Valve no longer accepts Epic exclusives if the delay is over a month |
- Valve no longer accepts Epic exclusives if the delay is over a month
- Iterating on the environment 'reveal' shader/effect. What do you guys think of it?
- Should you release a demo of your game? A post-mortem for an indie game demo (with stats)
- Free game engine NeoAxis 2019.4 is coming soon with a big amount of improvements! 2D game engine, particles, terrain paint layers, improved performance, and many more features.
- The History of Indie Game Design | What Makes a Game Indie , and the Future of Independent Development
- How much time does multiplayer elements add to game development?
- Company wants to ban me from gamedev for 3 months after end of cooperation
- What do people think makes a "Good Game Designer"? Lets find out!
- I really enjoy making games but never know what to make
- I've been working on my game for around 3 - 4 months now, and getting burnt out.
- "An Introduction to Utility Theory" - Rez Graham (from Game AI Pro 1)
- I want to make a big walking simulator, should I learn Unity or Unreal?
- I've never published a game before, should I start small or go for my big project idea?
- Babylon.js Weekly Video: Node Material Lighting Texture
- Did anyone went to Unite India 2019
- Screenshot Saturday #460 - Exclusive Gallery
- Roku Gaming API Emulator
- I did some live level design in UE4. The stream has ended but feel free to check out the video.
- How is called this type of view?
- My VR Game View Streaming Experiment with Unity Plugin FM Exhibition Tool Pack
- Creating Indie Game Devlog #2 UI Update.
- Here's a video to show you the trees & the forest - Dome Discover game.
| Valve no longer accepts Epic exclusives if the delay is over a month Posted: 23 Nov 2019 12:26 AM PST |
| Iterating on the environment 'reveal' shader/effect. What do you guys think of it? Posted: 23 Nov 2019 09:15 AM PST |
| Should you release a demo of your game? A post-mortem for an indie game demo (with stats) Posted: 23 Nov 2019 10:26 AM PST TL;DR: Yes. Bear with me if you want to know why. And yes, it will be a wall of text, but there will be PICTURES and STATISTICS and it will be TOTALLY FUN, I promise. So, if you like numbers, then this is going to be a blast for you. Lets rewind a couple of months. June 1st, 2019 I join the team for Death and Taxes (click me for context). Not much happened in June aside from making a first ever completely, fully playable demo, to be shown locally in an art gallery in Estonia (this is a whole separate story). We would then use this same demo as a base for a fully public version. August 30th, 2019 We open a store page on itch.io. We decided to bundle the aforementioned demo into the store page as well. We just thought: fuck it, it's good enough, people have had fun with it and we believe in it. So we threw it online, after a few quick fixes that, yes, absolutely broke some other things in case you were wondering. The usual. August 30th, 2019 - September 17th, 2019 So this is what our first weeks looked like. Death and Taxes Views/Downloads between 30. August - 16. September, 2019 In the first days we were lucky to get more than 20 views (which was once) and more than a couple of downloads. This was to be expected. We had no presence on itch beforehand and our social media accounts were, uh, barren, for lack of a better word. But at least SOMEONE who wasn't my mom decided that downloading this demo was worth their while. This was great for motivation. Then some surprises came. A week later we ended up having a view peak of 146 and a download peak of 43. Obviously we were over the moon. Again, consider that we only had a handful of followers on Twitter (about 30 at the time) and a few likes on the Facebook page (again, like 20). This was big for us. So this got us thinking, what in the nine hells is happening and how are people ending up on our page? So it turns out that we were in the top 30 (or so) of itch.io's Most Recent section. Great! We also decided (or rather, I did?) that I'd write devlogs on itch every week on Wednesdays and we'd release them right when #IndieDevHour is happening on Twitter and other social media sites. We got a few hundred views in total from all of that and then we have a dip (see the 11th of September). And then we go back up again? Again, this is very interesting. What now? We seemed to end up in the New & Popular section. Again, great! Another 100 downloads, another 300 views. Our Click-Through Rate (CTR) was ridiculously high (for us), around 1.3%, and the conversion rate from view to download was something around 35%. Insane, we thought. To top it all off, we were signal-boosted by itch, too! We were well over 500 views and 200 downloads. Key takeaways: Did uploading a demo help with motivation? Yes. Did uploading a demo help with visibility? Yes. Would we have done anything differently? No. Limited time and resources meant that we wanted to focus on the development of the full game as much as possible. Couldn't get any better, right? Well, guess what. This happened. September 18th, 2019 - September 30th, 2019 So I was woken up in bed by the lead of the project on Death and Taxes (we're engaged, don't worry). Being half asleep, I got asked: "Why are people asking us on Facebook where they can download our game?". Then we found out that someone made a YouTube video about us. We checked the stats of the video and I nearly shat. At the time it was already at 200k views. It's a channel I knew about and I'd watched the guy's videos before so I felt really amazed. Was this luck? Yes and no. The channel in question (GrayStillPlays) has a long, LONG history in making funny and absurdly destructive playthroughs in games and it's quite well known that a lot of indie games get featured there. There are no guarantees in life, but that's not what life or gamedev is about. It's about increasing your chances. <--- this is in bold