Some of you might look over sound effects. Here's a video explaining why you shouldn't!

Some of you might look over sound effects. Here's a video explaining why you shouldn't!
7 Obvious Beginner Mistakes with your game's HUD (from a UI UX Art Director)
Lessons learned from releasing my second game
Anyone interested in joining a one game a month challenge?
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Unity Ads - anyone?

Posted: 19 May 2021 02:55 AM PDT

submitted by /u/oddmaus
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7 Obvious Beginner Mistakes with your game's HUD (from a UI UX Art Director)

Posted: 19 May 2021 05:09 AM PDT

A video game interface has an immediate and lasting impact on gameplay, production, and the bottom-line. So… where are all the guides and best-practices for the most important Art in the entire game? Shouldn't there be a primer somewhere? Some kind of shorthand?

Ah Good Day to Yous, my name is John Burnett, game Art Director and remote 1-on-1 UI UX Mentor. There's virtually nothing out there on video game UI UX design and so I thought I'd take a minute to give back to you up-and-comers. Any questions you're too afraid to have mean old Reddit see, visit my site where there's a ton of other blogs & projects you'd probably be inspired by. Anyways - here are 7 of the most obvious beginner mistakes you are making with your video game HUD

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Mistake #1 - You're putting way too much information on the screen

If you are adding more confusion than clarity, you're not providing much in the "Heads-Up" department. Let's try a more tempered approach to throwing in the Kitchen Sink.

Some information can be opt-in; informing the player only as they need to know it. For example: prices inset on buy buttons, click-and-hold commands to read a full note rather than a snippet, complicated weapon stats distilled to a singular DPS value, etc. All information can be "rounded down".

Some information, once learned, does not have to be relearned immediately. That means some widgets can fade over time, or never show up under certain conditions, for example: hiding combat UI outside of encounters, or giving tutorials a [Do Not Show Me Again] button.

Write a list of everything you want on the HUD. Now assign it a number based on its importance to the player. This is your Hierarchy, and important tool in UI UX Design. Build the high priority items first and then build secondary items around this new foundation. Another way to use Hierarchy is to keep removing low-priority items until there is a measurable impact on gameplay. After all: if there's no impact, was it an important addition?

Mistake #2 - You didn't test early and in-context

Every HUD functions perfectly well in Photoshop on a 16:9 screen against a black background. Unfortunately, your designs will collapse in any other context.

Superimpose wireframes or even sketches of your HUD on top of screens representative of the average-ish experience. If you can, place an overlay of your wireframe over a movie of the game to get a sense of how motion affects the design.

For console games, test legibility for text and button prompts at an appropriate distance from the screen. For mobile games, shrink your compositions down to a mobile-equivalent size or better yet, save out screens to look at on your actual phone.

Test for your game's unique feel and gameplay. If you're making a fast-paced Royale game, having a densely-packed HUD like World of Warcraft would work against reactivity and awareness. Conversely, a 4X strategy game might feel infuriating with an ultra-lean HUD with no reports, updates, or maps. Your HUD is a direct reflection of unique gameplay and specific frustrations - make sure your testing is equally bespoke.

Mistake #3 - You're rocking bad typography

Typography is a difficult skill to master, but strong game interfaces are borne on equally strong wordcraft - which thankfully can be distilled into a few easy tips.

The easiest way to shore things up is to stay simple and consistent. Pick two fonts: a title font and a body font. The title font should be used for Headings and... well, Titles (you can also use all caps on these, typically). The body font should be legible at small sizes and in dense paragraphs

When in doubt, pick a sans-serif. Serifs are all the "fiddly-bits" at the end of a font, and they'll make your screens take a legibility hit. Sans-serifs, on the other hand, are the trusty workhorses of the digital world and friend to the common-man's sight.

Invariably you'll need to make the text on your HUD pop during hectic gameplay. Dirty temp-fixes include adding a black stroke around the font or a dark, faded polygon behind illegible areas. While these fixes are hardly ideal, you may have to humble yourself before the idea that sometimes there is no elegant solution to the problem of "make text read on a violent rainbow"

Mistake #4 - You're using colors like a madman

Speaking of rainbows - thoughtless color choice can make a monochrome wireframe unravel before your eyes in-game. Let's make the colors work for us, not against us.

