First month as a full time solo dev. |
- First month as a full time solo dev.
- Too Young for Game Development?
- Dan Marhsall: "Expectations of the quality of even a basic, entry-level indie game are now so high that it's becoming near-impossible to remain a one-man-band"
- Hey guys, I run a FREE tutorial platform where professional artists can come and share their knowledge with the community. This week Melissa stops by and shows us how you can create your own Stylized Environments in UE4! Come check it out and let me know what you think :)
- Solving a problem with your code feels so rewarding!
- How does one start a small game studio?
- Confused about ECS implementation
- Useful functions for game development
- How do you make puzzle games?
- Translating an Indie Game with a Whole Lot of Words: a Localization Case Study
- What makes a model professional for you?
- GameDev advice for a senior in Computer Science???
- I'm starting to write an indie dev blog, with stuff I learned over time. Feel free to check it out!
- What keeps you going?
- Reimplementing effects or algorithms that are protected by restrictive licenses
- Want to sign up for Playstation Partners. How do I get a static ip address?
- My final project is to create a mod for a game but which game?
- Does your game have 'staying power'?
- What workflow does Apex Legends use for creating their characters?
- Can you build a game out of Umodeler?
- In The Keep Podcast – #67 Mahelyk (SCP: Blackout)
- What is it like working with Publishers?
- Detective gameplay poses a number of unique design problems. We've spent a lot of time on research and experimentation for our detective game – here's an extensive writeup!
| First month as a full time solo dev. Posted: 29 Sep 2020 04:14 AM PDT Edit: wow guys, fantastic questions... not that I had any doubt, but we're all definitely in the right place 👍 A little context: I'm 35, I've moved back home, and I've quit my day job. I'm in full follow-your-dreams mode because that's the kind of year 2020 has been, and I finally got fed up with "maybe one day." Well now it's been a month*, so what have I learned? I learned that I made the best decision I've ever made. I've also learned that wearing a ton of hats is super beneficial in terms of staying productive. I put in 10 hour days. I treat it as a real job, not as just me staying home. There's always something for me to do, even if it's more on the business end and not developing. It's amazing fun. It also helps me stay motivated. If I don't want to program, I can level design, or write some music, or write some emails. After a day or two I'm pretty much ready to go back to whatever drove me away 🤣 I thought I'd write this for anyone else out there that may be considering the same thing. Feel free to ask me any questions! *I've been doing this stuff for 20 years as a hobby while I've tried making a "real" life work. I actually started my current project in May, but this September is the first month I haven't had a job or been in school in a verrrry long time. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Too Young for Game Development? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 08:32 AM PDT
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| Solving a problem with your code feels so rewarding! Posted: 29 Sep 2020 08:14 AM PDT I'm still fairly new with code. I'm used to the red stop signs alot and the program completely imploding on itself. I try and spend 4 hours a day to code in the morning to wake myself up for the day and I spent half an hour of it staring at my code trying to find the problem with my block breaker code. I tried not to use Google and I ended up figuring it out myself! That mad me feel really good and now I know in the future on how to avoid my issue :) No one I know codes or understands this, I just wanted to tell someone! Now back to my game! [link] [comments]  | ||
| How does one start a small game studio? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 11:26 AM PDT Hello! I'm thinking about opening a small game studio in the near future but I haven't been in the industry long so I'm not entirely sure where to start. I was hoping that your experience could help guide me :) Some key questions are: - What core team roles would you start from? - At what stage is there some security to move to this job full time? - How do you handle marketing and community? - How does one get players' interest in such a busy market? - Is there a particular platform that's less risky to start building games for during its early stages? - Should the first games try to innovate or just do what's already proven to gain experience? - What roles should be outsourced for as long as possible and what would be the priority hires after the core team? Thank you!! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Confused about ECS implementation Posted: 29 Sep 2020 12:52 PM PDT Hello everyone. I have been reading about ECS, and I was kinda excited to implement a simple game in C++ based on it. I was greatly excited due to the new approach of ECS made by unity, and inspired by Mike Acton. Probably it wasn't the right thing to do, although I have been using unity for a while, I just started to learn openGL since August. So this is my first time to write a simple game engine. I have started to implement some aspects, and I'd like to keep things simple. I'm still learning and I wanna get something done, but midway I started to feel something is wrong. I will try to write my questions in different points to make it easier and clearer. 