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    Wednesday, January 22, 2020

    Home Unlabelled If you haven't already, check out ArmorPaint as an alternative to Substance Painter. Plus it's free and open source

    If you haven't already, check out ArmorPaint as an alternative to Substance Painter. Plus it's free and open source

    January 22, 2020

    If you haven't already, check out ArmorPaint as an alternative to Substance Painter. Plus it's free and open source

    If you haven't already, check out ArmorPaint as an alternative to Substance Painter. Plus it's free and open source

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 10:25 AM PST

    Game dev union leader: “Dream job” passion “can open us up to exploitation”

    Posted: 21 Jan 2020 09:25 PM PST

    Price range of musicians for tracks, with examples.

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 09:13 AM PST

    Hello there, musicians.
    I'm currently developing an indie game and I'm thinking about eventually recruiting a/some musicians to design some tracks, so I'd like to get a good grip on the ins and outs of the profession and its factors,
    I'd like to know about your price range with examples, if applicable.
    Thank you very much!
    PS: This is not an job offer. I'm not currently looking. I'm simply asking for information regarding people's jobs to be better able in the future and in other places, to hire musicians.

    submitted by /u/lordshowsure4
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    A simple example on how to add Twitch integration to your game, to help streamers engage with their audience.

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:30 PM PST

    A simple example on how to add Twitch integration to your game, to help streamers engage with their audience.

    Hello everyone!

    I'd like to talk to you a little bit about Twitch integration. I implemented a way for Twitch streamers to interact with their audiences in Death and Taxes (for which I write teh_codez). It involves a few input boxes in an options menu and a really neat little book. I decided to post this to here so that maybe when people have a question on how to do it/if it's worth it/what you can do with it, then they'd have a general idea of what's what.

    When I started looking into the subject, a lot of search results just gave me mostly empty threads with theorycrafting and barely any links, so maybe this semi-tutorial-case-study-thing can help someone (HELLO FUTURE PEOPLE) who had the same questions I had when I started researching the topic.

    Quick blurb about the game: you're basically the Grim Reaper on an office job and you have to choose people who live or die. As you can imagine, this might be a pretty cool thing for Twitch chat to hook on to. It's basically a power fantasy by proxy. The streamers I pitched the idea to really enjoyed the prospect of it, so I thought: lets just go for it.

    Here's how you'd set it up in-game.

    https://imgur.com/a/dPmYSF5 (gif attachment seems to.. not work)

    ​

    Sorry for the crappy gif quality

    After you've set up everything according to your preference (channel name, voting phrases, voting duration), you can click on the book to start a vote. And when that's done, viewers can post messages in the chat to express their desire.

    We thought it'd be a fun way to just give content creators a chance to bring their audience into the game with them. All of this is completely optional, of course. This feature was something that we had been discussing mostly "as a joke" last summer, but the more we talked about it the more sense it made.

    Eventually, we laid down some facts on how we could use it, prototyped it, did some very basic UX design for it, and then our art lead produced dedicated art assets to give it a polished and in-world look. We didn't want to sacrifice immersion for the sake of having a "gimmick" (so to speak). We're quite pedantic when it comes to worldbuilding, and I think in this case it played out in our favour, since it looks like it mostly fits.

    So how did we do this?

    Luckily, it's quite simple and only takes VERY limited coding knowledge, so basically anyone could do it! Our engine of choice for Death and Taxes has been Unity, and we're running on the 2019.2.10f1 version. It's not the latest, but it's stable enough for our needs.

    The steps you need to take to set everything up, if you're using Unity:

    1. Go to https://github.com/TwitchLib/TwitchLib.Unity and download the DLL there, the latest on at time of writing is 1.0.0: https://github.com/TwitchLib/TwitchLib.Unity/releases/tag/1.0.0 (TwitchLib.Unity.dll)
    2. Import the DLL into your Unity project (literally just drop it somewhere in your Plugins folder)
    3. Set up Twitch credentials so that you'd have a bot who does all the heavy lifting for you (reading chat messages, essentially)
    4. Register your game on Twitch using the developer API
    5. Create a script that manages your Twitch connection and the interactions you want to monitor
    6. That's it. Yup. I was surprised at how little effort this all takes.

    This list seems short, and that's because all of this is quite simple to do. You can set all of this up within hours. The longest time it took for me at any single point was the third, as I was waiting for a verification e-mail from Twitch for about 20 minutes. Other than that, it was super fast. All you really have to do, is follow IMPORTANT ----> this guide <----- IMPORTANT and you'll be golden.

