I used my grandmother's memories to recreate the farmhouse where she grew up for my game about her WWII stories, Brukel

I used my grandmother's memories to recreate the farmhouse where she grew up for my game about her WWII stories, Brukel
Crunch is "not sustainable" but Blizzard wouldn't be Blizzard without it, founder says
The Danish games industry - Crunch and unions
Blender 2.8 Texture Painting with Layers like Substance Painter
Shaders for the eyes of one of Mirador's player skins - the Crow. :D Isn't it cute?
SHADERed - a tool for writing and testing GLSL and HLSL shaders
Finding people that do a let's play on my game
Indie Devs: How big does a Youtube channel / website have to be for you to want to work with them?
Unity ECS with Unity.Physics. Tutorial on how to handle colliding of thousands of Entities with a decent fps rate.
Paying Artists With a Low Budget
I would like to contribute to an open source game
What are the different programming roles in game dev?
What are the effects of negative Steam reviews?
Life in the indie frontier, part II
Tried to recreate the perspective mechanic from that trippy game. Felt cute. Might delete later.
USA Orders ‘Masters Of Doom’ Pilot Based On Book With James Franco
Has anyone added non-play/app store payments into their mobile games?
Looking for people to help make a game
AI Tutorial In 7 mins for Unity using Fuzzy Logic
How long should an attack hitbox be active?
How To Create An Item System - Part 4 - Inventory UI Visuals
GDC - Dialog System and Tools in Firewatch
Is there an internet course on udemy or any other website on game programming that you'd recommend?
how do you think i can continue this idea?

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 05:11 AM PDT

submitted by /u/MacBryce
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Crunch is "not sustainable" but Blizzard wouldn't be Blizzard without it, founder says

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 01:15 AM PDT

submitted by /u/sasoh1
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The Danish games industry - Crunch and unions

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 10:55 AM PDT

TL;DR at bottom

The danish news has lately been really focusing on game dev crunch and work place environment in the Danish games industry. There have been 3 articles within the past 2 weeks about it in our national news media DR (Danmarks Radio), with different people speaking out. The first one that started it all was spurred by the Epic Games articles that came out in April (Polygon and Kotaku). This was followed by 2 articles, the first one was a story about an alumni from The Animation Workshop, and how she moved to England because she was stressed from her work. The second one was about 4 other stories shared by workers in the industry, including a short answer by some of the employers (Tactile Games and Triple Topping Games). Just yesterday another article was published which has a few of the big organisations talking about wanting to understand the problems and how they can fix them.

The Danish industry is actually quite small compared to our Scandinavian neighbours such as Sweden and Finland. We have a few big studios, most notably IO Interactive (Hitman), SYBO (Subway Surfers) and Playdead (Limbo and INSIDE). We also have a bunch of smaller to medium sized studios, but not really many big hits. It's still a big industry in terms of revenue in Denmark though, making 552.000.000 DKK in revenue (€73.955.000). This is about half of our movie industry.

I just heard that PROSA, one of our IT unions are doing a survey on worker pay, health, crunch and so on to gather data about what they can do about it. The Danish working market has unions at the very core of the market. There is not legal minimum wage, because the unions have the power to keep the pay at a certain threshold. However, in the games industry, they haven't really gotten into the door yet. Hopefully they can make a splash, as we sorely need an agreement (overenskomst) that most of the others areas of work has. Even actors and such have an agreement, so we'll just have to wait for the unions to do something about it. That would be a huge incentive for even more people to join the unions, and thus bring them more members and help them obtain their goals of good worker environments. I'm sure that the reason is there is no agreement yet is because video game development is a fairly new and small industry compared to all the other ones. The bigger field of IT has an agreement, but the gamedev companies aren't part of those agreements. It looks like the unions are ready to make a move, so we'll just have to wait and see how it plays out.

TL;DR: The Danish media has taken much notice of the crunch culture, and now the unions are looking into improving conditions for workers.

EDIT: I realize this isn't exactly an article, but I didn't really think any other flairs were closer to whatever this is.

submitted by /u/Bmandk
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Blender 2.8 Texture Painting with Layers like Substance Painter

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 04:05 AM PDT

submitted by /u/jayanam
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Shaders for the eyes of one of Mirador's player skins - the Crow. :D Isn't it cute?

