I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners totally destroyed it. Here is what that feels like. |
- I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners totally destroyed it. Here is what that feels like.
- Indie studio presenting at E3 - Lessons learned & PostMortem
- Recreating Mario Kart's drifting mechanic using Unity!
- UNITY PSA: Windows Defender slows Unity Builds by up to 50-65%
- We put a whole theatre production in our indie game as an optional activity
- Listening to your own game, and letting it change.
- Why phone games usually don't have an exit button?
- What do you think of idea of LowMemory event?
- Any good online courses for 2d rpg game?
- Will teach for help
- Replacing our OOP pathfinding to pure ECS
- Fuseball - Open source, in-browser physics based football game built with p5.js
- Looking For Feedback
- Create a Match-3 Game in Unity! Full tutorial uploaded
- A Game Released With Its Asset Package...
- UE4 Lighting Tutorial : Static Lighting and Exposure Calibration Part 1 - Beginner
- Monogame: problem with Spritefonts (MacOS)
- What makes more money, simple games or tutorials?
- First dev job and fear of getting fired
- Cube Face Voxel Rendering
- Implementing peer to peer networking for a mobile game
- I Made 2 Game Prototypes in 1 Week :)
- How do I start making "flash"/mobile games?
| Posted: 20 Jun 2019 05:44 AM PDT |
| Indie studio presenting at E3 - Lessons learned & PostMortem Posted: 19 Jun 2019 04:58 PM PDT We're the developers of Killsquad, which was just shown at E3. We feel we did a reasonably good E3, in all humbleness. So, as a way to contribute to the community, here's a postmortem. I think a lot of the decisions we faced can be useful to others. Needless to say, if you got a question, feel free to ask, I'll do my best. To kick things off, here's a video of our E3 presence. Please don't take this as a promo, but more as a way to give context to things I'll explain later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq9k3PcF4k0 Backstory: after about 20 months of work, it was time to show our new game Killsquad to the public. We're an indie studio from Barcelona, Spain. Team size on the project was 16 people. Engine is Unreal. Studio history is 10 years as Sony exclusive, not exclusive anymore since 2016, now indie, multiplatform, self-funded. And with a goal in mind: show our game at E3 to get media traction. First of all, we needed a booth. The best way to get one if you're small like us is to secure space inside some larger entity, so you're effectively a mini-booth inside a bigger one. In our case, our booth was a section within the larger Indiecade booth, roughly 10x10 feet. We chose Indiecade as we love their mission, and we rightly believed they would give us good visibility as everybody knows Indiecade. Good choice! Talk to Indiecade if you need exposure at shows, super nice people. Seen in hindsight, our size was appropriate, as you can see on the videos, for our game, which is a 4 player PC title. All in all (floor, internet, décor, etc.) we paid roughly 10k USD for it. If you ask me, we feel this is a good value compared to what we got in response: we got 3 award nominations at E3, we did +300 demos, +30 media presentations, we were featured on the Steam home page… so of course owning a booth is a significant investment, but we feel it's worth the money. When booking booths, remember alleys are *not* part of your booth. Hence, 10x10 ft is actually bigger than it seems: your space is just the raw space occupied by your stuff, not the space around it. Second, remember booths usually are not networked. Our game was 100% online, so we had to fork extra cash to have a cable and be ready to connect. Never use WiFi at shows: it's usually congested with the audience's cell phones, so you'll have poor performance and the experience will suffer. Always make sure you get a guarantee that all the ports will be opened, no firewalls, so you can connect to whatever service you need, in our case, Steam. In terms of décor, always manufacture everything onsite. In our case, we manufactured all the materials in LA (we are from Barcelona, Spain). We used Vistaprint, we shipped it direct to E3, so we picked up right at our booth. Saves a ton of logistical nightmares and a lot of cost. Once the show is over, just ship the items back home and you have nice décor for your office! For audio-visual, we did a couple tricks worth mentioning: first, we didn't rent on-site. Quite frankly, renting a TV at E3 would have cost us more than buying the TV itself. Not kidding. Instead, we rented everything from a reputable audio-visual company in LA, paid one third the price, got super good service. Shout out to Red Carpet Systems, you guys rock! The other trick as to look for a sponsor. Our PCs were kindly donated by Lenovo, who supplied 4 super-duper game boxes, the Ideacentre. Not only are they amazing, and our game set on a solid 140 frames per second, but we also saved a ton of money and logistics. Of course, this was a loan, so the PCs were gone when the show was over, but that's exactly what you want: killer machines delivered to your door, and picked up on final day. Now, you got your booth. As a general rule, you want to have as many people onsite as gaming stations, plus one. That's because all gaming stations will be busy and require assistance, and the extra person can be doing interviews, maintenance, etc. In our case, we were only 4, so we ended up luring a good friend (thanks Saul!) to help out as we were overwhelmed by reception. I'd say the longest pause we had in 3 days was maybe 10 minutes. All the rest was game demos back to back, which is great but extremely tiring. I survive on Halls pills as my throat kills me after the first day. For E3, booths are assembled the day before opening. In our case, it took us approx. 