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plngsplsh

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,142
It might seem ill-advised, but I used a non-pixelated font precisely to make it stand out as something that's not part of the game itself. But point taken, I'll try to do the same differently next time.

Most of my points are rather nitpicky. I see why you chose a non-pixelated font, but maybe one could have used one in a way that would have stood out anyway - by movement, size or some background-banner. Mind you, I've never created a trailer before and I do think that your trailer does what it's supposed to do. The main complaint is that it could be shorter and snappier.

Hmmm. This specific cut is entirely unedited gameplay; the player entering a stage, as it happens in the game. That's why there's no transition, it's the same piece of footage. Perhaps I should cut it and add a transition all the same. It might be a bit tangential but perhaps this indicates I should add an actual a transition in-game.

Is that abrupt cut between the music also in-game? That was my issue here. Maybe if the last note of the first piece had played a second longer, it would have worked better. But as I said, that's rather nitpicky.

As for the game: It definitely looks like something that I'd like to play. Reminds me a bit of Risk of Rain. I like the way the lion scratches down the buildings. That looks like a fun mechanic.
 

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
19,343
Madrid
Most of my points are rather nitpicky.

Don't worry about that. If it was important enough for you to type, it's important enough for me to consider. :)

I see why you chose a non-pixelated font, but maybe one could have used one in a way that would have stood out anyway - by movement, size or some background-banner.

I actually played with font color for quite a while, but I didn't really like anything but white. Letter movement transitions all seemed rather... tacky, which is why I went for a simple fade (admittedly, I'm using Windows Movie Maker which is quite limited so that might also be a factor). I also made them as big as possible without overlapping any other important elements.

Mind you, I've never created a trailer before and I do think that your trailer does what it's supposed to do. The main complaint is that it could be shorter and snappier.

Yeah, I've got that a lot. It's so hard to decide what should be in and what shouldn't. I feel like I trimmed anything unnecessary, but I should have cut out more, I think. It's my first trailer ever, so live and learn is at play here too. :)

Is that abrupt cut between the music also in-game? That was my issue here. Maybe if the last note of the first piece had played a second longer, it would have worked better. But as I said, that's rather nitpicky.

No, although the music cut in the game is practically identical (the music that plays first is the one in the maps and menus, and the second is the one in regular stages), it was "artificially" done so that the entire trailer played without music cuts. That is, I recorded the footage with music disabled, then added the music in Movie Maker. I can add fade offs, and it has one in fact, but perhaps it's too quick and it would need a slower one.

As for the game: It definitely looks like something that I'd like to play. Reminds me a bit of Risk of Rain. I like the way the lion scratches down the buildings. That looks like a fun mechanic.

Hahah, thanks! It's more fun now that I've increased the Manticore's climb speed considerably.

The inspiration is actually Rampage, but it does have some elements that are similar to Risk of Rain, mostly the fact that it's a roguelite too. :)
 

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
19,343
Madrid
Anyone know what the best way to promote an itch.io page would be?

The million dollar question, isn't it? :)

I've heard that twitter is the most effective way of promoting your game, which is what I'm doing. That said, I have a grand total of 14 followers, so I'm probably the last person you should ask about promoting your work. :D
 

Deleted member 5167

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,114
Anyone know what the best way to promote an itch.io page would be?

Do you mean visibility on itch itself?
Make sure you have accurate tags, people search those.
Its probably a good idea to make a WebGL build (extremely easy to do on itch) and outline what your prototype does and what you're planning to do on the page too.
I think you can make animated gifs for your page preview image, so you probably want to do that for first look appeal, or spend a little time doing some graphics stuff.
Even just using basic colours for your materials will make it a lot more visually appealing at a glance for your screenshots (like a green floor, brown platforms, grey pipes and arches, whatever)

I have 4-5 visitors a day across various uploads, and most come from searches for specific tags, many of those from platform-web and html5 sub searches
 

wwm0nkey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,551
Do you mean visibility on itch itself?
Make sure you have accurate tags, people search those.
Its probably a good idea to make a WebGL build (extremely easy to do on itch) and outline what your prototype does and what you're planning to do on the page too.
I think you can make animated gifs for your page preview image, so you probably want to do that for first look appeal, or spend a little time doing some graphics stuff.
Even just using basic colours for your materials will make it a lot more visually appealing at a glance for your screenshots (like a green floor, brown platforms, grey pipes and arches, whatever)

I have 4-5 visitors a day across various uploads, and most come from searches for specific tags, many of those from platform-web and html5 sub searches
Just made a web build, hopefully enough people try it out
 

chubigans

Vertigo Gaming Inc.
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
2,560
Hey y'all! I made a blog post on my first year of sales on my latest game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!



Man, what a weird industry.
 

