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Not to defend somebody I don't know, but the game itself is definitely in some level of full development in that I've seen footage and such, it just seems like a first-time, solo effort. More than some ideas scribbled on paper, at least.
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Sep 16, 2023 23:51
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Godspeed, friend.
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Sep 16, 2023 23:56
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Mordja posted:Hey gang, I'm attempting a career shift into the weird, wild world of videogames. Somebody liked my portfolio enough that he's offered me a writing contract for his game. Problem is, he's asking me to scope out my timeline and pay rate and I'm only used to working the corporate 9-5 where I didn't have to think about that stuff. My old job was QA and while I did go to school for writing about 10000 years ago, outside of some early internships/assistant roles, I don't have much professional experience, so he's really bringing me on based on my short stories and some volunteer writing/editing I've done for some mods and in-dev indie titles. I'll just post the email since there's nothing identifying in it: I dunno what your situation is but assuming he's willing to pay you for hours billed up front or biweekly or monthly it could be a good learning experience for how to work with clients on writing for projects? Its something you can add to your portfolio which sounds like is what is the thing you're looking to get out of this in addition to whatever financial compensation seems fair. The simplest thing is to google online for Canada what a maybe fair entry level rate is for technical writing or editing role is and then just offer to send a monthly invoice for hours billed with clear logging of the work you've done. If you figure out what a fair rate would be, be sure to let me us know, particularly me as I'm wanting to track down in my Excel Spreadsheet of DOOM Artists/Writers such rates as for my game project the work you're trying to do might be one day something I'm interested in as well.
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Sep 17, 2023 00:10
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Mordja posted:Not to defend somebody I don't know, but the game itself is definitely in some level of full development in that I've seen footage and such, it just seems like a first-time, solo effort. More than some ideas scribbled on paper, at least. How is it in full swing when the portion that has a lot of the work done in pre production is not done? Edit: we aren't trying to be negative. We've all been down this road as greenhorns. Alterian fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Sep 17, 2023 |
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Sep 17, 2023 00:19
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Alterian posted:How is it in full swing when the portion that has a lot of the work done in pre production is not done? I think the idea is that the Dev has prototyped some of the gameplay and recorded footage like some kind of devlog of the work done so far; which makes sense.
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Sep 17, 2023 00:25
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Bill by the hour, and get paid regularly (weekly or something). Raenir Salazar posted:I dunno what your situation is but assuming he's willing to pay you for hours billed up front or biweekly or monthly it could be a good learning experience for how to work with clients on writing for projects? Its something you can add to your portfolio which sounds like is what is the thing you're looking to get out of this in addition to whatever financial compensation seems fair. Raenir Salazar posted:I think the idea is that the Dev has prototyped some of the gameplay and recorded footage like some kind of devlog of the work done so far; which makes sense.
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Sep 17, 2023 00:58
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You should get clarification on the scope of the work he wants you to do and how much creative freedom he expects you to exercise. Is he going to provide you with all of the details, and you just wordsmith it into something that reads well? Or are you expected to fill in the gaps between the big items that he knows he wants? Or are you inventing everything? The more freedom you have to work, the more groundwork you're going to need to lay before you start actually writing words that will show up in the finished product; make sure he's aware of that and is on-board with you billing hours that "don't produce anything" because you need to e.g. outline how some faction works and what their backstory is.
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Sep 17, 2023 01:36
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It's extremely important that you get a Statement of Work. Period. Do not move until you get this in writing because scope creep is a hell of thing.
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Sep 17, 2023 02:23
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I am very confused going to Unreal from Unity. I was expecting to have to do build a little sandcastle fort by stacking individual grains of sand with tweezers. Instead, it's holding my hand so much and obfuscating everything to the point that I'm not sure how to actually change anything. This is not what I expected. I had started from an empty level and enabled the stock third person game mode with a start point. So now I have a camera following a player from the start point I define. How do I then get the camera to, say, look more top-down and just stay in one orientation over the player? Something else I'm wondering for much later is how I can serialize state to save a game mid-flight. I had all this Unity code but I'm assuming if Unreal has something like ECS that I could save my component states and probably get 90% of that right there. Also, Linux support. Like, the last thing I really had me stuck on Windows was the Unity editor, so I think my next computer could just be a Linux box or something. Very strange feels here.
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Sep 18, 2023 08:02
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I am very confused going to Unreal from Unity. I was expecting to have to do build a little sandcastle fort by stacking individual grains of sand with tweezers. Instead, it's holding my hand so much and obfuscating everything to the point that I'm not sure how to actually change anything. This is not what I expected. Open the player blueprint and look how its set up to do the camera stuff. Look at the camera settings because you can turn off things like pawn control rotation. Is it attached to a spring arm? See how thats attached. I don't have it open in front of me and its been a while.
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Sep 18, 2023 12:00
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I am very confused going to Unreal from Unity. I was expecting to have to do build a little sandcastle fort by stacking individual grains of sand with tweezers. Instead, it's holding my hand so much and obfuscating everything to the point that I'm not sure how to actually change anything. This is not what I expected. Unity editor works on Linux. Not that I expect you care at this point.
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Sep 18, 2023 12:47
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leper khan posted:Unity editor works on Linux. Not that I expect you care at this point. Even as a Linux user I've been wary about telling people this. In my experience with the 2021 LTS once the project gets big enough weird editor errors start happening. If the 2022 LTS or 2023 normal version have fixed this, then I would consider that accurate. Haven't touched Unity in a while because of that, and not inclined to now because of everything else.
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Sep 18, 2023 14:55
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Linux users made their choice now let them live with it.  For the most part I don't think Unity hides very much, you have your Game Objects in the scene and your scripts attached to those game objects. Which includes the camera, so you can just look at the camera, or the player, and the scripts attached to them to see who is fiddling with the camera. The camera could also be parented to the player gameobject as well. So depending on how they did it if you want a more top down or isometric perspective either you can adjust the positioning of the camera and it's rotation or there might be parameters either public and thus adjustable or hard coded as a constant in the code. Shaders are also mostly straightforward as well. Personally I think the only obtuse things are using the rendering pipeline and ultra specific things like figuring out what sort of orthographic value I want to fill the screen right. Some stuff manually rendering stuff to a texture is very "well it works but I dunno why" for me. There's also some odd stuff where following sebastian lague A* tutorial I don't get remotely the same performance, I'm not sure why but it was a while ago. Like comparatively I found Unreal to be more hidden. Trying to debug the UI was painful until I learned about the widget reflector! In Unity the UI is actually a part of the scene.
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Sep 18, 2023 15:43
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I am in no way a professional game developer, just a mere hobbyist, but this whole Unity stuff made really try to get into Godot and it has been such a pleasant experience. Things often just WORK, everything is very simple, and even though C# support has only recently been implemented, it feels better than Unity's integration in many ways, I can easily add Nuget packages directly from my IDE's UI and the engine doesn't complain!
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Sep 18, 2023 20:11
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https://twitter.com/ManuelaXibanya/status/1703855244851961991 (This was a Dogpit group effort)
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Sep 18, 2023 20:48
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Don't worry Unity announced yesterday they're reviewing community feedback and will announce changes in a few days. Surely this will restore all trust and optimism.
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Sep 18, 2023 20:50
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Saw an article that said they were thinking of capping the fee at 4% of revenue over $1 million, but they still hadn't answered the question of what happens to you between $200k and $1m, so of course it's still hosed. And why wouldn't you just do the 4% rev and drop the install fee thing like what the gently caress are you doing. edit: source ZombieApostate fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Sep 18, 2023 |
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Sep 18, 2023 21:21
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ZombieApostate posted:Saw an article that said they were thinking of capping the fee at 4% of revenue over $1 million, but they still hadn't answered the question of what happens to you between $200k and $1m, so of course it's still hosed. And why wouldn't you just do the 4% rev and drop the install fee thing like what the gently caress are you doing.
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Sep 19, 2023 01:45
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ZombieApostate posted:Saw an article that said they were thinking of capping the fee at 4% of revenue over $1 million, but they still hadn't answered the question of what happens to you between $200k and $1m, so of course it's still hosed. And why wouldn't you just do the 4% rev and drop the install fee thing like what the gently caress are you doing. The current rumor is no runtime fee until $1 million revenue, and then no more than 4% revenue and the # of installs is self reported. But it's just a rumor. The problem in my mind is they need to do a weird thread the needle in that 2-4 million range where 4% of revenue + 2k/seat of pro can easily be more than 5% of gross revenue that Epic is asking for.
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Sep 19, 2023 06:06
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Self-reporting isn't going to help if the sales platforms don't track the stats that they intend to charge for.roomforthetuna posted:That was one of my favorite things about it, the whole regressive aspect. "If you're making lots of money we'll take less of it than if you're struggling!" So is it structured in favor of less-successful games or more-successful games? Neither, or both, it depends where you are on the spectrum of success! Also the install fee taper is per-month but the threshold is lifetime, so slow-selling long-tail games get hit way harder than something that has a huge launch.
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Sep 19, 2023 07:00
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OneEightHundred posted:Self-reporting isn't going to help if the sales platforms don't track the stats that they intend to charge for. It is/was structured to eat into f2p mobile games. I don't think any other type of game was considered in any way.
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Sep 19, 2023 10:16
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I am very confused going to Unreal from Unity. I was expecting to have to do build a little sandcastle fort by stacking individual grains of sand with tweezers. Instead, it's holding my hand so much and obfuscating everything to the point that I'm not sure how to actually change anything. This is not what I expected. Flecs is a solid and battle-tested ECS library you could use for Unreal. There are even resources on how to setup a minimal viable Unreal template to work with Flecs: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs It is also helpful to start from scratch instead of using their Gameplay Framework to learn how the engine work.
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Sep 19, 2023 16:18
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leper khan posted:Unity editor works on Linux. Not that I expect you care at this point. DrZepam posted:Flecs is a solid and battle-tested ECS library you could use for Unreal. There are even resources on how to setup a minimal viable Unreal template to work with Flecs: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs Huh. The fact that you're sending me a third-party one tells me it isn't really built in to the Unreal model itself, which tells me something about my assumptions; I thought ECS was a major thing with Unreal. I was bullshitting it in Unity anyways so I can't really gatekeep on how well anybody supports it. I do get the general gist of it and I'm more interested in it if it'll help me serialize my game state by isolating all the stuff I might want to save into the components. I'm guessing that is a normal a sane thing to do for managing saving at any point in gameplay. Alterian posted:Open the player blueprint and look how its set up to do the camera stuff. Look at the camera settings because you can turn off things like pawn control rotation. Is it attached to a spring arm? See how thats attached. I don't have it open in front of me and its been a while. I've been doing day job and life so I haven't scoured this well enough, but I decided I got far enough to see all this and I am not in a position to know where to actually proceed. I'm half stuck here and also you're half my rubber ducky while I post out loud. So if I understand anything at all, I: 1. Open the Content Browser 2. Navigate to my project tab in the browser. It's in the left column for me 3. Open the ThirdPerson folder 4. Right-click on the BP_ThirdPersonCharacter in there 5. Select Edit from the context menu. This should really screw with my editor UI but may not show Blueprint stuff yet 6. Select the Event Graph. There we are. At this point, I do see a CameraBoom as a child of the Capsule Component with a FollowCamera under the boom. So if my objective is to have a camera that is over the player and a little off on one axis, with now mouse pan/rotate: 1. I should delete the camera inputs. That should stop the pan/rotate. Alternately, I disable "Use Pawn Control Rotation" in CameraBoom to disable it. However, I found when I do that, the current camera is obsessed at being behind the character and just rotates around the world to stay there as the character changes direction. I haven't screwed with the Blueprint yet because I'm some strange baby afraid of it after spending the day modifying a Linux kernel. I don't know what's wrong with me. 2. Do something to fix the camera position to be Self + some height offset and little X/Y offset. I don't know how to specify the camera target and I think it just assumes the parent in the hierarchy. I then don't know how to specify that offset in a Blueprint. I found the messing with the socket offset and target offset in the boom would move the camera relative to the player. A fundamental problem I see is the Blueprint is showing how to react to events, where I am trying to establish a permanent setting. In Unity, I just had the my camera polling to look at the player in the desired way each update, but I suspect that's not the "Unreal Way" here. There's probably something I can slap down in the events (or construction?) or the editor that affixes this position. Also, is there some method to have the content like this third person character internals visible while having the game preview available? I have to close the BP_ThirdPersonCharacter each time I want to see the real result of whatever I did, and then go back to editing it in the browser afterwards. This must be a typical thing people do--especially with screwing around with Blueprint stuff.
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Sep 20, 2023 08:43
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Huh. The fact that you're sending me a third-party one tells me it isn't really built in to the Unreal model itself, which tells me something about my assumptions; I thought ECS was a major thing with Unreal. Unreal uses an internal ECS implementation for several of its features - the main one is Niagara, for particle systems, or the crowd simulation thing I can't remember the name of. You could hijack those and use them more generically, but as for an out of the box solution, there isn't one. Unreal has a thoroughly established Gameplay Framework which, while it solves a lot of issues behind the scenes, can take some time to understand before you can really gently caress with it (kind of like how with design principles, you have to know the rules before you can effectively break them). - FLECS is probably fine, though I've never used it. - Apparatus is another option on the Epic Marketplace, but it's expensive (not free). The developers are very responsive to questions in their Discord. It's also very native to the Unreal system, so the translation layer is done for you, much like Unity ECS. - I think there are a couple other ECS solutions floating around, but they may be more or less native, more or less documented, more or less easy to understand. You can also always just use any C++ lib you want 
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Sep 20, 2023 09:07
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jizzy sillage posted:Unreal uses an internal ECS implementation for several of its features - the main one is Niagara, for particle systems, or the crowd simulation thing I can't remember the name of. You could hijack those and use them more generically, but as for an out of the box solution, there isn't one. Unreal has a thoroughly established Gameplay Framework which, while it solves a lot of issues behind the scenes, can take some time to understand before you can really gently caress with it (kind of like how with design principles, you have to know the rules before you can effectively break them). UE Sequencer uses an ECS style setup internally for speed but it's very much an internal thing nobody is supposed to use afaik. Unreal has an integrated user-facing archetype style ECS called Mass which is barebones on the gameplay feature side but has built in threading and crowd avoidance. I have helped make a public sample showing how to use it along with some evil experimental physics+rendering integrations and usability thingies here: https://github.com/Megafunk/MassSample Always remember: An ECS just just a fancy for loop with queries... you don't need one to make stuff fast.
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Sep 20, 2023 20:51
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I figured out in Unreal I get the top-down I want just by tweaking settings on the boom camera: 1. Disable everything under Camera Settings: Use Pawn Control Rotation, and Inherit Pitch/Yaw/Roll. 2. Set Z position to 500.0 3. Set Y rotation to -75 degrees I'm not sure if I really have it properly centered or anything and I wouldn't want to tweak the numbers just to get the effect. What I'd really like to do is move the camera over the player by HEIGHT units, move it south SOUTH units, and then have it look at the player. Is this a normal thing to do with a dedicated Blueprint? I'm just asking now before I go bushwhacking into that.
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Sep 21, 2023 23:06
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You don't have to use a SpringArm for your camera if you don't want to, but yeah in the blueprint for the character where the SpringArm as attached, you could on BeginPlay reposition things to how you like: Set Height Set Distance Make Rotator using Height and Distance Apply Rotation to SpringArm Optionally apply a Translation to the SpringArm to change exactly where it's looking at You can also do this in the Constructor since it requires no references to external actors.
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Sep 21, 2023 23:21
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https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee https://unity.com/pricing-updates
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Sep 22, 2023 20:07
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"We're doing the thing that was already in the TOS which we tried to scrub from the public eye."
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Sep 23, 2023 00:26
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I think I saw someone predicting this; "we proposed an outrageously stupid plan, and now, due to CUSTOMER FEEDBACK, we're rolling it back to a merely exploitative plan and we hope that the previous stupid plan will distract you from the fact that we're still screwing you compared to what you were originally promised."
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Sep 23, 2023 00:35
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Might be a dumb question but is there any way to get autocomplete in the Godot script editor for C#? Whenever I'm writing code for work or other projects I'm so used to some kind of autocomplete/intelligence type feature, but in the Godot editor seems like all I get is syntax highlighting and even that is very hit or miss. I usually end up just making all the script edits in visual studio because of this, but it would be nice to do it in the same place and not have to have two separate applications to work on the same thing.
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Sep 23, 2023 00:40
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roomforthetuna posted:I think I saw someone predicting this; "we proposed an outrageously stupid plan, and now, due to CUSTOMER FEEDBACK, we're rolling it back to a merely exploitative plan and we hope that the previous stupid plan will distract you from the fact that we're still screwing you compared to what you were originally promised." I was expecting this, but while it's worse than before for the games that made it big, it's actually the same or better for smaller games now, since they upped the revenue limit and got rid of the splash screen requirement for the free versions of unity. If they had announced this originally along with a statement like "we need to pay our employees and the subscription-only model just wasn't working," I think there would have been grumbles but it wouldn't have been the end of the world. Just LOL at how bad they hosed up though.
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Sep 23, 2023 01:13
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KillHour posted:Just LOL at how bad they hosed up though.
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Sep 23, 2023 01:42
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How are large multimillion dollar companies that presumably pay their top ranked officers giant piles of cash constantly do this and be so bad at a basic aspect of their job and still have it?
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Sep 23, 2023 01:44
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Raenir Salazar posted:How are large multimillion dollar companies that presumably pay their top ranked officers giant piles of cash constantly do this and be so bad at a basic aspect of their job and still have it? capitalism isn't a meritocracy
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Sep 23, 2023 01:46
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well gently caress off to ars for giving this company a puff piece https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-exec-tells-ars-hes-on-a-mission-to-earn-back-developer-trust/
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Sep 23, 2023 01:56
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roomforthetuna posted:I think I saw someone predicting this; "we proposed an outrageously stupid plan, and now, due to CUSTOMER FEEDBACK, we're rolling it back to a merely exploitative plan and we hope that the previous stupid plan will distract you from the fact that we're still screwing you compared to what you were originally promised."
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Sep 23, 2023 02:22
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Irony Be My Shield posted:It's such a catastrophic hit to the trust in Unity that it cannot possibly be worth it though. Like so many studios are now painfully aware that Riccitiello has the power to destroy their business model at any time. Given the role of the CEO I did kind of wonder if the board was going to boot him. Think that would have gone a long way to fixing things. (I mean yes he does have a board seat but still)
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Sep 23, 2023 03:31
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The retroactive aspect was a massive poison pill. Almost anything else could be forgiven. If they were like our next version's license will make you pay a 30% revenue share people would definitely be upset but at least you can just say no to a new license. If you agree to a 30% split that's on you, and you might not like it, but there's a certain inherent fairness to a transparent new contract. But adding a new fee to old licenses? You can't do that because now I can never trust your contracts. The whole point of a contract is that it describes the entire relationship and I can know what I'm entering into when I decide to take it or leave it. The certainty is the point. How can I sign a contract with an entity I know is willing to just unilaterally change the terms in the future?
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Sep 23, 2023 03:36
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Phigs posted:The retroactive aspect was a massive poison pill. Almost anything else could be forgiven. If they were like our next version's license will make you pay a 30% revenue share people would definitely be upset but at least you can just say no to a new license. If you agree to a 30% split that's on you, and you might not like it, but there's a certain inherent fairness to a transparent new contract. Time-based licenses for a thing that is not inherently a service are, of course, a huge piece of poo poo.
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Sep 23, 2023 04:31
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