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    March 17, 2020

    FREE GAME ICONS

    FREE GAME ICONS

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 08:20 AM PDT

    I made a spreadsheet to help organize my thoughts/data on marketing pre-launch as an indie dev, and now I'm sharing it with you! Plus a ton of lessons I learned along the way. Hope it helps!

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 08:04 AM PDT

    TL;DR:

    1. Sales are a function of impressions, so think about impressions when marketing.
    2. If spending money on an ad makes you more money than it cost, run the ad.
    3. Use Google Analytics and Excel to make sure your ads are working for you.
    4. Once your game is out, Steam's algorithm is supposed to reciprocate page views that you generate yourself, which makes ads even more powerful than normal.
    5. For us, short Twitter gifs/vids seem to be best for generating wishlist numbers. Static splash art on Instagram is best for generating page views.
    6. I made a Google spreadsheet you can copy to check what ads are working best for you.

    Intro

    For a tiny bit of background, the last 2 years I've been developing a game that's coming out this week on Steam. We just hit 1,000 wishlists, have around 3,500 people on our Discord server, made a run at Kickstarter, and have tried a ton of different marketing strats (until recently everything we tried was on a $0 marketing budget).

    Some of this may sound obvious, but each of these things I had to learn painstakingly. Hopefully I can save some other poor indie dev from having to learn these lessons the hard way.

    Lesson 1 - It's all a numbers game, and the main number is "impressions"

    During our Kickstarter, I had a ton of stats available, but the one that stood out was the relationship between the following three:

    1. Impressions - How many times someone has the opportunity to see your site
    2. Clicks / Page Views / Click-Through Rate - How many times someone clicks through from an ad or video or whatever source
    3. Conversions / Conversion Rate - How many people actually buy your product (or wishlist if you're pre-launch)

    All three were almost perfectly correlated. If we did a big marketing push, we got a proportional bump in donations. It felt obvious in hindsight, but seeing it in action made me realize the true nature of marketing. I thought sales was about your product, but when I thought about sales as a function of impressions everything started lining up.

    The old adage is that

    • 1% of your impressions will generate a click-through, and
    • 1% of your click-throughs will generate a conversion

    Until you have hard data, I'd highly recommend using 1% for conversion and click-through rates. The average is 1% for a reason. Don't assume you'll do better until you have the data to support it.

    That said, the way you can beat these odds is as follows:

    • The better your ad is, the better the click-through rate is.
    • The better your store page is, the better the conversion rate is.

    Lesson 2 - Sometimes, spending money on ads is worth it

    Sexy as it is to be able to boast success with a $0 marketing budget, not all of us have the time, experience, or graphic design skills necessary to make that happen. Our team was able to get to 3,500 Discord members during our closed and open alphas using a bunch of different marketing pushes, but that doesn't mean we're getting 3500 sales from Discord.

    So when is it worth it to spend money on ads? Think about it like this: If you want to make 1 sale, how many people do you have to show your game to?

    Let's go backwards from 1 sale. At a 1% conversion rate, you'll need to get 100 people to click on your page. At a 1% click-through rate, getting 100 people on your page means 10,000 people had the opportunity to click. So 10,000 impressions = 1 sale.

    BUT, you probably don't want to make just 1 sale. You probably want to make thousands of sales. This means you need to be thinking on a scale of "How do I make tens of millions of impressions?" The fun thing here is that there are no wrong answers, and a tonnn of possibilities. Ads, press, flash mobs, social media campaigns, a viral video, a sick trailer, a feature with a big YouTuber… as long as you get the impressions it's all good.

    Lesson 3 - Steam will help you, but only if you're already helping yourself

    Once your game is out, Steam's new algorithm seems to reciprocate page views & sales that you generate yourself, upwards of 10x according to one dev on the sub. Our game isn't out yet, and so far they've reciprocated about 0.6x the page views we've generated on our own. Most of the marketing Steam reciprocates with happens only post-launch.

    I don't have this 100% confirmed since our game isn't out yet and there's not a ton of data I could find about it (plus what data I have found is now a year old), but I've found at least one dev who shared his data. There's also this dev vlog confirming that spending money on ads gave him a proportional boost in Steam's internally generated sales. I'd love more data on this, if anyone here with a game out is willing to share their stats.

