How to get a programmer

Yes you have, congrats you have coder, but will they code?
Coders are strange animals you need to keep them happy, else they do not produce working code.
Also remember that 9 coders will not produce a baby in one month. This is common misconception among managers.

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holy freakin moly , i actually have no words , if you thought the scope of the game is big now you should’ve seen what the normal versions features were lol, but in seriousness Im quite mind boggled as to the issues you mentioned , ■■■■! better luck next time i suppose ,

im not trying to say this is how you solve something but is the game scope to big even if the coders are working off of marketplace assets? genuine question?

A good asset is only going to give you a jump start while a bad asset is going to set you back instead of helping you on your way. Unfortunately there is a lot of bad stuff surfacing on the marketplace that is going to need a lot of sweat and tears before being ready for production.

Talk to this guy he was complaining he can’t find a job.
Why does this suck so badly? - Development Discussion / C++ Programming - Unreal Engine Forums

Maybe you can offer him one.

You can find freelancer programmers on different websites. A google search will be helpful.

Take ALL of your fancy features and put them aside. Take ALL of your necessary features and put 90% of it aside. Take the entire world and put 99% of it aside.
Reduce the entire project into a MVP, down to a tiny map with almost no features and make it work.

Once it works, start adding in based on this criteria:
A: Must be included, ie. almost nothing.
B: Should be included, but can be sacrificed.
C: Would be included if possible.

Once category A is done, you move items from category B into category A. You then free up space in B and start sliding C items into B.

If I was doing this, I would let the players vote on category B upgrades and eventually category C upgrades. This can also be a great PR strategy, because if the product is aimed at satisfying the player base, they will tell others. If you dismiss the player base, they will also tell others. In the beginning though, having non-biased players to keep you accountable on category A is vital. That means, don’t believe everything your friends and family tell you, because they are biased to making you feel good. Non-biased players are biased towards making themselves feel good, which will result in more honest feedback. Not to forget that the majority of your player base, if this succeeds, will be strangers from the Internet, most of whom you will never actually communicate with personally. If they like this game, they will tell others, if they don’t like the game, the studio or the dev team spokes person, ie. you, they will also tell others.

By getting people to play the not-so-great demos packaged regularly along the way, you will get hints on what should be focused on and what can wait.

The game doesn’t have to become spectacular in one year, it just has to be fun to play and with little to no errors and bugs, keeping the VIP fans engaged during the development time. Once the first version is launched, it will have to be fixed and maintained. After that, regular updates and upgrades can bring the grand vision to reality.

Make good looking prototype game as far as you can and make it highly visible to the public. Programmers will come to you. Plenty of skilled programmers out there looking for competent team to join part of.

Be wary of multiplayer for your first game. It’s incredibly difficult and takes a ton of networking and replication knowledge to get it to work.

Single player is much much easier to get working and finish. General rule of thumb for your first game is don’t go for your dream game. Create something you enjoy that is single player to get the hang of production pipeline, marketing and etc. all that comes with publishing a game.

After you have all that down it will be much easier to setup the plan correctly for your dream game.

Good luck and don’t give up. It’s easy to lose motivation the longer a project goes depending on progress.

okay based on your feedback initially what i should do is scrap faction selection,melee, and vehicles for now, start off with 2 basic teams, basic weapons no melee, one game mode, as ill be building off a marketplace third person shooter template, I actually have worked on the game for the past year with another good friend of mine, but sadly he has got his own dreams he needs to focus on so its up to me now , our original build of the game got corrupted and i had the only known build in existence, unknowingly- i deleted it to free up disk space, the game was on 50gb already lol, after i resumed production and tried to get hold of the build my friend told me that i was the only one to have a build of the game , with that being said the only purpose that serves now as a proof that it is possible, I have gameplay vids of the original build if you wanna see where the game managed to get to

(the sound design was flawed no-doubt but no work had been done on it yet and also the weapons)

other than that I have resumed to restart, i’ll post what I have managed to do with my small amount of knowledge on blueprints and intergration and maby you can tell me what your thoughts are then? ,Im going to try the feedback i got to dumbdown my game alot and maby ill make a catch but i can only keep trying so i shall

thanks everyone for the feedback!! , people don’t understand how important others inputs actually are in this businesss so thank you again guys

Agreed here about marketplace assets. Even if they are nice, good quality and professionally done. You pick two sets from two authors and it shows. You can see different style. And bigger the game more assets you need.

Most MP asset stuff is trash with bad materials.
Some even go as far has having 10 to 20 material slots on a 10cm^3 mesh.

If you make a game that’s even remotely good, you won’t be using any marketplace asset “as is” anyway.
And any programmer worth a penny will be able to tell you how stupid it is to sacrifice performance for an object you would barely even notice during gameplay.

So @op account for having to re-do or fix all assets you purchase anyway.
And/or contact the asset maker and hire them to work for you.

