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    Home Unlabelled How after 6 years I completed my game and released it on Nintendo Switch last week - a Solodev Story

    How after 6 years I completed my game and released it on Nintendo Switch last week - a Solodev Story

    October 13, 2020

    How after 6 years I completed my game and released it on Nintendo Switch last week - a Solodev Story

    How after 6 years I completed my game and released it on Nintendo Switch last week - a Solodev Story

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 01:18 AM PDT

    I'm not a native English speaker so sorry for any grammatical errors

    6 years ago I started to create my own platform game and last week it came out on the Nintendo Switch. I want to tell my story of how my game "Juiced!" came to life to you as fellow developers to inform you and hopefully inspire you.

    How it started

    As a child I grew up in the 90's playing platform games on PC, NES, SNES and Gameboy. My childhood dream was, of course, to create my own platform game. I still have drawings of the many games I imagined these years.

    In high school around 2005 I finally discovered software that could help me make these games: Gamemaker (I think I had a pirated copy of version 5.3). In 2008 I created the first 3 levels of what would later become Juiced! This was really basic stuff and as far as I knew back then there were no online places to distribute a regular PC game, most stuff online was Flash (Newgrounds). So no one got to play it and I started to lose interest.

    Motivation rekindled

    Somewhere in 2012 my enthousiasm was rekindled when the new Gamemaker Studio started to support exporting to Android. The mobile market was easy to access through the Google Play Store and I had a nice opportunity of distributing my game to a lot of people. So I bought the new Gamemaker and got to work.

    I was facing a few problems though. My coding from 2008 was really really bad and the Gamemaker software had completely changed, so I had to start from scratch. Also, I borrowed lots of the music, sound and backgrounds from other games, because back then I didn't expect to distribute it commercially. I learned how to create sound effects and compose synth music in Ableton Live and it was just perfect for the game style. With this new motivation I remade the first three levels and soon created a fourth. Also, I worked out a story that had to comprise around 12-13 levels, I now had a new long term goal!

    In 2015 I released Juiced! with the first four levels on the Google Play Store, for free, because it was still in development. I finally had over 100 people per day downloading and playing it and this made me incredibly happy!

    The road to completion

    For the next 5 years this game was my baby. I worked on it every spare hour (I just graduaded medschool and started to work as a doctor). I could've switched software (Unity) or asked others for assistance, but this was my baby and I wanted to finish what I started on my own. I gained lots of love from players on Android and they kept asking when the new updates would arrive. I developed roughly 2 levels per year and in June 2020 the game was finally done. Since Steam Greenlight was changed to Direct it was now also easy to get my game on Steam, on PC, how it was intended in the first place and so I did. Sadly, the Steam version didn't really pick up. And also...something was still stirring inside of me...

    Dreaming of a Switch version

    I bought a Nintendo Switch the year before and was secretly dreaming...what if my game could be on the Switch? I grew up playing on Nintendo consoles...this would be my biggest dream ever...

    I started playing Stardew Valley and Undertale and discovered these games were also made by a single developer, Undertale was even made using Gamemaker! It started to grow on me...and after collecting a lot of courage I pitched the (almost finished) game to Nintendo in May 2020. I was so incredibly happy when I received an email a few weeks later: Welcome to Switch!

    To work on the Switch version of Juiced! was a blast. I mean...I got to test the game on the Switch everytime! It just felt so right. The porting went pretty quickly and after 3 months I sent the finished ROM to Nintendo. Last week it came out on the Switch eShop. Hopefully the game will pick up a bit of popularity but that's another story... Also if you like...I could write about stuff I would have done differently in the process...

    So hopefully this will give you inspiration and motivation as a dev! No dream is too big, just keep believing and discover your motivation.

    Juiced! on Steam

    Nintendo Switch trailer

    submitted by /u/TimH1989
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    It’s Time To Stop Defending CD Projekt Red Over ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Crunch

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 06:21 AM PDT

    Links to game dev playlists (tutorials, tips & tricks)

    Posted: 12 Oct 2020 08:03 PM PDT

    Links to game dev playlists (tutorials, tips & tricks)

    Hi everyone,

    In my Youtube channel, I have created some sections showcasing game dev tutorials that I have bookmarked over time:

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCipViUvW-ztjkUeXZ_R-QVw

    Game dev playlists

    Section "Game development" contains famous playlists that I think almost everyone knows about (but there are rare finds too, you'll see. Worth a bookmark!)

