Feedback Friday #449 - Rich Experience |
- Feedback Friday #449 - Rich Experience
- I released my first game and it went terribly. Without a substantial amount of reviews, how do you tell the difference between a game that was just marketed poorly and a game that is genuinely bad?
- [You can be at E3 too!] How our 3 people Indie FPS got announced at E3
- I made a gsheet of all the most useful Game Dev links I know of
- Marketing Strategy Tips
- What game engine should I use for my top-down open world adventure game?
- GoNorth, a tool for planning content for RPGs an other open world games, now supports a review mode for wiki pages
- My first week with unity. I was learned how to code with c# player movement and player jump. I am happy with it . Why. Before I didn't how to code but now I am still learning and practicing every day .
- Stride Game Engine
- RPG: Would you prefer straightforward attribute names or more flavored ones?
- Do you switch engines/code to match the vision for your game, or scale your vision to match what's within reach?
- 8 years of struggling to make a big game or dark realities of an indie developer.
- For animators who worked on AAA video games, how long does it take to make a "flamboyant" animation?
- Avoid the first game from failing
- I want to use several stanza from Dante's Inferno in my game. How do I make it legal?
- Tightly coupling game logic to custom engine?
- Directx 10
- Why aren't character models and other textures "solid" ?
- Light Culling for Procedurally Generated Scenes in Unity
- Is there a gamedev job that is half designing and half programming?
- Having some issues with png sequences, the png gets cut off or only parts of the image get displayed. Any help is appreciated.
- Full-time dev by day, indie dev by night: Is it possible?
- Have you ever wanted to create a solar system with Unity Physics? Here is how!!
- Question about ray tracing
- I can write on a list anyone from USA to hear a pitch for my game. Who should I choose?
| Feedback Friday #449 - Rich Experience Posted: 17 Jun 2021 08:21 PM PDT FEEDBACK FRIDAY #449 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]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 04:45 AM PDT I released my first game Wednesday on Steam. I had only 411 wishlists on launch, so I was expecting 30-40 wishlist conversions on what I thought was the conservative end. Expectations for a big first day were not high and I was just hoping for some feedback. At the end of the first day I had only sold 20 copies of my game, and at the time of this post (Friday), I've sold 29 copies. Out of those buyers, I don't have a single review, positive or negative. There was not much hype or interest around the build-up to my game's launch. I tried posting to Twitter and Reddit. I didn't do it often enough, but when I did, nothing much came of it. That was the first sign that my game wasn't finding an audience, but I continued on for the experience. Now I've launched my game to what feels like a non-existent audience. Nobody cares, not even enough to play my game and tell me how bad it is. It's a little rough to accept, but I'm mostly okay with that. As I said, this was my first game. Positive reviews would have been nice, and a small profit would have been even better, but I made this game for the experience of creating and shipping a game from start to finish. As I said in the title, the main question I'm stuck on is: without a substantial amount of reviews, how do you tell the difference between a game that was just marketed poorly and a game that is genuinely bad? I feel like one can be remedied while the other should be abandoned. I already know I failed on the marketing front, but I still can't tell if my game is salvageable or completely hopeless. I sent the beta out to anonymous testers in early May and I included a survey. The purpose of the survey was to report bugs, aspects that people liked, aspects they didn't like, and most importantly in my mind, how much they enjoyed the experience overall. I enjoyed running around in the world I made, but I genuinely could not tell if I had made something that I could charge money for in good conscience or if it would be received as a cheap, bad-faith asset flip. I asked testers to be as honest as possible; sugar-coating would only hurt me once I launched my game. Of the 24 anonymous testers who answered:
Just over two days into a dismal launch and now I have no idea how much that survey data is actually worth. I'm left feeling quite conflicted. I already have multiple other ideas for new games that I want to prototype (something I didn't do enough for this game). With the terrible launch, I'm inclined to just move on. The game achieved its primary objective even before it launched with the amount I've learned throughout the process. But it also feels a little strange walking away from something playtesters seemed to enjoy (overall) and that I've spent almost a year on after just two days of bad sales. So I'll ask my question again: without a substantial amount of reviews, how do you tell the difference between a game that was just marketed poorly and a game that is genuinely bad? Is a complete lack of interest a significant indication of my game's overall quality or only of my marketing effort? How do you know if it just needs a few tweaks or if it's a lost cause and a waste of time? [link] [comments]  | ||
| [You can be at E3 too!] How our 3 people Indie FPS got announced at E3 Posted: 18 Jun 2021 09:40 AM PDT Hey everyone, I am part of a 3 people indie dev team and have been working religiously over the past years on our first game: A fast Time Trial FPS named Warcry Challenges After years of work, we have finally reached our first goal: being announced at E3! So, how did we arrive there? Here are a 3 tips to help your project succeed! For reference, our teaser can be seen on our official youtube channel: Warcry Challenges - Official E3 2021 Announcement Teaser
You've probably heard about it many time and that's in my opinion the most important rule! You probably don't have a 20 full time people team, so don't try to make a MMORPG or something out of the scope of your small team. My advice? Start simple, work on game mechanics and try to get something that plays well, is fun, feels good with the keyboard/mouse or controller in hand. You're making a video game, so it needs to be enjoyable from the start. If even you get bored of playing your own game while playtesting it, imagine what the players will think about it? That's the most important!