    Quick takeaways on how to determine if an ad is worth doing:

    Let's say your game is sold at $10. In this case you need to get ~10k impressions for under $6.50 or your ad is losing money (Steam and sales tax mean you don't keep all $10 on a sale). If your conversion and/or click-through rates are better than 1%, you'll need fewer impressions.

    I've been getting a cost per click on Facebook of ~$0.09, and a cost per click on Twitter of ~$1.80. Seems like Facebook would be better, but Twitter users take clicking on ads much more seriously, so their conversion rate is much higher. In the end for us the cost per conversion is estimated at around $9 for Facebook and $3 for Twitter. If you want to know how to do that math for yourself...

    Lesson 4 - Data is your friend, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Google Analytics & Excel

    Let's talk about making the most of your ads. First, set up a Google Analytics page. It's free, very easy, and there are several guides on how to set it up. It gives you a ton of data, but you generally only need to worry about a few things:

    • Avg. Session Duration is the closest thing you'll get to actual wishlist conversion rate. Steam doesn't have a way to track wishlist or sales conversions directly, so this is the best we've got as far as I know. Higher time on the page typically means your ad is bringing in customers who actually care. If your ad shows ~1 second avg session duration, it means your conversion rate from this ad is likely 1% or worse. You can find this under the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics.
    • Use different UTM's for each campaign ad url! This lets you quickly check for the Avg Session Duration stats on each ad you do, so you don't have to guess at which ads are working and which are duds. If you don't do this, all of your ads will show up as being generic Facebook/Instagram/Twitter referrals, which isn't super useful if you have a tight budget. This is another easy thing to set up, too. You basically just append some text to the end of a URL, like ?utm_source=Twitter. Easiest if you use a campaign url builder like the one Google provides. You can find the stats on each campaign under Acquisitions > Campaigns > All Campaigns.
    • Test a whole bunch of different parameters and ads. You can do A/B testing like crazy on Facebook (not quite as easy to do on Twitter, but still possible), and if coupled with UTM's you can get really accurate data on which ads/audiences are working very quickly.

    The only other data you need is wishlist data per day. Luckily Steam gives you this info on your Steamworks App Admin page under "Marketing and Visibility". It shows a table with some data, and next to your Wishlists it will give a link saying "(view detailed wishlist breakdown)". Once there, you can export the daily data for whatever time frame you want.

    Now that we have all this data, you can make a copy of my spreadsheet here and drop your data into each column (or add your own and drag the r2 formula over).

    It'll auto-fill with useful stuff like how well correlated your ads are with wishlist numbers (a higher number = a better ad). There's also a section on the right where you can determine an estimated cost per conversion as well on an ad, so you can see whether an ad is worth doing.

    I was going to make a section about reviewing each marketing attempt we did to give a rough overview + insights on them, but this is already SOOOO LONG that I'm gonna save it for another time.

    Happy to answer any questions, or if anyone has any of their own data to add to the pile I think it would be really helpful! If you're curious about my game, you can check that out to give some context for the numbers I posted earlier.

    Have a good one! （￣︶￣）↗

    submitted by /u/Winnarly
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    How to Make Stylized Flat-Color 3D Game Art in One Minute

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 10:26 AM PDT

    If I don't finish my game now, I'll never finish it

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 04:51 AM PDT

    Now please, I'm not saying there are positives to this virus. It's a terrible situation...

    ...but this has given me time to work full on instead of working on it in short spurts after work or school.

    So if you're developing a game for awhile, use this time to see if you're really up to finishing it up

    You don't want to pull a "yandere dev"

    submitted by /u/Ihaveastupidstory
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    I got to where I am today from hundreds of youtube tutorials, so I figured I'd give back. I present my series on making an MMORTS in unity

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 11:10 AM PDT

    Today was supposed to be GDC Day 1. Until everyone backed out... except for me! I guess that makes me the Keynote Speaker... BOO-YAH!!! I went ahead and gave my talk anyway, it's called "Rethinking Progression in Mobile Puzzle Games", would love your thoughts! Other Devs should post talks too!!

    Posted: 16 Mar 2020 02:23 PM PDT

    Localizing Your Indie Game: Crazy Idea or Growth Hack?

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 03:33 AM PDT

    Localizing Your Indie Game: Crazy Idea or Growth Hack?

    Working at a localization company, every now and then I see indie developers among the clients, so I got to wondering: how do indie devs decide whether to localize their games? Sure enough, localization is a way to expand your player audience, but does localizing indie games always pay for itself? The goal of this article was to let the independent developers speak for themselves and find an honest answer.

