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Did I just waste 3 years?

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#311

Post by mooseburger »

aphextron wrote: post #137

You made the mistake of thinking that anyone would care how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. But making a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, sh…

It doesn't take a large team. Look at latest indie hotness Hollow Knight (https://youtu.be/UAO2urG23S4), which was made by 3 dudes, who were artists and animators (http://hollowknight.com/our-team/). I agree that with game engines, making a successful indie game is primarily about artistic prowess, but you probably don't need that many artists. Just 1 or 2 really good ones.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#312

Post by gspetr »

gambiting wrote: post #25
shacharz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shareware, Demo ?

Both are prepared from a completed game. Except for some very specific genres, it's impossible to make a demo without building the whole game behind it. That's not a format you use to test a game idea.

"Specific genres?"

This probably depends on your ratio of story/art to engine/game mechanics[0] your game would have.

It seems games that do not require continuous player progress (ruling out RPGs entirely) can be a good fit.

e.g. Episodic story-telling games and then something like Hitman, so action games can be done that way too.

But you could easily release TBS games this way too, many "mission"-based games would lend themselves to this format.

[0] In a broad sense.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#313

Post by hannasanarion »

derefr wrote: post #282
LrnByTeach wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great analysis.. this applies to so many areas of software development. Building games, websites, any thing software .. > you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. > Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. > You need a massive…

You know, there's an interesting relationship between the graphic-novel industry and the TV/film industry at this point. Many TV/film screenplays are adapted from graphic novels, because a graphic novel is, in a sense, a "sketch" of a film—it's something that communicates most of the top-down spirit of the eventual work, while also being something that is able to be produced by a single creator, and so something that…

Because asset polish doesn't matter nearly as much as gameplay: the high-res remake will never make as much as the original.

The most successful game of the year, Far Cry 5, has sold 1/20th as many copies as Minecraft has, a game that is ugly as sin and always has been, but it's fun enough that it doesn't matter.

There's no point in adapting a property if the adaptation won't grow the audience. The Walking Dead was a comic book superstar, selling upwards of 500,000 units per issue when it was picked up by AMC for the TV adaptation. The TV adaptation is now reaching 8 million viewers per episode, and that's considered low.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#314

Post by Armisael16 »

Retra wrote: post #42
jtchang wrote: post #9

What is the target market for the game? I played Metroid when I was a kid on NES and the original gameboy. Games these days are a lot about marketing and huge budgets. The indie ones that do well need to be targeted as well as refreshing. Some hard thoughts just watching the video and reading a bit about the game: 1. I don't really like the graphics as much as I liked the original Metroid. This is probably just a per…

Super Metroid is literally my favorite game, and I don't really have a strong urge to play this. Metroid is an exploration-based game. The game rewards you for finding secrets and for knowing how to get places. It teases you to find a way to break sequence, and much of the replay-ability of that game is based on the possibility to do that and to bask in what you've already learned about the world. Procedural generati…

Is Civilization a story-building game? I certainly don't play it as such.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#315

Post by toast0 »

derefr wrote: post #282
LrnByTeach wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great analysis.. this applies to so many areas of software development. Building games, websites, any thing software .. > you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. > Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. > You need a massive…

You know, there's an interesting relationship between the graphic-novel industry and the TV/film industry at this point. Many TV/film screenplays are adapted from graphic novels, because a graphic novel is, in a sense, a "sketch" of a film—it's something that communicates most of the top-down spirit of the eventual work, while also being something that is able to be produced by a single creator, and so something that…

I think you would have to cultivate that market very carefully. Video gaming can be very sentiment driven at times, and there's a fine line between homage and rip-off.

Perhaps the way to do it is to acquire the license for a 'masterpiece edition' ... release it five years after the original.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#316

Post by megaremote »

acangiano wrote: post #11

He doesn't mention how many hours he spent marketing it. I suspect not that many. I fully sympathize with his struggle, but this is a trap most programmers fall into so easily. Market need/fit > Marketing > Design > Programming when it comes to software products. You can't just build it and expect that they will come, unfortunately.

Marketing isn't magic, not every game makes it. In fact most do not.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#317

Post by hannasanarion »

izacus wrote: post #121
meritt wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also... no Linux version? Really? You're criticizing an indie game developer who feels he just wasted 3 years of his life making a failure, for not spending the extra year or whatever it'd take for it to be cross-platform?

With engines like Unity and Unreal, supporting multiple platforms (including modern consoles like PS4, Xbox One and Switch) has a level of complexity of writing a portable Electron app. As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind). Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.

This is true, but also the game in question was coded entirely from scratch, which is part of the problem: the majority of those 3 years were probably spent duplicating the work done already by Unity and Unreal. If you want to make a living as a carpenter, you don't start by planting walnuts.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#318

Post by gnulinux »

Retra wrote: post #237
gnulinux wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda like games like nethack and brogue but my only problem with them is since it's extremely easy to die, it emphasizes attention a bit too much imho. I'm not a very attentive person and when I play games I'd much rather it be a bit more relaxed. When I know that even if I play the game for a whole Saturday, one floating eye can just randomly kill me for no reason, it kinda demotivates me...

It works like gambling. You play the game 100 times and you just lose most of them, but on the rare occasion you get very lucky... and you walk away with an unforgettable story about how you defied all the odds and did something wonderful and amazing. That's where procedural generation shines the brightest.

I suppose that's true. But one can imagine a game just like nethack except it's not as easy to die so after, say 20 run, you learn the ropes and can enjoy the game every time you play it. Obviously, eventually you'll get bored (unlike playing 100 times and losing every time) but that few times you beat the game would be enjoyable.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#319

Post by gmueckl »

azernik wrote: post #284
gmueckl wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're absolutely not "too cheap" for that - it's just a saturated market. Don't start a new company, look for a job working at Autodesk or Havok or Unity or Crytek or one of the dozen other companies that makes bank off of selling professional tools to professional game developers

I can tell you right here and right now that I know that some of the companies you name do not make a bank off of their products. And it's probably not the companies you would expect and not for the reasons you would expect. I have sources for this, but unfortunately I cannot name them.
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