Feedback Friday #446 - Free Play |
- Feedback Friday #446 - Free Play
- Give me a game premise, and I will design mechanics for it in the comments.
- I released my first game 2 weeks ago. It was created in 10 months. Here's the story on how I did it.
- Unreal Engine 5 Nanite Tutorial | This Is Magic!
- If you are having a hard time getting new hardware for game development : Suggestions
- What happens to Game Artists in AAA game companies after they're done making the models, animation, and other stuff?
- What are some game dev projects I can do which require a lot of math?
- To all the experienced out there, What are the things you wish you knew before becoming a Game Developer?
- Project l0wpoly - free AAA game/VR/AR assets
- Why I chose Godot over Unity for pixel art games
- (Part 2) Default Cube Art - Tiny Fantasy Hut Modeling in Blender 2.90
- Multi-player server communication strategy?
- How to integrate StyleCop.Analyzers in a Unity project in 2021
- How do you usually market your game on Youtube?
- I owned a Marketing company and now I want to teach Devs how to market their games.
- Unreal Engine 5 Female Mannequin Tutorial | How To Switch UE5 Mannequin Gender To Female
- 300 views on my youtube trailer out of nowhere. I check the analytics and then I follow the link. Turns out somebody hacked and torrented my small 3 dollars game and put it on a webstite. on the same day of release.
- Finishing a game
- Indie game development vs AAA. Interview with Andrew, Professional 3D artist ��
- OpenGL For Beginners - Tutorial #10: Indexed Draws
- The Heavyweight is bearing down (on me)
- Polish phase demotivation
- id Tech 3
- Free Downloadable Game Music Track!
- Help with the Systems part of entity component systems
| Feedback Friday #446 - Free Play Posted: 27 May 2021 08:39 PM PDT FEEDBACK FRIDAY #446 Well it's Friday here so lets play each others games, be nice and constructive and have fun! keep up with devs on twitter and get involved! Post your games/demos/builds and give each other feedback! Feedback Friday Rules: Suggestion: As a generally courtesy, you should try to check out a person's game if they have left feedback on your game. If you are leaving feedback on another person's game, it may be helpful to leave a link to your post (if you have posted your game for feedback) at the end of your comment so they can easily find your game. -Post a link to a playable version of your game or demo -Do NOT link to screenshots or videos! The emphasis of FF is on testing and feedback, not on graphics! Screenshot Saturday is the better choice for your awesome screenshots and videos! -Promote good feedback! Try to avoid posting one line responses like "I liked it!" because that is NOT feedback! -Upvote those who provide good feedback! -Comments using URL shorteners may get auto-removed by reddit, so we recommend not using them. Previous Weeks: All [link] [comments]  | ||
| Give me a game premise, and I will design mechanics for it in the comments. Posted: 27 May 2021 11:31 PM PDT The more ridiculous, the better. Edit: oh boy, I woke up to a lot of requests! I'm going to do a bunch more on my lunch break today, please keep them coming! [link] [comments]  | ||
| I released my first game 2 weeks ago. It was created in 10 months. Here's the story on how I did it. Posted: 28 May 2021 06:49 AM PDT Hello everyone. My first ever game has been out for 2 weeks now. It has a Positive rating on Steam and I'm happy with the current state of sales. It sells a little each day, but I don't expect it to be a life changing game (financially speaking). Since this is my first ever game release, I do consider it a huge success already. Getting this project off the ground and to completion was a huge victory for me. Development of this game took place between work and supporting a family. (I was not working from Home) Initial Goals
In less than 2 weeks I pivoted from a 2 year project to something brand new, I decided on a release date, I set up my social media accounts as well as a website, and I completed all Steam requirements to have a publicly visible store page. Now I had to make the game. Ideas This last year made me realize that the film industry is in shambles. The new streaming platforms and the shutdown of all theaters made me realize that film may never return to its former glory. But what if I could bring some of that cinema magic into a game? Maybe it was worth exploring. Even though this would be my first game, and there should be some leeway with that, I didn't want to be some generic game. I wanted to tell a unique story. I wanted this to be an experience. I wanted this to be something similar to the moviegoer experience that I had continually sought after, and which I've been deprived of this past year. "A cinematic gaming experience" is what I would strive for. The Script Every film needs a script. I've tried writing things in the past, but I never made anything public before. I don't consider myself a great writer… or a writer at all really. So not only would this be my first game, but it would be my first public release of an original story. I knew it would be a narrative game and I knew it would require voiceover to be able to sell the experience. The first major decision is what would be the player character. From