Screenshot Saturday #543 - Visual Clarity |
- Screenshot Saturday #543 - Visual Clarity
- I wanted to make a simple window with shutters, but then thought I could turn it into a cool neon billboard instead! Here’s how.
- My tips for dealing with streamers: assume most of them are illiterate and can't read instructions
- How is this rig, anything I need to change/adjust?
- The more I work on my own games, the less I'm interested in playing someone's games
- One Year Into Early Access for Golden Light! Let's share some numbers! AMA
- Game Performance: Screen or Scene?
- Where can I promote my new game? What are the best subreddits to use to promote a game?
- Does anyone have any rough numbers for the funding amount of the average indie publisher deal?
- Here's 32+ Free Animated RPG Characters!
- Using the name of a real world gun in your videogame
- I wanted to improve the sense of speed in the game. Does it feel more exciting? How could it be improved?
- hep with gado
- VR enthusiasts needed for a little university experiment (15-20 minutes)
- I'm a backend amateur. What's an easy but scalable data solution for my quiz game?
- Travis Has Coffee With Mandalore: How Gamedevs Can Build Relationships With YouTubers. Link in the Comments.
- Free Topdown Tileset!
- Help! I overscoped again.
- Unity shader to fix pixel art jitter / wobble
- Would appreciate some advice/experience on some specific technical problems
- Need help
- Where should I handle physics, controls, etc?
- How to architect simple microservices for a Phaser web-based game
- Marketing Question ?
- What would you have changed about your first game's launch?
| Screenshot Saturday #543 - Visual Clarity Posted: 25 Jun 2021 11:33 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. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 26 Jun 2021 04:58 AM PDT
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| My tips for dealing with streamers: assume most of them are illiterate and can't read instructions Posted: 26 Jun 2021 04:55 AM PDT I just spent $4000+ on streamers to play my game during the Steam summer sale. I hired them through a popular stream-sponsoring service. I am not going to mention the name of the service until I see if they refund me for some of these streams; until then I don't know how I'm going to review the service overall. So far about half of the streamers have submitted their videos and I have to say I am not happy. This was my first time paying for streams. My experience before now was with contacting streamers directly. I would send free keys to small-time streamers and I was very happy with the results. I focused on streamers who played similar kinds of games and small streamers who were probably flattered that someone reached out to them. Free streamers have done wonders for my game's visibility and they are a pleasure to work with. Later I paid a small fee ($60) to Woovit to have my game sent to streamers for one month. Woovit used to allow you to contact streamers for free, but the streamers ended up getting swamped with offers from crap games. I was happy with the results from Woovit and I know that a few streamers brought in revenue many times more than what I paid to Woovit. I thought I would get similar results through sponsored streams, and I had heard that you're supposed to spend half of your budget on marketing. But so far I can't say that I recommend paying for streamers. Maybe some of the coming streams will change my mind, but so far cost per click is not worthwhile and I probably would have made just as much money without the paid streams. With all that said, here are the lessons I've learned. Hopefully you can avoid the mistakes I made. Wait a few days after you launch your campaign before picking your streamers. I normally respond to streamer requests immediately and I almost always approve them. I only refuse a key if someone is an obvious scammer. When I started my campaign, I got a lot of offers right away and I excitedly started approving them. Don't do that. When you offer money to people to stream your game, you will get plenty of offers. I know it's exciting to see that people are willing to promote your game. But don't approve any of them immediately. Wait a few days for more offers to come in. Then look over all of the offers and pick just the best ones. Pick streamers who first of all, stream in the language your game is in. That Polish or Ukranian streamer with a million subscribers looks tempting, but how much of his audience is your audience? Next look at streamers whose style matches what you want. (Are they a good fit for your genre? Do they have a lot of banter? Is that what you want?) Next look at streamers within your price range and figure out who is most likely to get you the most views per dollar spent. Negotiate. I just approved everyone's proposed coverage. If I could do this again, I think I would negotiate. Detailed instructions don't mean jack to most streamers. I assumed that streamers would be a very professional bunch. I assumed that they would read the requirements before making an offer. And I figured that for sure they would read the requirements before delivering. And well, some of of them do, and some of them don't. Don't assume that everyone read your requirements. A lot of streamers make money on volume and