I made a tool for handpainting normal maps which uses joysticks or pen tilt as normal direction (Free and open source) |
- I made a tool for handpainting normal maps which uses joysticks or pen tilt as normal direction (Free and open source)
- I made a trailer that got 7K organic views and 1K wishlist in 3 days. Just wanted to share my techniques!
- MARKETING on Facebook 2021
- Have you ever lost your motivation to work on your game project, and dumped it? Happens to me a often and I talked a little about it after 2 weeks of break on my project.
- If you could travel back in time for one hour to the beginning of your gamedev journey, what would you do or say to your previous self to have the most impact?
- Create a character creator tool? How?
- MetaHuman - Early Access (Overview / Demo)
- I made a mini skateboard asset for Unreal Engine, and am releasing it for free! Hope people find some use from it
- Are Rusty Lake/Cube Escape type of games easy to make?
- How will I know I'm ready to start working on a game for official release?
- What word can I use to refer to the world around the player?
- How AI works in big RTS games?
- Which one to choose Godot or Unity ??
- Unity ML Agents Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence
- Manning's "Unity In Action" ebook / textbook doesn't allow refunds or exchanges if you make a mistake
- How does game tax work?
- Making a game in Visual Basic - source code included
- Hi everyone, we've just released a beginner level tutorial showing how to rotate one object around another in Unity
- If you could, what would you ask the devs of the indie perspective game Superliminal?
- How seed generation works?
- Do I really need a company as a teenager?
- Low Poly Military Base for Free
- Hi everyone, in todays video i will be showing you the best game engines in 2021, if you enjoy the video you can subscribe cause that helps me a lot :)
- Unity: Scripting-only loading and applying of animation
| Posted: 17 Apr 2021 06:38 PM PDT
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 10:50 AM PDT Hello folks! I know we are all dreading the day when we have to make a trailer and let the world judge our months/years of work by a mere minute of presentation. Chances are, very few of us are movie directors, or even youtubers with video editing expertise. So aside from spending budget on professionals, I believe we can all use some simple techniques and guidelines to make our trailer "catchy" for the viewers. My game is a top-down twin stick shooter with slow-paced combat and lots of survival elements. You can watch the trailer here. Also, the more polished version on my steam page here. Part 1 - What makes a good trailer? Sure, a trailer is a marketing tool, and we make it to inform the viewer what the game is all about. But if you want the viewers to actually watch it, you have to make it entertaining. That's rule #1 for anything you present to people, even boring business or technical presentations. Entertainment gets you attention. But, you also want to be respectful to the attention viewers pay you. Meaning: no fluff, no company logos, and no walls of text. You want the entire viewing experience to be quick, fun, and effortless. The information you want to convey is best *shown* to the viewer, not *told*. (i.e. "show, don't tell".) Finally, the lasting impression is what you'd want the trailer to produce. After they watch the trailer, can the viewers tell what genre the game is in, what the core mechanics are, and whether they want to learn more about the game - this is the goal you need to set and keep in mind throughout the production of the trailer. Part 2 - The Flow Most of us have heard of the concept of game design "flows". Well, why can't we use the same concept for trailers? http://whats-in-a-game.com/controlling-flow/ The viewing experience should have a flow consisted of moments of relax and moments of tension, but like the diagram above, with an overall trend of increasing tension. This way, viewers don't get too bored and don't get overwhelmed. The simplest way to achieve this is to use montage, and interlace every intense scene (like combat) with a calm scene (like managing inventory, sneaking etc.) Part 3 - The Making Of - I'll use my trailer's production process from brainstorming to final cut as an example. Initially I was trying to make it like the Left4Dead trailer, with an actual movie sequence, but later I ditched the idea. Not only is it difficult for me to produce a high quality movie sequence using the relatively low quality of my art assets, showing a movie doesn't give me the chance to showcase all the features. So I opted for a "gameplay montage" with some fly-over scenes. I started the design process by finding the music first. I believe all the scenes in a trailer should follow the "lead" of the music, like the emotion, the beat, the intensity etc., so that the visuals and the audio synchronize. Think of it like the harmonic resonance - both the visuals and the audio works together to boost viewer's feelings, rather than against each other. The music I found was from Fesliyan Studio, who have a lot of different types of trailer music you can use, and all you need to do is donating a name-your-own-price amount of money, for