1-Is it normal to have so many "Copy and paste" chunks? I mean for an example, in my implementation I parse the scene from a simple text file, so if I know I have to add a component to an entity, what I do is generally check if I have reached the maximum number of components for this type. Now this seems to be very specific to every type (as every type has a different array allocated on the stack). There are some other stuff like this, not a lot. So whenever I need to add a component to the engine, I create a struct for it, I have to add this function that adds a component to an entity and do this check. This feels wrong...although I don't know how can I improve it. 2-How big/small should a component be? My question comes from the idea of how data should be contiguous to minimize the cache misses. I haven't studied computer architecture yet, but I've read about caches and cache lines. My question is, if the cache line is 64 bytes, then how is it efficient to have a big component? Doesn't this make it similar to how a normal OOP implementation will be? If so, how small should it be? I mean, definitely I won't have a component for every simple property, but a simple directional light component having a direction, color, ambient, diffuse, specular would result in 9 floats, which is 36 bytes. I tried to google if the CPU would cache more than 1 cache line, but I couldn't reach an answer. 3-How should a system work? Specially if it accesses different components? Now I know that the idea of an ECS engine is to make things faster, easier to maintain to some extent and for parallelizing it. The thing is, how would different systems work in parallel, if one system might update the state of a shared component? I mean, what if I render the light first, and the other thread rotates the light, now they aren't consistent. Another thing is, how would one system access different components, the thing I read about is that the system usually should loop on contiguous component data, but if I am to render some Model, I will have to first access its transform component, then the mesh renderer component. This introduces 2 problems, the first is that I will now access data that aren't contiguous [Except if the CPU somehow fills half the cache with the transform components, the other half with the mesh renderer components]. The other problem is how am I gonna access the other component in the first place? The implementation I made at the beginning was by having a hash map (unordered_map) for every component that stores for every entity the index in the component array. I googled and found out that this is bad, as it introduces a lot of cache misses, so I ended up using a simple array per component that stores these indices. It is a waste of memory, as I have to create an array index[MAX_ENTITY_COUNT] for every component, but I decided to compromise just to get things running. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading all that. If anything is unclear, please ask and I will try to explain more, and sorry for my probably bad decisions I made. I know I'm over-engineering it, but I feel that if I won't do it "right", why did I even bother to go with that approach. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Useful functions for game development Posted: 29 Sep 2020 09:03 AM PDT
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| Posted: 29 Sep 2020 10:57 AM PDT If a game contains 100 puzzle areas/rooms/levels. How do you think up the 100 puzzles? especially the later puzzles which must be ultra hard just to solve, how would you actually come up with the design of an ultra hard puzzle? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Translating an Indie Game with a Whole Lot of Words: a Localization Case Study Posted: 29 Sep 2020 08:35 AM PDT
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| What makes a model professional for you? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 09:48 AM PDT TL:DR I'm mostly interested in what makes a low-poly model professional looking for you? I will be starting to design assets (mostly for games), and i was wondering what makes them professional looking for you. Like for example does the textures/materials have to look good, be fitting and feel subtle or the model have to look professional (close to the real thing [If the object is realistic of course]). I have a fair bit of knowledge in 3D design and have designed hundreds of models for myself. These models were never sold/given to others so i have almost no idea what others look for in a model. I hope that my small text is understandable and clear, if not please tell me. [link] [comments]  | ||
| GameDev advice for a senior in Computer Science??? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 09:32 AM PDT Hi, I'm a senior at my university with a major in computer science. I'm a bit lost on exactly what I want to do, so far Game dev is the only thing I have been excited to learn and do. I've dipped my toe into Software, OS, Database, WebDev, Networking, and AI, but as I said before the only thing that's interested me is GameDev. I'm feeling lost in exactly what I'm doing, and I was hoping to get some advice on what I can be doing to help myself. Thank you. [link] [comments]  | ||
