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    Over 1000(11+ GB) FREE SOUND EFFECTS [sci-fi, horror, foley, cinematic, music loops & more]

    March 04, 2021

    Over 1000(11+ GB) FREE SOUND EFFECTS [sci-fi, horror, foley, cinematic, music loops & more]

    Over 1000(11+ GB) FREE SOUND EFFECTS [sci-fi, horror, foley, cinematic, music loops & more]

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 10:05 AM PST

    We’re two devs who made an open world alien galaxy – here’s how

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 07:23 AM PST

    [This is a post we wrote on gamasutra, which includes gifs and images that illustrate our points, but I'm pasting the article here and linking to images for easier reading because convenience. Cheers!]

    ​

    Our space adventure/survival game holds a galaxy filled with more than 1000 unique worlds, 20+ interactive space businesses, and various points of interest. I want to share how we set the groundwork to generate game assets for this kind of scope and outline our approach. Hopefully this gives other developers (or even players) a framework for making a game map that feels broad yet unique. And, in some ways, describes how we designed the gameplay environment to be interactive with logical points of challenge.

    Big Concept = Keeping Details Simple

    When the two of us settled on the (foolishly large) idea of creating an open world galaxy, we forged ahead with loose ideas: fill space with unique worlds, cosmic businesses and illusions of "life." In many ways, we wanted to create a finite but massive galaxy that could be explored, mapped, and understood – similar to the worlds of Grand Theft Auto or Legend of Zelda. We also wanted it to make it all feel alive, as if the galaxy had been lived-in by beings for millenia. This was a very tall order for two devs making a game in their spare time, so for the sake of time and sanity we had to make concessions. How'd we set out?

    • Low-Poly Aesthetic – Modeling all things (aliens, items, plants, ships, animals, visual effects) with a low-poly design helped create a whole swath of meshes we could mix and match when plugged in to procedural generation. The more assets we made, the more "ammunition" we had to combine things and create instances of variety. This was hugely helpful during planet generation. Additionally, because player perspectives are generally "far" from the characters (and objects as well), we could get away with minimizing details on plants, items, animals, ship parts, etc. Sometimes the eye only needs to grasp a key detail or two of an object to understand what it is, and then let imagination fill in the overall experience. Thank you, pixel artists.
    • Toon-Shading and Color Pallets – We created specific cel-/toon-shaded color pallets for anything we modeled for the game. Our simple colors are based on pastel spectrums, with varying shades of vibrancy. This created consistent variance among specific items (plants, beings, animals, items), but also established thematic looks for the game as a whole. Vivid landscapes and spacescapes feel a little more unified. (Small example of how a very simple flower prefab changes colors across biomes.)
    • Simple Rigging/Animation – Animals and aliens move rather simply, and we once again applied the idea of having a few key details tell the story of movement. For example, sometimes the sway or jerk of an animal's neck/head is the biggest detail in imagining its size (birds and rodents are jerky, giant animals sway). Most importantly, we rigged creatures to accommodate the top-down view the player will have. We wanted animals to appear smoothest when seen from the sky, which meant animating details that are most prominent from that angle – whipping tails, flailing heads, flopping ears, etc. Admittedly, our animals would look a little wonky in an FPS perspective. At first, we tried to randomly generate animals. And while they were charmingly freaky, they didn't have the emotional connection we needed. Though the variety in our animals would be limited, we felt that they looked more intentional and relatable if we hand-crafted them ourselves.

