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    Screenshot Saturday #474 - Visual Impact

    February 29, 2020

    Screenshot Saturday #474 - Visual Impact

    Screenshot Saturday #474 - Visual Impact

    Posted: 28 Feb 2020 08:07 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.

    Previous Screenshot Saturdays

    Bonus question: Are you the type of person that generally reads most of a game's tutorial text/instructions?

    submitted by /u/Sexual_Lettuce
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    Testing Auto Interpolation AI with DainApp. It generated 10 new frames. What do you think about it?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 08:47 AM PST

    GDC 2020 has been Postponed.

    Posted: 28 Feb 2020 04:03 PM PST

    sfxia: a tiny sound generator

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 06:56 AM PST

    Klein: A SIMD-optimized C++17 Geometry Library

    Posted: 28 Feb 2020 11:01 PM PST

    Project Page

    Github

    Hey /r/gamedev

    I wanted to share a passion project of mine that I've been putting together in evenings and weekends the past few months. For background, I've been a graphics and game engine developer for about a decade now. About a year ago, I encountered Geometric Algebra at SIGGRAPH 2019 and was intrigued by the ideas presented. I had always heard about GA as just an equivalent but possibly easier to understand formulation of the quaternionic algebra. I was surprised to learn that GA is, in fact, far richer! More than just handling rotations and screw motions (rigid body motion), it handles projections, intersections, joins, and a fair bit more. Furthermore, it unifies the implementation such that all those actions (rotations, projections, intersections, etc) work equally well on points, lines, and planes.

    One persistent challenge historically with GA was making it performant. After a bit of work, I now have an implementation I believe is significantly faster than libraries like GLM because the entire codebase is organized around SIMD from the start. SSE3 (the default if you include Klein headers) has 100% market penetration at this point on the Steam hardware survey, and I have additional optimizations for SSE4.1 as well. I don't have complete feature parity with GLM yet, but already, Klein supports a number of operations I've found useful in my game engine that is unsupported by GLM, RTM, MathFu, DirectXMath, etc.

    So with that, I hope you'll consider giving Klein a try :) It's MIT licensed, and I really just want others to benefit from the formulation in the same way I did. You don't need to understand Geometric Algebra to use the library, but perhaps the library can help you learn GA! If you want to learn more about GA in general, the project site has some information, and also a few really handy references I refer to all the time.

    If you have questions, or feedback, or requests, I'd love to hear them and answer to the best of my ability. I'm generally happy to answer PMs or offer advice to people interested in graphics engineering in general.

    Thanks for checking out Klein!

    submitted by /u/m_ninepoints
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    The new VR Game we’re developing! Feedback appreciated

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 09:42 AM PST

    Post mortem: free arcade game on steam.

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 07:39 AM PST

    I thought some people may find it interesting how a simple, free arcade game lifecycle looks like if the game is not promoted actively and how the impressions convert to clicks and then to downloads in case of such games.

    The game I made is totally free, i.e. no microtransactions or paid DLC. I made it a) for fun and b) to learn how steam stuff works (was my first game published there) and c) to verify if the engine I used will be stable. I wrote it in python, in a completely new 2D games engine which is still pre 1.0

    The game is a top-down space shooter, kind of an old school bullet hell. It is extremely hard. Takes about 1 hour to complete it but requires about 15-20 hours to actually learn all enemies and their movement patterns to get to the last stage and kill the final boss.

    The game was published in October 2019. I have not spent anything on promotion. I gave access to all steam curators who requested, and sent out keys using Keymailer to all who requested. Since the game is very difficult, I announced a contest: $25 giftcard to whoever completes the game first (BTW someone eventually did, which I find amazing :)). I have published a few patches and minor improvements over the course of 2 months after the release then stopped working on it. It's safe to say that the game became "dead" after about 3 months.

    Here's the post mortem statistics:

    Total impressions on Steam: 9,793,947 (90% in the "free to play games center")

    Clicks: 268,922 (click through rate 2.75%)

    Lifetime free licenses: 9,159 (A free license is a grant of a product to a user, but does not necessarily mean the user downloaded the product)

    Lifetime unique user: 5,593

    Average time played: 1 hour 5 mins

    Median time played: 6 minutes (!!)

