Your Dream Does Not Have to Die aka The Power of Community

Appreciate it. Not a whole lot there yet but possibly enough to keep people busy for 10 minutes or so.

I'll have something to promote before too long because soon I will start thinking about what to make for my new Christmas game. Each year I will make a Christmas game and they will always be free. Last year I tried to do it all with free clip art graphics except for the Santa & sleigh that a Unity community member kindly provided!

November 1st I will be redirecting the artists from their current work (Gauntlet) to focusing on knocking out art for the Christmas game. It'll probably be a sequel to last years. Maybe the reindeer have stolen the rocket powered sled, broken it down and scattered the parts around the North Pole and now you've got to find all the parts and rebuild the sled in time to deliver the presents. Or maybe Santa has ditched the sled in favor of the reindeer and there is some other problem to deal with. I don't know yet but anyway when its done I will let those of you participating know so you can give it a tweet or whatever.

 

The sled has come back as a terminator type machine determined to wipe out the reindeer.

 

This sounds great! Android or PC by any chance? I know a few folks who I would love to send that to for Christmas.

 

I've not done any mobile game dev. The last one was a web game and this one will be web game. SRCD uses the Unity web player. This one will be html5 so people don't need any plugin to play it. Guess that will make it a little more appealing to people. Last year at my house we were playing SRCD on the big screen in the living room. lol

 

Speaking of the terminator, have you seen the most recent one? It gave a really interesting twist to the entire series! That would apply wonderfully to game design, I think.

 

Not yet. I'm several terminators behind. But it's on my watch list. I just don't watch much, so the list progresses slowly.

 

Definitely watch them in order, the last one is just... words cannot spoil what that movie is.

 

A friend of mine created a game called In Exilium. You could do a review on that, if that's what your looking for. He worked on it for 2 years but has not been able to get much press at all.

 

This is all very interesting,

I know im kind of new here, I have been readying the community forums for a few months, (just havn't posted much since i'm rather shy)

Unfortantly as i'm new to the social media thing (i just set up my twitter account a few weeks back and still havn't really used it except following people) I don't have the followers to be able to participate (if you go with the 200 followers or likes)

But readying through this thread has given me an idea,

At the moment its set up to promote and review exisiting games (which is great ) every one needs as much expossure as possible,

but a very important part of releasing a game is the first week (or so i'm told)

why not as an off shoot of this idea, have an option for when a dev releases a game (how often do we as a community release games?? defeintly not 25 an hour lol), everyone participating can review, tweet, share that game, that week?? (say with in the first 4 days of release if possible)

We can still all have the small group reviewing a few other games each, but it will just give the dev whos launching the game that little leg up when its most needed?

just my 2c hope i'm not stepping on anyones toes

 

I think again the best way would be for people to form small groups. Say 5, 10 or 20 people in a group. Maybe 10, 20 or even 50 per group would work well,

The problem is still one of so many games being created and released. Set a watch on the Showcase forum here and you will have an idea of just how many games are released per day and posted on that forum. This is only the games people announce on Showcase forum here. Probably not nearly all games being made and released in Unity on that day. And certainly not all of the games made in GameMaker and all of the other tools and released on this day.

You will find about 5 to 10 "my first game!!" games and other new games are announced there every day. Actually it may be the average is 10 to 15 or more per day and some days there are only 5. I don't remember exactly now but it adds up quickly even at 5 per day.

And that is why too many games being made too quickly is the root problem. As far as expecting any gamer to be able to consider them all. Who can possibly check out that many games every day? I am a heck of a gamer and tried to check each and every game announced there and I burnt out on it. Because the games just never stop coming. Every single day.

Sooner or later they all start to merge together. Nothing really seems different anymore. After checking out thousands of games the games don't even seem to matter any more. I imagine this is how game reviewers must feel. Truly because you think ah well who cares if I don't look at the batch today or the batch tomorrow. Even if there is a somewhat unique game in there I am sure there will be another game very close to that one coming in the day after or next week or whenever.

Anyway so the thing is there is a limit to how many games a person needs to see. Do you need 20 games per hour? 20 games per day? 1 game every day? Even a new game every day and you may well find you get a little sick of games and need to take a break.

