|
I'm one of those people who has made the tremendously foolish step of trying to make their own indie videogame. I know I have blind spots, things I just don't know I should be aware of because I haven't worked in the industry (my background is software engineering, but, like, corporate/enterprise stuff). So, first off: if you have any particular advice to someone in this position, please do lay it on me. Second, what all am I missing from this list that you'd consider basically vital to the creation of a game? - coding, graphics, writing, game/level design, project management (so to speak, there's only one of me): doing all this myself - sound effects: I'm buying off the shelf and tweaking as needed - music: presumably going to hire out eventually - QA/testing: hoping to lean on the community for this - marketing, publishing: ??? feels like it's much too early to worry about this? I don't even have a playable demo yet.
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2020 16:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 07:21 |
|
|
Yeah, this is more of a break year project than a business, though at this point it's pretty clear I'm not gonna be done with it in just one year. Guess who let scope get the better of them?  Good point on the business / legal work though. Art is a tricky thing; I'm doing it both because I want the control over visuals and because I don't want to pay for bespoke art. I'm not great at it, and while I'm getting better all the time it's still going to be a weak point in the finished product, I expect. Assistance with art design (either me paying someone, or some tips on how I can get better at it myself) is definitely something I could use.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2020 17:34
|
|
|
Thanks for the advice, y'all! It sounds like the big takeaways are: * Keep working on building a community. I'm on Twitter and periodically do livestreams on Twitch; my impression is that Reddit hates self-promoters so I haven't been talking about it there (plus I have zero established identity there). * Get a lawyer and an accountant handy for if/when they're needed. * Be very cautious around signing any publishing deals (assuming I ever make it that far!); get solid commitments from them in terms of amount of effort they'll put in. On an unrelated note, I started working on making a "trailer" for the game. Not really for promotion, just something I can throw at people to explain in ~1 minute what the heck I'm working on. And I gotta say, it's amazing how many bugs you find when you start trying to make the thing look good instead of just making it work. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2020 21:35
|
|
|
justcola posted:I've a touch of experience in games industry stuff. If you're just doing it for fun, nice, if you might want to make money from it, there's a few things you can do that others don't do. I really should be playing these games more, I recognize that. I think I have some kind of psychological block around interacting with "the competition", even though intellectually I know that "early-mid 20th century naval combat" is a very broad genre and players who like it are likely to play all good games in the genre. quote:Networking - go out and meet people, if you live near a big city there might be an indie games scene there already you can meet with. If not, there's usually events/festivals you can go to. I'd suggest generally go with a purpose in mind, like you want to talk to x amount of people or meet with such and such a publisher. Look at the games yours is most similar too and try and have a chat with them (even if just asking for advice) quote:Extra staff - anything you don't know how to do, it's usually cheaper and easier to just pay someone to do it. Marketing, accounting, legal etc. - the 'soft skills' - have steep learning curves, and if you're in a small team the time you spend doing that is what you're not spending developing your game. But yeah, totally agreed on the soft skills. In addition to marketing, accounting, and legal, I'd tack on music, portraiture / splash art, and general art design. Speaking of that last one, I'd characterize my graphics as "adequate" at the moment -- they're functional but not impressive. Partially this is because I have an intentionally streamlined art pipeline due to needing to do everything myself -- nothing is UV textured, everything uses a generic set of materials, etc. But I feel like it should be possible to improve the art by making a few relatively small changes, if I only knew what those changes were. I need, like, a professional artistic consultation or something. Is that a thing? quote:Do gamejams, make games, make characters or bits of code, just keep making stuff. I think starting off with little projects is a good way to learn quickly, and working with others is a good way to start building a team. Thanks, these are all helpful. I tend to fixate on making the game, but a lot of what you're covering here is about making games and having a social support network you can hit up for work if you're short on income, which also absolutely makes sense.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2020 15:48
|
|
|
Don't AAA devs also buy assets to use in their games? I mean, with any asset you're going to have to spend some effort on adapting it so it doesn't look out of place with the rest of your stuff, but if making a purchased asset look coherent is less effort than making a new asset from scratch, then why wouldn't you? Especially since AAA games are already hugely expensive, it seems like dropping a few thousand dollars on saving your artists a few days' worth of work would probably be worth it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2020 15:10
|
|
|
Yeah, contracting out isn't the same thing, agreed. I'm surprised though that there's no purchasing assets. Is the concern that someone might recognize a model being re-used, raise a fuss, and the resulting PR hit would tank the game or something? What about sound effects?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2020 15:51
|
|
|
To be clear, I wasn't talking about making a game entirely out of purchased assets. I was more thinking, like, "I need a crapton of rocks, instead of modeling them I'm going to go buy this asset pack of 100 different rocks and then adjust the materials / slap a shader on them so they look right for the rest of the game". Or boxes, or doors, or wall textures, or any of the other million little background elements that an AAA game has to have to have convincing environments but that doesn't really draw the player's attention. Even then, yes of course you're going to need to make modifications; a game with a cell-shaded aesthetic is going to look damned strange if the rocks all have realistic PBR materials, or have noticeably more/fewer polys than anything else.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2020 19:15