    Section "Other game dev playlists" well, contains tutorials from other smaller (but still interesting/promising) channels.

    Hope you could find these helpful!

    Keep sharing & learning :)

    submitted by /u/EmiliaKaida
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    Just some quick love and encouragement. I hope everyone is doing well. Take a break if you need to! A game made under stress will never be a good game. Stay happy and motivated ��♥

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 09:42 AM PDT

    Simple Color Output Limit Shader, Code in Comments

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 11:41 AM PDT

    I added Juiciness to my game. Juiciness is a quality that is abstract and almost invisible to players but so important for the feel of the game

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 08:26 AM PDT

    Web based Software engineer looking to get into Game Development

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 10:14 AM PDT

    I am a software engineer (web based) who is interested in Game Development. I am just getting burned out making enterprise applications for larger companies and would like to use my skillset to learn some fun stuff. My strongest languages are Java and JavaScript, but I have used about every object oriented language. Does anyone have any recommendations as far as engines or tutorials I should follow?

    submitted by /u/DeviAnt8332
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    Is there a good game dev discord for finding people to collaborate with?

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 09:34 AM PDT

    As an artist and game designer, I find it hard to find programmers who are eager to jump into collaboration projects and stick to them. And if I do, it's hard to find someone interested in the same genre.

    submitted by /u/MarcyayTTG
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    2020 Hypercasual / casual game publishers that won't rip you off. Suggestions?

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 05:32 AM PDT

    Hi We have an iOS game that has been featured by Apple as a Game of the Day around the world, and has in 3 yrs had over 1.3 million organic downloads with zero ad spend.

    Ad ops are just not in our wheelhouse.

    We have 4.7 global App Store rating.

    We are wanting to crack the Android market with our same title (as we have had repeated requests for this) - but feel we would be better served with a partner this time, who can actually achieve more than we have with the first platform launch, which has been pretty good profit with little to no overhead.

    It's our baby, so we are cautious about getting ripped off or them having a competing title and looking to bury ours.

    Any advice would be appreciated :)

    submitted by /u/FearAndSickness
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    It takes a long time to fully create a simple game - Part 2

    Posted: 12 Oct 2020 03:01 PM PDT

    4 months ago I made this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/h0h1ad/it_takes_a_long_time_to_fully_create_a_simple_game/

    talking about how long it takes to even create the simplest game. In my last post I estimated that we were nearly production ready, but it would probably be another month or two till it would be released... Well apparently I underestimated again, and 4 months later we finally released!

    And the thing is, there are still so many more things that could be tweaked and improved. We had a large backlog of items that still needed to be done. But we decided at this point, we have a full game, and it is ready to be released. It doesn't mean we are done with the game though, we can still update the game based off feedback and analytics.

    This has been such a journey so far, and it is bitter sweet that it is coming to an end. This is my first time completely finishing a game (really any side project to be honest), and here are some things i took away that made it possible:

    Motivation is not constant
    Some days, especially towards the beginning of the project, I was completely invested in the game. I spent a large amount of my free time working on the game. I'd go through periods where I thought the game had a huge chance of success, then other days where I thought there was no way it would be successful. But what I realized the most important thing to actually finish the game is to at least keep progress moving forward no matter how slow. Dedicating just an hour or two a week made it so the game at least became closer and closer, and it made it so I never forgot about or gave up on the game.

    Having a partner on the game is extremely helpful
    I was so lucky to have an awesome partner working on the game. It helped so much in being able to actually finish the project. Obviously it meant that we could split the work, but there was so much more than just that. Being able to bounce ideas of each-other, and try to figure out the best solution on different issues was invaluable. Then on top of that related to my above point, it kept me motivated to finish the game. If I stopped working on the game for whatever reason, seeing him work on it, and make progress meant that the game was moving forward, and that kept me motivated.

