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Did I just waste 3 years?

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#461

Post by tialaramex »

jacquesm wrote: post #429
kbenson wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously. Did we read the same article? Not only the total number of games, but the rate of their release seems to be geometrically increasing! Holy crap. And while many of them are Unity shovelware, etc., many are polished games that a lot of effort w…

Re. The shovelware bit: Once upon a time, when men were real men, etc, making a game meant writing it from the ground up, writing your own engine and then writing the game logic on top of that engine to make something unique. Now that game engines are commonplace, free and work better than what any single developer would be able to come up with after a lifetime of hard work the end result is that games have a very ha…

No.

It was never difficult to "come up with something truly unique".

Your unique thing might be rubbish, but that's not the problem for the millions of shovelware Unity asset flips.

Jim Sterling has covered this at length, even running a competition to show that people can take a horribly over-used cheap asset and do great original stuff - if they try. Asset flips don't even try.

The are tens of thousands of games in which you are an elite soldier running around shooting zombies. There are zero games where you're a pot plant using psychic powers to create sculptures.

Like Hollywood the video game industry chases trends until they're beaten completely to death, and then goes one more round just to make really sure.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#462

Post by cursorial »

fiblye wrote: post #444
fileeditview wrote: post #430

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem. You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you…

>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Very much yes. Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't…

Factorio doesn't look very visually appealing, but if you play it for an hour you can pretty much write off your next week because you'll be hooked.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#463

Post by hannasanarion »

Theodores wrote: post #449
hannasanarion wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adele wasn't self-published though, right? I'm not super familiar, but based on the wikipedia page she got picked up by an XL Recordings talent scout who put her on other albums associated with that label, including appearances on BBC, before even her first album, which had 32 credits. Being really good and self publishing helps you build your resume in a superstar industry, but it's nearly impossible to actually ach…

Her mySpace tunes were self published, however, getting XL Recordings on board has parallels with startup culture. It is like the importance of having a co-founder, proof that you have convinced someone to back you, then with that, you can scale things up. XL Recordings came from the rave scene, the Prodigy were their first big earning group, however, for every Prodigy there were scores of 'Dome Patrol' grade release…

I'm not saying that Adele's story isn't remarkable or that she isn't talented, but that she didn't break the industry pattern, finding her own slice of the pie without help. XL already had audiences, resources, collaborators, and connections, and a production pipeline that she was inducted into. Her debut product took 32 people to make, on XL's dime. It was not a Stardew-Valley situation.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#464

Post by baud147258 »

fiblye wrote: post #444
fileeditview wrote: post #430

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem. You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you…

>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Very much yes. Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't…

I'd say the part of marketing is lower than luck, since you'd have to be very lucky to have your game shown by a big streamer/youtuber.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#465

Post by wuyuzhe »

vagab0nd wrote: post #408
bmc7505 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the app?

It's a very simple App which helps you memorize and learn items using Spaced Repetition. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nerfsoftwa...

Your app gets me figuring that it would be nice for a dictionary app to have a feature that, after you look up some word a second time (indicating it's not a rare one), adds it to the "to memorize" list and trigger the notification mechanism you wrote.

Also wondering if support for memorizing equations would be straightforward.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#466

Post by wastedhours »

gmueckl wrote: post #253
Nokinside wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a lone programmer wants to write tight code for games, they should build game engines or libraries that games can use and then sell those to game developers. There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.

Except that it turns out that artists and game programmers are too cheap to pay for tools, even if you can present them with a clear benefit in terms of productivity gain vs. sales price. To make matters worse, big companies that could afford those tools will generally only buy exceptionally well established tools and rebuild the rest from scratch in-house. The only way to make money with games is to sell games.

There's different framing needed here though - hobbyist developers aren't really buying "tools" in the same way a studio is. You need to think of it as a B2C sale more than a B2B one - you're selling something that will enable them to realise their dreams, not cut 5% off their build times.

When you're committing 1000 hours of your free time to building a game from scratch, spending 30-40 building your own (hacky, not that great) animation pipeline for the learning experience is worth it over a £90 plugin. You don't really win this on cost/benefit over and above getting someone excited by the possibilities of your tool. Worth checking out Buildbox[0] for example.

