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    Home Unlabelled Made tall grass by mistakes !

    Made tall grass by mistakes !

    June 13, 2019

    Made tall grass by mistakes !

    Made tall grass by mistakes !

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 04:13 AM PDT

    Starting down the road of ray-tracing. It's so damn pretty.

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 06:53 AM PDT

    truth about hyper casual games

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 06:44 AM PDT

    i just wanted to summarise my learnings from being in the hyper casual games industry from the past few years

    THE PROCESS

    1. you make a small game prototype in Unity. it should be the type of game players play on the bus to work or while waiting for friends at a restaurant. NOT something they would play Friday night for hours like dota. look for some of these free top charting games on app annie.
    2. you integrate some analytics SDKs
    3. you pitch to a publisher (you need one in most cases)
    4. publisher makes a small video ad of your game and markets it on social media (yes they spend money)
    5. after 1-2 weeks, publisher tells you the key metrics (retention = how many people who installed your game came back to play it on day 1, 3 and 7. CPI = how much they did have to spend on "buying" each user through advertising)
    6. if the results are good (your game has high retention and is cheap to market), publisher takes it forward and you sign a contract. if the results are bad, go back to step 1
    7. you polish your game, integrate ads and in-app purchases
    8. publisher buys more users and tests how much money they get back through ads. you typically go back to step 7 multiple times until the game is profitable
    9. when the game is profitable, publisher starts spending thousands of dollars every day and pushes your games to the top of the charts
    10. you make updates to the game all through the year while earning $$$

    THE GOOD (which seduces developers)

    1. shorter game projects. you don't have to spend 6 months on a game and then find out that people or the press don't like it. in hyper casual games you make a game in under a month and very soon know if it will become a hit or not.
    2. money. yes, you can make a lot of money from these seemingly tiny games. it is quite common to make $500k - $1M from a hit hyper casual game.
    3. less expertise needed. you don't need to awe your audience through amazing game art or stories or novelty. you don't need to have a team of old friends who are experts in art, music, programming, script writing, game design, etc. even solo developers and small teams have successfully made hit hyper casual games.
    4. accessible to most developers. you don't have to attend GDC, setup a booth, talk to press, make posters, have meetings with publishers. you just sit at home or office and make small games. hypercasual games are evaluated objectively, not by one influential person at IGN or some app stope editor at Apple. it is very fair.

    THE BAD :(

    1. low chance of success: seriously, you might think you have made a great prototype and all your friends like it, but after you test it in the market, you realize that the results are terrible. this happens way too often. publishers are literally testing 100s of games everyday heartlessly to find that next hit game. the odds of success are extremely low. i have seen so many good developers grow tired of making new hyper casual games. lots get very close, but it just doesn't become profitable.
    2. abusive publishers: publishers offer some of the worst contracts you can expect. here are some realistic and scary ones:
      1. you are locked in for 10 years. you have to do as the publisher says for this period.
      2. you can't approach any other publisher for any of your future games until your current publisher has seen and dismissed your future games.
      3. you get a fixed amount of money no matter how much money the game makes.
      4. you owe the publisher lots of money if your game doesn't perform well or makes them a loss or you don't update the game as they askThese contracts have to be aggressively negotiated but it's still quite hard at the end of the day
    3. soul draining: hyper casual games are fun to play but the process and scale at which they are "scientifically" made have they made them almost devoid of soul. you have constantly think of how to addict your player and show them the most ads. it has become less about creativity and more of a science and maintaining a huge database of game mechanics and improvising on them.
    4. CLONING: if you make a great game in a month and start pushing it up the charts, guess what might happen. someone else clones your game, makes it even better (sorry, there are better and more experienced teams than you out there) and publishes it very aggressively soon. your game will stand no chance at it anymore because people have already started seeing your clone's ads. so it is very important to push very aggressively when you make a game AND to not disclose your game's metrics to random people.
    5. futile game testing. most of these publishers will test any game you send them these days. the reason is this: they get data. they get to find out what ideas work and what ideas don't. they don't care about your imperfect game, but they care about the underlying mechanic. if they realize there is potential, they can ask their "star" / "partner" developer (who they have special deals with) to improve your idea while they tell you your game didn't work.
    submitted by /u/angelina-aniston
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    Remember the GROW puzzles by eyezmaze? He is trying to bring them back!

