JeffG
Member
I don't believe that was the intent. So I will apologize for every one involved.
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GAF Indie Game Development Thread 2: High Res Work for Low Res Pay
- Thread starter Jacksinthe
- Start date
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Job-wise. Yeah can be fun, no problem. But I'm speaking more of those people
(graduated cs, art etc. students and similar) sitting on the fence and "fall"
for "security/money" (Belstras, take note of the quotation marks
), mostlyby social pressure, dying a little bit inside each time not doing what they
wanna really do.
Well, I think I'm speaking for the younger ones full of fear trying to take a
risk.
xD Nice story!
I think that gaming-thing never gets old. And I also thinkone gets really good when getting a bit older, for it really comes together.
I was writing from my experience, has nothing to do with this thread and the
people in here. I wrote this to see if others have made a similar experience.
JeffG
Member
That is a pickleJob-wise. Yeah can be fun, no problem. But I'm speaking more of those people
(graduated cs, art etc. students and similar) sitting on the fence and "fall"
for "security/money" (Belstras, take note of the quotation marks
by social pressure, dying a little bit inside each time not doing what they
wanna really do.
Well, I think I'm speaking for the younger ones full of fear trying to take a
risk.
and you would have to go through a lot of IF's and assumptions
but there are some inbetween choices
Here is a simple list of choices
a) Stay on the business side and give up the dream
b) Drop everything and become an Independent developer
c) Join a gaming company and be a good employee
So..do nothing, everything or a middle road
and why would someone pick one over the other...
What are your skills?
Whats your idea?
Do you understand the industry?
Can you do it alone?
How much help do you need to accomplish it?
Do you have access to those resources?
Do you have a family?
What happens if you fail?
What happens if you don't try?
probably another 100 questions
Gotta put it into a blender and see what falls out.
I am glad I don't have to make that decision lol
JeffG
Member
on another note.
I watch lots of Jim Sterling videos. It reminds me about how low the bar is for some of the crap that is coming out.
I do want to finish what I have started...but I also don't want to show up on one of his videos.
But to me that is kinda the elephant in the room when chatting with independent developers...is that level of "quality" does show up and is produced
I watch lots of Jim Sterling videos. It reminds me about how low the bar is for some of the crap that is coming out.
I do want to finish what I have started...but I also don't want to show up on one of his videos.
But to me that is kinda the elephant in the room when chatting with independent developers...is that level of "quality" does show up and is produced
Got you, but I think most of the IFs won't help, for they can only be answered
in retrospective. Asking too much may even stop you from doing anything because
you will always find a couple of things sounding bad if gone wrong. At times
you simply have to move forward. There is simply no guaranty for anything in
life. None.
It's going to be tough rising out of the noise floor. xD
Just going to add some of my own thoughts in here for those that might find it useful, or to know how to take the next step (just from my own experience).
I started with option C above as a game designer and took on board as much knowledge as I could as I joined at a junior level (first game dev job coming from a non-gam dev job). Never had any intentions of going Indie as it seemed impossible.
I got to see and know how everything worked in the industry from all disciplines and went to as many training courses I could that they paid for. The uprising of Unity/Unreal then started and I always had a technical background and wanted to mess around with them at home as a hobby. This was my journey into option B above releasing some of my own games by working on them after work and weekends.
Several years later, I managed to continue with option C for 9 years at the same studio whilst doing my own thing in my own time. I have since left the game studio and now gone full Indie. Personally, I found starting with option C the best route for myself as I had no experience in game dev and was coming from a completely different industry.
This is super late, but I just finished a project that worked with MovieTextures in Unity. I'm not sure if there's another way to play video, but apparently it's the best way to play 360 degree video, which I needed.
Good things:
MovieTextures are basically a texture you can place on an object. And it moves. There's also audio. Yay.
Bad things:
You can't scrub or fast forward or rewind. You can pretty much only play and pause.
Unity automatically converts any videos you import into .ogg, but it's really bad at that. Convert the videos into .ogg format yourself, and then import.