| I'm starting to write an indie dev blog, with stuff I learned over time. Feel free to check it out! Posted: 29 Sep 2020 01:04 PM PDT Hi there. I'm JP, one of the founders of Insular Games. Welcome to our dev blog, thanks for stopping by! I've seen quite a few dev blogs online throughout the years; most of them with updates about their upcoming games, or discussing some aspects of them (design, programming, art, etc.). Before deciding to go indie, I did quite a lot of research online. It was not a decision I took lightly. And while I did find a lot of information, it was really scattered. So I decided to try to compile things I learned so far throughout this "indie adventure" in this dev blog, no matter if I knew it already from past experiences, read about it while doing research, or discovered it the hard way while working on Gravitators. My main objective with the blog is to pass some of this the knowledge forward, as many things I learned were previously uploaded by someone for free. It's the least I can do for the next generation of indies. Sometimes journalists and outsiders tend to focus on the bad aspects of our industry (OT, working conditions, etc.), but something that is never mentioned is the "camaraderie" between devs. It is probably one of the most positive aspects of our industry: while in reality we are actually competing in quite a harsh and saturated market, we still help each other out a lot. So this blog will be our little contribution to that. On a side note, I've also read that writing a blog can increase traffic to your website or visibility to your game. So I guess we'll test that out too. I'll be posting the blog on Reddit as well, as throughout the years Reddit went from basically a shared meme from friends to being the only social site I really use and enjoy. It's got everything, and I love it. Contrary to what many people say, I rarely find toxic or rude people on the stuff I read. I guess I've joined the right subs. Who's this blog written for?
Disclaimer 1: the information I'll be writing in the blog entries comes from my own personal experience, both past and present, and knowledge I accumulated from books or articles. But what worked for me might not work well for you. So: take what you think it's useful, and feel free to ignore the rest. Disclaimer 2: In future blog entries, I will probably mention several things about Gravitators mechanics or story. If you're interested in the game, I suggest you play it first (currently in development, demo will release soon though). That way you will avoid any potential spoiler I might write here in the blog (I'll try to avoid it or at least warn about it). With that clear, for this first blog entry I'll give the first piece of advice to anyone looking to start working on their own company/game: Read as much as you can! In 2020, we're lucky enough to be working on a rather mature field (guys in the 80s were basically experimenting). Today there are tons of resources that can help you develop your video game idea and/or set up your own video game company. On top of that, material can be easily reached online in youtube, e-learning videos, or other e-formats (amazon, google books, etc.). Location isn't important anymore in order to acquire knowledge in our industry. There's no reason you shouldn't take advantage of other developers knowledge. But how do you choose what to learn first? The first thing you (and your potential group) need to do before starting is to do a self and honest evaluation. What are the things that you are good at? And what are the things you have no idea about? I've met some very talented people in the past that could design, do 2D/3D art and code. But even these people (who are more an exception than a norm) might still miss some key knowledge or skills that are required to put a successful game on the market. For example: Project Management, Sound Design (both sound effects and soundtrack composition), Marketing, Budgeting, Legal/Accountancy, etc. Most indies will notice when working on their first project that positions and task divisions tend to get blurry/fuzzy sometimes. And that's OK. You will most certainly need to get out of your comfort zone, and do and learn a whole bunch of new things that are completely different from your past work experience. If none of you is not comfortable with that, you are going to be needing a much larger team. On the other hand, if your team's experience is enough to cover all required items, that's great! You'll have a lot of work to do but you'll certainly have it easier than most teams out there. Our team consisted in:
All of our experience, however, was doing Mobile Games. But we wanted to do the jump towards the PC (because even though I had worked in Mobile Games, I've always been more of a PC player). You can see from the team composition that we didn't have an experienced Game Designer, a 3D Artist, or a Sound Designer (a couple of us have some experience with music composition, but not at professional level). I decided to take the responsibilities for the Game Designer, as I was the one with the game proposal. As Gravitators was 2D, we didn't need a 3D Artist for this project. And Sound Design is the easiest job to outsource, so it wasn't a big deal not to have one on the team. I've always been comfortable providing feedback on games and deciding when something is well implemented or not. However, starting a game design from scratch is a totally different challenge. I also worked exclusively on the "development" side of games, so my experience in marketing and branding was zero. That's why I decided to focus most of my reading on Game Design first, and then on Marketing. We also decided to outsource Sound Design. You should do the same. Focus on learning skills that you can improve or you think you are very interested in or want to learn, and check about outsourcing the ones that look too hard to do. It's very important to analyze time (to learn) vs cost (to outsource) at the beginning of your project. I'm sure that most developers and players have imagined their own "dream game". Except some rare occasions, all these games will almost always be a combination of mechanics and art style from various existing games, old or new. So with your dream game idea in mind, I suggest you read and learn, and use that new knowledge to polish your game design, find the most suitable art style, code it the most efficient way (which includes choosing the game engine too) and find your audience. I'll be going into more detail on some of this stuff in later blog entries. For now, I'd like to recommend the following books or courses, which have proven useful to me one way or another: Game Design - The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (2nd edition), by Jesse Schell. This is an excellent introductory book for anyone that wants to design a game, but it still provides very useful insights that can help even experienced designers. You will find a lot of information on Game Design, seen from every possible angle you can imagine. If you'll only get 1 Game Design book, get this one. - GameDev.tv. These guys are amazing. You can basically learn most of the things required to develop a game here: Coding (Unity / C#, Unreal / C++), 3D Art with Blender, 2D Art, VR, etc. I've personally taken the Unity course a few years ago (I also got the 3D Art course but haven't had the time/need to do it yet), and found their coding teaching method fantastic: they explain the topic, and give you a task that's slightly more complex for you to practice. You pause the video and do it, and then you continue the video to see the resolution. If you follow this method (instead of continuing the video and just see the solutions), you will learn a lot. BTW I actually found them through www.udemy.com, which every once in a while gives HUGE discounts in all their courses, including theirs. My advice is to wait for their store sales and get as many courses as you need from these guys. - The Indie Game Developer Handbook, by Richard Hill-Whittall. This book goes into extensive detail of everything that a Game Developer might need. Being from 2015, it's a bit outdated in some info, but most of the book is still useful if you never worked in the industry or even you've always worked with huge teams (these teams have all tasks distributed so much that everyone is a specialist of a very small part of the game development). So you'll be reading about different game engines, software, stages in game, platforms, presskit, marketing, etc. etc. It's well organized, and it even includes some interviews to different studios (both successful and not so much, which is equally useful). - 100 Principles of Game Design, by Wendy Despain. What I like about this book is that it explains concepts of Game Design but seen more from a theory/academic point of view. Some of the concepts explained here are similar to Jesse Schell's book, but they are more to-the-point (which can be good or bad, depending on what you're looking for). It's still worth a read. - Game Design: Theory and Practice, by Richard Rouse III. This book is a bit old (you'll notice right away when you see the "new" games it mentions), but I still found a lot of useful ideas. And it also includes some cool interviews to industry legends, which were my favorite parts. Art With some exceptions, I don't normally work on the art for the game, but I still found the following books very interesting: The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. - Pixel Art for Game Developers, by Daniel Silber. A lot of interesting suggestions and advice on how to do Pixel Art. If you haven't worked with Pixel Art and you'd like your game to feature this style, it's a good starting point. Marketing If you are going indie, there's a big chance you don't have someone with marketing experience or 100% dedicated to it. Marketing is an absolute must today, with the indie market being rather saturated. Games today must find their audience or risk failure. - A Practical Guide to Indie Game Marketing, by Joel Dreskin. A book written specifically for indie developers that have zero experience on Marketing. Reading this book won't guarantee that you'll be able to market your game properly and efficiently, but you'll still be better off than if you haven't read it. - Market Your Indie Game Like A Pro: Techniques Beyond App Store Optimization, by Amol Wagh. Story Depending on your game, it can go from non-existent or