they just want to download your game, play it for 60 minutes on Twitch, collect payment, and go on to the next game. I told everyone to post their streams on or after 24 June and to mention that my game was 25% off. A few of them posted their streams before then, and didn't mention the sale. I told everyone to play the game before the stream to familiarize themselves with the controls. And some of them obviously didn't do that, and they skipped the tutorials, and ran straight into the first fight not having any idea what to do, and they spent 30 minutes+ in a battle that should have taken 2 minutes, and they only got through the battle because they realized they could end turn, and the enemy would come to them, and their own soldiers could counterattack. Make your requirements easy to read and in bullet-point format. Streamers are not always the most intelligent people you will deal with. If you have requirements for them, make those requirements as easy to read as possible. And be sure you threaten those morons and say very clearly that you will reject their submissions if they do not follow directions. Ever hear the legend of Van Halen and the bowl of M&Ms? Any time classic rock band Van Halen played a concert anywhere, they had a requirement in their contract that the venue would place a bowl in the dressing room, and fill it with M&Ms with all the brown M&Ms removed. And if the M&Ms weren't backstage, or had any brown M&Ms, Van Halen reserved the right to cancel the concert right then and there. Some people thought Van Halen were being primadonnas and they could get away with making stupid demands. What they were actually doing was checking to see if anyone read the contract. You might consider putting an M&M clause in your requirements. Make it something simple, like sending you an email, or something like that, to make sure you know who read the requirements. And in your requirements tell the streamers that you reserve the right to reject their videos if they did not email you. Get them to confirm that they understand the instructions. If you want them to stream your game in Spanish, get them to confirm by sending you a screenshot of the main menu in Spanish. If you want them to play the game off-stream to a certain point in order to learn the controls, then get them to confirm by sending you a screenshot of their character at that point in the game, or get them to confirm that they know the controls by telling you which controls move the camera or whatever. Tell them that if the plane is going down in flames, eject. If they can't deliver a video that portrays your game positively, then they shouldn't deliver a video at all. I would have much rather had some of these streamers cut the stream early and try again later--or not at all--than struggle through and give their viewers a bad impression of my game. If you have a simple game that can be played by anyone with half a brain cell, great. Otherwise, you have to be a taskmaster. I understand now why big-budget games have full-time positions just for managing streamers. Don't just assume that you've hired a professional and that everything will turn out right. You have to follow up and make sure that they've delivered what you wanted. And watch for key points in your game and make sure the streamers handled it. I made the mistake of watching the first half of a video, approving it, and then finding out that right after that, the idiot streamer completely went off the rails. So far, no effect on sales and I am not happy with how much I paid. Some of the streamers actually did a great job and I'm very happy with their videos. But despite how good some of the streams were, they do not appear to have improved my sales. Most of my sales for the last two days have been wishlist conversions. For the videos submitted so far, I have paid $1.07 per click on YouTube and $2.20 per click on Twitch. Steam's UTM analytics show that I have not made any sales or even any wishlists from tracked visits originating from my paid streams. So far mostly the smaller streamers have submitted their coverage. I have some big streamers who haven't delivered yet and they might be able to turn things around, but I'm not hopeful. I'll post an update later if anything changes. [link] [comments]  | ||
| How is this rig, anything I need to change/adjust? Posted: 26 Jun 2021 02:42 PM PDT Just had my character rigged for a game (unreal), how does it look, anything glaringly bad that I need to change (was thinking the hair needs to be more detailed) [link] [comments]  | ||
| The more I work on my own games, the less I'm interested in playing someone's games Posted: 26 Jun 2021 04:05 PM PDT Did you notice a similar thing in your life? It's the time of sales now. I look through my wishlists, I have games that I planned to play, but every time I'm about to buy something, I think: would I rather spend 1 hour playing someone's game or work on my own game? And the answer is universally: my game. Sometimes I even think that I won't enjoy playing anything until I release a successful game myself... [link] [comments]  | ||