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 07:15 AM PDT

    I bet almost everyone here has played some of the GROW games back in the Flash days.

    About a year ago the developer started a revival project on Indiegogo to port them into HTML5 and make some new ones but in December he was diagnosed with a heart failure and hospitalized.

    He just posted an update that he's back but still recovering, so I thought it would be good to draw some attention to the project to cheer him up.

    submitted by /u/Qgsr
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    A little animation for my upcoming 1920s cartoon style roguelike

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 02:48 AM PDT

    Square Enix: The Setbacks of a Game Dev Studio

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 05:33 AM PDT

    I LOVE PARALLAX BACKGROUND. Anyways just wanna share abit on something i have done up! The environment took me around 4 hours!

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 12:53 AM PDT

    One week ago I launched my first game, here is a post mortem with numbers on the launch

    Posted: 12 Jun 2019 04:01 PM PDT

    Hi Gamedevs,

    One week ago I launched my first title, Hold the Fort, on Steam.

    This was my first experience in game development and I completed the project as a solo developer - I wanted to share my experience of building this game with the community, as r/gamedev and r/indiedev greatly helped guide me in this journey with other devs post mortems, best practices, and overall discussions.

    So I guess I will start with the obvious, why a fantasy tower defense game?

    Tower defense games have always been a love of mine, I grew up on Warcraft 3 minigames, even building a few myself in the editor back in the day. I figured for my first leap into game development, a tower defense game seemed like something that had simple enough mechanics to keep the scope limited and achievable.

    My major inspirations for this project were the classic Warcraft 3 tower defense mini games and Sol Survivor, I actually didn't even hear of Gemcraft TD until recently, which from what I hear is the staple of the tower defense community.

    From the start I didn't necessary want to reimagine the tower defense genre, but my gripe with tower defense games have always been they are too slow paced. I wanted to make the experience more engaging, so I settled with preplanned construction spots for the towers and an ability/spell system that the player almost has to utilize to be successful at medium or higher difficulties, as well as the enemies able to damage and destroy your towers to keep players on their toes!

    Planning

    After getting the core infrastructure in place I really started to plan the features. Over and over you read in all of the threads in gamedev and indiedev CUT SCOPE, CUT SCOPE, TOO OPTOMISTIC, FIRST GAME KEEP IT SMALL. So I really took that advice to heart and used a trello as a KanBan board to keep myself organized.

    I started by listing out all of the major features I wanted to implement. After which, I reviewed each and every one of those and put them into two categories, Backlog and MVP. MVP or the Minimum Viable Product category only had features that were crucial to delivering a working TD game with an enjoyable customer experience. Everything else, moved to backlog, which was saying HTF 1.0 will not have these features and they may or may not ever be delivered. Kicking the can down the road once HTF is out the door I will reassess them each.

    Once I had a good MVP, I prioritized each feature chunk from delivering the most value to least. This way, I would assure I was always working on the most important item, and those with lesser priority could be booted out of the MVP should I come on a time crunch. (Yes, my professional background is in Scrum/Project Management)

    This method really helped keep me focused and have a clear path to delivery. And it feels so damn good when you drag your feature to the done column. People are right when they say the funest part of gamedev is started a new project. Once you get into the meat and have to start create UI and other BS, it can become a chore. Being organized can help with motivation, break down your work into small enough pieces so you can feel accomplished when you complete it!

    Everyday move the needle, no matter how small, it brings you that much closer to release.

    Marketing

    Being new to game development, wouldn't you know it, I knew nothing about marketing an indie game, but from almost everything I read told me that marketing is the single most important thing you can do for your indie game. I took numerous approaches to this with varying results.

    Twitter:

    Right from the get go I created a Company Twitter (incoming shameless plugs) @mtoothstudios and @holdthefortgame

    I tried my best to keep a regular posting schedule, but it is VERY tedious and I kept in mind that most the people you will connect with are other indie devs. Over the course of a year I was able to gather 160 followers on @mtoothstudios and 120 on @holdthefortgame - not very impressive, but coming from scratch you got to start somewhere.

    Twitter Promote Mode:

    Once month prior to release I decided to try the Twitter Promote Mode for 100$ USD. This was basically a waste of money. While it did promote my tweets, the engagement level was just as low as before, and their analytics stated I had only gained 3 followers from my promoted tweets. Maybe I needed a bigger base to get their promotion levels they advertise, but for indie devs, probably not worth it.