4 hours to get the booth to its final form. Just make sure you have a clear idea of how do you want this thing to look, and be ready to change plans on the fly. In our case, quite frankly, the layout we had designed didn't quite work out, so we ended up moving pieces around and improvising a bit. If that happens to you, communicate with the show people: they've done this a million times. In our case, we discussed ideas with the Indiecade people, moved tables a bit and, all of a sudden, our booth looked fantastic. Humble, but so cool. And so the day comes, doors open, and people flood the booth. No! That only will happen if you've done your preparatory homework. It is *true* that a lot of people will just show up, and I mean very senior people who just walked by, engaged with us, and we now are friends with. We had people from Sony, Microsoft, Universal, and many many more just coming over to check out the game. Still, it's good to have an appointment list and work on it ahead of the show. In our case, that was 3 weeks of work before E3 by our PR company. They just reserved slots, and we kept track on a GoogleDocs sheet. Nothing too fancy, but definitely useful. At the show floor, we had an Ipad so we could keep track of schedule. Once the show starts, it's time to sell your game. Keep things short and to the point. For Killsquad, we knew our demo lasted about 15 minutes, which is on the long end of the spectrum. Aim for 10 minutes and you'll be ok, demos for shows need to be short. Additionally, prepare your presentation notes, so all team members communicate exactly the same message all the time. Keep it short and focused. In the case of Killsquad, the notes were literally two slides: one about the game design, one about the lore. Don't get creative or improvise: you'll do a lot of presentations (in our case, approx. 300 people). Being consistent on your messaging is key to a successful campaign. A good trick is, for every feature, try to define it in a 7 word sentence or less, so it becomes a slogan of sorts. At the show, conversation will be more free-form and fluid, but you will have your key messages ready at hand in this super compact form if you need them. Another good advice I can share is, be ready to jump at every opportunity. Don't be the guy who says NO: be the guy who says "sure!". For example, BBC came, all of a sudden, with a coverage opportunity. Say YES! A very well known German streamer came with a specific capture card, and needed a complex set-up to record him talking to camera while playing our game. Say YES. In my experience, the complicated bits are where good rewards lie. Don't ask me why, but generally speaking complexity of set-up is proportional to impact. I have a perfect example, at this years' E3. We were hanging out at the booth doing demos on Day 1, and all of a sudden, a person from Indiecade (hello Tiffany!) comes and says "hey, we had a game planned for an event at the Esports Arena, but there's a problem, so we have a gap. Could you jump in and be ready to show your game on stage, tomorrow"? As you can imagine, this was a logistical nightmare. In 24 hours, we had to:
In other words: a nightmare. But you see, this is the kind of nightmare you should *dream* of. What is the value of the coverage we received? Huge. And we got it just because, even before feeling scared and stressed, we said "YES". Trade shows are a land of opportunity. Make sure you use it well. Make sure you're nice to people. And great stuff will happen. I've seen a positive, open attitude pay off again and again. In my mind, those are the main lessons we can extract from this year's E3. I don't want to drag on for too long. Now, I'd just want to wrap up with a couple negative points as, let's face it, we didn't achieve all goals despite the overall positive balance: First of all, we failed at attracting bigger media, such as IGN, Gamespot, etc. If you're reading this, let's talk! You could believe this failure to reach them is due to them not covering indies, but that would not be true: they have covered a lot of indies at this years E3. I think we failed as we didn't work hard enough or long enough to generate buzz and get the bigger outlets into our booth. With so many games, journalists naturally tend to flock to the bigger titles. Securing coverage was harder than we anticipated, as you need to surpass a certain threshold to be noticed by the bigger outlets. Which brings me to the second point: in hindsight, we should have planned this with more time. We managed to assemble a booth, we got really nice awards, we got really good coverage, but I feel we could have achieved even more with longer planning. Our E3 plan was executed in the month prior to E3. It's way too short. We indies tend to overvalue development work, and undervalue marketing effort. When marketing does take a ton of time and effort as well. As a consequence, we will do PAX West end of August, and we're already working on it. That's about it. As I said, I hope it was useful. Feel free to ask anything on the comments section and I'll do my best. Feel free to copy this article wherever you like, just credit me (@dani_invizimals) or the game (@killsquadgame). And, if you'd fancy a 4 player coop bounty hunter RPG, make sure you add Killsquad to your wishlists on Steam clicking this link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/910490/Killsquad/ Cheers! dani [link] [comments]  |
| Recreating Mario Kart's drifting mechanic using Unity! Posted: 20 Jun 2019 06:08 AM PDT |
| UNITY PSA: Windows Defender slows Unity Builds by up to 50-65% Posted: 19 Jun 2019 07:05 PM PDT https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP-OptimizingBuildTimes.html [link] [comments]  |
