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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Marketing is hard! And trailer-making takes a lot of practice. You have a fair amount of work to do on this one, I'm afraid. I dropped out of that video after 30 seconds, which is at least 20 seconds longer than I would expect the average viewer to stick around. A few notes: Hey! Thanks for the feedback. I guess it would make a difference or not that my game's been out a year, and at this point I'm just trying to get it seen more, since annual renewals for license fees are happening and its made me reevaluate how much time I spend on new game dev vs what I've already invested in my first one (this one). As far as juicing it, I don't think its that kind of vibe. It's quiet, its slow, its thoughtful, there's no time limit. My obsessed bro plays it when he's stuck on conference calls for example. I understand that might limit me, but I get to be choosily artistic since this is a hobby and a labor of love (a serious hobby, but still, I've got a day job). Also, make what you love, right? Artsy! For the voice, sure, I've done that before, I just figured lets try to see if the tiktok simulation makes it seem more viraltastic. I think you're right. Also yeah its mobile, but it runs on Windows too. Anyway, this was kind of a random advert. This was my original trailer which I think 'popped' more but like you said, marketing is hard -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unQBHSf7oFY j.peeba posted:It’s not bad but not great either. I would release it now though (put it on Tiktok!) and then work on making the game appear more juicy and do another trailer in a month or two. Nicer visuals, more bang and boom on the effects (both visual and audio) and then for the next clip make the tempo tighter. Get to the gameplay sooner, preferably immediately. Show a basic move or two and then a huge combo which rewards the player and the viewer with greater fireworks and fanfare. Half of the clip is spent on the brother story which IMO can work but the idea needs to be squeezed down into 10 seconds. The gameplay itself does look fun and as a concept the template of quickly explaining what the game is about and how works is a keeper. Hey, thank you also for the feedback! It's on tiktok, thanks. Same answers though, this game's out. Thanks for the thoughts - I could def get 'poker' in the description on the store, I do always tag it with that, for what its worth. I love the name Solquence though. Again, just being a choosy artist. I like that its the only hit for that word on Google. Same reason I went with the studio name. Incidentally, the game started out as a falling blocks plus poker idea. I love what I ended up with so much more. I really think the real thing I need to do is somehow get it in front of the audience. Sharing with devs gives me insight, but I think like, one dev out of the hundreds or thousands that's seen it has gone further than saying it looks good and actually tried it out (and liked it, and gave me some great specific feedback). Everyone else that's played it has not been a dev, or even dev adjacent. I get it though, I almost never play anyone else's stuff, even when it looks exceptionally cool. I do feel kind of uncomfortable just joining into random groups or threads online and saying 'hay yall try my game' cause I know how I'd feel if I was them. But advertising doesn't seem to be worth it unless I'm doing it for free, based on everyone's general estimates of return on something that costs only five bucks on the store. Marketing is hard. What are y'all doing? Thanks again!
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Apr 8, 2023 17:52
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Well the most important thing marketing-wise that can be done is, and I’m sorry that I repeat myself, is to make the game unnecessarily juicy and cool. I get it that you want to keep the game low-key but even in that space there’s a lot of interesting detail and flavor you can put in. The first examples that pop into my mind are Threes and Mini Metro. Simple looking games that still grab your attention with their visual flair. That is much more difficult to pull off than the ”fireworks slot machine endorphin dispenser” is though. The eternal dilemma of the indie dev always is that who are you making the game to? Making a game for yourself is always a fine approach but if you want to increase your audience you probably need to think more about what the people who don’t play your game think about it. But yeah, bothering people to play the game (it sucks and over time you’ll run out of fresh avenues to do this) and trying to get the game featured on the stores are the other notable ways I can think of right now. If you are planning on updating the game it may make sense to hold back on some of the stuff to do a bigger update that you can signal ahead to the stores like 4 weeks in advance. At least for App Store there’s a form that you can fill and submit to tell their editorial teams of an upcoming update. For many these things are something that a publisher promises to do for them. The actual results vary.
