Screenshot Saturday #542 - Diverse Palette |
- Screenshot Saturday #542 - Diverse Palette
- I put together a list of ~10 university game development courses you can take!
- I ran a few ads on social media networks to see what would happen. Data inside!
- So I just got let go from my first job as a game programmer for underperforming. Now what?
- What is an engine problem/limitation?
- Tutorial: Animation blueprint - Unreal Engine 4 + Unreal Engine 5
- So what's up with matchmaking huh?
- Is it easier to get good revenue from steam or mobile games for an indie developers?
- How to handle translucency in tile layers?
- Best program to use for creating voxels, performance wise.
- Getting started
- A question about unreal
- Amount of triangles?
- What are some of the best video courses on game design (not the technical/programming side, but game systems and mechanics)?
- Which is better for narrative design?
- Steam Tag Wizard "Similar Games" are bang on, Store page "More Like This" is all over the place. Any advice?
- Gedel Escape Development Diary. Note №1. Introduction
- Software engineer and Game designer
- How long are your typical notes for games?
- Rust vs C++ for gamedev ?
- How would YOU approach creating avatar the last air bender (ATLA) combat mechanics
- What is your process of finding a composer to hire for your game?
- Is the Master of science program in Game design at Full Sail good or bad?
- How did you learn Unity?
- Any programs to help with rigging?
| Screenshot Saturday #542 - Diverse Palette Posted: 18 Jun 2021 08:11 PM PDT Share your progress since last time in a form of screenshots, animations and videos. Tell us all about your project and make us interested! The hashtag for Twitter is of course #screenshotsaturday. Note: Using url shorteners is discouraged as it may get you caught by Reddit's spam filter. Bonus question: Did you watch any news/trailers from E3? What was your favorite thing that was showcased at the expo? [link] [comments]  | ||
| I put together a list of ~10 university game development courses you can take! Posted: 18 Jun 2021 11:14 PM PDT https://collegecompendium.goldin.io/search?q=game I've spent the last week compiling around ~675 publicly available CS courses from around 20ish colleges. Of those, there are around 10 game dev courses ranging from introductory to advanced, along with some framework/language specific courses! Hopefully you can get some use out of it. :) [link] [comments]  | ||
| I ran a few ads on social media networks to see what would happen. Data inside! Posted: 19 Jun 2021 09:20 AM PDT Hi everyone! First off: I am not a digital marketer. Been working in animation and games for 10+ years, and coming at this as a first time indie developer of my own project. I decided to run a few ads around a demo we premiered this week on Steam. The game is VR, cartoony, and casual focused. I know that market is small, so a lot of this may not apply to you, but I figured I'd share nonetheless. Let's get to it: I had a few good friends let me know that these are way too expensive haha. Some things to note:
Now a friendly reminder again, not a digital marketer. I did pick up an online course to prep for the week and admittedly didn't prune/optimize during the week as I was heavily focused on game development and release. Let's go a little deeper: Facebook - https://imgur.com/a/laCzleC Here I am comparing different ads' placement. When you first start a Facebook ad it recommends automatic placement. This is a terrible idea as you'll go on places that have no high probabilities of a click. Think about it, bored scrolling through your Newsfeed and finding something interesting to click on has a higher probability than say already having clicked an article to read and being intruded upon. I did try the trailer on Facebook video, you'll see that as the 2nd row. That's pretty interesting. Reddit - https://imgur.com/a/MNyUSSW On Reddit I broke it into two segments, Desktop and Mobile (I'll get to that later). Plus I had some time to make a 15 second trailer so I tested that out too. I know they say "not delivering" right now, but I ended up turning off the Desktop group. After a few days it just wasn't gaining any traction. I did ultimately experiment with a different way of setting up the Reddit Desktop ad, there's an option that allows Reddit to extend the audience, but it's unclear what that means, so it is separate experiment. YouTube - https://imgur.com/a/60s6j9c I spent a good few hours combing through YouTubers and made a list of 50 that I felt were the top in VR gaming. There's some hardware folks that I filtered out, as I really wanted that core group of players. Then I broke it down into separate rows to put a video ad on. Honestly I'm just impressed, I didn't think people clicked on YouTube ads, but a good number did. It was a little pricey compared to the other networks, but hopefully some of that flows back to the YouTuber (I don't YT so I'm unsure). Twitter - https://imgur.com/a/xICSvWr Twitter was a bit of a mess. I didn't segment the data properly so, I have a jumble of images and video all grouped into one big lump of an Ad campaign. So this one jumble will have to suffice. Honestly I'm just disappointed. As an artist and developer, we put a lot of love into Twitter. It's simplicity is just great compared to all the other networks. But as an indie developer, it's just not worth your dollars to spend on, at least in my limited opinion. Did any of this lead to Wishlists?! Honestly I'm not sure. While we have gotten wishlists, how much of that can be attributed to