because it's important That being said, I need to stress one very important key point that I will be focusing on in this write-up: Death and Taxes was designed from the ground up as a game that would appeal to content creators. Our whole marketing strategy relies on the "streamability" of the game. We have absurd gallows humour, we have a visually gripping art style for this exact purpose - to catch one's eye. This whole type of experimental genre that we have our game in has proven to be popular with influencers. This "event" validated our strategy. It could have been another content creator who found us first, it could have been someone much, much smaller and it would have validated it for us. As days came by, more and more videos about our game started to pop up. We're at 6 (I think) so far. And note that this has been completely organic. At this point we haven't done practically anything other than tweeting about our demo being available on itch.io and people finding it on their own. A couple of problems here. Our first and foremost goal is to release on Steam. We did not have a Steam page ready for such a surge in visibility, as we weren't planning on starting our marketing push till the end of October. We also did not have a lot of materials ready for our storefront(s) and our website was still clunky af - the only thing there was the chance to sign up for a newsletter, not even a link to itch.io was there. Key takeaways: Would we have had the same kind of exposure if it would have been covered by a smaller content creator? No. Would we have had the same kind of exposure if we hadn't released a demo? Nope. Would we have had the chance for this kind of exposure without a demo? Absolutely not. Would we do something differently? UM. YES. Have a better landing page, have a Steam page up, have the infrastructure ready to funnel views into the Steam page. At this point we're getting a view-to-download conversion rate on itch.io of about 65%. That is remarkable engagement. The initial blitz brought us 1500 downloads alone and we got around 400-500 views daily. We scrambled to get our pages linking to all the relevant stuff (our itch.io page at the time) to make sure people were seeing what they needed to see if they were interested in the game. Other than that it was (mostly) normal development on the game, just implementing features and producing assets. And then we also relocated to Sweden. Yay. October 1st, 2019 - October 31st, 2019 We're still tailing from the video and for some reason we're not losing views. We're gaining views. At one point I become suspicious, so I browse itch again. In incognito mode >_>. It didn't take long to see that we're in the New & Popular tab, quite high up. We were around the 25th position, but we weren't moving down, we were going up. After the first week of October it climbed as high as the 6th game there (meaning you'd see it immediately) and we were also in the Popular tab, around the 30th position, at first. For those who are strangers to itch, the Popular tab is what you see when you just start browsing games on itch. This is obviously a strong factor into visibility. More people saw our game and a lot more played it. Again a new peak. The view-to-download ratio is back to a modest 30%. Still really good! We were on the front page of itch.io with the 5th position (maybe even higher at one point that I didn't see) on the Popular tab and we were 2nd at one point in the New & Popular tab, for more than a week. At this point we're asking ourselves why are we doing so well. After long, hard detective work, we came up with this:
SURPRISE! More stats! Lifetime Devlog performance. Granted, it's not much, but in hindsight, this is what kept our tail going during September-October. My incessant shitposting on Twitter does not compare *at all* to this. Here, I'll show you! Look! That's not a lot of impressions, actually. Why? Lets look at the next image... So we sit down with Leene, (my fiancé and project lead) and we start thinking about how to leverage our visibility better with the situation that we have on our hands. We have a mildly popular itch page, we have a game that "pops" and creates organic traffic and we have a solid strategy for keeping eyes on our game. What can we improve? As the marketing genius that I am (note: I am not), I say: "We need a new demo on itch!" So obviously there are problems with this. Let me list a few:
After some hectic thinking and talking to other team members (the team is actually more than 2 people, it's actually 6 - wow!) we decide that we're going to try and see how much noise we can make with a single, multi-faceted, large announcement. Back in September when we got the video done on us, we wanted to make a Steam page, so shortly after that we enrolled as a Steam partner and got an app slot. So that was already there. We decided to start using it. In one single announcement we wanted to say that:
If you've been paying attention (and god knows it's hard, trust me my fingers are already creaking like an old door from all this text), then you might see that there is a glaring omission from this list. We're only talking about itch.io for the new demo. Why? We still had no idea whether or not it's a good idea to release a demo on Steam. We're only talking about itch right now. There are a looooooooot of arguments, especially on /r/gamedev that assert that it's not a good idea to release a demo for your game ESPECIALLY on Steam. I will be covering this in another post because 99% of those arguments are firm bullshit. Now, if you looked at the impression graph for Twitter in October above, you might have seen that there is a significant peak on the 31st of October. HALLOWEEN! Yeah, so, we decided to have that huge announcement on Halloween. Now, I don't know if that brought us any less or more views, but I do know this: having a big blowout like that worked. We did a couple of things.