| One Year Into Early Access for Golden Light! Let's share some numbers! AMA Posted: 26 Jun 2021 07:37 AM PDT Hello everyone! In the beginning of 2020, when Covid kicked in, me and my good friend decided that it's time for us to make our own big and complete game, something we wouldn't be ashamed of selling for the first time in our lives. With prior experience in gamedev industry for both of us, as well as a history of small games developed for the fun of it on our own, as well as unfortunate loss of job for my friend - we've joined forces under the name of Mr. Pink and started developing a game that will further become Golden Light. A little bit about Golden Light - it's a first person horror rogueli(T/K)e with dark comedy, a meat infested journey to the bottom of The Gut inspired by such games as King's Field, Shadow Tower, Silent Hill, Resident Evil 7, The Binding of Isaac and Rogue, which is a strange mix i agree. In our game the premise is very simple, you start on a flowery field with your girlfriend that gets yoinked into a flesh hole by a giant meat hand. At that moment the goal should be pretty straightforward. You jump into that hole and find yourself in an oldfashioned enviroment, greeted by a cold statue of your girl. From now on you need to descend into The Gut to find her (or She, as we call her in the game). Floor by floor you walk around procedurally generated enviroments, killing meaty enemies, eating your weapons, throwing eraserhead babies at walls, killing (or not) bosses and collecting run upgrades with names like "Nose with Teeth", "Bum with a Boom" or "Golden Brain". There is much more to explain, but i'd rather keep this post about numbers. So, development has started in January 2020, and after around 6 months we've decided that we're ready to launch an early access for the game for a price of 12.99$. EA Release made us rather down, with some minor marketing through keymailer and our social media pages (as well as dozens of emails to a variety of YouTubers), plus a steam summer festival - upon launch we had around 12k wishlists (the steam page was created somewhen in March 2020), and that amount along an organic traffic converted into 1.5k copies sold in the first week. The reason we were down about it is a general formula found somewhere on the internet (not one source for sure), that Life Time copies sold equals around: First week sales x 5 = result. While in the beginning we've started only together, a month later around 3-4 people joined us to aid the development, and they stayed with us until Early Access launch with 1 or 2 people continuing with some work from time to time, so that 1.5k copies would go basically to split the revenue and pay our helpers and ourselves for a 6 month of work. Not much to call home about, but our dedication didn't die and we actively continued as fierce as before. Update to update we've improved the game, adding new content regularly and fixing stuff. While initially the game was purely singleplayer and wasn't really planned with any multiplayer features - the demand of our community clearly showed and in November 2020 we've started to make an online Co-op gamemode. That would release in december 2020 and make December 2020/January 2021 two of our most succesfull months up to date. In the span of these months, thanks to some attention to Co-op as well as quite a few videos from great JFJ andNeocranium (who streamed and played the game intensively in the span of one week, which also resulted in a few videos) and rather big Jim Sterling video - we made 14.495 sales. A few more major updates later and addition of a deathmatch gamemode (something like prophunt battle royale) today we stand here (including numbers from current steam summer sale): Lifetime steam units: 25.497 Lifetime steam net revenue: around 220k $ Current wishlists: 38.721 On steam we have a whopping 97% positive rating, and while that is great and we're very happy with that - if you consider how strange/weird/hard our game is - it may or may not affected our refund % which is around 9.8% (i consider that's quite high), because while the game can be very good for our target audience - people around that see a somewhat high rating find themselves buying the game and not dig the overall schizophrenic mood (or gameplay, haha). Right now we have 715 steam reviews and that would leave us with 35.66 copies sold per review ratio. Hope these numbers help someone to consider/analyze their potential or correct their expectations, while we continue to develop the game for PC and plan to come out of Early Access in the end of this summer, as well as port the game to Nintendo Switch someday after that. And of course, ASK ME ANYTHING! I'd be glad to answer any of your questions. The game is currently 30% off on steam for Steam Summer Sale, so if mods will let me - i'll leave a link in the comments. TL;DR We've sold 25k copies in the span of almost one year, which resulted in 224k$ net revenue, with only 1.5k copies sold in the span of first week upon Early Access launch. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Game Performance: Screen or Scene? Posted: 26 Jun 2021 04:11 PM PDT For example - if a device can handle a max number of 1 million polygons, are we talking about how many polygons are visible on the screen or how many exist in the entire scene? Is it ok, generally speaking to have a billion polygons in the scene as long as the camera is only viewing a few hundred thousand of them at a time? I know polycount isn't the only factor - just curious about screen or scene when talking performance. Cheers. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Where can I promote my new game? What are the best subreddits to use to promote a game? Posted: 26 Jun 2021 12:15 PM PDT Hi! I'm currently working on a platform game about zombies, it has a free demo and are available the pre-orders on itch.io, with this features where should I make a post about it to get more feedbacks, interaction with the players, people that maybe try the demo and even people that is interested in support the development? (Subreddits, Discord groups, Facebook groups, forums, communities in general, etc...) Thank you in advance! [link] [comments]  | ||