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Apr 8, 2023 20:45
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Contentato posted:I like that its the only hit for that word on Google. Be careful of this - it's not necessarily a good (or bad) thing marketing-wise. That means it's a term that no one is searching, and that removes one of your channels of organic growth. (Disclaimer: This post is about SEO but there's a whole lot more to marketing than SEO, and SEO isn't as important as it used to be - audience engagement on social channels is now more important. That being said, lessons about SEO apply to literally any storefront where users are searching for games to play, so they still help) In SEO there are short-tail phrases and long-tail phrases. A Long Tail phrase is a phrase that someone searches when they know exactly what they want to find - the exact model number/name of a pair of shoes, or the exact name of your game. The names short-tail and long-tail historically refer to length ("new shoes" vs. "new nike S-Shock 3500 Super Max Air") but the same principle can be applied here: "Solquence" is a word that no one is searching for unless they (1) already know about your game and (2) explicitly want to look it up - it will help get people who are already engaged to your website. That's not a bad thing necessarily either, but generally you chase long-tail results when you are an outlet selling items that are sold at other outlets: You want anyone looking for that specific pair of shoes to buy them from you, instead of from the other stores that have the same shoes. In this case, prioritizing long-tail results (for "solquence") doesn't do you any good, because you're already the top result for that term in Google. Short-tail phrases are what you would use to chase after potential new players. Players who would be interested in your game if they knew about it - this would be things like, as j.peeba suggested, including the word Poker (to prioritize your game's appearance in searches by users looking for things like "poker puzzle game" in the app store). These will have far more competition, so you don't want to get too vague ("card puzzle" or "puzzle game"), It's not necessary to change the name but you should focus on getting your game tied to more 'short-tail' phrases. One easy way to do this is a subtitle, you could title it something like "Solquence: A Poker Puzzler" or whatever. But also just, use these generic short-tail phrases a lot more in all the copy about your game. For example, the page on your website for the game: https://www.contentato.com/solquence Only mentions the word "Poker" once, as part of a Youtube video title, which is part of an embedded element, which won't help much for SEO. The written description you have is: "Solquence is a puzzle game combining strategy and classic card game elements. Play your next card, make matches to clear the board, and see how far you can go! A new way to play with 52 standard cards ♣ ♦ ♠ ♥ and a few extras! 🃏💀🌞 Easy to learn, difficult to master! Can anyone get past level 500?" But consider this: How many people are going to Google or the app store and searching for phrases found in this copy? A lot of people probably search for "Puzzle Game" but there's a massive amount of competition for that phrase and you'll never show up in the search results. In effect this copy is a description of the game, but a description of the game doesn't help people find out about your game. For that, you need text that includes the things they're typing into search engines when they're looking for a new game: "new poker game", "poker puzzle", "card puzzle", etc. I mean, don't just stuff your descriptions with those words, but think about your potential playerbase and think about specifically what they would type in to a search engine when looking for a new game to play, and try to work that terminology in. The same is true of the description of the game on the Play store - it doesn't mention Poker or any specific card games, just generic terms like "puzzle game". As an example of how you could naturally stuff some of those words in there: Solquence is a new puzzle game combining elements of classic strategy and card games. Inspired by games like Poker, [examples], Solquence [blahblahblah]..." This would be more likely to get people searching the app store for terms like "new puzzle game" or "games like poker" or "poker puzzle game", etc. (Don't expect a tidal wave of sales after changing this stuff but it's just one step you can take toward more organic growth over time - the games that show up first in searches are the games that do the most of this stuff, so the amount you need is all relative to your competition) e: But that being said, I think there's enough competition in mobile card puzzle games that organic search results isn't going to be a major avenue for growth either way - you'll need to sort of 'kickstart' the buzz about the game in the first place (through ads, social media engagement, etc), which will go a long way toward placing higher in SEO. SEO alone won't do much until people are engaging with and talking about your game. And this is why digital marketing sucks  I'm not sure if it would work in games but I used to use press releases as a cheap SEO booster. You can write a press release about your game/product and then submit it to a PR distribution service like Newswire for around $50 - there are a lot of "journalism" websites that use automated systems to repost press releases, which gets your PR re-posted a whole bunch of times (by relatively low-value sites tbf), which can help strengthen your name in Google overall deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Apr 8, 2023 |
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Apr 8, 2023 23:34
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SerthVarnee posted:So I took a look at your trailer and I'm wondering if you've included an option to turn off the flashier spell effects? lots of swirling and lots of flashing colors are a bit of a hindrance to me these days. The spell effects are quite uncommon in the game - the rainbow circle effect is required to be activated by players ~10 times across the game, and the magic spells like the lightning (and fire and ice not shown in the trailer) only happen in the final day with the boss encounter - however they can occupy more space on the screen than shown there. But if it makes it more accessible for people, it would be silly to have gone to all the other accessibility efforts we've done and not include another.
