487)

    (The game is priced at $11.99)

    ​

    Net income is the exact amount that finally reaches me after withholding rates, Steam's/ GOG's 30% cut, returns, lower prices in different countries etc. Yes, it's almost half of the gross income.

    ​

    I find 55% of the gross income is a good way to calculate how much I'll be earning for each month's sales.

    ​

    I'll now focus on only Steam's sales and data, as their reports go into much more detail, is the major source of my income, and is also what most devs are interested in I'd imagine.

    On a monthly basis, this is the split:

    ​

    February (release month)

    Units sold: 711

    Gross income: $6793 (incl $100 recouped Steam direct fee)

    Net income: $3966 (incl $84 recouped Steam direct fee after VAT)

    ​

    Also:

    1st day: ~165 units; ~$1500 (gross)

    1st week: ~507 units, $4618 (gross)

    I was initially quite disappointed with the first day numbers as according to my research from that time, to reach my 1 year target (4k copies) I needed to sell 500 copies on the first day. That would then equal to 1st day x 2 = 1st week units (=1000) and 1st week x 2= 1st month (=2000 in first month) and finally 1st month x 2 = 1st year (=4000 in first year)

    Since then I've learned that this formula doesn't always apply, at least not for smaller games that have a longer tail and depend highly on word of mouth, discounts and sales. In any case, I'll learn more about this as time goes on.

    ​

    March:

    Units sold: 161

    Gross income: $1771

    Net income: $988

    Daily avg sales - 5

    161 units is 22%, or almost quarter of the 1st months sales.

    ​

    April:

    Units sold: 94

    Gross income: $1029

    Net income (estimated) : $565

    Daily avg sales - 3

    94 units is 58% of March's sales, so the earnings are nearly further halved going into the 3rd month from the 2nd month. It is also 13% of the launch month's sales. I'm hoping that this is where the graph stabilizes, and that the coming months maintain the same number of sales as the 3rd month (except when discounted for sales, of course)

    ​

    I also released the game on itch and gamejolt a month later, but the sales were depressing, around 20 in total. This despite the game being featured on both those stores, and the demo I released in 2018 getting about 12K downloads. It would seem those are good platforms for demos/ free games, but perform terribly for paid games/ full releases.

    Surviving on this income

    ​

    So I've made about $6420 in the first 3 months, and I expect to earn at least $500 per month going forward, from Steam alone. Considering upcoming console ports for the game + discounts and seasonal sales, I expect the number to be safely above that.

    ​

    How can I get by on this, and how does this work out for me? As I mentioned above, low costs of living in my country (India) help tremendously. During my time as a junior architect, my starting salary was about $220. (I also earned anywhere between $70-120 every month from selling random t-shirt designs on Redbubble) During that time [during job, before game] my monthly expenditure was less than $150 (including rent, food, parties, everything) Of course, with no family to support etc I could afford to live in what was pretty much a dump (which I shared with my friend)

    ​

    Once I quit my job, I moved in with my parents for the duration of the game's development. I'm now planning to move out and live on my own again, this time my monthly expenditure shall be double of what it was before (as I'm moving to a bigger city which is also more expensive) Going by everything I've often heard, I'm guessing this still counts as a very low cost of living (do correct me if I'm wrong and if this is infact normal monthly expenditure wherever you live)

    ​

    Traffic sources

    ​

    I think discussing the source of traffic during this period is also important. Here are the major sources:

    Feb - 66k visits | March - 16k visits | April - 13k visits

    • Other product pages - 43% (Feb) | 47% (Mar) | 37% (Apr)

    Discovery queue - 38% | 43% | 35.4%

    New releases - 4.2% | 1.5% | ~

    More like this - 0.5% | 2.2% | 2.15% <----- needs to do better

    • External website - 17% | 7% | 9%

    Google, other, reddit about 5% each; review on RPS about 0.09%

    • Tag pages - 9% | 17% | 10%

    New and trending - 8% | 11% | 9.92% <-------I don't understand this one. Never caught the game trending (maybe I missed it) but how is it a source 3 months from release?

    ​

    Main takeaway: The discovery queue is a MAJOR source of traffic, and I'd be dead without that. Only yesterday I read this blog that talks about what factors affect a game's appearance on the queue, but it seems there's not much you can do to help that other than be a popular and appealing game with positive reviews.

    It would also seem that I wasn't affected by the October bug that killed discovery queue as a source of traffic for many games? I'm not sure.