So one group cannot handle it all. If 5, 10, 20, or 50 people focus only on their games then it becomes manageable. And it also kind of provides a service to the gamers out there helping to focus attention on the games produced by this group. Keeping the number of games being focused on to a manageable number so they do not burn people out.

That is my view. Not everyone may agree. I know there are people who do not see all of the games being made and released as the problem. I think it absolutely is because people cannot process them all.

A good experiment for anyone to try is set a WATCH on the Showcase forum and check out every new game announced there. Read the post watch the videos, visit the game website / page and play the game. See how many days it takes before you start getting sick of games.

 

My freebie is also Christmas themed. I got a Acer Iconia Tab 8 from Intel out of it from a Intel/Unity sponsored contest and I am must say it's a very nice tablet that I now use for FB and all computer things that don't involve my game making hobby.

If you want something to write about you can play the game I published from the angle of an asset flip you can play identify the asset. It might sound like an easy game to identify the flipped asset but it would only be easy because of the search function. I can't even remember the assets I used myself outside one or two important ones for work avoidance. ;-)

You can talk about my forgetting to include a exit on Windows OS. Something someone programming traditionally using traditional PC or Unix programming tools wouldn't forget but something someone targeting mobile platforms might and in this case did.

You can point out the rendering glitches (that cause me frustration) and that UI design that breaks (as in showing hidden elements) when in too wide a screen.

Or it might be interesting to find out the criteria Windows 10 uses to state "This program's not commonly downloaded and could harm your computer." that it didn't state last year when I downloaded it on Windows 8.1. I guess I will see if there is a free way to package it securely without paying a lot of money or maybe it's simply a statistical function they use for that message: e.g. number of downloads vs date stamp for the file.

Could talk about self rating a game at the ESRB vs GooglePlay. I almost didn't rate this game Everyone because Santa crashing into objects causes him to fall which is strictly speaking violence. I couldn't have rated it Everyone and filled out the ESRB surveys honestly till I did more research and found out the ESRB and Google self surveys still need accuracy work in pigeon holing games with appropriate ratings because at the time I did those surveys they would give you a 10+ or Teen rather than an Everyone with an advisory for 'Mild Unrealistic Cartoon Violence' for any mention of violence. Or maybe that will be the new standard? It's important to know these ratings as professional or hobbyist for your game players. There are games with Unrealistic Cartoon Violence that should be given 10+, Teen, or Adult and so it's a very tricky path to take.

Anyway, this game was the challenge I made for myself to make a nice game with no coding and I accomplished that. I goofed off with Unity on occasion for a long time but it and the assets available were not good enough to meet my goal easily enough until last year. I have to admit though that my knowledge of coding did come into play though when I identified bugs on an Jellybean platform I was using for testing and caused my to change some of the art used to eliminate that bug. That worked but it was a bit of a cheat since my coding knowledge allowed me to figure out what to do. For a person with no or very little coding knowledge I would recommend only publishing to more modern and capable HW/SW. Which is what I did anyway as I published only to Android KitKat and above.

As a bonus frustration I can point out the frustration with creating a free website using templates with getting the website to render correctly in the browser everytime. Or maybe this new frustration is Edge browser related? The webhost is cool though and called zoho.com

You can do a whole plus / minus about the game.

http://jack.city/HolidayRoad.html

I'm at a standstill now though on further improvements as a bug in Unity 5.2 to do with Intel HD Graphics on some specific FBX meshes / their prefabs (or maybe it's the way the mesh colliders or other objects are attached to the FBX meshes) crashes Unity in import and locks up Unity on game play. I guess I need to go through the rather large prefab and check and uncheck the attached objects to this conglomerated FBX until I narrow it down some.

 

Sounds good. I will check it out later after work. Always like holiday themed games (especially Halloween and Christmas)!

After a week of battling with the flu and forcing myself to work 4 to 5 hours per day then sleeping today I think I am finally 95% over this crud. So I am back to work the full day. Of course, if I actually worked in the office I would have taken a few days off completely. Another reason why us folks working from home probably work more than the ones in the office. lol

 

I tried the Santa's Christmas Drop but it won't play. The Unity Plugin viewport is white and nothing else in Firefox. Chrome is deprecated. Edge is deprecated.