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Apr 9, 2023 00:08
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Incidentally, after spilling all these words I do feel it is important to ask: what are your goals here? Are you hoping to maximize the monetary return you see on this project? Do you just want more people to play it? Are you trying to get experience in performing various business work related to launching projects? Do you actually know? Keep your actions aligned with your goals. When you push back on our suggestions because they involve things that you don't want to do, recognize that this may sabotage you achieving your goals -- or it may just mean that you've done a poor job of telling us what your goals are.
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Apr 9, 2023 00:09
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Contentato posted:I really think the real thing I need to do is somehow get it in front of the audience. Sharing with devs gives me insight, but I think like, one dev out of the hundreds or thousands that's seen it has gone further than saying it looks good and actually tried it out (and liked it, and gave me some great specific feedback). Everyone else that's played it has not been a dev, or even dev adjacent. I get it though, I almost never play anyone else's stuff, even when it looks exceptionally cool. I wrote a post about this somewhere earlier in this thread, but the best way to get it infront of a new audience like that (e.g. Reddit) isn't to ask people to try your game necessarily, but just get them to engage with a post about your game. That's also your opportunity to show off the juice or whatever other hooks your game has. For example, you could whip up an alternative set of card art then post on some Reddit gaming related subs asking for advice about which set looks better. Another way to do it is add a simple accessibility feature to your game, then make a post on Reddit that's some variation of "Here's the new colorblind mode for Solquence! What accessibility options do you think I should add?" It doesn't seem like much, but that kind of thing gets people to (1) Click your post and reply, because they want to be helpful, (2) commit your game to memory, and (3) generally ask questions about your game and/or ask to play it, which is better than you asking them to play it. They feel like they contributed something towards its development and have some trace of personal involvement in it, which means they feel a stronger desire to check it out. Don't ask anyone to try your game - get them thinking about or talking about it instead, that will make them want to try it. (May require multiple posts over time - the more often they engage with it, the more interested they will become) deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 00:24
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deep dish peat moss posted:Don't ask anyone to try your game - get them thinking about or talking about it instead, that will make them want to try it. (May require multiple posts over time - the more often they engage with it, the more interested they will become) Yeah, honestly when it comes to building word-of-mouth, the most reliable way to do it is just to join communities and talk about your work. People enjoy seeing the behind-the-scenes process. You're not explicitly trying to sell them anything or even get them to take any particular action, you're just saying "here's this thing I'm working on, I think it's neat". Of course, you hope that they will take action, by buying the game or helping to spread the word. And you can strive to build your posts such that they want to do so, by putting cool hooks and surprises into them. Oh, and the other thing about joining communities: if all you ever do is talk about your game, then you aren't part of the community. You need to engage with other peoples' stuff as well.
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Apr 9, 2023 00:29
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deep dish peat moss posted:Good info about SEO Excellent post. I’ll add that in iOS App Store in most featuring opportunities the games are only visible as an icon and a name. The ”common” featuring slots let you be part of a list with a dozen other games without any screenshots or descriptions. If you want to chase the numbers you want the name and the icon to attract the player to tap on your title instead of the others. It’s good that the people get some understanding what the game is about from glancing over the names alone. These things are of course not rules or mandatory. They’re just tools that people can choose to use if they feel helpful. These thoughts are mostly of ”for future reference” variety and I don’t really think it’s a good move to rename an already released game.
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Apr 9, 2023 06:10
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Metos posted:It doesn't, no. Possibly something I can look into for a future update. I can think of one more place where the effects show up. The game trailer... I forced myself to look away during the parts where any spell effects were shown because I had one nasty seizure on Friday and I was NOT in the mood to have another on Saturday. Had I been blissfully ignorant of recent previous experiences, I would have sat staring at the swirling spell effects and like would have had a sense of lightheadedness for hours or an actual seizure.