    Generating Unique Worlds = Make Many Mix and Match Details

    Planets, moons and asteroids are integral to gameplay as they hold resources and fuel that keep players alive and ships moving across the galaxy. Since players would land on these space rocks rather frequently, we knew we had to keep them fresh and intriguing. To generate the feel of unique worlds, we had to have enough environmental variables for them – details that we could manipulate across a breadth of occurrences so that no two places would ever appear the same. These details were:

    • Planet biomes – 9 biome types (color pallets) with matching, low-poly trees/bushes/plants (i.e., desert, snow, wooded, and various alien-looking atmospheres)
    • Animals – 20+ animals (from rodents and grazers to giant herbivores and predators)
    • Civilizations – 7 civilization types with unique houses, monuments, and city centers.
    • Enemies – 3 hostile groups, including gangs and raiders
    • Businesses – 3 kinds of malls
    • Garbage – Miscellaneous trash/pollution on land and sea
    • Flowers/vines – Varying their concentration
    • Rocks/Trees – Varying their concentration and tree design based on the biome
    • Relics – 7 space monuments and 7 planetary relics
    • Weather – Various atmospheric happenings like rain, fog, snow, meteors, methane hail, methane snow, and more
    • Topography – The shape of the land (prairie, steppes, mountains, hills) and the amount of water present, from desert planets to those almost totally covered by ocean

    With these variables defined, we created more than 300 star systems that, in aggregate, held more than 1000 types of explorable worlds, such as planets, moons, and asteroids. We even threw in gas planets for ambience!

    The process was painstaking and somewhat gritty. Mind-numbing data entry. We worked in a simple database to name each star system, name the orbital bodies they hold, and then semi-randomly assign the above variable elements to them. I say "semi-randomly" because we connected certain variables for effect. For example, planets with particularly rich resources typically have some kind of hidden danger – whether that's predatory animals or gangs and raiders who won't hesitate to blast at the player. High reward should come with high risk.

    All this data was pumped into a planet generation module that we coded in Unity. There were plenty of hiccups from human error, but nothing that couldn't be identified and straightened out. From there, we positioned each star system in our galaxy to create solar highways for space sailing, risky shortcuts, and pockets of alien civilization.

    Creating "Life" in Space = Create Points of Interaction/Challenge Across Vast Maps

    We knew we needed to fill our galaxy with the appearance that it's "lived-in," evidence that this cosmos has been home to aliens across millenia. To achieve this feel, we created 20+ types of interactive space businesses that have different service capacities to someone traversing the galaxy. Some stations offer fuel, others provide medical aid, loans and investments, planet harvesting equipment, guns and ammo, XXX holo-videos, college books, dapper clothes, fast food meals and more.

    • Space businesses – we first created a list of space businesses that we wanted. Because hand-crafting each one was a tedious endeavor, we narrowed the list down to less than 30, with room to add any more if early access communities find them fun. We also created two types of space malls, which allowed us to add a location that held a bevvy of different businesses – a neat little work-around that allowed us to add interactivity without putting more 3D modeling on our plate.
    • Items – Inevitably, having unique businesses meant filling them with various items that they'd hold. And the items needed to have some sort of purpose, so each specialty item in a business can boost one of six player stats to varying degrees. It would be completely pointless to offer items without any gameplay relevance.
    • Mapping – With star systems generated and placed, we filled in "dead space" areas with stations, rewarding riskier routes with fruitful businesses that held important services or items. From a gameplay standpoint, these space stations helped balance the risk and reward trajectories that come with charting your path across a particular stretch of space. If you take a less risky route, there may be a star mall waiting with refuel, repair, and shopping opportunities. If you stick close to solar highways, you may only see fast food stations and space gyms.
    • Flair – In addition to space stations, we modeled 7 megalith monuments that float in space (which hold elements of galactic lore). Space is huge and thus visually kind of boring – it's just a bunch of black with star specs in the distance. But having something large, colorful, and mysterious on the horizon offers interesting views. We also made it so that space is not always black! We threw science out the window to achieve a vibe where space changes color depending on the color of the star in the area. Red stars create a reddish hue, until you fly near a blue star that gently turns space blue – so on and so forth; yellow, orange, pink, and green stars abound. And lastly, we took our spaceship assets and coded them to fly around and visit planets and businesses. This was an element of movement in the stillness of space – a key impression that aliens were going about their lives, just as you are.
    • Threats – Adding elements of danger to space travel gives a jolt to the navigational gameplay. There are the more passive dangers, such as running out of food or fuel, but we wanted to create something more direct. Shrugging off science yet again, we created space weather – more specifically, roving storms you can track on a ship's navigation software. Without stabilizing ship parts, these storms severely knock you off course and damage ship attachments: engines, space sails, antennas, fuel tanks – including the ship hull itself. We also added "dead zones" in space that hold electrical anomalies that shut down ship communication systems, essentially blinding your navigation across a certain stretch of space. And then, there's raider zones. These are areas spaces that have been identified by law authorities as having raiders – hostiles that can board your ship, hurt your family, take your loot, and beat up your vessel.

