Game Creation/Design Catch All

Athros and GodzillaBlitz, good thread idea!

My single published game is Vigil RPG for iOS. It was released in late 2014.

I didn't use any engine for Vigil RPG; I just coded it up from scratch in Objective-C.

Since Vigil RPG was a solo effort and I'm a coder but not really an artist or a music composer, I pulled a lot of the graphics and music from the game from free sources (especially Creative Commons licensed stuff where the license permitted "commercial use").

Art

A lot of the art (in particular, most of the enemies) came from http://opengameart.org.

Sound effects

I did create a lot of the "8-bit-like" sound effects myself using these two tools:
- http://www.pulseboy.com/ ­
- http://www.superflashbros.net/as3sfxr/

Music

Most of Vigil RPG's music came from:
- http://freemusicarchive.org
- Kevin MacLeod - http://incompetech.com

A full list of resources used by Vigil RPG are on the game's "Credits" screen (which also fulfills the obligation to the authors of the various "attribution" Creative Commons licensed assets).

I'm working on a game in Unity 5 that my daughter described to me from a dream she had.

I've got a pretty good idea of how to implement the basics, but I haven't had the time to really get work done on it.

How does everyone balance this sort of thing as a hobby? If I were trying to make a go of it as a livelihood I'd probably be willing to sacrifice more, but between work and general parenthood and writing I don't have a lot of bandwidth to bang my head against Unity.

I think the key is that its not a hobby. That if you keep it a hobby you won't get anything done enough to have a cohesive direction. I know I struggle with that a lot. I start with a premise, get a couple of pieces working and then lose myself in another idea. Frankengaming they should call it, an amalgamation of unfinished ideas.

Godot.org is an MIT open source licensed 2D/3D game engine that is a lot like Unity. The impression is that it has better 2D but less bells and whistles on its 3D than Unity.

The development schedule for Vigil RPG, done as a hobby project, was 10:30pm to midnight, several nights a week, for about year and a half.

As you might guess, the impetus for that schedule was that for the remainder of my life, work / family (w/ small kids) / chores / church / etc. stuff took priority.

I essentially needed to sacrifice the time that I would have spent playing games on a given day to spend that time working on Vigil RPG instead.

WolverineJon wrote:

I essentially needed to sacrifice the time that I would have spent playing games on a given day to spend that time working on Vigil RPG instead.

That's what I did to complete the game in my sig. Same as I started on another project as well.

GameGuru (on Steam)

WTF.. can I sue these guys? I wonder if these are the people that have been bugging me to sell my domain name.

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

How does everyone balance this sort of thing as a hobby? If I were trying to make a go of it as a livelihood I'd probably be willing to sacrifice more, but between work and general parenthood and writing I don't have a lot of bandwidth to bang my head against Unity.

Random thoughts, because I've been thinking about this a lot as well...

I'm more interested in the process than the outcome, so actually making a great game isn't as important to me as is learning things and "making something". I guess this puts me firmly into the hobbyist category for now. I manage our app development program at work, though, and feel like I could use those skills and connections to take a worthwhile idea to a higher level if I ever came up with something that seemed particularly promising.

My first goals have been to understand the game design process, learn some programming fundamentals, and get used to some of the game engines. With family, work, and coaching responsibilities, progress has been sluggish, especially during soccer season. I'm okay with that. The progress I've been making has been satisfying.

My second goals are to make some bad games. Just to get something created and get momentum and experience. I hope to get to this stage this summer

I think scope figures a lot into this. Identifying projects that can be done with regard to available time and resources is key. Many game/app ideas I hear would be complex, massive undertakings for even a team of developers. Identifying a simple game that you can actually make is a key part of the process.

A lot of it comes down to priorities and productivity, which is a whole different discussion. I believe that most of us generally have time to do the things most important to us, and that we generally use time very inefficiently. For example, I say I have little time now with soccer, but I've probably spent 50 hours playing Stone Soup over the past month.