When we started working on our First person shooter a few years ago, we planned a 15 hours campaign mode, 1h ++ levels etc.. The plan seemed amazing, the gameplay was 90% ready, what we had (about 3 hours of gameplay we created over the span of 3-4 years) was really fun…. but we were nowhere near completing the game! To be honest, we were really lagging behind in terms of level creation. Yes, creating 15 hours of gameplay for a campaign, aiming for AA quality graphics with 2 people working part time on level design/building/3D is just not doable, unless you want your development to exceed the dev time of Duke Nukem Forever. So when we realized that, we decided to reduce the scope of the project and change things drastically. One important note: that indeed doesn't mean throwing everything in the trash! The goal here was "smart reusage" of what we had. We noticed that the most fun part of our game was speedrunning like crazy in the levels (the game is really fast!), headshotting enemies while bunny hopping like a madman. So why not make it the goal of our game? Why not make a game where you teach players to play like a speedrunner? That's how Warcry Challenge was born! So, we brainstormed, quickly posing the bases of the game. The levels will be short but high adrenaline, we will reuse many pieces of the big levels that were already ready, all the assets and of course all the gameplay elements (character controller, AI, enemies etc…) With that in mind, we were able to capitalize on years of work and create Warcry Challenge in about a year. This scope reduction not only allowed us to make something enjoyable quickly, it allowed us to make a game we can release ! And that's the important part. All this without sacrificing the play time: Completing Warcry challenge actually takes more than 15 hours, and it has way more replayability than the original game we had in mind! We all have way over a thousand hours of play time, no one is getting bored and we are constantly improving our skills. In addition to this, reducing the scope allowed us to polish the gunplay, the powers, the player controller feeling etc.. We were thus able to put more focus on the important parts of the gameplay. So bonus points here too!
We are no superheroes, so during these past years, we all had our "down" moments, where we were less focused on the game, had to keep up with real life stuff or simply were less motivated. We are human, and that's normal! When you are working solo, these kind of down times can kill your game, because:
On the contrary, with a 3 person team, when one of us had a down time or less time to dedicate to the game, we were able to keep things flowing and the game was always making progress, even if one of us was less involved than usual. And the most important part is that the progress made by the 2 other team members always motivated the 3rd one to get back to it more seriously after his short break! To sum it up, getting to the E3 is a matter of : That's all for now guys! Good luck to everyone with your projects! And if you have any questions, of course don't hesitate to ask me here or on twitter ! [link] [comments]  | ||
| I made a gsheet of all the most useful Game Dev links I know of Posted: 17 Jun 2021 01:23 PM PDT Hi, I'm Uno. I made this list with all the links I've collected and saved over 4 years of studying Games Programming. It has a particular emphasis on art, programming, games accessibility & UX, and I'd love help to continue to expand and improve it. Check it out below, and feel free to share it wherever. Thanks for reading! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ingVlCEftStqau1KjGqm0P7M44YlY3G5H2rCD0aSXDY/edit#gid=0 Edit: Wow, this was much more popular than I expected! Thanks to everyone for all the kind words, and thanks to everyone who sent in even more resources! I've spent all evening today improving the sheet. It now has a column to indicate beginner/veteran difficulty, a new category for Optimization resources, and a whole flood of new links! I will continue updating and growing the sheet for the foreseeable future, feedback and suggestions are very welcome ^^ [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 03:45 PM PDT I have a few questions regarding the marketing of indie games, and I'd be really happy if a veteran developer would be willing to share some tips! Here are my questions: --In which point in the development of a game should you start trying to promote it? Early development? Mid-way through development? Late development? --What social media is the most appropriate for promoting your game? Is it a bad idea to promote your game on tik tok, instagram and other platforms with lots of young people? --Is it worth it to pay for ad space? If so, in which platforms does paid ad space give the best returns? --Should you register the name of your game before promoting it? Thanks in advance! [link] [comments]  | ||
| What game engine should I use for my top-down open world adventure game? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 03:34 PM PDT I have a bit of experience coding in Python and a while back I used GameMaker Lite to make a small game. I am planning to develop a top-down open world adventure game like pokemon pearl or something, but on PC. I am wondering what engines you would recommend to me for such a project. I am willing to learn new programming languages for this. I am just a bit hesitant to commit to an engine right away without asking for any advice. Thank you! [link] [comments]  | ||
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| RPG: Would you prefer straightforward attribute names or more flavored ones? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 11:18 AM PDT I'm working on an RPG (a monster taming RPG to be exact) and I'm coming up with the attribute system and in naming the attributes I started wondering if I would be better off using really straightforward names or more flavored ones. Here are my attributes so far in the format of Flavored / Straightforward:
I feel like the flavored names add more... flavor to the thing they are describing, they somehow feel more like measures of an actual being. The straightforward ones are just super easy to understand and remember though. Any thoughts on this? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 12:02 PM PDT If the engine I'm in makes it hard to enact the systems I want, is it better to change my design and just make something, or switch systems to keep my dream closer to its vision? I don't want to spend all my time engine hopping, and I want to stay motivated by having small wins, but I worry that itch to make-it-as-i've-dreamt-it won't go away. What have you done, in your game design journey? My context: 40 year old gamer-to-developer, working on first game in my spare time, re-learning programming after 20 years away from it. Started in Godot, then Phaser, now working in GameMaker Studio for the past month. [link] [comments]  | ||
