What are /r/gamedev's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Also, the French.https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SpitSlide.ThisIstheEnd
Just give us the possibility to bind our own keys.

I would suggest something like https://scratch.mit.edu/ it uses drag and drop blocks and is very easy to undestand. They even have tutorials right on the site, this is where a lot of kids and sometimes even adults have started making simple projects that introduce them to programming. I have seen some books that help teach scratch however I have never used/read any of them so I wouldn't know how good they are.

Reading news about myself is really, really strange.

Thanks for the heads up though! A big thanks to everyone for liking and above all using my assets in your projects. Over the past couple of months I've seen hundreds of projects pass by and honestly, I'm often impressed how creative some of you can get with a few simple sprites.

As /u/clintbellanger already said; there's no stopping and I've still got hundreds of assets in the works. The donations, Steam sales and future Patreon pledges make sure that I can keep all the assets public domain and keep creating new packs to cover all possibly genres in gaming.

Again, THANKS everyone for the support and love!

Dwarf Fortress - It's not on Steam, it's free, it's not advertised anywhere... but Toady used to get 3000-4000$ a month on donations.

Now that he has a patreon set up, he gets 4246$ per month (https://www.patreon.com/bay12games?ty=h) - One person getting 4000$ per month working on a free ascii game... that's success for me

What surprises me in this high $22k fee, is that people asking for so many money should provide some insight about what you can get for this price.

You can easily find paid Youtubers for a Minecraft server, and those Youtubers will tell you how many players you can expect and how many time it will take to get your investment back.

• https://www.spigotmc.org/threads/list-youtubers-with-pricing.22242/
• http://www.mc-market.org/threads/31060/

I suppose they give you some informations (usually their Youtube / Twitter stats) (if you can consider them true). The fact you are not convinced makes me wondering if the price could be part of the strategy: "we are big, look, we are asking for a big price".

You can use some online tools to check if their Twitter followers are real or not. It should give you a good indicator of whether or not the used bots to inflate their numbers. If they tell you they have 60+ twitter accounts and are using bots, just run.

(I'm still saying that undisclosed ads are bad and can get you problems, so I'm saying all of this to quickly find if they are bad scammers)

Sentiments like this won't help: Notch: Minecraft on Oculus Canceled, 'Facebook Creeps Me Out'

Please give it a look, I'd love any feedback! (iOS)

Edit: Now on Android as well!

I checked their profile and found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidGaming/comments/npqyec/dev_i_wanted_a_game_i_could_play_in_short_spans/

Link to the game is https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superspacedive.kudos

Open Broadcast Software for recording in game footage and making close to lossless 60 fps gifs (using Gfycat).

You might not think of screen recording software as a must have, but anything that makes the creation of promo materials/hype content easier seems like a must have to me.

A really good question, I'm going to throw out one answer. One of the most helpful things for the artist is being able to get their art in game without much hassle. If they're emailing you their spritesheets, and you're importing them into the engine, you've become a hoop to jump through. A much less painful process is to get regular developer builds to the artist, and as much as possible, allow them to be the first to run their art in game and iterate themselves. Being able to replace a spritesheet image with another spritesheet image, load the game, and see the changes immediately is how it ought to be.

Depending on the engine, this may be very straightforward, or rather complex. If it's complex, spend some dev time to create a pipeline that converts their assets into game ready formats, and write super-clear docs on how it can all integrate. And sometimes, there may absolutely require some much closer programmer/pixel artist collaboration, for example, with particle effects. Still, tools can help here too.

Ideally, and this sometimes isn't possible with the less technical members of the team, but teaching them the basics of code versioning software like git can automate the process of getting builds to the artists, and integrating art assets into the master build, smoothly.

In conclusion, what you really want to do is:

• Increase autonomy for the artists to do what they need to do.
• Allow the artists to iterate on the art themselves, before it gets to you.
• Automate close-to everything that can be automated, to make it less painful for everyone.
• Remove gatekeepers and hoops to jump through.

And often, a good set of well doc'd tools, and pipeline processes will tick those off. Have some conversations with your artist(s) and work out what needs to be built for everyone to be happy.

Blueprints are used in AAA games. Not sure where you got that incredibly wrong idea. The usual workflow is develop in blueprints then shift complex parts into C++, but exposing functionality in blueprints to allow everyone to easily and quickly alter\add to game mechanics.

Fortnite

Paragon

It's how Unreal themselves work and it's how a lot of other developers work. If your universities goal is to teach you how to use Unreal for that course then you need to know blueprints. You should be able to find the rest of the curriculum to determine if you learn other things as well, I would hope they don't limit your learning to just unreal.

I did it!

It's like those falling down games, except DOUBLED. That makes all the difference.

Oh and after 2000 it's pretty much impossible.

edit: but the world record is apparently 3013.

edit #2: this game is supposed to be for ONE player, with TWO hands. 2 player just ruins the experience I think.

The people who go to game developer hubs is other game developers.

(Edit: Hijacking my own comment because it's the top comment and I'm a scumlord.

From a blog post I wrote in 2014:

>The issues with Greenlight and the increasingly large Steam library parallel a lot of the issues in the indie game scene. Lots of products, but no good ways of sorting and finding relevant products. The problem is primarily one of query, not over abundance of product. Google isn’t bad because it has indexed thousands upon thousands of crappy, irrelevant sites. It’s good because you can type in a terse phrase and generally find relevant results.