OK, so the regular Internet Explorer on Windows 10 works.

I like the game. I would add volume control. I would make the snow fall over the entire sky. I would have snowmen or children throwing the snowballs. I would add directions. Add more Christmas themed music to switch between.

Maybe later add complexity like it being a minus for Santa to drop presents in a house with the lights on as the children are supposed to be asleep. Have abominable snowmen throw the snowballs to sink the sleigh but children throw cookies and milk to recover altitude.

It is a relaxing and fun game. I like it. I would make improvements to make it a more complete game and publish it to be available to more people.

 

Yeah I want to get away from the plugin. Originally, I thought it was a bit ridiculous people wanted to kill the plugins. But it is getting to where the stuff is becoming erratic. A friend tried it not long ago and said it did not work for him either. Another person said all they ever got was download the Unity plugin. They downloaded and installed and still it only showed download the Unity plugin. So yeah I think the plugin's days are rapidly coming to an end. I've switched to Monkey X so I can do HTML5 for web games now.

 

I played Pond Wars and I think I upset the water physics too much too early in the game as the few hits I got on the boats had no effect on health and once a sailboat was flipped upside down I couldn't attempt to recover it without making more turbulence to flip boat back over.

I would reduce the amount of turbulence created and get rid of the health meter and change the cannon balls to paint balls and sink a ship when it was painted.

The music does sort of sound on theme but the loop is way to short so turned it off.

To recover health I would make it random and have an occasional rain storm pass over and wash off the paint but it helps both players so it's not really skill related.

 

I tried to switch a project to WebGL so a friend could give opinion on a level I put together and not worry about 'Unity' but WebGL couldn't handle the about 200K polygon scene. No code was in the scene yet.

 

OK a search revealed what I think is the game you meant to point us too:

http://www.exiliumgame.com/

At $10 I can't afford to start reviewing games and pay for the opportunity to review the game. However, the graphics and game play look good if you are into that genre gaming.

As it is, I visited the web site and there is no chance for me to try even a mini-WebGL demo to see that I might like the game, instead I'm immediately asked to pay $10 for a game I know nothing about. The web site should attempt to interest me in the game 1st and then maybe I'd be interested in paying for the game.

 

I think for the focus on this group thing Exilium would be out of my league at least. Meaning this game has apparently already passed Steam Greenlight and has good reviews on Steam as well.

I can't see this dev linking to my site and game. They'd be a great candidate for other devs who already have a game for sale on Steam Greenlight to coop with.

The game itself looks interesting and as someone who greatly enjoys D3 it looks like the kind of game I'd like. If it was multiplayer I'd buy two so my girlfriend and I could play. Probably get my cousins to buy it as well. These kind of games are ideal for multiplayer I think. That might be just from over a decade of multiplayer gaming in Diablo series with my cousins though.

 

Checked the website out on my new mobile device (Amazon Fire) and it isn't any better. If the video hadn't been slightly peeking over the bottom of the display I may not have even noticed the page had anything besides payment options.

Additionally the Steam purchase option does not seem to appear on Chrome. It does appear in Silk though on my tablet.

 

It seems to me like what would be ideal for this kind of thing is a website dedicated just for Big Indies, Small Indies and Hobbyists to form coops.

Something where people can register with their name (or nickname), website, marketing clout / accomplishments and then the website can sort of match them up with other potential candidates.

This way someone like the Exilium dev could find Indies closer to that level and people like myself could find hobbyists such as myself. We probably have different goals. We may all be moving in a similar direction overall but some of us are definitely more into this as business "have got to make moolah and make it soon because I want to become a AAA someday" and others are more "ah I am on a slow train to somewhere and no deadline for when I get there". Might end up being the same destination ultimately or it might not. The time frame and focus is probably the biggest difference.

I'll have to take a look out there because as big as Indie Game stuff is it seems likely someone has already created such a thing. Basically it would be like a more specialized form of TeamUps and IndieTeamup where people aren't necessarily teaming up to build a game but to help promote each other and their games.

If not it might be something worth building.

 

Found this right off the bat. I get the feeling it is probably fairly exclusionary though.

