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#indie game development
tipsheda · 2 months
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atwas-meme-ing · 6 months
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HEY ALL!!! If you haven't heard, Unity is gonna start charging devs 20 cents per download. Not per sale, but PER DOWNLOAD. This applies to not only big-name games like Hollow Knight and Ori, but also smaller projects that might be free. This includes mobile games made with Unity, Undertale fan games like Undertale Yellow and Deltatraveler, and also, get this: Murder of Sonic! It was made in Unity, and so far, it's still free, but Sega's gonna hafta start charging for it sooner or later- IF they don't decide to take it down completely.
So, on this note, I have 2 things to say:
Get your favorite games NOW. Some devs, like Team Cherry, are talking about "taking their games down" (so much for Silksong- thanks A LOT, Unity!!!). I don't know if that means you'll still be able to play these games- like on Steam, for instance- if you already have them downloaded.
Please, please, PLEASE, support those games that are made with Unity. 20 cents adds up when there's a million downloads, and if it's like a mobile game, where people don't necessarily have to pay for it, that's going to COST the devs money- a LOT of money. I know we all hate the paywalls and "pay-to-win" schemes in mobile games, but let's be real- crap like this Unity thing are the whole reason those paywalls exist! These devs aren't doing this for free, they're trying to make a living! Even if you only spend $1, only 1 time, that is STILL going to be an 80 cent profit over the new Unity costs, and maybe, just maybe, give some game devs enough incentive to keep the game around.
I know Unity has a bad rep because it's easy to use and allows devs to release games that control poorly because you don't have to be good at coding to do it (*cough* Guardian of Lore *cough*). That's why I haven't used Unity, despite having several game ideas in my head, because I don't know how to code (yet), and I didn't want to release a game like that- and now I never will use Unity. But games like all the ones I've mentioned are proof that Unity CAN be used for good games, in the right hands. So please, if you love a game made with Unity, please support it, so the game doesn't go away. Don't send the devs into bankruptcy just because Unity is a money-grubbing so-and-so.
(Oh, I should also mention, for browser-based games, apparently this "per download" thing also includes "per BROWSER REFRESH". So, yeah, please don't blame the devs, support the devs and blame Unity.)
EDIT: It's not quite as bad as I'd thought. I knew Unity had a threshold, but I thought it was an either/or thing- either a certain number of downloads, or a certain amount of money made from a game. And, it's not, it's both.
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So free games (like Murder of Sonic) apparently won't be affected.
Here's their pricing schedule once the threshold is met:
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It still adds up for the smaller projects, with Unity taking all or most of the revenue from smaller games.
And one thing that's still bothering me: the install threshold is "life to date" and Unity is charging per install over the threshold. So, if a game's been around for years and had a million downloads and has made 200,000 dollars in the last year, they're gonna end up paying that 200,000 all at once.
At least, that's what I'm reading.
So, ok, I was wrong. Free projects won't be affected. But this is still awful, especially when it's first starting out.
EDIT 2 (2023-09-23): They've lessened the fees:
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I'm still not using them. They never had a good reputation- I mean, there's good Unity games, but there's also a lot of bad ones because people can just release games with Unity with no coding experience. I want to make games someday, but I want them to be a good quality, so I'm waiting until I can actually figure out C++ (heck, I'm still wading through HTML, I'm nowhere near real programming languages). As long as I have to learn coding to make something good, I might as well find an engine that I can trust. I hear a lot about Godot. I also think I'll want to look at Monogame, because Monogame was used to make Axiom Verge and Celeste, and it's apparently based on the defunct XNA that was used to make Stardew Valley. Or I'll find something else. But not Unity. I just don't trust them.
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abby-howard · 1 year
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Episode 4 spoilers ahead-- some quick anatomy illustrations I made!
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Sorry the body isn’t terribly detailed, but here’s his basic anatomy in his Coolguy form! In his mid-form he’s much closer to normal tall human height, perfect for, say, resting your head on his chest UwU
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Snake yawn.gif  -->
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efangamez · 3 months
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Hey y'all! Here is Efan's quick rundown and review of almost all the cool games I played this year, as well as my Steam in Review!