an afterthought, to a novel-like story, with many main and secondary characters, and layers upon layers of complexity. While our medium works radically different vs other mediums (as players normally have control of their avatar's actions), it's still very important to know how other media builds stories, so you don't fall short if you need to have one. - Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks. This book explains very well how stories are structured and organized. It has a somewhat slow start, but it's totally worth it. If your game has a heavy focus on story, you should definitely give it a read. - Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee. This book is aimed at screenwriters, but the content absolutely applies to novels or games. It's one of the most famous books on the subject. Extra - The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries. You might have heard of this one. While more oriented towards innovative products (meaning, products and services that are more on the experimental side), the ideas in the book are very different and counter-intuitive vs "normal" business strategies. It also gives a lot of insight and examples of companies that started with a fixed idea of a product, but then changed it over time for different reasons. Which sounds exactly as the evolution of many games. Mind however that many ideas of this book are currently contested, so I suggest you probably read some criticisms after you finish with the book. While I've added links to all book suggestions, there are other online stores where you might get them for a cheaper price. Browse around. I found that archive.org sometimes had books I was looking for (although I'm not entirely sure if they are legally uploaded there). I've also read other books but I thought the list above was a good, varied summary. There are countless articles, videos and tutorials online too. Whatever topic you think you should learn, do search online and learn as much as you can about it. Even better if you do it before you start working on your game. They will help you structure the game idea better in your head, and save you time. Speaking of time, it is hard sometimes to actually find the time to read and learn new things, especially if you still have a daily job or other responsibilities (parenting, formal studies, etc.). I found 2 ways to "force myself" to read these books or watch the courses:
The easiest for me was to drop any fiction reading at night (which I used to do). This gave me 30-45 minutes to learn something new (usually I read a game design related book). Also, by reducing the amount of days I watch a TV show or a movie, I get 2 extra hours each time. As long as the learning topic is interesting for you, this shouldn't feel like a chore. This brings me to the last advice of today: Get an e-book reader. It's probably the best purchase you'll do. I was hesitant for years, as I considered myself more of a "traditional reader", and thought that I'd be missing the feeling of paper in my hands, and that the device would feel weird to hold or read. I stand corrected now. I was absolutely amazed when I realized I didn't even had an adjustment period. I loved the feeling immediately after I started reading: you don't need to turn the lamp on at night (bothering your significant other), it's very lightweight to hold on your hand for long periods of time, you can download all your books immediately (no more shipments nor lack of availability if you're in a foreign country like us), and the greatest feature of all: you can highlight all the important things you read that you might need later, or leave written notes. This means that whenever you need the info, you can easily go back to all your highlights/notes and jump back to the juicy parts right away. Consider all the time you spend learning and doing research as an investment. It will save you time and money in the end. That should be all for the first blog entry, hope it wasn't too long for an intro. Stay tuned for the next one. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 29 Sep 2020 05:33 AM PDT I'm a game artist by day and have been spending the last year or so learning and working on a small game project. I started off pretty slow, but have been spending more and more time on it. I think I see the finish line in the distance, at least for a very rough complete prototype, but there is still a ton to do. It's now at the point where it occupies most of my free time as I try to dash to the finish line. I see countless post postmortems and discussion about how many games release every day and how none of them make money. As much as I tell myself it's just for fun, the reality is - we would all like to eventually be able to make our own projects full time and support ourselves by doing so. Knowing this most likely will not happen likens it to spending a year to building sand castles before the tide comes in. Enjoyable for the moment, but in the end, it won't matter. It could have something to do with the fun part being over and all the bugs and headaches emerging in the project, but I find myself frequently sitting back and thinking why am I even doing this? I know this is kind of a depressing rant, but I can't be the only one this has happened to? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Reimplementing effects or algorithms that are protected by restrictive licenses Posted: 29 Sep 2020 12:57 PM PDT So as the title says, I am wondering what would be the correct approach to adopt if I wanted to implement a technique that is protected by a license that does not allow its use in commercial products. For example, let's say that I wanted to recreate an effect such as this Black Hole on shader toy. The default license there is CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. The ideal solution would be to try and contact the original author and discuss this with them. However, it often happens that it is difficult to contact them directly. Maybe they don't use the website anymore or for some other reason do not respond. Case in point, the inspiration to that shader has itself a recent comment about using the code apparently unanswered. In that case one would have to reimplement it. But, the thing is, after looking at the code, are you not influenced by their solution? How many different ways there are to implement graphical and geometric techniques? When does a re-implementation stop being "I just changed the names of the variables"? What would you do / what have you done in these situations? Or are we forever barred from implementing anything similar, if it is not possible to get in contact with the original authors? Note, I'm not proposing to straight out copy it. I wanted to understand how to reimplement these techniques in a way that would be "mine" and not just an appropriation of somebody else's work. What would make it "really mine"? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Want to sign up for Playstation Partners. How do I get a static ip address? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 12:43 PM PDT We have created our game on steam, htv vive, and soon oculus. We would like to put our game on the playstation store with playstation partners. One of the requirements is a IP static address(not private one). I'm not sure what this means. I set up a private static ip address with a youtube video howto, But i don't think this is what they are looking for. Go daddy sells dedicated ip addresss for 100 a year, does anyone know if this will work? My Internet service provider offers a static ip but i need to upgrade to business internet which costs 150 a month. Does anyone have any experience with this, thanks for any help or direction. [link] [comments]  | ||
| My final project is to create a mod for a game but which game? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 12:42 PM PDT I've decided my final project for my computing degree will be myself modding a game of my choice where if needed I will learn how to: Learn the game engine for said game Learn the programming language for said game Publish mod for said game However, the game I choose is up to me but the requirements are that the mods are heavily code based with my own code that focuses on the functionality of the modification more than the appearance. This will be my first mod for a game but I am confident that I can do it. The games also need to have a healthy modding community so I can receive feedback on everything to do with what I decide. The games I have shortlisted so far based on my love for them or knowledge of heavy coding/mod community: Rimworld Skyrim Fallout 4 Kerbal Space Program Factorio Minecraft Yandere Simulation Would love to hear more suggestions and what problems I could run into or not know about! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Does your game have 'staying power'? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 06:14 AM PDT
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| What workflow does Apex Legends use for creating their characters? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 11:55 AM PDT Hey there, I just wanted to know what workflow/pipeline does Apex Legends use to create their characters? do they use Substance painter to texture their characters? or do they use Photoshop? any articles would also be extremely helpful! Thanks for your time! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Can you build a game out of Umodeler? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 07:41 AM PDT I just bought the plugin and it looks really cool for simple designs. Is it possible to build an entire 3D game out of it right in Unity? I have Blender but this looks simpler. [link] [comments]  | ||
| In The Keep Podcast – #67 Mahelyk (SCP: Blackout) Posted: 29 Sep 2020 11:22 AM PDT
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| What is it like working with Publishers? Posted: 29 Sep 2020 11:07 AM PDT What do publishers expect from you and what do you get from them? Do you just package your game file and that's it? do they make demands like 1 update every month? what happens if a bug is found is there anything in the contract to force you to fix it? If you purchased and used some Unity Marketplace asset store files in your game, how does the licensing for that work? does the publisher have to rebuy those assets to publish your game? What kind of things can I expect a Publisher to expect from me as a gamedev and what kind of things do I get from them? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 28 Sep 2020 03:38 PM PDT
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