    The most important place where you really have to pay attention to what you're doing is the "SETTING THINGS UP" chapter. Just follow the guide line-by-line and you will be fine. I won't transcribe or re-iterate on what the guide says. Seriously, it's one of the best guides I've read. It really takes you through everything step-by-step. Like, you would have to actively try and screw things up for something to go wrong.

    You can do a lot of neat things with the library, but our design needed something very barebones. We just needed our bot to read the chat messages and search for the phrases that would count as a vote. To that end, I merely had to register to a message handler, which the library provides, which looks something like this:

     private void ClientReference_OnMessageReceived(object sender, TwitchLib.Client.Events.OnMessageReceivedArgs e) { Debug.Log("Sender: " + sender + "; " + e.ChatMessage.Username + " wrote: " + e.ChatMessage.Message + " is broadcaster: " + e.ChatMessage.IsBroadcaster); if(VoteCounter.instance.IsVoteInProgress()) { if(e.ChatMessage.Message.ToLower().Contains(SaveManager.instance.CurrentOptions.StreamCommandDie.ToLower())) { VoteCounter.instance.RegisterVote(e.ChatMessage.Username, true); } if (e.ChatMessage.Message.ToLower().Contains(SaveManager.instance.CurrentOptions.StreamCommandLive.ToLower())) { VoteCounter.instance.RegisterVote(e.ChatMessage.Username, false); } } }

    I have a very simple algorithm that the code is supposed to be doing:

    1. Check if a vote is in progress (clicking on the book starts a vote)
    2. Check whether the message contains the phrase that counts as a vote (which can be customized in the options menu) - and yes, I do realize that if you'd write both phrases into a single message then sparing someone would take the vote, but I'm writing code for cool people, not for trolls
    3. If there is a "vote phrase" in the message, register the vote
    4. If a vote by an user was already registered, replace it with the new vote (no multi-voting so spamming won't work)
    5. Update the visuals!

    ​

     public void RegisterVote(string username, bool die) { if (UserVoteMap.ContainsKey(username)) { if (UserVoteMap[username]) { DieVotes--; } else { LiveVotes--; } UserVoteMap[username] = die; if (UserVoteMap[username]) { DieVotes++; } else { LiveVotes++; } } else { UserVoteMap.Add(username, die); TotalVotes++; if (die) { DieVotes++; } else { LiveVotes++; } } float liveRatio = (float)LiveVotes / TotalVotes; float dieRatio = (float)DieVotes / TotalVotes; Debug.Log("liveRatio: " + liveRatio); Debug.Log("dieRatio: " + dieRatio); Debug.Log("livePercent: " + Mathf.RoundToInt(liveRatio * 100.0f)); Debug.Log("diePercent: " + Mathf.RoundToInt(dieRatio * 100.0f)); SetScaleTargetAngle(Mathf.Lerp(-35, 35, dieRatio)); TextLivePercentage.text = Mathf.RoundToInt(liveRatio * 100.0f) + "%"; TextDiePercentage.text = Mathf.RoundToInt(dieRatio * 100.0f) + "%"; }

    For the book itself, I use a script that just has a bunch of Text and Sprite components, in addition to a few parts that have to move (the scale).

     [SerializeField] GameObject BookOpen; [SerializeField] GameObject BookClosed; [SerializeField] GameObject ScaleTop; [SerializeField] GameObject ScaleLive; [SerializeField] GameObject ScaleDie; [SerializeField] TextMeshPro TextDiePercentage; [SerializeField] TextMeshPro TextLivePercentage; [SerializeField] TextMeshPro TextVoteResult; [SerializeField] TextMeshPro TextDieCommand; [SerializeField] TextMeshPro TextLiveCommand; [SerializeField] TextMeshPro TextTimer;

    And the options menu I just covered with 3 InputFields and 1 Toggle component:

     [SerializeField] Toggle ToggleStreamerMode; [SerializeField] TMP_InputField InputStreamChannelName; [SerializeField] TMP_InputField InputStreamCommandLive; [SerializeField] TMP_InputField InputStreamCommandDie; [SerializeField] TMP_InputField InputStreamVoteTimer;

    For the sake of my own sanity I use singletons for a lot of stuff so I don't have to instantiate or otherwise spaz around with things during run-time.

    This is just scratching the surface of what you could do with this library. Fortunately or unfortunately, Death and Taxes does not really have many points of interaction for community engagement in the game, other than the main mechanic. Implementing all of this took me about an hour, with around 15 minutes of testing on top.

    At first, I didn't have the voting phrases customizable, but I asked our streamer friends on Twitter and they said it'd be a nice thing to have. Adding that on top took me another hour, with additional testing and user input validation.