my time on my last project I knew Human characters were extremely time consuming to implement and digital humans also look dated or bad almost immediately. At this point I saw many narrative games using animals. "The First Tree", "Lost Ember", and "Spirit of the North", to name a few. I decided on a wolflike character. I felt it would fit the spiritual theme I was shooting for. Little did I realize how this decision might pigeonhole expectations for the game. I started writing scenes of random things that came to me. Nothing overly long or descriptive. If an image came to me, I would jot it down. "Girl in a patch of flowers humming a tune", "Boy & Girl lost in the forest, frightened." I would expand upon these ideas with some dialogue. Eventually I had to connect the ideas together in some way. Most of my writing took place on my phone, anytime I had an idea come to me I could jot it down quickly, and it was a way to work on my game on the go. While writing I tried to keep in mind game mechanics and how I might deliver the story. I didn't want to write something too elaborate that could soak up development time. My initial milestone was to finish writing the "Prologue". The Prologue was 10 script pages and it was originally intended to be a single level. I needed to see if I could pull off telling my story using game mechanics. Beginnings I was not working from home and I need to focus on family after work. My gamedev took place after the family was asleep. Typically this would be from 10PM to 2AM give or take. That gave me 3-4 hours a night, 25-30 hours a week, for the next 10 months. The only way I made it was knowing it would be over on a set date. Again, having a deadline was really beneficial to my mental state. I started work on the first imagery for the game, the majority of assets would be from the asset store. I implemented a low poly wolf character and then I had an idea to make a Meteor event. The Meteor event was one of my first social media posts for my game. Making these first posts was very nerve wracking! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztdx24qL_bg As expected, it did not get a huge fan faire, but at least now I had something out in the world. I would continue iterating and developing at a quick rate. By the end of August I started to see the direction the game was heading. Although my work was minimal at this time, I was starting to receive some good feedback on the visuals. To my surprise, many people on social media are very kind and supportive. The gamedev community is full of amazing and supportive people. I don't think the game would have been released if not for the support from this community. Organization I set up a Trello board to keep myself organized. There is no way to finish a game without proper organization. I logged every item, big or small. Between my Story Script and my Trello board, I always had a plan for my 3-4 hours of dev time. I would even prepare ahead of time the methods of how to accomplish these goals. I would try to rule out time consuming processes. Once I sat behind the keyboard I usually knew exactly what to do and how to do it. If I finished my daily tasks early, I would start dabbling with something new or experimenting. But I made sure to knock out my tasks first. If I ever needed a "reset" I would switch to a different type of task, be it visual, programming, FX, sound, etc. There is plenty to do with game development. I would try to avoid struggling through something if my mental state for it was fading. Music If I truly wanted an immersive experience then I had to have a score. But of course finances would get in the way. Ever since starting my marketing campaign I started getting messages from composers… A lot of composers. I responded back to every request simply stating I had no budget, this was my first game, and I planned to purchase songs from online libraries. Simple. I thought my plan was solid and that would be the end of it. One day a composer sent me a message and I responded in my usual way. But the conversation never ended. He was going to send me some music he felt would suit my game. He ended up sending me about 9 tracks. Not only did he do this in such a quick time - so fast I just assumed it was all music he composed prior (which he claims most of it was not), but his music was nearly perfect for what I had envisioned. At this point I was quite nervous, because now I had to tackle something I never imagined having to tackle. I just wanted to keep to myself and buy songs and not have to deal with collaborating with anyone, it sure would make things a whole lot easier anyway, but alas, it was not to be. Not only would this potentially hinder my development, it threatened the release date, and in fact, my most frightening thought was to drag some unknown person on this crazy journey with me and then never actually release a game at all. I mean, I was still less than 1 month into this thing. In any case, I was as upfront with him as I could be and we agreed on a revenue share. So I now had a composer. To ease collaboration, I then set up a Discord server for the game. To this day I am still amazed that this worked out. It took a giant leap of faith for him to go on this journey with me. Having him be a part of this