| 8 years of struggling to make a big game or dark realities of an indie developer. Posted: 18 Jun 2021 11:55 AM PDT Part I: Breaking Bad In this story, I am going to describe the difficulties, social aspects, and problems an indie developer may face. Also, I can't help mentioning Moscow, poker and sports, without which this story would be incomplete. Now, to excite the reader's interest before I begin my tale, I gained 22 kg during the development period from 2013 to 2015 and transformed from an athletic guy into one who hardly recognized himself in the mirror. Over the course of a year, I drank about one thousand cans of Red Bull. It all started with one or two. Now I rarely have less than three. I was sleeping sometimes four or five hours. For two years, I woke up on weekdays at five in the morning and rode the early train to work in another city, so that I would have time to work on the game in the evenings. I stupidly turned down an offer of 250,000 euros to develop the game. This was probably the cause of a case of severe pneumonia and a court trial with a former employer, as well as serious back problems due to my constant, sedentary lifestyle. Ah, and if that isn't enough, I quit university and my job! Alright, let's start… "You can be more than just a man." Remember this famous line from Batman Begins? Well, this line is not about me. Now, a little about me. For the past six years, I've been working as a Java software developer. For as long as I can remember, about fifteen years, I played semiprofessional sports and poker, read and wrote books, holed myself up in Blizzard games and studied aimlessly, dipping into my German loans, until my girlfriend told me one day that she was pregnant. And so we begin our story. There are essential things one needs in order to go into indie development. These are a profound optimism, unlimited amount of boyish maximalism, self-confidence that stems from cockiness, faith in one's art and, of course, purpose because we all want to do something great in our basements. 2013 had just begun. I was in the middle of watching Breaking Bad and something in my head clicked after the news about the baby. There was no need for motivation, speeches or exhilarating music. It was simply the realization that it was time, we should be an apartment beforehand, the child needed to be provided for, my business, my empire. I just opened a book about game development on Android, read it four times, and programmed for a couple months. It was something between Snake and Battle City. But something was wrong — the graphics were terrible. How could I fix them? I began searching for options. Artists, turns out, cost a fortune. I scoured the great expanses of the internet, searched for pixels, examined the work of freelancers… … now, epic music should ring out, as I clicked a link leading to the asset store at Unity 3D. "An idea is like a virus." I briefly mentioned the qualities I think are necessary to get into this foolhardy business and the principal one is faith. It has to be even more foolhardy than that of the Crusades inquisitors. The project moved quickly from a place where, after three months, I had already hammered out some semblance of a game in a pretty shell. In the beginning, I was still working and studying. Or, rather, I was enrolled in the university. My Bachelor's was almost finished but, in the end, I decided that I no longer had the time for it. I simply didn't have the energy to study for roughly another year. I would like to point out that I already had a job with 40 hours a week, a good salary for a Junior and an open-ended contract, which I would soon flush down the toilet. Weeks passed, months. My child was born. I began playing sports less often, almost stopped altogether, and began stress eating a lot. I worked on the game in the evenings and at night. 2014 came and I charged ahead with renewed vigor, two cans of Red Bull a day became three, and work refused to give me a raise because I didn't graduate university. I was practically a hostage to my situation. It was a tough year, as I would fall asleep at 12 or 1 am, wake up at 5 am and feel like I had just crawled into bed — I couldn't believe that five hours had already passed. In reality, the project had no returns. I spent money and time, physically surrendered myself, and spent little time with my wife and child. But wasn't there supposed to be a plus somewhere? Jesse, you asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I'm in the empire business. Sometime many years ago, when the USSR had just collapsed, my father organized an underground casino in our apartment. Rather intellectual people gathered there to play preference, idiot, chess, Sika, backgammon and other games for money. Why am I telling you this? It's hardly a surprise that by age six, I could already play five-card draw poker. No, this isn't about that. After moving to Germany, my parents completely disappeared from my life. It became some kind of depressing, endless stream of years. Then, doctors discovered that my dad had advanced-stage prostate cancer. The operation went as usual and brought him back to life overnight. A few years before watching his favorite film, that's right, Breaking Bad, he began dealing in antiques. Now I'll explain why I approached this from such an odd angle. As an antiques dealer, my father met people from the former USSR who wanted to diversify their businesses and invest their free money into some kind of project. Essentially, it all came down to those 250,000 euros for development of 50% of the game. I won't go into detail about the "negotiations". To be honest, I would agree now, probably. At that time, though, my inept maximalism was unprepared to share that much of the project and I wanted 250,000 euros for 20% of the project. Naturally, that was the end of that. So, an attentive reader would ask me what the casino in the USSR is about. One of my father's oldest friends, with large investments in real estate, grew curious about the project and wanted to diversify his business. I had known this acquaintance from Moscow and after a couple of negotiations, we decided that if he could sell some property quickly, then he would go in fifty-fifty for about 500,000 dollars. The location, unfortunately, didn't sell. Moscow's real estate problems are well known now but perhaps, after some time, he didn't want to risk his money in this venture. Thus 2014 came to an end. I stepped on the scale: 102 kilograms. But not everything was going to be disappointing. I put the game in Greenlight on Steam and on December 30th, I received a gift — the game was selected in a relatively short time. I think the funny thing about my lack of knowledge about games is that, when starting development of the Dark Forester in 2013, I did not know much about Steam and I'm not even sure if I had an account at that time. The first two months after the Steam approval pass in a grand euphoria. I increased my efforts. And I make the next big mistake by putting the game into Early Access as the Alpha version. After a week, I