    On top of that, using this kind of library is safe (as far as I know). You can also program the bot to send messages to the chat, but I left that out, as some streamers would have to grant the bot extra privileges to write to chat, plus there is no real need for it, as the streamer can call out the vote on-stream and also there is a visual indicator on the screen (the red book).

    Just make sure you come up with secure credentials for your bot and enable two-factor authentication. You don't want to be losing accounts.

    In action, all of it looks something like this:

    https://imgur.com/a/sVwNRvX (gif attachment borked)

    BAM. Votes.

    What you could do with it:

    • Parse chat - you could have chat take over control of the game somehow, or have votes like we did
    • Get notified of followers
    • Get notified of subs
    • Parse whispers

    You can mix and match as much as you want, and make pretty detailed implementations based on how involved you want your streamers' communities to be. All in all, was it worth about 3h of coding and 4h of art production for us? Yes, yes it was. We'll see how it performs once we release, but so far our streamer friends have been quite hyped to try it out, so I have a good feeling about it.

    Many thanks to the creators of TwitchLib, and Honest Dan Games for the awesome guide on how to get started with it! I hope that if you're ever making a game yourself, you found inspiration on how quickly you can add a neat little feature to share the fun!

    Thanks to everyone who got this far for reading along! I hope you all have a wonderful day :)

    PS: Release anxiety intensifies

    submitted by /u/Oakwarrior
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    C# for Beginner using Unity

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 11:01 AM PST

    Hi everyone!

    I'm a total beginner here and I want to get into game development. I plan to use Unity because it seems to be the best fit for me and what I would like to do with creating a game. Unfortunately, I have no programming experience and so what I'm reading is difficult for me to grasp. Is learning straight up C# different than learning it specifically for use in Unity? How pivotal is a deep understanding of C# to be able to make a game in Unity? Does anyone have suggestions for learning how to do basic game development using Unity and or tools to learn C# in a way that feels applicable to game development?

    Also, does using Unity and learning C# differ between Mac and Windows? I currently have a MacBook Pro and was hoping to use it for this game development venture.

    I'll take any advice and I'm very appreciative!

    submitted by /u/Ithuriel1234
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    Why are there no forearms in Boneworks or Alyx?

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:34 PM PST

    It can't be that hard to put them in can it? I must imagine the problem (without playing VR before) is that they look awkward when the conroller freaks out and the wrists pop out... but this is visible without them too..

    submitted by /u/rapidlyprototyping
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    Info for putting a multi game bundle on steam?

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 11:44 AM PST

    Hey everyone - hope all is well!

    I wanted to post here because I am having a hard time finding information on releasing multiple games as a single game bundle via steam. I have looked through steamworks quite a bit and have not come across what I am looking for. It would be three different games all with different EXEs.

    Anyone have any info on doing something like this? Does steam install each game individually or can they select which game they want to launch? Should I go one step further and put all of the games in a single EXE and then allow the user to choose which game they want to play from there?

    Any info is greatly appreciated.

    Thanks,

    submitted by /u/rocketarticuno
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    How do you make your game feel cozy?

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 11:29 AM PST

    Hey everyone! Hope all is going well. I'm working with a group of people on a delivery game and was wondering what I can do to make it feel cozy. The deliveries may get hectic, but I want their to be sometime where players can just kind of chill in cozy places during downtime. Any help would be appreciated.

    submitted by /u/richardsureman
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    Learn to - Melee Combat 2D Enemies in UNITY - Coding Attack Pattern - Part 2

    Posted: 21 Jan 2020 10:42 PM PST

    What degree would be good for someone who really likes game design, but doesn't want to be tied down to only games?

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 07:18 AM PST

    Hey Reddit, I'm a 16 year old who is looking into college and is trying to figure out exactly what I'm looking for. In the past couple years, I've taken some game design courses, and while I'm not too great at programming and whatnot, I've found that I'm quite good at the actual design and project management part, to the point where I scored an A+ in a college course full of adults. It just sort of comes naturally to me I guess.

    So basically, I'm interested in game design, but I'd also like to be able to design other things too, like mobile apps and whatnot. The specific job I'm interested in is a creative director sort of position.

    Recently I've been looking into the "Communications Design" degree at MassArt, since I could go there for quite cheap, it's not too far from home, etc. I also did some research and found that the degree does make you eligible for creative direction jobs, and the classes you take for that degree sound fun and interesting too.

    Thoughts?

    submitted by /u/SithCrafter
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    Material Maker 0.8 Released.

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 10:19 AM PST

    Schell Games will be holding an AMA with Jesse Schell and Charlie Amis on /r/pcgaming today at 3pm EST/12pm PST

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 07:52 AM PST

    2D pictures and multidimensional coordinate systems

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 03:30 AM PST

    "How much would you pay for a pitch deck for your game?"