>In other words, focus on query and not curation. Curation is a very small part of the problem.

>Steam’s game categorization is really bad; Indie is considered a genre. I think even the most definition liberal individual would agree that is not helpful. Contrast that with Shiny Loot’s genre and trait system. It has issues as well, such as the Casual genre, but look at Empire Building and Hack-n-Slash – why aren’t these on all distribution sites?

)

Doesn't seem like it to me. They lowered their price cut from assets sold on the unreal marketplace because they now have more financial freedom. Source

They're even paying sellers back for previous transactions >In addition to implementing the policy for future sales, Epic is paying out all Marketplace sellers retroactively, applying the more creator-friendly 88% rate to previous transactions dating back to the store’s 2014 launch.

Like, now one asked for this or complained about the previous rates, which were the same as other stores. They just did it because they can afford it. Wouldn't see valve do that in a million years.

Just adding to the list.

Blackmagic Davinci Resolve

• Professional grade e.g. used by tv/film production
• Linux / OSX / Windows support
• Free version does plenty (up to 4K)
• Competitor to Premiere

EDIT: Oops. crap formatting fixed.

Well, did you have the right content ratings set ? (Explicit violence, USK 18) If no, that could cause the problem.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/6209544?visit_id=636717482837666094-3487591228&p=appgame_ratings&rd=1

Violence in general is no reason to suspend an app. There are plenty violent apps out there like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.squareenixmontreal.hitmansniperandroid

In general there is not much you can do. Check our ratings and maybe try to re-submit. Or wait for an answer, which could take days / weeks. Google sucks at support.

Looks like it might have been taken down on Play Store indeed. It was still up when I checked 3h ago, but 404 now.

Here's the link to the ripped off app for testing: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.giorgi.nelazviadi

http://projectzomboid.com/blog/

These guys were behind a tech demo of a zombie game that sold a huge amount of pre-orders for promises of a finished product. Now they are going around creating the worst PR disaster since the BP oil spill. One of them got drunk on twitter and start insulting everyone, and now the account is deleted.

It's a bit of a two sided coin, while it wasn't their fault for being robbed, they were operating with no external backups of code that contained months of work.

If you ever plan on being a successful developer, try not to insult/disappoint the people handing you wads of cash with no real assurances of your competency.

Really excellent video - thanks for posting that!

Systemic game design is the entire point of my book, "Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach", published last December. The book takes a deep look at systems thinking and game design.

Not coincidentally, systemic game design is the focus of our game design degree program at Indiana University.

In terms of the benefits of systemic game design, this makes for much more flexible, varied gameplay, and just as importantly it frees you as a game developer from the dreaded "content treadmill." If you're trying to make a game by throwing more content at it, you're setting yourself up for a lot more work and expense to get less gameplay.

The discussion of emergence in this video is really important as well. The way I like to think of it is that you can create emergent systems by providing behavioral connections that are local, generic, and modular. There's some really good work that's been done on this in cellular automata, most notably in Conway's Life. This video has some great examples of the conditions for emergence, in particular in terms of making the connections relate via underlying attributes than in terms of specific object interactions. The more you can think about your game design in terms of systems -- leaving behind linear narratives and missions -- the easier it becomes to get to this kind of gameplay.

ETA: Hmm, the downvotes coming in. Too much self-promotion? I'll remove this if so.

For those who are actually interested in how to use or not to use Paypal for pre-orders, they have a really easy to understand FAQ on their website.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/brc/presale-policy-and-reserves

The real moral of this story is not "never use Paypal", but rather "whichever payment processor you use, make sure you read and understand their TOS".

We built a custom engine for The Masterplan, using Haxe. Recently had the post-mortem for the game, and we all agreed we were still happy with the decision. Why?

• Whenever we encountered a serious problem with the underlying tech, we could drill down as deep as needed to fix it. With most commercial engines, you hit a wall at a certain point, and will need support from the company making it.
• Help was very readily available from the Haxe open source community. With commercial vendors, that level of support would've costed some serious $$ - now we just had to be active and make ourselves useful in figuring out the issue.
• All engines have a "sweet spot" for what kind of games they're best for, and turns out for a top-down tactical heisting game it really can be faster to build your own instead of adapting an existing engine.

Having said that, my recommendation to new developers is to go with Unity. The team behind Masterplan has built engines before, and we've probably learned a couple of things on the way.

Secondly, I strongly advocate at least using a framework that allows you to get crap on the screen on day one. You need to be working on the game from the get go.

Damn, I was still under the impression Newgrounds is still a place to go!

If you consider "old newgrounds" to be where you mostly find odd/interesting games that you don't find in most sites, it still sort of is. But I think GameJolt is becoming what Newgrounds used to be when it comes to representing many of the odd/interesting games.

Newgrounds is still an awesome place to find interesting art pieces and music.

Here is the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Research-Artists-Architects-Designers/dp/0393730077

> Looking for images of architectural materials?

> Surfaces offers over 1,200 outstanding, vibrantly colorful visual images of surface textures--wood, stone, marble, brick, plaster, stucco, aggregates, metal, tile, and glass--ready to be used in your designs, presentations, or comps, as backgrounds or for general visual information.

> CD-ROM included: easy-to-use screen resolution TIFF files of every image!