    I reached out to some indie developer acquaintances and received answers from four teams ranging from one to 10-12 people. Two studios produce mobile games, while the third studio and one solo developer make PC games.

    Meet the heroes of this article:

    Duck Rockets (Bon Voyage), Alexander Goodwin (Selfloss), Ink Stains Games (Stoneshard) and Mountains (Florence).

    Mountains — an Australian studio founded by Ken Wong, a leading designer of the popular mobile puzzle game Monument Valley. The studio's first project was the mobile game Florence, which was released on Google Play and the App Store in 2018 for Valentine's Day. Then on February 13, 2020, the game was released on Steam and for Nintendo Switch.

    Florence is an interactive love story, told in comics format in the "daily life" genre with mini-games, and is memorable for its offbeat presentation, cute design, and pleasant soundtrack. The game has received numerous awards for "Best Mobile Game" from The Game Awards, GDC Awards, and BAFTA, and was the 2018 winner of the Apple Design Award.

    Ink Stains Games — an indie studio based in St. Petersburg (Russia, not Florida!). The team's first project is the PC shooter 12 Is Better Than 6, which was made by three people. The studio's next game was Stoneshard, a turn-based hard-core RPG about the travels of a medieval mercenary, for which the team had to be expanded to six people.

    Recently Stoneshard was released on Steam Early Access. Interestingly, in 2018 Ink Stains Games conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign for Stoneshard, collecting over $100 thousand — three times more than the target amount.

    Duck Rockets — an indie studio from Chelyabinsk, Russia. In 2017 they released the mobile game Bon Voyage and localized it into 8 languages. We talked about this in our interview article.

    Bon Voyage is a casual three-in-a-row game, available on Android, on the social networks VK, Facebook, and Odnoklassniki, and in the local stores of Iran and Japan.

    Alexander Goodwin is a fairly unusual developer. He makes a point of doing all his projects alone, from the initial concept to the music and release trailer montage. And yet Alexander is entirely self-taught, and has acquired his skills in modeling, art, music, and engine expertise in the broad expanse of the internet.

    Under his belt the young solo developer has two mobile games on Google Play, which have gone unnoticed, and three games on Steam: Algotica, Mechanism, and Selfloss (release slated for spring of 2020). Selfloss is a melancholy adventure about a kind old man and his magic staff in a fantasy setting of Old Russia and Iceland.

    Alexander is passionate about his work, and sometimes goes for days on end developing his games. He is also a postgraduate student and teaches at the Unity and Unreal Engine courses of ITMO University in St. Petersburg.

    What made you decide to localize your games?

    Ink Stains Games: Not every gamer speaks English, and having their native language among the supported options is a strong reason for them to buy. If translating a game is an option, it should absolutely be done, as it has a direct effect on sales.

    Incidentally, the entire text of your page should be localized, including the game expansion plan, the early access text box, and the supporter pack description (if any). We translated our Steam page into the languages for which we have localization. We can't cite any specific numbers, but we have definitely seen an impact — wishlist conversion and purchases in these regions is markedly above average.

    With Chinese gamers we had a debacle: we translated the description into Chinese, but forgot about the early access text box and the expansion plan. This made many people think they were buying a finished or nearly finished game (when in fact it was essentially an open beta), and they left lots of negative reviews, not realizing that it was still in early access. Or else they purchased the supporter pack, thinking it was standalone DLC. After we hastily translated these texts, the flow of negative feedback dropped considerably.

    Alexander: Many developers don't know (or forget) that Steam only features a game in the countries for which its page has been localized. At least, that's how it was for a long time. This means that translating a game's page and the game itself into different languages is the quickest way to make it visible to the largest number of people.

    Duck Rockets: We decided to translate into languages other than English for one simple reason. The launch of the first non-Russian version was planned for Facebook, but the platform did not allow country-based soft launches or filtering of the countries in which gamers would see the app. So we had to at least cover a basic minimum for our European audience.

    Who do you turn to for translations, and how do you choose the languages for localization?

    You can localize through localization studios, freelance translators, or even using fan translations (crowdsourcing). Naturally, the quality of fan translations is rather unpredictable, but for indie games with a solid fan base this is a realistic option (Klei Entertainment is a good example). The crowdsourced translation can later be groomed using an editor and localization testing.