Make the colors a part of your toolset. Ensure navigation buttons only have one consistent color. High contrast and vibrancy draws the eye, whereas darkness and desaturation dials details down. Use this to showcase areas of importance and clamp down needless distraction.

Try to only have one "Hot-Action" color, a color that is meant to specifically draw the eye. This Hot-Color can be used for everything from highlight states to titles and other important interactions. Even if the color palette for the UI is kaleidoscopic, make sure the Hot-Action color is consistently and purposefully used through the entire game.

As a general rule of thumb, try not to make your entire HUD red. Yes, there are professional exceptions to this rule, but it is also exceptionally challenging to work without red for concepts like cooldowns, iconography (blood vs. poison vs. water vs. oil), alerts, etc.

Mistake #5 - You made some real unsexy math

Sometimes a UI is called a GUI, or Graphical User Interface - emphasis on the Graphical. Plain numerators, denominators and text strings simply will not do.

Is there a more interesting execution for the information you're providing? Instead of numbers, what about a meter, a toggle light, haptic-feedback, a voice-line? What can you represent sensually that will make it easier (not more obtuse!) for the user to comprehend in a wild moment of gameplay? Can you combine multiple ideas to make the feedback even stronger?

Shockingly (to everyone but UI UX Designers), information design is also an intimate part of the feel of the world. Do critical hits feel meaty? When I'm poisoned, am I anxious or is this all business as usual? When I level up, is it anything worth celebrating? Game UI UX design is not just about information architecture, it's performance art as well.

See if you can push these concepts even further. Can you show a Mech's 5 stats in a Pentagonal Radar Chart? Wouldn't the timeline be much more emotional as a scrolling trail of polaroids with the events hand-written on the bottom? If critical hits can get special treatment, what if we also scale down the size of the font based on how much damage the armor mitigated? Information design is worldbuilding!

Mistake #6 - You're Clumping or Spacing too much

Ah yes, the great dilemma in game HUD design: do you clump widgets together in a corner, or scatter them to the four winds? There are a lot of factors, but let's dumb it down to a simple ruleset.

Elements of equal importance or elements of a similar species should be clumped together: health, mana, stamina - these are all important resource pools that influence player behavior. Ammo, a lesser concern in the Hierarchy, would be inappropriate to clump together with Health, as would tertiary concerns like abilities, perks, quests, etc.

On the other hand, spacing elements everywhere is equally problematic - causing the eye to recklessly pachinko around the screen. If you are going to space things, try to balance your composition with equally weighted elements on the left and right, like health on one side, ammo counters on the other. Whatever you're doing in the upper corners, make sure they coral similar information: Mission updates and story details by the Quest widget, location and geographic updates by the map.

You may also want to consider Naturalistic design; the idea that there shouldn't be any 4th wall-breaking HUD at all. Is there information you can imbed on the Player's body or in the world? Is there a... well... more natural way to find things out like how many arrows are in your quiver, the condition of a sword, or the relative lethality of an enemy? How would you get the information if you were really there?

Mistake #7 - You didn't think about the Medium you're building for

PC games boast a panoramic amount of screen real-estate and superior controls. Icons can be microscopic and you are guaranteed most people will be sitting less than 5 feet from your work. Make sure the "button prompts" you've designed for left, right and especially middle mouse buttons read well (my mouse has 8 supplemental buttons that games absolutely have prompts for!).

Console games presume the presence of a controller, which sometimes demands innovation in navigation and interfacing. Presume your audience can be as far as 10 feet away from your button prompts and typography. Iconographers be warned: Playstation buttons can turn illegible at a distance and Nintendo Switch buttons are color agnostic.

Mobile gaming is a very difficult platform to make UI UX Designs for, especially the HUD. All of your iconography disappears when there's a thumb over it, there is no tactile feedback from "buttons", and all UI designs suffer on a screen the size of a playing card. Also consider the incredible challenge of designing for a screen where you always cover up to 33% of it at any given time. Always test your mockups on your phone!

As a great champion of VR, I can easily attest that the hardest medium by far to design for is Virtual Reality. Each controller/headset boasts a wild range of capabilities - as do the human bodies they are rigged to. You may need to go beyond button prompts into full-blown gestures, and quality-of-life improvements are actually impressive accessibility concerns. If you're looking for a real UI UX Design challenge, your no-hit pacifist-run awaits you in Virtual Reality.