them to remove the copyright claim on your video. I picked a music and just listened to it over and over again, while visualizing in my head what the trailer should look like, what would seem "cool" to the viewers, and what scenes would work. I chose the "Blood Pumping" piece because it has a gradually progressing intensity, and the beat is really nice for timing the montages. Then I wrote down all the possible gameplay scenes I can think of, and arranged them according to the "flow" I mentioned above. I.e. interlacing calm and intense scenes, but in a overall increasing manner. With this I made myself a script, and then I went into the game and recorded (painstakingly!) all the clips needed. For editing the video, I use OpenShot, it's free with a little bit of quirkiness and bugs, but for a zero budget I can live with it and make it work. At the end of the trailer I intentionally made the release info kind of obscure. I put two dates on the blackboard in the scene without saying anything about it. Later, as expected, people guessed that the dates meant the day when the game dev started, and the day when it's released. A little bit of mystery :) The entire process of making the trailer took me about a week, roughly 30-40 hours of my free time. Part 4 - The Sharing Of - Once I have the trailer ready and the steam page created, I recruited a few of my followers to make reddit posts announcing the "available on steam" moment. This is why it's so important to start marketing early - not because you're going to reach a lot of people from early on, which you probably won't, but you are building rapport with just a handful of people who really love your work. You must cherish the relationship with them because they are like the girl who married you when you were at the poorest, lowest stage of your life. For me, these folks helped me tremendously when it comes to advertising - since self-promotion is very much banned in reddit. The post from /r/games attracted some small gaming sites and in a few days, the game was all over google search. I of course don't expect any big gaming sites to feature my game, because it's really not news-worthy for them. The game will have to live up to its own merit once it's out. In other words, if the game fills a niche, people will find it - IF, my trailer makes it easy for them to understand that the game will fulfill their need. So with the help of that one reddit post, the youtube video gained 7K views in 3 days, and since it linked to steam page, I got 1K of wishlist. When I checked the viewer retention, it was pretty solid, even a quarter of people watched all the way till the end: Part 5 - Summary: Simple Do's And Don'ts - Show, don't tell. - Don't show text unless absolutely necessary. - Do make the trailer entertaining to watch. - Have a clear goal for the lasting impression you want the viewers to have. - Make the visuals and music work together. - Don't bother showing any company logos at the beginning. Save it till the end if needed. - Don't throw information in from of people's face; try to encourage them to discover it from your trailer. - Show as much gameplay sequence as possible that can summarize "what you can do in this game". - Don't show any feature that you aren't sure about including in the final release. - Try to make the trailer vary in emotion and feeling throughout the video, i.e. have a flow. - 40 seconds to 1 minute of length is a magic number. Too short it doesn't convey all the information, and too long people will start getting bored. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 07:37 AM PDT MARKETING on Facebook. I thought about also sharing with you guys a recent marketing experience with 0 money investment, mostly because I assume most of us do marketing ourselves so it automatically becomes part of the game development. So during this post, I want to : - point out the importance of knowing your target audience Ok, let`s start! ------------------------------------ First-round I recently remade my Steam thumbnail and what better way to get some promotional material than this?! Also please note that this information is strictly resuming to Facebook groups. Pixel art + 35k members = post got 330 likes 30 comments 17 shares Pixel Art 29k members = post got 111 likes 25 comments Pixel Art Heaven = post got 136 likes and 22 comments Results: 1 follower and 20 new wishlist additions Conclusion: I am not some high tec guru dark star fapfap button Wizzard master developer, no, I am just like most developers so when I start to see so many like per post I was very excited, normally my posts on those groups get per average 20-30 likes, I was having high expectations for a wishlist so I was a bit disappointed when I saw only 20 new additions. It can also be the fact that some of them already had my game on wishlist since I posted there before from time to time about the game. Anyhow it was a good result and I strongly recommend you make smart posts, for example, I only stated in the post I made these pixel art banners but I did not put any links in the description so people actually asked for a link and only after that I edited and added the link, so try hard not to be a hit&run poster. Also if you want to keep your post up, respond to