    Mountains did their translations using a localization studio, Duck Rockets used the online professional translation service Nitro, while Alexander Goodwin and Ink Stains Games employed a combined approach: localization studio, freelance translators, and fan translation.

    Ink Stains Games: 12 Is Better Than 6 was translated using a major localization studio. For Stoneshard we selected translators on an individual basis — mostly they found us themselves, since they had an interest in the project.

    Polish localization was done by a fan: we met him halfway and gave him access to all the accompanying documentation, and then we integrated the translation into the game.

    Alexander: Quite frequently the native speakers themselves help us out. I was once assisted by an ordinary school principal from Peking, who helped translate Algotica into Chinese — free of charge. He emailed me, offering to do so. I also employed the services of a localization studio for Mechanism: they translated it into Chinese and corrected my English and German (a friend provided the German translation).

    How do you choose the languages for localization?

    The number of languages selected cannot avoid being affected by the amount of text in the game. For example, Stoneshard (Ink Stains Games) currently contains 40,000 words, while Bon Voyage (Duck Rockets) has around 5,000 words, and Florence (Mountains) and the games of Alexander Goodwin contain little text. Algotica, for instance, has fewer than 1,000 words.

    *Other languages into which Mountains has localized Florence: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese

    Ink Stains Games: Stoneshard is currently available in five languages (one of which is Russian, and another of which is a fan translation); our previous game was released in six languages. Stoneshard alone, even in this early stage of development, with no plotline, has over 40,000 words. 12 Is Better Than 6 has nearly three times fewer words — around 15,000. So for Stoneshard we lacked the resources to translate into every language.

    It's not simply a matter of money — nearly every localization has to be vetted for quality, and the more languages there are, the longer it takes. The game is complex, with extensive mechanics, so numerous nuances have to be fine-tuned. The translators have many questions regarding the setting and how to correctly translate various concepts. If there are any references we have to explain them as well, so as to adapt them to the language of translation.

    Alconost comments (some feedback from the localization managers in my company): The challenges described by the Ink Stains Games team are a striking example of the need for glossaries for large-scale projects. These glossaries can contain the game's primary terms, names, and locations, with explanations of their meanings. Ordinarily our localization team helps compile the project glossary.

    Also important is the platform used to organize the translation work. Choosing the right platform makes for easy and productive discussion, so that issues are quickly resolved. Incidentally, here are the platforms we work with.

    Mountains: Just like Monument Valley, Florence doesn't have much language in the game. Based on my experience with Monument Valley, it's relatively cheap to translate the game with so few words. So we did the most popular languages first — English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Polish, Portuguese and Russian. This list was recommended to us by our publisher, Annapurna. On a later update we decided to add the extra languages.

    Duck Rockets: At first we translated Bon Voyage into the primary European languages, betting on their profitability. Japanese and Arabic came up by accident; they were an experiment. We also tried translating the app page into other languages, and since there was interest from Turkey and Italy we localized the entire game into their languages, as well.

    Which is better: to localize into many languages or to stick to the five most popular?

    Ink Stains Games: In the future we plan to add localization into Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, and Japanese. Fan localizations may also end up being integrated.

    We choose languages for localization based on the percentage of Steam users from a given country, and also based on data for various regions for our particular game.

    https://preview.redd.it/u8eaa75mn7n41.jpg?width=699&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e7176342ebc943e7fdd6ba577ca366c02d141d0a

    Alexander: If I see a game gaining popularity, I will naturally try to localize it into all the available Steam languages.

    Duck Rockets: We have plans to expand the list of languages into which Bon Voyage is localized, but this is highly dependent on our audience. If we are seeing 1,000 installs a day from a country, it is definitely worth localizing into that country.

    If the budget permits, it is worth including as more languages. Because everyone thinks you ought to translate into the most popular languages, which ends up raising competition among games in those languages.

    Of course, we need paying users from these countries (where popular languages are spoken). The bulk of our profits comes from English- and German-speaking users. But the smaller stores also produce some income, and should not be written off — especially considering that they increase our download numbers and other metrics.

    Mountains: We would love our game to reach as many people as possible. Like many decisions, we have to balance our desire to reach underserved audiences with the costs.

    Localization process and results

    Localization is more than putting a game's text into table format, translating it, then feeding it back into the game. For some languages the game architecture may require serious reworking. Fortunately, many developers already know that it's best to prepare for localization at the development stage.

