Pitching a Game to Publishers with Zero Expectations! |
- Pitching a Game to Publishers with Zero Expectations!
- he why and how of running a game Kickstarter
- Is this the right subreddit to discuss browser game development like Torn, Inselkampf etc.
- Terry Cavanagh regarding VVVVVV open-sourcing: "Only good things have happened"
- Progress on my indie game “Everdream”. Just started learning how to make games this summer, I’m happy with the progress so far.
- I’m coding a stealth action game completely from scratch. I made a tool to visualize Quaternion bugs. (more in comments)
- the official answer to every "is unity/unreal worth/better/capable of?" question
- Finding the motivation to complete a game
- Can I be a father with a full time job, and learn to be a game developer?
- Is it even worth it to contact games press?
- In California, am I effectively doxxing myself if I publish a game on steam with only a dba?
- Managing players regarding scenes in Unity
- Do you use analytics on your promotion website or in your game?
- Possibly throwing in the towel for 3D, thinking about switching to 2.5D (Action game)
- Licenses from Commissioned work?
- How to create firing area for ai using EQS？
- Multi Threading Gameplay Code
- ShapeNeon Wars on Steam. Wishlist now !
- Long term game dev freelancer (contractor) thinking of quitting my current job (client) and hunt for shorter projects, how dumb am i ?
- Smithsonian's CC0 3D Scan Collection
- Done for its own sake: Games as an aesthetic form
- Any opinions on this one? What can be done visually to improve the overall aesthetic. Especially looking for ideas to improve the hex tiles and the visualisation of the tile level. At the moment its this little number on every tile. (Need more models for enemys and stuff. Thats 1 thing of course)
- Aspiring Game Developer and I need some advice
- Can you recommend some resources/codebases to study project architecture?
| Pitching a Game to Publishers with Zero Expectations! Posted: 11 Jan 2021 04:30 AM PST
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| he why and how of running a game Kickstarter Posted: 11 Jan 2021 03:53 AM PST
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| Is this the right subreddit to discuss browser game development like Torn, Inselkampf etc. Posted: 11 Jan 2021 02:03 AM PST I always like Inselkampf which closed down a few years ago and fancied having a go at a reimagining of that. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Terry Cavanagh regarding VVVVVV open-sourcing: "Only good things have happened" Posted: 11 Jan 2021 10:11 AM PST | ||
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| Posted: 11 Jan 2021 12:20 PM PST
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| the official answer to every "is unity/unreal worth/better/capable of?" question Posted: 10 Jan 2021 01:28 PM PST theyre both fine, throw a dart & see if u like it, if not switch & see if u like that one better. it literally doesn't matter just go do the thing instead of going to a forum to see if you should do the thing. The engine u pick will never make nearly as much difference as u having the drive to just go do stuff & find out will [link] [comments]  | ||
| Finding the motivation to complete a game Posted: 11 Jan 2021 02:43 AM PST This is something that I've always struggled with when making games. I get all these grand ideas and I focus much more on what I want the product to be and not the process. When I get down to doing the actual work, I usually get unmotivated quickly, especially if I'm doing programming. And more so if I'm encountering issues and bugs that are frustrating to fix. So my question is: how can I stay motivated to see a game to completion? I know you just need to persevere and work hard, but how? Am I doing things wrong by focusing on what I want the final game to be too much? How should I focus my efforts mentally to stay motivated? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Can I be a father with a full time job, and learn to be a game developer? Posted: 11 Jan 2021 04:09 AM PST Is anyone out there a Father with a full time job, chipping away at your dream project? I'm 34 and am currently learning how make games. I've been flat out since October learning C#, Unity and every article of theory related to game development. I can safely say I'm in love with it. My goals are small right now, and will be for a while. The only long term goal I have is 'don't give up'. In a couple years me and my soon to be wife will hopefully have a kid. I don't want to pass through life without experiencing fatherhood. However, I also need a creative outlet in order to stay sane, and to be who I am. And of course, I need a full time job. I don't entertain any fantasies about being a full time game dev at this point. My question is: when a kid is on the scene, and a routine has been established, is it possible to keep doing this? If I prioritised my Family, work and game dev - in that order - will this dream remain intact and in reach? Once the dust has settled, Is a couple hours a day or at night to work on a Project Monday - Friday unreasonable? I've spoken to my partner at length and she said she'll absolutely work with me to try find the time, whilst maintaining a healthy balance. I would also love to be able to pass these skills on, and to set an example to my kids that if you want something bad enough and you're prepared to work hard enough, you can make anything happen. Thanks for reading :) [link] [comments]  | ||
| Is it even worth it to contact games press? Posted: 11 Jan 2021 05:29 AM PST I'm going to release my first game next month and have been doing a lot of research on games marketing. For what I understand, it's extremely hard to get coverd by press if you are not already well known. And even if you manage to get covarage, the results can be underwhelming. So my question is: Should I even bother? It takes a lot of time to compile a email list and send out good emails. Maybe my time is better spend improving the game. [link] [comments]  | ||
| In California, am I effectively doxxing myself if I publish a game on steam with only a dba? Posted: 10 Jan 2021 04:14 PM PST | ||
| Managing players regarding scenes in Unity Posted: 11 Jan 2021 11:30 AM PST Hey all, hope all is well. I'm currently working on the core mechanics of a game I'm developing solo in Unity, and I've unfortunately ran into a split in the road regarding how a player will be managed when in close proximity to another player. If you're familiar with unity scenes, they act as folders, but they're more than that. You can also separate players into their own "world" without interference from others. Explanation: In my game, I'm using a subdivided coordinate system for managing how chunks of data (like in minecraft) are processed. Because of an engine limitation, each player has their own scene to interact with the world, however when close to another player the two scenes "merge" into one since there's a player viewing the same portion of the "world." This is both to avoid duplicate calls to load the chunk, and allow both the players to interact with each other. My game is also strictly server-authorative, so as nice as it would be to just offload it to a client, it's a no-go. The networking API I'm using is Mirror, and AFAIK all GameObjects that are to be visible to a player need to be in the same scene, so there's a few limitations Mirror imposes. The conundrum: How would I go about handling the scenes alternatively? A: (same as above) Move any player that requests the same chunk(s) to be loaded into one scene, but if spaced correctly they can daisy-chain the player's to become one single large scene, eventually running into the float-point limitation. This avoids duplicate requests to load chunks, is the simplest, but restricted by the float-point limitation. B: Keep the players in their own scene, and have reference GameObjects that link the scenes togther. The downside is it will have a major performance impact because everything is duplicated for each player. This avoids the float-point limitation, and duplicate chunks at the cost of heavy performance loss. C: ...or? Need something better than the two above. I feel like there's an alternative that meets all my requirements that I'm not seeing. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Do you use analytics on your promotion website or in your game? Posted: 11 Jan 2021 11:13 AM PST I am currently building a website for my game and I want to use google analytics to optimise my landing page and get some information about visitors. I am interested in hearing about your experiences with using analytics either on your website or even in your game. Any tips or experiences? Is it worth setting it up? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Possibly throwing in the towel for 3D, thinking about switching to 2.5D (Action game) Posted: 11 Jan 2021 01:30 AM PST I've been struggling for months to learn the animation for a basic Katana animation combo string. If you played any Japanese action game you will know what I'm referring to. https://youtu.be/v-70T1-QYt4?t=39 (Most basic example I could find. Other examples are Ninja Gaiden Series or Way of the samurai) https://youtu.be/WcljWzfzA8Y?t=214 (Full View) The part I struggle with is making them look good when the camera is behind them. It always looks terrible. So I ended up purchasing different Katana animation assets (not all at once of course) and I'm noticing this issue with all of them. The first string where the character steps forward is missing, they either overshoot or don't move at all, even after modifying these animations myself it never looks right from the back. One thing I've got though are multiple animations that look great from the side and can look even better with some tweaking. My goal was to make a third person action game similar to Ninja Gaiden Black or DMC1 (Dynamic Camera). I'm starting to think that this is too ambitious for a solo dev seeing how difficult it is to create a fluid basic combo string even with the help of assets. Should I bite the bullet and scale down to a side scrolling action game for my first game or would it be worth it to find someone who's able to replicate the animations above? PSA: When buying animation assets try to picture how they would play in your game rather than how cool they look. I learned that the hard way. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Licenses from Commissioned work? Posted: 11 Jan 2021 08:49 AM PST I've commission a few assets (music, pixel art) from some artists for my game. When they produced the deliverables, I paid them on paypal and they just sent me the files. We did not agree to any royalties or anything, but also never discussed it - just a fee for the price of the assets. Of course, my assumption is that I have to right to redistribute these with my game and profit from them, but none of that is in writing. Are there any standard licenses I should ask the artists to agree to just to be official, or is the unspoken agreement enough to go on? I'm not looking to hold a gun to anyone's head, I just don't want them to turn around in the future and try to claim royalties if the game ever ends up making any money [link] [comments]  | ||
| How to create firing area for ai using EQS？ Posted: 11 Jan 2021 06:28 AM PST As a level designer and a developer, I recently needed a tool to assign some location information to AI, such as using a box to tell AI that you should stay in this area. I used to see some stuff in this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8W7EQKBgcg&t=249s I also imagined that this area has several priorities. For example, we divide it into ABC according to the priority from high to low. We use the lowest priority C to set a basic "battlefield". For example, we have multiple sentinels, and each sentinel will have a large area with priority C. We use a large box to represent it. In this way, monsters belonging to sentinel 1 only need to consider the position of sentinel 1. In the area with priority C, there are several areas with priority B. We can assign different areas to different AIs, or multiple, and so on. There are also areas with priority B The area with priority A can also contain multiple I imagine that we can use the EQS system to deal with it. The scores for the area covered by different boxes are different, but I don't know how to deal with this problem. Can someone help me? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 10 Jan 2021 07:02 PM PST What's the approach for multi threading game object updates? I can accept that game state may need to be double-buffered or have an RW lock built into each object. I already have a basic lock-free job queue and an assembly implementation of fibers. Fibers are nice for implementing state machines and async code in general. But gameplay code is fundamentally messy and prone to change. Expecting synchronization to be done manually is not feasible, IMO. "Give up" is an option, but not one I like. What's the state of the art? I like BitSquid's approach of attaching locking to parts of the API, but it's tied to Lua and I don't intend on embedding a scripting language. http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2015/03/multithreaded-gameplay.html [link] [comments]  | ||
| ShapeNeon Wars on Steam. Wishlist now ! Posted: 11 Jan 2021 12:09 PM PST | ||
| Posted: 11 Jan 2021 08:16 AM PST Hi, I've been working fulltime as a mobile game developer since 2014, in 2013 i had various clients and worked on many projects, but since fall 2013 till 2020 i only had 2 clients:
I live in north Africa and i make $2500/month, which is pretty good considering our currency, but at the same time am getting a bit tired of being Mr.OneManArmy, we do hire some artists occasionally but 90% of the time it's just me and a budget for the Unity AssetStore, i also think i could be making more money if i do freelance properly instead of sticking with a single client for years, especially that the games I make are actually games that other publishers/clients are asking my client to make them.
What do you think ? i would love to know the opinion of active freelancers in our field. my area of expertise (in order):
Thanks! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Smithsonian's CC0 3D Scan Collection Posted: 11 Jan 2021 12:01 PM PST | ||
| Done for its own sake: Games as an aesthetic form Posted: 11 Jan 2021 11:56 AM PST Games are an interesting case that make us examine our assumptions about aesthetics. Chess is beautiful, but in a very different way from the way a painting or sculpture or film or poem is beautiful. I've come to understand "aesthetic forms" in the following way, which I think is really useful: "An aesthetic form is an otherwise ordinary activity made special and done just for the sake of doing it, because doing it is enjoyable." We all eat every day. But cuisine is eating done for its own sake. We all look at things all day long every day, but we look at a painting or sculpture just for the sake of looking at something. Visual art is looking for its own sake. We all watch things happen every day, but we go to the theater or the movies just to watch something happen---watching done for its own sake. Stories are thus the aesthetic form of relaying a series of events for its own sake. We might narrate a series of events in a court room, but it's not a story. We all move every day for all sorts of reasons, like walking down to the mailbox. But dance is movement for its own sake. Walking down to the mailbox isn't dancing. (We also watch other people move all day long, but we're not watching dance---we go to the ballet to just watch other people move for its own sake.) Poetry is the written word for its own sake. It's not a contract or a letter or even the written form of a story. Aren't these words together interesting and amazing just as words put together? Oh, and obviously, music is listening for its own sake. We all listen every day for all kinds of reasons. "Is that the garbage truck going by just now, oh crap, I forgot to put the bin out!" The hurricane siren isn't music. The phone ringing isn't music. But when we assemble sounds together---or even invent sound-making objects (like violins) that serve no other purpose other than making sounds that are enjoyable to listen to---that's music. And that brings us to games. We all think and then act based on that thinking every day. We look at our situation and decide what to do---what course to take. "Oh crap, the freeway down there looks jammed up. I'm going to go the long way on surface roads instead." We consider how to approach our boss about a problem we've been having with a co-worker. But none of these things are games. A game is "thinking and deciding and acting" done for its own sake, because it's interesting and enjoyable to think and decide and do. Games are the aesthetic form of thought and action, of instrumental reason. If this kind of stuff is interesting to you, here is an excellent talk by my friend and mentor Frank Lantz, "Hearts and Minds": [link] [comments]  | ||
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| Aspiring Game Developer and I need some advice Posted: 11 Jan 2021 11:49 AM PST Hello, I am a sophomore in high school and I want to be a full-time indie dev. I've known this since I was in 5th grade and I haven't reconsidered it at all. Recently, I've only wanted to pursue game dev more because I like making music, art, and I like coding. So, in a way, game dev is the perfect job because it's like a party pack of all those subjects. I've recently bought a 1 year license to Game Maker Studio 2. These past couple of months I've been learning GML and slowly creating my first game (see here, this isn't important to the post though.) I've been loving every second of it. Seeing the result of hard work is very rewarding and I only want to continue. However, as I get closer to graduation, the world becomes a scarier place. I've been looking around and I've seen people talk about how unlikely it is to score as a full-time indie dev. Seeing these posts kind of crush me, game dev being my life. I'm planning to go to college but I don't know what to take. My plan was to create games while in high school and college and become a full-time indie dev fresh out of college. I now realize how unlikely that will be. I don't have any alternatives right now and I don't know what to do. When I say this, I mean with all my heart. Game dev is my dream, my passion and I really don't want any other way. When I bring up these concerns to friends and/or family I'm often told I'm too young to worry about this or they can't help because they have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to game dev. I am just so scared I won't be able to make it but, at the same time, I want to succeed as a full-time indie so bad. I understand game dev isn't a get rich quick type of thing, trust me. I know this will take several hours of hard work, improvement, and dedication. Just, I imagine seeing my name next to other big designers and it's motivating. My philosophy was always hard work pays off, but now I'm not so sure. I'm becoming very overwhelmed and my mind is kind of all over the place... so sorry if this post is jumbled.
TL;DR I'm a sophomore in high school and want to pursue full-time game-dev but I've realized how unlikely it is to make a suitable living off of it. Need some advice [link] [comments]  | ||
| Can you recommend some resources/codebases to study project architecture? Posted: 11 Jan 2021 11:47 AM PST It's been two months since I've started making my first 'serious' project. While I haven't officially released anything, I've worked on a ton of smaller projects over the last 6 years -- some of them admittedly unfinished -- ranging from your usual Pong/Tetris/Mario/etc. clones when I first started out with SDL to more complicated prototypes in Unity. I feel that my programming and game design foundations are much stronger, so I decided to take the leap and make something more challenging, something I actually want to play. A few quick words about the game I'm making (feel free to skip!): it's an FPS/horror co-op hybrid, where a team of 2-4 players must infiltrate various buildings and facilities and either exterminate their monstrous denizens or retrieve some kind of object. Some players will be able to take on a more supporting role, like watching cameras to guide their team through safer routes, or hack into the electrical network to manipulate devices. Basically, it's a game concept that serves as an answer to the question 'What would happen if Rainbow Six operatives entered into the Resident Evil mansion, and some of them had included 'Security Guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria' in their CV?'. I'm taking an incremental/iterative approach towards this project: I've done most of the design work concerning the core features of the game and what I want to get out of it, and have built some of the systems -- namely the code responsible for connecting to a room (using the Photon PUN2 plugin), basic UI and a character controller that can walk around, shoot, interact with environmental objects and includes common components and FPS behaviors (aiming down sights, hitscan bullet effects, health/damage management etc.). My first goal is to build a working, bare-bones prototype where I can call a few friends, get them in the game and shoot at each other in a dark map to test out the feel of the main mechanics. I'm confident that I'll be reaching my goal in two weeks time. And this is where my problems start. So far, I've written code that does its job, is easy enough for me to read, and makes use of some of Unity's standard assets for speed's sake. In general, while I'm far from a seasoned dev, I'm at a point where I can program any system I want, and make it work. However, even those simple systems have already started getting cumbersome, and admittedly hacky at some points. It's far from spaghetti, but also from good, maintainable code. Once the prototype is done, I'm going to have to add new systems: inventory and item management, the system responsible for the cameras and electrical stuff, AI for the enemies and more choices on the multiplayer part (buying weapons from a database, managing player profiles etc.). Some of the already existing systems will have to either be refactored or completely rewritten to play nice with the new additions. To be honest, I'm lost. There are so many choices or things I don't know, that I'm going mad. I'm trying to draw diagrams, see how everything's connected, but it doesn't really work. Some of the design choices are easily made because of Unity's recommendation to follow composition over inheritance, yet other systems are so much better when they're represented through traditional OOP. I'm at a point where watching tutorials or reading articles doesn't really help, because they rarely concern themselves with architecture; just getting the job done. What I wanted to get to after this massive, verbose wall of text is that I need some reference about how people do larger scale projects. I'm aware of some perfectly good books that concern themselves with engine architecture (like Jason Gregory's phenomenal "Game Engine Architecture", which I'm currently reading) or general good programming/engineering practices, but these don't really go into game project architecture. I understand that there can't be a book specific to each person's project, so alternatively, I'm asking for any open-source codebase I can get my hands on. It doesn't have to be 100% matching to my project, just something where some of these systems might be implemented, so I can study how others do it. Even more alternatively, I'm open to any advice you can throw my way concerning the matter. Thanks for reading! [link] [comments]  |
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