Steam Strategy now that Greenlight is gone

Really? That would be terrible for image quality and control over the final result.

 

Well, there are a bunch of different sizes of graphics needed for a game on Steam. That really tiny one (184x69) is the one used in all of the lists. But yeah, Steam generates that image from a slightly larger image (231x87) supplied by the developer or publisher.

 

That is odd they don't just ask the developer to provide an image for each size.

In other news... my strategy is centered around speed so I am currently building a tilemap & sprites based platformer game framework. Basically just need a foundation that has all of the basics complete. Then can actually focus on the games. It's coming along well. The idea is all of the basic requirements for such an engine will be in place and can be customized and more importantly built on top of as needed for each game.

 

Definitely think building a game engine and then using it to develop a line of games is a smart thing. And by game engine I mean a game engine / framework for a specific type of game / genre.

Over the past 2 nights I spent 2.5 hours just working on plumbing (still not done probably another 0.5 to 1.0 hour left on this work). Refactoring code to clean and tighten things up both in terms of using as well as performance and reliability. Of course this will pay off a lot when I get to the next step of adding enemies/obstacles. Just saying had I already done all of this work and the framework was "ready to go" I would be focusing only on making a game right now.

Just something to keep in mind because although I think we all know this is common sense it is also easy to forget. Probably more so with something like Unity where people may view it as their engine / framework. I'm talking about building on top of it to create a framework for developing games of a specific type or at least games that share certain major elements similar to assets on the store except you do it all so everything works the way you want it to, you fully understand the codebase it's all logical in how it is structured which means you can more easily fix problems and make enhancements.

Again yes pretty obvious but also something that is not done very often at least based on the projects I've seen by Indies.

 

So I can't tell from your post, but are you using Unity and building the framework on top of that? Or building the engine completely?

 

Does it matter? I am not using Unity. Decided to drop down to assembly. Needed a clean slate without a bunch of stuff already in place by other people who didn't consult with me on how I wanted things to work. Lol

That's a joke. I am using AGK2 for the development... kind of in the middle of assembly and Unity. It has a fantastic api for dealing with images, sprites, 3d objects etc without layers and layers of other stuff. Although it does support 2d and 3d physics and so forth they are not a part of the system by default (it is all there built-in but unless you are using that stuff you don't even see it at all). Also I like the flat c-like api and find it refreshing to work with.

Basically just doing the same as I did with Unity. With Unity I would use the excellent SpriteTile tile map editor and in AGK2 I am using Tiled. With Unity I would be performing my own collision checks for sprites to sprites and sprite to tiles. Doing the same with AGK2 just that it makes it simpler overall because there is just less to deal with.

I suppose in a sense I am writing it from scratch but I just see it as writing it in a different way than is popular today. Basically I think the main difference between how most people would do it in Unity, AGK2, etc and how I am doing it is people would add colliders on top of a large image of a level or on tile images and use those for collision checking probably even using the built-in physics. I add my own colliders (just a data structure) to my sprite objects and using those colliders I directly check the interactive map layer for tile markers. I just find this a much more straightforward way to get precise control over the interactions.