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 09:41 AM PDT

submitted by /u/SauropodStudio
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SHADERed - a tool for writing and testing GLSL and HLSL shaders

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 07:20 AM PDT

submitted by /u/thefranx
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Finding people that do a let's play on my game

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 08:39 AM PDT

Hi guys,

From what I gather it seems that the best marketing one can get is from "Let's Plays", is that right? So I guess my question is how do I get streamers/youtubers to play my game? I imagine there must be a lot of smaller streamers that want to break into that market, and I'd be happy to pay them for their efforts (regardless of their eventual rating), but my budget isn't huge, so what do you consider would be a good compensation for smaller youtubers to play my game? And is there some website for this? I saw terminals.io but that doesn't really seem to be useful for my case

Thank you so much in advance!

submitted by /u/exon_studios
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Indie Devs: How big does a Youtube channel / website have to be for you to want to work with them?

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 03:39 AM PDT

Hi folks. I've made a few games as hobbies, but I'm not primarily a game dev.

I'm trying to get a website and Youtube channel off the ground and honestly, I think it would be easier for me to compete if I focused on one segment of games such as indie games.

I just did a review for an indie game about a week ago and got 50 pageviews (second page on google for the review) and about 50 views on Youtube. I know - it's not much, but it's a start.

Anyway, I wanted to know how many eyeballs I would need to get for you consider working with me worthwhile. Ideally, I'd like to do first looks, reviews, and guides for indie games.

submitted by /u/second-rate-hero
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Unity ECS with Unity.Physics. Tutorial on how to handle colliding of thousands of Entities with a decent fps rate.

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 07:37 AM PDT

submitted by /u/_h4ri
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Paying Artists With a Low Budget

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 10:06 AM PDT

For clarification, this isn't a job posting. This is a question on professional etiquette, and personal opinion on how to present an offer.

I'm trying to get customized work done on a project of mine. I've been working on it for about a year, and I'm currently trying to hunt down modelers/riggers/animators to help flesh it out and swap the chunky brick-boys I have with actual character models, based on some original designs.

Since I work a day job, and I haven't done anything with gofundme or kickstarter (and likely wouldn't be successful if I did, as the game looks like shit right now), I have a very limited budget. I fully believe in paying people for their time and effort, so what do you all suggest as a way to approach the situation? What is a decent rate for time? I'm pretty straightforward with my requests, down to a polycount art references and source material.

So, for artists, how would you prefer to be "pitched" to? How do you decide your rate? What do you think is fair? Any advice would be appreciated.

Additionally, is it worth establishing an LLC if I'd be paying people for artwork?

submitted by /u/lowbudgetlegend
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I would like to contribute to an open source game

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 08:05 AM PDT

Do you know any place where game owners/authors post their open source and look for contributors? I have ~10 years of programming in Java, JavaScript, Delphi/Pascal, PHP; I've been doing amateur games with DirectX, libGdx, Slick2D and even java.awt, but these were lame. I'd like to contribute to some real gaming. Anyone?

submitted by /u/HyperDanon
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What are the different programming roles in game dev?

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 09:15 AM PDT

I know there are different programming roles except for being a gameplay programmer. I want to know more about the other roles in programming that are available. Which are the most in demand and what you should learn to be in those roles?

submitted by /u/Reimochi
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What are the effects of negative Steam reviews?

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 08:29 AM PDT

submitted by /u/itsmotherandapig
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Life in the indie frontier, part II

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 10:56 AM PDT

Hello there!

I posted this piece some days ago with advice for Indie studios at E3:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/c2opq7/indie_studio_presenting_at_e3_lessons_learned/

It got quite a few positive comments, so I thought I'd write another one, with more black magic for developers & indies.

Again, for context, this is the game I'm referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZD37u7jjLU

Ok fasten seatbelts, here we go:

1.- Google Analytics is your friend

Sounds boring, but trust me, GA is better than Nutella on sliced bread: add it to your Steam page. Now. How?:

Create a Google Analytics account on their site.
Add the Google Analytics widget to your Steam page from within the Steamworks tools.
Oh did I say this is all free and takes literally 5 minutes?

Now, why should you care? Well, Google Analytics allows you to track, in real time, all the data about people who come to your Steam page. Country. Web site they visited before clicking. Hours of day. Size of their shoes. You name it. You can even do tons of reports telling you who they are. And use that info to decide what you should do next.