Obviously studios are a different beast and it make sense for parts of their workflows to be custom. If you want to get a start in the goldrush, sell pickaxes, not JCBs.

[0] https://www.buildbox.com/

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#467

Post by aldanor »

derefr wrote: post #285
scrollaway wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stardew Valley is insane. The developer did everything . Art, music, sound effects, engine, gameplay, design, writing... everything.

Stardew Valley is an interesting case in that the developer didn't really need to invent anything. They took a formula (the Harvest Moon series), produced a clone, and then polished the hell out of it in response to community demands until it was hardly recognizable. None of that really required an act of genius creative talent, though. Learning enough about audio production to create the set of SFX and music you alr…

> in response to community demands

I don't think so. The author mentioned in one of his interviews that he was the only person to actually play the game until the very late pre-release stages. Even those who signed him haven't really played it.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#468

Post by baud147258 »

seventhtiger wrote: post #403
krapp wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not actually competing with the whole world, though, just whatever else is similar to someone's interests. In this case... "metroidvania" is a very oversaturated market, and a lot of games do it better.

Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard. Maybe that used to be metroidvania, but that's long over. Visual novels have been on the rise for a while, so are rougelikes and card games, but those are saturated now. You want to get in before the big streamers and reddit frontpage and ride the wave. Who knew a Harvest Moon clone would be the biggest indie suc…

> Making the games you want to play is actually not great advice. You need to find a niche and hit it hard.

I'd say you need both: you need to want to do a game you'd want to play, because you'd have an easier time recognizing if you're doing something that would appeal to at least one person. And if it's in a niche, you'll have a better chance to get coverage and buyers. But if you just try to hit a niche hard without knowing what makes the games in that niche good, you'll have a hard time making something that'll interest players.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#469

Post by bspammer »

beaconstudios wrote: post #459
Rainymood wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't very spectacular. Stardew Valley takes the formula of an existing series (Harvest Moon). >To make a successful anything, it's 90% marketing, 5% quality, and 5% luck. If the right person finds your product and endorses it, quality doesn't matter. You'll get guaranteed sales. It's then that it takes quality…

the point is that if the game wasn't well marketed, you wouldn't even know it existed in the first place.

Definitely not true, I've never seen an advert for Stardew Valley but it's talked about all over the internet because it's a really good game.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#470

Post by aranelsurion »

fiblye wrote: post #444
fileeditview wrote: post #430

After being active in the indie game dev scene for many years I see this kind of story again and again. I see many people ask why didn't it work or others say he should have done better marketing. I think they all don't understand the real problem. You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you…

>You have to look at really successful indie games, such as Terraria, Factorio, Mini Metro, Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeon, Papers Please.. and there are many more. If you look at these games do you really think there is an alternative reality where they would not sell many copies? I don't. Very much yes. Most of their success is due to being fortunate enough to get a bunch of coverage. From screenshots, most aren't…

While I wouldn't disregard the importance of marketing, I think quality, as in both quality of game itself and quality of the idea behind it, matters.

I think having a competitive advantage/value and having unique qualities are not the same thing. For example, before Stardew Valley, an entire genre of "calm, casual, farming oriented games" were mostly unknown to PC gamers. For years I have wondered when someone would notice an entire genre missing. At some point, someone noticed the same thing, and instead of building just another sandbox/crafting game they built a polished Harvest Moon alternative. It turns out, from a pool of millions of PC/XBone/whatever gamers, some people liked this genre of games.

By the way, I cannot stress the importance of polish: great artwork, fluid animations, good UI, proper bg music, smooth learning curve and of course, being generally exciting to play. Most of the games mentioned (maybe Factorio being the exception) have these qualities. Your average gamer has 15sec attention span at best for a new game. Most wouldn't even wait until the end of your launch trailer.

I've gave my full 30 seconds to watch the trailer of Infinitroid (OP's game) and I cannot see why I would choose it over, for example Dead Cells. They are not exactly the same game, but they are competing for the same resources. (entertainment budget and spare time) Just watch trailers of Infinitroid and Dead Cells side by side, the difference you will see cannot be written off as marketing success.

Just my 2cents as an avid gamer and potential customer.

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