    Twitter Bot:

    Like any other developer, I hate doing anything manually, so when I started up my business and game accounts, I also had the idea to create a chat bot to start accumulating followers. I created a fairly simple bot that retweeted #gamedev and #indiedev posts and over the course of 8 months I was able to accumulate 6,000 followers! I was stoked! I was planning on using this bot to blast all of my content on launch. Unfortunately, one week... yes.. ONE WEEK before launch, twitter banned my bot. I admit it is my own fault, I set the retweet timer too aggressively. Such a shame.

    Game Jolt

    Before I got a pipeline setup in Steamworks, I was published early builds to Game Jolt and promoting on reddit for feedback. While the actual number of people who downloaded the game was small, I found that many who did actually provided feedback. Gamejolt can be useful if you have yet to setup your steampage and want something public facing and more official than google drive to distribute your game in Alpha and Beta playtests.

    Keymailer/Woovit

    About a month out from my release, I had a pre-release build I was satisfied with enough to start sending out keys. At first I was spending a few hours after work each day browsing Youtube and manually mailing random small time youtubers who focused on Let's plays and indie game review. This process was VERY tedious and the return was basically nothing for the amount of emails I sent. Enter in Keymailer and Woovit. Absolute timesaver and an indie game developer MUST. Between the twos paid services, Woovit has the much better offer. For 60$ you have access to search through similar games and offer keys to the content creators. Keymailer wanted like 200$ for the same service for 1 month. In my mind it was not worth it in comparison.

    Overall, between Keymailer and Woovit, I saw 20 youtube videos created over the past month, half of that in Twitch streams (with very lower viewer count) and halfed again in reported tweets. Still seeing your project being played and featured is pretty cool. I am happy with the results for 60$.

    Reddit Ads

    Two weeks from release I started with Reddit Ads, I bid .10 a click with a limit of 20$ per day. Each day it reached that treshhold and most of the clicks came from outside of the United States. A few people actually reached out to me via twitter and email stating they say my ad on Reddit and were interested in the game. I did not look at Google ads in comparison, but I can't say if this was worth the price for a small niche game.

    Launch Day (With Numbers)

    The day finally came and at midnight EST on June 6th - I hit the button. I can't tell you how good that felt to hit that button, followed by the absolute dread and anxiety of how it would be received.

    When I launched I held a live stream via Steam Broadcast for about 4 hours, followed by a 10 hour stream the following day in the morning. I game away a key every hour during the stream and held about a constant 80 viewers throughout the day. Based on my google analytics, during the first day I hit 15k hits on my store page.

    Hold the Fort launched at a 14.99 price with a 10% discount with approximately 500 wishlists. While I have heard the target wishlist numbers for a good launch should be at 2000, I wanted to beat the Steam Summer sale.

    As of this writing, just about 7 days from release, Hold the Fort has sold 121 copies and doubled its wishlist numbers to just over 1000. The conversion rate for wishlist is current at 5.4%

    ​

    From what I have heard, indie game sales come over time and are less about launch numbers, still it is less than I expected. However, all that being said, I am very proud of my first release, and really can't believe I put this out mostly by myself (shout out to my awesome Composer Kyle Grimm on the campaign music). I have achieved my dream of becoming a game developer and am excited to continue to support my game and put all my learned skills to use on my next project. I plan on posting updates on the numbers for those interested after HTF's first quarter. Hope I have shared some useful information for all the aspiring game devs out there

    Cheers,Monster Tooth

    ​

    ​

    TL:DR HTF by the numbers:

    Here is what you came for right?

    Let me disappoint you:

    ​

    Price at launch: 14.99 with 10% discount ($13.50)

    Development Time 12 months

    Average Salary for Game Developer in Seattle Area: 107k

    External Development Costs ~$2,500

    Wishlists at launch: ~500

    Wishlist as of today: ~1000

    Wishlist conversation rate: 5.4%

    Steam page traffic in first week: 33k users

    First week: 121 copies sold

    Reviews in first week: 23 (87% positive)

    submitted by /u/MonsterToothStudios
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    Gimp, Inkscape, Blender (or other for me unknown free programs) instead of Photoshop, Illustrator and Maya - how is this limiting you?