was a constant push for me all along the way since now it wasn't just my time at stake here. Voiceover One of my objectives early on was to tackle every aspect of the game that I couldn't do myself early on. Voiceover would prove extra challenging because I had never cast VO before and was very nervous with how it would turn out. If the VO lacked emotion or was off, the entire game could suffer tremendously. I wanted to do a test run with the 10 page Prologue. It was August 21st, still less than 1 month into my game's development. But I felt the VO was going to make a lot of decisions for me and determine my trajectory for this project. Cost was a crucial factor. Not only was I trying to create a game in 9 months, but I wanted to do it inexpensively. I felt that VO had the potential to really blow up my budget. My game featured 4 speaking parts and for the 10 page prologue each character had about 100 words. I found Fiverr and decided I would try finding the talent there. I listened to a lot of reels and started contacting talent there. Pricing ranged wildly but I ended up getting the 10 page, 400 word prologue script read for a total of around $100. This trial was perhaps the best thing I ever did. I learned a ton about VO and it definitely affected a lot going forward. Hearing my writing read back was a jarring experience. It was certainly something I had to get used to. Not all lines were delivered as I had anticipated, but I asked for no revisions at this time. Since I had an entire game to get VO for I wanted to wait until the entire script was complete before really going through and fine tuning the VO. Having some sample VO allowed me to visualize the game a bit better and it also forced me to implement the delivery systems for the VO and subtitles. Doing this early was a great decision. Subtitling alone was a very tedious task, so doing it as I went helped break up the task a bit. At this point I was a couple weeks out from finishing the full script and I had some important decisions to make. A Beautiful Tale To assist my writing I ended up compartmentalizing the story. To do this I decided on a 5 Act approach. This means there would be 5 levels in addition to the prologue. Each Act needed a theme to guide my writing. Act 1: Kindness, Act 2: Trust, Act 3: Love… These words helped guide my writing, but also the game's development. For Kindness, the level is bright and airy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grOHyGpgZb8 Trust is cold but still lovely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HND_sMwQGKU Love is very evocative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saQb7Qov1Go The dialogue in these levels are also centered around these keywords, only straying a little. On September 9th the script was 54 pages long and was considered "complete". Having a completed script was essential. It kept me on track and helped decide every future decision. I sent a copy to my composer so he could better conceptualize music for it. The largest task at this point would still be the VO. Casting Call At this point the game is about 5 weeks into development. I have a completed script, a composer and about 4 levels in development. But still the VO continues to consume my thoughts. I was at a crossroads. I felt the performances from Fiverr were acceptable but I also felt there was a disconnect between the actors. Keep in mind everything was being done remotely, so in my mind I felt this could be an impossible ask. The other consideration was still cost. I spent $100 on the first 10 pages, at that rate the entire VO would come to around $500. Certainly cheap but not for a solo dev with a family to support. I had to research this further. I then discovered the website voices.com. Unlike Fiverr, it required a minimum contract, so right away I knew this could be an expensive option. However this site allowed me to post jobs and get auditions for free. Then only if anyone fit the bill would a contract be signed and payment required. With this knowledge I posted 4 jobs with the expectation that nobody would audition. To my surprise I ended up being flooded with auditions. At least 15 per character. With the help of my wife we narrowed down the propositions until finally landing on 3 perfect candidates. For the 4th it was extremely close and in the end I went back to one of the actors I had previously used from Fiverr. Retakes and Revisions Locking in the cast was only the beginning. As I started receiving the performances I started spending most of my late night game dev time pouring over the recordings, readying them for the game and noting revisions and retakes. In many cases I would rewrite dialogue to try smoothing out some of the lines. Since the script was hastily written this was an opportunity to strengthen it. Over the next 2 to 3 months I'll have had each actor do a set of retakes, I'll have revised the script adding 11 more pages of dialogue and I'll have the VO team record those new lines with another set of retakes after that. The time and coordination involved was an enormous ask and thankfully by December I felt the VO was locked. It ended up costing a little bit extra but VO was the one area I was willing to spend a little more. Once the VO was locked I made the decision