Pixels

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
1,005
41608660_1134113383402628_8903894278976045056_o.jpg


Patch time!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/679270/announcements/detail/1694932494292327599
 

Toño

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 26, 2017
2,039
Spain
Hey y'all! I made a blog post on my first year of sales on my latest game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!



Man, what a weird industry.


What a ride. Thanks for sharing your adventure with the game. I'm happy that you have overcome a tough year and you're ready to a new adventure.
I'm a big fan of both games, the original and this. I still need to try the Barista expansion!

Maaan, I have been out of this business more than two years now. Even if it was really frustrating and a complete failure, I want to return!
 

Minamu

Member
Nov 18, 2017
1,900
Sweden
Look up "object pooling". You'll get better performance (since there won't be a need to reparent anything) with no sacrifice in code cleanliness, and don't have to assume the amount of bullets that can be created.
This seems... somewhat "ad-hoc". I think a more general purpose solution that decouples the pooling functionality from the objects using it will save you a lot of headaches and repeated code later on.

I created a PoolManager which holds a dictionary of pools: when an object is needed, the pool manager provides the next unused object in the pool associated to that prefab. When an object is no longer needed, they have a Remove method that disables them and re-enqueues in the appropriate pool for later reuse.

The other half of the equation is preloading these pools with the appropriate number of pre-created instances, so that there's no delay when a lot of objects are suddenly needed at once. This preloading is done at the start of the scene, in a cascading way, i.e. enemy generators preload a number of enemy instances, and the first time an enemy is preloaded, it also ensures that anything it needs, like bullets, has at least a certain number of preloaded instances. I even show a warning in the log if any object is actually instantiated after the "preload" phase of the scene (e.g. if I forgot to preload something, or preloaded too few objects and more needed to be instantiated at runtime).

All of this is handled very high in the object hierarchy; pretty much all objects (enemies, projectiles, explosions, etc.) descend from a PoolObject class that provides this functionality. If you're interested I can send you or post here the relevant classes!

Thanks guys, I'll discuss it with my team, after they have ripped my code to shreds ;)

*

15 minutes away from starting my job :D
 

Jintor

Saw the truth behind the copied door
Member
Oct 25, 2017
32,404
I should probably get back into csd2 since I'm cursed not to spend more money on games for the next week or two

Great read mate
 

Camille_

Member
Oct 26, 2017
224
Angoulême, France
Hey y'all! I made a blog post on my first year of sales on my latest game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!



Man, what a weird industry.


Thanks for your article - most of these feelings and experiences usually go unsaid, and as such, misunderstood by a large part of both devs and audience alike.
As with many other devs, I suspect, I strongly echo your experience with my own previous release, and I'm glad you've managed to put those feelings into words better than I could back then, and still to some extent today.
Good luck with whatever's next - for whatever it's worth, this article helps me and hopefully many others stay on track by reminding of our shared experience, in that at the very least, we're not alone in our struggles and anxieties!
 

chubigans

Vertigo Gaming Inc.
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
2,560
Thanks so much y'all, I am honestly shocked at how many devs have told me they've gone through similar experiences. It's comforting to know I'm not alone and damn scary this is so common at the same time.
 

ArtemisLunar

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Jun 13, 2018
598
Hi ERA, I hope and all ofd you are having a great day!
I'm mostly a lurker on this post, but I'm also developing a game, mostly based on the mexican (aztec) culture mixed with the Mahou Shoujo formula, I really want to talk more about our project, but right now we're having issues trademarking the game, a friend of mine told me about INDAUTOR (A mexican trademark audit) but, when I cheked the prices it was imposible for us paying that amount of money (6500 pesos, equivalent of 400-450 dlls only to trademark only one character, not including the name of the game, the studio, etc), because we're starting we're only looking a way to avoid the classic "idea stealing", so I don't know if there's a way to protect all the project from the internet stealing, or a way to register the game with a international validation.
 

vestan

#REFANTAZIO SWEEP
Member
Dec 28, 2017
24,611
Hey y'all! I made a blog post on my first year of sales on my latest game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!



Man, what a weird industry.

Thank you for this write-up. You definitely aren't alone in what you were feeling. Even though I haven't played CSD, I'll be sure to check it out :)
 

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
19,343
Madrid
Hi ERA, I hope and all ofd you are having a great day!
I'm mostly a lurker on this post, but I'm also developing a game, mostly based on the mexican (aztec) culture mixed with the Mahou Shoujo formula, I really want to talk more about our project, but right now we're having issues trademarking the game, a friend of mine told me about INDAUTOR (A mexican trademark audit) but, when I cheked the prices it was imposible for us paying that amount of money (6500 pesos, equivalent of 400-450 dlls only to trademark only one character, not including the name of the game, the studio, etc), because we're starting we're only looking a way to avoid the classic "idea stealing", so I don't know if there's a way to protect all the project from the internet stealing, or a way to register the game with a international validation.