Oooh! This is great!

Few art package suggestions:

Photoshop, obvee.

Alchemy is good for quick concepting and procedural fun.

Hexels 2 is also fun, for a not-quite-8-bit art style.

Maya LT (Not full-blown Autodesk Maya, this one's much cheaper and tailored for indies, with some caveats)

ZBrush (Same owners as Sculptris, this is professional sculpting software that's got a bit of a learning curve to the UI but it feels like no other sculpting package I've ever used)


Substance Painter
(Texture painting software geared towards Physically-Based Rendering)

Substance Designer (Cool procedural texturing/shader development software from same folks as Substance Painter)

Silo (Barebones poly modeling package with some great tools for retopology and UV layout)

And PICO-8 is a cool little 8-bit console/game engine for making tiny NES-like games and programs. From the same guy that brought you Voxatron!

I second Toddland's book suggestions because he was my teacher back in the day and that might make me a little biased. But he's right about those books, regardless.

WolverineJon wrote:

My single published game is Vigil RPG for iOS. It was released in late 2014.

I didn't use any engine for Vigil RPG; I just coded it up from scratch in Objective-C.

Since Vigil RPG was a solo effort and I'm a coder but not really an artist or a music composer, I pulled a lot of the graphics and music from the game from free sources (especially Creative Commons licensed stuff where the license permitted "commercial use").

Sorry for the double post, but ... bought!

Congrats! That seems like an excellent example of a single person project. Thanks for sharing the resource list too. I'm going to check them out.

Following because of potential new books to purchase and read, having a contact that might be able to do music work if anyone needs it, and also the unending dream to one day in some fashion contribute creatively to a game.

So basically: vicariously living through you guys.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Sorry for the double post, but ... bought!

Thank you very much! Enjoy!

I'd love it if Vigil RPG would just continue to make enough money to keep itself on the App Store ($99/year to Apple). With the recent price cut to US $0.99, the game needs to sell about 150 copies annually to break even...

Also on that note, I recently did a blog post on what the financials of Vigil RPG look like (what it cost to make, plus all of the lifetime sales figures), if that's of interest to anyone: http://blog.jonschneider.com/2016/04...

WolverineJon wrote:
Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Sorry for the double post, but ... bought!

Thank you very much! Enjoy!

I'd love it if Vigil RPG would just continue to make enough money to keep itself on the App Store ($99/year to Apple). With the recent price cut to US $0.99, the game needs to sell about 150 copies annually to break even...

Also on that note, I recently did a blog post on what the financials of Vigil RPG look like (what it cost to make, plus all of the lifetime sales figures), if that's of interest to anyone: http://blog.jonschneider.com/2016/04...

That's an interesting blog post, and what a fun project! We've seen the same sort of tail off with our educational apps, but have found that giving them away free for a few days results in better sales afterwards. We tend to tie the free giveaways in with major conferences, where we plug the free giveaways.

I'm up to XL 9 in Vigil RPG. Really enjoying it. I played for a half hour or so while waiting at my daughter's goalkeeper practice last night. It's motivating, too, to see what a one-person, 600-hour project can turn out to be. Nice work, and thanks for sharing.

Sure thing! Glad you're enjoying the game!

This is somewhat related and worth remembering...
(re: the loud minority that always complain and disparage about a game because it was written in RPGmaker, or Unity, etc)

I’m still surprised at how much shame and defensiveness there is around using an off the shelf game making tool. It’s weird.
Whatever you make your game in, Game Maker, Unity, Unreal, Flash, HTML5, hand weave it and put beads on it and a bit of glitter, still the same thing. The vast majority of people who will ever play and enjoy your videogame, the vast majority of people who will pay you to play your videogame do not give one single solitary sh*t what you wrote it in. The vast majority of people only care about two things. Is it good and has it not fallen over like a drunk on a bouncy castle in a high breeze? Can I say ‘vast majority’ a few more times as well? I was enjoying that.
Rather than try and hide what a game is written in, make the best games that prove it all to be bullsh*t, make games the best that you can do, do good work and be as happy as you can be with it. Worry about the people who want to engage with your work, the people who want to enjoy your work, pay you for your work.