    ​

    Wishlists:

    At the time of launch: ~3300 (Created the Steam page on Jan 2018, so the duration here is about 1 year)

    During Feb (release month) ~4400

    Current total wishlists 10,101 (3 months)

    Conversion rate - 4.9% (below Steam avg of 14%, expecting this to change with discounts and such)

    Main takeaway: wishlist numbers explode around release time.

    Upcoming plans

    A couple of days ago, I went through this excellent blog in an attempt to optimize my Steam page, and mainly improved my short description and prioritized my tags (read point 5 in the link - order matters) I also discovered steamlikes.com - a website that shows you which game's "More like this" your game appears on. At the time, I had 13 likes, and all games except Virginia were relatively unknown, or weren't released yet. My major aim was to get on Night in the Woods' m.l.t list, as that's a huge game with a lot of similarities, and I'm sure players of that game would be interested in this game as well.

    After optimizing my tags (a good mix of popular and unique tags, ordered properly, with similarities to NitW's tags) I was thrilled to find that my game now does appear on NitW's m.l.t. The likes have now moved up to 16. The website seems to update slowly, so this number might still go up.

    ​

    But mainly, my traffic from More like this has gone up slightly in the past week from 11 per day, to 28 per day (or 49 visits/ 1.5% per week consistently to 73/ 2.1% last week) I expect this to slowly continue to increase as well. (The discovery queue blog mentioned above does say that Valve has been reducing the importance of tags recently, so maybe this could've been even better a few months back)

    ​

    I have also put the game up for 20% weeklong sale for the first time starting today, and it'll be interesting to see how that affects the numbers.

    ​

    Things that worked for me

    Here's the things I did that made sure the game wasn't heading towards total obscurity:

    ​

    1. Demo - Released the demo of the game on itch.io and gamejolt.com a year before the game's release. This got massive amounts of traffic, downloads (12k as mentioned before) and helped me build a small following over the year. The demo was one hour long, left on a cliffhanger, and ended on a Google form that asked players their opinions about the game, and collected emails for a mailing list. This had about 500 responses by the time of release. I'm not sure if these followers converted directly to sales, but it helped me get my twitter etc off the ground, and there was talk about the game.More importantly, the game was covered by media outlets (PC Gamer, apart from a good few others) and also Youtubers. It wasn't huge, but there was some talk about the game, and that's huge. It helped me get out of obscurity.
    2. Maintaining a Twitter presence - Although I don't have a huge follower count (above 1000 now, a bit less during release) I feel maintaining a good twitter presence is super helpful in creating an image of your studio that only helps your game. It's not a big source of sales, but that's where I've caught the attention of many major journalists, devs and where I've made most of my connections. If not directly, then through these influential people, Twitter helps in spreading the word about your game, and in building a community around it. This Twitter presence will come in especially handy when I move on to future projects. It can also help build an image/ identity for the studio, which further helps in making your studio/ game stand out among the crowd.
    3. Posting on reddit, facebook pages and forums - this has only been helpful in spurts, but seems to be most effective in creating a snowball effect during major events (game release, trailer release etc to get the view count moving up)
    4. I also maintained weekly/ monthly updates through devlogs and newsletters. Basic stuff, but it stops your game from sliding away from people's attentions.
    5. I also feel that the theme/ concept of the game helped it catch people's eyes. It's a Twin Peaks inspired murder mystery detective game dealing with themes of love, relationships and unresolved trauma. It's a story that I'd always wanted to tell, but these themes were also the reasons a lot of reviewers approached me. People have also called the art style eye catching. This is basic, obvious stuff (a decent looking game that sounds interesting) but it's worth thinking about when planning a game. Is it just going to be an excellently made game, or is it going to be that and have thematic pull? There's a blog about this (I haven't read it myself, planning to read it soon for my next game) which I think talks about similar stuff: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/What_Makes_an_Indie_Hit_How_to_Choose_the_Right_Design.php

    ​

    Things that didn't work

    Leaving the quality of the game itself out of this, I think the major things that hurt my launch week was the lack of coverage by streamers, youtubers and major press. The demo received much more attention from Youtubers than the full game release. I sent keys to about a thousand websites, many of which had been interested in the game/had covered it before (such as the release date announcement) but completely panned it for the release itself.