Found some general information on cross promotion and how it is a big key to KetchApp's success. They use cross promotion in the form of updating their own games to promote each new game they launch which helps them to quickly rise to the top of the charts. Not really what we are looking for. I think we all know that yes if we can knock out dozens of games we can leverage that to help our new game get lift off. This is common sense. Basically every game is just part of a portfolio. Leverage them.

Aha! I found something called Tapdaq which seems more like what we are talking about. Found mention of a few others too. Strangely, they are all focused on mobile apps. Still for the people interested in cross promotion and into the mobile market I'd recommend checking out services such as https://tapdaq.com.

Possibly http://www.executionlabs.com but they seem more focused on what I'd call the AAA Indies.

There might be some general cross promotion networks set up out there handling web games, pc games, Indie devs in general but I did not find it in my 15 minutes of searching. Mobile game devs appear to have several options.

Maybe one of us should launch a site for this thing.

 

Well that's more or less the gist of App Annie, Steam Spy, and several other clone businesses I'm sure by now but it's out of the scope of my interests. A thread like this wouldn't need to build such a service unless one of the members became very successful and drew in interest from others to have their games reviewed. LOL, I think most people aspiring to get rich quick will try to get PewDiePie's attention then those of us in this thread.

I don't think the Exilium got the short end of the stick because I or others can't be reasonably expected to pay to promote their games or review their games. We discussed that earlier and ruled it out but it's a long thread. And they didn't go away empty handed their website & game videos where reviewed.

And we can't promote their game really without reviewing it, OK we can but it's not likely to help much if by promote you mean simply mention it a couple times and be done with it. For that promotion mention to even garner any interest the reader needs to feel that the promoter has vetted what they are promoting and that's often not the case.

In that regard a video of the game as they have done is more effective than a promotional mention. And given the Exilium name it's hard to imagine anyone coming across that game in a search that wasn't specifically for that name or game genre specific and still, even then, often the top results in these game search engines as discussed before elsewhere are paid results with no true association with the search terms used.

As someone with no 'social media empowerment' as it's called, the only value I have really to offer someone in such a group is to play their game long enough to lightly test it and get a feel for the game itself and offer my opinions on those. And repeat the process as they make improvements. If after sufficient time enough of us did that and helped each other improve and test our games that some of them became successful that that is a realistic goal for this group. And maybe we can make a website or FB showcase for those games, maybe even highlighting the evolution of the games as we improved them. Just a kind of small coop from this thread.

 

That's more or less what I was talking about but others didn't care too so I dropped the idea. Instead of a big, formal business that intended to profit off doing such a service for many though my intent was to be a small, informal non-profit service we did for each other in the coop. That's the way coops work.

 

Yeah that is what I mean. Not something set up to make money off of people. lol

I'm just not very money oriented. There are things more important than money.

Just thinking it might be cool to set up a site. I can't see it really becoming huge anyway. The only thing that puts me off to the idea is needing to write all of the php code and set up the MySQL db. I've done it many times before but I'd rather be working on other stuff like Gauntlet and Christmas games. lol

 

You guys!!! <3!!!!! :') I can definitely share on Twitter as well! and join me for #indieDevHour on twitter! its a twitter event every wednesday at 7pm UK time/11am PST Just follow the hashtag. They are anther group that strongly encourages self-promotion, RT, and constructive criticism if it is asked for <3!!!

 

Well I've never liked web programming and having actually did UI design with OpenWindows libraries. UI designs can often be frustrating.

If you want to maybe you can create modify a template at zoho.com and use that. Lots of ways to do it and tab and sub-tab criteria you could define to drill down and sort by ESRB, Genre, Coop Member, and so on...

 

Also, madewith.unity.com is a way to help cut through the noise. It's a growing platform that is just starting out, but it will definitely be worth it when Phase 2 kicks in. More info coming...soon.

 

That's awesome to hear @holliebuckets!

Ultimately, I still say there is no way everyone with the dream can make a living off this as an Indie. However, I also think there needn't be such a huge (I mean like REALLY HUGE) difference between the "top dogs" and the rest of the people. It's awesome that Unity recognizes the issue and is trying to help folks out.