| We put a whole theatre production in our indie game as an optional activity Posted: 20 Jun 2019 10:11 AM PDT |
| Listening to your own game, and letting it change. Posted: 20 Jun 2019 08:20 AM PDT What are your experiences with making a game where you had a design you wanted but had to give it up because the game starting telling you it was not working? Not just other people. Even when playtesters don't really comment on a feature, when you play the game, you just really get this feeling that the feature isn't working. I had an experience like this making my new game, and wrote a bit about it in a post on my website: https://www.kaiomeris.com/zero-strain-development While I think I eventually gave up the design elements I originally wanted for the sake of making a better game, it made the development process take a LOT longer. Do any of you have a similar experience? [link] [comments]  |
| Why phone games usually don't have an exit button? Posted: 20 Jun 2019 12:19 PM PDT |
| What do you think of idea of LowMemory event? Posted: 20 Jun 2019 10:50 AM PDT A year ago I worked in a gamedev company on a tank battle MMO game where among many others we had a particular issue: many 32-bit clients crashed because of memory shortage. Basically malloc gave us nullptr and our code couldn't handle that. I had an idea which I haven't implemented, but I still wonder if it would help. So we could track free virtual memory and when it went too low, send a system game event (let's call it LowMemory) which would be handled by various game subsystems. They would be able to free some parts of occupied memory: - empty caches - hide/delete some unnecessary objects - shrink_to_fit vectors - remove hi-res lods for some time - run garbage collector if there is such And that would prevent the system from going down. Have you seen such idea implemented? [link] [comments]  |
| Any good online courses for 2d rpg game? Posted: 20 Jun 2019 08:50 AM PDT I want to create a 2d rpg game but I am a beginner who is planning on using Godot with C#. Is there any online courses that teach about game design, theory, and the rest of the development process for a 2d rpg game or information that can be transferred to a 2d rpg game? I was thinking udemy since I know they do tons of sales but very open to other sites that have it so you just buy the full course instead of a monthly subscription. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 20 Jun 2019 12:28 PM PDT Hi 👋🏻 I'm a software engineer working at a bank for some time. I've been making my own engine for a game that I've been working on. It performs well on both desktop and mobile devices so far. There's so much more that needs to be coded though. I would be excited to transfer my knowledge of coding in exchange for man hours on this project. Message me for more details! [link] [comments]  |
| Replacing our OOP pathfinding to pure ECS Posted: 20 Jun 2019 12:27 PM PDT |
| Fuseball - Open source, in-browser physics based football game built with p5.js Posted: 20 Jun 2019 12:24 PM PDT I wanted to share my project that I've been working on with you guys. I'm a beginner so any suggestions and advice is highly welcome! So what's Fuseball? It's is a browser based, top down football game built with webpack and p5.js. The game itself is inspired by haxball, but built to be more modern and have more features (e.g bots). Some screenshots https://i.imgur.com/ajw4fld.png https://i.imgur.com/aWxZItv.png https://i.imgur.com/AqCqGRP.png Can I play it? Yes! The latest build is always hosted on github-pages right here. Can I contribute? Yes, please! Fuseball is a open-source project, so any contributions are welcome. The game is obviously pretty early in development, so except to see things change quite a bit over time. But the core mechanics are here, so meanwhile - enjoy! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 20 Jun 2019 12:16 PM PDT New to the whole "making music for games" thing. I found out that you guys really like tracks that loop (naturally) and the importance of .wav and .ogg files. Anyways, Thought I would make a straight forward track that naturally loops. It has some progression in the middle, but it's good for looping the whole song. Also, there is about 6-7 loopable tracks within the song itself. Am I going the right route on this? Have a listen and I hope you like it! [link] [comments]  |
| Create a Match-3 Game in Unity! Full tutorial uploaded Posted: 20 Jun 2019 12:14 PM PDT |
| A Game Released With Its Asset Package... Posted: 20 Jun 2019 11:45 AM PDT Hello, I am Junior :) who maybe you know Of Already, or Maybe Not. :) Here is a Question I have for Discussion. See, when my Gang and I are always releasing a package of Games every Month, in each one we always make a Point to include a File with all the Assets and Files used in the Making the Game as part of the Download. The reason we do this, is we really want to Encourage People to Use and Recycle and Go Wild with the files themselves, Remixing or Borrowing From or just Going Wild with the Structure of the Games to their Heart's Content. But, people aren't really Using these Files as much as I'd Like... :( What do you think about This? Like How Do You Feel About My Idea, and Why Do You Think People Aren't Really Getting It? [link] [comments]  |
| UE4 Lighting Tutorial : Static Lighting and Exposure Calibration Part 1 - Beginner Posted: 20 Jun 2019 05:19 AM PDT |