the Livestream we did yesterday, or the Steam event as a whole? Steam does have a UTM breakdown lists that can shed light into a few things: There's a few good take aways here. First, Reddit out of the gate is just worth more for your time and money. Second, Twitter did place third but boy was it expensive (as noted above) for those clicks. Compared to a YouTube ad, it may be worth more of your time and money to focus on YouTube. I was even more surprised that Facebook brought out so many clicks honestly. I didn't think it would but it definitely did. Did I tell you I'm not a digital marketer? But you can learn to be one! This was my first foray into this world and I learned a lot. While I did spend just over 500 on the experience, I think understanding more about who clicks and where is really important. For example, one correlation I found is that women over 25 across the board clicked way more on average than men. Or that Korea actually was the second country behind the US in terms of visits, Germany third. We're not localized so that baffles me even more 😅 Going forward I'll be tweaking the messaging, cutting the expensive ads sooner, and putting a little more focused on Reddit, and I have to admit either Facebook or YouTube as I'm impressed by both. Twitter on the other hand, I just can't get it to work. I didn't try Instagram (though it's owned by Facebook), but just on a regular social media basis, it has dismal engagement. Maybe I'm just not a good Instagrammer... I hope this helped someone out there in r/gamedev! I've learned a lot being part of this community and wanted to give something back. I welcome any feedback or thoughts. I'm sure what I did was completely wrong in the eyes of a seasoned marketer, but we all have to start somewhere. :) [link] [comments]  | ||
| So I just got let go from my first job as a game programmer for underperforming. Now what? Posted: 19 Jun 2021 05:43 AM PDT Hello, fellow game devs! As the title says, I've been recently let go from my job as a game programmer, and would like some advice on how to move forward. More precisely, I was hired by Ubisoft as an online programmer through a sort of programming bootcamp (they called it the Coding Campus, don't think they've had another edition due to COVID), and the end of the probationary period, they said they weren't pleased with my performance. They extended my probation by 3 months and moved me to the gameplay team (really more UI), but I again underperformed and was finally let go. Now I'm not certain what to do. As far as I can see, I have the following options:
Any advice is appreciated. In case this information is necessary, I went to university in Romania, and am currently living in Newcastle, UK, due to the aforementioned Ubisoft job. [link] [comments]  | ||
| What is an engine problem/limitation? Posted: 19 Jun 2021 06:22 AM PDT Hey, sorry if this is the wrong sub to post this. I'm not versed in any sort of game dev but I play a lot of games, and I often hear people say stuff like 'it's an engine problem' or an 'engine limitation', particularly when someone suggests upgrading a game system or something similar. It being an engine problem/limitation seems to imply that it's very hard or impossible to implement a change (which often sounds like a simple change). What does that term mean, and why does it make it much harder to implement than someone on the outside would expect? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Tutorial: Animation blueprint - Unreal Engine 4 + Unreal Engine 5 Posted: 19 Jun 2021 09:17 AM PDT
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| So what's up with matchmaking huh? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 05:10 PM PDT I'm doing a paper on matchmaking in online games, specifically why it seems to be such a widespread problem. I'm certain you've heard people complaining that the matchmaking in X game is "broken". From what I can tell that means the players get matched with people who are significantly more/less skilled than themselves, leading to unfair and unfun gameplay. What kinds of complaints have you heard? What kinds of matchmaking systems exist? How do they differ? Have you ever written your own? Have you heard of a game that dramatically improved it's matchmaking system? Anywhere I can read up on that? I really just want to discuss the topic with y'all. It's interesting and, I mean, I've got a paper to write about this too. Thoughts? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Is it easier to get good revenue from steam or mobile games for an indie developers? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 09:29 PM PDT It seems that it's potentially easy to publish and implement monetisation on mobile games, as you can add advertising, which you can't on steam, besides selling the game or in-app purchases. Also, mobile games are more friendly to casual gamers which may represent a big amount if the market. Nevertheless, many indie developers are publishing games on steam only, even though many game engines allow quite easily to make a game multi-platform with little extra effort with respect developing it for a single platform (e.g. steam). Personally, I have published some android games as hobbyist so I partly know the process to make mobile games. I'm wondering if there are 'hidden' advantages in doing it for steam only. [link] [comments]  | ||