    I wouldn't say any of these systems are particularly complex. They are deepened by data, simple elements of interactivity and low-poly models. These elements combined work together to create variability across breadth, and life across stillness. Creating something vast is a unique challenge, but one that can be tackled by a variety of simple detail. And the main trick of those details is that they suggest just enough of something to prime the imagination to fill in the rest.

    Hopefully this idea dump helps with conceptualizing little tricks and features that, when working together in your own project, can create a level of immersion that touches the vision you have for your work.

    submitted by /u/HermanThorpe
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    I made a tutorial about How to Make a Stylized Tree by using Blender and Unity. Hope it could help you make stylized scene :)

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 01:36 AM PST

    Honest Review - Our first Indie Game took us 2 years. Experience about game development and game release on Steam

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 06:14 AM PST

    Hello, Developers,

    I just wanted to share about my game and development process that took us to get where we are.

    Firstly development is hard as fuck. Everyone who tells it easy, I can tell either you are genius or stupid as hell. So when you start your first game good advice is to optimize your scale and try to do game as basic as possible (main mechanics), then add life to the world. This was one of our mistakes in the development process. We made world too big and started to populating it. After we populated in some scale, we faced optimization problems. Optimization is pain in the ass, especially when you are new in the game development world. We worked on Unity, so our main problem was trees optimization (culling calculations took 85% resources). Then we had multiple game crashing moments every month of the development. I think we done everything right, but I am still not sure (does anyone ever?).

    Team. Thank god our lead programmer was passionate and hard working as I am, because this project would not have seen the day light. I can't say the the same about artists because we had 5 of them in 2 years time. First artist was good, but he left after half year because we didn't have any money. Other artist done shit and left after 1-3 months (no responsibilities). We paid them, but sometimes money can't buy a good artist. The last our artist is very responsible and we glad we managed to hold him, because he has done a lot. Somehow there are a lot of talented and quite cheap sound designers and composers, so we didn't have a problem with that. Otherwise our experiences with freelance specialist was pretty decent.

    Game. It had 3 versions in 2 years development time. First version was 2D, then after first artist changed we tried to expand that 2D and finally with the last artist we moved to 3D version, which is the final version of the game. We are releasing our game in Early Access, because we have liabilities to government for the funding we got (it was quite small funding). So it is not the best version, still it has the main mechanics, story line and environment. The biggest flaw probably is some empty spaces and lack of additional content. The thing we proud of is the world we build. For 3 people team it is a major achievement. The last version development took a bit less than 1 year.

    Feels. I am tired, stressed and the most thing I am afraid the most is negative reviews. I hadn't slept normally for more than a week and even in my dreams I am developing my game.

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/1252480/Plasticalypse__Submarine_Adventures/
    The game is going to be released 16:00 EET.

    Please be gentle with us.

    If you have more questions feel free to ask.

    submitted by /u/Goblinas
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    Someone Else's Problem: How Game Publishers Buy Crunch Overseas

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 09:23 AM PST

    Face animation of the indie project Liber, we are in active development

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 07:08 AM PST

    My unrealistic goals of getting rich with hypercasual games

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 12:28 AM PST

    You know what I'm talking about. The hypercasual genre. The one with the lowest barrier of entry to mobile game development. The one that can potentially bring enough money for the rest of your life with a single game.