|
|
|
Ah, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Why buy assets when you already have them?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2020 22:30
|
|
|
My (non-professional) experience with gamedev is that trig is unavoidable, matrix math and quaternions are borderline essential for 3D, and understanding how rendering works is very helpful for shaders. Higher-level math can certainly be helpful in a bunch of other areas but I'd hesitate to characterize it as essential for an indie dev.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2020 16:42
|
|
|
As someone who started using Unity full-time last year (3D game, but not remotely bleeding-edge), I doubt you'll have trouble. I have a 12-year-old CPU (3.2GHz Core i7), 16GB of RAM, a 980ti graphics card, and if I wanted to improve my development life the #1 thing I'd do is replace my drive with an SSD. Like, yes your game is probably going to have bad performance, but you're not going to be playing your game much, especially early on. You're going to be writing code, making assets, waiting for stuff to compile, hitting the "run" button, waiting for all those assets to load, playing for five seconds, stopping, writing more code, etc. Of all those steps, the most annoying are "waiting for stuff to compile" (and link) and "waiting for all those assets to load", and I'm pretty confident that those (definitely the latter at least) are dominated by disk I/O. EDIT: vvv yeah, and you also pay a significant performance penalty for running your game inside the editor, especially if you're profiling. Performance in standalone builds will be much better. I managed to completely wedge my entire computer once while trying to deep profile the game through a mysterious 500MB allocation during program start. Couldn't bring up Task Manager, and every time the mouse moved the built-in speaker beeped. Weirdest thing I've ever seen my computer do. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Apr 15, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2020 22:26
|
|
|
Got some questions about representation in games, and specifically how representation is perceived by game players. My impression is that we still seem to be largely mired in the "token representation" that's been the norm since the 80's at least -- where you have a bunch of default white male characters, then you have The Black Guy, The Asian Guy, The Girl, The One In A Wheelchair, etc. There's been a little progress in terms of representation of gays, and basically nothing when it comes to transgender characters. So first off: how accurate is that assessment? Second, assuming it is accurate, how much of that is companies perceiving this as the safest route to take to make a game that will sell? Is there much discussion about broadening representation and moving away from tokenism? What kinds of issues have to be considered when deciding on the background for a character, especially considering their role in the game? E.g. it being problematic these days to have your only female character exist to get captured/killed as a motivating ploy for the guys, or making your science character Asian. The reason I'm asking is because I'm giving some thought to the identities of the characters in my game. Frankly, gender and race shouldn't matter a whit to who they are; they're defined by their professional roles (captain, executive officer, commando, businessman, etc.). Historically, they'd all be male, and almost all white, but I'm not paying a whole lot of attention to historicity (edit: the main cast is all American storywise, but fortunately that leaves plenty of room for different ethnicities, recent immigrants, etc.). I'm really tempted to have no white men in the cast whatsoever, and basically have a cast comprised entirely of "tokens". Being a white man myself however, I'm leery of making mis-steps; I'm sure I have plenty of blind spots due to my background. And even assuming I did a good job of it, I have no idea how this would be perceived by the market. tl;dr babby's first guide to representation in games? TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Apr 18, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2020 22:46
|
|
|
I assume that "great race space" is the subforum currently known as "Minority Rapport"? I have trouble keeping tabs on all the subforums, and mostly stick to the creative/historical threads so I haven't been in D&D in...ever. Is this the thread you were talking about? If not, please link it, thank you! EDIT: oh, you probably meant this thread. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Apr 19, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2020 04:37
|
|
|
Particles are basically just textured quads with some rules on how the quad transforms. Ribbon trails connect the particles together with more textured quads arranged as a, well, ribbon. If you want the ribbon without the particles, disable the particle renderer and leave the trail renderer enabled. (these kinds of specific "how do I do X" questions should probably be in the Game Development Megathread or the Making Games Megathread; my reading is that this thread is more for demystifying the game development industry)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2020 14:58
|
|
|
Stick100 posted:Is it a hobby or a job? If it's a hobby it's ok to take time off until you feel ready to work again, if it's a job then you have to treat it like a job which means you power through the low spots. This is kinda true and kinda not. It's true in the sense that one of the markers of a professional is being able to get work done when they're not passionate about it. So we need to differentiate between "I'm not passionate about this" and "I'm burnt out." You can't power through burnout; trying will only make it worse. If you are suffering from burnout related to your professional work, then you need time off and therapy. Treat it seriously, because it can legit be career-ending. Burnout can cut you out of the industry for years, and if/when you come back you may find that your capacity to get stuff done is way lower. Assuming it hasn't gotten that bad yet and you're just in a low spot: especially right now it's not at all surprising that many of us are having trouble maintaining interest with creative work. The most important thing is to be honest with yourself about your mental state and what you're capable of accomplishing. Don't set up expectations that you can't realistically meet. Maybe today all you can manage to do is doodle some character designs on a scrap of paper, or fix a typo. That's OK! What you don't want to do is sit in front of the computer trying to force yourself to do something you really don't / can't do. Something I try to do that I find helps is keep a supply of "easy wins" -- low-priority tasks that don't require any hard decisions and can be knocked out in maybe 15-30 minutes. Sometimes all you need to get a good day in is to get started, and an easy win is a good way to help you get in the groove. Even if you just do the easy win and then quit for the day though, that's still something you accomplished, and it's worth celebrating.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 15:38
|
|
|
Ranzear posted:I could actually make some weird suggestion that, from a pure skillset and resources perspective, procrastination is better than prototyping. It's too easy for temporary solutions to become permanent hobblings. Generalize your work instead... It sounds like you're saying "build the idealized form of the utility you need, that can be adapted to any future requirement." The consensus I'm aware of is the opposite, viz. make the code that solves the problem you have right now, and hopefully on the next project you'll be able to cannibalize the parts from this project that are actually re-usable. The price you pay is that you'll have to rewrite some parts of your code, even in this project, because as the project advanced you realized that the current code didn't meet your current needs. But arguably you'd have to do that anyway with the "ideal" code because correctly anticipating your future needs is borderline impossible. The advantage is that by the time you need to do the rewrite, you have a much better understanding of what your actual needs are, so you'll be able to write code that is much more likely to be correct for the long term. Put another way, designs never survive contact with reality unaltered. The best way I know of to cope with that is to engage with reality as soon as possible. The longer you spend in ivory-tower land, crafting the perfect jewel, the more likely you are to spend time/resources on stuff you'll never actually use.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2020 19:17
|
|
|
Ranzear is quite reasonably expecting developers to have some domain experience and to be able to make basic judgement calls themselves. Nobody's saying "the developer must be a subject matter expert." But at minimum the developer should know the limits of their knowledge and be able to ask "Are we certain that we will only need these six stats in the future?" or "What does it mean to land an airplane?" In industry work in my experience, the way this would go would be something like: customer delivers requirements to the program manager. Program manager, tech lead (/architect/senior dev), and customer work together to hammer out the requirements, propose easier-to-implement alternatives, and try to get everything nailed down in terms of what the customer actually wants. Tech lead converts the requirements to a design, and the design into work items (tickets, deliverables, whatever you want to call them) which then get handed out to individual devs to implement. The program manager keeps tabs on development fairly directly (i.e. interacting with individual devs), and provides clarifications as they are needed. I don't know how it works in industry gamedev. I'm guessing it's usually more informal.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2020 18:27
|
|
|
The indie equivalent to that I think is something like Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud, a.k.a. a passion project that is worked on by a small handful of devs and primarily supported through sales and crowdfunding. But those games involve less pandering to whales and ignoring of playerbase pain points. I assume that "coalface dev" is an analogy to mining coal, a.k.a. the people working on directly producing the game content and logic.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2020 20:14
|
|
|
When it comes to building special effects, do y'all have any recommendations for teaching materials that can help me build a framework for how to approach the problem? Like, if I'm drawing something by hand, I can break it down into primitive shapes. If I'm making a 3D model, I can rough it out and then fine tune with loop cuts and extrusions. If I'm making a sound effect, I can think of sounds similar to what I'm trying to achieve and layer them together. But outside of fairly simple examples, I'm having trouble building visual effects from the ground up because I simply don't know how to approach the problem. I can write basic shaders OK, and navigate my way around particle systems; I can gain familiarity with the tools. But that doesn't tell me how to use them.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2020 15:39
|
|
|
I'm having some generalized anxiety about my game, in part precipitated by watching Rami Ismail's "you're going to fail" talk. In particular the bits that resonated:
Where I am fortunate:
I'm trying to figure out how to de-risk things, to the extent that that is possible in indie gamedev. I'd appreciate a sounding board from others in the biz. My big risks as I see them are a) getting the attention of gamers, and b) loving up something business-wise (missing out on opportunities I don't know about, mostly -- I know there's nothing I can do to even remotely guarantee success). I don't know how to fix either of them. Getting a publisher or a successful crowdfunding campaign would help, but those are both not remotely guaranteed. Another potential option would be to try to take the systems and content I've made so far and build a smaller-scoped game that I can iterate on and publish faster. For example, instead of a 30-mission game where the player can design their own ships, have a 10-mission game where each ship is pre-set for each mission (or you can choose from one of a small set of presets). The main advantage of doing this would be that I'd be able to get to the parts of gamedev I'm not experienced with (viz. finishing and selling) faster...but the resulting game also wouldn't be as interesting to me. In particular, I think most of the ship customization would have to go out the window, since it really needs a fairly long campaign to dole out parts over. I'd also have to come up with a different storyline and appropriate content; I don't think I can do a world-spanning epic in 10 missions. Uh, that was long and rambly. Apologies for the wall of text. tl;dr am indie, what do?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2020 05:33
|
|
|
Vino posted:At a basic level risk is basically the probability given the data you know that you're going to make enough to have a viable business. There are a few parts of that to break down. Thanks for this! I'll look into the books, and the advice about making a vertical slice makes a lot of sense. I think I'm pretty close to that now -- I have five playable missions, which is enough to get a basic progression going; all I really need is music and ideally some portrait art to replace my stick figures. Regarding how sure I am that I'll make money: I'm aware that something like 5% of indie games are profitable. I feel like I ought to have at least somewhat better odds than that since I have more experience and resources to throw around than your average fresh-out-of-college startup, but I have no idea how much better. 10% odds is very different from 75% odds. And of course, to some extent the more I spend on the game, the more likely the game is to sell...but the greater my costs are as well, so the more it needs to sell to be profitable. I have a (now badly out-of-date) demo up on Itch, which did get me some very valuable feedback about how players were confused about what was going on. I've since done a lot to improve feedback and give more or less subtle guidance on various aspects, though I'm still missing a tutorial on combat mechanics. What I don't have though is data on if the game is fun. And it's just really hard in this day and age to be able to watch other people, especially non-gamedevs, mash on my game. They need to be set up for streaming, or they need to record their video and send it to me, or else I just get scattered "I couldn't figure out how to do X" feedback. ...I guess in principle I could add some kind of session recording functionality to the game that would record inputs and game state in enough detail to let me replay their sessions after the fact, but oh lordy that sounds complicated to retrofit in. SerthVarnee posted:As a way to get people to talk about your game, have you considered going into the lets play part of this very forum and ask for volunteers who want to stream their playing of the game, potentially with you doing a director's commentary sidekick with them as they play and talk about the game? Oh, absolutely -- you can bet that when I'm ready to start marketing in earnest I'll be leaning hard on even community I'm in. I'd be a fool not to. And of course I'll also be reaching out to general streamers and game journalist sites (and, because my game is a war sim, wargamer journalists). I don't think it's smart to start doing that before I have a fully-polished section of gameplay to show them though. At the very least I need music.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2020 15:33
|
|
|
Thanks for your detailed and blunt advice, Vino! I really appreciate it. It's hard to find communities that don't sugarcoat their advice these days.Vino posted:Those 5% that are profitable aren't evenly distributed by experience, they're the ones that already have experience. Nobody makes a profitable game with no experience. So you can't improve your odds on that basis. quote:You seem to think that how much your game sells is 100% a function of how many features are in the game. Untrue. Features matter, but the marketing work you do is a larger factor. You as a business owner need to be putting more thought and effort into the marketing than you are putting into the game. quote:This game looks cool. One promotion model for you could be something like Skate Story or Untitled Duck Game where you use Twitter as a video dev log to grow an audience. quote:That's not the data you need. You can tell whether the game is fun by playing it yourself. You're a game designer, it's your job to make fun games. The watching-over-the-shoulder playtests you're talking about are for testing the first-time user experience and you can do them by streaming over Discord, but they won't get you the business data you need, which is not whether your game is fun but whether it will sell. Think about what conditions need to be in place for your game to sell a lot at launch and work backwards from there. Thinking in terms of the conditions I need to have in place for the game to sell on launch: - People need to know about it. This implies a lot of getting the word out, through word-of-mouth, articles, streams, Twitter, what have you. - People need to want it. That implies making the game look good in all or most of the above. - People need to be able to buy it. That implies good storefront presence and a price point that's in-line with their expectations. This feels kind of uselessly high-level, did you mean something more specific? quote:You're ready now. If you don't start now, you will fail. There's something of a circular dependency / snowball effect in what you say that I'm not sure how to resolve. You need to demonstrate an audience before the big names will care enough to give you spotlight time, but in order to get an audience you need people to be able to find out about the game. Is this basically "bootstrap through word-of-mouth until you can say "I have all these metrics (followers, preorders, wishlists, etc.) saying this game will be big, you [streamer/journalist/etc.] should pay attention to me"? I'm not clear on how to do more effective word-of-mouth marketing; my impression has been that self-promoting in most communities is counterproductive unless you're already a member in good standing, and I can only maintain membership in so many communities without cutting into my time to do other important things. quote:Question: When is your game ready to be sold? You probably think the answer is "when it's done". This is false. The answer is "when people buy it". One of the many tasks on my plate is to set up a Steam page for the game, not for Early Access necessarily, but just so people could wishlist. That had been blocked on me getting the aesthetics nailed down, which has finally happened in the relatively recent past. I'm not really sure I want to be in the position of directly taking preorders on a self-run site...aside from Steam and Itch, are there other places you'd recommend an indie set up shop, so to speak, to help garner attention while they're still in development? edit: fix a bbtag. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Sep 21, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2020 20:47
|
|
|
Vino posted:This is good. You've built a model that you can test. If you can make each more concrete then you have something to work on. How specific can you get? I find it helps me to pretend my boss or an investor is asking for a report and write everything down in a document somewhere. "People need to know about it" - How will you do that, in particular? Twitter is a good start. If people will be streaming it, what streamer? Pick a specific one as an example. How will that streamer decide to stream it? How will they know about it? These are excellent questions that I don't know the answer to. I will work on this. I know a few mid-range streamers (who can reliably pull in 50-100 viewers), but I'm not at all confident I can convince them to try my game since it's a bit outside their usual wheelhouse. For a total stranger? I don't know what I'd do beyond cold-calling them. I also know plenty of smaller-time streamers who I'd have an easier time convincing to give it a shot, and I will be doing that, but the snowball potential seems small. One recommendation I got from the Dogpit Jams discord was to trawl Twitch for streamers that don't seem to have much going on and just straight-up ask them if they want to try my game. Could be a good way to get some playtesting if nothing else. quote:"People need to want it" - You can do art tests for this. Find some players who like this kind of game and show them art of other games in the genre and ask them for their opinions. Cross-reference that with what games they've bought. Ask your artist to art one or two pieces and then throw those into the other examples and ask for more opinions. Maybe you'll discover you can get away with simpler and cheaper art. "People need to be able to buy it" - That ones easy for game devs, there are already a lot of solutions out there. Of course, materials and lighting can make a big difference to how those assets are received; one of my big challenges is making the daytime and nighttime environments as nice-looking as the sunrise/sunset environments, which routinely get positive feedback on social media. For example:https://twitter.com/byobattleship/status/1302258800842293249 quote:Yes. It's hard, and that's why your primary attention should be focused there. You're already an expert in technical development, so you don't have risks there. You should put your time where your risks are, answering the questions about how to start that snowball. quote:It's probably not as simple as "Hey streamer look at my data!" because as an oversimplification the data they look at to determine what to play is this page. If your strategy is to use streams to gain an audience then you need to make it onto that page. Your streamer strategy might be more like finding streamers who are already playing similar games and inviting them to play your game, asking for their feedback, and using it to direct development. If you can get them bought in to your game then you may be able to get them to stream you on release day. I would say all this only works if your game is multiplayer, if not then you're probably best off abandoning the idea that streamers can help you. quote:Why is it blocked on aesthetics? Is your game the type that people will judge based on the aesthetics and then never look at again if they don't pass the visual bar? If your game is like a first-party playstation singleplayer experience then that might be true, but maybe it's not? Have you tested that assumption? If you can invalidate it then you can put up a Steam page and get wishlists sooner. My graphical quality is very roughly like if you took a Dreamcast game, replaced the textures with flat colors and gradients, and then used a modern resolution. And then replaced that with what people imagine when I say the previous sentence. In other words, it has moderately detailed models, but they're visibly chunky and almost entirely untextured (because I knew I don't have the resources to texture hundreds of models, especially as my 2D art skills are relatively weak). quote:Why not? Set up Stripe and send anyone who pre-orders Steam codes on launch day. (Again I'm not saying this should be your strategy, just that it's a possible strategy you can consider. You've got to figure out what your best strategy is.) I guess I've been tacitly avoiding techniques that involve collecting data from my playerbase, due to not wanting to deal with a privacy policy. But the telemetry discussion reminds me that metrics on player interactions would be really useful, so I may need to just bite the bullet on that and add a privacy policy to the game.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2020 05:12
|
|
|
1337JiveTurkey posted:I'm some random dude who just tried running the game as compiled for the operating system I'm using (Windows) and it's not going anywhere. I'm a programmer so my system is probably in some weird state that I'll try to send back to you. Otherwise yeah you probably want to focus on peoples experiences that are outside the bare minimum. If I can ever BYO My Battleship I'll be happy as can be. Oh dear, if you have any more details on this I'd love to know! quote:edit: I got it working! I think most people don't know who an XO is and I'm not sure who's the RATC, but I understand that people who want to get the game going this far are willing to spend time understanding who they are. I just think they're a bit beyond me and may need to be better defined for people just picking up the game at random. Yeah, sorry, the text is in a bit of a state. The story missions pick up in the middle because I punted on doing a tutorial, plus at the time that demo came out I didn't have names for any of the characters. Good things to take care of shortly.Vino posted:Cold-call them. All good advice. Thanks again!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2020 14:47
|
|
|
SerthVarnee posted:Goddamn your game is way too fun. I played through the 5 missions and the prequel mission and im having a blast. Hey, thank you!  I'm working on the Steam page this week, but for today I just put out an updated demo. I also have a dev.log thread which is where I usually post updates about the game.OtspIII posted:You can probably use twitter attention as a rough metric for how you're going to do on launch. If you're struggling to get responses to your twitter posts about the game, that's a pretty clear sign that the game (in its current presentation) is going to struggle with sales. From what I've seen of other comparable games (solo to tiny team, no budget, good design, but not a lot of marketing momentum) I'd probably expect you to sell in the range of 2k copies your first year? I definitely think that one of the things I've struggled with on Twitter is figuring out how to make the game look cool in badly-compressed MP4s or short-duration GIFs. I've been doing better as the game's gotten prettier and I've gotten more practice with composing posts, but it's not like posting "hey look at this slice of platformer gameplay" or "hey check out this enemy sprite" where people can instantly understand what's going on. quote:It really is, and without financial backing it's real hard to break through. My experience is that it really relies much more on what you're selling than on how hard you hustle, too--you can show at cons, get a RPG article written about you, run reddit AMAs, etc, and each of those will get your game in front of up to a couple thousand people, but of those couple thousand people you're unlikely to get more than single-digit sales out of it--almost never worth the amount of time and effort you put into it. It only really works if there's something about your game that gets those people telling their friends about it, and those friends are telling their friends, and so on. If your game doesn't sell itself, there's no amount of hustle you can do that'll make it take off. I've given some thought to this before, and I think the parts of the game that have the most "viral potential" are the ship designer, and the silly bosses. The ship designer is really quite freeform and a good creative outlet, and I've tried to give a lot of aesthetic power to the player as well with customizable paint jobs, decals, and flags (all of which are really easy to mod, too -- just drop a JPG or PNG into a specific directory). I could definitely see players wanting to share screenshots of their ships, and I'm trying to figure out how to encourage that. One possibility is adding a "photo booth" to the ship designer, which would drop your ship into a simple ocean scene and let you play with the camera and the weather settings to compose a nice shot for sharing with others. As for the bosses, they're where the game universe really goes off the rails, so they have a certain "what the gently caress?" factor to them. Thus far I've implemented a flying battleship with paradropped PT boats (little speedboats that shoot torpedoes at you), and a giant gun mounted on a train that uses flying train tracks to improve its mobility, plus the sections of track can split off to strafe you. Other bosses I have planned include things like Battleship Voltron, a mobile iceberg superfortress that's basically the Death Star from Star Wars, a submersible reversible aircraft carrier (a.k.a. a submarine that can launch planes when surfaced, and when you damage it enough it spins about its long axis to reveal all the guns it had mounted to the underside), a gun made out of a volcano, and a superweapon factory on a subterranean magma ocean. Conceivably I could try to make a game that was entirely "custom warship fights ridiculous superweapons". It'd be throwing away a lot of the work I did on fleet battles, though, and I'm not sure I have enough ridiculous boss ideas in me to fill out a complete game. But I will definitely be billing the bosses front and center in any trailers I make, and they'll need to show up early in the campaign to help hook the player.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2020 22:07
|
|
|
OtspIII posted:What gets people excited about your game isn't necessarily what they like about it once they've started playing it. Both the ship customization and the boss fights sound like good hooks to use for advertising, but that doesn't mean you have to change gameplay at all. I see your point re: not having to adjust gameplay. Gotta focus on the marketing, TMA! Putting some gimmick builds in the marketing is definitely planned. Hell, today I finally got around to adding screenshots to the Itch page, and threw in one of a ship with 17 giant gatling guns and no other armament. I'm reminded of this trailer for Mothergunship that really focused hard on the "make silly guns" angle. In actual practice, during the game you're more constrained and can't afford to throw around a dozen connectors to make weird-shaped and inefficient guns that take up 50% of the display, but it made a good trailer. For bosses...each of them is going to have at least one cutscene introducing them, which I can mine for trailer content. Like, the flying train has this thing (which was my very first attempt at using Unity's timeline to do a cutscene, so it definitely needs some refinement). Some of them are going to be easier to use in trailers than others -- I plan to have Battleship Voltron strike some classic sentai poses with appropriate Dramatic Camera Angles, for example. Others look better in actual gameplay, so I can show the player sailing around and shooting at a flying battleship while the target info display says Flying Battleship. I'm not sure I can be more specific than "uh steal from my cutscenes I guess", mostly because I haven't actually made most of the bosses yet. But part of making a good boss is really selling it to the player so they think "holy poo poo I'm actually fighting a <whatever>!", which I feel like is a similar kind of energy that you need to apply to trailer making.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2020 23:52
|
|
|
SerthVarnee posted:Nevermind the bosses. Your core gameplay of going up solo against an increasingly absurdly sized enemy fleet is what sold me on your game. Now im already sold, but pictures of your bosses would be a great hook (as in the part that makes me unable to back off), but the point that pierces my skin and gets my attention? the normal ships. the normal fights. The "this day started out so well" kind of escalation where in a series of 6-7 pictures you show my fight going from a 1v1 fight against another destroyer to slowly increasing numbers and sizes and the ending up in my little destroyer staring into the sky which has been darkened by the wave of incoming fire (I loving love your fleetbattle map) while the periphery of the image just barely manages to catch those 50-100 torpedoes bearing down on me. I'm imagining this as a trailer, and it definitely has potential. I think the big trick is that trailers generally want to hook the player in the first 10 seconds or so. That doesn't mean that the "holy poo poo what is going on" bit has to be less than 10 seconds from the start of the trailer, just that I need to have caught the player's attention. Maybe in this case it'd just be "huh the number of ships the player is facing is ramping up awfully quickly..." quote:Any WTF moment you throw up as a hook is spoiled ingame. So sure the bosses can get people's attention, but if thats what they came for then the general enemies are just so much chaff to get past to get to the fun stuff. I understand what you're saying, and I certainly don't plan to have the trailer spoil everything about the game. But the bosses are an important enough part of the core concept of the game that I can't leave them out either. I'm not going to put all or even most of the bosses in, nor will the trailer cover why you're fighting a given boss, which can be just as absurd as the boss design itself in some cases. So I think there'll still be plenty for the player to discover even if they remember everything that happened in every trailer before they start playing the game. quote:The ship designer thing had me bounce off at first, but i warmed up to it after playing the game some more (mind you, I couldn't actually get it to USE any of my designs in the old demo thing so that didn't help the feature much either). I also loved the "unlock entire tech tree for fun" button. Please don't remove that. quote:Too Much Praise Didn't Read:  You're very kind, thank you!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2020 19:07
|
|
|
Is this something you'd say to do while the game is still in development, with the goal of using the trailer to help build that marketing snowball? Or are you talking more about the leadup to launch (or Early Access or a Kickstarter)? I made a trailer half a year ago mostly to get some familiarity with the tools. Of course the game is extremely different now, and I've been contemplating making a new trailer to go on the Steam page so it isn't just screenshots. But it is a lot of effort. I certainly wouldn't put that trailer up on Steam; I had no real idea what I was doing, there's no story/throughline in the trailer, no focus, and of course the music is a little odd. Since I put out that demo on Monday, I've accumulated over 80 new issues. They're mostly polish and "the way this works isn't super obvious", fortunately. The overall impression I'm getting from feedback is that the game is mostly in a pretty good place!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2020 15:39
|
|
|
It's tough to prioritize, I guess. There's so much that needs doing and only one of me. Every once in awhile I daydream about some publisher coming along and saying "hey, we'll pay you $big to finish this game and we'll take care of the marketing, you just focus on finishing it." Which is a pretty laughable pipe dream, but hell, that's what daydreams are for right? Re: how you describe the game, I used to describe mine as "a build-your-own-warship arcade naval combat simulator". It's a big jumble of genre words, and I think it gets the broad points across well, but it's a lousy elevator pitch because it doesn't say anything about what the game does to differentiate it from other games. Like, I think it's more likely to make people think "this isn't the game I want to play" than "this sounds interesting". Especially the "naval combat simulator" bit is going to sound grognardy as hell to most people, with "arcade" not doing enough to haul it back into the realm of accessibility for normal folks. The itch.io short description is currently "Fight hordes of enemy warships with your custom ship! Take on ludicrous superweapons! Save the world from tyranny!" which is still kinda generic. It also kind of has the opposite problem of not really making it clear what kind of gameplay it is. The customization is there, and it's a warship game, but that could still mean turn-based or tactical fleet action or any number of other things.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2020 04:23
|
|
|
Hughlander posted:gratuitous tank battles but in water? That sounds good, but if you're familiar with the Gratuitous <X> Battles games, you'll be misled because they're completely different from my game. This is a "sail your single custom supership around in realtime while shooting at things with your big naval cannons" kind of game, and (unlike Gratuitous Tank Battles AIUI) it's singleplayer. Here's a video from a playtest of last week's demo, timestamped to one of the ship vs. ship conflicts, in the first mission of the game. NB I've fixed a bunch of the stuff that the game was failing to communicate properly, so hopefully the next demo will feature smoother play even from total beginners...anyway, hopefully you can get something of a feel for what the game's like.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2020 00:31
|
|
|
1337JiveTurkey posted:I feel it's really a spiritual successor to the Naval Ops: Warship Gunner series down to the superweapons you have to take down but that doesn't help most people understand what it is. This is, in fact, exactly what it is. I loved Warship Gunner 2 and was sad there weren't really any other games like it, so I decided to recreate it. Obviously I'm putting my own spin on the whole thing but the core game loop and a lot of the mechanics are the same.Studio posted:Singleplayer Arcadey World of Warships? This is, like, take everything that defines World of Warships and throw it out the window. It's a very amusing description for that reason.Anyway, I feel like the elevator pitch / short summary shouldn't reference other games by name. At least, when I see a description of a game on Steam and it says something like "Like Metroid meets Risk" or something I mentally tune out. I've been burned in the past by games saying "if you liked <famous game> you'll like <my game>" so now I want to see pitches that are confident enough to stand on their own.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2020 01:57
|
|
|
SerthVarnee posted:The first thing I think of when you tell me a game will be taking up a fuckton of space is: "one metric buttload of textures and audio, no mention of plotline, story or balancing yet. I wonder if they'll have time to make the plot this time once they are done rendering". quote:Are you telling me that you are primarily running into people who don't think 99% of the development is visuals and audio? You're not that far off though. Look at the credits for a game you enjoyed, odds are there's something like 10x as many graphics artists as programmers. Most games, especially content-driven AAA games, have a lot of art in them. The game I'm making a spiritual sequel to was a PS2 game made in 2005, and even back then it had IIRC over 20 artists and 4 programmers. Then you add in music, sound effects, and voice acting and things tilt even more heavily towards the content creators. As to more falafel please's original question: you might try showing them screenshots of games through the ages, to help reinforce the difference in what they're seeing. People tend to get rose-colored glasses about the graphical quality of games they played even just 10 years ago. You can also point out that games get exponentially bigger as texture quality increases (going from 128x128 to 256x256 uses 4 times as much storage).
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2020 16:11
|
|
|
Gromit posted:You'd better not gently caress up Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation V.I.D.E.O.G.A.M.E. or there will be hell to pay!  that sure is a game title. No, I was talking about the much more reasonably-named Naval Ops: Warship Gunner 2; my follow-on game is currently titled All or Nothing: Waves of Steel I sorely wanted to call it BYOBattleship, but it turns out there's a very good reason why there's exactly one game with the word "battleship" in its name. My lawyers advised me it wasn't worth the risk. 