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:50 PM PST

    "How much would you pay for a pitch deck for your game?"

    ​

    Those in the know realize how much of a huge role a pitch deck plays between landing investment (publishers, private, etc.) and getting the silent treatment, and realize the work that goes into it (the cost analysis, credible sales projections determined by market research, USP positioning, etc.)

    I've built decks for successful businesses and got a rather high closing rate in ensuing negotiations with publishers (high by this industry's standards at least) but it seems to me a lot of indie developers I encounter that have very limited understanding of the business of video games have some incorrect assumptions about the work involved and the value of such collateral when seeking for funding.

    ​

    I'd be curious to hear other developers' thoughts on the cost and value at play here, and specifically, how much you'd be willing to pay for a professional pitch deck by someone with a positive track record 'gate crashing' into actual negotiations, and most importantly, how you came up with this pricing?

    submitted by /u/orymus
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    Looking for Marketing Tools

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:25 PM PST

    Hey fellow devs,

    So I've been working on my game for a little over 3.5 years, with the intention of releasing in September of this year. I am on the verge of entering the marketing phase and am hoping you might be able to help me (and future readers) out with some suggestions. At the moment, my intention is to begin making frequent posts on social media, namely twitter, instagram, and reddit. When I'm a little closer to publication, roughly 3 months out, my intention is to reach out to content creators with some keys in the hopes that they will play my game on stream.

    Firstly, I have no idea whether or not this is a good or bad approach so any thoughts on my method would be greatly appreciated.

    Second, I'm hoping you might be aware of some marketing tools that will help me to keep on track with the frequency of my marketing posts.

    Anything else is of course appreciated. Thank you for your input!

    submitted by /u/little_charles
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    What was the worst case of scope creep you've experienced?

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:12 AM PST

    Looking for somwthing to help “manage my ideas”

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:06 PM PST

    I'm looking for anything to help me with managing everything from just writing down notes, to writing larger stories, to quick doodles of world design and characters etc.

    Does a tool or application like this exist? Just looking for something to house all my ideas in one place.

    submitted by /u/GreenPebble
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    Games made with Java

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 12:06 PM PST

    Hi,

    I would like to ask if there is some kind of database or list of games which have been created using Java or other programming languages listed. I'm just curious. I suppose that there is not very much of them since most of the assets and stuff are created for other languages.

    submitted by /u/bajorro
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    How do people feel about giving away free work when doing art tests?

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 11:57 AM PST

    I'm curious because I was just asked to do a VFX test. I'd be fine with delivering an MP4 of the effect, but this particular studio also wants textures, materials, scene files, etc. I feel like this is equivalent to working for free. I've done VFX tests like this in the past and I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of my work, things like textures, have just been collected and used in the studio's games. Its always felt incredibly wrong to me for studios to be asking for this kind of stuff for free.

    I'm wondering if I'm alone in this sentiment, and if I'm not, what have you told studios that ask for this kind of stuff in the past?

    submitted by /u/jayhawx86
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    Indie Potential

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 03:03 AM PST

    Greetings everyone, can a single person develop a game such as "Darkwood?" As a beginner? How time would approximately be needed in order to complete a project like that?

    submitted by /u/StarvingRodent
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    legality behind fanmade games

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 11:44 AM PST

    So I would like to do a starwars fanmade game, so I'm wondering about legality behind it(I'm unable to pay for the rights since I'm just 17 and no finished published games to earn any money of them).

    Whatever the conclusion of this is I'll make it, I'm just wondering whether I should or should not publish it

    If I publish it I'm not going to monetize it in any way, it's going to be free to play, no adds, no microtransactions and no donation links.

    submitted by /u/matejcraft100yt
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    Need advice :)

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 11:28 AM PST

    Should I start with 2D or 3D games? I'm new to game dev and want to know what the learning curve is like :)

    submitted by /u/bolgz
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    Mechanics in VR and UI?

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 11:03 AM PST

    I would like to know where/how I could acheive showing an overlay of where the horizon is in VR/realty?

    I'll be using Unity/C# and either the Rift or Rift S.

    What I want to be able to do is add a mechanic where I can see a line/outline of where the real earth horizon is in VR. Maybe like some sort of overlay just off to the side of the screen?

    Any ideas?

    To be clear my Skill set with VR is OK and Unity is Adavanced (Been using unity since 2013). Just can't figure out what to tap into to be able to display an overlay of the horizon. Brainfart moment.

    submitted by /u/OberZine
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    Realistic Environment Building

    Posted: 22 Jan 2020 07:16 AM PST
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