    Ink Stains Games: The need for future localizations is something we gave thought to from day one, when we were planning our game's infrastructure, so considerable effort was made to optimize the mode of text storage. The entire in-game text was exported in a special text file format, from which the game can then pull it without our having to rebuild or alter it. The translator can freely edit and autonomously insert text into the game without our assistance. This proved convenient for both the developer and the translator.

    Alconost comments: Working with text in table format is an option, but it is our opinion that for text-heavy projects — such as Stoneshard — it is more convenient to work using localization management platforms, which let you store localized texts, communicate with the translation team, and provide context within the text itself. Our customers prefer to work with us on Crowdin for app localization, and on GitLocalize for GitHub projects.

    Duck Rockets: For translations into European languages we didn't have to change a thing. When it came to Japanese we had to spend some time figuring out the display of the characters and the position of text in the game.

    During localization into Farsi we had to make a serious effort to get the text to display properly from right to left. Here's a bit of trivia: Farsi has its own symbols for Arabic numbers, meaning that we had to transform all the numbers displayed so as to replace the numbers we're used to with Persian ones.

    Mountains: We had to go through the game and identify any artwork that had words in it and prepare those bits of art to be substituted.

    Did you have to change or redo anything in the game during localization?

    Ink Stains Games: Yes, every language has its idiosyncrasies. For Russian and German we had to make it possible to indicate word gender and to produce the proper forms of adjectives, so that our generator of names for objects and dungeons would function properly in these languages.

    Chinese posed a number of problems. In the same dungeon name generator the algorithm had to be changed: adjectives and nouns had to switch places. To do this correctly we had to rewrite the text parser — Chinese, as we know, has no spaces, which we use for text transposition in other languages. We also had to add support for Chinese punctuation for the log, since it has its own punctuation marks. In addition we had to work out the font settings: in the game the text is pixelated, which rendered many of the characters unreadable.

    Alconost comments: Certain game fonts do not have the symbols for every language. This means that for certain language versions different fonts must be chosen, because without this many symbols will appear like □□□□. How can you check for this ahead of time? The internet has a number of excellent tools for pseudo-localization. These tools imitate the interface in the foreign language, including changing the text length and "checking" the encoding. Essentially, this launches a scenario that imitates the target language and produces a build, which can then be checked as in the testing process.

    Alexander: No, my games are rated for a fairly young age group, with no skeletons (which are strictly prohibited in China), so I didn't have to do any "culturalization."

    Duck Rockets: We only had one such incident: the game included the Carnival of Brazil, at which the heroine had almost nothing on. The Iranian publisher asked us to put some clothes on her, so we redrew her.

    Has localization paid for itself, and what languages have proven the most profitable?

    All the studios named Chinese as the most successful and profitable language. Duck Rockets' game has not been localized into Chinese: for mobile games the situation is somewhat more complex, since without an arrangement with a Chinese publisher it is impossible to launch a game in China.

    Ink Stain Games: Yes, all our localizations have paid off. Experience has shown that the purchase ratio is higher than usual in countries where the game is accessible in their language. Chinese performed especially well: the percentage of Chinese gamers ended up being on a par with the USA and Eastern Europe.

    Alexander: Yes, absolutely. The majority of purchases come from the Asian market, especially China. Be sure to localize into Chinese (both simplified and traditional). That is an absolute must.

    Duck Rockets: Our best-paying countries are the USA and Great Britain. Germany also provides a significant part of our income. We've never had a situation where localization failed to at least pay for itself. The game profits cover development, with funds left over to experiment a little with translations into new languages.

    Of course, we had hoped that if we just translated into this one language we would see our audience increase in that country. But in the realities of the current market that remains a distant dream. What we ended up seeing was a noticeable rise in audience engagement and loyalty, which are also highly important, so localization was worth it regardless.

    Mountains: Half of the sales for Florence were from China, and more people had played the game in Mandarin than in English.

    Localisation did meet our expectations. We encountered some feedback from our players where some words would work better than others; but that is to be expected. We made the corrections on future updates.

    Comment by Alconost: Collecting user feedback on localized versions is an excellent practice. This helps to correct oversights in time — for example, by sending a localized text for proofreading. Or to realize that your current provider is not producing a very high-quality translation. As our customers observe, "When users say nothing about the translation quality in our games, we're thrilled: it means the translation is just fine."