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And that's it! You're now the best UI UX Designer in video game history!

If not, well, it worked on my machine.

submitted by /u/TheWingless1
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Lessons learned from releasing my second game

Posted: 18 May 2021 09:07 PM PDT

SNKRX is the second game I've released on Steam and in this post I'll go over my thoughts on its development and how it performed. I made this game in the past 3 months as a dev challenge to start making and releasing games more consistently.

You can read the full post here.

Financial Results

Stats

To get it out of the way, first let's go over financial results. I'm writing this only 1 day after the game has released, but Steam seems to be consistent with how it treats games after how they perform initially so I can extrapolate somewhat safely from here.

Here's how BYTEPATH, my first game, did for its first day and a half:

https://i.imgur.com/Y5PHtlp.png

And here's how SNKRX did for its first day:

https://i.imgur.com/a86qB9F.png

So roughly about 1/3rd as well. One interesting thing is that both BYTEPATH and SNKRX released with about 200 wishlists. At these low numbers most of how the game performs is related to how much external traffic you can generate for it rather than people who wishlisted it buying it.

BYTEPATH had quite a few popular reddit posts on release day:

https://i.imgur.com/iwR05qH.png

Whereas SNKRX had pretty much nothing:

https://i.imgur.com/zUmyS3v.png

So this explains most of the difference. I'll go over some of why that difference happened in the rest of the article.

Projections

After 3 years on the store BYTEPATH has made $12K and sold 10K units, which means that, should everything remain equal, SNKRX should go on to sell ~3K units and make about $4K.

I end up making half of that, and since I live in Brazil and the local currency is worth less than the dollar I also should multiply it by 5 or so, which ends up being a total of R$10k. For 3 months of work this would be about R$3.3k per month which is somewhat above the average local salary.

Compared to a similar analysis I did for BYTEPATH this is slightly better results, despite being worse in absolute terms. This is mostly due to this game taking only 3 months to make and also due to currency conversion being more favorable now than it was 3 years ago.

Overall I'd say that I'm neutral on this performance. It could have been worse, but it also could definitely have been better. The main thing I'm positive about is that if I can keep this pace up and release a game like this every 2 months or so then technically I'd be making a living off games, which would be nice I guess.

Also, "should everything remain equal" is a big assumption, because I don't know if SNKRX will progress in the same manner that BYTEPATH did over time. BYTEPATH had quite a strong response on release day and that seems to have shot it up in the algorithm's eyes for the rest of its existence on Steam.

It's possible that SNKRX falls down the void of Steam and thus experiences a much more timid increase in sales over time in comparsion, which would decrease the results significantly. I guess I'll see what happens as time passes.

Strategy

A game every 2 months

Motivation

Since the start of 2020 I've been trying to make and finish small games consistently. Projects that take between 1-3 months to make from start to finish and that I actually release on Steam. For the entirety of 2020 I failed to do that.

I worked on about maybe ~10 different projects that year and most of them weren't released for anyone to play:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1szzTEk5fpQ

The only one I managed to release in any shape was a prototype that I made in 3 days at the end of the year. I've been inspired by a bunch of people doing this, most prominently Chilla's Art.

The reasons for me to do this are simple: it seems impossible for me to commit to longer projects. I just don't have the discipline to do it. Most projects fail in the same way and they're all due to a general lack of direction mixed with poor scoping. I get way ahead of myself and try making something bigger than I can handle and eventually my motivation drops enough and I just can't work on the project anymore.

Scoping

So given that this is the problem, it seems like the solution is just starting small and building my game finishing skills and discipline up over time. However, the reason I failed all this time is also because the kinds of games I want to make naturally tend to be games that are easy to overscope.

I'm particularly interested in games where you can try lots of builds. Be it with a huge skill tree, lots of items, lots of characters, etc. Genre doesn't really matter, it can be a roguelite, a base-building tower defense deckbuilder, platformer, whatever, as long as you can play it in lots of different ways.

It's very hard for me to be excited about making small games that don't have this "lots of builds" component. So over time I've found a way to think about this that has helped me at least deliver this game, and I hope it does many more in the future.