Feel free to ask if you have any more questions!
Gone a step further and I'm now able to scan the whole sphere around the craft,
up to 360 degrees that is;
The display's main scanning direction is from behind displaying that content
within its inner part, and with the outer part showing what's in front but
will be heavily distorted which is isn't that useful but now I can adjust the
FOV arbitrarily. Perhaps a 220 one would be cool or a 270 one closing in with
the 90 of the front view. Don't know, lot's of experimentation needed. May
also be useful to approximate the lighting around the craft to make color/tint
correction resp. adaptation. Will see.
Edit: Funny. You can see the bounds of the large ground plane in that
display, as it should, when looking in the up direction.
Edit II: Tried something more meaningful. Did that 270 degree thing;
As you can see, once the red sphere touches the end of the windshield it
appears on the rear-view display. So you get sort of a continuity in the
horizontal FOV. Amazing! I think this must be cool for stuff flying close by.
up to 360 degrees that is;
The display's main scanning direction is from behind displaying that content
within its inner part, and with the outer part showing what's in front but
will be heavily distorted which is isn't that useful but now I can adjust the
FOV arbitrarily. Perhaps a 220 one would be cool or a 270 one closing in with
the 90 of the front view. Don't know, lot's of experimentation needed. May
also be useful to approximate the lighting around the craft to make color/tint
correction resp. adaptation. Will see.
Edit: Funny. You can see the bounds of the large ground plane in that
display, as it should, when looking in the up direction.
Edit II: Tried something more meaningful. Did that 270 degree thing;
As you can see, once the red sphere touches the end of the windshield it
appears on the rear-view display. So you get sort of a continuity in the
horizontal FOV. Amazing! I think this must be cool for stuff flying close by.
LordRaptor
Member
So, uhhhhh... yeah, I think we need to actually start thinking seriously about OT3 because we're only a couple of pages away from mandatory lockage
Actually, I found some Indian guy on youtube today who showed his video player code and it works pretty much flawlessly
Check out my results I created on my own today:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWnjgu7sL8&feature=youtu.be
Edit: I also found some guy called Parvus Decree over at freemusicarchive.org and the game is updated with about 10 of his tracks, as temp music.
I've also been semi-busy with Skyrim recently:
Makai wanted, no?
Easily the most complicated and difficult level I've built for Clive 'N' Wrench, but very rewarding! Here's a quick video summary of the level; set in the 1930's it kind of crosses between Little Italy and a New Orealeans Bayou.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsIeiXNxY6I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsIeiXNxY6I
LordRaptor
Member
I must have missed that while on GAF holiday
Do you want suggestions for stuff to link, or are you good?
I thought you had this locked and typed out already, missile :-D But I'll welcome anyone who takes on the challenge, so if it's you, Makai, I'm looking forward to it! If you need anything to make it happen, feel free to ask!
I remember he wanting to do it.I must have missed that while on GAF holiday
Michael Armbrust
Member
Oh gosh if you want a horror story about a first game being too complex, just hear my project. I had practically zero programing experience yet I decided to make an open world puzzle game with real time online multiplayer, on PS4.
~4 years later and I'm still working on it.
(I did wise up eventually at least. About a year ago I went through the feature list with a chainsaw, and about 6 months ago I split it into two separate games so I can release one soonish)
Added some more display panels. Layout and design needs some more work.
The one next to the board computer needs a little be bit time to get used to
and currently doesn't seem to make much sense due to the small vertical FOV.
But I think it may be quite useful for more complex scenes where the craft
isn't on the ground and is more enclosed by walls whatsover.
I'm currently experimenting here. Anyone has some ideas to put this stuff to
some good use (gameplay-wise) or wants to see something specific in the game
with respect to these displays? Let me know. The projection can be fully
animated per pixel which should lead to a couple if effects further down. Will
see how it plays out.
The one next to the board computer needs a little be bit time to get used to
and currently doesn't seem to make much sense due to the small vertical FOV.
But I think it may be quite useful for more complex scenes where the craft
isn't on the ground and is more enclosed by walls whatsover.
