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    Home Unlabelled Feedback Friday #424 - Spectacular Finish

    Feedback Friday #424 - Spectacular Finish

    December 25, 2020

    Feedback Friday #424 - Spectacular Finish

    Feedback Friday #424 - Spectacular Finish

    Posted: 24 Dec 2020 08:33 PM PST

    FEEDBACK FRIDAY #424

    Well it's Friday here so lets play each others games, be nice and constructive and have fun! keep up with devs on twitter and get involved!

    Post your games/demos/builds and give each other feedback!

    Feedback Friday Rules:

    Suggestion: As a generally courtesy, you should try to check out a person's game if they have left feedback on your game. If you are leaving feedback on another person's game, it may be helpful to leave a link to your post (if you have posted your game for feedback) at the end of your comment so they can easily find your game.

    -Post a link to a playable version of your game or demo

    -Do NOT link to screenshots or videos! The emphasis of FF is on testing and feedback, not on graphics! Screenshot Saturday is the better choice for your awesome screenshots and videos!

    -Promote good feedback! Try to avoid posting one line responses like "I liked it!" because that is NOT feedback!

    -Upvote those who provide good feedback!

    -Comments using URL shorteners may get auto-removed by reddit, so we recommend not using them.

    Previous Weeks: All

    Testing services: Roast My Game (Web and Computer Games, feedback from developers and players)

    iBetaTest (iOS)

    Promotional services: Alpha Beta Gamer (All platforms)

    submitted by /u/Sexual_Lettuce
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    My friend and I argued about this lately. What do you think about this platformer mechanic? Does it looks fun to you at first glance?

    Posted: 24 Dec 2020 10:31 PM PST

    How do you finish a game without having a mental breakdown?

    Posted: 24 Dec 2020 07:57 PM PST

    So a little bit about my story. I learned programming as a hobby in September 2018, found it to be really fun and wrote some code in C# in my spare time. Later I found out about Unity and that I could make games using the very language I got used to. So March 2019 I started learning, made a couple of small things (pong, tetris following tutorials), then I decided I was ready to make something on my own.

    Fast-forward to today, December 2020 and I finished a whopping 0 games. I wrote and rewrote stories, got stuck on a thousand problems with the engine that I couldn't figure out, gave up 2 projects and I even gave up on game development itself once and I couldn't sleep until I came back. Right now I'm on godot, since 3 months ago. I decrease the scope of my game, it's basically walk and read narration, AND I STILL CAN'T MAKE IT! Am I just Dumb AF? What's going on? It's like no matter how simple my idea is, I always get stuck on something like programming, something on the engine I don't know how to do, even my artistic limitations to draw something I want but it doesn't look good at all. I keep thinking about those guys on gamejams finishing awesome games on a month, on a week, on a couples of days even. HOW!? I love the process, I love to figure stuff out and overcome challenges, I really love spending time to create these stories and see them come to live as I'm progressing, It's so satisfying to create something from nothing and I love this so so much, but this is going for soo long now I'm felling like shit, like no matter how long I put in a simple project, I can't finish it unless is by following a tutorial step by step, and I don't want that, I want to create something of my own. Anyone has some advice to fight this felling? Should I keep doing this or should I follow a hobby that rewards me more? Well, I thank you all for any help and merry Christmas.

    EDIT: WOW, I really wasn't expecting this much feedback. I replied to some comments and there are so many awesome advices, points of view and experience. I'll have lunch and then make sure I'll answer to everyone. Thank you so much for taking time to answer my post

    TL;DR: Been trying to make games for almost 2 years and failed so bad, advice please?

    submitted by /u/mirrorsterrifyme
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    I created a main menu for my android endless rider game

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 05:47 AM PST

    "AI + Physics" Motion Capture: Turn 2D Videos into 3D Animations - You asked for less self-penetration !

    Posted: 24 Dec 2020 10:46 PM PST

    How to make a Third Person Game - Camera & Movements | C++ 3D Game Tutorial Series - Part 26

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 04:58 AM PST

    Why programming brings out the hero in you - Sharing positive thoughts about one of our community's favourite pastimes while so many of us are stuck away from friends and family!