| How to handle translucency in tile layers? Posted: 19 Jun 2021 12:05 PM PDT I have been trying to render tilemaps but I am having trouble figuring out how to handle all the different methods of auto-tiling. In particular, I would like to avoid calculating and rendering every layer. However, there are a couple of issues. Given a 2D Array some auto-tile methods need to be checked on both tiles that do and don't match while others only need to be checked on tiles that do need to be matched. With Wang 2 Edge tile matching the cell at the bottom left will give a non zero tilemask despite have a zero value in the cell the tile will cover. In Orthogonal Tile matching only the center cell will give a non-zero tilemask. However, translucency is messing things up because a cell that would not normally be seen because of layering does need to be rendered because the layering doesn't actually obscure it. How can I fix the issue evident in these examples? --EDIT-- I have a set of Tiling strategies: None - Used for the water Wang2C - used for the grass Orthogonal - used for the 'walls' OrthogonalPlus - Used for the 'tops' I also have Blob and all versions in Exact... the difference being exact matches only the exact terrain value while the non-exact version just needs to have a lesser value. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Best program to use for creating voxels, performance wise. Posted: 19 Jun 2021 08:03 AM PDT Hi there, I have started making a voxel-based game in unity using MagicaVoxel to create the voxels. However I heard this program is not very good on performance for your game. I don't know to what extent this is true but if I can make my game more optimized I want to strive for it. So does anyone know a program for creating voxels which is properly optimized. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 19 Jun 2021 11:24 AM PDT To be clear I am not asking to hire anyone. I have ideas for many games, as most probably do, but have not been able to pick up on programming/art skills to make these games myself. Also the scope of these games are too large to do myself even if I learned. So my question is, has anyone here been successful in gathering other talented people to develop a game, without knowing any major skills themselves? Did you learn on the way? I know I should start smaller, I know I should just start learning. If that's your answer then I'm not asking you. I read the FAQ If this kind of question doesn't belong here I'll remove it. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 19 Jun 2021 11:13 AM PDT Hello, my issue is the following- I'm currently experimenting in Unity. doing some very simple games following a course.. meanwhile I find myself very intrigued with Unreal... it all looks better (graphics wise , id like to make quite a good looking game ) and the bp system is also quite attractive . Now, how does it really differ ? anyone who is mainly using Unreal and used unity before and cares to say why he/she moved? Thanks [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 19 Jun 2021 11:06 AM PDT Is 200+ triangles in low poly hand gun asset for unity mobile 3D too much or not? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 19 Jun 2021 03:20 AM PDT I'm already pretty okay at programming and making the games from the technical perspective, and now I want to really understand the game design. Most courses I see are focused on the technical side, creating specific games with such and such engine or technology. What I want to learn is how to invent new games that are original and fun to play. Ideally - as an indie developer (as opposed to an employee at AAA studio, but I guess either one would be helpful). Do you know if there are any good learning resources covering that? Ideally, video courses? (I already know about the books like "Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses", "Level Up" by Scott Rogers, "A Theory of Fun", and "Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design".) [link] [comments]  | ||
| Which is better for narrative design? Posted: 19 Jun 2021 10:45 AM PDT Hi all. I know Ren'Py includes some coding, and since it's for visual novels, it allows to add the art. Should I use Twine, which seems to focus 100% on the writing, or ren'py since it has a combination of several components ( and I think people are more willing to check your work if it has art instead of simply texts) ? Or another one that I haven't found yet which is better than those two? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 19 Jun 2021 04:07 AM PDT I'm struggling to get the Steam store page to show anything sensible in the "More Like This" section. I've been through the Tag Wizard on the backend, and the selection it shows at the end is exactly the kind of thing I'm after (puzzle games like Spacechem, Opus Magnum, etc), but the Store page is stuck showing everything from Mechwarrior 5 to Dorfromantik. The game isn't released yet, but this would suggest that Steam doesn't really know who to show the game to for wishlisting. Are there any other levers I can pull to get "More Like This" showing something useful? Tag Wizard vs Store Page: https://imgur.com/a/vBIpK3H Game store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1248420/Hexahedra/ [link] [comments]  | ||