I read somewhere (for whatever "something someone in a forum read once" is worth) that if you can estabilish that you were using the name before them, you can estabilish that you came up with the name and it makes harder for people to patent-troll you. Personally I don't think anyone would ever try to plagiarize a random indie game like mine, so what I've done is register a domain with the name of my game, and a twitter account with the same. The first is cheap (I used GoDaddy) and the second is free.

In general I don't think most indie studios actually trademark anything; plagiarizers go for stuff like Pokemon or Mario or the odd indie game that's a breakaway success, not our humble indie games. Plus I have no clue how much trademarking your stuff in Mexico protects you from plagiarizers from other contries.

That said, take what I'm saying with copious amounts of salt, as I'm neither a lawyer nor anyone who's done any remotely extensive research on copyright laws.
 

wwm0nkey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,551
*looking at Pun2 for networking*

Yeah this shit just seems WAY easier than UNet by far.

Also I don't want to keep spamming my project, but just had a pretty good edit to my hook script and now you can go fast as fuck boi!
*Only if you have good control

 
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Minamu

Member
Nov 18, 2017
1,900
Sweden
*looking at Pun2 for networking*

Yeah this shit just seems WAY easier than UNet by far.
Just make sure it doesn't still rely on Unity's relay servers for connecting people. If you go live with a multiplayer game you'll need to pay for that internet traffic. In the case of nat traversal, they have their own free relay server and they provide the source code for setting up your own as well.
 

JonDadley

Member
May 4, 2018
38
Finally got round to getting story / characters into my prototype. The presentation of the UI etc. needs tidying up but I'm pretty happy with the general flow now.

 

JonDadley

Member
May 4, 2018
38
That feels... kind of unexpectedly shady, for how chill your game was feeling until now. :D

That's intentional - I don't want to spoiler the twist but things aren't what they seem :D the pickup is made to seem shady and gives you the time you spend driving to the drop off to consider just what it is you're transporting until it's revealed on delivery. There's a cute little subverting expectation twist when you get there :)
 

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
19,343
Madrid
That's intentional - I don't want to spoiler the twist but things aren't what they seem :D the pickup is made to seem shady and gives you the time you spend driving to the drop off to consider just what it is you're transporting until it's revealed on delivery. There's a cute little subverting expectation twist when you get there :)

Oh, so you are actually revealed what it is at the end! I had no clue and I thought you left it intentionally unknown the whole game; objection retracted. :)
 

JonDadley

Member
May 4, 2018
38
Oh, so you are actually revealed what it is at the end! I had no clue and I thought you left it intentionally unknown the whole game; objection retracted. :)

Yeah, one of my little quibbles with games like Euro Truck Sim is there's no mystery to what you're delivering (you know what it is at pickup) and so no climax / payoff when you deliver it. When you deliver things in Transmission (in the story missions at least) you get to see what it was you were carrying in a little cutscene vignette.
 

plngsplsh

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,142
I've now ported my smileBASIC prototype to gamemaker. Things feel a lot less constrained, though for some reason the IDE all of a sudden is super slow. Really weird. Maybe I need to reinstall it.

https://twitter.com/no_okay_bye/status/1040889377004683265

I'm not really content with the art style, but I will worry about that later. The next step is to create a framework for the other game objects.
 

WieDerrickWie

Member
Jul 4, 2018
650


Been playing with dynamic lights. Got them working right, and when your grenades blow up, it splash damages a fire extinguisher, an enemy shoots, and light fixtures shatter, well its a sight to behold with their dynamic lights acting accordingly. Still a lot to work on but its already great in-game.
 

Benz On Dubz

Member
Oct 27, 2017
763
Massachusetts
Working on a brush fire effect. Laser shots are rendered onto a damage texture that the grass used to determine if it's been shot. The CPU reads this texture back and determines where to place the fire objects. The fire objects can add more scorches to the damage texture creating a feedback loop.

[

Edit: Updated video
 
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Weltall Zero

Game Developer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
19,343
Madrid
Why is welltall zero banned? :(


Awww, you guys. :) Don't worry, I'm back to my regularly scheduled shitposting.

Working on a brush fire effect. Laser shots are rendered onto a damage texture that the grass used to determine if it's been shot. The CPU reads this texture back and determines where to place the fire objects. The fire objects can add more scorches to the damage texture creating a feedback loop.

[

Edit: Updated video


Really cool effects. Between this, the bullet holes and the destroyable grass your game has such advanced effects for an indie game!

Been messing with a thing...



Wow, you never rest, do you? Juggling a day job, developing solo games like Jack B Nimble and the one you're making now, and also tackling challenges like this...
 
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