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 08:41 AM PST

    How to use Touch with NEW Input System - Unity 2020 Tutorial

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 05:48 AM PST

    PixelCraft: A Pixel Art Editor

    Posted: 24 Dec 2020 11:53 PM PST

    Setting up Firebase Realtime Database with Unity

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 06:12 AM PST

    How to import character directly over gameObject (unity)?

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 07:55 AM PST

    So I have played around with Unity (C#) and have managed to do some basic scripting using a cube 3d gameObject. However I want to import a Character from Unity asset store or mixamo but I want to directly put it over/replace my cube - so that the same script and components can be applied on my new character. I'm sure it should be possible? - I know how to import characters, but not how to replace my original gameObject. Thanks.

    submitted by /u/unknown40300
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    My new project on Unity with C# Job System is already available on google play.

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 07:49 AM PST

    free game assets I made (Is just four sprites and is pretty simple) cute little monster

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 07:33 AM PST

    Help me choose my Main Menus background.

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 07:21 AM PST

    Problem with matchmaking

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 02:23 AM PST

    So, I am currently working on a co-op game, where you complete missions with a random team of players. However, I am probably going for handcrafted levels rather than procedurally generated one's. The only problem with that is that I need to match up players of varying skill levels to play missions that are to hard for some and to easy for others. The game in itself will be a stealth game where everyone takes on different roles (some will go into the field to do the mission, while another player has a top down view and gives information about guard patrols... Etc.) Any ideas on how I could keep the game fun without losing the feel of progression?

    submitted by /u/EgonVR
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    3d multiplayer game fps shoot control

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 02:02 AM PST

    Hello

    I'm working on a 3D fps game. The game will be mull.

    On the server side I can get the direction that a person is shooting. But how do I check who he hits in 3d.

    https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_Networking

    I found such an article. I understood the synchronicity thing here. But how do I check if he really shot that person.

    I use unity for client and golang for server.

    Apart from these, I am open to all your suggestions :)

    ​

    submitted by /u/mauska1
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    We made a game about making pizza to celebrate holidays!

    Posted: 25 Dec 2020 04:28 AM PST

    7 lessons from 7 years of indie game dev. Lesson 5.

    Posted: 24 Dec 2020 02:44 PM PST

    Link to lesson 4: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/kjocjz/7_lessons_from_7_years_of_indie_game_dev_lesson_4/

    TL;DR;

    I could write a novel on using "best practices" to your advantage in the workplace. After all, every corporate culture strives for its workers to follow guidelines and industry standards. And it's true, blindly following best practices and adhering to industry standards is a great way to get a job working (overworking) on someone else's dream game.

    If that is what you want, then just ignore my advice and use industry standard game engines and best practices. That is certainly the safe option, but safe is not necessarily fulfilling and rarely the most fun. If you want to have a fighting chance of making a living off of your own game ideas, throw out that conventional wisdom, and learn to treat "best practices" as simply "the current meta", and break out of those constraints. Bend those rules, examine, and dissect the best practices. Think of "off-meta" solutions to get the edge you need to survive and make it as an indie.

    To put it another way; it's not enough to be as productive as everyone else. You have to find ways to beat the averages. "Best practices" is a complete misnomer. It's more accurate to call them "averaged practices", or "generic practices". Don't be generic.

    Lesson 5: Best practices and industry standards will not help you succeed as an indie.

    What I'm about to elaborate on is a hard pill to swallow. It may directly challenge your identity as an indie, and devalue all the countless hours you've spent learning an "industry standard" game engine.

    The official term for this uncomfortable feeling is cognitive dissonance. But here's the thing, uncomfortable is good. To grow and challenge the status quo, you have to make yourself uncomfortable. Average is comfortable, but success as an indie is never going to come from following generic practices, and by extension, putting out a comfortable/generic product. As indies, we don't have that luxury, we have to beat the averages.

    "If people from the industry were telling me I have to do this or that, I would run straight in the opposite direction. In order to find if there aren't any other options elsewhere." - Yoko Taro, Director of Nier: Automata

    There are many examples of off-meta solutions throughout history. Here are a few examples that will hopefully encourage you to take the path less traveled.

    Beating the Averages/Off Meta: Super Smash Brothers Melee

    Super Smash Brothers Melee's competitive community has had "off-meta upheavals" throughout history. There's a 3 hour documentary series about the game's history if you want all the details.