Tough luck, I guess.

Using texture bundles is a common practice, and not only as a matter of convenience, but also a way to stay on the safe side of the copyright law: you buy a bundle and use it under its royalty free license, with very little restriction. 3D artists love it. Lawyers love it.

Until someone brought a CD bundle that is licensed under some weird license, despite being advertised as product for use in your designs.

It's good that asset stores enforce clear licensing these days, so you can't accidentally buy an asset, put it to good use, and then got "sued by an artist for using her photos", because apparently the texture pack you bought was licensed "for research only". This is nothing for Capcom. It could be a disaster for a small indie company that can't even afford a lawyer.

nWorld is long dead. It ultimately turned into two different products, Mirai and Nendo. Both were ultimately released by a company called Izware who have product pages for both, but that's about it.

Wings3D is an open source modeller based on the same underlying concepts as nWorlds, the winged edge mesh. It's a great little modelling package, but sadly is pretty much abandoned.

Interesting history lesson nobody asked for!

nWorlds started life at a company called Symbolics. Symbolics made LISP machines, powerful LISP based workstations in the 80s. They had a graphics division that created a series of products, S-Paint, S-Geometry, S-Dynamics and S-Render (texturing, modelling, physics and renderer respectively ). This software was ultimately ported to NT and SGI machines, then sold off to Nichimen Trading Company, based out of Japan. For years they sold it as Nichimen nWorlds.

Interesting fun fact(s)...

Symbolics.com was registered in 1985, and is believed to be the first .com address globally.

Nichimen was founded in the 1870s and is now known as Sojitz, after a merger. Nichimen and now Sojitz make everything... why did they sell 3D software? Beats the hell out of me.

Symbolics, the company behind the original product, was heavy into LISP. They also got into an early scuffle with Richard Stallman and ultimately lead to him forming the GNU license.

TL;DR -- NO.

Exactly, we filled questionaire as honestly as we can and it gave us 7+ rating, which this game with way too violent graphics has "exactly" same

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ba.lum.tribalrivals.arabic&hl=en

We do not mind raising our app rating to 10+ or even 18+ if only that's the issue, i do hope google replies...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samusaarikivi.swingo there's the game.

Swingo is currently trending in Finland at #14 in games, play console has not updated yesterdays traffic and shows it is inatalled in 44 devices.

Proof: https://m.imgur.com/a/QTaTeHV

Edit: Country

I'd highly recommend sfml if you're looking to use C++. Right now it's only for Windows, Linux, and Mac but they will be adding mobile support in the future. However, it took forever for version 2.0 to come out so I wouldn't expect mobile support any time soon.

If you're looking for something to go multi-platform right now there is cocos2d-x. It's only 2D though.

Did you really just resubmit Pukka Golf's email list?

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/2uiun8/list_of_around_200_mobile_game_review_sites_and/

Guess I can share my story.

I created a game, that's absolutely free, didn't have any ads neither any in app purchases.

The game is not a simple game and I actually did work over a year on that project, put money from my tight budget into it, as it was my hobby.

However the game only got like 50 downloads. Not a single friend of mine did give me a rating, only collegues who were interested.

So here it is, earth rage quit: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.keeyzar.earthragequit

Remember folks: marketing is good.

I really liked programming with libgdx so much, I hold a presentation for game developing with libgdx and refused to use the time for any marketing.

I, kind of, wanted to share my good intentions.

I don't mind getting no downloads, as it's free in any way and I wouldn't get cash, and it's my own success story in my life. The biggest one imo.

Edit: what frustrated me most was, that I didn't even got a single vote from reddit, not even a 'that's a bad game' just. It just disappeared into nowhere.

Sorry for the long text. Have a great day :)

Not quite what you asked, but I think it's also worth mentioning that the "Humble Widget" is a good choice for selling on your own website. I recommend reading the full article linked below, CC fraud is often a big problem for small games companies distributing their own keys.

I think this is something everyone should be aware of!

> On our side, the cost is very large, each chargeback costs roughly $20 in fines, effectively a negative sale, and we were seeing upwards of 10% chargebacks on our website transactions.

> We switched from processing payments through braintree and paypal, and instead implemented the incredible Humble widget. It has built in fraud prevention, which completely stopped all the chargebacks we were seeing. I highly recommend the Humble widget for anybody looking to process payments on their own website.

Full article, scroll to "The Grey Market"

http://www.openshot.org/videos/

This is one of my favorites. But be warned it's nothing like the higher end tools. This is what I'd call projectionist software.

Like in the old days, it was usually a projectionist's job to splice together reels of videos OR to edit them by slicing apart two pieces and adding in more footage.

That being said, while it provides basic things like titles and animating footage, tansitions, and I think it can do keying... it doesn't do particles, or any other real massively fancy graphics

Unreal Engine uses C++. It sounds like your ambitions are beyond just using a pre-built engine, but it's probably the best place to start. Use the engine for simple games, follow tutorials, and I highly recommend Ben Tristem's courses on Udemy.com

Did it in my spare time after work (dayjob as a web developer). Found an artist over on FGL and just started going. Made about $30k so far, and I'm putting every dime of it back into game development.

Key reasons for success: the game was fun, and it piggybacked an existing concept (Tiny Wings / Sinsurfer) onto two platforms where it hadn't been used (Android and web).