Consolidating our efforts on multiple fronts brought us a reasonably successful announcement. We had 100 wishlists in the first 24h of the Steam page being up, we had higher-than-ever numbers for our tweets and we were showing up on itch again. Note the Steam Page Launch viewcount! It is *large* So, we thought, we did good. Key takeaways: Would we have had more success with the demo if we put more time into it? Probably not. (spoiler: you'll see when I get to the next part) Did it make sense to update the demo? Yes. Did it make sense to make one big announcement for all 3 things? Yes. Yes, yes yes. So what happened with the new demo launch? November 1st, 2019 - November 23rd, 2019 aka. The Time Of Writing Of This Absurdly Long Post First off, thank you to everyone who managed to get this far in the post: you're the real MVP. So we released the demo update, and while we were really happy with our first week Steam stats (2,665 impressions, 2,191 visits (82% clickthrough rate!!!) and 180 wishlists), our updated demo was, uhh, well. Look: While 10-20 downloads per day is still nice, it really doesn't compare to the numbers before So what gives? Basically, people who have already played the demo probably already made up their mind about it, and people who haven't played the demo aren't seeing it because we're already tailing again due to visibility algorithms. Meanwhile, leading up to Halloween we were doing this game jam at the place we're living at, and I had an interesting idea. We released our game jam game on itch.io on 4 platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux and WebGL (which means you could play it in your browser. It got a LOT of hits (probably because it's a "free" and "horror" game on itch because those sell like pancakes on there). And where did most of the players come from? WebGL. And yes, I have the numbers to back it up! Lifetime visits for Paper Cages, our game jam game So, at this point.. are you thinking what I'm thinking? Well, if you were thinking: "They should put out a WebGL demo for Death and Taxes!", then you're spot-on. One knee-jerk idea led to another and it took me about 4 hours to *literally* hammer the demo into a shape that could work for WebGL and it was UGLY AF and it was just so hacky I can't even. But it worked. This was the most important part. Since we're using Unity to develop, it wasn't a big problem to get it done, but memory usage on WebGL almost killed this idea. I found a workaround for it (and it's as dirty as my conscience), but again - it WORKED. Time to put the hypothesis to test. We launched the WebGL demo on 5th November. The first week was great: So how did it affect our overall visibility? Well I'll tell you hwat: pretty damn well. It's been almost 3 weeks since we did that and it is just now starting to tail off. Not as good as our previous pushes in Sept/Oct, but still very good. Views/Downloads/Browser Plays from 1. October till 23. November So we have around ~1000 Browser Plays, ~1500 views and ~200 standalone demo downloads just because we released on WebGL. I can confidently call that a success. Key takeaways: Was it worth 6 hours of time to get the WebGL demo out? Yes. Would the effort that went into the demo have been worth it without the WebGL demo? No. (But with Steam it's a completely different story) What did we learn? Updating your demo does not seem to have a big effect unless you start targeting new platforms. Now, I've literally been writing this post for TWO HOURS so I better get somewhere with my points, right!? Some last stats in conclusion: I chose this font deliberately to piss everyone off In conclusion:
The last one comes with a big BUT. You should probably release a demo if you have no other way of generating visibility for your game and/or if you have a very limited marketing budget. If you're an indie dev and you have a first playable version out, at this point, unless you're being published, you probably will have zero resources to actually generate traction for your game. Posting into gamedev groups, having a Facebook (is it written FACEBOOK now instead?)/Twitter/etc. account is going to be an uphill battle because you're probably going to start out at zero. When we started at the end of August this year, we literally started at zero. We had no other marketing plan other than railing the game into the public consciousness for 6 months before release with using as many low-effort/high-reward tools as possible and our ace in the hole was supposed to be content creators from the get-go. We were initially skeptical of having a demo, because there had been a lot of hearsay about how having a demo hurts your sales and whatnot. I repeat: a lot of that is firm bullshit. If you have to choose between 100 views (without a demo) and 10000 views (with a demo), I will pick the latter option ten times out of ten. It will help engage your community, because you can ask for feedback (we did, and it worked for us) and present regular content updates in addition to it, so people can follow the game's progress. When you do decide to make a