earned about $3,000, but the damage done by this decision was much greater than this sweet, long-awaited money, this small bit of payback after two years. The game's rating dropped and, at first, it wasn't clear why. What you don't understand is this because this is my game. You don't understand that this is was an early alpha and not everything would work! But, really, the game was terribly unfinished. I promised a bunch of patches and began working on the bugs, although I was far from the heart of what needed to be done. But at the beginning of the year, the thing that eventually brought me down and led me to the road of war. Now I'll tell you about how things went really bad and I quite literally had already begun a crusades in the sake of my game. In May 2015, I was laid flat by the worst bout of pneumonia for five weeks. After the first week, I genuinely looked like a zombie from The Walking Dead. I don't know if it was the two years of sleep deprivation, the Red Bull flowing through my veins, just an unfortunate occurrence of a sick man sitting next to me on the train or, probably, all of it combined. Either way, all this ushered in a series of unpleasant events. After the third week of my illness, I received two letters from work — "Abmahnung" and Ermahnung". It's something like creating a file on you and if you make even one mistake, they can fire you for whatever reason. Now, on to what was in those letters. The first forbade me on penalty of dismissal to develop the game in my free time. The second letter said that I promised on Steam to release a patch and accordingly, if I could write in Steam chat, I could probably work. Nobody fucks with blowfish. Maybe this is true, but I'm not a blowfish. I'm on a crusade. That very evening, I wrote to work that I was resigning. Since my company was a subsidiary of a Swiss business, I sent letters to all the available email addresses of the bosses, where I said that I would sue them for getting into my personal life and intimidating someone with pneumonia, as well as gone through the whole thing with my own boss. In the end, my boss fired my six days after these events, unfortunately with only three months' compensation. A couple of days later, I got a call from the head of the main German office in Stuttgart, who asked me to stay and bury the hatchet. But ultimately, I stayed unwavering and, three weeks later, filed a suit on four counts. After resigning, I realized that this was my chance to finish the game without the headache of a regular job. I took a private loan of 12 thousand with no difficulty from my father's acquaintances. I decided to work on the game for four months and then, if nothing happened, I'd go to work. As a result, the summer turned out okay. I was able to work on the game, playing live poker in Stuttgart on the side. I won't get too distracted by poker. Unfortunately, after winning my money back plus 3,200€, my partner, who I played with during our university days, played very badly. We finished with nothing because of him. We had to stop poker because we needed money to simply exist. The fourth month was coming to an end. The final game wasn't even on the horizon. The suit was at a standstill, while the other party and myself to scribble our accusatory letters. Money was running out and, in addition to student loans, yet another loan with a 650- euro monthly payment was hanging over me. Finally, I killed the motherboard and processor in the computer I bought for installments of 3,000 euros. By the fifth month, the situation had gone critical — money had run out. At that time, Unity cost 75 dollars and I still had an Android Pro license. Without money, I could no longer pay for Unity. Ultimately, I was left without the Unity Pro engine and primary computer for the next 6 months. My family and I had to urgently abandon our rented apartment and move into our parents' apartment (yes, all with a small child and wife). The Empire Strikes Back I had a series of interviews. Since I quit my job and things were not working out with the game, it was time to leave the barren world of Java and those stupid bank applications, and try to find a job at Unity3d.Ñ€Well, not exactly, no need to exaggerate. Rather these were my thoughts, as I applied for work at all possible companies. Dark Forester had played its part on Steam. Unity3D responded to my job applications within a few hours. As you know, regular applications take at least a few days or a few weeks. The first offer was in Leipzig at a young startup with a nice team of 50 people creating games for small children. Well it wasn't Blizzard, Valve or Nival, but at least it was Unity3D. I rode six hours by train to negotiations. Everything went well and they were ready to take me, but when it came to my requested salary, rather basic by Bavarian standards, I was told that even the startup founders didn't make such money. As a result, I was forced turn it down. Several more proposals followed from the former GDR, but wages there were even less and I understood that Unity3D can't offer close to the salary of a Java Developer. I got one refusal from Ubisoft in Düsseldorf and I probably spent the most miserable phone interview in my life with Gameforge from Karlsruhe. Have you ever had a conference interview with five developers? If there was ever a time to hang up, that was me after the event. Ubisoft and Gameforge required programmers with knowledge of C, but not Unity3D and UnityScript, and it was knowledge I didn't have. It's a Small World. As I said, I was also looking for work in Java. I won't go into much detail but to sum up, talk spreads quickly. More than once, Dark Forester proved useful and conversation for the first ten minutes of the interview was about that. I actually felt that, for the first time, those almost two and a half years of development were not in vain, that I had really made a lifetime investment. However, I wasn't hired because of Dark Forester. Fourteen people I had worked with at my previous job, turns out, had fled over those months and two of them recommended me to their employers. As a result, I was invited to two companies and found out during the telephone call, to my surprise, that they already knew about me. In both places, they offered me a regular salary, much more than at the previous company. One firm was located in Dresden and then other in Munich — the choice was obvious. "Went up" A month passed and the first money from work was finally coming in, just as my lifestyle of recent years makes itself felt again. I was having a perfectly normal day at work, just wanted to stand up…п I got home somehow, with the feeling that my legs are detached from my back. The next morning five meters to the toilet required a five-minute effort. The diagnosis: two pinched herniated discs. I was out of work for three weeks, but they could fire me without explanation for two weeks within the first six months. I wasn't fired, but it was time to return to sports with renewed vigor. Suit for the right