    Life Hacks and Conclusions

    What would you recommend to other developers to make localization more effective (cheaper, faster, etc.)? Can you share any life hacks with us?

    Ink Stains Games: First and foremost, look for translators who actually like the game itself, and who will find it interesting to work on it. The best translator is one who understands the game and how it works.

    Alexander: I stick to the rule that games should have as little text as possible, but it all depends on the project. If it's an adventure game, it's easy to keep the text to a minimum. Remember "Inside": no words whatsoever, except for the menu text, and what a hit that was! My games have very little text, which simplifies the task of localization.

    I don't deny however that there are genres where extensive, well-written texts are of the utmost importance. If you have an RPG with a ton of text, make your standard language as close to ideal as possible, so as not to overpay for additional translation of new sentences later.

    If your game is popular, and you've already translated into all the primary "gamer languages," you are likely to get emails from gamers in various countries asking you to add localization for their own less widely spoken language. And if there is a demand, why not? In game development, especially in the indie sphere, it's not how profitable a decision is that matters, but how it affects your image. I think people often forget about that.

    Duck Rockets: If you need to quickly translate small texts, especially into 6-7 languages or more at once, the most convenient way is the online service Nitro.

    You can find publishers for local stores, who usually undertake the localization themselves. That's how it was with our Japanese and Iranian publishers.

    Perhaps our best life hack is to localize the app store description and screenshots into other languages as a way to test audience interest. If a person opens the game's page and sees English description and screenshots, they lose interest, and conversion drops. But when you localize the game's page, conversion immediately increases.

    Frequently the smaller markets have few interesting games (and apps in general) in their native language. This means less competition there, making it easier to attract an audience and make some money.

    We took Bon Voyage to Iranian and Japanese stores. In Japan the result was not particularly impressive, but we did earn something. Iranian gamers, on the other hand, found our game very much to their liking, and they ended up becoming the most enthusiastic players we have. Games vary, and you never know for sure how the audience in a given country will receive your game. You have to experiment.

    Alconost comments: In any case, a game needs to support EFIGS: English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Otherwise gamers are guaranteed to complain. Gamers have come to expect this selection of languages by default. As for other languages and markets, you can experiment with them by translating the description on Google Play and the App Store (without localizing the game itself). This is a good strategy.

    The Russian-speaking segment currently accounts for a fairly large part of the gaming community: it is the third most widespread language on Steam, and the Russian gaming market has a worth of $1.7 billion. Gamers are constantly demanding Russian translations, and they leave low ratings for games that lack a Russian version. For this reason, in addition to the standard EFIGS languages + Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, we recommend including Russian in your localization.

    Bottom line: is it worth localizing indie games, and when should you consider it?

    Ink Stains Games: If you're able to localize a game, absolutely do so: it's the most effective means of increasing your game's overall reach. There's no point whatsoever in getting on Steam exclusively in one language. A good rule of thumb would be English, Russian, and Chinese.

    If there are any regional statistics available for your community, take advantage of them. In our case, we went by the statistics for the countries of our Kickstarter backers. This was a fairly good way to approximate the order of precedence for the different languages.

    Duck Rockets: If the game was created not just as a hobby, but in order to attract a wide audience and as a way to make money doing what you love, it's worth it.

    If the game doesn't have much text, I think it is absolutely worth trying out the local stores. Everyone wants to make it big on Google Play and the App Store, but few consider the potential of the smaller platforms.

    Alexander: Chinese localization for games is absolutely essential. Add the other languages gradually in order of profitability.

    Mountains: Just build the game and UI with localisation in mind from the start. The China market is so big that I would never release a game without at least English and Chinese versions.

    Our games have very little text, which made localisation a relatively cheap and easy process. For games with tens of thousands of words, such as RPGs, it's a little more complex. But I think even indie developers should build with a localisation system already in place so that they can future proof themselves. It's far more complicated to add localisation into a game's architecture at the advanced stages.

    A big thank-you to the talented indie developers who agreed to chat with us and share their experience!

    Localize your games, guys — after all, experience has shown that it's not always expensive, and an additional flow of players never hurts. :)

    Article by Alconost contributor Margarita Shvetsova

    submitted by /u/ritis88
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    I gave up on programming after my first 30 days. Frankly I never felt like I was smart enough to program anything. Well since covid-19 quarantine I decided to give it a try again. Here is the pre pre pre alpha I made. It's remake of my favorite indie title! It's not much but I'm very proud of it!