I'm currently experimenting here. Anyone has some ideas to put this stuff to
some good use (gameplay-wise) or wants to see something specific in the game
with respect to these displays? Let me know. The projection can be fully
animated per pixel which should lead to a couple if effects further down. Will
see how it plays out.
ThePhotoshop
Member
Can you folks tell me if you find anything about this AI awareness tutorial popup confusing or unclear?
NipplesAndToes23
Member
I'm upset. I was supposed to meet two people yesterday to get started on making this game and neither of them showed up or bother to tell me they weren't coming. I had to message both of them and one of them replied to me 4 1/2 hours later telling me he wasn't going to make it.
CertifiedFP
Member
Can you folks tell me if you find anything about this AI awareness tutorial popup confusing or unclear?
Works relatively well I'd say, though the text could use some fleshing out.
Well, that reminds me, I should probably get to making an actual scenario out of the mechanics I have so far for REDFOXES rather than continuing my current feature-creep loop. That, and adding a proper Alert indicator since the Debug-Cube going red-eyed isn't going to be something that sticks around. Yet... Aha, a color-cue change for the proper enemy sprite when alert is INGENIOUS now that I think about it.
...Like shit, I just added a dodge-bonus mechanic on a whim because it occurred to me that writing code JUST to have a bullet-whiz sound play for dodging bullets seemed like kind of a waste. And even THAT was some on a whim feature creep to put more audio-cues in in compensation for the game being dead-silent since forever.
...That begs the question though, is it really feature-creep if every unplanned mechanic I've added so far has only taken about five lines of code each and has made my gameplay much less barebones?
It told me everything I need to know afaik. It follows obvious color coding that could be called an industry standard so the text was somewhat superfluous to me (but don't remove it). If anything, if the gif is meant as gameplay, maybe freeze the game, highlight the enemy and make a confirm button. I barely had enough time to read everything. The colors saved that.Can you folks tell me if you find anything about this AI awareness tutorial popup confusing or unclear?
Nice. I'm considering to implement something similar for the 2d cockpit. SoBeen working a lot recently, and just finished a few treasure rooms for the game. I love playing with the lights and normal maps for 2d surfaces
what's all needed? A normal map and the light's position in 2d or even 3d,
what else?
This.
It begins.
LordRaptor
Member
Its very clear - maybe too clear?
Being explicit about behaviour states somewhat demystifies the illusion that they are 'real' reactions and not programmed conditions - if you think about Pac Man, each enemy had a different name and each behaved in different ways to give a 'personality', but it took a long time for people to figure out what exactly was going on 'under the hood' with their AI behaviours.
Player information is a very valuable thing to provide, but 'perfect' player information has a side effect of making your game feel very 'gamey' at the cost of immersion - not that there's anything wrong with that, just a trade off it might be worth considering
specularity?
StrangeADT
Banned
The thing that gets me is the extreme amount of process when you program professionally. You don't just get to code. You deal with customers, verification of bug fixes and the associated processes (documentation, closing out of tracking bug issues using whatever bug tracker you use, code review (which is a good thing, but still - more process)), not to mention the weight of a large established code base that takes years to orient yourself. Between all the process and side shit I have to do, I'm lucky to get to code an hour or two a day. Some days I don't write any code. This is the reality for almost everyone I've talked to that works on a relatively established code base. If you're lucky enough to work on a green field project, don't take it for granted.Job-wise. Yeah can be fun, no problem. But I'm speaking more of those people
(graduated cs, art etc. students and similar) sitting on the fence and "fall"
for "security/money" (Belstras, take note of the quotation marks
by social pressure, dying a little bit inside each time not doing what they
wanna really do.
Well, I think I'm speaking for the younger ones full of fear trying to take a
risk.
xD Nice story!
one gets really good when getting a bit older, for it really comes together.
I was writing from my experience, has nothing to do with this thread and the
people in here. I wrote this to see if others have made a similar experience.