comments a few days after so that your topic gets bumped up. Please also consider I did not include the private messages received based on this. ----------------------------------- Second round So why haven't I posted in all FB groups the same day? Because of Facebook algorithms, for example, even though I made the new custom text for all posts, I did have the same 2 pictures uploaded and if facebook sees you post the same comment too many times it will automatically warn you and mark your posts as spam. The second day I decided to target Xcom players because my game is heavily inspired by Xcom, I am not talking just about some art and 1-2 mechanics, no I am talking about the overall game design and the majority of features, heck, my game is basically Xcom in real-time. And note that I posted same 2 picture but I adapted the text, Here are the results: XCOM players 4k members = post got 80 likes 50 comments XCOM: Enemy Withinposting 400 members = post got 14 likes 3 comments Xcom 2 2k members = post got 40 likes 8 comments Results: 10 followers and 80 new wishlist additions Conclusion: Based on pixel art communities results, I was expecting around 8-12 wishlist additions so when I saw the results it was clear for me, I first yelled some mumbo-jumbo spartan DarkStar Sailormoon Voltron lines in a weird language then I realized that even though the pixel groups were A LOT bigger then Xcom ones and that I got more engagement on them then on Xcom ones, the more I get closer to the target audience the bigger the conversion rate is. So I strongly recommend hard research on the target audience before starting marketing. I believe it is the same s\*t with wishlist conversion rate into sales, as in if you get wishlists from giveaways and from people who meh or are casuals the conversion rate will be lower, and the more genuine wishlist audience you got the more the conversion rate will grow.* ----------------------------- Third round & forth round At this point, I included both 3 and 4 rounds of Facebook group marketing because the results are non-existent. Round 3 was aiming toward casual gamer groups and round 4 was aiming toward Indie Game developer groups and other small pixel art groups, same promotional picture + adjusted text. Please notice how huge are some groups, how small, and how that factor is truly not important when it comes to smart marketing and knowing your target audience. Results: Indie Game Promo IGD 56k members = post got 9 likes 3 comments Retro Indie Pixel Game 9k members = post got 12 likes 1 comment RTS game lovers = post got 2 likes and other groups not worth mentioning because of results Conclusion: And for the casual gamer audience, I targeted PC gamer(more than 30k members) group, steam gamers, and so on BUT and it is a strong BUT here, I got 1 or 2 likes per post in these groups, now you are going to say "awww then this is a waste of time I will ignore those groups" and after you say this I will strangle you because you know nothing, Jhon Snow! Why? Some time ago I made TAURONOS game and that game had casual players as the target audience, the thing is that I got good love on this casual player audience group for that game specifically because that was its target audience. So in conclusion: Know your target audience & do not be a spammer that does hit&run, be smart about it and you will avoid wasting time on promotions that will bring no results. Time is very important. Now I am not saying not to post in Indie game development groups but I am saying do not post in Indie game development groups unless you have too much time. Overall: Aditional: If you got any suggestions/feedback on what I did wrong please do let me know. IMPORTANT NOTE: I am not perfect and this is just my opinion based on personal experience. Screenshot preview of my MK post: https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzU2MjI2NzcucG5n/original/gtbaZp.png Link to the game I did marketing for MK round: [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 11:28 AM PDT
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 05:37 AM PDT There are quite a few guides and postmortems here that give great, general advice on game development. Instead, I thought it would be fun to post the personal advice you would give yourself if you only had an hour. For example, would you convince yourself to... switch to decaf coffee or spend time coding instead of watching and reading Game of Thrones because - spoiler - it's going to absolutely blow in the end. or maybe buy that gold standard power supply instead of the brand you've never heard of, because two years from now you're going to have a power surge in the middle of a storm and lose five months of work because you're still terrible at backing things up. So, what is your advice for yourself? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Create a character creator tool? How? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:59 AM PDT Hi, I was watching a old game called champions online, the character creator of this game is simply amazing!! You can change tons of outfits and accessories all divide in categories(arms/arms/upper/lower) Even the body you can make a skinny, fat, muscular, huge hero like hulk, you can make arms very long/short, legs too, change foot/hand size, height etc etc and a toon of other features. Video about the game (https://youtu.be/PXyvf6VVp0I) My question is: how a 2009 game have such complex character creator, but if you ask someone to make a character creator is a mission impossible and the maximum is change a bunch of hair and T-shirt? Even the budget aspect, if someone wanna create something like this today, probably people start telling that's is too complex and take millions and millions, idk about the game, but look a small company, idk how big the budget can be at the time. Btw i want to know if someone know what is the process to make something like this, not in a game, even create a stand alone tool of a character creator like this, and how the team of this game made this (?) idk I'm very curious about this topic, but online can't find nothing who go deep about the argument, only very basic demos (change hair, clothes) [link] [comments]  | ||
| MetaHuman - Early Access (Overview / Demo) Posted: 18 Apr 2021 06:08 AM PDT
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:59 AM PDT
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| Are Rusty Lake/Cube Escape type of games easy to make? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 05:48 AM PDT Hi, everyone! I've recently started learning C# and Unity in order to make a game similar (but a lot simpler) to those of the Rusty Lake/Cube escape series. However, as I go deeper and deeper into my project, I encounter lots of difficulties. For some of them I have managed to come up with a solution (e.g. how to move around the different parts of the room using Cinemachine), but I can't simply deal with others (such as the inventory system, for which I can't use UI because of the way I started planning the game). As this is my first game from scratch, I was wondering if such type of games was no mean feat. From my humble experience, which comes from a couple of platformer games tutorials, those games with a playable character are easier to make as well as having more tutorials for them online. With that said, should I reconsider my project and leave it for a time when I will have the skills needed or should I continue to research on the topic as I experiment with the mechanics? [link] [comments]  | ||
| How will I know I'm ready to start working on a game for official release? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 10:58 AM PDT I'm a newbie to game development and just like a lot of people in this subreddit, it's my dream to become an indie developer so I want to take it more seriously. My questions are: How much experience/knowledge do I need before I can work on a game to release it? How many games will I have to make before I can work on a fully fledged game? When will I be ready to deal with marketing, publishers, community feedback and all that? I am probably being impatient but I want to start releasing games as soon as possible since I'm just gonna have less and less free time to work on game development in the future. Because university work is just going to get more tougher and then I'll need a job and so on. [link] [comments]  | ||
| What word can I use to refer to the world around the player? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 10:18 AM PDT I'm talking about the floor, walls, props, whatever. But not about the main character or interactive things such as enemies, NPCs or items. scene? Unity (which is what I'm using to make my game) already uses "scene" as a keyword scenario? It is synonym of "situation" and can make things confusing map? It has another meaning that could also be used in a videogame level or stage? it implies the game is not open-world environment? it means more than what I want it to mean, and is typically used for concept-art background? in a top-down game it could work, but in a side-scroller or 3D game it means something else [link] [comments]  | ||
| How AI works in big RTS games? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 06:15 AM PDT Is there any articles or gdc talks explaining how AI works in big enterprise RTS games? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Which one to choose Godot or Unity ?? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:53 AM PDT I have just started learn game development, I am mostly into 2D Games. I have 3 years experience in programming including web development, ML and App development. I am confused between Godot and Unity, which one to start with. So, I need some advice regarding the pros and cons of both, which provides more job opportunity, learning curve, etc. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Unity ML Agents Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:42 AM PDT