    A good designer is worth their weight in gold
    As someone who does not have any art background, we were so fortunate that my partner knew of a really good designer who was willing to join our team. The artwork he gave us transformed our game from a basic, generic looking puzzle game to a game with character and theme - his design even influenced the name of our game. Since he made a really cute cube shaped character named Cubo, we changed the name of our game to Cubo's Adventure.

    The look and feel of a game is a huge part of the player experience, so getting that right has made a huge difference.

    Anyway, this is basically my post mortem on the game. It has been such a fun and rewarding experience. And while it is all released now, I know that there is still so much more that needs to be done to improve the game and make it successful. Thank you for reading!

    submitted by /u/VastoMocha
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    3d Pathfinding on a Large Grid-Based Game (1 Million+ Grid Tiles) Suggestions

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 10:48 AM PDT

    I'm making a game where players can make custom maps that they move around on like a board game. It needs to be 3D pathfinding (x, y, z) because it has things like multi-story buildings.

     

    I've tried implementing A*, but it slows wayyyy down on maps around 1000x1000 tiles. I tried integrating an existing Jump Point Search into it from here with the Dynamic Grid option (and adding some multi-thread support), but it still takes over 5 minutes to find a path from (0,0,0) to (999,999,0).

     

    I'm kind of stumped trying to figure out if there's a solution for this outside of just teleporting the player to a node if it's a certain distance away or something. I'd rather avoid that if I can. Can anyone point me in the direction of an algorithm that would be suitable for this kind of scenario?

    submitted by /u/eric_stasis
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    Game Project & Design organisational tools for different teams, workflows and sizes. Contributions very welcome!

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 01:51 AM PDT

    When you work solo on a quick prototype, game jam or some other weekend project, there's usually no need for much documentation or organisation. After that, the need slowly arises as the project as a whole becomes too much to keep in your head down to every small detail. Here are some tools that I know of that people use, but I'd like to hear more on experiences of using these tools as well as new tools that I don't know of.

    Basic, physical:

    • Whiteboard. Write things, put sticky notes on it, erase and start again for the next session. You can take pictures of it with a phone these days to keep the ideas and clean them up afterwards. Good for short collaboration sessions, not so much for documentation. Organises thoughts on the spot for unifying vision, but not long term.
    • Speaking of sticky notes. Good for small snippets, can code by colour. Seem to be useful for high level overviews and abstractions, people do build physical Kanban boards and the like with these. I've seen a team use these when building a game. Does work, although fiddling a lot with the order does make them fall off. No versioning long term either, so a bit flimsy. More for ephemeral short term use, but can be used to track work of a team.
    • For organising papers and documents, meet physical folder. Has more redundancy in storage than virtual documents, but does take a lot of physical space. I've seen these especially for storing art sketches and the like. Definitely has value when put nicely on a shelf, as it's easy to grab the one you need. Not for bigger teams generally.
    • Other common items: paper, game boards (for physical/paper prototyping), notebooks.

    In general, I think one of the biggest advantages to physical notebooks, papers, notes and such is the fact that it's easy to get a high level overview and it's easy to share it with a team when brainstorming or collaborating on design. Also fairly fast to do paper prototypes and such. If you have some cool or unintuitive tools or uses for physical tools, please do tell.

    Virtual (Software) tools:

    • Typora. I started using Typora this year and I really like it. Writing Markdown documents has never been easier. It's also very easy to jump to different documents through its folder/file outline. There's also a search and documents can have table of contents inside them that work nicely. Markdown documents have added benefit of easy git diffs and you can use Hugo or other static page generators to make sites and documentation for collaboration. I think this can work very nicely solo or in a small team, but might have issues scaling to really large teams. The standard structure of Markdown format is rigid, so it's a good base, but not suitable for random moodboards or the like, unlike e.g. OneNote.
    • Articy:Draft. I've followed Articy:Draft over the years a bit, but I haven't used or tried it yet. If you've got experience with it, please share it. I think it's an interesting tool that I'm interested in trying at some point. Often used especially for more story-/lore-heavy games as far as I understand.
    • Arcweave. I've heard this is a bit similar to Articy:Draft, but I haven't used it either. Is it good?
    • Shotgun, not the gun, the software. I just heard about this recently from an animator, but apparently it's used for games as well based on their website. I think it's originally more intended for art and animation, but regardless, it's apparently intended for bigger teams. I have not tried it, but based on what I heard on how an animation studio used it, you set up a pipeline that allows you to follow work in different stages, you can give feedback and check different versions/iterations to see how e.g. a piece of animation is progressing.
    • Milanote. I haven't used this one either, but apparently it has OneNote-like qualities + a lot of different templates to use, some of them related to games. I might try this one later as well, just ran into it today. It was what prompted me to start this thread.
    • The virtual board classic, Trello. I've used this a bunch of times. It's solid, especially for small teams. The workflow is streamlined, it has the basic features you would want out of a virtual board. I've even heard of a developer whose whole life is basically on Trello from shopping lists to game features. Apparently every aspect of life can look like a board.
    • Notion, a collaboration based software for creating documentation, wikis and such. I considered getting Notion this year after evaluating it for a while, but decided that for now, Typora would serve my needs well enough to not need a heavier collaboration tool. Easy to put a lot if not all of outside engine stuff inside a workspace instead of scattered in different places.
    • Other common options that come to mind: OneNote, Evernote, Google Docs and the bunch. There are others I probably forgot, so feel free to point those out.

    One thing that often comes up with game development specific tools is that there are relatively few options for tools that aren't very heavy vendor lock-in often with online use requirements, subscriptions or included hosting that's not very transparent to the user. This often makes it either hard to justify picking up a tool unless it's the absolute best thing since the invention of language. It also makes it equally hard to drop if you build up a sophisticated process around the tooling and the pricing, conditions or support changes.

    Any other tools or processes you have come in contact with? Personally I'm really curious about:

    a) Really good processes and extensions to general tooling, such as Markdown tools I quickly mentioned myself. Open source or good APIs make it easy to extend and make it possible to customise for the team.

    b) Very game development specific tools. I feel like I haven't seen some tools that must exist.

    submitted by /u/KaisanKaizen
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    Good school games.

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 07:28 AM PDT

    So I've been doing online school and I keep coming back to a thought about why there isn't any good school games. I'll explain in more detail, most school games are just basic stuff to do with learning most of them aren't fun and don't have a story. Now I'm not sure about other people but I remember games way more then I remember actual school. So that's why I think if someone (or a school district) made a fun game with a good story or even just a fun game that relates to school it would help people a whole bunch. Then again the reasons they probably don't do this is because it would take to long. I honestly don't know what I'm talking about so thanks for reading this little rant i guess?

    submitted by /u/Uuuiiioooppl
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    What engine will be a best fit for a swarm-based game?

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 07:12 AM PDT

    Howdy, folks! For some time I've had an idea about an open-world game with swarms consisting of massive amounts of creatures (800-1000) existing at the same time during a battle, Crimsonland and Infested Planet being main sources of inspiration. However, I'm not sure which engine will suit me best in this endeavor. Writing a custom one is not really a good option since I'll run out of steam way before I'll have something even remotely playable and besides I consider making it for iOS, so I guess I'm left with the choice of three: 1. Unreal 2. Unity 3. Godot

    I may be wrong about Unity, but from my experience it'll get bloated way before I'll have a decent amount of enemies on screen, and besides, garbage collection can introduce quite a lot of overhead if I'll have many entities destroyed at once. Unreal seems fast enough but its quite massive, although I can reduce its size by removing unnecessary modules. I don't have much of experience with Godot yet.

    Can you give me some advice on what fits my goal best? I have a gamedev coding background so I'm not afraid of C++ or engine customizations. Thanks!

    submitted by /u/radioharvest
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    RPG devs: What type of music do you find the hardest to find?

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 09:10 AM PDT

    I'm asking this because I'm planning on releasing some free tracks for RPG/ARPG games and I'm wondering what you'd be most interested in (what would get your attention, what would get you to want to hear more...)