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:09 AM PDT

    What would be the problems I run into using the free versions instead of the professional ones?

    submitted by /u/plzEntertainMe
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    Just a simple rock (Downloadable)

    Posted: 12 Jun 2019 11:51 PM PDT

    The story of our failed political sex management game about making your own Brothel

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 09:42 AM PDT

    Begginer here

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:09 AM PDT

    hey there, I've always been interested in game development, and wanted to get in the community myself, the thing is; i have absolutely no experience or knowledge on programming, how do I get started? What engine do I use? I think I have good ideas for game concepts and its kinda frustrating for me that i can't get them out there. Any help would be appreciated

    submitted by /u/melon2400
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    Implementing a simple Cover System in Unity

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 09:31 AM PDT

    Idle game where to go from here? Marketing/Publisher/etc

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 10:48 AM PDT

    All I'm a little unsure of what direction to take my game next. It has been out for about 6 months making around $250 per month. It is an idle incremental game for iOS and Android. I'm pretty happy with how it is doing so far but I feel like it could make a lot more money. My biggest struggle is just getting the game out there for people to see. I tried Facebook ads, Google ads, Reddit ads, and Google ad words. All those failed and cost me lots of $ for almost no new users. 70% of my new users come from the Apple App Store searches. I was approached by a publisher when the game first came out but I didn't care for the terms. At this point I'm not sure how I can push my game further. Should I look to hire a marketing firm, find a new publisher with better terms, or other ideas? I know big publishers throw $1000 of dollars at mobile games but I can't afford to do that. Am I just out of luck and this is how much my game will make given my limited resources?

    submitted by /u/X51rocketextreme
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    Any recommendations for books or other resources on game writing?

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 10:57 AM PDT

    Version 1.2 of esper released, the Python ECS

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 05:43 AM PDT

    Hi everyone, finally pushed out a new version of esper. Lots of little cleanups, and finally fleshed out the README a bit. https://github.com/benmoran56/esper

    One useful change is that you no longer need a call to super() on your Processor subclasses.

    Happy to answer any questions.

    submitted by /u/Beemo56
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    Have any indies actually moved to a low cost of living area?

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 09:17 AM PDT

    I see this argument get posted up on this subreddit every now and then: Being an indie dev doesn't pay, but you can work by yourself or remotely with others, therefore you should move somewhere with a low cost of living. The suggestions vary a lot, from moving away from the big cities, to moving to states/provinces with lower tax rates, and finally to outright moving to a different country. On paper, it seems somewhat reasonable, especially if you don't have commitments in real life.

    It seems to me that there quite a lot of barriers to just moving to the cheapest place with Internet infrastructure. Language barriers and immigration laws seem to rule out any cross country migration for purposes of indie gamedev, but maybe I'm wrong there.

    Has anyone actually done this and gotten measurable success?

    submitted by /u/Snarkstopus
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    The World Design of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes | Boss Keys

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 09:07 AM PDT

    What does rendering engineer need to know?

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 03:56 AM PDT

    Hi guys. I was watching Ask Gamedev's hardest roles to fill video and it mentioned this role of Rendering Engineer as 1 of the 4. It is the only role I have never heard of before and curious what knowledge/skill do one need to know to fill this role? Is it geared more towards projects that uses custom-made engines?

    This video - https://youtu.be/pLFMs96Y-e4

    submitted by /u/panupatc
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    6 months ago I worked 12hr days so my game server could handle 500 CCU

    Posted: 12 Jun 2019 08:30 PM PDT

    Progress on physics driven procedural animations for my game Knight Crawler

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 08:02 AM PDT

    Creature2D Animation Runtimes now also under Apache License

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:11 AM PDT

    Hello all,

    ​

    Example Creature character from Images to final Game Engine result

    We have made the Creature Runtimes for various game engines ( UE4, Unity, Godot Engine, Cocos Creator, PhaserJS etc. ) now also under the very liberal Apache License: https://twitter.com/KestrelmMoon/status/1138272965496193025

    We have benefited a lot under the open source community and hope this little contribution will aid Game developers in their Game Animation related work.

    ​

    Github: https://github.com/kestrelm

    ​

    Cheers

    submitted by /u/kestrelm
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    Levels & Bosses by SALAI - My first EP of Game Level Music. Looking to work with other on future projects.

    Posted: 13 Jun 2019 11:07 AM PDT
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