Small long games

Essentially, you can think of games as either big or small, and either short or long:

Big vs. small refers to how long the project would take to complete and/or how many people. Short vs. long refers to how long the game lasts to the player. A game that lasts a few minutes or a couple of hours would be short, a game that lasts tens or hundreds of hours would be long.

The space of big games, either short or long is explored by lots of people. The space of small short games is also explored by lots of people, generally indiedevs. But the space of small long games is largely ignored.

Perhaps ignored it too strong a word, but for some reason people assume that projects that last people a long time should also take a long time to make, but to me it seems like this isn't true. So I've set my sights on exploring this space, largely because it aligns well with what I'm interested in making.

SNKRX

Overall this strategy went well for SNKRX but I fell short of making a very long game. I think the game I made before, BYTEPATH, had much more long potential than SNKRX, so this was a failure.

I ended up finishing an initial version of the game 1 month in, and then the next 2 months were spent adding content. But I lost quite a lot of time due to poor decisions made along the way and it just limited my ability to add more long hooks into it.

In the future I should probably take less than a month to finish the initial version of the game. It would be really cool to finish it in 1 week, for instance, and then have the next 6-7 weeks just for adding content + long hooks.

I think on the whole the strategy of focusing on something small and then expanding on it with more stuff over time seems solid, I just need to execute it better and execute on ideas that have more potential to last longer too.

Steam followers

L. Stotch

A consequence of doing a game every 2 months and releasing each game on Steam is that I can take advantage of the Steam follower feature.

I got this idea from seeing a random dev called L. Stotch on Steam. I have no idea who this is and he doesn't seem to have a presence anywhere else, still he has about 4k Steam followers and quite a lot of games released since about 2016.

From my own experience with BYTEPATH, I got about 100 followers from it before I mistakenly decided to delete my profile and change my Steam name and lost them all. But if each game I release gets around that many then it's quite feasible to build a few thousand followers over the years which should help somewhat.

And for SNKRX I got about 20 followers on day 1. If followers also trickle in over time just like sales do then I should get a total of maybe 50-60 followers out of this game, which isn't a lot but it's also not bad.

E-mail

The specific way in which followers help is that everyone who follows you on Steam gets sent an e-mail whenever you release a new game. So essentially it's as if every game you released automatically had as many wishlists as you have followers by default. This means that L. Stotch, for instance, has about 4K wishlists per game he releases.

This kind of wishlist is probably weaker than a normal wishlist, since people might follow you but not be interested in the next games you make, but it's still a pretty good and solid amount of consistency that you can add to your results, as e-mails are a fairly strong form of marketing.

Long term

This is also something that most indie developers are just not paying attention to. I said that I'm inspired by a group of indie devs called Chilla's Art. These guys are very consistent about their release schedule, what kind of game they're releasing and the overall quality you should expect. Yet they simply don't have a Steam developer page.

I'd guess that most devs aren't interested in focusing on this too much because it's essentially locking yourself to Steam in a fairly unhealthy way. Most indie devs these days seem more interested in looking for alternative sources of income, which is the correct thing to do, and so tying yourself to Steam even more will naturally be seen as a mistake. Personally I have a fairly positive opinion of Valve so I don't see a big problem with doing this.

Either way, I have no idea if this is a good thing to do or not, because I've found no indiedev business oriented articles talking about how useful Steam followers are or not. But since I'm going to be releasing lots of games it doesn't hurt to focus on it as a sort of long term goal too.

Having a plan

PUBG

At some point I was playing A LOT of PUBG and it was the first BR game I had played. It was a really fun period but I also learned a fairly solid lesson from playing that game so much. In a game like that you're often put into very uncomfortable spots and whenever you die and try to figure out what went wrong it's very easy to reach the conclusion of "I got unlucky" in a moment of heated gamer anger.

In general I prefer believing that luck isn't real, or that it doesn't affect any of my outcomes significantly, so as soon as I noticed myself reaching for that conclusion while playing PUBG I'd take note of it and try to stop it.

