What I learned from spending $500 trying out artists for my game. |
- What I learned from spending $500 trying out artists for my game.
- I have released my 2000+ instrumental pieces free under creative commons 3.0 by (Free to use in your videos, podcasts, movies, games or what ever. Just credit me Antti Luode) (If you can not, that is fine too.)
- I recorded a short video tutorial on how to move a cube by rolling it in Unity (link in comments)
- What techniques are used for customizable items (2D) ?
- Our studio logo now has an opening animation!Feel free to drop any feedback
- I'm thinking of starting a Youtube channel to promote my game. I'm wondering what kind of content gives the best results
- Built a roguelike RPG in Javascript for Mobile - Lessons so far
- With gamedev experience, what jobs will be easier for me to get outside of gamedev?
- How hard is it to develop a game for consoles/Xbox?
- Do you still need to make High and Low quality 3D meshes for scenes?
- What are common practices during project planning?
- What is the best way to work with a Freelance as Collaborater without worrying ?
- How moddable games handle mods compatibility?
- Why do youtuber games succeed better than some other great games?
- Long progression models for roguelike
- Embedded scripting with Umka: using C structures as native data types is easy due to static typing
- Game Engine Development Series - Part 1: Getting Started | Source Code on GitHub
- Vector Cheat Sheet?
- Is there a good tutorial for gm2 with visual scripting?
- Making a simple (educational) tower defense game without prior experience
- Pixel Texture for 3D projects
- GB COMPO 2021 — Game Boy / Game Boy Color development competition organized by retro community (from July 1 to October 1)
- Is making a mod for the game Rivals of Aether a good way to venture into the world of gamedev as a very beginner programmer?
What I learned from spending $500 trying out artists for my game. Posted: 29 Jun 2021 05:35 AM PDT Hey everyone! Last month I started the process of looking for an artist to do some of the half body portrait art in my game. I read a couple posts and articles about what to expect and some common courtesies that I'd like to share with you all, as well as my learnings along the way. Where to find artists? This is the first thing you're probably thinking of. There are a ton of places, but the spots I chose to focus on were the following:
How to negotiate with artists? I'm incredibly bad at negotiating, but I did have a few key takeaways in this part of the process as well.
What did the process look like? For just about every artist I contacted, the flow was extremely similar.
General Courtesies
Here is my post in hungry artists sub-reddit for anyone curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/HungryArtists/comments/npb0cs/hiring_halfbody_dialogue_portraits_in_the_style/ Hope this is helpful to some of you. I would be happy to give more detailed examples or answer any questions you may have in the comments. Thanks for reading! :) [link] [comments] | ||
Posted: 28 Jun 2021 08:52 PM PDT As used in games such as Headliner Novinews. As used by Youtubers such as Kyle Le with 56+ million views and 218k+ subs and Sam Hogan. My Instrumental site (Soundclick): https://www.soundclick.com/bands3/default.cfm?bandID=1277008&content=songs My Imdb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10882843/ 2203 Instrumental pieces on Google drive Zipped. (non categorized): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s1wExddwq3UWjMUmvmTI3DggYs-2TVsX/view?usp=sharing Link to 1790 CATEGORIZED instrumental pieces in a single zip file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1yCZtjPSKW3ifngIP6zzbc9spXspjatIf My blog where I release the songs and FLstudio project files for them: http://anttismusic.blogspot.fi Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVOwcdYEBQFiyGyvWF5VkwQ 2203 pieces on Google drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1t5awWiDLZhMXBmT0M5Mm1nRG8 My songs are released under creative commons 3.0 by: [link] [comments] | ||
I recorded a short video tutorial on how to move a cube by rolling it in Unity (link in comments) Posted: 29 Jun 2021 09:32 AM PDT
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What techniques are used for customizable items (2D) ? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 01:38 PM PDT Hi, I´ve wondering how some 2D games manage their art assets/rendering in regards to customizable items like diffrent armor types, diffrent weapons, diffrent hairs ect. So far I discovered two techniques: 1) Paperdolling (make one spritesheet for the naked body and several other spritesheets for each armor/weapon. Render them on top of each other to compose the final sprite) 2) Skeleton animations Do you have some good ressources to the mentioned techniques or do you have other techniques which can be used especially to save some time on making assets ? Thank you :) [link] [comments] | ||
Our studio logo now has an opening animation!Feel free to drop any feedback Posted: 29 Jun 2021 08:55 AM PDT