Here's a screen of how the think looks inside. It's massive, so take it nice and slow:

https://i.redd.it/4mkuwv0zn4731.jpg

We always keep an eye on this. Whenever we see a spike in traffic, we look at the source URLs on GA, and this way we know who has posted about us and can track impact. Did that piece on PCGamer have an impact? Check it out live!

By doing this, we know what actions make more sense next. For example, Killsquad is popular in Brazil. Moito obrigado! This means we'll translate into Brazilian Portuguese.

I suspect people here on Reddit who know a lot more about GA than I do. If you know specific fields to track, post them on the comments!

2.- Enter the Funnel

To buy your game, they must click a button. To click that button, they need to reach your Steam page. To reach your Steam page, they need to come from somewhere. That, in a nutshell, is a funnel. A funnel allows you to understand how many people move from one step to the next in the process of discovering you and purchasing your title. Tracking and improving your funnel is key.

In the case of Killsquad, our funnel starts usually at Youtube or on a news piece about us on a site, say, IGN. We tried with Twitter & Instagram, but response is inferior. (Note: did these 2 work for you guys? Comment below!)

What we then do (using Google Analytics as I said before) is try to see how are we losing people in the process. For example, how many of the IGN guys click on Steam? How many of those who reach Steam make it to the "buy" button? And so on.

In an ideal world, if we were rich, we'd have a super duper tool to compute all this and do pretty graphs. Reality check: we don't. So, we pick some data from GA, some data from the Youtube channel admin, and a ton of data from Steam itself. We put this all into an Excel chart which we update once a week, shake vigorously, and we have our funnel. Ready for step 3?

3.- Your data, my data, our data.

Here's the question: how good is your funnel? Well, that depends, right? Are other indie games performing better or worse? There's just one way to know, which is to have their data. So you know how this is gonna work: I give you my numbers, you give me yours, we both benefit from the insights, and can optimize.

Here at Novarama we've gathered datasets from a few comparable games, and this way we can detect what's working and what's not. Want to see our data? Sure, send me a PM here on Reddit. We will exchange!

Things to look out for is:

Conversion within Steam: from the moment they enter Steam, how many buy the game/add to your wishlist? We are at 20-25%, which is supposed to be rather good.
Impressions vs visits. We've been on Steam's home page a few times. Which gives you a HUGE visibility boost (thanks Valve!). But that doesn't mean you'll get the same number of visits. Featurings give you impressions (i.e. people seeing your icon). Of course the % of people clicking lowers. It's not the same to have say 100k organic impressions, and from there, say 10k visitors, than to have 1M impressions and 50k visitors. Again, as impressions grow, conversion lowers.
Media impact. Based on our experience: this is huge. You're on PCGamer? Brace yourself for the avalanche. As in, expect x8 more traffic due to that. Problem is then getting these major outlets writing about you. Being indie AND Early Access, this has proven really hard for Killsquad. But we'll keep trying.
Specialist sites do matter. In our case, we were not featured on the huge web sites, but we were featured in a lot of mid-sized, more specific sites about MMOs, RPGs, etc. You'd be surprised how much impact they have! It's a smaller crowd, but if you get the *right* crowd, they all come to your site, and conversion is super high.

4.- Do shows

I can't emphasize this enough. Do all you can afford. E3. PAX. Gamescom. You'll get a ton of value out of them:

Playtesting. Wanna see how stable is your game? Take it to a show. Are you concerned about difficulty, tutorials? Take it to a show! Back in the day, I used to work for a platform holder, and we did user testing: brought in people to a lab, had them playing the game. Wrote reports about it. A Trade show is the best user testing you'll get in your life!
Meeting media, influencers. 60% of the people who came to our E3 booth were youtubers/twitchers/mixers. We have a ton of people who can talk about Killsquad now thanks to that.
Understand your game better. The only way to understand a game is to see other people play. Our opinion about Killsquad changed a ton just by seeing people playing it at E3 10 hours a day. We got bugs. We got opinions. We discussed pricing. We understood our Unique Selling Points better.
Of course, you'll see other games and can compare yourself. But, more importantly, you can ask your attendees about them. We compared our game to all other top down RPGs at E3 with about 100 fans in 3 days. Believe me, know really well what our strengths and weaknessess are.