    Play time distribution:

    10 minutes 38%

    30 minutes 17%

    1 hour 0 minutes 10% (well below average as compared to other Steam games)

    2 hours 0 minutes 5%

    5 hours 0 minutes 2%

    10 hours 0 minutes 1%

    20 hours 0 minutes 0%

    The game got 30 reviews out of which 80% were positive. Negative reviews complained about "XP grinding" and slow pace in the early stage of the game, which I think is a fair point and a lesson learned.

    Conclusions:

    The median time and average time was not surprising. The game is very difficult and you die a lot in the beginning, the game takes a lot of effort to master, and bullet hells aren't very addictive types of games, so most people just get bored and quit.

    Another thing that wasn't surprising was the sudden drop of installations after about 3 months. When Steam stops promoting your game, and it did not manage to get a criticall mass of attention (no snowball effect) then it will never come back.

    Things I did find surprising:

    1. A huge click through rate of 2.75%. I used to do some development on a real time bidding platform few years back and CTR of 0.5% for a typical banner ad was a very good result. I think it's much less now. I think the high CTR comes from the fact those aren't just banner ads in mobile apps but a thumbnail pics in the "free to play" section of major gaming platform. People consider them links to a free games they know they can download & play, not ads per se.
    2. Low conversion rate. Out of 269k clicks, only 5.5k unique users actually downloaded and played the game (about 2%). Conversion is usually the most tricky thing and 2% conversion should be considered very good, but in case of a free game I expected it to be somewhat higher.
    submitted by /u/iqsoftwaregames
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    Screenshot Saturday when your game has “basically two possible screenshots”

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 05:57 AM PST

    Regarding Cultist Simulator, Weather Factory recently described it in a tweet as "the game with basically two possible screenshots". Now Cultist was of course a successful game, but that characterization is accurate.

    Video games are generally speaking a strongly visual medium. This is advantageous for things like Twitter (or even reddit), where easily digestible visual content has a tendency to rise to the top. This has spawned traditions like Screenshot Saturday on most social media, including this subreddit, to leverage this advantage for some exposure. While this benefits most games, it's not as effective for something like the above.

    I'm struggling with the same issue myself in that my game has perhaps 3 possible screenshots. There is a fair bit of art, but despite that the thumbnails will look nearly identical. I was wondering how other people have handled this. Do you just not participate in these hashtags? Do you post screenshots anyway, despite the lack of visual diversity? Do you do something else entirely?

    submitted by /u/ledat
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    How would you describe the core game loop for Disco Elysium?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 08:28 AM PST

    Hi! I'm looking to get in to game development since it's something I've always been interested in, but I'm 34 and have been working in an unrelated field for almost 15 years. Could you offer some advice?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 07:57 AM PST

    Some of my main concerns are, am I too old to be making a shift like that? I dont have relevant experience or schooling, what are some good ways to break in without school / how important is school, actually? I know developing a project on your own is a good way to show potential employers what you're able to do, but I kind of dont know where to start, would you suggest finding someone to work with, or really just solo it?

    Please dont think I'm not willing to put the work in to learning what I need to, I'm highly motivated. This is the field I've always wanted to get in to, but when I graduated high school in 2004, the gaming industry was much different than it is today, and I know its a significantly more viable career path than it was then. Just wanted to make it clear that I'm not looking for an "easy" way in, just, what actually should I do? Thank you!

    submitted by /u/beatdazzler
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    In light of GDC cancellation, Wings Interactive and several industry partners organize a GDC Relief Fund for struggling indie developers

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 12:52 AM PST

    What does everything think about Dreams (PS4)?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 06:19 AM PST

    I have seen some pretty impressive stuff being made with the game will full fledged games and remakes. Recent news reported one creator was offered a real job based on his Dream creation.