Add in the cruft of half baked features cause by project management never prioritizing technical debt and pushing too hard and too fast for new features. Unless customers complain about it, you generally don't get to work on technical debt items unless the debt affects some new deliverable, so good luck fixing that awful design from over a decade ago.
The software I work on is highly specialized and very technical, but it's not in my personal field of interest. I'd much prefer working on games, but where I live it's not practical and the paycut and lifestyle change to move to programming games isn't worth it. I'd have to move cities or strike out on my own, and I'm not willing to leave my family as both my wife and I have very strong family ties here. I'm also not willing to lose the income or work more than 40 hours a week. I have a child now. He takes priority over anything.
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
Firstly, those are 2 people I wouldn't continue discourse with. I hate people like that, just completely disrespectful. Secondly, there's bound to be online groups of budding developers looking for people to partner with if the locals aren't working out. Wish I had more insight to offer here, I always just wanted to do everything myself so this never came up. Whatever I didn't know how to do, I learned while doing.
It works but I'd do something about the actual images. The white thick frame kind of makes the inside of the icons way too hard to see (too much contrast going between the white frame and the dark background, makes the inside harder to tell). I'd probably lose the white frame or change it to for example a lighter version of the color inside. The "!?" and whatnot is very hard to spot.Can you folks tell me if you find anything about this AI awareness tutorial popup confusing or unclear?
I put in some work on finishing the Crucifix being used as a tracker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4N0-KICpmY
There will be penalties when its being used so use it wisely
https://gfycat.com/TestyPinkAlaskankleekai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4N0-KICpmY
There will be penalties when its being used so use it wisely
https://gfycat.com/TestyPinkAlaskankleekai
It depends on what stage of development you're in. Doing it while you're still in the prototype stage is okay as long as you do take some time to sit back and look at whether the features you just added actually gel with the game's base design or not, but I'd say from experience that adding new sub-systems late during production is often very risky since it can derail the whole development process and delay milestones unless planned around very carefully.
Pretty much although you can also do a specular map and emission map as well.
The only thing is that you might want to have a normal map generator specifically for 2d/flat objects that appear 3d. Crazybump isn't great since it assumes it's for 3d objects. I personally use sprite dlight which is a small, rather unknown program but works like a charm and has a ton of settings (also does depth and specular maps too !)
After that, in unity it's just about how you place your lights. Really straightforward, and fun to see your 2d drawings come to life in a fake 3d environment
shysaursoft
Member
Last piece of music is in! Gonna launch this week, hopefully Monday, or Wednesday at the latest - giving the musician some time to get their bandcamp page set up for the album.
I'm just glad it's almost over. While I love the game to bits, spending half a year on nothing but, can be tiring.
I'm just glad it's almost over. While I love the game to bits, spending half a year on nothing but, can be tiring.
best of luck!
Can you folks tell me if you find anything about this AI awareness tutorial popup confusing or unclear?
I agree that the black-on-red and black-on-orange contrast is kind of low at those resolutions... maybe you could just make do with colors and shapes? Using road signs as an example, I think you could change the square into a diamond as well.
As far as tutorials go, I think it does demistify your games' systems a fair bit. Perhaps you could use "Lost target during pursuit" or something along those lines for the second tier of awareness if you wanted to hint at the AI's behavior without giving away exactly how it works, and then have players figure things out over time as they play.
Thx for sharing!
Yeah, the overhead to manage some software is staggering, no question about
it. And salaries for doing gamedev aren't really that high unless you work for
some of the larger studios. One can earn more money while doing business /
off-entertainment software, no doubt, which becomes esp. important when having
to take care of a family. So there is sort of a given time span where one
really has the freedom to try something new and more risky (when you have
graduated, aren't married, and have no kids, yet) in our fast changing market.
So one should better use that time if one has any bigger dreams. Which isn't
to say everything is over once you have kids and are married, but the stage is
pretty much set (your wife will tell you then xD).
Sounds pretty cool. I'm going to try dlight and see.