 

@GarBenjamin definitely the reason I took the job <3

 

Never heard of Zoho.com I will check it out. I guess it wouldn't be too big of a project to knock out a little site that does what we're talking about here. Basically just set up a little MySQL db only a few tables needed and a few bare bones web pages. Just a way for people to cross-promote each other. Not like it needs to actually look good.

 

wow, i had no idea it was that many, just from our community, just wow,

i'll defiently take your advice and start watching that section, hopefully i might even find a few good games.

I was just looking at the play store, and came across about 5 different crossy road clones, ALL BY THE SAME COMPANY!! and the sadest part was, they had in the millions of downloads, and the top reviews were saying 'its the best game they ever played'

anyways, i really hope this works out, best of luck with it

 

It fluctuates of course. Some days are low like today. I had about 4 alerts for games posted in Showcase. Of course, the day is not over yet.

I think it is probably around 5 per day on average with some days having 10 or more. However, I have alerts set on both the Showcase and WIP forums so for me nearly every time I log in there are many alerts of new game posts. The WIP are all for games in various stages of development and not yet launched. So you may want to set a Watch on that forum too.

Together I feel these two forums give you a good insight into amount of games coming out of the Unity community (sooner or later). Just keep in mind the games actually posted in the Showcase forum are a small % of the number actually released on any given day.

 

I checked out Zoho.com then I did a search for online database creators that led me down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours as I signed up and tried out various things.

All of them are GUI-based design tools which means they are so darn slow and tedious to work with.

So I finally just closed those pages thinking geesh I probably could have the thing nearly done if I had just used PHP & MySQL!

I had plans to work on my game project this weekend so I don't know if I will put any time into this project but I might.

Regardless we can obviously continue to have people just add their sites and such here.

People just need to realize if they are wanting others in this co-op to promote their site / game they need to be doing the same for the other participants. I am sure that is common sense otherwise it won't work. It's not something to just list games and websites and have us promote your stuff for nothing in return.

@goat I am gonna check out your Christmas game now!

 

OK, well the UI based web design is difficult & buggy but the site was free so I suggested it.

I just worked around the 5.2 bug that had stopped me from working on an update to my Christmas game so I guess I should tell fogbugz I've isolated the bug to unwrapCL.exe and Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPUs although I might reasonably guess the bug affects at least the older versions of Intel HD Graphics GPUs too.

 

That is actually a nice game! The way you had downplayed it so much honestly I was expecting it to be fairly bad. lol

I don't care much for infinite runners but the unique level design made a huge difference in keeping things interesting. The strong Christmas theme really helped too. I will likely throw this up on the big screen this holiday season and we'll have at least a few plays of it. Most of the world seems obsessed with staring at the little screens on their cell phones and to me these games are all so much cooler on a large tv screen. Just hook up the HDMI cable and off we go. Sometimes I think people are losing their minds really with the phones.

One thing I struggled a lot with in the beginning was identifying which items I could collect and which should be avoided. If you can when you make your update I'd suggest giving the bad things a red or black glow or changing them to be non Christmas items. As it is they all look like Christmas stuff to me so I was running into each one to find out by trial and error which I could collect. There might be something that told me that in some way but I never noticed if that was the case.

Still, it is a fine game. Plays very smoothly, nice atmosphere, I got a few achievements and almost reached 4,000 points on my last attempt. At one point I swear I saw a freaking dragon behind me breathing fire on my arse. It was only there briefly so I might have imagined it but it sure seemed like it was "real".

Heck yeah definitely update it for the upcoming Christmas season!

 

At least you are playing with bugs. I'm stuck with a hardware failure that hasn't let me start up my PC for a week. I need to bite the bullet and pay for it to be fixed/replaced. But it can be rough justifying big spends for a hobby.

 

Thanks. I am reworking the Santa running thing completely. I'm not sure how I'm going to do in but I want Santa in a sleigh with reindeer flying. I like that Santa but I will probably buy another this season I like better. The UI is also going to be tossed and that's the 1st thing I'm doing because I want a Universal UI for my games.

I've attached a screen shot of the UI changes I've done so far. I haven't finished yet but the idea is to minimize words and old fashioned menus that computer users and programmers are accustomed to using and replace them with controls non-computer users are used to using. LOL, although most of us that are old enough have heard jokes about not being able to program the VCR.