| Monogame: problem with Spritefonts (MacOS) Posted: 20 Jun 2019 09:17 AM PDT Hello everybody, I 'm relatively new to the world of coding and even more regarding game development. I'm starting with Monogame(2D), and when I open my spritefont (created in the pipeline and opened with Atom) the following errors occur: 1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding=" ... 8 ... 60 As long as I run Game1, it works, as I created it specifically for MacOS (obviously it has nothing to do with spritefonts); but to solve the issue of the topic, I don't know what to do... is there someone who can help me? (Even if it may not help, I'm coding with Visual Studio) [link] [comments]  |
| What makes more money, simple games or tutorials? Posted: 20 Jun 2019 09:10 AM PDT Anyone ever made simple games and then made a tutorial for that game and posted it on udemy? I'm curious which makes more money. Where can I find that kind of data? I'm bored at work. [link] [comments]  |
| First dev job and fear of getting fired Posted: 19 Jun 2019 03:57 PM PDT I've started my first dev job right out of college about two months ago. I joined my team as the only person that has experience in javascript and on my second day I was given my first task which was basically a project that I had to complete by myself without any help or mentor. I wasn't given any instructions so I had to implement everything on my own. I was exhausted everyday learning and searching for the solutions to my problems on Google and I couldn't really ask for help because no one could help as I was the only experienced person in the tools that I used, but somehow I got the project done and we released it. Almost everybody was happy about the project including my boss. After two months my boss put me into a team with a brand new project which has been programmed with python. I don't have any experience in python and almost everyday end up studying python and the codebase that I really don't understand. During these two weeks I've been studying everyday without being given any tasks. I asked for some small/simple tasks so I can practice phyton by doing, but our team's leader/senior refused to give me any tasks as there is no simple tasks that I could do. Now during these two weeks I have started to see that my boss's attitude towards me has been changed. He doesn't really ask how am I doing or doesn't really care about what I do anymore. I remember before when I was doing my first project, he would come and ask me how I was doing but not anymore. He is cold to me now and he doesn't really care what I do. He acts like as I'm not even there in the team. I've started to worry and feel every day that I will be either let go or fired after my probation period or even during it at some point. I know my python skills aren't good enough still to contribute to the project as I'm constantly learning, but I wasn't even hired to learn python. They knew what languages I knew before they hired me. I don't understand why would they now put me as a junior developer into a project written in python without any previous experience or knowledge. I've been thinking about talking with my boss about my future in the company and my performance as I'm not sure if they are going to continue with me after the probation period if this situation continues like this. Has anyone been in this situation before? What do you suggest me to do? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 20 Jun 2019 08:02 AM PDT Hey guys, I'm in the process of developing a small voxel rendering engine and I'm not a fan of how I'm generating the vertex data for the visible faces on a voxel cube chunk. Basically, I want to write a function that given a specific face (NORTH, SOUTH, WEST, EAST, UP or DOWN) it will generate the four vertices (position, normal, texture coordinates) associated with it without doing some lengthy case statement for each face. Is there a procedural way of generating them or should I just relent and use a case statement? [link] [comments]  |
| Implementing peer to peer networking for a mobile game Posted: 19 Jun 2019 10:03 PM PDT I am making a multiplayer game for mobile that is similar to agario using Unity. I want to implement peer to peer networking instead of server-client. I have used Photon's PUN before and also considered the new Unity Multiplayer but I honestly do not want to pay and I think it would be fun to implement peer to peer as an educational exercise. I do not need any cheat protection or a high degree of sync, which is why I think p2p can work here. Also in my opinion PUN is very much p2p-like since you do not really touch the server at all and deal with all the logic on all of the clients. I read the peer to peer section of 'Multiplayer Game Programming' book and various other resources, and while they explain the high-level overview none of them give an example of how non-lockstep p2p might be implemented. I decided to use LiteNetLib to manage all the networking. I have some questions about implementing p2p before I dive right into it:
Thank you guys [link] [comments]  |
| I Made 2 Game Prototypes in 1 Week :) Posted: 20 Jun 2019 07:41 AM PDT |
| How do I start making "flash"/mobile games? Posted: 20 Jun 2019 07:30 AM PDT I want to build a portfolio this summer while earning some side cash if possible. I'd like to keep my project small so I can make a new game every 1-2 weeks, so I'm thinking "flash" games and mobile. I can program in pretty much anything but I have no experience in mobile development. I made one game some time ago and posted it on Kongregate but it's dead now. It was a simple 5 minute platformer written in Phaser, with pixel arts and no sound. I'd like to know:
btw, I'm on Linux, so Linux and web software preferred. Any piece of information/advice appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from gamedev - game development, programming, design, writing, math, art, jams, postmortems, marketing. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment