Is it just me, or is it not totally obvious why most indie games just fail miserably?? |
- Is it just me, or is it not totally obvious why most indie games just fail miserably??
- We are reversing games and give security tips to game devs
- As the Steam festival is ending today, did the festival help visibility of your game?
- Any advice for someone who would like to soundtrack games?
- Can you first create a steamworks account personally, and then, when you are getting close to an actual game release, have your LLC ready and switch your account to it?
- Does anyone feel guilty for using paid assets?
- Here are my results after participating in the Steam Game Festival Feb '21
- Luck shouldn't play a role in making your decisions - a small rant
- Voice acting recommendations?
- I've just uploaded a small tutorial on how to create an easy fast travel system in Unity. (Project on GitHub)
- About Isometric grids
- Where do I find resources for developing AI to be used in procedural generation.
- GDevelop sprite demonstration (video tutorial) Includes: Hide/Show, Opacity, Scale, Color tint, Angle, and Blend mode
- Game dev books
- Indie game cliches.
- Revealing the Character's Ghost | Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (With Narrative Lead Aaron Contreras)
- I want to get into game development help?
- 30 minute gamedev challenge
- A game developer that has too much wisdom for the his subs, so he needs more to spread it out
- Purchased Spine License, Software doesn't run at all.
- Is there somewhere to find finished/ready game scripts for several different purposes in gamemaking?
- Melee combat design - rules to adjust technical burden on players
- Creating a pinball game???
| Is it just me, or is it not totally obvious why most indie games just fail miserably?? Posted: 08 Feb 2021 01:55 PM PST Honestly, I have seen so many posts and threads on why people's game failed, or a kickstarter that didn't reach It's funding goal and in 9 out of 10 cases, the Art (regardless of chosen style/medium), wasn't even close to looking professional. But then you see them trying to write a post-mortem on why it failed, and people almost always conclude that their marketing wasn't strong enough, or they did something wrong marketing their game at some point. And honestly, most of the time I just go like.. "...What?" How?... How could you have these really high expectations, If your game looks amateurish? In 9 out of 10 cases, I look at their game's steam page and immediatly I notice that the Art is either really bad, or not at a professional level which is expected from indie games that are successful. They lack appeal. So.. like.. It's just really obvious to me? I don't know what you expected would happen. That your game will sell like hot cakes with a steam page that screams mediocrity? It's literally the first thing people will see. The look of the game, not your awesome little game's feature or mechanic, but the Art. That's why people will not move their cursor to the big red X in the upper right corner after 2 seconds of visiting your steam page. Yes, people have to see your game in the first place, so marketing is definitely important. But who wants to eat a spoiled apple? You go in with an expectation of selling 50,000+ spoiled apples, and then you're wondering why nobody is engaging with your gifs on twitter, or trying out your game. And It doesn't mean that your art can't be simple. With a solid grasp of drawing/design/colour fundamentals, you could already make a semi-professional, clean looking game even with a very simple art style. Simple doesn't equal bad. But shitty art happens, when people don't learn the fundamentals, or never went beyond them, because they want to work around having to work hard, or whatthefuckever. At least adjust your expectations, or get someone to look over your game's art who has a trained eye; someone who can point that stuff out. I read so many comments where people say how bad they are at art, and what they do to work around that in a very half-heartedly manner, but they never talk about what they're doing to work on actually getting better, because they see potential dollars flying away or something, I dunno. As someone with an art background, this really baffles me in the indie scene. Why would you not get really good at drawing and painting, and then try your hand at pixel art, or 2d art, or 3d art even? Or whatever your project calls for, after having that stuff down, you can literally do anything you want, If you can code it. Anyways, sorry for ranting and I know this will probably aggravate some people, since It's a pretty controversial post but I would really like to discuss this further with you guys. Cheers! EDIT: Holy Smokes! Okay, so I did not expect this to blow up and I would love to reply to every comment, but after reading through everything, I think It's not necessary anymore. There are a lot of people criticizing my post, and a lot of people defending it. There's not much more to say here, but I want to offer a different perspective here which is why I made this post in the first place. I still believe that art is the #1 important thing that will make or break your game's marketing campaign/kickstarter/whatever. If you work hard at it; with the right sources, you can get pretty good in 3-4 years. You might say "Wait! That's way too long!! It's not worth it!" Well. Aren't you in this for the long haul? Are you doing everything you can to make your games stand out? Like REALLY do everything you can? Getting good at art is involved with making a lot of sacrifices, as you already know from gamedev in general. Just give it a try for a few months, and see where it takes you. At this point, I'm going to link a few things that WILL get you good If you sit down, do your due diligence, because you're 'fighting the good fight'! art isn't the enemy, It's your strong ally and you should look upon it fondly. Anyways, here we go: Training: https://www.wattsatelier.com/ IMO the best structured online program in the world right now, led by the probably best living draftsmen on the planet, Jeff R. Watts. Trust me when I say that this can, and with enough effort put in, WILL replace even programs at the world's best art colleges like ArtCenter. The online drawing program is $99 per month. ArtCenter tuition: $44,932 per year. Q: Do I have to go to college to get really good at drawing/painting? A: No. https://www.nma.art/ Also a good resource, but people tend to get lost here, since there are mostly demonstrations, but no structured assignments as of now. I would take a few courses here, especially from Glenn Vilppu, as a supplement to Watts. Books: Andrew Loomis - Fun with a Pencil Mindset & Motivation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX0MrnzBJ8M I don't care If you "only" want to get good at art for your game. This video will help you regardless, and note that you can't take this stuff lightly If you really want your game to have good art in it. Anyways, I hope I provided some help for people who came back to this post, or just read it. I wish the best of luck to all of you! [link] [comments]  | ||
| We are reversing games and give security tips to game devs Posted: 09 Feb 2021 02:09 AM PST I am working on a security product for mobile apps and I am often surprised with how little security awareness I see, even in the development community. We are doing all kinds of security research and one of the topics is video game development. We are making a blog series specifically for game developers where we want to show what cheaters can do, and what developers can do to make their life harder - in a very practical / no-bs way. Here's our first post where we implement teleportation cheat in Bomberman and give some tips on how to improve security of your games. Good luck with your game! [link] [comments]  | ||
| As the Steam festival is ending today, did the festival help visibility of your game? Posted: 09 Feb 2021 09:13 AM PST The Steam festival which ran from February 3rd to the 9th is ending today. The festival is a way for indie developers to show off their games, release demos and get a chance at getting their game noticed. Did you see a large increase in wishlists, visits, impressions? Do you think the festival helped with visibility of your game? I released a demo of my game https://store.steampowered.com/app/1445070/Specular_Stranded/ and had my wishlist's triple over the course of the festival. So for me, it was definitely worth it! Curious how it was for the rest of you! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Any advice for someone who would like to soundtrack games? Posted: 09 Feb 2021 08:36 AM PST I produce electronic music and would love to try my hand at creating videogame soundtracks. I'm always trying to build a universe inside the music I write so I like the idea of using my sound to help flesh out a universe someone else has created! Any advice from you guys of where to get started on this journey? Here's some of my music for reference btw :) https://iamaom.bandcamp.com/album/eat-the-fruit [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2021 08:34 AM PST I am trying to see if I am supposed to have created an LLC right in the beginning or if it is better to continue working on the project and see if some buzz is generated in pre-release. Thanks ! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Does anyone feel guilty for using paid assets? Posted: 09 Feb 2021 04:53 AM PST I am solo developing my current project, over the Christmas sale I bought a bunch of assets on the unity asset store for cheap. My thought was there's no way I can make all the art and ui and sound for my game myself so I bought everything I would need to finish the game to my current vision. But now that I'm fully going through it I can't get over this feeling of being a cheat or a fraud for using things that I didn't make myself. Has anyone else experienced this feeling before? I know I am putting in a lot of work myself designing and coding systems but it's still hard to get over the fact that it's not all my hard work. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Here are my results after participating in the Steam Game Festival Feb '21 Posted: 09 Feb 2021 10:43 AM PST Summary My game I Am the Captain Now participated in the Steam February Festival these past couple of days. I had no live stream at the event, but I released a demo. I went from 40 sessions on the demo to 500. I went from 150 wishlists to 600. Verdict: it was really cool being involved in this and would definitely recommend it. So let's dig into the details. Page Visits My page has been live for almost 3 months now, and for the first 2 months had around 15 visits a day. Since I released my demo my daily visits increased to around 40. For the steam festival, the visits were as much as 800 per day and 200 at the end of the festival. See the graph below for details. Most traffic came from the festival page but I also got mentioned on a Russian site for Co-op games which gave me an additional 190 page views. Would have never found that article unless I had Google Analytics set-up, so if you haven't already, set that up! Wishlists Before the festival I had 190 wishlists, which is not a lot but something I was proud of having achieved without doing any particular marketing. The day I had most wishlists was when I released my demo and got 25 on one day. So what happened at the festival. The first day I almost doubled my total number of wishlists when I got 137 net gain. Amazing in my opinion. The wishlists declined a bit after that, but as of now I have a total of 613 wishlists while still having one more day of the festival to go. That is more than triple the amount I started with. This still looks to be way to few to get on the new and trending page of steam at launch, but I'm super proud to have this many people interested in something I have created. Demo plays This is the thing I was most hoping for. After all, all this hours I put into this was to have people enjoy it. So how did it go. Before the event I had around 40 people download and start up my game. As of writing this, I have now had over 515 people download the demo and start it. And I have had 256 people start Steam remote play sessions where they have tried it with their friends. This is really cool and the thing I am most proud of. It is also worth having a look at the average time played. I estimate that a full play-through should take between 20-40 minutes depending on how fast you are. But when looking at the stats, the median play time is only 3 minutes. That means half the people only had the application open for a maximum of 3 minutes. I need to try and figure out why that is, but I suspect one reason is that a lot of people shut it down when they come to player select screen and realise you have to be a minimum of 3 people to play. Because once people start the actual game they seem to play for longer. The total average time playing is 15 minutes, which is compared to the median very high IMO. But I will analyze that more, there might be more reasons for this. Conclusion If I participate with my next game I think I would do two things different. I would try to set up a live stream, since it looked very fun hosting one and it also seemed to give a lot of good exposure. I would also put some money into creating appealing thumbnails for my game. I am no graphical artist so the ones I have now are very limited, and when looking at some others I am blown away by how good they look. And when clicking around and testing out demos myself, I was fully drawn in by the ones with cool concept art. Overall, very much liked this experienced and would do it again. Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to try and answer it in the comments [link] [comments]  | ||
| Luck shouldn't play a role in making your decisions - a small rant Posted: 09 Feb 2021 02:24 AM PST I often see people who say luck is like 90%-100% of a game's success and honestly it drives me nuts. It's such a bad way of working on games (or anything honestly). It's the biggest excuse I see among gamedevs to not to think properly about marketing or even the game itself. As Alexander Bruce said it in his GDC talk (which is one of the best talks tbh): "If luck is in everything, it makes sense to me to factor it out of everything." There are a lot of factors that you can change. If you don't release your game, you won't sell it. Your video can't get picked up by the YouTube algorithm if you don't publish a video. The chance can be still tiny if you write to press but it's even tinier if you don't. If you only develop for an obscure platform your market will be greatly limited. And everything of that makes sense on a very basic level and you can reason from that to other decisions. You don't need to do everything but doing nothing and saying: "Yeah, we'll see if I get lucky", is just a big oof. It's honestly also insulting to a lot of hardworking devs - "yeah he got lucky" - like an artist - "yeah you have talent" - most of them worked years to perfection their skills, it's not just something given to you. If it is just a hobby and you don't care about downloads/sales this whole thing certainly doesn't apply for you. I never heard from any gamedev that is in the least way successful that he just bets on luck to publish his next game. Why is it still such a big part of the discussion? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2021 01:02 AM PST Im Currently working on a game and I finally decided to take time and work on the sound part. Im a solo developer so my budget is limited. What are some voice acting sources and sites that dont take 100$ per actor? I dont want to go broke haha. Thanks in advance. [link] [comments]  | ||
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| Posted: 09 Feb 2021 06:59 AM PST Hi, looking for use a 2D isometric grid, but got a couple of questions about.