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1. Darkest Dungeon
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I've been playing this game for nearly ten years, and I finally beat it this year. Not a 2023 release, but a huge milestone for myself. After a terrible year before it, I made it a goal to face my fears and beat this game. Lo' and behold, I did, and it's one of my own personal gaming accomplishments. It's solidified as the best turn based game I've ever played, but it does have its late-game issues, specifically with the Crimson Court maps and the final dungeon maps. It's just absurd tbh. However, this is one of my favorite games of all time, if not my favorite, and it's a must have for horror fans, HP Lovecrft fans, and turn based game fans. 9.7/10
2. Sun Haven
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A wonderful and cute farming sim that scratched an itch no other could scratch. Its characters are fun, the music is solid, the graphics are very bright and fantastical, and the combat was simple yet kinda fun. I really loved the progression in this game too. It still has its issues, such as the late game (it may have been fixed because this game was in early access) and some of the utility of the workbenches you can use. All in all, a very solid farming sim (and just life sim in general tbh) if you like a little bit of fantasy mixed in. 9/10
3. Halls of Torment
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My favorite Survivor game. The music, aesthetics, progression, characters, and maps are all different enough to keep you coming back for more. As I am disabled, these games are actually super fun to play because I only have to play with one hand. It was in early access when I played it heavily, so it had some issues like the handling of inventory, some balance issues, and feature creep issues, but they may have been fixed now. 9.3/10
4. Cassette Beasts
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A must-play monster battler with an amazing plot, an incredible soundtrack, interesting monsters, and great characters for the most part. If you've been really wanting a game that is reminiscent of Pokemon colleseum but also want that 2d love of the Black and White games, this is a must have. It does have some balance issues (again, early access game when I played), but other than that and maybe some performance issues that are probably fixed by now, it was an incredible game that made me want a 2d Pokemon game more than ever. 9/10
5. Roboquest
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A fantastic FPS roguelike game with great gunplay, movement, art direction, and music too. Each weapon feels pretty unique, it has melee weapons (wish there were more though) and a progression system that's really cool. It plays like if Doom Eternal had a kid with Borderlands, and I think plays a bit better than any other RANGED FPS roguelike/lite that I've played. I will say the difficulty settings are really cool, but I think they are a little too enticing due to game balance as of 1.0 due to progression being a bit of a grind. I think that having different endings for each difficulty might be a cool idea, each as satisfying as the other, but I know that can be a pain to develop. 9/10
6. Mortal Sin
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A beautifully dark and trippy mostly melee FPS roguelike that takes the intensity of DOOM and the melee weapons of Elderborn and drenches it in a slow-mo filled, heavy swinging fun time. It's definitely the most FUN game this year as I've been craving an FPS melee roguelike for a while. It accomplishes this and then some with pretty cool progression that adds some variety to each game. The art direction reminds me of a more purple and red MORK BORG (fellow TTRPGers rejoice) and I LOVE it. The only issues to me are that the story and lore are a bit boring and lacking, but again it's in early access, so it has time to cook. 9.5/10
7. And last, my game of the year, LUNACID by @stylishkira
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What a gorgeous game all around. The music has probably the most atmosphere out of any indie game I've played outside of Darkest Dungeon. Its levelling system is accessible but fun, you can create your own character with their own name and profile picture which I think is SO cool (Mortal Sin should totally do this if it's not too much of a copy). The combat is really fun and the sound design is probably second, once again, to Darkest Dungeon. It was an absolutely magical experience playing this game, and an experience I don't think I'll ever forget. I do think, however, that the ending feels really really rushed, and that sullied my experience a little bit, and the bosses are pretty unbalanced because you can just spam all of your health potions and tank the bosses, but the experience leading up to the ending is amazing. Also, I know the true ending is purposely a little complex, but tbh, if the goal was to have the "true" endings similar to the Souls games, having the final climactic boss (which I won't spoil, but is really cool) be the core of the normal ending, paired with alternate endings WITH that really cool final boss I think, might make the experience a bit more satisfying. It's already kinda implemented, but I loved this game so much that the standard ending just kinda felt....empty. Don't let these critiques stop you from playing this game, however. It's one of my favorites of all time, and I only give these critiques because I love this game so much. This is a MUST PLAY, and for the price, it's an absolute steal and should be priced up, imo. I cannot wait to see where the direction of possible King's Field style games come, because I am THIRSTY for more! 9.6/10
Annnddddddd that's it! Some great other games I played this year were the Demon Souls remake (9.2/10) Shadow of the Colossus (9.3/10), and Bloodborne (for probably the 30th time, and that's no joke, 9.8/10), and Quake (9.8/10).