Early obstacles: not enough hours in the day. My dream is to make enough from game development that I can afford to quit my dayjob.

The best tip I can really offer is to just shut up and code. The indie scene is stuffed to the brim with talkers, dreamers, and thinkers. Talking, thinking, and dreaming are all fine things, but they don't make games. The best way to learn is to jump in and get started on something simple, fun, and easy. You can spend two years writing a GDD for your dream game, or you can spend two years getting your hands dirty and learning from firsthand experience. The biggest mistake new devs make is trying to make their dream project first. It's just dumb. You should never try to make your masterpiece. Eventually, when you're ready, it will make itself.

GameMaker is FREE. You pay $0 to make a Windows game. Even the Pro edition license goes on sale for $25 or less frequently but you dont have to pay anything to get started.

http://www.yoyogames.com/studio/download

It does involve maths, but it's a very different type of maths to what you learn in school. I know programmers who hate maths and mathematicians who hate programming.

EDIT: If you start off by writing Visual Novels, which is a very writing focused style of game, you won't need to know very much programming and it will involve hardly any maths at all. I recommend checking out turorials for Ren'Py.

EDIT 2: Twine is also a good shout.

Sublime Text

Edit: I should actually give a little ramble about what it is: The best text editor ever. With Package Control installed, you can find auto-complete hints, text highlighting, syntax completion, and generally anything to help you be more productive when editing code. It's very customizable and $70 USD for the license but the fully featured "trial" lasts forever and only bugs you yo buy when you save sometimes. I've completely replaced Monodevelop with Sublime, and I basically use it for any type of text editing.

It's Itch.Io, which is mostly small 2D games. Unreal is not really the first choice for that kind of content, and 5% royalty is probably too much hassle for most devs to bother with when you have very low sales.

If you included Steam and specified a minimum revenue then Unreal would be a much bigger share.

>What language was RollerCoaster Tycoon programmed in?

>It's 99% written in x86 assembler/machine code (yes, really!), with a small amount of C code used to interface to MS Windows and DirectX.

Quoted from his own website.

Technically the game was made by three people though. He outsourced two other guys, one for the art and one for the music.

Slack for team communication. It really is much better then hangouts/messenger, and its app supports all major OS'es. Basically it's a communicator tailored for the needs of teams. It supports easy file transfer, thematic soubgroups, copy-pasting everything you want etc. In short I highly recommend it https://slack.com/

Hi Todd! First of all, congrats on releasing your game! I've been actually following it a bit and saw a few mentions of the game before.

A few things:
1) itch.io offers only a fraction of Steam audience. If I were you - I'd spend those $100 and make a Steam page, you'll probably get a bit more sales, even without a following.
2) $14.99 seems a bit too steep, probably due to the graphical style (the assets are from Kenney, right? I have definitely seen this style before). It's your choice of course, but if this was my game - I'd put it cheaper. I don't live in a first world country tho so take it with a grain of salt. You can take a look at how Deathwar Redux 3030 (game that is apparently similar to yours) did it: they started cheaper than 14.99, but kept adding features and increasing the price occasionally.

In any case, good job for getting the game to where it is at and good luck with further development.

$50 with the plus subscription, $5 without it is what they have hidden with 'default.' Pretty scummy.

"As referenced on the Buildbox Pricing Page, the “Default” Monthly Threshold is US$5.00."

I've been working on games for quite a long while so I picked it up here and there.

I haven't gone through this particular series myself, but I've browsed through it and his (thebennybox - everything he makes is high quality) series on creating a software renderer, and they are fantastic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss3AnSxJ2X8&list=PLEETnX-uPtBXP_B2yupUKlflXBznWIlL5

This is by far my favorite book:

https://www.amazon.com/Engine-Architecture-Second-Jason-Gregory/dp/1466560010

I'd recommend thebennybox's video series first, the book may not be quite as beginner-friendly.

The canonical reference on this matter: <em>The Mythical Man-Month</em>

And the oft-cited wisdom:

> nine women can't make a baby in one month.

The idea is a common one, and often fails. It's the same reason we can't automatically build a game with one button click; the computer does not understand art (among other things). It cannot process a visual scene like we can, and make improvements that make visual sense.

Games that have taken the approach you describe (joining pre-made parts together) would include Spore and No Mans Sky. In the case of NMS, this has been shown to lead to interesting and also ridiculous creations [1].

There exists a pretty awesome tool, Meshmixer [2] that can join arbitrary meshes together, which is probably exactly what you are trying to make? The main limitation with it though is that when you join up random meshes together the result is, well, random. A cohesive art style would see you build all the meshes needed for the character, and then, well, what would be the point in linking things up in a tool at all? You may as well just create the whole model in Blender/Maya etc.

Ultimately the problem can't be solved algorithmically, as it is an intuitive problem. Better 3d tools are what we need, and I do think that the mainstream 3d modelling tools have stagnated a bit, and are due a shake up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvAwB7ogkik

[2] http://www.meshmixer.com/

A game developer entering the regular world seems to be best appreciated as a bit of a "jack of all trades," so I'd say try to establish basics in the areas that you feel you are lacking.

I wouldn't worry about knowing a specific JS framework since the framework of choice changes every 6-8 months, but knowing JS itself will be invaluable. "JavaScript: The Good Parts" is dated, but still covers the majority of the basics. If you have to pick a framework, go with JQuery since it's still used by a ton of places.