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Apr 9, 2023 07:14
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I asked on the unity forums but I figured I'd ask here as well since after a few hours my question doesn't even have a single view other than mine (unless their view counter on the forums is off, which is possible). Unity UI with TMPro question here. I figure this is a terrible place to ask since its such a specific little problem, but maybe someone here has run into it before. I have a game where copying and pasting is important. So, for many of my text boxes I am using a TMPro Input Field in place of a TMPro_Text element. I created a "read only" input field. This allows me to treat it like a text element, but also allows the player to highlight the text. I believe this is best practices for text that the player can copy bits and pieces from. (If there is a better way I'm totally down to switching this to some other UI element) However, this particular text box has some additional requirements. It must scale the text placed in the box to fit in a certain UI window. With a TMPro_Text element this is super easy, you just give it a minimum font size and max font size and set it to wrap horizontally and truncate vertically. I thought it would be just as easy with the input field too, because I noticed behind the scenes that an input field is actually just using a childed TMPro_Text element in the "Text Component" field. Unfortunately, changing the wrapping/truncating settings in that childed element did not work. They would reset on their own at runtime. The only way I managed to get it to work how I wanted, where the text would wrap horizontally and scale to match the size of the window was to have a "Input Field Line Type" set to Multi Line Submit. This was almost all entirely working. It looks exactly how I want, scales how I want, and the text can be highlighted. However, there is one small quirk. With the settings I'm using, if the player mouses over the text and scrolls down with their mouse wheel, the text scrolls up. This seems to happen in any situation where the text had to scale. If the text is max size and still fits in the box, the scrolling doesn't happen. But when the text had to scale, it looks like this. Spoiled just in case the motion triggers anything with regards to SerthVarnee, its an image of text scrolling up and down and being highlighted If anyone knows a different way to do copy/pastable text boxes with the built in UI I'm all ears, or if anyone knows a variable I could set to false to stop these input fields from being able to scroll, either solution would be fantastic. Thanks Superrodan fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 13:25
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Are you relying on Unity's built-in navigation system at all? You could try turning it off. I forget how exactly to do that, I think it's part of an object that's automatically included in new scenes.
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Apr 9, 2023 15:17
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Are you relying on Unity's built-in navigation system at all? You could try turning it off. I forget how exactly to do that, I think it's part of an object that's automatically included in new scenes. The entire game is essentially UI based, so I'm not sure that disabling that would be a good idea, but I will look into it. I have not tried using a legacy input field (as opposed to a TMPro one) yet either, I thought of that last night after bed. Hopefully it will be "worse" feature-wise, and therefore better for my use case. Lastly it might be possible for me to just set the wrap and truncate settings in code whenever necessary, since the reason I had to use the scrollable input field in the first place is because the settings were being reset from what I set in the inspector.
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Apr 10, 2023 03:39
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I finally got doors working and I have to say what the frick this was so difficult  I had to build out systems to load levels and make all the stuff line up in sequence and stuff.
Cory Parsnipson fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Apr 10, 2023 |
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Apr 10, 2023 07:09
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Hey everyone. Thanks for the detailed responses. I don't get this level of feedback anywhere else. I really appreciate it. I'll respond to everyone who gave advice! Paraphrasing for readability, original posts linked.j.peeba posted:Make the game juicy, try getting featured I have for sure thought about giving it an upfit, but that would def be a complete rebuild. I ended up with this game by after 20 years of flirting with game dev, deciding to sit down and actually make one, start to finish. I didn't even have the goal of publishing it - but like halfway through the build I realized I was actually on to a pretty drat great game. I wasn't expecting to prototype something actually good, and I targeted a simple puzzle game cause that's what everyone's advice is for beginners. But I didn't want to also learn modern tools on top of learning everything else. I went with what I knew (Java and a manual game loop). I talked to devs and started learning more, and now that I've got some Godot under my belt, I shudder to go back to Android Studio and libGDX and try to make Solquence better, instead of just starting fresh. But, I'm still drat proud of it, and even though it had been years since I did any digital art, my wacky technique of drawing on paper, scanning, vectorizing, and basic fills ended up looking pretty okay. Animating with those tools is manual though, and I can see how much better I could do if I did a re-do. My next one's going to be pixels, with a lot more concentration on look and feel and I'll focus heavily on making sure there's some catchy visuals and what not right out of the gate to make marketing that much easier. I learned *a lot* from this project. I just don't know if I can build it all over again. It works well enough that people like my bro will play it for hours and hours on end. That's what I was going for. I'm not defensive, you