For more on shows, head over to my previous post, here it is again. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/c2opq7/indie_studio_presenting_at_e3_lessons_learned/

5.- Ignore complexity. Focus on polish

This is another one we learned about at E3. As developers, we tend to think "this game needs x" or "we need to add this feature". There's always one more. The game is a never-ending list of things we need to ADD. When, if you look at a lot of killer games, they're dead simple. Pacman. The Sims. Minecraft. They don't have a ton of systems and subsystems and whatnot. They do one thing. And they get it absolutely right. When we went to E3, we had a long list of things our game still needed. We wanted to do PvP, ridable vehicles, crafting... And, you know what? That was wrong. When people came and sat down and played, 99% of them said: "The control is spot on. Focus on that guys". And we kept saying "yeah but we'll do PvP also!" and people looked at us and said "ignore that, focus on all the good stuff you ALREADY have and make it a perfect 10".

So here's an oft-overlooked fact for you: games make money regardless of their complexity. Candy Crush Saga is a dead simple game. And makes a ton money. And so does Minecraft. And you can do an MMO and fail miserably. It's the quality, not the complexity. Check this list out, old, but still valid. Lots of pretty simple games in it:

https://i.redd.it/5li3a0w6x4731.png

Hence, if complexity doesn't add to the sales, why do we make complicated games? Well, because we're stupid. Really. We are engineers. And we love to solve problems. To face new challenges. And hence we seek problems to solve. And, if we don't have them, we invent them. There's another reason as well: we see the bigger fish (say, Sony, EA, Bethesda) and we try to copy their games. But that's equally stupid. What are the realistic chances of you beating Fallout at their own game?Wouldn't it be smarter to focus on being the next Minecraft, Risk of Rain or Path of Exile instead?

Keep your game as simple as needed, so all the focus is spent on making it amazing. And it will sell. Quality is necessary. Complexity is a nice to have.

6.- Bonus track: be nice

Building a reputation is slow. Destroying it is fast. If you're nice to people, you will have friends AND you with that comes the bonus of being able to ask for help and favors. So I know it sounds obvious, but the classic "treat others like you wish to be treated" is true. If possible, treat them even better. Be the guy they remember. This is an industry with tons of hidden knowledge. Everything you see in this piece was explained to me by someone. Someone who wanted to help. If you're a moron, that ain't gonna happen!

True story: E3, 3 weeks ago. A gentleman comes by, screaming "Dani!!". Takes me about 10 seconds to process. This was a person I met at Nvidia more than 15 years ago, and I hadn't seen in at least 5 years, it not more. We were chatting for a long time, we're gonna do stuff together with them. See? That's what you want.

Well, that was it. Last time we did over 90 comments. Let's see if we can generate an even richer debate this weekend.

Feel free to copy this article wherever you like, just credit me please (@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/

Have a great weekend y'all!

submitted by /u/danisanchezcrespo
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Tried to recreate the perspective mechanic from that trippy game. Felt cute. Might delete later.

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 07:49 AM PDT

submitted by /u/omeysalvi
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USA Orders ‘Masters Of Doom’ Pilot Based On Book With James Franco

Posted: 27 Jun 2019 06:59 PM PDT

submitted by /u/theyre_not_their
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Has anyone added non-play/app store payments into their mobile games?

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 08:04 AM PDT

because of the 30% off the top that the play store and the app store take from purchases, I want to add in the option for customers to pay via stripe so we can make that money instead, has anyone added in payment through stripe or something like that into their games?

I got the idea from tinder tbh, they default you to paying outside of play services and give you an option to use the play store. Instead, I want to give players an option of "20% off by not paying through the app store"

as we would be paying 2.9% + 30c instead of 30%, it would save us a great deal, and we could give the customer a discount to encourage it

submitted by /u/PicklesAreDope
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Looking for people to help make a game

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 11:49 AM PDT

hello,

I am looking for people to help make a game with me and my friend.

I am a modeller based on Blender and he is an artist

we need a coder and music producer for our game

details will be discussed in our discord server join if you wish!

https://discord.gg/DVy3SqX

submitted by /u/RVLkreez
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AI Tutorial In 7 mins for Unity using Fuzzy Logic