A basic understanding of HTML5 and CSS3 won't take long to acquire.

Also, if your backend work was mostly C++, try to replicate a small bit of it using Java or .NET.

Overall it's been very positive. I plan to use it in the future.

But I would never, ever, ever make an open world game with it again. It's just not what the engine is built for. The low-level manual resource management just isn't there and it makes stuff like dealing with texture memory a total nightmare.

But again, now that I've 'broken' it I have a firmer grasp on how it wants / expects me to do things, and I can see myself using it for all kinds of non-open-world projects. If I use a hammer as a toothbrush it's not the hammer's fault when I chip a tooth.

You just have to give their name and the name of the asset that you used in your credits. If you would like to go the extra mile you can contact them and ask how they would like to be credited and/or link to their website.

Check out the freesound guide for more help: http://www.freesound.org/help/faq/#licenses-1

Oh man, this is super convenient. Neat and clean, easily adaptable to color schemes. Very nice of you to put this up for free. OpenGameArt.org would really appreciate this if you want to post it there as well. Thanks!

No offence but it was a very bad decision to go premium on Android. Like really bad. Super bad! Only a handful of studios can pull this off. Also, it's on the wrong side of $5. Sure, it's not a lot of money but it is a lot for a mobile game.

I had fully intended to release a premium app when I was developing my own game but all the evidence told me not to do that so I massively reworked it and it paid off pretty well.

Find something in your game that players genuinely value and monetize it. For my golf game it was level restarts. Watch an ad to get 10 or buy the game and you'll always have restarts when you play. This way players can play entirely for free or buy the IAP if it's of value to them. It's basically shareware where creating value (scarcity even) is key.

If I were you guys I'd be tempted to pull the Android app because the way things are now it's just going to tank.

Good luck!

If you mean an update on the release date, then no. But if you mean updates in general on what's going to be in 4.0, then yes. They update the News section of the Godot website pretty frequently with what they're working on. Most recently, they've shown how their changing the multiplayer networking and replacing GDNative with GDExtensions to make extending the engine easier. Several bug fixes and minor enhancements get back ported from the 4.0 branch to the 3.3.x and 3.4 branches as well

Maybe 4 months but it wasn't a full time project. Also, It's the first game that I finished and released.

Edit: Google Play link

Telling people to use Armory3D would be the big FU. From https://armory3d.org/manual/

>Armory is not production ready yet, please consider reading through this manual before you start.

The documentation is almost nonexistent.

Guard your render thread's quit flag somehow, or use atomic_flag or condition_variable. You're modifying and checking it in two diff threads. Also, read up on RAII, it'll save you. the rendy object lifetime destructor happens after SDL_Quit(). This is probably fine with SDL, but be aware that improper ordering of destruction can result in memory leaks and crashing with other libs and even in your own code. Just some tips :)

EDIT: Oh yeah, you don't need "this->" everywhere. You only need it for "this->window = window;" because of the name clash.

EDIT2: SDL_DestroyWindow needs to be called on the same thread that created it. I think this is a platform-specific limitation.

EDIT3: I was suspecting that there was another issue with the SDL state access between threads but I could not remember the rules for it. /u/nope_dot_avi's comment is correct, the unprotected window data is accessed by 2 threads.

Anyone wishing to dive into concurrency should Read this book

Unfortunately successful. I made Avalanche in my spare time and it got several million plays. I haven't managed to make anything more popular yet.

It took me a while to get over it.

haha okay, okay. I just realised it's next to my name anyway haha

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stormrade.dungeonsofrunegold

After 500 solid responses and as the traffic seemed to be decreasing, here are the results of the survey as promised. Thanks to everyone who completed the survey!

If anybody has interest in the spreadsheet, then HERE is the raw data. Did a bit of cleanup, and added a few more items to the form when looking through the columns.

Enjoy!

Krita 3.0 came out yesterday. It has a really nice animation workflow and paints like photoshop. (And its free)

On the topic of flow, it depends what kind of art you are making. There are two kinds of animation. The first is when you draw every frame separately. The other is where you draw parts of your drawing separately, then attach them to bones and animate the bones.

For the first type the flow is pretty simple, you draw your drawing. You press Add new keyframe. You go to the next frame, and you make changes to your drawing. Then you save that keyframe. You do this multiple times and then you can simply loop through all keyframes to see your animation.

Say for the second type you wanted to animate a character. You would draw its head, legs, arms, body separately. Attach them to virtual bones which are part of a skeleton. Add a new keyframe. Go to the next frame. Move the skeleton. Save the keyframe. etc.

Krita will handle the first type of animation really well. For animation with bones you want a program like spriter.

That's a great puzzle mind-fuck game ! I love it !! Reminds me of Antichamber. Also has shades of Narbacular Drop before it became Portal.

The levels needs some lighting work since the floors and walls tend to blend into one another but I could totally see this turning into a "proper" game! Looking forward to see what you do with this!

I didn't think that was true but I did more reading and you're right.

https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/arts-culture/arts-culture-resources/legalmusicforvideos/

>Most importantly, you need to use music that is not licensed under a No Derivative Works license. This means that the musician doesn’t want you to change, transform, or make a derivative work using their music. Under CC licenses, synching the music to images amounts to transforming the music, so you can’t legally use a song under a CC No Derivative Works license in your video.

FlashDevelop - free and open sourced. This in concert with a library such as flixel, assuming you need such a thing depending on your AS2/3 experience.

Why are you using Paint instead of the vastly underrated Paint.NET? It has things like layers, effects, and proper line drawing tools.

Anyway, making assets is possibly the most time consuming part of my workflow. Artistic prowess aside, it takes a lot of theory and knowledge to make assets that all blend together nicely.

Reaper is an amazing, fully-featured tool that has an uncrippled demo. Like WinRar, you can keep using it after the 30-day demo has expired.

You'll want to give them your money, though. $60 for that software is criminally cheap. The dev team is reponsive and constantly patching and adding new features.

Reaper has a great piano roll MIDI editor, but if you're looking for real "composing" software (as opposed to a DAW, recording package like Reaper or Cakewalk), MuseScore is open-source and free.

There's an anecdote from Art and Fear (great book, and very short, highly recommended) similar to that. Half of a pottery class was told they'd be graded on the single best pot they produced that semester, the other half was told they'd be graded solely on weight of pots produced. At the end of the semester, the "graded on weight" half was producing better pots.

I found there is only one good way to go, make it free and add additional content for money. This will give everyone the chance to play the game for free. Everybody that likes it will spend $0.99 for additional features in a heartbeat. Offer add-removal, additional levels, music packs, additional characters etc. and the game will monetize just fine.

If the app costs money in the first place it just adds a hurdle that most people won't even take.

Plague Inc. is a great example of a good monetization model.

EDIT: There is a big difference in how willing people are to buy apps depending on the platform. Apple users generally pay for their apps, while Android users rarely buy anything, because there are tons of free alternatives (including piracy). Not sure how the windows phone market looks like atm.

The RPGMaker Series uses ruby as its scripting language. And I've heard that, with scripting, you can create games very different than the usual run-of-the-mill JRPGs. I remember them being kinda pricey though.

EDIT: RPGMaker is currently on the humble bundle.

I just thought I'd mention Godot, a free and open source engine that's been getting more and more attention recently:

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https://godotengine.org/

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It has a built in language that's similar to Python, but you can also use C# or other languages with it, if you want.

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If you want good tutorials and assets to buy etc, probably Unity is the best for that.

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But I enjoy Godot for its simplicity and purity - it's a very small install, everything is built in to the main editor (which itself is written in Godot), and it has a very logical and neat way of structuring games into trees with nodes.

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I would say Godot is easier to get into, if you are ok with figuring some stuff out yourself by asking questions etc. There are tutorials available, but not as much or as good as the big commercial engines.

I feel like Steam might not be the right platform for Indie Developers. The generic store page takes away most of the charm that makes an Indie Game. I have found that websites like itch.io give a much better platform. I personally use GameJolt because it lets you customize the way you want to present your game in a really nice way. It is also easy to find the kind of game you are looking for on there. Additionally it gives you the option to write a DevLog, which not only can help you keep track of what you have been doing on your game, but it also gives you a way of showing people the amount of work you put into your game.

Try putting your game up on one of those platforms. It would be a shame to see such a dedicated and well polished game rot, just because steam makes it incredibly hard to find and market.

Community management is an integral part of any game or game-adjacent space, like game art tools. Speaking as someone who's managed Quixel's community since 2014 I can say that I've... seen some stuff in the past, and not all of it was something I want to repeat here. People can be vicious and cruel when everything is just words on a screen to them.

A good CM handles these issues before they become issues, and helps relate to the community and provide a sense that the company or development team cares. If you don't do this you run a serious risk of the community spiraling out of control and turning into a pitchfork mob.

Sorry...last advertisy...spammy comment. If you are a beginner game developer, you should start w/ the beginner tutorial on the link below. We worked really, really hard on it and it's designed for someone who knows nothing about game dev.

http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d

Sure, Java sometimes gets a bad rep, but as long as you know what you're doing, any performance differences would be trivial compared to alternatives. The JVMs have come a long way and are very well optimized these days. And if you're looking to release on Android, then Java would be the recommended choice. You can also even deploy native executables on Windows, Linux and OS X with software like Excelsior JET. Either way, your end user likely won't care or understand what programming language you're using anyway.

Also look into LibGDX, which is a popular Java game development framework.

I'd weigh in and suggest to take a look at Duality, if you're into C# and 2D stuff. It's been around for a while and has accumulated quite a bit of usefulness over the years. Although I do not fully share this opinion, it is often described as "Unity for 2D games" - still kind of gives you an idea about it.

In case you're interested to expand the above list entry of Duality into a full description, here is a suggestion for it, which you can copy and/or modify, if you'd like to:

• 2D
• C# for engine, editor and user code
• Open Source on GitHub
• Plugin-based, user code is a first-class citizen
• Editor is Windows only
• Exports to Windows only at present
• Small community, some commercial projects
• Very extensible and modular, Package Management using NuGet

This post is heavily biased, because I am the main developer of Duality.

Windows Defender has made a lot of progress over the years. Microsoft improved its usability and track record on dealing with Zero-day threats. Also, System Center Endpoint Protection (Microsoft's Enterprise Anti-Virus) uses the same technology, so your basically getting enterprise support for free.

https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/business-windows-client/windows-10/april-2019/microsoft-windows-defender-antivirus-4.18-191517/

Super casual games like Flappy Birds or Snake vs Blocks. I have not actually played snake vs blocks but I imagine it is one of those types of games.