are. deep dish peat moss posted:Being the only search result isn't that great. And then a lot of amazing marketing advice. I am clearly professionally trained. Put Poker in your description. Also I looked at your website. Press releases are a good option and they're cheap. Your post was an amazing deep dive. Thanks so much. I'll incorporate some of this advice. One thing is, I really don't think dipping $50 into advertising will get me $50 back. Do you have any reason to disagree? If my game looked more flashy, more polished, then *maybe* but honestly, I think my best bet is to find online communities who would give it a go if they saw it. The game's small fanbase is mostly not gamers. Which I guess is a lot of mobile players these days, but still, I only know gamers online. Gonna try to find some pinterest communities of people looking for poo poo to do on the train and what not I think. Your advice is really appreciated though. If you thought advertising could help, I'd consider it! (What about an SA ad, would that just be pointless?) TooMuchAbstraction posted:What would you say you're doing here? Looking for validation, pretty much. I could have gone into the industry if things had been different, and I also could have been an artist, or a screenwriter, or many other creative professions. I just ended up doing websites and computer administration. But I love hearing people tell me my poo poo's good. And I love entertaining people. So, even though this will never be a full time job, its been a wonderful experience and I'm not planning on stopping. Started a new one already, love the process, love having a game on the stores, just wish more people would play it cause then I'd get more of that sweet validation. deep dish peat moss posted:Get people to talk about your game instead of asking them to play it. Add a new feature, then discuss. Leaderboards are a big one, but it has been such a slog to learn everything up to this point. Looks like I'd have to learn two more systems at least. I did this to myself, listening to my friends with iPhones, I ended up doing at least twice as much work as if it was just on Android. I don't know if I really want to dig anymore down that way, with less than 50 people installed. If it got some popularity, yeah I would figure it out. I realize that is chicken and egg. It's why I started trying to do some more ads though. Yalls advice is giving me some good direction to go in. TooMuchAbstraction posted:Play everyone elses stuff too, don't just push your own game Yeah, I am guilty of this. Does this thread (or one of the others?) have a pinned list? I'm genuinely curious. So many channels of people sharing their stuff in long threads, and nobody responding. Its why I think I need to find some non-dev groups out there. I thought SA was a good choice, but here I am in a dev thread... edit: ^^ doors are hard man
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Apr 10, 2023 18:57
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Superrodan posted:The entire game is essentially UI based, so I'm not sure that disabling that would be a good idea, but I will look into it. I have not tried using a legacy input field (as opposed to a TMPro one) yet either, I thought of that last night after bed. Hopefully it will be "worse" feature-wise, and therefore better for my use case. To be clear, I'm not telling you to disable Unity's event system, just the form navigation. By default Unity will try to automatically make it so that using the arrow/tab keys will change which form input has focus, which sounds like a good idea but in my experience it invariably causes more problems than it solves.
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Apr 10, 2023 19:54
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Yeah we override and customise that for every single instance of UI navigation. As soon as you want to do anything slightly unusual you end up needing to write a system for it, and having two competing systems is a bad idea, so we just did our own one with full control
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Apr 11, 2023 04:45
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Contentato posted:Hey everyone. Thanks for the detailed responses. I don't get this level of feedback anywhere else. I really appreciate it. I'll respond to everyone who gave advice! Paraphrasing for readability, original posts linked. Make no mistake, what you have already accomplished is a HUGE achievement. Making an entire game that’s not only playable but fun enough to be addictive is incredible. Selling/marketing games is tough. On Steam there were 11k game releases last year and an average player plays 5 (IIRC from some old stat) games a year. I imagine the numbers aren’t much better on mobile. Finding an audience in an environment like that is difficult no matter what tricks you pull off. With advice you always have to filter what is useful to you and it’s totally alright. You know the situation and your resources the best. Sounds like you’re on the right track to make the future projects even better!
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Apr 11, 2023 06:03
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j.peeba posted:Make no mistake, what you have already accomplished is a HUGE achievement. Making an entire game that’s not only playable but fun enough to be addictive is incredible. Numbers on mobile are even more disheartening. Something like 3-5x number of new releases compared to steam. Paid game stats are extremely sad, and the capital requirements to drive users for free games are absolutely insane. You can get help with a publisher, but many of the mobile publishers that will do deals with indies are extremely predatory.
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Apr 11, 2023 13:20
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Contentato posted:Yeah, I am guilty of this. Does this thread (or one of the others?) have a pinned list? I'm genuinely curious. So many channels of people sharing their stuff in long threads, and nobody responding. Its why I think I need to find some non-dev groups out there. I thought SA was a good choice, but here I am in a dev thread... Have a look at the Goon Made Games thread.