    To save some time, here are three notable competitors that have had an off-meta rise to greatness:

    It's important to keep in mind that Melee has been the same game since November of 2001. When competitive play started taking off, the "best practices" was to always use Sheik, Fox, Falco, and Marth. Players would look down on anyone who used a character other than these four.

    Axe, Hungrybox, Amsa (among others) proved the masses wrong. They were part of the "best practices upheaval". They prospered and gained a massive "off-meta head start" over the competition. Everyone continued to dismiss what they saw, they didn't like the cognitive dissonance they were feeling. Eventually, these players had to accept a new reality, and then find ways to catch up.

    In 2001, the "best" characters of Melee were only Fox, Falco, Sheik, and Marth. By 2013 the competitive ranks now include Jiggly Puff, Pikachu, Peach, Captain Falcon, and Ice Climbers.

    Beating the Averages/Off Meta: League of Legends Junglers

    League of Legends is another game where off-meta techniques forced a fundamental change to the game's landscape. The "best practice" was to have the team split into a 2-1-2 formation across the map's three primary paths. But players like Diamond Prox challenged this notion. He employed an off-meta approach that later became a key role in the team.

    Again, everyone else saw this off-meta approach and dismissed it. And yet again, these players had to later face reality, and realize that they had been left in the dust.

    In both of these examples, it's important to observe that these individuals who employed off-meta solutions had deep knowledge of what was considered "best". With that knowledge (and the drive to beat the averages), they came out on top. This same idea can be correlated to great writers. They have mastery over the rules of grammar, but they don't always adhere to them. Great writers know when and where to break these rules, and from that comes things of beauty.

    How I beat the averages with DragonRuby Game Toolkit.

    Building a commercial game engine is a non-trivial endeavor. Before I even attempted this, I had eighteen years of software development experience (gaining a deep understanding of best practices), expertise in multiple game engines/languages, and I shipped multiple successful indie titles. Only after that foundation did I have the insight into how to break the rules. Here are just a few of the best practices, industry standards, and status quos that DragonRuby challenges:

    • The engine uses a dynamic language as opposed to a statically typed one. I saw the benefits of strict, structural forms as cognitive overhead when it came to building art (games). The engine allows for the dynamic creation of entities where properties are auto defined simply by accessing them. I never waste time creating boilerplate code.
    • Having the capability to control resolution has been removed. I saw that as cognitive overhead. Everything is presented at a 16:9 aspect ratio on a 720p virtual canvas that automatically scales across all platforms. I never have to waste time with device-specific rendering.
    • The engine does not expose delta time. Simulations run at a fixed 60hz and rendering happens as fast as the device allows. The cognitive overhead of multiplying everything by delta time was removed. Everything became deterministic and consistent. I never waste time with the class of errors delta time creates.
    • A code, compile, run feedback loop takes you out of the flow. While it only takes a few seconds to compile, the context switch/cognitive overhead pulls you out of the zone. DragonRuby hot loads your code while retaining the game state. I never waste time waiting on a compilation process.
    • A "Quake Console" is built into the game, allowing you to execute arbitrary code while playing. I never waste time with logging or environment inspection code because I can access the game state live, right from the game.
    • The cognitive overhead required to manually recreate bugs (and the context switching associated with it) wasn't acceptable to me. The engine has record and replay capabilities built-in. Random number generation is deterministic. I never waste time getting my game into a valid state, and can just concentrate on fixing the issue.

    The list goes one. But the general theme is the same. DragonRuby Game Toolkit provides off-meta solutions so that time is never wasted, and cognitive overhead is removed.

    That's how I beat the averages.

    The Gloves Come Off.

    At this point, you have two ways to deal with some potential cognitive dissonance you might be feeling given the list above. One way is to dismiss these bullet points and continue doing what you've always done. The other way is to push through the uncomfortable feelings, and see what's on the other side.

    Ask yourself if you want to be part of an upheaval, or a witness to it.

    Conclusion

    The tricky part of this lesson is that there isn't a prescribed path to beating the averages and challenging best practices. I had to find my own way, and only started to considered off-meta solutions because of an essay I read back in 2010. I'd encourage you to read it too. The realization that best practices were anything but, occurred because of this passage:

    In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do. I don't think a lot of people realize this, even in startups.

    The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.

    The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.