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 11:46 AM PDT

    Some things we learned while making our second indie game.

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 09:25 AM PDT

    I wrote a quick article on how to add multiplayer to your indie game in one weekend, and although it sounds like click-bait it kind of isn't.

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 04:37 AM PDT

    Howdy everyone,

    I am the lead developer on two small scale game projects for Strangest.io. Two of our indie game projects, Bizzarioware and Underworld, just received updates and both of them included light weight online play (in addition to a number of other things).

    Our team did a lot of work evaluating the pros and cons of different platforms and eventually settled on using Parsec. There was very, very little information on how to implement Parsec with unity so we decided to write up a quick tutorial on how to add multiplayer to your game using their SDK.

    We wrote it so that the next team that comes along and wants to add multiplayer to their games will have a way less stressful time than we did. Gamedev is hard and we wanted to give back and make it that much easier if possible.

    Without further rambling - here is the article: Add multiplayer to your indie game in one weekend or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Parsec

    submitted by /u/rocketarticuno
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    File format for game localization

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 05:13 AM PDT

    File format for game localization

    Hi everyone. I want to understand the the various process you guys are using for localizing your games to improve a dev tool I am creating. So please, could you kindly answer this questios?

    • What are the steps of your localization process? (roughly);
    • What file format you use to store your translated strings? (if any);
    • What external tools you use to translate your game strings? (if any);
    • How was your experience when hiring a translation service? (if applicable);

    No more questions, thank you for your help. I will be forever glad.

    ​

    P.S.: I have this sample format:

    ​

    https://preview.redd.it/lajqz5hh58n41.png?width=375&format=png&auto=webp&s=f759552b7db3de4cb8719b7b080e5553f8728404

    submitted by /u/programad
    [link] [comments]

    #30Days30Shaders | Day 02 | Broken TV Screen Shader (Free Download)

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 06:34 AM PDT

    SFML vs SDL in 2020

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 09:37 AM PDT

    I've been wanting to get into gamedev recently and looked up some frameworks in the langs I know. SDL and SFML seemed to be really the main ones which popped up. Most of the information I could find was from 6+ years ago though, so I don't exactly know what the scenario is now. So I'll ask here, which should I go with, SDL or SFML, I'm using C++.

    submitted by /u/OhItsuMe
    [link] [comments]

    The Galaxy shader is simple and great for characters skins, weapons and other assets. Tutorial in comments.

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 11:48 AM PDT

    Unity 2020.1 beta is now available for feedback - Unity Technologies Blog

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 11:38 AM PDT

    Finishing Phase I w/ Announcement - Indie RPG Game Devlog #13

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 11:14 AM PDT

    Looking for UI Game App Designer

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 11:12 AM PDT

    Hey guys,

    I am starting a company that makes games for the Android and IOS App Store. We have come up with our first simple idea for a game. We are looking for a talented individual who can design the game UI, to be more specific the buttons and the art. I can't release any further details but if your interested, please DM me personally and we can talk.

    Thanks,

    Best Regards, Yash Khaitan

    submitted by /u/yash_khaitan
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    Nikhil Malankar Game Jam - Theme Rescue

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 11:04 AM PDT

    DirectX Developer Day

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 10:49 AM PDT

    We are excited to announce DirectX Developer Day – streaming LIVE on Mixer on March 19 at 10am PST. Join our presenters and engineers as they share the latest and greatest in DirectX graphics development.

    Bring questions to the chat, our engineers will be online to answer questions!

    submitted by /u/DirectX_12
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    A Little Help With Unity?

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 10:28 AM PDT

    Hey Everyone,

    So I'm making a zombie game in the Unity engine and have a UI that is always on screen, that shows how many NPC's are in the map, how many are infected and how many arent. This works perfectly when I play it in the editor, but as soon as I build the game, and test it, the UI doesn't update and it just stays at 0. Can any one suggest any simple things that I could check that I might have overlooked?

    submitted by /u/Money-Grapefruit
    [link] [comments]

    Wizards In Training - Behind The Scenes - Basic Combat

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 09:56 AM PDT

    Is there any place that keeps a list of free gamedev art assets?

    Posted: 17 Mar 2020 09:38 AM PDT

    Every week there are cool new sprites and sound effects and 3d models. Is a list of all these and others stored anywhere?

    submitted by /u/SooooooMeta
    [link] [comments]
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