Because if there’s one thing that fifteen years in this game as an indie has taught me, it’s Unity today but it’ll be something else tomorrow and the complaints, stories and rumours will be the same. Kind of almost like they’re just stories built on half knowledge and slithers of truth, right? And whatever the package, folks to on and make amazing things and most of their customers, most of their players, never ever know or care what the game was made in.

Watching "Get Lamp" again yesterday got me interested in poking around with IF a bit, so I reinstalled the latest version of TADS to have a play around with. Will I manage to make anything? Probably not, but it'll be fun to mess around with for a bit at least.

WipEout wrote:

Oooh! This is great!

Links added!

And that's the reason I'm not so focused on Unity, and still prototyping everything on my iPad right now in Pythonista (beta version using Python 3). I'm engine hunting to find one that I can work with. Unity might be considered the best tool, but for some reason my brain doesn't like it at all. Löve2d, Godot or even just using pyinstaller and doing it in PyGame are all very viable options for me at this time.

In other personal game news: Having converted to using an ECS (Specifically esper. Further reading on ECS here and a video talk from the developer of Caves of Qud here) I'm making solid progress to nailing down a prototype, and getting something playable using the Lost Garden sprites as placeholders. I'm still debating using the OpenD6 system on the backend, but I need something playable before I can really commit one way or another. Samething for the magic system. Something playable first, then start refining and nailing down to mechanics.

pyxistyx wrote:

This is somewhat related and worth remembering...
(re: the loud minority that always complain and disparage about a game because it was written in RPGmaker, or Unity, etc)

I can understand this, though. I generally have reservations about a game on Steam when I see that it's created in RPGMaker. It's not the engine that a balk at, though. It's more that because the engine is so accessible it tends to attract inexperienced developers.

I get a similar thing at work. I do a lot of instructional design for digital learning, and as a general rule our field is filled with horrible learning modules. We get people who dismiss us out of hand when we bring up building a digital module to support some kind of learning initiative, because their only experiences with the medium have been awful. It takes a lot of determination on our part to get them to see that you can do cool things with the tools.

So the skepticism I can understand. The outright dismissal of anything created in RPGMaker, however, is silly.

Take a look at my game's Greenlight page for a good example of the hate RPGMaker gets.*

*admittedly my game looks like junk. It's legitimately funny and I've offered it up on Steam for free. All ignored.

Tagging here.

Following this thread; thanks for starting it up! My background is architecture; this summer my project is messing around with a borrowed DK2 to see if I can get my architectural models running in VR, which is going to require some transition to gaming engines. Not much clue what I'm getting myself into, but should be interesting!

The first thing you will learn is that real world scale does not translate well to virtual worlds or video games.
It seems like a project every hobby level designer goes through where they try and recreate their house or favorite hang out spot from when they were younger. It ends up being extremely cramped and claustrophobic.

Yup. When I was making skateboarding and BMX games (Fang was there for some of that) We had to make doorways about the equivalent of 12 feet tall by 5 feet wide to make them feel right.

athros wrote:

The actual project lives on my iPad right now, in Python. It was an outgrowth of the Roguelike Farmer. Top down, 2D RPG, real time movement and attacking. You're helping to build up a town buy doing things like protect caravans, explore the monster infested countryside to find resources (and perhaps Ruins, Caverns special NPC's and so on) . There are going to be monster attacks on the town that you can jump into that the townsfolk will help defend. Nothing really "Save the world" or huge plots. There will be some crafting (I'm still debating the magic system - prebuilt spell list ala JRPGs, or Elder Scrolls style mix and match - equipment crafting and so on internally). I have a ridiculously oversized Mind Map, which is a shrunken version of the original that I'm working off of.