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dream-trail-rpg · 1 year
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DREAM TRAIL DEMO IS ALMOST HERE! (PLEASE REBLOG)
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Mark your calendars, dreamers. The Dream Trail demo arrives next week.
We've worked very hard to make something we hope you'll all enjoy, and we're very excited to get this game into your hands! We'll see you on Monday.
Please, please, PLEASE reblog! It helps us out a lot! We're a small team with a small game and we'd really appreciate any shares! We'd really love people to see our hard work!
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askagamedev · 2 months
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My friend is making an arcade racer and I've been playtesting his builds for him. He didn't go into it thinking it'd be easy but there's a ton of things he didn't at all realize would be a headache going into it. Obviously all games are hard to make but some are more apparent about their daunting nature. Which genres are deceptively difficult even if reasonably possible by a small indie team? What surprised you when you hit the big leagues?
Whenever I do solo dev work, the feature that always takes the longest and tends to require the most work to get something playable by actual players is the UI. Building out the gameplay features is always a lot of fun, but you can only go so far by fiddling with variables and restarting. There's always a significant amount of UI groundwork that needs to be done in order to make a game playable at all, just because of how much information needs to be conveyed to the player.
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Whenever I build support into a game for different characters, cars, tracks, loadouts, etc. then each of those options needs its own way to choose that option from a list of available choices. That display must show a lot of information to the player so she can make an informed decision (e.g. this car has fast acceleration, that one has high top speed, this other one corners well, etc.), which all requires an intuitive screen layout, information presented, and so on and so forth.
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Small-team dev also tends to build more system-driven games because it's more dev-time-efficient than creating single-use narrative-driven content. The tradeoff is that system-driven content also requires significantly more UI to convey all of that information to the player. This means games with a lot of options for players to choose tend to require a lot of UI work, which is something many hobbyists don't think about when starting.
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nerdypunkdev · 1 year
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Learn how to build a turn based combat system (like in Pokemon games) in this FREE tutorial series I just finished posting on Youtube. It has all kinds of cool coding insights on to build a very fun and modular turn based system in over 6 hours of rich content.
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I just pushed the last part of this series, check out it out here:
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unlimitedtrees · 9 months
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making character sprites as a one-person indie game developer
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(huh. turns out this post on cohost didnt have a “read me” section”. o well. i will put the read me section Here,  before any of da actual text. click it if u dare !!)
so, i've been meaning on making a Big post talkin all about how i actually Make my games and my processes n such ,but also ive been procrastinating on making it for so long that i thought i might as well just make One part of that post now .. and its about making the Character Sprites for my games .
So. these images are the (mostly) full sprite sheets of the three characters from my game UNITRES Dreams, taken directly from the big giant 'charactersprites.png' image that i used for nearly every sprite for Most of the game's development. some quick things to make note of: First off, Trees (the first one) was one of the earliest things i made for the game, and had their sprite sheet redone Twice since then.. this first picture doesnt contain the latest sprite sheet as the new sprites were done on aesprite and im too lazy to make a sprite sheet out of them right now.
Secondly, the Second character (the pink one), had two different designs, being completely redesigned as i didnt like their first design all too much. their redesign's animations was done in aesprite, but i made a sprite sheet out of em before so i was able to just put them here. Lastly, the Third character (the blue one with the big silly hat) remained mostly unchanged as their original sprites and design were pretty good, but they needed to be cleaned up and given better colors so i ended up polishing all of their sprites.