    Will this give birth to new generation of game developers? Wonder if Media Molecule will allow games to be monetised in the near future.

    submitted by /u/Ghulam_Jewel
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    Reflection about mis-uses of street art and graffities assets in video games

    Posted: 28 Feb 2020 10:42 PM PST

    Reflection about mis-uses of street art and graffities assets in video games

    Hello !

    I already apologise for the long topic, but here we go. I have been a gamer for 25 years now, and as I used to do a lot of street art and graffiti when I was younger, I find my immersion broken often in video games, by seeing the same few tags and graffitis everywhere, or by seeing assets used wrongly. Most people do not notice it, but people who have that kind of interest will notice. Since the tags are supposed to add to realism and atmosphere of the game environments, breaking the realism this way is something to avoid, right ?...

    ​

    Escape from tarkov, construction site on Customs.

    A quick case study here. This is a screenshot of escape from tarkov (because it's the game i've been playing recently, but I can find the same exemples or other mis-uses in most games). Look at the bottom left of the first tag, look at the lower curve of the S, and the bottom of the last letter as well. From the way the lines fadded, I can tell you this was probably made with a edding-like marker that was not used much, and probably on paper before it was scanned to be treated with photoshop... The second tag as well, looks like it was made with some kind of office-markers on paper. It's obvious it wasnt made with a spray, it wasnt made with a roller, or a fire extinguisher, or any "traditionnal" efficient street art technics. So since it's obvious it was made with a marker that is not even good for properly tagging in real life, this virtual tag is way too big. "Oh yeah the lead of your marker was 18 cm large ? How long was the marker itself, 7 meters long ? How did you even manage to use it ?"

    Second problem I see here, is the height. Of course there are graffitis made along whole giant buildings, but that means there is a way to reach the painted spot, right ? Either from the ground, or from the roof, maybe with ropes, maybe climbing... I dont know. But on this screenshot, I see nothing to climb, and no way to reach the roof either. According to tarkov's lore, this is a war zone, so people carrying ladders around with them to reach the spot, risking their lives for a shitty tag with a giant marker, does not makes sense either. It kinda fits into the game, but in real life you would never see that exact situation.

    You can also argue "they were carrying ladders before this place became a war zone" but it makes no sense, in a normal economy system, to tag over a site that is being built, before it's even finished and painted by the workers. There are other details that bother me here, but I will try to keep this topic short. Dont get me wrong, the tag assets are not bad themselves, the size and the placement are.

    While roaming into virtual environments, I (and other graffiti-cunts will tell you the same) spontaniously "scan" the area in a way, that I notice all potential good graffiti spots, and of course all graffities already there, just like I do when I walk in the street in real life. Like some people use landmarks like architecture to navigate into a city, a street artist or graffiti enthusiast commonly uses tags and graffities for the same purpose. From that perspective, in a city, each street has its own unique identity and atmosphere that is evolving daily or weekly.

    People who dont watch graffities, dont really realise how organic it is, it's a sign that the city is alive, it tells a lot about who walks in this street, who lives here, it is marks left by individuals with different purposes. The first dude has political convictions and will write "fuck the system" or other slogans on symbolic buildings and monuments, the second one has never tagged in his life and wrote "i love you" in front of his gf's place to impress her, the third guy is a serial-tagger who wants to have the name of his graffiti-crew on busses and trains in the whole city and spends his whole time on it ... Maybe some gangs mark their territory, and at the same time you have the "cool-14 years old skaters" who tag little shit on his way to school just like bart simpson.... All those people will use different tools for tagging. They will not tag in the same places either ... while the arty dude will enjoy abandonned buildings to make colorful paintings without being bothered by people and cops, the political activist will write his slogans in city centers, where he has more chances that people will see his convictions ... in the same way, you won't see bart simpson's graffities inside a crack-house, and hopefully you won't see the crack-dealers-gang tags into the school toilets.

    Also, most devs are missing that there are interactions between graffities. There are crews who sometimes share a name (so you see the same name, with a lot of different "fonts" and "styles" in a lot of different places). People have wars and cross/paint over each others. People insult each others or tag things related to what happends in the city. (for exemple, where I live, there is a house marked with a "snitch". The legend says that the dude who lives there actually snitched on his dealer a few months before). Also, when a tag says "monica is a bitch" ... monica is a real person and there is a whole story behind that tag. When you're used to some neighbourhood and you know the people around, you can relate a lot of tags to the story behind it.