This kind of sounds like Hinterland to me which would be awesome because I would love to see a new Hinterland type game.

To add to that, to be fair it probably changes based on the game engine and FOV. But your findings fit right in with my rule of thumb: increase everything by %50 to start.
Or if they have a player model you can place in the editor, make the door 2 players wide by 1 and 1/2 players tall.
And if movement is key to your goals, then be sure to limit the amount of right angles and narrow gaps. I think this would be key for architectural too since the last thing you want is your client to run around and get stuck on a wall or have some collision or camera error.
Though I freely admit that collision has probably gotten a lot better or more sophisticated in modern engines. (sadly, I haven't been a level designer in 15 years, and I haven't messed around prototyping levels in at least 5, maybe 10)

Another engine that's not listed in the OP: Ren'Py which is a Visual Novel engine that uses Python scripting.

fangblackbone wrote:

To add to that, to be fair it probably changes based on the game engine and FOV. But your findings fit right in with my rule of thumb: increase everything by %50 to start.
Or if they have a player model you can place in the editor, make the door 2 players wide by 1 and 1/2 players tall.
And if movement is key to your goals, then be sure to limit the amount of right angles and narrow gaps. I think this would be key for architectural too since the last thing you want is your client to run around and get stuck on a wall or have some collision or camera error.
Though I freely admit that collision has probably gotten a lot better or more sophisticated in modern engines. (sadly, I haven't been a level designer in 15 years, and I haven't messed around prototyping levels in at least 5, maybe 10)

I actually took a level design class in college when I was getting my CIS degree. We were using some old Unreal Engine Educational package (based on UE 2.5 or something like that) that hadn't been updated in years and was super buggy (this was right before UDK was released). Getting the scale to feel right was the hardest part of my first level (a police station for a zombie survival game). The hardest part of the final level I made was the fact that everything somehow got flipped upside down when I saved it and I couldn't get it flipped back over so I had to restart it about 16 hours before it was due.

From my experience, current engines like Unity and Unreal kind of require real-world scale for accurate physics and lighting. Or rather, they kind of require that you start at real-world scale then deviate from there as necessary. They (Unity especially) assume 1 unit is 1 meter, so altering that too much can cause some unexpected results sometimes.

Like Todd and Fang said, you used to (and likely still do, in some cases) need to scale doorways and things up to get the feel right as a player passes through them. I'm sure this is based on a multitude of factors-- FOV being a big part of it, gameplay, control schemes, perspective, etc. I haven't had a chance to mess with VR yet, but I'd assume if you're going for a more real-world perspective, you'd likely want to start at a real-world scale then push the geometry from there. I'd assume the problem with perception of scale is kind of opposite with VR-- you'd want things to match the player's perspective to maintain immersion. Given the sense of presence some VR experiences actually provide, I'd think altering the scale of a doorway or table would have an adverse effect on immersion (players would likely feel too small in the environment). But again, this is all an assumption-- I haven't been able to develop for VR at all yet.

This thread has got me all motived again. I started working on skills, by signing up for the MIT Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python course.

I've gotten partway into the course before, but this time ... will ... be ... different.

Here are three games i made for jams, and the only games i've finished (i have a few other bits and pieces lying around). All made using GameMaker. I'm delving into Unity now, as my next idea needs some 3D graphic effects. I really like GM though.

Idle Thumbs Winter Wizard Jam 2015 - Winter Jam Along with Dibs and Friends
Low Res Jam - Digital Mom Zoom
Idle Thumbs Wizard Jam 2016 - Rolling With the Pope

Each of these was done in two weeks or less. I did a little pre work on the Pope game as i'm so new to this stuff i wanted to make sure what i wanted was feasible!

All my games are terrible, enjoy!

Some other people were recommending Udemy to me, but i think i'll pass. It is not really the way i learn. All my GM is basically following a tutorial for a half hour and then googling the crap out of everything else.