Anyways. it's going to be hard for me to explain my actual process, as i am Bad With Words, but i will try my best.. So. for Most of my time as a game dev, I've used Paint.NET for Everything. This includes backgrounds, tilesets, and every animation ever in all of my games. For my character sprites specifically, i usually start with making the color palette (which is a whole different process where i mess around with the RGB values until i get a specific color that i think looks pretty ... its hard to describe). When making a new character, i usaully start with an Idle animation, just so i have a good base to make all the other sprites on. I just make a sketch of the character, then i do the flat colors (as my games dont have line art), and once i have the colors i start doing the rendering , where i try to pull off a sort of Sonic CD-esque , celshaded style while Also including a bit of anti-aliasing and other modern pixel art techniques to give the sprites more Depth and make them look Sharp. Idk. it's hard to describe my process in words ... i Did make a video Years ago showing off my process, but its old and my editing in that video isnt the Greatest.
So., that's my process Lol . the only thing thats really changed is that Now i use Aesprite for making the Actual Animations , as making animations with Paint.NET is Really Difficult and Annoying , as i have No Idea how the animation will Look until it actually appears ingame .. which results in the early versions of each character's animations looking a little weird (such as Trees' first two versions, the first version of the Pink character, and the Blue character's animations.. .though the blue character isnt as bad as the other two and i kept their animations mostly the same in the final game LOL).
Something that people have kind of criticized about UNITRES Dreams' animations is that some of em dont exactly ... Look Good. a lot of animations are pretty Inconsistent , with characters like Trees having inconsistent sizes in some animations and the movement in animations such as the Pink character's walking animation and various other animations (Especially the ones made in Paint.NET) looking Unnatural.
And Well .. here's the thing about making animations and sprites for something like this. When you're the Main person making an indie game, you have Tons of different parts of the game that need to be worked on while having Very little time to work on others. On Top of making every single animation for UNITRES , i had to make every single Tileset and background for every single level, On Top of making the Level Layouts , Programming , and even making sprites for things like the UI. And you have to constantly Test the game to make sure everything works and things Look good.
So. i had very little time to work on the sprites, and i Knew this. Something you have to consider is that, not only are you making the animations for the main character , you Also have to make Tons of animations and sprites for Literally Every Other Aspect of The Game . this includes Enemies , Level Gimmicks , NPCs, And the UI .. so you end up having to work on Thousands of sprites by yourself in such a short time.
I ain't the best animator , nor the best sprite artist . But , for this game I chose an art style which is Kinda simple and comfortable for me, which made making things like tilesets and backgrounds so much easier for me. The character sprites specificially only use a few amount of colors ,but also i tried my best to give them as much depth and make them as Colorful looking as i could. Also , something you might notice is that all of the playable characters dont actually have a whole lot of animations .. each of the characters only have the Exact amount of frames and animations necessary for them to Look Good moving around the levels. Aside from a few Gimmick Specific animations that arent in the sprite sheets i posted , there arent many Extra animations or animations with Tons of Frames that i wish i could have added .. and it Kind Of Sucks . Having to split my time across Three Different Characters , i had no time to make any animations Too Crazy or Too Smooth , and i couldnt include any extra animations that could add a bit of personality to the characters ... In Fact ,the Idle "animation" isnt an animation , its just a still frame. I didnt have time to even make a simple waiting animation !!
It Is What It Is. For what its worth , Ithink Im pretty proud of the animations i did for UNITRES Dreams. while i think ive become a much better artist and animator since then, i still think some animations and some of the frames look really good ..just looking at some of the still frames is really nice .. so i think i did a good job, especially for a game that was made in 2 years and is Free. And Hey, while the animations in UNITRES Dreams may not be the best or have the most smooth animations , i Did get to experiment with making more smooth animations for TREES' ADVENTURE. while ,now, i think some stuff could use some work, i am Really Proud of how some of the animations look .. ididnt get to make Too Many extra animations (there still isnt even an Idle animation), i Did get to make some cool extra animations , such as individual animations for your Jump that are based on how fast you're moving . (the original post on cohost had a buncha gifs of da animations but im Too Fuckin Tired 2 post em here LOL !!!)