    An example of what I'm aiming at: I have a Dark Fantasy RPG album and I want to select the best track from it and give it away as a teaser. Would you personally be attracted to battle music, exploration cues, tavern songs?

    submitted by /u/ThomRedbeard
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    Took forever to edit, but ITS FINALLY DONE!! Creating Cozy Stylized 3D Environments In-Depth Tutorial. As usual, its 100% free. Enjoy :)

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 12:22 PM PDT

    Need help for a slow progressing game dev

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 08:15 AM PDT

    So let me get a few things straight :

    i started my learning journey on february , and my expectations have honestly not been met . game dev is so much harder than i thought . however , i didnt give up . switched from unity to game maker for a while . absolutly loved it but coudlnt afford it . went back to unity , but laptop too slow to handle it . went to godot . didnt find it great , but got the job .

    ​

    my ldjam entry is much more polished and better than the first ever jam i entered . i know that i have made progress as now i feel comfortable using godot documentation to get things done but im just disappointed on how slow progress im making now . uni is starting soon so i wont have a lot of time to do game dev . learning 3d low poly modelling as its easier than pixel art for me .

    ​

    im realy mentally confused now and any sort of help / motivation would be greately helpful .

    sorry for the rant

    submitted by /u/DumbGamer9
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    How does one work on the historical accuracy/cultural side of game dev?

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 11:51 AM PDT

    If this is the wrong place feel free to remove, naturally. I have a dual degree in political science/history and spent the better part of my history degree researching celts. Lo and behold...Assassin's Creed Valhalla comes out next month with a load of anachronism, yes, but also a good deal of accurate iconograpy/architecture/etc. Someone had to help them with that, I'm sure. Just job searching while unemployed during COVID, thought it was worth asking about!

    submitted by /u/ResolutelyIndecisive
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    Why are my posts being removed from here and /indiedev?

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 11:49 AM PDT

    The title kind of explains it. I want to know why I'm unable to post anything? It's very frustrating and I haven't received any communication regarding it. I'm trying to share my progress and it's just seeming impossible. The posts I've submitted to /indiedev were removed automatically.

    submitted by /u/An_Ordinary_Owl
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    Time frame and Game planning

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 11:29 AM PDT

    So I have worked on two games in the past. Both of which were very short games. One took me 3 months and the other took me 11 days.

    Now I am planning to do a bigger project. a very ambitious game. That I estimated it will take a year minimum to finish. I am not sure if this is too soon for me. Working on a project for that long and it might just fail again (just like my previous games lol). But perhaps I am ready to take a leap of faith.

    About the game planning. I thought I would plan it like this.

    First I will make story concept that would give me the feels and the atmosphere and how the level design should look like.

    Second. I will start making art concepts

    Third. I will start making 3d assets. A lot of them so I can later shove them in the level design.

    Fourth. I will start with level design. Modeling each room individually until it all comes together.

    And at the final stage I am going to do everything else on random. Scripting. Audio. Atmosphere. Ui. Animation....

    Not sure if this approach is going to work. Since last two projects I didn't really plan. And I worked randomly and that didn't turn out to be so well.

    So what do you guys think?

    submitted by /u/Kingoftifity
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    Tutorial: How to recreate the targeting arrow in Slay the Spires

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 11:26 AM PDT

    Designing Balanced Dice for Online Catan

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 11:08 AM PDT

    Why do so many tutorials on making tile-based games "fake" it?

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 01:15 AM PDT

    What I mean by that is many tutorials talking about making tile-based games in certain game engines make it by having a player character moving a set distance every time you press an arrow key. To me, this seems like almost counter productive to what a tile-based game should be. Having bugs where objects can be in-between the grid seems like a nightmare. Not to mention it seems extremely odd when the only way to check if something is a certain place in the grid is creating a dummy raycast at a certain point to check if anything is there.

    I guess I'm trying to ask, can anyone point to any tutorials/advice for making actual tile-based games?

    submitted by /u/dungeon_roach
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    Space Game DevLog#1 (Pixelart Animation Showcase)

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 10:43 AM PDT

    How To Measure Fun For Game Designers

    Posted: 13 Oct 2020 06:49 AM PDT
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