I've found that the most consistent way of stopping it was to have committed to a high level plan before doing things. For instance: "I'm gonna stay here until the circle comes and then move over there" or "I'm gonna roam around this area in that direction since my back is covered by the circle" or "I know there are 3 guys in that direction and they have to come through here because of the circle so I'm gonna ambush them".

As soon as I started thinking these plans out loud and trying to stick to them, whenever I looked back on what went wrong, because I actually had a plan, I could clearly point out where I went wrong and then improve from there. Whereas if I had no plan it was very easy to reach for the "oh I just got unlucky!" and other similar excuses.

Indiedev

The same logic applies to indiedev. Looking back at my failures and wondering why they happened it's easy to reach the conclusion of "because I had no plan".

Most games that failed failed because they had no clear vision or north, I was just doing whatever I felt was cool aimlessly. And when the "cool" part was over I simply jumped to the next thing. And I simultaneously also had no higher level plan, my goal was just "doing games" because that's what I like doing. But that wasn't attached to any real long term goal.

My mindset recently changed and I actually feel like I have a plan now. And it's simple: make a game every 2 months, build out my engine while doing so, and accumulate followers over time.

The short time frame helps with a lot of things, as with each game:

I can focus on a specific type of game;
I can focus on a specific aspect of my engine that I want to improve;
I can focus on a specific visual style that I want try out;
I can focus on a specific tech that I want to learn;

Or I can also do all of those things at once. Regardless, each project becomes this massive multipurpose endeavor where on top of just making a game, I'm also building up to something larger and more consistent over time.

It seems dumb but this change in mindset and having these things as real high level goals really helped push through this project and actually finish it. And I hope that this continues for the next projects.

Design

Most of the time I wasted while making SNKRX was wasted when I didn't know what to do next. I would finish a set of tasks and then the next set wasn't immediately clear. I could X or I could do Y, and they'd generally both be these fairly large tasks that I hadn't broken down yet in any way.

That break in continuity would often take me a few days to recover from, but it happened very consistently. I noticed it eventually because I kept a daily devlog for this project and after a point it was obvious that that was the issue.

Then I started looking back at my previous projects and sort of realizing that they all had the same problem essentially. Just a general lack of direction and I would always quit when that lack of direction was at its highest.

So in the future I will simply try to plan each project out more. Spend more time thinking about it and perhaps even visually mocking parts of it up so that I have something solid to work from from the start.

Demo and wishlist building

As previously stated, having a plan is good because you can clearly figure out what went wrong. So going into this game I had a fairly developed plan for how things would go: I'd make a playable web demo of the game, release it on itch.io and at the same time also release the game's Steam page. If the game's demo was well received then I'd get a boost in wishlists which would boost my game's page on Steam and I'd get tons of algorithm wishlists as a result.

Sound bugs

After about 1 month of development I managed to finish the demo, but upon testing it was clear that there were a few bugs that I couldn't fix. Namely the sounds weren't playing properly. In my view sounds are really important and add a lot to this game, so while I could release a demo with buggy sounds I'd only do so if that really was the only problem the game had.

Poor reception

But it was also clear that within a few hours of having a few people playtest the game that it just wasn't something I could release in good conscience. Most problems people pointed out from the demo were things that I knew were problems and that I knew I was going to fix before the game released, but the game just didn't work without those things being there.

This was a clear case of the game in my head being one thing, and me thinking that even if I implemented half of it people would understand that the other half is missing because it's a demo. But it just didn't work out this way.

Due to the very fast nature of development on a game like this, the half that was missing was fairly important to making the game work at all and playtesters made it clear to me that essentially what I had was garbage.

Changing plans

So I pretty quickly decided to not release a demo at all and just release a Steam page. I spent quite a lot of effort making a trailer for it which in retrospect wasn't entirely necessary. I made a complete trailer with tons of cuts, the kind you expect from a game release, when a way easier one to make with fewer cuts and more gameplay being showcased would have worked just as well.

This article goes over this a little. The main reason why looking back I would have done an easier trailer was because the effort was pointless. I released my Steam page, posted it everywhere I could and my game didn't really get any traction anywhere, which I should have predicted and assumed would happen.

With my previous game, BYTEPATH, the same happened, and before release basically no one cared about the game and trying to get people to care was pretty pointless. Only after release did I manage to get traction with it anywhere.

