21–30 of 34 posts
I only allow myself an hour or so per day to write code on the side, or to play with a new technology or library. If I don't put boundaries around whatever I'm doing (and have an end-game in mind), I end up wasting a lot of time and don't get anything out of it.
So, for those who are into this - for somebody with a little experience in C++ and mostly experience in C# and various dynamic languages, what's the shortest distance between "idea" and "game" in terms of tools? Unity?
Definitely Unity. The forthcoming Unity 4.3 release will feature a new 2d game workflow that should make it easier to create simple games for people new to game development.
I'm guilty of nearly everything you listed at the end - on a single project. I've been working on a WWF/Scrabble type game (with some unique gameplay elements) since early 2012 and it continually gets picked up and put down again. I've ended up building a component-based ui engine behind it, keep adding features, try to pick it up without clear goals or tasks in mind and am probably trying to tackle far more than I s…
I've been up to something similar for the last year or so. Man is there a lot of complexity in a simple turn-based word game than I ever imagined. I threw together a prototype of the basic gameplay in a weekend but to actually ship something you need user accounts, game history, push notifications, error handling, multiple games per user, game creation, a way to get friends into the app to play with you, screenshots,…
A really good framework for building turn-based games I bet would have a decent market.
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.co...
Do you have any stats on the downloads or user engagement? I just released my game two days ago, and here are the live stats: http://slagalica.tv/drones.php Can you compare yours to this? Am I doing any good? Thanks.
Oh well. Thanks for down-voting someone who was brave enough to make their stats public. :( I guess no one is interested in real user engagement figures and I should remove the access.
Disregard internet points, acquire users :-) .
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely Unity. The forthcoming Unity 4.3 release will feature a new 2d game workflow that should make it easier to create simple games for people new to game development.
Ah. Now all I do is need to reign in my raging ambition enough to admit that an RTS is not appropriate for a first game.
Look at a game like Rymdkapsel. It's an RTS, but it cuts a ton of complexity out of the gameplay. By doing that, and focusing on some simple but fun mechanics, and a very simple art style, you've got an RTS that a small team or a lone programmer could implement.
Rymdkapsel cost $4 and they've got at least 10,000 downloads on Android and who knows on iOS so that means they've probably cleared north of $50k to maybe over $100k.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah. Now all I do is need to reign in my raging ambition enough to admit that an RTS is not appropriate for a first game.
Maybe you could still do an RTS, but cut it down to the bare bones of what it needs to have. Look at a game like Rymdkapsel. It's an RTS, but it cuts a ton of complexity out of the gameplay. By doing that, and focusing on some simple but fun mechanics, and a very simple art style, you've got an RTS that a small team or a lone programmer could implement. Rymdkapsel cost $4 and they've got at least 10,000 downloads on…
The problem is that even a simple RTS has some brutal challenges - pathfinding is hard, and if you want to go multiplayer you have to find a way to get lockstep logic (in C#/Unity this means doing all your simulation math using custom fixed-point numbers and using lookup arrays for all your trigonometry) - that and you need unit-AI.
RTS is hard.
Do you have any stats on the downloads or user engagement? I just released my game two days ago, and here are the live stats: http://slagalica.tv/drones.php Can you compare yours to this? Am I doing any good? Thanks.
I just released my first app on the Windows 8 App Store the other day, but went about it a little differently. I decided to build the absolute simplest app I could think of – the kind of app that really could be completed in 48 hours.
The goal of this app was to get something into the store. Even if I don’t get any downloads, this app served its purpose for me. Now, I have the whole infrastructure in place for my future apps. I have a checklist of what I need to do. My accounts are all set up. I’ve seen some of the potential bumps in the submission process. Having successfully been through the process once, I don’t have that in my mind as some huge hurdle, which could demotivate me from even starting another app.
Now it’s time to focus on building something that solves a problem that people are willing to pay for.
For a moment I read the title wrong as the following and got super excited: "How to make a 2-year game in 48 hours!" :)