demo, make sure that you are showing enough of the game for your players to be interested in it, so you leave them wanting for more: don't show off everything you have. And likely, you won't be able to, because when you're thinking about a demo, a lot of your game is probably still unfinished. Is there a winning formula for when to release a demo? Well, no. From other examples that I've seen, for example from u/koderski right here on reddit, or Crying Suns or Book of Demons: you should be releasing your demo before you release your full game, and then consider whether or not to keep it up after your game releases. If your objective is to generate traction I suggest getting a demo out rather sooner than later, but not at the expense of the full game. As always, your mileage may vary (YMMV), but this worked for us. It worked for us so well that we decided to bite the bullet and release our demo on Steam, too. We did this only a few days ago, so results are still preliminary, but I can just say that it skyrocketed our visibility and it's giving us visits, installs and most importantly: wishlists. I will tackle the topics of demos on Steam and the firm bullshit part in another, future post. If anyone has ANY sort of numbers, stats, experiences, etc. that they are willing to share, please do so in the comments. When I was doing research on this subject, there was simply not enough data to make a strong enough case, but having tried this out ourselves, we can see that the numbers simply do not lie: Having a demo helps with your visibility. Thank you for reading <3 EDIT: Fixed links to Crying Suns and Book of Demons [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 22 Nov 2019 08:55 PM PST |
| Posted: 23 Nov 2019 11:18 AM PST |
| How much time does multiplayer elements add to game development? Posted: 22 Nov 2019 10:21 PM PST Hey, all! As I'm finishing up my first project I'm starting to look toward what I want to build next. At first I was intent on building this 'masterpiece' that had been melding in my mind for a while but now that I know a little about what game development is like... I think I want to make another wave based zombie shooter. BUT I want to make the one that me and my friends always wanted growing up. I want to scratch that itch that none of those late 2000's flash games could scratch. Thing is I've no idea how long it takes to add multiplayer and I don't want to dive head first in and find out I've signed up for a year long project or something. So some information you may need: I want essentially the easiest multiplayer you can get. 2, maybe 4 friends at once. I have no money for servers or anything, so whoever hosted the game would have to be the link that binds us all together. (Or however multiplayer works. Honestly I imagine I'm up for a steep learning curve) I think that's all that's needed? I'm using Unity and C# if that's important. Cheers, Cameron. TLDR: How long does adding basic multiplayer elements add to game development? Looking to make the host player initiate a server that 1-3 other players can connect to. [link] [comments]  |
| Company wants to ban me from gamedev for 3 months after end of cooperation Posted: 22 Nov 2019 05:36 PM PST I recently completed a positive recruitment process at one of the fairly large mobile games companies. I was very excited that I would finally start working stable as a developer. Before that, I wanted to know the details of the contract, so I received the draft of B2B contract by email. What worried me was the fact that there was a record (part of Non-Compete Clause) that during and within 3 months after the end of cooperation I can't work/cooperate with/for competitors (under high financial penalty). The problem is that the agreement defines competition so broadly that it covers almost the entire gamedev industry. This rule also applies to a trial period of 3 months. So if after the trial period due to the decision of one of the parties, our cooperation is not extended according to the contract, I cannot work in gamedev for the next 3 months. I felt this entry was not fair. I wrote about it in the email, but I got a very laconic reply from their lawyer that basically said they would not change the contract, adding that they don't not forbid me to work outside the game dev (ohh great! 😉). I am mentally broke 😟 at this point. What would i do within this 3 month period of "ban" for gamedev? Games are my passion i don't want to work in other IT branches. I think will not sign a contract whose terms I consider unfair. What do you guys think about it? Maybe such records are standard in this industry? [link] [comments]  |