Btw; I need a cool paint program which is able to draw on the RGBA components
separately and the whole image at the same time. So I want to paint on for
example the B and A component with all the brushes etc. and get to see the
combined image at the same time and may also paint on the combined one seeing
the changes in all the components. Tried GIMP but it sux.
Btw II; I also need a paint program which can do all that at higher bit depth
than 8, like for example 16 bit per channel .png, able to manipulate an 64
bits per pixel RGBA .png or something like that.
I put in some work on finishing the Crucifix being used as a tracker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4N0-KICpmY
There will be penalties when its being used so use it wisely
https://gfycat.com/TestyPinkAlaskankleekai
Wall hack ftw! xD Really love how it was implemented in MGO! One of the
penalties could be that the Crucifix becomes glowing hot with the player
staring to scream drawing a lot of attention. Ahm ... what's that mesh
rotating around the player while using the Crucifix?
That mesh is my poor implementation of cheap smoke/ghostly effects on the camera lol. Thanks for pointing it out as a problem, I'll make it better
As for the penalties, I really want to try an enemy type that only exists in this "Spirit" world and is pretty bloody deadly e.g. they can probably just go straight at you as Walls don't exist to them... so when you're using it, you don't want to stay in there too long.
I originally design the Crucifix this way but the compass like lights didn't really "work" as intended and I always had this idea of stepping into another world at will and this seemed like it could be rolled together to keep things simple.
Yeah looks like an artifact to me.That mesh is my poor implementation of cheap smoke/ghostly effects on the camera lol. Thanks for pointing it out as a problem, I'll make it better
Even better!
I'm not in the business of writing shader code so I've been tinkering in Shader Forge. Turns out getting depth, at least of some kind is possible but I'm finding it very difficult to achieve what I want. After some experimentation this is what I ended up with.
Try to ignore the terrible colours, regardless it's not what I want at all. Since my goal was to achieve height based gradient and not depth based. I know it's possible, or at least I assume it's possible, to sample a gradient based on the Y of an object but I haven't worked it out yet. I'm sure I'll get there eventually, slowly but surely.
Thanks guys, the feedback is definitely appreciated! Hadn't got comments about there being to much green but two in a row has definitely got me thinking about it now. Haven't made any headways towards fixing this yet but I'm 100% going to.
When it comes to episodic content I almost always wait until all the episodes are out before buying anything. I'm definitely not the only one that does this so it would be something that I would watch out for.Hi everyone! Quick question :3
Light Fairytale have been planned as an episodic game from the beginning, as it is way too ambitious for a solo indie dev like me to release as a single, complete game.
The initial plan was 3 episodes, but I'm currently considering dividing each episode by 2. This would allow to release the first one sometimes this year rather than next year.
Basically, here's the two options:
Initial plan: 3 episodes, each one having 6 hours of gameplay, priced $10, with one year between each release. The first episode for Q2 2018.
New plan: 6 episodes, each one having 3 hours of gameplay, priced $5, with 6 months between each release. The first episode for Q4 2017.
So, do you guys think that the new plan is a good idea?
Bonus, here's a few videos on YouTube that I've published since my last post:
The new opening.
The first battle.
And here's a work-in-progress screenshot from a cutscene that I've been working on this week-end:
I know given episodic releases thought before and my own personal conclusion is that I would probably be really bad at them. I feel like you've got to release content on a consistent schedule otherwise players will lose interest and assuming I plan to fund subsequent episodes from the previous episodes money I run a big risk of running out.
Saying that I understand making games is tough, really wears you down. So I say go with what feels right. If you think you're going to make a better game by releasing it in 6 episode chunks then go for it! At the prices you've stated I would support you.
Saw this on twitter, I think it works fine. Maybe have the text display while the player climbs? So they have more time to read?Can you folks tell me if you find anything about this AI awareness tutorial popup confusing or unclear?
Click the image to see this in action.
I've been working on the sound. I've got gibberish dialogue going along with sounds which help the feel of the game a lot.
I also re-did the whole intro. The opening was super weak, whenever anyone played they always commentated how the intro was boring so we've reworked it entirely. I spent a while and spruced up dialogue too, the act of talking to characters was boring before as everything was static. Adding some movement has helped tons!