Future plans

So for future games, especially these games that I'm making in 1-3 months, as soon as I have like 1-2 minutes of gameplay that can be recorded and be somewhat coherent (it doesn't even have to be a complete gameplay loop), I'm going to grab that, record it a little, cut it up into a trailer in a very minimal way, and then make the game's Steam page. This should probably be done in week 1 or so of development, since I want the page to be up for as long as possible.

At the same time, I shouldn't worry at all about trying to build up my wishlist count once the page is up. For these small releases all that matters is driving traffic to the store page on release day, and while wishlists help, I shouldn't assume I'll be able to get a significant number of them for it to matter, and I certainly shouldn't spend time trying to make that happen.

The main thing I can improve on currently to make these games be received better is improving their visual quality. I know from projects before BYTEPATH that if a game has proper art it just makes everything easier marketing wise, but I want to hold off on pairing up with artists for a while until I can release games more consistently, so until then I should try to find a visual style that I can do by myself but that people respond to better than they did for SNKRX.

submitted by /u/a327ex
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Anyone interested in joining a one game a month challenge?

Posted: 18 May 2021 04:50 PM PDT

Hello! Joining game jams is a great way to practice gamedev, but I realized most jams are very short which can be very inconvenient: They encourage crunch, which is counterproductive. They make it hard to fit a game that you actually would like to make within the timeframe. And they aren't meant to be done successively, unless you want to burn out.

I think that one month is a great timeframe to make a small game comfortably and on your own terms, and still get feedback for it. This is where the challenge comes in: make one game every month, no matter how small, and publish it on itch.io for others to play and provide feedback.

If you're interested, drop your discord username. If enough people are interested I will open a discord server where we share our monthly games and provide feedback. You can even find team members there, if you want. I will also host the One Game a Month jam on itch.io just for the sake of better organizing the entries for each month.

Also, it doesn't matter how long you can keep up with the challenge, there are no prizes and it's not supposed to be competitive. So don't feel pressured in that way. The point is to build a community where we encourage each other to keep making games and improving on a regular basis.

Edit: This is great. I didn't expect this many people to be interested! Here is the discord server: https://discord.gg/5CHZ5GVMgY And here is the jam's page: https://itch.io/jam/one-game-a-month

submitted by /u/Desward
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Here's how much money my game made after getting 15 Million views on YouTube

Posted: 19 May 2021 12:45 PM PDT

Tldr: Almost nothing

Last year I launched my Early Access game "My Beautiful Paper Smile" on Steam. It's a very linear, artistic, story based game that doesn't have any really special stand-out mechanics. Because of the artistic, and story driven approach, a lot of YouTubers have picked up the game and played it on their channels. People like Markiplier, FGTeeV, and GT Live, as well as tons more smaller channels. There were also some big videos published on the Chinese video sharing website Bilibili, that got around 4 million views in total.

You'd think that this amount of exposure would mean a lot for a game, and while my game gets recognized by a lot of people now, not many have played it themselves. The game is selling fairly well considering that it's in Early Access, but the YouTube views just aren't carrying much weight.

So how much is nothing?

The only time my games stats saw any increase due to a YouTube video was when Markiplier played the demo of my game a month before it launched. This video got a few million view in the first few days, and my game gained about 1000 wishlists during those first few days after the video was released (my average daily WL count at the time was around 70-80, so this was fairly significant). The video now has over 4m views, so I'm assuming it has been giving the game some small but consistent traffic over the past year, probably resulting in 1500-2000 wishlists. It's hard to estimate the sales impact since his video was made before the game launched, although it did result in about 100 extra demo downloads (not much at all).

Every other video that was created about the game resulted in no noticeable spike whatsoever. A few months ago FGTeeV played the game, getting a few million views in the first day, and the game got about 10 sales, which was pretty typical, and even a little low compared to the average daily sales we were getting at the time. No extra wishlists. No extra views. If I had just looked at my stats I'd think it was just a normal day, and this was the case with every single other video released about the game.

Why so much nothing? Is there a fix?