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 05:53 AM PDT For anyone looking to buy "Unity in Action" by Joseph Hocking, don't make my mistake of buying the 2nd edition. The current version is the 3rd edition, linked below. The publisher Manning.com will just keep your money and parrot their policy of no refunds or exchanges. You can "upgrade" the old version for 50% of the new price, but this situation isn't an upgrade. https://livebook.manning.com/book/unity-in-action-third-edition/ [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 07:13 AM PDT Hi, so, I'm a brazilian teenager and me and some friends are going to be making a game! We have the idea and I'm writing the story and will be dealing with the more artistic side of game development. But, that doesn't really matter now, the question is if we sell the game we will probably have to pay taxes, I think Steam takes about 20% of income but we don't know if we need to pay something to the government :/ And I'm having trouble finding information about this :( If anyone has any idea of how this works, even if it's based on another country, please tell me I've been thinking more about this and I think maybe making the game free can avoid loads of headaches (And making a game free may have some advantages because due to the game being free maybe more people will play [well...if the game turns out to be good] it) [link] [comments]  | ||
| Making a game in Visual Basic - source code included Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:11 AM PDT
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 12:15 AM PDT
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| If you could, what would you ask the devs of the indie perspective game Superliminal? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 08:21 AM PDT ETA: Thanks fizzd for clarifying - sounds like Albert Shih was likely the biggest influence on the project! I'll be doing more research this week to get a better sense for Christopher's role. I'll be speaking with Christopher Lloyd, the Executive Director of Superliminal, this coming Friday and want to make sure I ask the right questions! I'm pretty sure he was the primary brains behind the project. If you could ask him - or another person who had a similar role on an indie game like this one - anything, what would you want to know or learn about? What are questions that really help you learn and grow in dev or your perspective of it? For reference, I'm planning on asking about his background, the inspiration for the game, how challenging it was to develop and program the game, how they managed to get the level of publicity they did, what's next, etc. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 05:51 AM PDT I made a project with two types of squares (one big, one small), character and random number generation. How games using this random number define position of object, it's type and amount? What formula should be used for these purposes? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Do I really need a company as a teenager? Posted: 18 Apr 2021 08:02 AM PDT So I've been making games for about a year now. I've mostly released games on itch and never really charged anything for my games. But lately I feel confident enough in my abilities to make a commercial game. I plan to release the game onto Steam, but I keep seeing people crop up all over talking about how all indie Devs should set up their company to save trouble and more. But is it really essential for me as a teenager releasing a small game? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Low Poly Military Base for Free Posted: 18 Apr 2021 11:07 AM PDT -This pack contains +20 models of military base, since a quarter, medic tent, bathroom, sniper tower and etc.. -With this pack you can build your military base to create yor RTS, shooter, fps, adventure or any other genre that u like. -Thank you for download if you like please help me on Patreon and you will reciev special rewards like 1 extra pack. Download here: https://zsky2000.itch.io/military-base-pack Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/Zsky [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Apr 2021 10:49 AM PDT
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| Unity: Scripting-only loading and applying of animation Posted: 18 Apr 2021 09:58 AM PDT Already posted this on r/Unity3d, but only one person there was able to help me and only halfway. Maybe sb here knows more. I have a GameObject loaded from a vrm file:
I have an animation loaded from an fbx:
The skeleton in the fbx has one bone that the vrm doesn't have and the vrm has two bones that the fbx doesn't have. I could delete the extra one in the fbx, but would really like to keep the extra ones in the vrm. Apart from those, all bones have the same names in both files. From what I've heard, simply doing
won't work, because the skeletons don't match. People have told me to use the Animator instead, so I guess the beginning would look sth like this:
Now, I was told that I need to use an Avatar if the skeletons don't match.
With AvatarUtils being a modified version of https://github.com/bkevelham/unity-avatar-generation where I replaced all the bone names with the ones from the vrm:
That seems to do... something. Now, when loading in (with the animationstate set to sth where an animation should be playing), my character is stuck in a huched-over pose, with all bones either 45 or 90 degrees to each other. It looks like Unity is accepting that human definition and can technically apply mesh deformations in the correct places, yet fails to map the animation to it. Any Ideas? Is there sth more I have to do than provide an Avatar definition? I'm completely clueless. [link] [comments]  |
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