    PC Gamer wrote a couple of articles on the game (release date, demo etc) but skipped the actual release. Rock Paper Shotgun was the biggest site to cover the game (which was awesome) along with a bunch of other great outlets, but it didn't have the intended effect (possibly because many of the reviews came up a couple of weeks after release)

    I feel that if the game had received the expected amount of attention during release, the effects could've been exponential and sales could've been much more. I suspect that most outlets were caught up with reviewing other games (even in Feb!) and even though I sent the keys a couple of weeks in advance, maybe sending it even earlier would've been better (that, or being a recognized developer)

    ​

    Conclusion:

    So, considering everything, has it all been worth it? For me - hell yeah! Apart from the financials, I was able to leave a job and routine I completely despised, for something I love. I'm now able to immerse myself completely, everyday, in art and in my passion. I love being a part of the game industry, "being my own boss" and working and living on my own terms. There's risks and relative uncertainty but that also depends on your comfort levels with such situations.

    Releasing this game has allowed me to travel out of my country for the first time (For EGX Rezzed, London) where I met other devs, showed my game on a Rock Paper Shotgun stream (an absolute mad dream for me) met some famous people, devs, streamers, made friends, and even ran into Baldur from God of War (he was there collecting a BAFTA for his performance in that game) in the airport on the way back from the expo!

    It's basically changed my life - not to a degree that it does to the big, famous indies, but I'm grateful for what I've had regardless. Now I'm preparing to move out of my parents house, out of my small coastal hometown (Goa) to a big, fast-paced city (Mumbai) and getting ready for a new phase in my life. I also plan to learn programming and start working on my new game soon (cannot wait for it!) while I hand this game over to be ported to consoles. I have zero regrets about switching my career, but yes, I did have favorable conditions in which to make this shift.

    ​

    Hope this data has been useful! I scoured the internet for numbers of this sort leading up to and even after release, so I'm happy to be able to share some of it myself - good thing Steam now allows you to share data! I shall also update this post/ create a new post with figures from the previously mentioned weeklong sale that I've just started today. Hopefully that affects the data in interesting ways :)

    Happy to answer any questions. It's late at night here, so it might be a few hours before I can respond, but please ask away :)

    submitted by /u/huntingmagic
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    Coding Adventure: Marching Cubes

    Posted: 06 May 2019 06:25 AM PDT

    The Design of FTL & Into The Breach

    Posted: 06 May 2019 05:02 AM PDT

    Finally got some ragdoll that doesn't explode, an endeavor since the very beginning 2 years ago

    Posted: 06 May 2019 09:47 AM PDT

    My average day - trying to inspire other busy folks to make time for their passion projects!

    Posted: 06 May 2019 07:49 AM PDT

    Is this programming advice any good?

    Posted: 06 May 2019 11:57 AM PDT

    Per-pixel selectable objects (both 3D and 2D) in scene. (discussion)

    Posted: 06 May 2019 09:39 AM PDT

    So this is a method I've been using to do my "object selection" since the early 2000's, and I'm wondering how far things have come along since then. I've not revisited this since then since this method works, but am looking to see if anyone has a better option.

    So basically it works like this: Every object in a scene has a unique ID (just by default). If an item is 'clickable' it gets added to a linkedlist of 'clickable' items. So when a user clicks on the scene, then behind the scenes the entire scene of 'clickable' objects is rendered to a texture with every item having no texture on it, (for 3d scenes) or using the object's mask (for 2d scenes) with full emissive on the object, where each objects' color is equal to its ID. (Thus, RGB gives me about 16.7 million IDs before I have to recycle them.)

    Then it's a simple matter of seeing what the pixel color was where the object was clicked. The bonus this gives me is that if a texture is "transparent" indicating that the player SHOULD be able to click "behind" it, they can.

    Anyone do anything different/innovative?

    submitted by /u/Javin007
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    Lightweight fast 3D engine

    Posted: 06 May 2019 09:30 AM PDT

    Hey guys! Im looking to make a simple 3D rythm game and i feel like UE3 and Unity are an overkill for it.

    Im looking for sth light and fast that could run also on older PC's and laptops.

    Any recommendations ?

    submitted by /u/mikewirkijowski
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    How to do animations during loading screen?

    Posted: 06 May 2019 06:21 AM PDT

    I've always wondered how animations and such work during level loading. Since I'm going through the logic part of my game loop to load the level data, I don't hit the new draw update until it's done, so how do people normally have animated graphics on screen for loading? I know how to load in chunks and update a loading bar, just not smooth animations.

    ​

    FYI, this is more directed to using a lib like SDL with a game loop programmed myself, not any engines (Unity / Unreal).

    submitted by /u/VO22-IT
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    AltaWega - Scifi story driven open world game

    Posted: 06 May 2019 12:39 PM PDT

    Hey friendos can anyone tell me what the difference is between cel-shaded and flat-shaded (like with low-poly)?

    Posted: 06 May 2019 10:26 AM PDT

    Epic Buys Rocket League - The Business of Video Games - The Paradox Podcast

    Posted: 06 May 2019 06:23 AM PDT

    Need help with UI colors in my game.