Like I said, the game is very linear, and while it makes for a decent video since there's a story for viewers to follow, they already know the ins and outs of the story, and have no need to play it themselves. On top of this, I've mentioned that there are no crazy game mechanics that look amazing to play. If you go over to your friends house and watch a movie, you probably won't stop at the store on your way home and buy the movie for yourself... Because you just saw it. (also my game is in EA so people are just inherently a little more hesitant to put money into it)

Of course some people will though. There are a handful of people who have watched these videos and become big fans of the game who have bought it and played it for themselves, but this is a very small minority.

As for "fixing" this issue, there's really only one thing you can do if you want to benefit from YouTubers and streamers playing your games. Don't make extremely linear "movie-like" games.

I've seen many people talk about small Youtubers playing a strategy card game, or survival game that get 50,000 views, and sell hundreds of copies. If your game shows people something that they can't truly experience unless they play it themselves, then you've got serious potential in the YouTube space.

I've seen people try to refute this whole concept, that linear doesn't sell well on YouTube, but think about it for a second.

Fun looking, gameplay centric game + 50,000 views = a few hundred sales.

Slow build, linear story, no amazing gameplay + 19,000,000 views = probably a few hundred sales.

Seems pretty obvious to me.

In Conclusion...

Does this mean you can't make artsy linear games? No. I just want to tell you that you shouldn't bank on big YouTuber stars to sell your game. The market won't adapt to you and your game. You'll probably need to find other areas to focus on when doing promotion. Sure, having YouTubers play your game is great recognition, it can give you some cool review quotes if they enjoyed it, and it can be a really neat experience, but depending on the kind of game you've developed, it might not make you any money.

This is a post I've been thinking about making for awhile now, and just thought it might help some fellow developers out there. Hopefully you found this interesting :)

submitted by /u/JawDroppinAwesome
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How do you theoretically build a scalable MMO server ?

Posted: 19 May 2021 07:23 AM PDT

I'm not really a game dev, though, I've always asked myself : how can you build a software that can handle hundreds or even thousands of players at once ?

As, even with the best hardware available, you're still heavily limited by the number of cores of your servers, and by the number of operations that you can execute in a second, which quickly become very small when managing and synchronizing a massive amount of players.

I'm not trying to build a server, I'd just really like to know how can large companies build that kind of infrastructures ?

submitted by /u/cube2kids
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VKtracer - Vulkan Profiler

Posted: 19 May 2021 10:00 AM PDT

submitted by /u/PlizKilmy
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Unstoppable Force vs an Immovable Object Real-Time vs Turn-Based Combat in RPGs

Posted: 19 May 2021 02:17 AM PDT

submitted by /u/dr4v3nn
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How to get a UX/UI design job in the Games Industry (and how to succeed once you get it)

Posted: 19 May 2021 10:14 AM PDT

Hi Gang,

Sprung Studios is an external development studio specializing in UX/UI design for the video game industry. We have worked with various AAA game developers and have worked on big titles like Valorant, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Mortal Kombat 11, just to name a few.

We hosted a webinar a few weeks back in which our CEO discussed and answered questions around our article "How to get a UX/UI design job in the Games Industry."

I wanted to share this video to point out that from 46:18, Jim describes how to succeed once you have a job.

This is one aspect I have not seen covered very well, if at all, within the industry, and I was hoping that it could be beneficial for those who have just got a job or are looking to make the most of the opportunity.

The entire webinar is located here and is timestamped with the exact section on succeeding in the role - https://youtu.be/XV0FODf5LXs?t=2778

Other aspects discussed in the webinar:

His hiring process
What he looks for in a portfolio
How to handle yourself in an interview

I hope this is helpful to some of you, and good luck!

submitted by /u/SprangDev
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Procedural generation of a virtual World based on 3d Scanned Environment

Posted: 19 May 2021 09:56 AM PDT

Hey,

Im currently working on an Unity Project to procedurally generate a virtual world, with Bioms and Vegetation, base on 3D Models like scanned rooms. So that there's a sea or a planes biome on the floor and the furniture will be converted into a mountain with snow

This Project is for my IT Degree, so i have to write a Paper, but i couldn`t find any relatet studies or papers to reference them. Do you guys know if such a project has been done before?

These are the only related Studies i could find:

https://diglib.eg.org/bitstream/handle/10.2312/egve20171373/019-020.pdf

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2993369.2993372

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/vroamer-generating-on-the-fly-vr-experiences-while-walking-inside-large-unknown-real-world-building-environments/

But these dont really fit the idea of my Project.

submitted by /u/mrbrable
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How would I go about creating a unique story in a fighting game?