| Does anyone have any rough numbers for the funding amount of the average indie publisher deal? Posted: 26 Jun 2021 01:38 PM PDT I know it's impossible to seperate from all the particulars. But it would be good to have some sort of idea of what is reasonable to ask for. £5000, £30,000, £100,000, £200,000 etc? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Here's 32+ Free Animated RPG Characters! Posted: 26 Jun 2021 01:37 AM PDT
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| Using the name of a real world gun in your videogame Posted: 26 Jun 2021 10:33 AM PDT There is another thread about it but it's archived. And the answers are contradictory. I want to know to what lenght can you add a gun in your game, put the real name of it and have no legal issues? And if you do have legal issues, what would them be (Cease&Desist, or outright sue you?). Does the game being free discards the problem or should you still be careful? Also, does the law that determines what can and can't be done have to be from where your game is being released (in my case, Brazil), or from where the company originated from? Do different gun manufacturers have different rules in regards to using the names of their products in media? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 26 Jun 2021 11:42 AM PDT | ||
| Posted: 26 Jun 2021 04:19 PM PDT | ||
| VR enthusiasts needed for a little university experiment (15-20 minutes) Posted: 26 Jun 2021 04:19 PM PDT Hey everyone! I'm a game dev student from Germany and I'm working on a little experiment about player experience in VR. So if you have around 15-20 minutes spare I'd appreciate if you participated! It's a collection of 4 rooms with a simple task to complete and a questionnaire. You'll find the questionnaire here (the instructions are in there as well): https://forms.gle/2Li69mDjJoUHZgSH9 and the applications for the experiment itself over here: https://we.tl/t-I1pZY9FMuF. Thanks and don't hesitate to contact me if needed :) [link] [comments]  | ||
| I'm a backend amateur. What's an easy but scalable data solution for my quiz game? Posted: 26 Jun 2021 04:03 PM PDT I'm making a social quiz game for mobile. Players can upload their own answers which can then be seen and clicked on by other players. The game needs to keep track of stats like how much a given answer is seen or clicked. It needs to be able to pull up a list of the most clicked answers, and things like that. While I could crudely spin up a MySQL database and hack together an API using PHP, I feel like that would end in disaster. The last time I did anything like that was in 2013, and my hunch is that there is an easier, fully managed solution for me out there, perhaps one that doesn't involve me writing a bunch of backend code. But I'm pretty unfamiliar with today's landscape of tools. I'm overwhelmed when I see the promo page for Google Cloud, AWS, or what have you. These services, at first glance, seem like overkill. But I know I'm looking for something out there that will store my data securely, scale to a million users or more if needed, and make it simple for me to query and update my data in the mobile game. What's out there that might work for an amateur like me? Any insight you can offer is much appreciated. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 26 Jun 2021 11:52 AM PDT Have you ever struggled with pitching 100's of YouTubers asking them to look at your game? I asked Mandalore A.K.A. Mandalore Gaming, a gaming YouTuber with over 600k subscribers, about what works and what doesn't. Idk, maybe you'll learn something. Please leave a comment at the end and share if you enjoy the interview. ⬇️ ⬇️ [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 25 Jun 2021 08:54 PM PDT This week I launched my first asset packs! One of which is a free topdown pixel art tileset, Rocky Grassland. You're free to use it in both personal and commercial games. Find it here: https://pondgames.itch.io/ttt-series-rocky-grassland [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 26 Jun 2021 06:28 AM PDT 3 months ago, I started my second project. This project is meant to be the one I actually finish and release, after spending 7 months or so on the previous one only to figure out I can't possibly match the scope I adhered to in the beginning. Why does this keep happening? and what can I do to finally figure out the scope I can actually accomplish in reasonable time? the idea is to have less than 6 months development because anything longer than that I just get burnt out and throw it away. Or maybe I can redesign my current project's vision, although it does not seem like the