    After I have tried tens of prototypes for 2 years, I am thinking of leaving hypercasual for good. At, first I was tempted like many fellow game devs. But the idea of publishing a hit game with a top publisher no longer looks realistic.

    It's good from a publisher's point of view. They're still probably receiving hundreds of protoypes to test every month. Sooner or later one of them will bring good results. But is it going to be your prototype? Maybe, if you're lucky enough.

    I'm truly capable of making better games than these. Being this shallow is killing my passion for game development.

    I just wanted to share my feelings, that's all.

    submitted by /u/signalboi
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    How did you learn how to make a dedicated server for a multiplayer game? Books? Tutorials? University?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 07:40 AM PST

    I want to hear how people who have succeeded in the task managed to make it.

    Hopefully, I can follow your steps and succeed as well... How did you learn how to implement networking to your games?

    Start from the very beginning and assume that I have all the basic knowledge of C# and Unity

    submitted by /u/EternalStud3nt
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    Fruit Ninja Let's Code

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 05:56 AM PST

    What is the best way to do ads in a mobile game?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 08:56 AM PST

    My last game I released completely free, as an exercise in learning how to complete something.

    However I just had an amazing idea for a game and this time I want to get some revenue if possible.

    I just looked up how to do ads in Unity, and it seems Unity have their own ads service. I also saw that Google also have a service that can be used.

    I expect there are other services, and each of these presumably will give you a certain amount of money depending on the click-rate.

    Which do you recommend?

    Also I could potentially serve up full page ads, or put ads on some section of the screen. Which in your opinion is better?

    Personally I don't really like ads at all, and I have found ones that regularly show full-page ads every few minutes are quite annoying. Maybe the mobile demographic in general is less sensitive than I am and I shouldn't worry too much?

    I don't want my game to be obnoxious, but at the same time I would also like to try and make a bit of money this time if possible.

    Any advice is appreciated.

    submitted by /u/adscott1982
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    Good Websites to Help Me Learn C#

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 10:20 AM PST

    I want to use unity to make a game. However I don't know C#, I'm ok with python and pretty good with HTML, I'm just looking for some resources or good youtube videos/youtube playlists of videos that can teach me C#. Thanks in advance. Any other advice is appreciated.

    submitted by /u/LittleLuigi69
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    Where do you guys test your games and how?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 04:04 AM PST

    Hello!

    I have been developing a coop only, fantasy disc golf game and it's finally reaching a state where I can start play testing extensively. To be clear, that means it runs without crashing, has levels, but is rough around the edges when it comes to visual polish. I've let friends and family play it, but I was looking for more objective, anonymous feedback to really help me find the fun and catch bugs.

    I was wondering how you guys go about testing your games and if you could describe your general testing workflow? I've never had a game play tested rigorously before so are there any dos and donts when it comes to engaging with play testers?

    Thank you!

    submitted by /u/Torgen_Rhim
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    How much is too much?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 08:07 AM PST

    When you start planning mechanics for a game, what is usually the amount of mechanics you have before it becomes too overwhelming for the player?

    submitted by /u/halfblinde
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    Is there a way to make a server for a game that has been closed?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 11:29 AM PST

    There is this game that I used to play a while ago and I really enjoyed it but they ended up closing down the servers for the game. I have the got .apk file for the game and I am able to load it in an android emulator (blue stacks) but it says "Failed to download server list code=0". I was wondering if there would be anyway for me to make a server for this game or just be able to play it locally without a server.

    submitted by /u/YTflamingplayz
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    First Part Of Trajectory Drawing Tutorials For Physics Throwing Using Velocity Or Force In Unity

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 06:44 AM PST

    Game Narrative Designer Cara Ellison talks about how usually bad story means bad design

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 05:28 AM PST

    I am on the verge of giving up on game development but I don't want to.