Posted: 19 May 2021 11:57 AM PDT

Now look, I know most fighting game stories are a snoozefest and laughably bad, but I really want to tackle the issue of a story mode in a fighting game I'm working on. The project I'm in the process of creating involves two players facing each other in a colorful arena full of objects to interact with, like rails, monkey bars, ramps etc. to perform stunts and other things on. The goal is to strike a perfect balance between interacting with the environment and actually hitting the opponent, basically multitasking. Think Lethal League+Sunset overdrive. In my opinion, the concept is pretty solid, but how exactly would I create a solid singleplayer experience for a project like this?

submitted by /u/Bigfoot-hands
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What are some funny misconceptions about games that you had when you were young/naive?

Posted: 18 May 2021 03:00 PM PDT

When I was very young, I thought maybe that games were made like a slide show presentation. Every frame was already drawn in advance, and changed depending on the input.

Another strange misconception I remember having when I first started to make games (with Scratch) was that there was some kind of universal win state common with all games. I was surprised that there was no Scratch block/command called "game won!"

What are some misconceptions that you have had?

submitted by /u/macsimilian
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Any way i can make a text based on mobile, or in my browser?

Posted: 19 May 2021 11:07 AM PDT

I have been wanting to make a text based for a long time now, but i only have a mobile device and a school chromebook, which has blocked basically everything except for browser stuff. Is there any program i can make a text based in, or am i stuck?

submitted by /u/ParcodeKid
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Should I port my game to Xbox?

Posted: 19 May 2021 09:51 AM PDT

I've always wanted to port my game to switch, but I read that you need a track record of sales on PC and other platforms. Currently my game is on steam, android, and iOS. Would it be worth porting the game to Xbox? Do people play indie games on Xbox? Has anyone had experience doing this? Any clue what criteria the Xbox team is looking for?

submitted by /u/iceberger3
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Short Blog Post About My Cinematic Camera Sytem

Posted: 19 May 2021 12:58 PM PDT

submitted by /u/ia97lies
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Unity beginner tutorial: Earth orbiting around Sun (plus navigating around in Game view)

Posted: 19 May 2021 03:08 AM PDT

submitted by /u/EmiliaKaida
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How would I go about designing characters with unique movesets in a fighting game?

Posted: 19 May 2021 06:48 AM PDT

I recently made a post on this subreddit about a new fighting game I was considering developing as a passion project, and with the unique concept of that game I'll definitely need a set of very colorful characters. The problem here is that i'm not the most creative when it comes to original characters, so how would I go about this?

submitted by /u/Bigfoot-hands
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How to properly identify and deserialize packets?

Posted: 19 May 2021 05:13 AM PDT

Say for a server sending packets to a client, and that packets can contain any arbitrary classes/structs, at runtime the client would not know which is which. Lets say for classes A and B in this case, how can the client properly identify the class before deserializing it as a whole?

One way I thought of in my head is to have a base class containing type IDs, and have A and B and other "packet data classes" inherit from that base class, and then deserialize the packets based on the IDs. This doesn't quite gave me the confidence that its a proper way (I don't know why, perhaps anything that just comes out of the head in an instant will hit you hard in the long run)

My question is, is there a proper way to do this? Would also appreciate if any references can be linked here so I can check it out too

submitted by /u/normalequation1
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Need advice on finally making something on my own

Posted: 19 May 2021 12:16 PM PDT

For the past >year i've been learning coding and programming in general, the last few months i've spent have been learning C# and Unity. Pretty much all of my learning has been done with free online videos/classes including those that show you how to use Engine IDE's by just making a game in them, while you follow along. These kinds of tutorials are good for learning the interface/IDE/how to do simple things but they don't really guide you to make your own work.

I feel like everytime I attempt to make that "leap" of finally making my own game (yes, I start off small, not trying to make an MMO right off the gate) it feels like i'm still not learned enough. Do any of you have advice on getting over this? Should I just go for it and learn by failures?

submitted by /u/Fenneca
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Underwater effect post processing script

Posted: 19 May 2021 08:20 AM PDT