    Think hard about the things you accept as "best" and see if you can find ways of challenging those ideas. I try to provide a means to beat the averages in game development via these lessons and via DragonRuby. Keep an eye out for lesson 6.

    submitted by /u/amirrajan
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    7 lessons from 7 years of indie game dev. Lesson 4.

    Posted: 24 Dec 2020 02:42 PM PST

    Link to lesson 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/jynb9i/7_lessons_from_7_years_of_indie_game_dev_lesson_3/

    TLDR;

    Ship a prototype that resembles The DVD Logo scene from The Office (except add the ability to pause the bouncing by pressing space on the keyboard). It should be cross-platform and render at 720p. When I say cross-platform, I mean truly cross-platform (PC, Mac, Linux, Web, iOS, Android). This is harder than you think.

    Lesson 4: Actually ship a game. However small. However trivial. In fact, ship this Bouncing DVD game as your first game. Do it.

    This small step matters. You need to exercise the "ship a game" muscle. I want you to be able to reply with "Yes!" when someone asks "Have you ever shipped a cross-platform game?". This quote is poignant:

    "Real artists ship." - Steve Jobs

    I'll say it again to emphasize its importance:

    "Real. Artists. Ship."

    The specs for the DVD Bouncing Logo.

    "How do I get started as a game dev?"

    When an aspiring game dev asks me this, I tell them to build the following game and ship it:

    • When the game starts up, show a sprite - that's 50x50 pixels in size - at the center of the screen that has a resolution of 1280x720.
    • The box should start moving in a random (-1, 0, or 1) x and y direction at a rate of 1 unit per simulation tick. The speed of your box simulation should be 60 hertz (60 "ticks" per second).
    • The box should bounce around within the bounds of the 1280x720 canvas.
    • When the box hits the edge, it should change to a different random color (the box should not be the same color after hitting an edge).
    • If you press the space key, the box should stop moving. When you press the space key again, the box should resume moving in the direction it was going. Your game should support PC, Mac, Linux, Web at least (iOS, and Android for extra credit).
    • The exe/binary icon for the game should be a square with the color of your choosing.
    • Release your game to Itch.io (PC, Mac, Linux, HTML). And to mobile (if you have the means) Test Flight (iOS); and Google Play Beta Testing (Android).

    "DVD Game" in DragonRuby Game Toolkit.

    Here is the source code for "The Bouncing DVD Screensaver From The Office" written in DragonRuby Game Toolkit. Take the time to read through it.

    Proud Lines of Code.

    The DragonRuby implementation of the game is one file, and ~70 proud lines of code. It's important to emphasize the word "proud" because this is something I wouldn't be embarrassed to show someone else. This implementation isn't an attempt to write as few lines as possible or tries to be "clever" in any way. The code is sane and readable.

    You can use DragonRuby's Online Sandbox to see it in action (and even change the source).

    Here are other examples implementations of this Bouncing DVD Game:

    Be Critical of the Game Engine You Choose to Work With.

    I've refrained from talking about other game engines, until now. If you currently have experience with another game engine, try to implement the same game in your engine of choice. Ask yourself these questions as you are building thing the game:

    • How many proud lines of code did you have to write?
    • How many different game engine concepts (eg: physics bodies, matrices, events, transforms, camera) did you have to be knowledgeable of before you could build your implementation?
    • Did you have to use classes, inheritance, structs or any other overly complex data structures? Why does the engine you are using require these complexities for such a trivial game?
    • How many times did you have to start and stop execution? What was the feedback loop like when you were developing?
    • Were you required to use a dedicated IDE? If so, how long did it take you to get familiar with the IDE when you first started off?
    • Is the source code for the game easily sharable? If you have to share more than just one file and some sprites, what else did you have to provide? What do these ancillary files represent?
    • How difficult was it to set up a 720p canvas with a deterministic simulation?
    • How difficult was it to export to "all the platforms"?
    • What was the output binary size?

    In essence, be critical of your game engine of choice and don't just parrot the marketing material they put out. When a game engine claims they are cross-platform and makes it easy to ship, you have to put that claim to the test.

    Post Your Version in the Comments

    This is your chance to exercise the "ship a game" muscle. Post your version of Bouncing DVD in the comments. Ask yourself the questions above while developing it. Please do this. Please ship a game however trivial. It's important.

    Link to lesson 5: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/kjodio/7_lessons_from_7_years_of_indie_game_dev_lesson_5/

    submitted by /u/amirrajan
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