| What do people think makes a "Good Game Designer"? Lets find out! Posted: 23 Nov 2019 06:15 AM PST tl;dr: Help shape the future of game development education by filling out a very short survey? (~5 min) Hi /r/gamedev! My name is Charles, i'm a PhD researcher from the IGGI group in the UK - we specialise in games research. I'm conducting a cross sectional study on the public understanding of what constitutes a "Good Game Designer" in the hope of building a picture of the field as it is now, and eventually provide us with insights that allow us to critique Game Design education, which many argue is lacking, and build practical tools for game designers in industry. If you could (anonymously!) fill out this very short survey it would be incredibly helpful: https://york.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3b1i97yZXOr6a8Z?Q_CHL=social&Q_SocialSource=reddit I would massively appreciate responses from game developers (of all disciplines), since ultimately it's you who have boots on the ground in the real world and if anyone knows what it takes to make good games, it's probably you lot. Edit: Just as a heads up there are two (+1 optional) multi-line open ended questions. Once responses have collected i'll be sharing findings with the community. Hopefully you can give me your insights into what we find. If you have any questions at all please fire away, i'm super happy to chat about the study! [link] [comments]  |
| I really enjoy making games but never know what to make Posted: 22 Nov 2019 07:55 PM PST I want to be able to make games but I'm not that creative at thinking of games so I struggle starting anything that I think will be cool. If anyone has any ideas of some game ideas I could make that are somewhat simple but have some challenges. I am maybe just past beginner level at making games. I use Unreal Engine mainly. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| I've been working on my game for around 3 - 4 months now, and getting burnt out. Posted: 23 Nov 2019 08:08 AM PST Yeah, I've been working on it for around 3 - 4 months and im starting to lose motivation and look at it in a less optimistic light. What can i do? [link] [comments]  |
| "An Introduction to Utility Theory" - Rez Graham (from Game AI Pro 1) Posted: 23 Nov 2019 08:02 AM PST |
| I want to make a big walking simulator, should I learn Unity or Unreal? Posted: 23 Nov 2019 11:12 AM PST I want to just make really big environments and walk around in them, WASD and Jump. I have a little programming and modeling experience from being an engineer. It seems like Unity and Unreal are the two choices, so which is better for me to learn for this? I'm also only going to be getting the free version for what that's worth. [link] [comments]  |
| I've never published a game before, should I start small or go for my big project idea? Posted: 23 Nov 2019 06:14 AM PST Hello, so I've been working on the development of this quite big project of an rpg game since last year in Unity. I've had experience making small games with different software but they were never fully finished, let alone published. After spending many hours on developing my dream project I realised I was learning many of Unity's workings on the go, and most of the time I'm not even sure I'm coding things right. It has made me think about creating a smaller project which I could publish first to get experience...but on the other hand I'm really passionate about making the one I'm working on. What would we best and what are your experiences? I would very much appreciate some advice... [link] [comments]  |
| Babylon.js Weekly Video: Node Material Lighting Texture Posted: 23 Nov 2019 09:46 AM PST |
| Did anyone went to Unite India 2019 Posted: 23 Nov 2019 05:59 AM PST |
| Screenshot Saturday #460 - Exclusive Gallery Posted: 22 Nov 2019 08:10 PM PST Share your progress since last time in a form of screenshots, animations and videos. Tell us all about your project and make us interested! The hashtag for Twitter is of course #screenshotsaturday. Note: Using url shorteners is discouraged as it may get you caught by Reddit's spam filter. Bonus question: What is the longest you've waited in line for something? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 23 Nov 2019 09:31 AM PST As a member of the (small) Roku game developer community, I always wanted an emulator to test my games without the need of a real device. I decided to change this and developed myself a Roku 2D API Emulator so we can run our games on a browser or as a desktop app. It's open source (MIT) and just entered Beta. The desktop app also emulate Roku remote control services so it can be integrated to the great VSCode BrightScript Extension! Comments and collaboration are welcome. Links below Library Repository: https://github.com/lvcabral/brs-emu Desktop App (Windows, macOS & Linux) https://github.com/lvcabral/brs-emu-app Online demo: [link] [comments]  |
| I did some live level design in UE4. The stream has ended but feel free to check out the video. Posted: 23 Nov 2019 09:07 AM PST |
| How is called this type of view? Posted: 23 Nov 2019 08:54 AM PST |
| My VR Game View Streaming Experiment with Unity Plugin FM Exhibition Tool Pack Posted: 23 Nov 2019 08:54 AM PST |
| Creating Indie Game Devlog #2 UI Update. Posted: 23 Nov 2019 08:50 AM PST This is a UI Update of my indie game. [link] [comments]  |
| Here's a video to show you the trees & the forest - Dome Discover game. Posted: 23 Nov 2019 08:32 AM PST |
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