Something else that helps is f.lux, which changes the color temperature of your monitors based on the time of day. So as it gets darker outside, your colors get warmer and it's not as harsh on the eyes. Available on Windows and Mac.

https://justgetflux.com/

I'm sure you've seen this before, so I can't believe that I'm quoting it again, but from Kickstarter's FAQ (boldface is mine)

> Is a creator legally obligated to fulfill the promises of their project?

>Yes. Kickstarter's Terms of Use require creators to fulfill all rewards of their project or refund any backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.

When a copy of a product being produced is a "backer reward", Kickstarter is a store for pre-orders, and people who donate money are guaranteed to either get their backer reward or a refund, according to Kickstarter's own policies and requirements. Not only doesn't Kickstarter need to "campaign this stronger", they're actually arguing exactly the other direction from what you're saying.

Want to make sure that backers are clear that it's a donation, and not a pre-order? It's easy to do. And yet nobody does. Here's how you do it: simply don't include a copy of the final product as a reward for backers. That's it.

Make your backer rewards be t-shirts, art books, licensed copies of your previous games, big hugs, whatever -- ANYTHING except for a copy of a finished game funded by the pledges. Then, people will be under no illusions that their money is a pre-order for a product, rather than funding someone to try to make that product. And you won't find yourself running afoul of this sort of consumer-protection lawsuit.

It's so simple, and so ethical, and everyone would immediately understand exactly what they're paying for.

So why aren't people doing that?

Something about your post made me thing of this:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/28/killing-your-startup-on-a-thursday-night/

Don't know if it's directly applicable to you, but I thought you might find some comfort in it.

Graphics Gale just became free, I suggest you to check it out. I've been fiddling a bit since then, and I have to say I like it, particularly the workflow with animation frames.

I heartily recommend Urho3D. It lacks a pretty editor but is very easy to work with in both C++ and Lua, and has an extremely high-quality codebase that is actively developed. It's extremely versatile and I've found it incredibly easy to extend. One of the biggest advantages is that its entity-component system is very similar structurally to Unity's, meaning it's extremely easy to translate existing Unity scripts and examples into working with Urho3D. It effectively extends the support and tutorials far beyond what's provided just specifically for Urho3D.

Really, there are two ways to make a game: Write the code or write the check.

The good new is that there are some great easy-to-learn tools for narrative gamedev right now. Take a look at Twine. http://twinery.org. You can build very involved "choose your adventure" games with little to no code, and it's free.

If nothing else, this is a good way to prototype your ideas and get them in front of people.

I've made some videos about this tool I've used for kids coding camps and with English teachers to encourage creative writing. Let me know if you want them.

To help clear up peoples concerns on the 5% fromUE4. https://www.unrealengine.com/custom-licensing

CUSTOM TERMS & SUPPORT SOLUTIONS Epic Games charges a 5% royalty based on gross revenue for the use of Unreal Engine 4 under the subscription plan.

If you require terms that reduce or eliminate royalty for an upfront fee, or if you need custom legal terms or dedicated Epic support to help your team reduce risk or achieve specific goals, we’re here to help.

No. Would you suggest for a 5 year old to be air dropped into the pacific on its own to learn how to swim? Would you give someone who wanted to learn Linux a LFS handbook and say "go to it?" See the point I'm trying to make?

Stick with Java for now, no need to learn a new language yet. Save your killer game idea for later, and stick with things like tic-tac-toe, pong, snake, etc. Learn the basics of game development first, don't just dive in the deep end head-first.

I know I'm being a little harsh, but trust me. You sound like (I don't mean any offence by this) someone who would end up giving up within a month. I've seen it happen many times. Please just start small and work your way up to your bigger ideas. You'll thank yourself, and anyone who plays your games will surely thank you. I'm sure you could hack together your game at this point, but I'm also sure it would feel like a game that was horribly hacked together by someone with very little experience.

Have you tried Godot?

> Today we are releasing the first beta version of Python for Godot, the GDNative interface that enables you to use the full-blown Python 3 as a scripting language for Godot games.

Posted on 2017-07-12

I would say Itch.io is a good cheap alternative to Steam, especially for small indie games. The kind of crowd that visits itch.io also expects to see smaller games and not AAA titles.

Depends on which CC license it is. If it's CC0 then yes.

Most CC music on soundcloud and such is released under this one: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ in which case it would go back to your reason for releasing the product in the first place. If it's a commercial thing, then that's a no go.

If you feel like you can't create stuff fast enough, you might want to consider using different tools. Some development environments allow for games to be developed quickly so that you spend less time coding and more time actually making your game.

Try something like Gamemaker, Construct 2, Multimedia Fusion 2, or Love2D for getting your ideas out quickly.

Might be throwing in my two cents worth too late, but I think you should.

From what it sounds like, using the DRM means that there's no extra work for you to ensure the steam features are working. It's one less hassle for you, and one less potential problem for the player.

As some others have said, if people buy it on steam, they expect the DRM, because that's part of the reason for Steam's existence. They know it's there, and it's not a problem because of all the great features and convenience Steam brings. Have a look round at platforms such as Origin and U-Play. Everyone hates them because DRM restriction is their entire purpose. Whereas Steam, people use it because they want to, not because they're forced to. Steam has a community, a huge, diverse easily-browsed catalog, the market, workshops, and on. Having DRM on a Steam game is not a problem.