    Posted: 06 May 2019 11:38 AM PDT

    Hi there, i am not experienced graphic designer, so during my first mobile game development i received situation where i cannot find the colors for UI(buttons, menu background, text?) that will fit the game. I tried Yellow/Red, some Cold colors but nothing made it fit the game.

    Can anyone suggest some variations of what i can try?

    Here is a short video of the game.

    submitted by /u/Wind0z
    [link] [comments]

    Tips for marketing casual games (mobile)?

    Posted: 06 May 2019 06:39 AM PDT

    Hey, I have a game that I wanted to make sure i released properly. It's a pretty small arcade/casual game as my first release, but what should I do to make sure it gets the most exposure possible? Other than get a social media following and maybe running a few IG ads? I don't think it's big enough to be worth reaching out to reviewers to review it because it's more of a time waster game with not much difference in game play outside of getting faster. Any tips are greatly appreciated, thanks!

    submitted by /u/ShackShackShack
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    New free sample pack featuring five different unique wind chimes!

    Posted: 06 May 2019 06:01 AM PDT

    You can check out the pack right here: http://gum.co/bb_chimes use the code free_chimes to reduce the price to $0 for the month of May. More info on the pack and some example sounds can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYsHMKTcJkA

    Hello friends! This month's sample pack features many different wind chimes! I participated in the reddit ASMR Secret Santa a few months ago and my Santa gave me a wonderful set of wind chimes. I just had to gather up all the other ones I had in the house and make a pack from them!

    This pack contains nearly 30 minutes of unique audio from five different wind chimes. There are some solo chime strikes and a lot of interplay between the chimes. Really beautiful for meditative music and background ambiance.

    Some of these samples were lightly processed because the volume is so low I tried to remove some background rumble, but my aim is to leave the audio as raw as possible.

    These sounds are public domain (Creative Commons 0). You are free to enhance, reuse, remix, or do whatever with these files. Obviously, linking back to the pack or dropping my name in your liner notes is encouraged, but not required.

    submitted by /u/PM_ME_UR_FAVE_TUNE
    [link] [comments]

    AI Spawn Patterns

    Posted: 06 May 2019 05:08 AM PDT

    Hello everyone! I am a developer working on a game that contains a lot of different types of enemies with different types of abilities and movement capabilities.

    I have been thinking for a while that our game lacks a good way to spawn these types of enemies in an interesting way. I read an article that talked about the idea of making an AI that had a currency it could use to purchase enemies. I'm having some trouble finding good examples of AIs like this although I'm sure there are many.

    Are there any great examples you have seen that you could point me to?

    Do you have some good insight on a system like this you would be willing to share with me?

    Any help I can get with this topic would be greatly appreciated and if you think you might have a different more interesting way of spawning enemies, please let me and the rest of us who are curious about this topic know!

    Thanks for your time.

    submitted by /u/Kyroku
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    NVGen Shader for Unity SpeedTree (STC) V2.0. Customization of wind and other parameters of the shader. Available on GitHub.

    Posted: 05 May 2019 02:21 PM PDT

    Orcahq Back in Service?

    Posted: 06 May 2019 12:57 PM PDT

    Help with file structure (for value initialization)

    Posted: 06 May 2019 12:40 PM PDT

    Hi!

    I'm working on initializing as much as possible by reading files instead of assigning values directly. I'm using Unity3D, not that it matters.

    I don't want to assign sprites directly to an object for example, I want to map sprites to object id's and assign them later.

    My goal is for everything to be as data driven as possible, so the game is easy to change during development and for modders down the road.

    My current idea is to use a relational database-like structure where each file could be compared to a table.
    So I would have a file with object properties and the object ID, each line contains data for the type of object stored in that file. Then I would map the sprite to that object by having another file where each line is one ID and a sprite name.

    Is there a better way to do this? The problem I see is the number of files going through the roof.

    submitted by /u/N-A_CptSnow
    [link] [comments]

    Maya is driving me crazy!

    Posted: 06 May 2019 03:47 AM PDT

    So I'm animating a character in Maya and importing it into Unity. The character has a tail and when I animated him the first time and exported it as FBX into unity, it went well and no issues came up. I started working on another animation today and whenever I bring it into Unity through FBX, the tail dislocates and doesn't move with the rest of the model! So I tried redoing the same exact animation that worked the first time and the same issue happened, the tail came off! Someone help!

    https://reddit.com/link/blakud/video/jodiqc85mkw21/player

    submitted by /u/kingofthehill93
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