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 00:38
|
|
|
I posted this in the Making Games Megathread a bit ago, but there's a different, more business-related circle in this thread and I'd appreciate y'all's advice too. I'm working on a trailer for my game for when the Steam page goes up (they've been stuck verifying my tax info for a week now  ). What do you think of this?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1bXD5fGKrc At this point all I think I'm missing is a title card at the end, and the link to Steam. But if there's anything else that you think ought to change, I want to hear about it. It's a lot easier to change before I release the trailer publicly after all
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2020 20:00
|
|
|
Popete posted:Yeah I was thinking specifically games with a graphics window like DF and Caves of Qud. I assume they just split the screen up into an X * Y set of tiles and use ASCII graphic tilesets as the graphics. Yeah, these days relatively few ASCII games actually use a real terminal any more. It's mostly just an aesthetic that you can cultivate rather than a specific set of technologies.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2020 20:52
|
|
|
I don't think you're going to get a single consensus, because there's so many potential ways to do what you're talking about. But there's a fairly small number of options that (I would guess) are going to come to the forefront. First off, if the experience is mostly or entirely passive, you can just make a video, or a set of videos that users can pick between. There's any number of tools for that, but for free stuff there's Blender and Davinci Resolve. For more complicated stuff you are probably looking at a game engine though. You want to use an engine (instead of writing everything yourself) mostly because it'll take care of stuff like setting up the display, loading and displaying graphics / playing sounds, handling user input, etc. Basically a bunch of fiddly stuff that you don't want to waste your time on. I would recommend starting with an engine even though you're also brushing up on your programming, mostly because your #1 priority is staying motivated, and that tends to be easier when you're writing programs that have graphical/audio feedback (like games), as opposed to writing toy programs that just take in text and output more text on a command line. There's several big game engines that you can choose between. I can try to sum up their major points: - Unity: probably the most popular game engine (for game development, that is). Huge installed userbase, which has the happy side-effect that pretty much any problem you encounter, someone else will have encountered previously. The asset store also has a bunch of stuff you can just buy and plop into your project. The main issue Unity has is that the engine's quality is pretty variable; a lot of stuff doesn't quite work the way you'd expect and documentation isn't always the greatest. But it can do your project, pretty much regardless of what your project is. All programming is done in C#. - UE (Unreal Engine): the serious engine for serious devs. Honestly probably too heavyweight for you: it expects users to have a fair amount of time to dedicate to getting things working just so. But on the flipside, it can turn out prettier, faster, and generally nicer content than Unity can. Programming is done in C++ or Blueprint, a sort of visual coding system. - GameMaker: much more limited than the above two engines, but focuses on doing what it does well, which means that if your project fits into its scope then you'll probably have an easier time of it. That scope is pretty much 2D sprite-based games, so there's still a lot you can do with it. Programming is done in GML, a custom language that's kind of Javascript-y. - Godot: a relative newcomer, I don't know much about it. I've heard good things about it, and it can do 2D and 3D, but it's so new and has a smaller install base compared to the above three that I'd hesitate to recommend it for a newcomer. It supports a fairly wide variety of languages. My personal recommendation would be to take this Udemy course, which is a learn-to-program course that uses Unity. Don't buy Udemy courses at full price, incidentally; they go on sale all the time (I saw it at $15 when making this post, for example).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2020 22:20
|
|
|
punk rebel ecks posted:Also, is the work environment for an established indie studio better than a big corp on average? My impression is that indies are more variable. They also don't employ anywhere near as many people as the big corps do, so it's pretty rare to find an opening at one. In particular the ones that have a really pleasant atmosphere are rarely going to need to be publicly hiring. People won't quit that kind of job, and if the company needs to expand, odds are they can find someone through the employees' professional networks.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2021 18:59
|
|
|
This is kind of far afield, but I'm looking for some help with advertising my indie game. I purchased a consult with Rami Ismail to get advice. One of his suggestions was to run some Facebook ads targeting people who have liked games like Warning Forever or Captain Forever -- basically, arcadey ship games with lots of explosions and things breaking apart and maybe a bit of a builder element to them. That sounds pretty reasonable, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to target Facebook ads based on pages people have liked. As far as I can tell, all I get is an interests browser which has hopelessly broad categories like "action games", a search box to look for more narrow interests that will pull up e.g. World of Warships but not less popular games, some very basic demographics information, and then some options regarding people who have interacted with my pages, which is nobody since I just made my game's Facebook page today. I don't suppose anyone here has advice for helping me narrow down my categories? I was hoping to target fewer than a million people with my first ad (I don't feel like World of Warships is a particularly great match for my game; they're both naval combat games, but mine is very fast-paced, has customizable ships, is singleplayer, and has cartoony graphics, while WoW is the opposite)
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2021 22:50
|
|
|
Hughlander posted:https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager/audiences => Facebook Source => Faccebook Page => Include People who Meet ANY of the following Criteria => Page <Warning Forever> <Captain Forever> I had a brief moment of "holy poo poo it's going to work" but no, the "Facebook Page" source is limited to your pages. You don't appear to be able to use other peoples' pages as ad criteria unless you have appropriate permissions to those pages.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2021 00:43
|
|
|
The language on Audiences sure sounds like it requires people to have already interacted with you: "Connect with the people who have already shown an interest in business or product with Custom Audiences" / "Reach new people who are similar to audiences you already care about" (for Custom / Lookalike audiences). That makes bootstrapping kind of difficult!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2021 01:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 07:21 |
|
|
thebardyspoon posted:I've been asked what sort of salary I'd be looking to get for this role I just had a second interview for and I'm not entirely sure how much I should say cause in my experience places vary pretty wildly in how they pay/value QA. I don't know about gamedev, but as a rule in software you should always make them make an offer first. If they're willing to pay up to 60k for a job and you say you're looking for 35k, what do you think you're going to be paid? The unfortunate fact of interviewing is that companies have lots of tricks up their sleeve to help them get favorable terms when they hire people, and one of those terms is to get interviewees to name numbers first. It's a simple social pressure trick but quite effective.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2021 01:34
|
|