SeanNoonan
Member
Not quite at the point where I'm going to write a post mortem yet, but I know some people were interested.
- So far Jack B. Nimble has sold extremely poorly on mobile - it won't even cover the App Store costs
- Steam Greenlight votes have slowed to a crawl - mostly positive responses, but not a huge total
ThatStupidLion
Member
Can you folks tell me if you find anything about this AI awareness tutorial popup confusing or unclear?
I like it but it may be too much information at once? Plus the orange symbol isnt used so can be a little confusing. Everything plays a little fast
Maybe try a version where the animation plays out and as each symbol pops up over the ai head, the animation pauses as a description displays. Then you can do the orange sumbol after the yellow, and then the red one
Great stuff though keep it up
Dang... have you already exhausted the possibilities for getting the game covered on some news sites, blogs or streams? Maybe that could help raise some more awareness/interest.
The game I worked on that got greenlit (and was absolutely free, mind you) took a month before it somehow got to the front page of the steam store (I think it happened after the christmas sales were over), and then it somehow blew up, getting about six times more installs than before and lots of reviews in a wide variety of languages.
Sales of the artbook + soundtrack DLC (which was mostly a way to help people who liked the game to give something back to us, with the game being free and all) were pretty bad, and we still haven't actually done anything to get paid by Steam or our publisher (dunno how that works right now), but if we do that could be a bit of money to help our next project.
timetokill
Banned
Decided to use a girl I'm dating as a challenge to keep pushing my voxel art forward
I'll probably have to simplify the hair style stuff a bit before it's "game ready" but this style is a bit more expressive than the ones I've been showing before
criticism welcome
I'll probably have to simplify the hair style stuff a bit before it's "game ready" but this style is a bit more expressive than the ones I've been showing before
criticism welcome
think positive. at least you know right from the beginning that you don't want to start a project with them. better than realizing that they re unreliable after a few months.
SeanNoonan
Member
Yeah, I'm going to do a bit of a press push this week. Feeling a little burnt out on it to be honest. I thought that sales were going to be low, but not this bad. Update installs are pretty low too. I guess the audience just moved on.
have you tried selling it on itch and/or gamejolt too? every bit counts
(although for me sales on those 2 sites were extremely low but my main audience is on Steam)
SeanNoonan
Member
I'll be working on a web version soon. It's not too much work. It was more that I wanted the iOS release to at least pay for the Apple yearly fee - currently it is not.have you tried selling it on itch and/or gamejolt too? every bit counts
Also, the PC version isn't ready. It'll take me two weekends to finish it, but I'm not going to waste the time if I'm not greenlit.
A lil blurry but otherwise pretty sweet! How does it look in-game?Decided to use a girl I'm dating as a challenge to keep pushing my voxel art forward
I'll probably have to simplify the hair style stuff a bit before it's "game ready" but this style is a bit more expressive than the ones I've been showing before
criticism welcome
oxrock
Gravity is a myth, the Earth SUCKS!
she looks better than 100% of the voxel art I do. I like it. The only comment I have is that every part has a lot of detail (considering being made of voxels) except the legs/feet. As far as I can tell she doesn't even have feet unless they're black and blend in perfectly with the black background.Decided to use a girl I'm dating as a challenge to keep pushing my voxel art forward
I'll probably have to simplify the hair style stuff a bit before it's "game ready" but this style is a bit more expressive than the ones I've been showing before
criticism welcome
There's lots of little things you can do to add just that little bit of detail that can add up to a lot. Maybe add a band of slightly darker grey at the top of her socks to signify the elastic band there, (assuming there are currently no developed feet) giving her some nice shoes that compliments her outfit.
maybe some crazy colored panties in case any weirdos position the camera for a panties shot? I dunno, lol.
Just to reiterate, I like her as is, but some of that might make her better. Also, if you plan on animating her in your game you'll probably want to modify her into T pose, otherwise I don't see how moving her arms is going to work out.
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