So Yea . the moral of the story: making video games is kind of hard and time consuming , Especially when you're like , the Only one working on them. just make sure to plan ahead and try not to overwork urself .. make what you can and do it when you can. Thats what i think , anyways.
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amadeusgame · 1 month
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New Demo Coming Friday - And New Game Page on Itchio!
This update will be short and sweet! I'll get to the point - the new demo for Amadeus is a downloadable application for MAC, PC, and LINUX. It is so completely different from the original WebGL prototype in every way that I've decided to make a completely new game page for it, and preserve the original idea as a playable work of "concept art" so to speak.
The new demo is also FINISHED, and coming out THIS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23. Launching on itchio as well as on Steam. Look for that announcement when it comes!
That will be the last update for the browser proof-of-concept. All future updates will be on the new page! (And here on Tumblr.)
BUT ALSO - linktr.ee/amadeusgame will always be up-to-date as things change. Bookmark it and you'll be solid. Thanks for following the development over the past ~6 months, and I am so excited about what's in store!
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okretrozone · 3 months
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Reflecting on Ghost of Tsushima
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I've been playing Ghost of Tsushima...I started it for Ninja November and then was playing offline just doing side quests when I wasn't feeling well and now I'm in approximately 60 hours in and in Act 3.
I think Sucker Punch has made something really special. At first I was annoyed with being pulled into duels to fight with my samurai skills after I've done so many missions as stealthily as possible but it makes sense. It is a mechanical and physical response I have to the situation Jin Sakai is in.
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And perhaps I have just played my quests/missions in such a way that it reinforces these feelings. But the writing is dynamic and somber and somehow really relatable. And no I'm not a 13th century samurai. But see Jin wrestle with the expectations of his upbringing, family, and community, while trying to do what he thinks is right...or the way he can protect and save his home...is...devastating.
You see Jin really grapple with being referred to as a demon or ghost...he's just a samurai trying to save his home...and over time you see the impact from the community and hope he brings as the ghost...a folk hero who's pushing back the mongols and bringing hope to Tsushima...
I am not done with the game yet. But I'm also very interested to see where the secondary cast ends their quests of revenge and retribution and if they can ever find peace in a place that no longer looks like their home.
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And perhaps I'm just a silly little guy. In between me playing Tear of the Kingdom, a handful of retro titles, and always revisiting Shovel Knight and Cyber Shadow...this game has just left in some sort of way. It is like a book I can't put down. Its somewhat predictable and has also taken me off guard. My last play session has left me distraught with the events that occurred and I know I'm creeping up on the end and I'm torn with doing all the side missions or mainlining the story to get to the conclusion. But perhaps that is another sign of well crafted writing. Me, the player is also hurt and upset and want a resolution...
I did not expect to have such big feels. I'll report back once I've completed the game. But I do know right now that this game is very special and while it isn't a Tenchu game...it does scratch that itch with a variety of items, story, and character.
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madelynhimegami · 3 months
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Buy Master Cookie Crafters!
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tipsheda · 4 months
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cuebitcrush · 3 months
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sized up walk animation for the protagonist sprite ! i've namedropped her on twitter but im trying to be secretive about it for really no reason
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abby-howard · 1 year
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Scarlet Hollow Episode 4 is LIVE!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1609230/Scarlet_Hollow/
I feel it’s our best work yet, and I am ssssoooo excited for everyone to play it. We’ve updated our list of content warnings, so please check that out if that’s the sort of thing you like, as this episode is quite heavy~!
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efangamez · 2 months
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New beginnings, new bundles!!!
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Introducing the New Beginnings bundle hosted by @sprintingowl !!!
Snag 60 games for $20!!! it's one heck of a deal!
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rainyteiproductions · 1 month
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Behold, an Inn!
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