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 09:53 AM PST

    As a university graduate, I have not been successful in getting any entry level programming position in UK. I've been trying for a while and applied to many places but no luck in the end. I have failed a few interviews and from others, I don't even get a reply. Last year it was bad anyways as there were not many jobs available in the first place due to Covid.

    It has been bothering me and I've felt the need to quit my passion because it just is not working out. Looks to me that I am not just disappointing myself but also my family. It is quite disheartening when I fail interviews/tests especially when I think I did not too that bad in it. I think it got to a point where I started thinking about other career options. Not sure what steps I should be taking now so I came here asking for any advice for me, if any.

    submitted by /u/AaySquare
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    What's the best way to make terrain for an FPS in Unity?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 09:00 AM PST

    I'm interested in finding out how FPS devs would go about making terrain in a map. I understand how assets like benches and lampposts would be made in 3D software and imported in as an obj/fbx.

    But what would be the most effective way to create the terrain to place the assets on?

    Do devs just create a large plane in their 3D software and give it some height in places then texture it?

    Or do they create separate roads, paths etc and snap them together in Unity then place assets on top of that?

    submitted by /u/OrchardLeaf
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    Hello everyone, in this new video, I'm defining a couple of data types in C# to unpack the imported/generated mesh geometry into. I hope you'll like it.

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 06:20 AM PST

    More features to alert enemies of player presence

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 07:56 AM PST

    I've been working on a top down Zombie shooter and much of the fun in the game is running and gunning - That being said, I also want players to enjoy and have fun sneaking around and avoiding conflict when possible, especially since ammo and other items are a bit scarce and all weapons break down after so much usage.

    I've added a feature where at night time Zombies will almost not detect the player at all unless the light of the player flashlight touches them.

    Another thing is that if the player sprints near a zombie they will be detected, but if the player walks slowly enough near them won't be detected either.

    These mechanics really add to some tense moments when players are moving through an area late at night that is packed with a horde of Zombies, and detection would mean almost certain death.

    What other ways could I make the sneaking around mechanics even bettter that players would enjoy?

    You can see a bit more detail of the early build on itchio if you want an idea of how it works https://genetixgames.itch.io/survive-into-night

    submitted by /u/Genetix_307
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    FREE Battle Music Pack : 5 different loops, HQ WAV. Powerful and dynamic combat tracks for action scenes (LINK IN COMMENTS)!

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 05:17 AM PST

    How would you define those puzzle game sub-categories?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 05:07 AM PST

    Hi! I'm trying the right words to differentiate those two opposites types of puzzle games:

    1 - Puzzle games that are played in real-time, for example, Tetris and Puyo Puyo and Lemmings. In those kinds of puzzle game the player manipulate the puzzle in real-time. Time is part of the gameplay.

    2- Turn-based Puzzle games. Think games like Minesweeper, Sokoban, and Threes. Time is not part of the gameplay as the game state only advances when the player completes a move/turn.

    Making an example from the same developer, I would consider FTL belonging to the first category and Into the Breach to the second one.

    What words would you use to define the two sub-categories? I was thinking about "real-time" vs "turn-based" puzzle games but googling those two terms doesn't bring up anything relevant so I'm kinda lost here.

    submitted by /u/rex64
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    Tesla's looking for a Godot Engine Front End Developer

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 11:01 AM PST

    Is Kickbooster a good tool for indie game crowdfunding?

    Posted: 04 Mar 2021 05:00 AM PST

    I've come across this tool for crowdfunding called "Kickbooster" it looks like it charges about 30 usd per month and then gets their network of affiliates to promote your campaign. The affiliates get paid off commission so you only pay if your campaign is successful. This sounds like a pretty good deal to me, but I'd like to see if anyone wants to burst my bubble lol.

    submitted by /u/sinkingShipLog
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