to work on the game Early on, when all this mess was brewing, I called a couple Russian lawyers for consultation or hire. But I was immediately told that I did not have to quit, that if I had been fired, we would have won this case, but now it was pointless. Frankly speaking, I was still confident that I could win this case. If courts in a "democratic" country worked, like what I saw in Hollywood movies, then I had to lay it out for them using their logic. The other party wrote absolutely wild accusations against me, but the funny thing was that they were writing about a topic they knew nothing about. In the end, my accusations came out to twenty pages of German scribbles and all I needed to win was just the logical thinking of programmer. What were the four counts I brought against my former employer? Number one: Meddling in my private life. The court should annul the Abmahnung. Number two: The court should annul the Ermahnung. I used the word "madness" several times in my accusation, as it was madness in my opinion to compare a couple of replies in a Steam forum, written from my laptop in bed, with my ability to work a full day at the office with pneumonia. Number three: they were supposed to write document for me that described the situation, how I worked for the company and what I did. I'll note that, several times, I wrote not an excellent document, but exactly what I actually did. After I finished the document, they detained me at that for more than three months. The fourth point, which they eventually repealed, but still forced my former employer to pay compensation for my dismissal in the order of 15,000 euros. I was living in Germany, so what did I have to do to win the first point? Just emphasize the word "democracy". If you shout the word "democracy" a few times, you can toss in a few bombs and get the chance to do any legal thing you want in your own free time. Count number two was even easier. I had a doctor's medical opinion and, more importantly, x-rays from the second and fifth weeks that showed the inflammation in my lungs. There were two hearings, the first and second. At the first hearing, we were asked to come to an amicable agreement and keep the matter quiet. To which I and, later, the accused refused. But I still won one point automatically — number three. I asked the court how I was supposed to look for a job if they hadn't written the document stating what I did there and that it looks suspicious to future employers. They sent the paper a week later, with all I did and didn't do. That was pretty funny. Count four was annulled. Under German law, if you quit the job yourself, then there was no count with which I could claim money from my former employer. However, since I won the case on three counts, my former office had to pay out a bigger sum for losing the case because it's better not to venture a trial in Germany without a case. Of course, I could write separate chapters on the court, as with any other part of this story, but the main thing I validated was that nobody could tell me developing the game outside of work was prohibited. So, I won the case and my new firm outlined in my contract that I had the right to work on games outside of work, but what was the point if I'd already dropped development of Dark Forester for a few months? There had to be a way out and then it dawned on me. Until I had enough money for the engine and computer repair, I would do what I should have done long ago. I would start writing a 2-dimensional world on C#. The game idea I came up with was brilliant. I'm convinced to this day that this idea is much cooler than Dark Forester, and when I finish it one day, then continue where — well, now you know for yourself. This idea was born for fans of Habr and those who spend their days on stackoverflow. Programming War It's a 2D game where programming languages battle each other. No, I didn't want to write some logical, difficult-to-learn style of game. This was supposed to be an arcade RPG-action strategy that not only programming fans could play, but also those who were far from it. Well, of course, there would be surprises awaiting programming fans at every step. For example, the HTML character had <br> in its arsenal, something like a little bomb that blew through all the bad cod below, and <hr> was the ulta, which could remove all the code in a line. I quickly came up with a bunch of stuff like that. I've entered into the game some semblance of a Repository, NullPointerException Boss Levels and OutOfBoundArrayException.t The game initially had 4 programming languages — HTML, CSS, JS and Virus (please don't write in the comments that HTML and CSS are not programming languages). I later added C# and Java. Each character had a satellite and the virus a Trojan, which could process one of three types of resources: code, matrix and functions. They all had skills in the form of the usual syntax. I also introduced a couple of factions and the characters traits, so I added 5 types of programmers: D'Artagnan, Heisenberg, Pinkman, "Old Boy" and Hughes. Back to the Future. But it's time to put Programming War on the shelf. It took half a year of work to finally my debt for the engine. I was able to pay almost 700 dollars, and buy a new motherboard and processor. I returned. Unity 5 had already been released and I immediately decided to move the whole project to the new version, as the store had a couple of great forest assets. Unfortunately, my still switch to Unity 5 won't be painless, but I'll refuse new assets. My time spent out of development had not passed in vain. I have had time to reflect, to get back into shape. I started living and working according to the old, updated formula. Activity comes first and until I'm back in form, I'm not going back to work. I'll take as much time as necessary. I won't write out here how I got back into shape, but I'll still describe one bit of information that's unnecessary for many. As I was standing in the shower under the hot water after working out, I felt an occasional splash of unearthly cold water. Standing nearby was a guy of Scandinavian appearance, I glanced at his faucet, which was turned fully in the other direction, so you understand when I say it wasn't just cold water, but ice. He stood there, completely calm. What are you even writing about, anyway? Are we supposed to be interested in how you shower at the gym? No, of course not. It's just that this is war, war with myself. After that day I only bathed in cold water. After that day at least half a year ago, I haven't been sick at all. I won't dwell on the benefits of cold water. I'm even sure whether I believe in them or not. I only know that I wake up refreshed and that I sure as hell don't want to do this crusade every day, but in order to finish Dark Forester, I defeat myself. And a man, a man provides. And he does it even when he's not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it. Because he's a man. I'm slowly crawling out of debt. With this salary, we only went to