| Gedel Escape Development Diary. Note №1. Introduction Posted: 19 Jun 2021 09:12 AM PDT 0. AcquaintanceHello everyone! My name is Alexander and I am developing a game called Gedel Escape (and also the author of an already released game in the Play Market called Color Chips). By my main profession and education, I am a history and social science teacher in an ordinary city school, I am 30 years old and I decided to leave pedagogy, change my field of activity and start developing games. I study game development from articles and tutorials on Youtube. The article will be divided into several sections. Inside each of them there is a detailed description, a video demonstration of what was said and also an analysis of working and not very mechanics. In general, you can finish the introductory speech and move on to the plot. 1. Plot and genreThe game is positioned as a space survival game with resource manager elements and riddles. It is naturally single-user, which means there is a plot. I plan two versions of the endings (because I simply won't take out more with my experience). The player will play the role of Dominic Stewart, a space traveler who, in search of his father, explores the depths of the cosmos. During the next trip, Dominic's ship falls into a wormhole and finds itself in an unknown system. There he crashes on the planet Gedel. After the crash, Dominic is faced with the main task: to survive and get out of the planet. As the task is completed, the mysteries of the planet Gödel will open up to the player and it will become clear what its secret is. 2. Core GameplayThe game loop is based on the fact that Gödel is an unusual planet. At the end of its planetary day, time rolls back. A kind of groundhog day. The beginning of a new day affects the main character, reducing his health and water indicators, the collected resources that are not in special cells of the inventory disappear, as well as created items. The main goal of such a mechanism is to constantly put the player in front of a choice in collecting the required amount of resources for survival and the elapsing time when everything that you have collected (or rather, practically everything) will disappear. 3. EnvironmentPlanet Gedel (code: YXY-37B) is a small mature planet, seen as a dark ball, close to a star. The mass of a celestial body is 4.3 times less than that of the earth, the planet makes a complete revolution around the star in 53 days, hours per day: 12. Satellites of the planet: 2 (Antenatus and Frater). The planet is a world of "terrestrial" type, but with an atmosphere consisting mainly of carbon dioxide. The surface of the planet has a mountainous topography and moderate geological activity. The atmosphere is of limited breathability. There is no life here, although it may have existed before. There are three biomes on the planet: biological Vital (covered with vegetation, rivers), Arctic Frigus (covered with ice), desert More (covered with sand, has no sources of moisture). Vital and Moret are located symmetrically on two sides of the planet, perhaps earlier they were part of the same continent, but due to the cataclysm they were separated by centrifugal force. Frigus is at the planet's south pole. The game begins on the mainland Vital, where Dominic's ship falls. Due to the peculiarities of the planet, the space around has undergone distortion (I call it a gravikub) and there are portals for traveling between parts of the continent. There are three parts in total - river, field and mountain. The old version of the portals is shown here. They look much better now. Dominik is far from the first to be on the planet Gödel. Before him there had been another space expedition, much better prepared. This, in the end, did not save her from the harsh world of the planet, but it allowed her to discover a lot of new things. Just the same portals were created by members of that same expedition for ease of movement. Each of the parts of the Vital continent is a separate scene in Unity, a trigger is configured on the portal, upon interaction with which the corresponding scene is loaded. All parts of the mainland are a regular Terrain tool, but I want to do a fully procedural terrain generation so that with each new day the environment changes. In part, such a generation was created for the place where the player starts from - there are procedurally placed trees, stones, etc. But this is done clumsily, because you need to try something new. The main problem I faced during the generation was the need to place trees in areas with different heights. As you can see from the previous videos, trees and other environmental elements also looked sparse because they were created by me in Blender. After my next paycheck, I bought an asset with ready-made and normally configured landscape objects, and as a result, everything looks much, much better. Would you agree which looks better? For the demo version (about it a little below), I want to make a fully working world of the Vital mainland with all tasks and activities. Therefore, the design of other continents and parts of the Vital has not yet touched upon. 4. Inventory and game itemsThe location for storing resources and game items has undergone two iterations. First, I found an extremely large inventory development playlist on Youtube and started doing what is shown there. There were such new things for me as scriptable objects, creating my own classes, etc. But as a result, the author of the channel chose to switch from the inventory to other mechanics and what I wanted to get in the end did not work out. Therefore, I went in search again and found a video already from a Russian author who made inventory in about the same way (classes, Scriptable Objects), but somehow simpler. As a result.. After that it was necessary to create game objects (items). He also took the game resources necessary for crafting and survival there. The following came out: The main resources: vital (vital energy, that which feeds the cells of all living organisms), silicon (contained in stones and other stone rocks, the main resource for the production of various technical devices), carbon (used in combination with silicon for the production of semiconductors and derivatives on their basis)