to have no more story changes. I stuck to that decision. There was too much work still ahead. Game Mechanics Between the music, VO and level concepts, I had to figure out how to deliver this story and shape a game around it. Above all the story is the game, and I didn't want to distract from that. But of course there needed to be more for it to be a game. Since the characters are human, a huge decision was how to show them without consuming all of my dev time. After some deliberation and testing I came upon the concept to make people from particles. This method was perfect and suited the theme of the game. Particle people kept the game size small, I was able to reuse animations and I didn't need to fine tune animations too much. Each scene from the script would be called a "vision", it was a complete scene with color adjustment to fit a mood, specific music, voiceover, subtitles, and these particle people performing the scene. In total the game has 42 of them. Most of development was spent implementing these 42 scenes, some of them get rather complex, with branching conditions or extra events. At first I attempted to create a system to handle these visions myself but then I discovered Sequencer in UE4 and it handled everything I needed. This would be my first foray into using Sequencer. Now that I knew how to deliver the story, I had to decide what the rest of the game would be. These next parts would be extremely challenging with quite a bit of trial and error and wasted development time. Steam Games Festival A goal of mine was to have a demo available for a Steam Games Festival. Although the game was nowhere near ready I felt it would be very important to participate. Steam only allows games to enter 1 festival, so I had to choose wisely. The October festival was too soon so I decided to wait. The February festival was then my goal unless I wanted to extend development another 6 months. This is the first time I would experience other people playing my game. It was a nerve wracking time but it was the best decision I could have made. During this festival is when I realized one of my core game mechanics wasn't cutting it. This forced me to go back and reevaluate things. I ended up scrapping something I had spent a lot of time on and implementing something new which in my opinion is infinitely better for the game. I also learned the importance of supporting controllers. In total over 1500 players tried the demo and I had gained over 4000 wishlists. This is when I figured the game might actually do okay and not be completely lost in the mix. Wrapping Up Once the festival was over I had only 2 months till my release date. Once I was about 2-3 weeks away I realized I needed more time. I pushed the release for 5 weeks. The story would be fully implemented by mid-March. Then April saw a polish pass hit every level, as well as the UI. Music was being completed by the composer, and I also decided to do localization. Localization was an expensive proposition and it ended up costing more than the entire game up to this point. Localization will get the game to more players and it also helps the Steam algorithms. Anything that was favored by the Steam algorithm is something I would try to incorporate pre-release. The game was released with support for 11 languages. Final thoughts & Reflection Looking back I don't know how this game was completed in 10 months. I attribute it to a few key areas:
Now that my first game is released I intend to rest, reset and reflect on the experience. I met a lot of amazing people and I really feel like I'm part of this great community now. I hope I can share more of my experience and lend any assistance I can to other aspiring gamedevs. The next battle will of course be porting the game to other platforms. And at some point I'll begin concepting my next game. I've already decided to allot myself at least twice the amount of dev time for the next one :) I'm willing to answer any questions. Thank you. Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1392780/The\_Companion/ [link] [comments]  | ||
| Unreal Engine 5 Nanite Tutorial | This Is Magic! Posted: 28 May 2021 07:23 AM PDT
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| If you are having a hard time getting new hardware for game development : Suggestions Posted: 28 May 2021 10:58 AM PDT Sign up and or locate hardware specific developer programs! Most of these companies have these programs to focus on getting new hardware into the hands of game developers, then gamers over crypto miners (in the case of GPUs). It might take a few months and you might have submit your project you are working on to accelerate it, and prove you are a game developer by sharing your screen with your "handler" or account manager to prove you are legit but it is better then not being able to get any new hardware if you are using an older system that needs upgrades. Once you have these relationships setup never sell or give away the hardware you get because it all tracked, of course if someone on your team needs it you can send it to a "trusted" teammate as if they sell it you will be in trouble, so protect your relationships or you will lose this privileged access forever. All I can tell you is my experience and what I know even the employees of the hardware companies have to go through to get hardware, and they are a priority for them. My good fortune has been built off of decades of working on games, so I have the advantage of longevity. I have friends from old teams at a few of the key hardware companies who can also help me find an account manager, and by taking care of these folks by delivering on what I sign up for I can occasionally "cash in" and get free or early access or just "fucking" access to hardware even though I am indie developer doing mostly contract work at this point. Sign up before you need it, have something ready to show at a professional quality level all this can help! Good luck! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 27 May 2021 07:32 PM PDT I'm just curious how it all works because I have no idea what goes on inside a typical AAA game company or an indie game studio. [link] [comments]  | ||
| What are some game dev projects I can do which require a lot of math? Posted: 28 May 2021 12:00 AM PDT I've picked up game dev as a hobby recently and I love it. I just did my first game jam. What surprised me was that game dev actually requires quite a bit of math - I've only made very simple games and I had to use vectors and trigonometry to make some of the features I've wanted to implement. This is great for me since I love math. I'm thinking of majoring in Physics at university, where math is really important, and I thought it would be cool if I could also learn math and sharpen my math skills while also having fun creating games. So what sort of projects can I do which involves a lot of math? I know procedural animation by using Inverse Kinematics requires some math, so that's something I'm gonna learn. Plus procedural animation looks really cool. What else can I do? Bonus points if it involves calculus and linear algebra. If it matters, I'm using the Godot game engine. Out of all the Game Engine I've tried before (Unity and GMS2), Godot is the one I prefer the most. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 28 May 2021 01:50 AM PDT Besides the most obvious ones like knowing how to program or limiting your scope, I'd like to know the small things that you thought weren't important, but turn out to be something that will greatly benefit or harm you in the journey of becoming a Game Developer. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Project l0wpoly - free AAA game/VR/AR assets Posted: 28 May 2021 07:01 AM PDT Hi everyone, I've started a project l0wpoly. The idea behind l0wpoly is to make "ready to use", textured and optimized assets, which are not only a temporary placeholders . Assets which doesn't need to be fixed, tweaked or replaced later during the development. Let me know what you think about it. Any feedback is highly appreciated :) [link] [comments]  | ||
| Why I chose Godot over Unity for pixel art games Posted: 27 May 2021 04:57 PM PDT
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| (Part 2) Default Cube Art - Tiny Fantasy Hut Modeling in Blender 2.90 Posted: 28 May 2021 03:41 AM PDT
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| Multi-player server communication strategy? Posted: 28 May 2021 10:57 AM PDT I've been a programmer for a while but I'm pretty new to game development. As a learning experience, I'm making a simple in-browser turn-based multiplayer game and I'm wondering what I should be sending from the client to the server and vice versa. I can think of a few different ways to do it but it's not clear to me if one way is preferable or more common.
Given my current game, which is very simple and turn-based, I'm leaning towards 2. 1 seems potentially risky because the clients could wind up with different views of the world, 3 seems insane now that I've typed it, and 4 seems interesting but too complicated given my project. Also, if you have any good multiplayer programming resources you'd recommend, I'd love to hear them! Thanks! [link] [comments]  | ||
| How to integrate StyleCop.Analyzers in a Unity project in 2021 Posted: 28 May 2021 10:57 AM PDT
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| How do you usually market your game on Youtube? Posted: 28 May 2021 10:25 AM PDT Hi, I'm wondering if anyone has a strategy for finding youtubers, so you pay them and they make a video.Someone has any ideas? [link] [comments]  | ||
| I owned a Marketing company and now I want to teach Devs how to market their games. Posted: 27 May 2021 12:25 PM PDT Well, I've pretty much summed it up right there. I want to start giving something back to the game Dev community by making easy to understand marketing tutorials. I've created content campaigns for all sorts, ranging from UFC fighters through to Painters. It's just storytelling, but to the right audience. Please let me know any particular topics that you'd like me to cover. I'll make a note of what you're after and get creating from there. No questions or topics are too big or too stupid :) Fire away! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Unreal Engine 5 Female Mannequin Tutorial | How To Switch UE5 Mannequin Gender To Female Posted: 28 May 2021 09:45 AM PDT