McDonalds twice this past year. This is almost the fifth year without a vacation. That's five years without the sea, only programming. I'm slowly getting into shape. There are cold showers, the third Red Bull, and five hours of sleep each night, but I'm running a long-distance race. Dark Forester, barely revived, entered beta, where there is was still an endless amount of work to do. If I ever need to look for work, I know that the column in my biography of Dark Forester and Programming Wars (development is currently at a standstill) will play no small role, along with my experience in Java. I paid my private loan and a huge portion of my other government loans. The day before the New Year, we finally moved into a new apartment in a good neighborhood in Munich. And yes, I can once again go to McDonald's. My story does not end there. It's still only the beginning. I hope I managed to inspire or motivate someone not to make some mistakes in the future. We may live without the "load" and "restart" buttons, but all setbacks dedicated to the cause give you decent "experience". Not experience in Diablo 3, but in your own life, the best RPG you'll ever play. And I'll close 2016 with words from Breaking Bad and Batman. I'm doing this for my daughter, yeah… but I'm ultimately doing all this for myself. I believe that each one of you sitting on the other side of the monitor can be more than just a man! Part II: True Developer Game was released on 27.07.2018 and died on 28.08.2018 even though I had almost 4k sales during early access to release. It stacks on performance bugs. It was a great idea but lacked execution. Now it's been 8 years developing computer games as a hobby and 10 years developing business applications. I counted, I must have drunk almost 11,520 cans of Red Bull. I would probably bet on 30.000 hourse of developing in last 10 years. I still was an indie developer, with a dream of making my own AAA game. But as much i had my struggles with game developing as much my career ran upstairs. Has worked for one of the largest companies in Europe for three and a half years now. I'm at the point where nothing is up, you are at this "big point" where there are no standard development positions in sight. With relative success in my career came no satisfaction . I tried to do more sports, bouldern, fitness, pull ups, push ups, got second kind, trying to find a balance between family, sport, work, hobby and playing computer games. Only middle crises and sureness that we are living in a simulation. But to be honest I had no plans to release the new game Mad Wild Fairy Tale on steam in early access at all! But then something knocked on the door - Corona. [link] [comments]  | ||
| For animators who worked on AAA video games, how long does it take to make a "flamboyant" animation? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 02:04 PM PDT Lemme just start by saying that I'm a guy who doesn't know jack about animation... at all. Aside from that, "flamboyant" isn't the best term to use (only using it to describe animations that look fancy), so I think I'll just demonstrate it visually to better examplify what I mean. So there are 2 videos I want to share for context This is the first one, a compilation of all the fatalities from Mortal Kombat 11 (GRAPHIC!). Each fatality lasts roughly 10-15 seconds (excluding the slo-mo bits), And there are roughly 75 of them in the game. And this, is a compilation of supermoves from Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 (EXPLOSIONS!). Most of them last between 5-15 seconds, with the longest ones reaching as much as 30 seconds. All in all, they all make for less than 40 minutes. Finally, here's a compilation of ultimate moves from Final Fantasy XII. They vary in length but most of them seem to last roughly 25 seconds. Apologies for all these examples, but it's best that I examplify as much as possible to proper convey what I'm meaning. I suppose these took a torturous amount of time to make, but I don't know jack about animation so I'm incabaple of properly understanding what it's like. Basically, my questions are:
Lemme just clarify that I'm not asking how long the game in question ITSELF would take. I just asking about the animations themselves. Other aspects of the game's development, such as art and bug fixing and whatnot, are irrelevant to my inquiry. Anyways, if you can enlighten on me on the matter, that would be awesome. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Avoid the first game from failing Posted: 18 Jun 2021 04:38 PM PDT A short lesson from my little experience. I used to hear all the time that the first game always fails. But I convinced myself and my coworker that our game was gonna succeed. Of course we failed, we tried to put so much in one game, all without a previous planning, that wasn't gonna work, and it didn't. It helped us to learn a lot of things, but It took us 8 months. All that time "wasted" made us be very very careful to build our second game, a simple but challenging math game for Android. After the lesson we became obsessed with how much perfect the game had to be, and that of course means that we had to put limits in what we can do. It took us 3 months to finish it entirely. So what did we learn: In the planning stage, always try to anticipate all the problems that you will have, and spend all the time necessary to solve them. It really makes the difference. [link] [comments]  | ||
| I want to use several stanza from Dante's Inferno in my game. How do I make it legal? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 03:23 AM PDT I am wondering how to go about it so that it's legit and that I am not stealing or whatnot. any advice would be helpful, thank you. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Tightly coupling game logic to custom engine? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 04:12 PM PDT I've been writing a custom 2D game engine with OpenGL and C++ for the past few weeks for fun. It's been interesting, but developing it got me thinking about code coupling. So far, the way I've been developing new features is by hard-coding something in my game loop, and then gradually breaking it down into smaller chunks as I create classes/methods to handle the feature. It's been working well, but here's something I realized today: My demo game doesn't have, and never will have, circles or collision detection involving circles. This means I'll never need anything more than one vertex array object, one vertex buffer object, one element buffer object, and one shader. Realistically, the most optimal way of setting those up would be to initialize them as soon as my window context is created, bind them, and forget about them until I close the game. But that sounds like tightly coupling the game engine with the game logic. But, isn't that exactly why people make their own engines? To be able to have granular control over their games and optimize them where possible? So, that got me thinking: Is tightly coupling game logic to the engine code considered a bad practice in game development? I understand that in my case, it probably doesn't make a difference, performance-wise, since it's a simple 2D game, but I was still curious about it. Most Googling just results in general discussions, but I'm curious about the game dev aspect, specifically when dealing with custom engines. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 03:42 PM PDT Currently, my gpu can only run Directx 10 but the game i want to play requires Directx 11. Is there any way to force the app to let me play with Directx10? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Why aren't character models and other textures "solid" ? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 03:02 PM PDT My question is mainly about clipping. Why does it still exist? I notice that sometimes in a game, if you get the camera angle just right, you can see through walls, or even look inside of a completely empty character model. In some games whenever you glitch out of the world, theres not really "ground" or floor. Its like the entire world is built on a sheet of paper. I thought about this question playing Next-Gen 2K. 2K boasted about their Impact Engine, but it's almost entirely BS because animations still play too large of a rule in driving to the rim. Your entire arm can still clip through a players body or his arm, which should result in a foul, blocked shot, a bump to throw you off balance, but the game simply didn't register that. So, why aren't the character models or all textures just solid on the inside? Why are they all just empty inside? Wouldn't putting something in the inside of the textures prevent things from clipping through? I'm 99% positive this is easier said than done tho. I'm not a game dev by any means whatsoever, it's just a question that lingered in my mind for a bit. Thought maybe I should ask the guys who know what they're doing. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Light Culling for Procedurally Generated Scenes in Unity Posted: 18 Jun 2021 07:18 AM PDT NOTE: This is a copy of the post "Light Culling for Procedurally Generated Scenes in Unity" from the Doors & Corners Devlog. In this post, I discuss how I implemented a custom real-time light culling system in Unity for my game, Doors & Corners. This was critical to my game because I made the decision that, while I wanted to use a very simple low-poly art style, I also wanted to use a relatively advanced lighting setup. Specifically, I wanted every light to be a shadowcaster. This approach creates dynamic scenes with lots of shadows, but it can also quickly cripple a game's performance. In Unity, one way to reduce the performance impact of shadowcasters is to use the lightmapper to bake shadow data for static objects in a scene. The lights in the scene can then be configured to use mixed-mode lighting, which allows them to use the baked data for rendering static objects and limits real-time rendering of shadows to dynamic objects only. Unfortunately, this wasn't an option for Doors & Corners because it generates level data at runtime. Since Unity's built-in lightmapper processes scenes at edit time, this ruled out using it to bake the lighting data. As a result, every light had to be configured to real-time only mode. I could also have chosen to implement a custom lightmapper to bake the lighting data at runtime as part of the level generation, but this wasn't a technical challenge that I wanted to take on. A typical level in Doors & Corners uses a couple hundred lights to illuminate the rooms. Additionally, every projectile fired has a light attached to it, so a firefight between characters can add one to two dozen additional lights to a scene. With each of these configured as real-time shadowcasters, the average frame time was reduced to 33ms (30 FPS). My development box is far from top end in 2021 (i7-6700K, 32GB RAM, GTX 1080 8GB), but it is also well above my target min-spec machine, so dramatic performance improvements would be required. The easiest solution to this problem would be to use Unity's built-in occlusion culling feature, which prevents objects that aren't visible to the camera from being rendered. Unfortunately, just like with the lightmapper, this works by baking data for scenes at edit time, which means it also can't be used in games that have real-time procedurally generated scenes. To achieve the required performance, I was going to need to implement a custom culling system to stop lights that weren't visible from being rendered. Initial Implementation: Distance-based cullingMy initial approach to the culling system was to use the simplest possible implementation. The system just looped over every light in the scene and if the distance to the camera was greater than the culling distance, then the light was turned off. Otherwise, the light was turned on. The culling distance was set to the maximum possible size of a room on the level. This approach delivered reasonably good results. The average frame time improved to around 16ms (60 FPS). It also didn't take very long to implement – it doesn't get much easier than looping over all the lights in a scene and checking their distance to the camera. However, this approach had a couple of downsides. First, the results weren't always correct. There were some cases where you could see into a room where some of the lights were beyond the culling distance. This would result in these lights suddenly popping on as the camera moved closer to them. This didn't happen very often, most rooms were much smaller than the culling distance so the lights in adjacent rooms would still be on, but if there was a really long room or if several open doors all lined up then you would see it. Not ideal. The second, more important problem was that the performance still wasn't where it needed to be. If it was taking an average of 16ms to process a frame on my machine, then (a) this didn't leave any room in the frame budget for other features and (b) my machine wasn't meant to represent the minimum specs for the game, which meant performance on a min-spec machine would fall well below 60 FPS. The root cause of these problems was that "distance to the camera" wasn't a good heuristic for whether a light should be rendered in a scene. It allowed lights to be rendered that were near the camera but couldn't be seen because they were behind a closed door in another room. At the same time, it wouldn't render a light that was located in a room visible through an open door but beyond the culling distance. I needed a better approach for determining which lights should be rendered and which shouldn't. Improved Implementation: Room-based CullingThere are many different techniques for occlusion culling. Some are rather simple, while others are incredibly complex. Some only handle static objects, while others support dynamic ones. Some only work well with confined scenes, while others work well with any type of scene structure. I was looking for a method that would be relatively quick to implement but would still yield solid results. I knew that portal rendering was a technique that would work well for Doors & Corners. The lights were mostly static and the levels were composed of a series of generally small rooms connected by doors. Additionally, it was a relatively simple technique to implement. However, as I began to think more about the specific details of Doors & Corners, I realized that it had some constraints which allowed me to implement an even simpler and more performant solution. These constraints were:
Traversing the graph was fast because of the nature of the data. Most doors were closed most of the time, so the search terminated very quickly. The culling test was fast because it was just checking whether a value was present in a hashset. Furthermore, for objects that were static, it only needed to calculate which room they were in once, when the level was generated. Dynamic objects were supported by this solution because their room could quickly be determined using only their worldspace position, and this calculation was cheap enough to do every frame. ResultsUsing the new room-graph based culling system, the frame time had improved to 10ms (100 FPS). This represented a 69.7% reduction in frame time over the implementation without culling. This improvement was sufficient for me to be comfortable with the performance implications for lower-spec machines. The culling solution itself is straightforward to implement, handles both static and dynamic objects, and is always correct (i.e., it will never cull an object that should be visible). ConclusionMy main takeaway from this effort was that it underscored the importance of analyzing the specific data and constraints of a game when building custom solutions for features in it, as these may create opportunities to use approaches which may be easier to implement or be more performant than standard, well-known techniques. While my approach to culling is not particularly sophisticated and is not a generally applicable solution, it leverages the unique constraints of Doors & Corners to provide a solution that strikes the right balance between ease of implementation and performance. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Is there a gamedev job that is half designing and half programming? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 07:02 AM PDT | ||
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 02:33 PM PDT Hey everyone, so as the title says, I'm having some trouble with png sequences. The animation that plays doesn't work as intended as the format cuts off some parts of the image - especially on ios devices. I'm guessing this is something to do with caching parts of the image, but I'm not sure how to workaround this. Example: I have this png sequence where some sunglasses have a glint running across it. On android and web the animation plays fine and the sunglasses are visible the whole time. On ios the animation only plays the actual moving glint part of the sunglasses and doesn't show the entire sunglasses for the whole animation. I found this website which breaks down the png sequence frame by frame. I'm wondering if there's some way to alter the values stored in the png format to display the whole image the whole time and not only the cropped moving parts? Or maybe there's a better way of rendering the frames in the first place? I made this originally in photoshop, maybe there's a better tool... This is for an app made in react and the png sequence is being displayed via <img> tag. If anyone knows, then please let me know. Thanks! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Full-time dev by day, indie dev by night: Is it possible? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 08:14 AM PDT I wanted to learn how to program my own games, so when it came time for college I began pursuing a degree in computer science. Here I am 4 years later with another 2 to go before I can actually get my degree due to transferring schools, and I have begun to question whether I want to see this through to the end. I want to make my own creations; that goal has not changed a bit. I initially thought that the best way to achieve this goal would be to work a game/software development job for a large company by day and then come home to work on my own projects, with the job experience and income stability supporting the progression of my personal work. Now, after burning out multiple times trying to complete personal projects alongside programming assignments for school, the idea of doing this for the rest of my life no longer appeals to me. I almost feel like I should have pursued a different career entirely - one that would require a different set of skills than programming does - so that I have energy to do both paid and personal work every day. This is obviously my own decision to figure out, but I wanted to get others' perspectives on situations like this. Have you successfully handled both a full-time game/software development job alongside indie development projects, or did you pursue a different career for income? What helped or hindered your experiences? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Have you ever wanted to create a solar system with Unity Physics? Here is how!! Posted: 18 Jun 2021 08:13 AM PDT
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| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 10:19 AM PDT Well, from what I've heard about ray tracing, it makes a ray for every pixel on the screen, so in a 1920x1080 gridded environment we would have 2 million rays. But wouldn't there be a way to group this 1920x1080 screen in which every 4 pixels would be fired, or would you reduce the resolution of the image that would generate the rays? I thought about it for reflections, as a 960x540 image is 500,000 pixels, 4 times less than 1080p, and in the case of reflections people wouldn't notice much of a difference and still have realistic reflections. is this a bad idea? [link] [comments]  | ||
| I can write on a list anyone from USA to hear a pitch for my game. Who should I choose? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 07:50 AM PDT Hi My school has given me an opportunity. Thanks to the USA embassy, we are allowed to list several people related to technology development who they might me able to contact for us to show a pitch of our projects to them. We have been told that there are no limits, but it probably wont be possible to contact or establish a zoom meeting with Bill Gates. So, I'm asking for advice on who to write on this list. I'm thinking some well-known game developers like Jeff Kaplan, maybe Cory Barlog and such. Since I'm aspiring to work as a game designner in the future, I want this opportunity to make it count. Who would you call so they can hear your pitch? Thanks! TL;DR: I'm working on a game for a highschool project and I can choose anyone from the usa to hear a pitch about it. Who should I choose? [link] [comments]  |
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