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Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

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Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

#81

Post by karaterobot »

newobj wrote: post #28
tombert wrote: post #19

Out of curiosity, what kind of margins do you get when you sell a game on Steam? Like, what percentage of a sale ends up in your bank account (pre-taxes). Also, how do Steam sales affect that? Congrats on making a game to completion, and doubly so for making something that gets fairly popular. Making a real game has been on my bucket list for about as long as I've known how to program, and I haven't completely given…

Between returns, taxes, and other stuff, I think you can model at ~55% of gross Steam sales. Then, whatever your split w/ your publisher is, on top of that. So I think it's easy for ppl to severely overestimate how much a dev is actually earning by just multiplying units times price :) I think in general the uptick of sales volume more than offsets the discount during a Steam sale. There's a reason Steam sales have a…

Related to this: is there any kind of contractual language that keeps Steam creators from saying how much money they made on the platform? Please note that I'm not asking how much you made on this game, that's none of my business! Just wondering if there's an NDA or something like that. I've been curious about it for a while.

Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

#82

Post by newobj »

_ache_ wrote: post #70
newobj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest answer? Dancing stick figure guy on the title screen. I did it very early in the project, in a fugue state at 3am. It lingered and lingered there, with ppl wondering "Is this real? Is this the actual title screen?" and luckily by the end I think everyone had drank enough psychedelic koolaid to agree - stick figure man stays. The artist made some better art for his hands/feet, and that was that. He's divisive,…

Did the dancing stick is Meta AI applied to some stick like this research paper ? https://ai.meta.com/blog/ai-dataset-animation-drawings/

It's a stock animation from mixamo :P

Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

#84

Post by newobj »

thehodge wrote: post #80

I've seen this game played on YouTube a LOT and really want to give it a go.. Any chance of a Mac port?

"There's always a chance" ..

People have had luck playing it via Whiskey/WINE, but I would hate for you to spend money and find out it's not a great solution, so I can't encourage it.

Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

#86

Post by newobj »

bb88 wrote: post #64

Hi, I enjoyed playing Ballionaire. I do like this style of rogue-likes where things can maybe break the game itself (infinity, slow down the game completely when too many eggs are spawned). I was curious in your platform choice of windows only. Was this due to the framework/programming language you're using? Or was this more of a time savings of trying to support more than one system at a time? Or maybe both?

FWIW, it works on the Steamdeck, natively, without Proton -- so it's a native Linux game in other words. Apparently a lot of folks are playing it on desktop Linux, as a result. It's just not "officially supported".

I'm a one-man dev operation, so it's strictly a matter of opportunity costs of my time. Linux and Mac are miniscule gaming markets, like 1% of Windows, but could potentially generate a significantly proportionately greater burden of support. So I have to be careful there.

Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

#87

Post by protocolture »

newobj wrote: post #36
posnet wrote: post #11

I realise you can make games in any language/engine. But could you explain the language/system/engine you used? How did you go about validating the game is fun? Did you end up having an intuitive sense for it, or did you need external feedback to refine the mechanics? My steam deck might as well be a billionaire/balatro machine.

Godot 4.2 / C#. Godot is an amazing engine and I highly recommend it for indie devs. The iteration cycle is a few seconds. IMHO, using Unity will absolutely slow you down, as a designer/programmer. I can't comment on the reality of a 3d game with a complicated art pipeline, however. But for a game like Ballionaire, Unity or Unreal would have been a mistake. Ballionaire was fun by day 3, the first time a ball dropped…

>I can't comment on the reality of a 3d game with a complicated art pipeline, however. But for a game like Ballionaire, Unity or Unreal would have been a mistake.

Going from Zero to Working 3d Game is very quick in Unity as long as you do everything the Unity way.

Going from Zero to Working 3d Game if you need to create functionality from scratch in Unity is a heartbreaker.

I am actually planning to take one of my old projects and rebuild it from scratch in Godot, for exactly this reason.

Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

#89

Post by mattigames »

What is your opinion about the top bad review on Steam? Have you addressed those issues or perhaps you disagree with them? Posted here for reference

> Really fun game at first, and it has a lot of potential. Unfortunately you are very strongly incentivized to NOT UNLOCK ANYTHING (i.e. the meta-progression).... because after you unlock many additional items and get to the higher difficulties, the vast majority of runs become impossible since there are way, way too many items in the pool and way, way too few rerolls (and no ban feature for some reason), so you end up with random unrelated crap almost every run and auto-lose because of it, as strong synergies are mandatory to win on the higher difficulties. It feels really bad having to fish RNG over and over again just to get a run that's actually winnable. They could easily fix this with many solutions, like: stronger reroll tag affinities, more choices per round, item bans, 10x the amount of rerolls, builds/profiles with more limited pools, map-specific limited pools, etc. etc. If they fix this massive roadblock then this game has the potential to be a amazingly fun.

Re: Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

#90

Post by chefandy »

newobj wrote: post #82
_ache_ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the dancing stick is Meta AI applied to some stick like this research paper ? https://ai.meta.com/blog/ai-dataset-animation-drawings/

It's a stock animation from mixamo :P

Stock assets: the first “AI”. Honestly still a better option than AI for most anything in game dev with a few workflow-oriented exceptions.
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