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Apr 11, 2023 17:18
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:To be clear, I'm not telling you to disable Unity's event system, just the form navigation. By default Unity will try to automatically make it so that using the arrow/tab keys will change which form input has focus, which sounds like a good idea but in my experience it invariably causes more problems than it solves. I ended up fixing it by switching to legacy input fields. The legacy ones worked pretty much the same way but without the weird scrolling behavior. Of course, they had a different unwanted behavior (when you click on them the entire field highlights) but I found a way around that in code.
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Apr 11, 2023 20:04
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https://twitter.com/Shoehead_art/status/1645806193116590080?s=20 I finally did something worth showing off 
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Apr 11, 2023 20:16
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j.peeba posted:Make no mistake, what you have already accomplished is a HUGE achievement. Making an entire game that’s not only playable but fun enough to be addictive is incredible. Thanks! I am genuinely proud of it. It feels good to have it as my first game, feels like I started on a good foot. leper khan posted:Numbers on mobile are even more disheartening. Something like 3-5x number of new releases compared to steam. Paid game stats are extremely sad, and the capital requirements to drive users for free games are absolutely insane. You can get help with a publisher, but many of the mobile publishers that will do deals with indies are extremely predatory. Yeah. I made a free version with ads, but only on Android. Wasn't interested in figuring it out again for iOS. I realize its pretty darn hard to get noticed. I only got the nomination from the GDWC guys cause they sent me an email asking me to enter. I was overwhelmed by the mountains of articles telling me to start cold calling for reviews and what not. Indies who do this for a living are super impressive. cranky corvid posted:Have a look at the Goon Made Games thread. Thanks for the link! Exactly what I was hoping to find.
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Apr 11, 2023 20:38
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I've mostly recovered from the post-launch-panic/hype/haze and I'm working on some new things for a content update. https://twitter.com/antti_tiihonen/status/1646101334389673984?s=20 The launch hasn't financially been a huge success but it's not a complete disaster either. I've had some success in getting featured on iOS App Store. We'll see if I break even over time. People have enjoyed the game a lot and the user ratings are at Steam 100%, iOS 4.9 and Android 5.0. 
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Apr 12, 2023 12:00
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We used to have someone posting in this thread, who was making an incredibly detailed car-building game. Gorgeous models of every piece of some specific kit car, all the appropriate tools were modeled and functional, you could build the entire engine up from individual components, it was VR-capable. I swear I remember they got approached by the US military to make a training sim, though that might've been goons telling the dev "hey go get that sweet government contract money." What was it called?
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Apr 12, 2023 23:43
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Pretty sure it was 'Wrench'. Well, is. It's out there on steam if you want it.
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Apr 12, 2023 23:45
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j.peeba posted:I've mostly recovered from the post-launch-panic/hype/haze and I'm working on some new things for a content update. First time seeing this and I must say I adore the style. Giving me PICO-8-but-not-quite-so-constrained vibes with the dither effects and stuff. I'ma pick it up As for myself I added some lovely bullet trails to guns that don't have big visible projectiles (read everything but grenades and rockets) that makes it a bit easier to see if you are actually landing your shots or not, since nothing is hitscan in this project EDIT: now that I think about it more went into this than just making the stupid trail meshes dynamic in case I decide to add bullet drop later (…), I also am now faking the origin of the projectiles on the client side so they look like they come from your gun, heading toward the furthest collision point away where your crosshair is pointing (or an arbitrary very far point if aiming at empty sky) not the middle of your camera where they actually get created on the server. Looks a lot nicer client side and doesn’t give right-peek advantage server side EDIT2: typo https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/642431754959061002/1095887127306305577/trails.mp4 CH Science fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Apr 13, 2023 |
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Apr 13, 2023 02:48
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Man, getting unity particles to work in the UI has been a miserable adventure, but it kinda works now: https://i.imgur.com/LI04qsy.mp4 Unfortunately this means that the game will only support a 1920x1440 display resolution, but I'm sure noone will have any issues with that.
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Apr 14, 2023 11:18
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Have you seen this package: https://github.com/mob-sakai/ParticleEffectForUGUI
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Apr 14, 2023 11:36
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Yeah, I tried it first and it appeared to require special shaders in some circumstances (or at least wasn't entirely compatible with the ones I've made), and I was unable to get the particle colors to display properly. It also added a mystery camera to every particle system, which seemed to be disabled at all times, but couldn't be removed? I dunno, I have a fairly strong aversion to random plugins to begin with, and it gave me a bad first impression, so I didn't really give it much consideration. The solution I ended up with seems to suit my needs though; the thing I said about resolutions was a joke, even if I'm sure more corner cases will show up later. 