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Posted: 29 Jun 2021 09:38 AM PDT Greetings. I've spent a couple of years tinkering around with Unity, and I decided to take the step and start developing a game with a commercial purpose for the first time. I'm aware that reaching out to people plays a big role in this whole endeavor, and I think I'm going to focus on Twitter and Youtube as my main "channels". But I'm wondering how to go about it on Youtube. My target is not just to promote the game, but to be able to reach out to people and interact with them. I was thinking of making a series of videos focusing on the development of the game itself (coming up with the ideas, setting it up, coding, etc.), but I guess that won't be of much interest to the actual potential audience that might be interested in playing the game. Perhaps content updates as I hit certain milestones, or as new features get added to the game would work better? Maybe mixing the two, and following development but keeping out the dense parts? I suppose that what I'm looking for is pretty much a Youtube devlog, but I'm slightly confused about the focus. I'd like to hear from your experiences with this kind of thing. What has worked best for you? Thanks for your attention and your time. Kind regards [link] [comments] | ||
Built a roguelike RPG in Javascript for Mobile - Lessons so far Posted: 29 Jun 2021 01:08 PM PDT Hi! This is a record of my exploits in building Overworld, a mobile mini-RPG currently in beta testing. It looks like this. https://redasteroidgames.com/overworld-press-kit/ It will mainly be about how I got a single javascript code base running on Android, and (theoretically) iOS, as well as server side for validation. Tech stack involves vanilla javascript, closure compiler, pixel.js, ionic+capacitor, node.js, express.js, npm, mongodb. IntroI've been a back-end engineer for about 20 years, most of that in games and always working on a game side-project. Most of these have been MMORPGs that I built for fun. Two projects I tried to commercialize, Overworld being the second. After wrapping up the last MMO, my artist Santiago said I should try something small for a change. So I spent 6 years building a mobile roguelike! (It felt small at the beginning.) FoundationMy previous big project, Battle Mines, had been written in Flash. We all know how that went, I finally shut down its servers at the end of last year. It never generated a stable following, but some players hung on to the bitter end, and some spent thousands of dollars on in-game currency. The takeaway is, if you build it they might not come, but SOMEONE will come so that's kinda cool! From that experience, my goal was to write something once and make it as portable as possible. Something with established 2D engines that doesn't require a lot of overhead. Something everyone knows already, including me? Javascript! I have no first-hand Unity experience, but it looks harder than the dev setup I chose with basically VSCode and a web browser. As for the game, the hook was to be its simplicity. Most RPGs/roguelikes feature a lot of depth, which can be hard to cram elegantly onto a small device. I wanted something highly accessible with low hardware spec, but still deep and engaging. Overworld features:
This material fits comfortably on pretty much any device from the past 4 years. Early Dev (~2015)For several years the game was made of crude static images rendered in an old <TABLE> tag. You'd tap to move your hero, and the page would refresh. No animation, just 3x3 tiles of programmer art and an inventory. In this environment I was happy building game mechanics, but the game wouldn't have gotten a second look from most players. Graphics Engine (2016)An out-of-town client engineer friend came to stay with me. For rent, he added a proper canvas renderer to the game in Pixel.js, and animated the hero moving between tiles. This was arcane magic to me. I have spent months wrestling with the 500 or so lines of code he wrote (now ballooned all the way to 1700) and even now barely understand it. Slight exaggeration but I'm more used to databases and rest clients. At this point I didn't even have sprite maps, and the browser started to chug just from the sheer number of 16x16 images it had to load. Fortunately my friend had added the basic capability to capture assets from a sprite map, so my artist friend Santi started creating actual 2D assets. Still going strong today! Optimize and Obfuscate (2017)By now gameplay was becoming defined, and there were a handful of characters (heroes) for the user to play. I wanted to feel better about putting my code out in the wild, so I decided to get it running through the closure compiler. Closure basically transpiles blocks of javascript into dense, optimized text blobs that otherwise behave identically. There were two main challenges. First I had to get rid of my non-standard uses of javscript. Misplaced globals, undeclared vars, stuff like that. Second, to get the game running discretely from the renderer, I had to segregate some of the hot organic mess I'd created so far. This involves being much cleaner with globals and leveraging externs. I made a blog post about it, details in the link. https://redasteroidgames.com/2017/08/25/closure-javascript-obfuscation/ Server Side Validation (2019)Good old Javascript, so ubiquitous that even server-side it has a massive community and following in Node.js. Solid tech to build on! With the game engine separated out and closure compilation in place, I was able to set up a node server that accepted the string of commands a user made playing one game of Overworld, and re-run the game on the server. At first this was just to verify the output of the client, later on it became the definitive output for values I would store against the user's account. A game of Overworld looks like this: 13121111522222F6699926F64478288882558778444666228W2288222L8887444222251775994231222311212191595559159299669936979975666658889921278772222662886655599865894884LLLL91132328 The numbers are player movements (3x3 map movements, per the number pad). The letters are actions taken with inventory items, and some special actions. Along with a number seed, the whole payload is miniscule and human readable. Since the whole game is rerun on the server from the same code, it's cheap and reliable to validate user input. I started building out meta, adding challenges to unlock heroes (eg. Kill 10 rats!) and nethack-style conducts for fun. The challenges fill up passively just by playing the game, though can be focused for faster completion. Javascript isn't as univeral as you might think though. Depending on the engine you use, some operations like floating point math are non-deterministic. So I spent a long time stripping out that stuff and finding workarounds. For randomness, I built a service that returns a static array of random numbers, which are looped all game long to generate the world. That way the client and server have access to an identical pool of random numbers and produce identical outputs from matching preconditions. I did another blog post on this subject. I was up to 3 or 4 posts a year by now. :) https://redasteroidgames.com/2019/02/12/server-side-overworld/ Mobile Client (2020)Until now everything was through a web browser. You could play on a mobile browser, but only on my website. It was time to make the game into an app. PhoneGap (a technology for porting javascript to iOS/Android) is dead it seems. The cordova project it was based on has accumulated tons of libraries and community and lives on. It forms the core of most related tech, including the service I chose, Ionic. Ionic is "a complete open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development". I have only built for Android so far, but it's good to know iOS should be quick to ramp up. Capacitor is an app container built that makes interfacing with native device features easy. Even if not adopting the "look" of a native app, you'll probably want access to stuff like haptics, focus detection, keyboard, native browser, clipboard, not to mention the native game platform (Play Services, Game Center), store (Play Store, App Store), and billing. All the modules are handled through NPM (Javascript package manager). Some time around here I switched from I think a php backend to express.js. A simple RESTful api, it handles auth and game validation, storing user data in MongoDB. It runs under pm2, a "process manager for the JavaScript runtime Node.js". All tech was chosen to be off-the-shelf, proven, and open source wherever possible. As a side note, with ionic you have to pick an engine: angular, react, or vue. In a single act of contrarianism I went with vue, and happily have not regretted it yet. There was some trouble injecting my pixel.js canvas renders into the vue world, another friend helped me with that. At the end of the day I'm not doing much with that medium. The graphics are very unambitious, and a pass to improve them would be hot on the heels of any commercial traction. Testing and Iterating (2021)A lot of this past year has been spent fleshing out the economy and testing with real users. This has been tricky during the pandemic, fortunately it's very easy to record video these days. I used playtestcloud.com until the freebies ran out, then I used fiverr to have gamers record their first-play experience. This has informed a lot of the recent design. I'd been gearing towards a free-to-play payment model from the start, and first time user experience (FTUE) is integral to the success of that business model. Retention, retention retention! Production Servers and Monitoring (2021)Fortunately there are capacitor libraries for Firebase integration, which gave me analytics and crashlytics for free. I had an old dev box on Linode which saw me through about a decade of general use. For this app I've moved to Digital Ocean, who are getting big and have lots of app rollout support, without being AWS in terms of complexity + price. I set up a simple load-test using Locust, which indicated I should be able to handle around 1000 DAU on a $5/month box. Even with a safety factor of 2 or 3 that should be in my price range. (Remember that tiny 100-byte game payload?) Still a two-man team (me + artist), right now I'm working to generate some very modest hype and get my beta test filled up. That'll prove the tech, and hopefully give me a core cadre of followers. I just started this last week, it's intense but fun. You have to integrate the delays of getting approval from google to publish changes (even just adding a new list of testers) with your release pipeline. That created a few launch-week snafus but good learnings. Overworld Meets Real World (Present day)What do you think of my story? Did I make any obvious mistakes? I've been pretty happy with the pace of development, and the end result. Overworld doesn't look as flashy as 90% of games these days with store-bought assets, but I feel it conveys the gameplay experience I've always been shooting for. Unlike my old Flash game it's built on tech that doesn't look like it will go away soon. It's cheap to run, cheap to develop, and can be played on just about any machine. Thanks for reading, have fun! Beta signups are open, but I'm here to chat about game dev!
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With gamedev experience, what jobs will be easier for me to get outside of gamedev? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 10:00 AM PDT I've tried looking for my first job in the game industry for over a year and a half now ever since the pandemic started and ever since I graduated but have gotten no interviews. I've tried applying to literally every entry level position out there but to no avail. There have been several jobs where I did hear a response and they did some kind of screening test like a coding test which I scored decently on each (80% to 90%) but then they just ghosted me after doing the tests. I've had some people who were from the game industry critique my resume and they gave me advice on how to refine my resume and portfolio so that it's more effective. They also said that what I had in my portfolio wasn't that bad. While I felt like their advice improved my CV and portfolio as it seemed like it landed more responses, I still didn't get even 1 job interview. I'm pretty much ready to give up now and try to transition to other fields because my funds are almost depleted and these last 1 and a half years have been emotionally/mentally draining. I just want to know what I can do with my credentials and skills because they clearly aren't good enough for game development. I have a college degree in game design. I'm self-taught in C# through Unity scripting and used it for 6 years (5 through college) and have also used Java throughout my college program. I know a bit about the different data structures and big-o notation but most of the coding I do is through Unity scripting where I just tackle my needs for my game one by one. I really want to know what kind of jobs outside of gamedev based on my skill set are possible for me and will be easier for me to get. I've heard people recommend web design but I heard you need to be good at PHP, CSS, Ruby, JS, etc. and I just don't have the funds or time to invest in learning that which will probably take another 3 months or so and god knows if I'll be good enough. I really don't know what to do at this point. [link] [comments] | ||
How hard is it to develop a game for consoles/Xbox? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 01:32 PM PDT So me and my friends were playing this Golf It type game on Xbox and it was pretty good but I thought that it could use some work. So now I've decided to make my own golf game and release it so me and my friends could all play it. I have little experience in game dev (other than very basic games like tic tac toe, Pac-Man, geometry dash clone, etc) but have been interested in it for a while and though this could be a project I could work on that challenges me and is fun to make. I plan to release it on the Microsoft store as a free to play game and I'm giving myself a 6-8 month goal but I would be fine if hat stretches to 1 year+. Is there any challenges for developing games on console vs pc? [link] [comments] | ||
Do you still need to make High and Low quality 3D meshes for scenes? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 04:12 AM PDT I was looking at the tech demo of Unreal Engine 3 and the presenter mentioned that all of the meshes have 2 versions, A high quality mesh which would have all of the detail A low quality mesh which would have fewer polygons, but have it's normal maps (and other maps I'm assuming aswell) derived from the high quality mesh. This would be the mesh shown in game. Is this still done or are there other/faster methods? I'm working with Unreal Engine 4 if that answers any questions. Thank you :) [link] [comments] | ||
What are common practices during project planning? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 12:55 PM PDT I was wondering what does r/gamedev consider the most important types of pre-production documentation. Planning on a calendar? Flow charts of the game's logic or gameplay loop? Trello-style boards? Game design document? Concept arts? All of the above? It seems that there are so many options out there to choose from, but I'm not sure about what are really worth the time and the effort. Feel free to share your personal experiences. Currently working on a student project as an indie, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. [link] [comments] | ||
What is the best way to work with a Freelance as Collaborater without worrying ? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 09:39 AM PDT Hi everyone, I m a solo Indie Developer working on a MetroidVania game, I m planning on hiring an environmental artist, from "Fiverr" or "Upwork", so the best way for me to work together is to share with him my Unity Game Project. How can I be sure that the project won't be stolen? Or should I share with him just the bare minimum to do the work ? I ve thought about making a contract, but I want to avoid this kind of thing if possible. Thanks in advance for your answers. [link] [comments] | ||
How moddable games handle mods compatibility? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 02:21 PM PDT Im trying to design a game that at its core is easily modable and extensible. Im having a hard time wrapping my head around it and how to approach it. My main question is: how to make systems work with objects or systems from other mods? simple example: a mod adds a fire system. from now on things can be set on fire, and fire spreads. classic way to do it is to add lets say "flammable" property to every item in game and system would work based on this. Ok, but what about items from other mods that didnt had this property added? what about whole new categories of items that could be added that we cant even imagine right now? How is this issue handled in games like Rimworld or Factorio? [link] [comments] | ||
Why do youtuber games succeed better than some other great games? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 06:22 AM PDT Games such as Muck are in a way very basic but work so much better than great other games. It seems that youtube plays such a big role these days. But to a lambda game developer, is it necessary to create a youtube channel? I do understand that marketing is a big asset to learn and make use of, but youtube just seems so easy to some and so hard to others, it looks like only luck goes into these. [link] [comments] | ||
Long progression models for roguelike Posted: 29 Jun 2021 10:26 AM PDT I need some help Does anybody now any material (papers, blogs, gds talks) about progression models for roguelike I want to keep players engaged for weeks, and trying to figure out how For instance, I like Hades progression - it fuzes narrative in roguelike gameplay loop, and keeps players for weeks Also guns aspects and pact of punishment are amazing - it allows players to unlock new mechanics and game features and also keep game challenging Do you know any detailed materials about the theme, or interesting examples? [link] [comments] | ||
Embedded scripting with Umka: using C structures as native data types is easy due to static typing Posted: 29 Jun 2021 03:57 PM PDT For me, directly using C structures has always been an important requirement for an embeddable scripting language. This was one of the reasons for developing Umka, my statically typed scripting language. Its approach to data types is the same as in C or Go: it supports fixed arrays, dynamic arrays (roughly similar to Go's slices) and structures. Polymorphic behavior is achieved via interfaces. As an example, consider a function taken from my tractor simulator. The function computes the required control effort (i.e., the steering angle) using pointers to several 3D vectors (like position, velocity, attitude and angular rate) as arguments. The function is written in Umka and called from C/C++. C/C++ application: Umka script: [link] [comments] | ||
Game Engine Development Series - Part 1: Getting Started | Source Code on GitHub Posted: 29 Jun 2021 03:54 PM PDT
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Posted: 29 Jun 2021 05:04 AM PDT Does anyone know of (or have) a good cheat sheet for common Vector operations within the context of game development? I find myself Googling a lot of the same things over and over. [link] [comments] | ||
Is there a good tutorial for gm2 with visual scripting? Posted: 29 Jun 2021 11:46 AM PDT | ||
Making a simple (educational) tower defense game without prior experience Posted: 29 Jun 2021 03:31 PM PDT I had an idea for an educational game and I would love to have some perspective on how difficult it will be to make it a reality. It's supposed to be a tower defense game that teaches you about antibiotics. Each level will be a different type of infection (like pneumonia, bladder infection, etc.). The enemies will be the bacteria and the antibiotics will be the towers. There will also be a diagnostic tower (I'm picturing a little microscope) that will give you more information on the enemy as the game progresses. The challenge will be to use the right antibiotic at the right time, based on the type of infection and what your diagnostic tower tells you. I would start with a very basic version (just one level, a few different towers) and once it works, gradually add more complexity whenever I have the time. I don't have any game development experience, but I have played around with HTML in the early 2000s, I've done some Arduino projects and written macros for MS Office in VBA. Never formally learned any programming language though, it's a lot of trial and error and looking for similar examples on google. After going through the FAQs, it seems like using a visual editor would be a good start. Is there a specific one you would recommend? Or would you use a completely different approach? And is this something I can put together on a few Saturdays (with simple 2D graphics) or would it take a lot more time? Since I've never done something like that before, I have no idea what I'm getting myself into. [link] [comments] | ||
Posted: 29 Jun 2021 11:43 AM PDT Hello guys, Sorry for bothering you, but i came here after don't finding an answer, i wanted to make a pixel art texture, but in some faces the checker would stretch a lot, and when trying to fix that it would get even worse, would increase its size and then fill all the UV Editor canvas, making the texture out of scale and stretched. I came here to find a solution. [link] [comments] | ||
Posted: 29 Jun 2021 03:28 PM PDT
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Posted: 29 Jun 2021 02:44 PM PDT I REALLY wanna work in game development in the future, so I am attempting to learn programming along with other game making skills. The game Rivals of Aether has a really detailed guide (https://rivalsofaether.com/workshop/) on modding characters, maps, etc into the game. It uses Gamer Maker and GML. Would this be too advanced for a beginner in this field? Also would this be good to build a game-making foundation? [link] [comments] |
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