Hardware has rapidly progressed since the arrival of UE4 allowing many developers to create their dream project. however do to the nature of game development the process still remains lengthy, with tons of variables new and old in between. many indies of various backgrounds have either stalled their projects or are left overwhelmed as a result of the lengthy and complex process. not to mention many gamers are left waiting too long, or end up learning that their games of interests have been canceled. while the process of game development remains complex do to the many types of genres, there are still some common development issues that could be addressed and help make game development a whole lot shorter.
Marketplace ideas, also include instructions on how to use.
. “Insert genre type” Template using simpler presets including a simple drag and drop system, custom event triggers, and AI system specific to the genre type for enemies and NPCs. (high value)
. Character creation suit. (great value, works for everyone)
. Custom Animation suit, allowing you to make your own animations. (great value)
. Simplified drag and drop custom trigger events. (great value)
. Simplified library of preset scripting nodes to choose from, with detailed descriptions on each node to plugin. (great value)
With these ideas games should be made a lot faster. any suggestions, this is the place for it.
It doesn’t matter how much content there is on the UE4 marketplace, you will still need to put in the time and effort to actually make your game a reality.
Welcome to game development
Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for more quality content on the marketplace.
It just has the unfortunate side affect of promoting lazy development and shameless content flipping.
You just need to check out any of the many (many!) worthless projects that have been “green lit” and made it onto Steam.
Marketplace content should help you prototype and develop your game, but it should never be your game.
Exactly as Kris said, it should help you, but not be your game. The marketplace is a great place for assets, but I think it’s silly to rely on it to shorten development time.
I mean personnaly as hobbyist I’m in the coding way and in fact I don’t care if I never again release any game. (I’m not appeal by the marketing, and other “hard stuff” that should be done too)
but why shouldn’t other be able to create a game without coding ! If what appeal them in creating a game is all about creating a community around the game, and they don’t want to have to do with “hard stuff” like coding, moddeling,… . (or even if it’s just to make $$$)
Well, for the sake of originality (There is nothing wrong with buying assets, but personally I would like for a game have at a few things original), and the development experience. If you are working on a game, you won’t have much of an experience if you have just blown $2000 on pre-made assets and thrown it together to “make” your game. If I could afford to buy everything pre-made, my mind might be changed, but that’s just my take on it.
Well I 100% agree with the fact that games should be original, artistically speaking. My project aims to be original. the market place content so far seems pretty flexible with customization to work with everyone’s project. However I don’t necessarily think that paying for marketplace content is a lazy approach towards game development. Many of the major companies spend lots on their budgets hiring artist’s and programmers that work on multiple projects for different companies. And then some developers use real life actors and cast them in their games using their voices instead of hiring artists to create realistic characters. Either way it’s a job and they get paid and credited for their work.
My main issue though with game development is how much time and effort you put into your project and how much people will be willing to pay for your project. if it’s just a hobby the time, effort, money, and hrs spent coding is flexible, and it doesn’t matter who you’re making the game for and when it releases. and if your hobby project fails nothing is really lost. however if you choose to take game development seriously all of your efforts and years spent coding and properly debugging will matter. And this is the road that ever indie is at, eventually everyone will decide - “does making a game pay your bills or working at grocery store pay your bills”. kickstarter indies have broke a record for the most job quitting failed attempts and game cancellations. And most of it rests on how much time and effort it takes to make a game. game investors like their games released soon and can possibly back out from their investments if dates wander into years or because you now have a job and a life of your own. the reality is hitting many indies with their projects.
The quest and dialogue system on the Marketplace is nice but can be limiting sometimes in its current state, so I had to modify it heavily to get it up to scratch in a complex narrative RPG. Buying assets saves a lot of work on a certain thing but you do end up doing a lot of legwork to make it unique.
For example, in my quest mods, I can use a GetStage function on scripts to check the quest stage. In the system, it exists within dialogue but it doesn’t exist for use in external Blueprints so I added that manually. Templates are templates, not full systems. It’s up to you to heavily modify and add to them.
I use assets 90-95% of the time, having custom made assets where necessary. If I want a generic set of mountains and someone already made these exact mountains, why reinvent the wheel if it means paying more for exactly the same thing? On the flip side, if I want a UK style school modular set, I’m not going to “settle” for a US style school modular set.