As you've said, you're going to make your game available DRM-free, so it's not a big issue to those who are steam-haters. They won't be looking on Steam for games in the first place.

tl;dr If it's easier for you to use the Steam DRM, do it. Steam users really don't mind or care, and other players who do want DRM free have other ways of buying the game. Sorry for wall of text, I stretch my two cents to breaking point. Hope your game goes well!

Looking at the source for Mari0 might help. The developer provides the source as a .love file, which is just a zip file with a changed extension. So just change the extension from .love to .zip and extract it.

Also, reading up on prototypal inheritance would be helpful if you're only vaguely familiar with it. It's the style of OO that Lua (and Javascript) uses.

Seconding this, anyone who needs to do similar operations on large number of images is doing themselves a disservice if they don't get familiar with all the stuff you can do in ImageMagick. Here's some examples to check out.

https://krita.org

...free.

If you are on a Mac, Pixelmator is impressive.

Or if you have an iPad, there are tons of great options.

Full disclosure: I work for Epic as a gameplay programmer.

If you want to use industry standard tools that come with some great written and video tutorials definitely stop by https://www.unrealengine.com/ and pick up a subscription. It's $19 for a subscription but you can subscribe and cancel whenever you want and still keep using the engine. If you need updates, you can resubscribe whenever you need to.

There is a 5% royalty if you make more than $3,000/quarter ($12,000/year) but, seeing as you're only just getting started, I doubt that would apply. A lot of companies in the industry and around the world use it so you'd be setting yourself up with some directly applicable skills.

Hope to see you over on the forums :)

In a email I got when I signed up: "You can update or cancel your subscription <https://www.unrealengine.com/dashboard> at any time through your account settings. If you cancel your subscription, you won’t receive access to new versions, but you can continue to use the existing versions you obtained as a subscriber."

It looks really nice, but without playing I'm seeing familiar design & am curious is it any different from Spring Ninja by Ketchapp and tons of similar releases that game... sprung already? Making a late clone of a well established game might not be best use of summer time :)

I actually think you're doing a lot right, and that app discovery is simply really difficult for small developers on the App Store in 2013. We've released an iOS title that was:

• In New and Noteworthy
• Given a big-ass honking feature
• Game of the Week in multiple countries
• Solidly 5-star rated by users
• Critically praised (Metacritic listed it as #10 of the top 25 best iOS games of the year)

...and yet, the PC version has easily outsold it by a factor of 10. Yeesh! It's not too surprising for us to run into PC gamers who have heard of the title, but rarely an iOS gamer. We haven't solved this problem, so I can't say for certain what'll work, but some food for thought:

• Check out the landing pages for successful iOS titles and see if you can glean something from them. For example, many have text on the screenshots that sell the game.
• Have you hit as many press outlets as you can? (E.g., TouchArcade, 148Apps, Slide to Play, etc.)
• I actually might recommend against lowering the price. We raised the price of our game, and are generating more revenue.

Anyway, I like the art style, and hope you guys do well. I see that you also have a Greenlight submission up; best of luck on both!

It's not up yet unfortunately, still writing some text and creating a video to go with it. Will be up somewhere this week :) Thanks for considering contributing though!

Edit: It's up! https://www.patreon.com/kenney

Using Unreal Engine 4 won't really teach you C++, given how heavily UE4's code makes use of their custom memory management classes, their macros, and their classes.

I think a much better way to learn C++ would be to download something like SFML and try to construct an engine or game using it.

I would strongly recommend using something like code.org or Scratch as that teaches you basic logic using drag and drop blocks, so you don't have to learn the syntax of code. They're both free, and I know my little cousin (9 years) loves doing code.org in school.

Once he understands the basics of logic and programming, you can transfer him to using an actual game engine (that's still drag and drop) like Game Maker, Construct, etc.

If anyone is curious about the LOVE API, do it! If you don't know Lua, you can learn them both at the same time. It's really simple and intuitive. For me, one of the drawing points of Lua is its non-rigid grammar as compared to other high level languages such as Java- it really lets me focus on the logic as opposed to finagling with the language.

Anyways, Lua + Love is good. You should use it. Oh and if you want some animations, try AnAL.

At work we use google workspace. It is a paid service, but gives a lot more space + shared drives. Although I have to say that I work in manufacturing, not in game dev. We use it to share documents, project files like CAD models and stuff.

I totally second that. Its a book full of commonplace ideas and pretty thin for such a collection of platitudes. i bought it and returned it to amazon.

Depending what OP's husband motivation is, I would suggest either "Game programming patterns". If he doesn't have access to a machine, then game design may be the only option, since everything else is machine based. However, pixel art can be practiced with a pen and paper...

This is one of the few books I recommend. I think the complete list at this point would be:

Game Engine Architecture

Game Programming Complete

Game Programming Patterns

That's it for game specific books. If you want to deep dive into old school graphics:

Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book

Computer Graphics Principles and Practices

On top, most people (mostly repeated from /u/Karzka list) should own:

Code Complete

Design Patterns

Pragmatic Programmer

Then in terms of language specific books:

Effective C++ (getting dated but still a must read)

JavaScript the Good Parts (even though the author comes across like an epic Douche)