    Also, every single tag or piece is different. Some people paint everywhere the "same" graffities, but even doing so, there are often differences with proportions, size, color, or other details from one piece to another. You will never find 2 totally identical graffities, right ? Or if you do, it's a stencil (banksy style)

    What I mean here is that many devs usually spend time on making plausible atmosphere with a high level of details with sound, lights, textures, variety of high-details assets, but generally forget about the street art that would add a whole dimention of credibility and life to their cities with just the addition of a bunch of unique textures used strategically.

    Now I'm surprised that in 99% of games, even AAA, there is not a proper work done about this because it really doesnt sound like difficult to achieve technically, and finding an artist who actually understands the dynamics of tags and graffs to produce unique assets for unique spots inside your virtual city sounds easy as well ... I mean, I know a lot of talented graffiters who would enjoy a lot producing series of assets for video games ... instagram is full of them, worldwide. You scan/picture everything, send it to your texture-artist for photoshop treating before implementing them into your maps.

    Edit : Of course there are games that do the thing not-too-bad. I remember quite a few unique graffities in gta 5 (especially in the hood around franklin's aunt's house) giving the area some unique feel ... but most graffities are still the same 10ish repeated textures with different sizes, depending on the wall it was put on. Also I have a few memories of deus ex being not-too-bad.

    I hope this was not too long and thank you for reading.

    submitted by /u/Yoda-is-a-goblin
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    Resources for creating an Orwell-like game?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 09:16 AM PST

    I've been really into investigative games lately, like Orwell, Her Story, and Return of the Obra Dinn. I want to make a game similar in style to Orwell or Her Story where the player is using a database or operating system the whole time. I've never done this before. I've only ever worked on 3D games or 2D platformers. Are there any resources that can help me get started, like tutorials or articles? I don't even know how to refer to this style of game or what I should look for. Is Unity even the best option for a game like this? I've never been particularly comfortable using Unity's UI functions, so any help there would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

    submitted by /u/blewws
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    Monetization of long play sessions?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 01:25 AM PST

    Morning everybody, I have two questions!

    1.) Our physics puzzle game on android has average daily playtime per active user 13,7 minutes which seems quite high at least compared to our previous game which had it around 7 minutes. Is it actually high when compared to a puzzle genre?

    1. ) Might be a stupid question, but are there some unique ways to monetize game which has long play sessions? Or should it just be done excatly the same way as in shorter session games?

    We currently have in between level ads showing after every 4 minutes and rewarded video ads for level hints. Currently impressions per DAU is aroung 2.7. We also have IAP to remove ads + costume pack.

    Thanks in advance! :)

    submitted by /u/PauliPotta
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    how do you compete with a game that has much better visual assets?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 06:41 AM PST

    one of the things ill do is targeting different audience (which means their audience + more audiences of different types)

    another thing is that ill add unique features so that our games will be different

    and another thing is that ill make my game work very smooth even on very bad PCs.

    ​

    but honestly how do you compete with game that has better visual assets? theres no sweet-talking it, i can produce code and assets but my assets will never be as good as their because thats not what I specialize at, and it would take ages as well.

    submitted by /u/dragonelofelo
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    Choose your weapon, sir

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 06:31 AM PST

    The question is related to a problem I am facing with Game AI. A bot is a unit able to act independently and attack using the best strategy. With weak bots they're behavior is easy: one attack for ranged and one for melee.

    My problems are related when the bot is really strong and has, as consequence, many attacks, such as: - strong attack - medium attack - ranged attack - magic / special attack - use medipack

    The function able to return the right weapon to use should consider multiple variables (target distance, target power, current health, projectiles available to say something) and, at first, doesn't seems something general enough, neither simple.