These NEVER work out. The more stuff these packages add the more restrictive they become. Not to mention they usually don’t play well with other assets.
You mean Mixamo Fuse?
You mean Autodesk Maya LT?
You mean the Blocking Volume, Camera Blocking Volume, Cull Distance Volume, Hierarchical LOD Volume HLODMesh Culling Volume, KillZVolume, LevelStreaming Volume, Nav Modifier Volume, Pain Causing Volume etc.?
I am using Maya 2016 pro, Mixamo and we’ll throw in Makehuman in as well <- Artistically you could stick to this workflow as an indie dev artist, providing their support is updated. And i actually want to stress neither of these programs has actually solid support for UE4. A few exporting options, and Mixamo only supports facial animation via blend shapes (exclusive btw to Mixamo only characters). But anyways I spent months re-rigging and skinning my characters from these programs, and maya has workflow issues of it’s own - with random crashes, and skinning glitches when exporting/importing via fbx. these are common workflow issues that can be resolved by making frequent backups, but fundamentally UE4 should have an internal setup of it’s own when all 3rd party software starts generating issues of it’s own. We can of course side with our favorite 3rd party software but I just think a dedicated character editing setup within UE4 would work great for many indie developers, and of course the tweaking doesn’t end there more personal adjustments could still be done through endless exporting.
I am referring to blueprints, but we’re talking much larger node tasks in a library to choose from.
Before i go any further with suggestions UE4 does have a Marketplace - which consists of various completed assets marketed. The people that CAN do all the stuff in the market place most likely won’t bother with the store. Mainly It’s the Indies that do go there and most of the time they don’t pickup the stuff they CAN simply do; it’s the stuff that takes time out of their work that they look for. Now, “Blueprints” IS listed in the category among other things listed. For my suggestion #5 - Instead of buying a single blueprint; it would be a collected set of presets - consisting of complete tasks to select from.
My suggestions are simply to boost indie developers with their projects. Disputing what can be created destroys the purpose of a marketplace. In fact, many here are disputing what the marketplace already IS doing. Anyways, what the marketplace also needs is flexibility and plenty customization in the in their assets released, with detailed instructions to work in related game projects.
personally I use the marketplace for a learning tool, I find a lot of the assets don’t work together at all, there all built differently made for that reason and that reason only and nothing more to what they are sold as, they look good or work best buy themselves, but for me buying the assets that I can modify no matter how heavily still saves a hell of a
Except they’ll all be fundamentally identical games with different skins.
There are already tools for character creation and animation - no point reinventing the wheel. The simplified drag and drop tools / preset scripting nodes is what Blueprint is. I don’t get how some of these nodes could get any more overarching, they already do to much and cause headaches because of it (I’m looking at you, camera manager BS).
This is why I never sell on Marketplace specialized content; they never fit together.
I only sell systems, never Models, systems that can integrate well and be used on ANY game no matter what the game or genre is…
If I ever publish something that must be linked to adjacent systems to work well, I never publish until I develop something self-integrated, delivering the whole package instead of forcing user to have headaches trying to figure out how to “add inventory system X to game toolkit Y”; from my understanding there’s no point on buying a inventory system without all the other adjacent systems, for example.
Or buy a game toolkit without a builtin inventory system flexible enough to fit any game genre, makes no sense to me at all.
I don’t think so; top seller is @Allar and his asset is far from hitting an average U$ yearly income judging from his shared sales reports. You’d still to keep your job to pay the bills
I personally only do it to share things I believe are useful and to fund my own expenses buying Assets. Everything I sell, I return to the Marketplace buying assets that are useful to me as well.
Aye, but he isn’t working 40 hours a week on GS either. Personally, the marketplace has been a nice source of income, and I like working on content for it. As I continue to release new assets, my income is certainly rising, so I’ll have to see where I’m at a year from now.
^ Guys I posted a response, my living expenses is $300 US a month Max if i want something very comfortable. But $200 is manageable aswell, cost of living here is way cheaper than the US.
If I make between $200 to $300 US a month I would be golden.