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Apr 14, 2023 12:08
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LoboFlex posted:Man, getting unity particles to work in the UI has been a miserable adventure, but it kinda works now Looks great! Yep, in general, it's always a nightmare trying to sync UI space with 3d world space. Lord knows what "best practice" is. With your use-case, needing to get the particles to move to a specific point on screen, i'd have probably immediately given up on the built in particle system and used a pool of gameobjects (which would be easier to control, but likely a little worse for performance)
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Apr 14, 2023 14:53
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Yeah, when I needed a "particle system" in the UI for my game, I just hand-coded the specific effect I needed using Images. I assume the ParticleEffectsForUGUI package needs a camera for each particle system because it has to render the particles to a rendertexture, which then gets inserted into the canvas for display.
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Apr 14, 2023 15:12
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The only thing I worry about when doing fancy UI effects is performance because it seems like animating anything in canvas tanks harder than having a million polys on screen.
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Apr 15, 2023 18:59
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al-azad posted:The only thing I worry about when doing fancy UI effects is performance because it seems like animating anything in canvas tanks harder than having a million polys on screen. For this reason, scene hierarchy makes a substantial difference when dealing with UI stuff. Segregate your UI that doesn't change often from your UI that does, and try to avoid changing large swathes of the UI in each tick. On a completely unrelated note, I've been poking a bit at that procgen Metroidvania I was talking about earlier. I find it amusing that I made the entirety of Waves of Steel without once making or using a pathfinding algorithm, and this procgen thing doesn't even really exist yet and I've already had to implement A* for it. 
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Apr 15, 2023 19:11
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I found some time to work on my game today. I decided I should pull the band aid off and start on music. I've got to learn a tracker for this, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to import midi files into tracker software. I found one shady exe buried on archive.org to convert midi files to deflemask files, but I wasn't happy with the output. I'm not sure if this will be race or title screen music. It's probably far from done, too, but it was OK enough to shove into the game to try out. I also will have to re-write how I do sound effects during races to have music. Turns out that calling SND_startPlay_4PCM stops all the music. I got it figured out on the title screen, load the SFX with XGM_setPCM, then call XGM_startPlayPCM later to play the SFX. But I was doing tricks in races with 4 channels I'll need to re-evaluate to include music or not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdCTqnNShuw
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Apr 15, 2023 19:45
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LoboFlex posted:Man, getting unity particles to work in the UI has been a miserable adventure, but it kinda works now: I really hope the heck yes will stay. Otherwise as a fan of these types of games looking forward to the continued progress as it looks good!
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Apr 17, 2023 12:24
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I'm thinking maybe there should be a small % chance that the "LEVEL UP" (and other feedback texts where applicable) have alternate versions, so it'll probably stay And thank you, happy to hear it! <3
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Apr 17, 2023 17:49
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Have you folks used any terrain sculpt tools that felt good and natural to use, while offering ease for doing things like ramps? I don't really have have much past reference points other than the one included in Unity and that was some years ago. Use case is isometric 3D if that is of any help.
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Apr 18, 2023 15:02
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The Gaia plugin for Unity is the least painful terrain generation I've come across.. but it's still not fun or fast. Sure you can get some nice looking mountains real fast but making a playable space is still fiddly. I think it's just a hard problem to solve. I was recently playing with making terrain in Blender using their sculpt tools and exporting that mesh to Unity. It works and looks nice but I haven't decided if it's the best way to go. Blender's sculpting tools are pretty enjoyable to use, though you'll probably have to spend some time hunting down some good brushes.
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Apr 18, 2023 15:15
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Sauerbraten still has the easiest/most intuitive level editing I've ever used. It has some limitations, but all level editing paradigms do. http://cubeengine.com/
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Apr 18, 2023 16:05
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Ah, sorry I should have clarified that it was specifically ground terrain, hilltops, mountain, crevices, that sort of stuff and real-time editing. This is specifically because we are currently developing a limited toolset for those functions into our engine to enable a larger palette of options for level design on the micro scale. Gaia I have a recollection of seeing in action, but that was also years ago and had forgotten how extensive it was.
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Apr 18, 2023 17:04
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