    I was wondering if you know some approach that would help the implementation of this "evaluator": maybe there's some mathematical tool (games theory, maybe) that could lead to an elegant and general "right weapon evaluator"

    submitted by /u/Jak_from_Venice
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    Hope this helps some of you guys

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 06:17 AM PST

    What's the best GDC alternative to pitch early stage games?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 12:12 PM PST

    Hey gang,

    Many devs were excited to pitch at GDC and saved for months. We can't get a plane ticket refund, at most we can switch it.

    What's the next-best investment summit to pitch disruptive early stage games?

    We are doing our research and will be happy to share what we find to any colleagues here.

    submitted by /u/JavierRayon89
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    The impact that Steam Curators can have on your game

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 12:03 PM PST

    The impact that Steam Curators can have on your game

    I haven't seen Steam Curators been talked about much in the game development community and I didn't really know much about the effect they have on games either, especially on unreleased games. But I got somewhat of a wake up call that brought the whole thing to my attention.

    Wishlist graph

    The September Steam algorithm changes took the daily wishlist traffic of my unreleased game down to crawl, but recently I noticed a sudden bump. I traced it down to the fact that a Steam Curator with 35k followers had added it to his list. The interesting fact about it was that overwhelming majority of the impressions and visits were coming from the front page of the Steam and from what is categorized as "Recommended by a Suggested Curator".

    Which would mean that there's some algorithm in play that is pushing new curators to Steam users. I don't know if that's a new thing or something that's been there for a while now, but at least I hadn't noticed it before. I also wonder how aware of this Curators themselves even are, because it isn't really shown in their own traffic breakdown.

    Traffic breakdown from Steam Home page

    Within the 5 days the feature resulted in over 850k impressions. The click-through rate wasn't very high (possibly attributed to a substandard capsule image?), but I'll gladly take the 2k visits and 400+ wishlists it generated.

    A fellow developer I chatted with also happened to have his game added by a curator around the same time, but that one only had 2k followers. Impressively it ended up generating about 10 times the visits compared to what my game got. Thus I would conclude that the algorithm takes some other factors beyond the follower count into account on deciding which curators it pushes on the front page. My guess would be that it's at least partially depending on how active the curator is, but I'm open to any other suggestions.

    To test and understand this better I also created my own curation page and I've been trying to post there almost every day, but I probably still need more followers to make something click. Anyone feel like giving a helping hand? ;)

    I'm also planning to get in touch with more curators to study this further.

    TL;DR: Steam Curators are a thing and can give a lot of impressions to your games even if they don't have a lot of followers, because Steam promotes them on the front page.

    I also recorded a video about it for some more details and thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPv2audK5PQ

    submitted by /u/tulevikEU
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    Best way to learn video game development.

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 12:02 PM PST

    I plan on going to college to pursue a degree in Computer Science but I want to also pursue a career in Videogame development. I am also happy getting a job in normal software development since I understand it is a very competitive job market. But from what I can see, the computer science degree doesn't tech you videogame development (obviously). So what is my best course of action in terms of learning video game development, or rather, learning how to take the skills learned from the computer science degree and use them on videogame development. From what I can see my college doesn't offer classes for videogame development. Would self teaching be my best method? Any advice is appreciated :)

    submitted by /u/IIIIIIIIIIIIlllll
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    Best game engine for Linux with free drivers?

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 11:57 AM PST

    I wanted to use unreal engine buy it needs vulkan which needs nvidia drivers on my device, so I need ideas to maybe change to a more free engine if possible. Thank you guys for the help

    submitted by /u/fuse_changer
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    Understanding Dreams | Rethinking Game Design, Creativity and the Future of Art

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 11:14 AM PST

    I've implemented "invisible walls and roads" to allow me to use the existing pathfinding methods to prevent characters from walking through walls and other visual obstacles. It affords you the same functionality as the normal walls and roads, but without displaying anything on the screen.

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 11:13 AM PST

    What platform are you interested for game dev

    Posted: 29 Feb 2020 11:08 AM PST

    So where do you want to upload your game to. Ps5 Xbox series X Nintendo switch/lite Mobile Steam Epic Games

    submitted by /u/starryshadow
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