 

I just bought a 4 year HP laptop for $130 on eBay last month although I supplied my 2 old SSDs and 4GB RAM out of my tablet PC that the lithium ion battery blew up in (my fault - one fan wasn't running and I knew the computer was getting excessively hot multiple times as it shut down because of hitting 105 Celsius - although you might argue with the fan design for cooling being shabby after spending $1500 2 1/2 years ago altogether on my old tablet PC you can see why I went with a $130 HP laptop this time). I guess it might be tougher to find a used computer in NZ for a decent price. The one I found in the US took a hour or two of searching...

 

MadeWithUnity, is a super cool thing added to site, but I really dislike that "share your story", like a development blog, and I really don't want to write a book with a story. You guys could made it much simple, eventually attach a story if developer wanted.

 

Well, if you are the type that don't like to be autobiographical, and most people don't - leave 'Tell Your Story' blank. I think if I fill in 'Tell Your Story' I will just use that pseudo 'Lorem Ipsum' text they use to demonstrate what fonts look like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

And it's late and I want to paint my living room tomorrow so ciao.

 

Wow, I love the stories! Thanks for sharing, @holliebuckets! I am not sure how I missed this.

 

I've finished the last of my morning chores the rabbit has a clean house and is now happily munching on carrots. I've been disliking the slowness of my site using wordpress so have considered writing my own quick n easy website management system that is actually you know optimized.

I won't do that today because I really want to work on my game project but to kind of get my mind back into the web dev I think I will go ahead and start on the Game Dev Cross Promotion membership db and add it as a section on my website. Since it will exist outside of wordpress I expect it should load and run much quicker than the rest of my site. Will find out. If not then I'll know I need to contact Yahoo and find out what in hell they are doing because my hosting is supposed to be fast!

 

You have heard of "me" generation? That mindset persists, evident in blogs without readers, twitter, etc. Everybody wants to be a superstar. And they want to complain about their struggles, how hard Mondays are and how hard they worked to get where they are.

In reality, few actually care about improving the world in any way. Collaborating is nearly impossible because everybody wants all of the credit and to do none of the work.

Don't quit your day job, kids.

 

Well then they are doomed to failure. Along with every "rock star" there is a network of people that all helped to make it happen and generally are also rewarded in some way. They might not be "in the limelight" but they are there making it all happen and keeping it all going.

 

The "me" generation? Well what's one to do really? People like to hear talk about other people, and you've nothing to talk about socially if you don't like complaining about other people so you try to talk about yourself and poke a bit of harmless fun at yourself.

Most blogs are still factual that I've read and if I like the topic they are trying to code, interesting to me too; but I'm not a regular reader of any of the blogs and I don't expect any of the writers actually expect regular readers. I mean it's coding, for goodness sake. I used to get phone calls from my college buddies Friday nights laughing at me and telling me what THEY were doing because they knew I was coding and no one was interested in that, but all in good fun. Every once in a blue moon I'd go out painting the town with them too. So the idea of a coding blog seemed to me when I 1st heard of them is: you've got to be kidding? But they're OK.

I like artists' blogs better because there is less reading.

 

I actually did some work on this project today. Designed the data model, created the database, tables, appropriate user roles for working with db (first php db project I have done on GarsGames.com so didn't have anything set up yet) and so forth.

Wrote the php for the database connectivity with the different roles. Started on the login page. Yeah, during the data model design I approached it as something you'd sign up for, login then could create your profile, list your assets and view the opportunites.

Be nice to not have to actually make it a membership session-based system as it would be less work but the more I thought about it seems like it made the most sense.

Anyway, it will be ready sooner or later. Basically for things like this I look at it like it will be ready when it's ready. lol

In the meantime certainly people can feel free to continue posting their interest here.

 

BTW @goat I have not forgot about your game. I figured I'd list that on my site and Twitter when it gets closer to Christmas. You'll probably have an updated version of it by then anyway.

 

Oh, I'm not worried about that. I'll get the updated version by the end of November.

 

Yes, tell me about it. This community loves their tremendous walls of text. Most of it is too awesome to skip too.

 

LOL, let me tell you how my jaw drops slack when I scroll past one of the walls of text I've written. Uh...