scope can be any smaller - the project is meant to be a very basic base-defense game where there's one resource building, one base, one turret to defend it, and one wall model. Enemies attack the base in waves. That's it. 3 months in and all the base systems are in place and core gameplay loop is infact ready, but something I noticed is that writing the system is 10% of the work, polishing it is the other 90%. This means that in rough estimate i'm gonna need at least a year more to polish everything I have so it's release ready. In fact what this means is that in order to have a 6 months development cycle, the gameplay needs to be ready within 2-3 weeks while the rest of the time is for gathering art references, sound, visual effects, fixing edge case bugs, etc. Am I spending too much time on needless things? what would you advise to change in my thought process? [link] [comments]  | ||
| Unity shader to fix pixel art jitter / wobble Posted: 26 Jun 2021 08:58 AM PDT Hey everyone, I have made a unity port of a godot project to fix pixel art wobble / jitter. Smooth Pixel Filtering project uses a shader to achive perfect pixels, you can zoom and scale without any jitter or wobble. Hope this helps some of you making your pixel art games. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Would appreciate some advice/experience on some specific technical problems Posted: 26 Jun 2021 10:49 AM PDT I'm planning my next (proper) game that involves some technical aspects I haven't dealt with before, so I would appreciate some input about best ways of designing solutions for them. For reference, the game will be a 2d RPG (think art style similar to Graveyard keeper) . Problem 1: 3D shadows. I realize that 3D shadows can be achieved in multiple ways in a 2D game (i.e., normal maps, 3D grid but 2d camera, etc.) Though I'm unsure the best approach. Problem 2: Spatial sound. I.e., simply walk closer to an object making noise, it gets louder. Problem 3: Rain affects. Weather (specifically rain) isn't difficult in your generic 2d pixel games. However, I'd like to explore a more realistic approach whilst still 2D. For example, in terms of how rain behaves in wind, how it falls in sheets rather than spreading evenly, etc. If anyone has any advice for, or experience in, the above scenarios, it would be great to hear. [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 26 Jun 2021 10:47 AM PDT Im starting on being a game dev and I dont know what language I should use I want to use C# but its all about Unity and Godot I dont want to start on using a engine, and most of the tutorials on YouTube is all about C# and with these game engines, I'm also thinking of java and Python but I dont know [link] [comments]  | ||
| Where should I handle physics, controls, etc? Posted: 26 Jun 2021 02:01 PM PDT I was told not to do it in the MTKView draw method, so where should I do it instead? [link] [comments]  | ||
| How to architect simple microservices for a Phaser web-based game Posted: 26 Jun 2021 02:01 PM PDT Hello! I'm a computer science student hoping to work on a simple web game built with PhaserJS on the frontend, with a microservices-oriented backend. For the backend, I would like to do something simple, since I don't have a lot of experience with socket-programming, microservices, or backend work in general. I'm hoping for some advice on two ideas I had about how to architect things. I would like to have separate servers for the game and chat functionality. I have attached links to imgur to show the diagrams of what I had in mind. In Diagram A, every service needs a separate socket connection to the web client, and in Diagram B, only the game server has a socket connection with the web client, and would presumably handle getting any additional information through a pub/sub relationship with the other services. Can I please get advice on what approach seems most common/potentially successful? Are there any aspects of either diagram that are common at all in Backend gaming dev? Thanks so much for reading! links to diagrams: https://imgur.com/a/cmyATuz [link] [comments]  | ||
| Posted: 26 Jun 2021 07:27 AM PDT Is Marketing with 0 Budget a good idea ? Or you should really spend some money on it to make people hear more about your game ? (Assuming that your game is a good looking 2D Platformer/MetroidVania with good gameplay) [link] [comments]  | ||
| What would you have changed about your first game's launch? Posted: 26 Jun 2021 06:16 AM PDT I'm about six weeks away from launching my first self produced title and I sit here looking forward to it, I also realize I'm probably making a good number of mistakes. Even just looking back at the year of production I can say I've learned a ton; game design (I've got a long way to go!), unreal engine, even simple things like how to setup a GIT and Jenkins for auto building have all big great. It makes me wish I would have done so much differently when I began, but you just don't know what you don't know. So it had me thinking, what would I do differently with my game's launch _today_ if I had launched a couple of titles already? Since I haven't done that before, I figure I would ask r/gamedev! What would you have done differently with your first game's launch? :) [link] [comments]  |
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