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| Where do I find resources for developing AI to be used in procedural generation. Posted: 09 Feb 2021 08:42 AM PST Hello everyone! I'm a beginning game designer with a background in computer science and I'm trying to tackle one of the first hurdles in my little passion project. My process has so far been to first create the concept and now I'm working on developing the systems in which my game is going to function. I started with outlining how I want world generation to work but now I've hit a stump in implementation. I was hoping to do some research on various methods of terrain generation using pre built terrain templates, or by giving the computer various data and letting it go from there (Think Elite Dangerous: Horizons) I'm well aware of the scope of what I'm trying to accomplish I'm just hoping to find some resources to be used for research into these specific topics and after having little luck with google, I am now turning to my one stop shop for answers. [link] [comments]  | ||
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| Posted: 09 Feb 2021 08:17 AM PST Hi! I'm a solo indie game dev who wants to delve into the book front of "mandatory" books every game dev should read. If you can recommend me or other readers that you find to be must read for game developers feel free to share it! Thanks! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2021 11:49 AM PST I've noticed so many games have cliches, it's even worse than AAA sometimes despite not being held by industry trends. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Revealing the Character's Ghost | Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (With Narrative Lead Aaron Contreras) Posted: 09 Feb 2021 11:47 AM PST
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| I want to get into game development help? Posted: 09 Feb 2021 11:25 AM PST I'm a CS student in my second year of college and I want to start learning game dev and taking it seriously. I had played around with unity a few years back but I didn't take it seriously. I know C++ and basic Python. What would you recommend me to learn, where to learn, and what's the best routine to get better and gradually grow over time. I want to eventually release indie games on steam or even the appstore, maybe join a game dev company or make my own! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 09 Feb 2021 07:37 AM PST Hey people! i tried to make a clicker-game in 30 minutes, i am quite happy with the prototype. I just put something together, i hope you guys like it and/or will learn something from it (i made it primarily so people can learn how UI works). the source is available on Itch: https://castimierdev.itch.io/clicker-game-in-30-mins i also made a video about it explaining how i did things it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9foY0MetB8 [link] [comments]  | ||
| A game developer that has too much wisdom for the his subs, so he needs more to spread it out Posted: 09 Feb 2021 11:19 AM PST
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| Purchased Spine License, Software doesn't run at all. Posted: 09 Feb 2021 11:14 AM PST I use Windows 10. Tried Spine Trial version and decided to purchase it. However, the licensed version doesn't run. After completing the installation when I try to run the software nothing happens. I see the process in task manager which results in a crash I guess then disappears. Your help is most appreciated. Thanks a lot! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Is there somewhere to find finished/ready game scripts for several different purposes in gamemaking? Posted: 09 Feb 2021 11:08 AM PST Instead of spending hours creating new games from scratch I was thinking that I now and in the future should be using such codes (be it a trading system, player movement, enemy AI, skills, bullets, interactions etc. etc.) and adding my own touches and tweaks. Does anybody know of such a place? I looked around a bit on google and didn't find anything. Youtube on the other hand has many many tutorials. But I was thinking ready scripts to copy paste. It would save a lot of time for the design of the game and much less for actually making it happen. Leaving room for faster improvement and content creation and more creativity. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Melee combat design - rules to adjust technical burden on players Posted: 08 Feb 2021 07:39 PM PST
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| Posted: 09 Feb 2021 09:40 AM PST Hello everyone, I have a bunch of time on my hands and I was thinking of creating a simple pinball game. The problem is, I can't find any decent resources on the web about such a project. I have some light experience in UE4 and I tried to follow a udemy pinball tutorial, but it is majorly outdated and while I fancy myself a pretty good artist, I am no programmer, so thats where I really need the help. I was wondering would it be possible to model a pinball table and all its features in blender, and somehow bring the table over to ue4 or even unity? and if so could someone point me in the right direction of learning to some pinball specific code? I've looked high and low with no luck. -sorry for stupid quesition/bad english thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  |
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