For each type of item, a separate class was created and the main characteristics were indicated. Then I started to create 3D objects for the inventory. But since I'm a lousy modeler, after several unsuccessful attempts I just started downloading ready-made models under a free license. This is how the objects associated with the contents of the inventory look like According to the idea, there will be 20 slots in the inventory, five of which will be protected from planetary changes. It turns out that the resources and items that are there will not disappear. It will be possible to get the necessary tools and food using crafting. The schemes for obtaining will be opened immediately, you just need to have the required amount of resources on hand (see the text above). The collection of vital, silicon and carbon is only possible with a special tool called the Reaper. The player will receive it after solving the first riddle and completing the first micro-task at the beginning of the game. The Reaper model was also assembled from ready-made models. And only recently I pre-configured it to work. At first I made the icons for the item through Photoshop, and then a novice designer got in touch and agreed to draw just like that. The result is much better than it was. Inventory looks much better than before 5. Character controlThis is a separate story, and therefore brought it to the point. It was originally planned that the game will be from a top view, so the movement was planned to be carried out by mouse clicks. After some time, I decided that the usual control through WASD was better and changed the character control script. And then the torment began with the position and movement of the camera, etc. In general, I wanted everything to work as it does in most games in a third-person view. And as a result, only recently I sort of got to what I like and suit. A cursor has appeared in the game, which changes when the inventory appears, and you can also direct the work of the Reaper with the cursor. I set up the basic mechanisms of camera movement using an extension for Unity called Cinemachine, although it did not work out the first time. What else needs to be done is running. I do not plan to do jumps, since there are no game mechanics and elements for them. 6. ConclusionThe game is scheduled for release in the fall of 2021. There is a page for the game on Steam, but it needs to be very seriously configured (I will leave the link to the page in the comments below). I will talk about the development progress on Reddit, so you can follow me to stay tuned. Hope you enjoyed the article and the game. Thanks for attention! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Software engineer and Game designer Posted: 19 Jun 2021 09:06 AM PDT Hi. I'm a first-year student and currently studying computing and software system in unimelb but since I was a kid, I have always wanted to work in game development. Can a software engineer work as a game designer or should I change the program and learn more in detail about game design? [link] [comments]  | ||
| How long are your typical notes for games? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 11:12 PM PDT So when you're drafting up new ideas and such, for those using something like a notepad or word, how many pages do you tend to have for the basics and what's the overall complexity of the project? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 19 Jun 2021 08:06 AM PDT The title is self explanatory. I'll add in a few details that might help :
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| How would YOU approach creating avatar the last air bender (ATLA) combat mechanics Posted: 18 Jun 2021 08:55 PM PDT Just a thought I had while looking at Elca gaming's fan game, how you would tackle such a complex fighting mechanic while keeping it similar to the show. what are your guy's thoughts? and how would you implement it. [link] [comments]  | ||
| What is your process of finding a composer to hire for your game? Posted: 19 Jun 2021 07:19 AM PDT I'm just curious how indie developers go about finding a composer. Do you go with someone you know? Do you search the internet for someone cheap? Do you go through peoples portfolios until you find someone thats a good fit (if so how do you conduct your search?) Or you already have someone in mind from the start? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Is the Master of science program in Game design at Full Sail good or bad? Posted: 19 Jun 2021 05:09 AM PDT I'm not talking about the online version of this course. I'm talking about the offline on campus version. Most of the reviews that I've looked at are about the online version. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 18 Jun 2021 08:54 PM PDT I know how to add things to a scene but that's it. Every youtube video is no longer works because its outdated or because you have to change some settings in the coding software that the video doesnt explain. Is there any free and current ways to learn to program with Unity [link] [comments]  | ||
| Any programs to help with rigging? Posted: 18 Jun 2021 04:57 PM PDT I would like to rig my models I made. I am making pretty simple models and I tried rigging them, but eh, it didn't go right, so I was wondering if there were any programs to help me rig a model [link] [comments]  |
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