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| Posted: 28 May 2021 12:24 PM PDT Who does that? it's a small 3 dollars game. it's a coffee. Somebody really went to the trouble? or it is something automated. Did it happened to somebody else? What do I do? do I leave it there? who cares it's just my small little first game? Di I do something? Do you guys have advice to give? thanks for your time. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 28 May 2021 08:27 AM PDT After 3 years of learning to code in unity I am finally releasing my first completed project on May 31 .Even though it is a relatively small project ,the deadline was 3-4 months ,the development was a great success as It was on time and even enjoyable to play .Do note that I am self taught and a part time student so It was hard to get anything done during the week ,most of the development was done during the weekend . There are many reasons why this project was completed but the main reason was that I had another person helping . Even though he was a very competent developer and created several systems his biggest contribution was keeping me motivated to continue . knowing another person is also working on a project makes abandoning it much ,much harder . Another reason was that for the most part I don't have much more to learn in c# so my code from a few months ago is logical and understandable which is not true for my older projects . And the final thing that helped me finish was having a rough timeframe (3-4 months ) so I could adjust the project accordingly . i hope this post was of help to those struggling to finish projects [link] [comments]  | ||
| Indie game development vs AAA. Interview with Andrew, Professional 3D artist �� Posted: 28 May 2021 08:25 AM PDT
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| OpenGL For Beginners - Tutorial #10: Indexed Draws Posted: 28 May 2021 06:11 AM PDT Hi, I've published tutorial #10 in my "OpenGL For Beginners" series on youtube - https://youtu.be/kQOwkG15dYo. This one is on indexed draws. Thanks, Etay [link] [comments]  | ||
| The Heavyweight is bearing down (on me) Posted: 28 May 2021 06:10 AM PDT Sorry in advance for throwing possibly another "Engine war" subject, but I feel the need to ask the question at this point. I've been using Unreal 4.26(.2) for a few months at this point. The engine is fantastic in its features, yes. But I keep feeling the design flaws are cracking under its own weight at this point. Examples include:
There's a lot of little quibbles or more serious engineering problems beyond that. The engine is simply heavy, and feels very bloated, and I am at a point where opening UE is bothering me simply because I feel like another subtle little piece of bloat is going to get in the way of just doing things the way I want it, despite my code and logic being relatively simple. Of course that's not an expert's assessment, just my feelings as a noob in UE. So I'd like to know, from people who have used UE and left, or people that came to it:
I'd particularly appreciate input from more experienced UE devs that used it in the past. Is this something that got truly worse, was the engine always giving little limitations or insufficiencies from the start? Would a switch to Godot just give me new bloat or problems or would it mostly wipe a lot of the bloat out? (dare I ask if UE5 will fix some of the bloat? Probably not huh) [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 28 May 2021 06:05 AM PDT Core gameplay loop? check. Code systems in place? check. Now I have to do the main menu screen, the settings menu, sound variety, shaders, particle effects, upgrade my free asset models to something more visually appealing, build the UI, provide visual feedback to every action in the game, etc.. How do you get yourself to do those things? I can't be the only one feeling they are a burden to do. I keep track of all things in Trello but still, staring at the board just makes me wanna quit. [link] [comments]  | ||
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| Free Downloadable Game Music Track! Posted: 28 May 2021 07:11 AM PDT Here is a free downloadable music track. It kind of has a ice cave or dark forest vibe. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Help with the Systems part of entity component systems Posted: 28 May 2021 06:56 AM PDT I've been studying ECS for a little while now and I have the entity and components part down. I particularly like the structure of arrays approach. If you use a dictionary, map, or hash table with this approach it feels like a relational database with the entity being the primary key in most if not all "tables". The problem I'm having is with the "systems" part. There is a lot of tutorials out there about ECS frameworks/architecture, and most, if not all of them, focus on the entity and component parts. Then give a quick "and systems are the logic and you run them every frame" kind of explanation. Examples are always something basic like the rendering system or collisions system, maybe a brief appearance of the AI system, but never anything concrete. Nothing that helps me move from a collection of components into an actual game. People who have built/plan to build anything using an ECS can you give me an idea of the systems you used, please? Thanks in advance. Some resources that I've been using: [link] [comments]  |
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