At the same time, just because you make assets, please realize that maybe you know nothing about making assets for a game:
If I had 1c for every time someone said ‘yea sure, I’ll send you the models’ and subsequently proceeded to delivered sheer trash that wasn’t even UV mapped, let alone light mapped… I could potentially have paid a dedicated person to take care of it twice over by now.
(This is most common with Architects, as they have no clue what rendering outside their niche software means).

In the end, unless you want to become a generalist and learn it all, you have to probably hire a generalist.
Literally - someone who has done and can do everything himself.
Or at least comes close to it - maybe they don’t know networking, but if they know the rest and theory they can probably tell when whoever you hired to do the networking is giving you trash net code, for instance.

Regarding the scope/size.
I just disagree with any limit in principle.
I don’t care how long a project will take. Or the fact that it will be “dated”.

For one,
You cannot possibly cause a high poly / impossible vert count model to ever become dated.
And if you have self scanned 4k sized textures you’ll be hard pressed to ever find those become dated.

For two,
Game play systems are unique, as such its hard for any of them to become “dated”.
We ALL still mimic games like Thief when working with shadow/rogue like games.
Has this now become Dated? Not really.
Can it be made better? Sure. Always.
Same principle can go for another 20 or 30 game mechanics we still use to date.

For three.
Every year your code needs a complete re-write anyway. You learn new stuff along the way. This means you can increasingly do better no matter who you are.

Also, everyone here is correct.
A smaller project scope will make development with less people more plausible.

Deal with it by prototyping in a non prototype fashion.
Where the code and stuff you make is final quality with over-thought optimization, so it will almost never need backtracking and changes.

Just Modular-palooza the s*it out of everything. Animations, interactions, gameplay stuff. Everything.

And do not ever:

  1. rely on engine features.
  2. update engine version after starting…

I would go as far as contacting Havok and paying for it. Yep, even as an indy project.

Re finding actual people.
Trust no-one.
Period.
Especially if you don’t know. Have them earn trust by proving their stuff works…
There’s a ton of scammers who claim they know how to code but can’t even add 2+2 out there.
And it’s getting worse because of job cuts in the US…

Well ■■■■, so basically I need to become the guy that can do everything, then do everything and then only try get advertisement once I have done everything already but the whole purpose of advertising for my game is to get developers to do things but i have already done those things myself then? I mean like what? :joy: I’m extremely confused , one moment blueprints are easy enough to learn and do but hard enough that you’ll need a dedicated team of years to be able to create even a simple feature?? One moment the game scope is too hi but everyone complains about a 1000s of bad games being made with simplistic features which are actually dumbed down versions of there games that received flacked for being to hi scope then they play the game and say it’s bad becuase it does not look like a good game or its generic , but that’s any game , a first person shooter is always a first person shooter , what makes them unique is the features they add for each one , but now if you take those features away everyone gets the same game , so essentially programmers will only do sorta bored programming on quick easy projects , that’s one thing I call , “lazy” , you guys probably think I don’t know much of unreal but I have spent this year building a game , actually working online game , all my textures for my models are 4k and the models themselves I don’t think there is a model there with under 25000 polys , i have done sound engineering for 6 years now I have a pretty ■■■■ good clue of what’s cooking in that front , and I know that blueprints are actually doable , especially if you build off of marketplace assets , and almost never will the whole assets be used just things needed from it like animations , or models , programming etc , if you want my post ending statement is this cuz I can see that only when you guys see that I can make half this game by myself only then will you join , and to me that’s like seeing your mates fighting a battle and your on the hill shouting orders and not actually in the s*it, but anyway,

If people really want to do things, they can , never underestimate a person, that’s one thing I have learned this year ,

But anyway I thanks again for the feedback guys , I realised I should keep this idea to myself , I’ll keep my game post updated incase any of you “hill commanders” want to come down and join the fight , I don’t mean to be rude imagine I said all of this in a curious confused voice not a fighting arguing one cuz that’s not what I’m going for ,thanks guys and happy Christmas or New year’s soon I suppose

What game are you building Alpha, just wondering.

An unrealisticly hi -scoped game lol, no I’m kidding but I’m just tryna make a game made like battlefield but inspired with art design and concepts from Warhammer 40k universe and lore , this was suppose to originally be a fan based Warhammer game but I won’t get past games workshop copy right , so I had to make my own universe

So it’s a first person shooter, you could do that with blue prints easy.
For more complicated sand box games you have to write in code.
As I remember battle filed is a mission like game, where you just sort of go ahead forward and shoot around, but you can go around the map, there are some cinematics and that is about it.

For example Star Citizen, you can’t do that with blue prints :slight_smile:

This is an ok showcase for what it can become like. I have that template as well, but abandoned it because it was too much of a headache to figure out for someone who didn’t understand the basics.

You might want to remake the entire thing from scratch, by going through the template and redo everything in a separate project, one thing at a time and study what they actually do.

But first, do yourself a huge favour and create a near empty project and package it for multiplayer, and set it up on a dedicated server to establish a baseline. Simulate some serious lag on both the server and at least two clients to see where your networking code breaks.

I haven’t done that, but apparently, you have to package two versions, the client version and the server version. This will probably lead you down some Github, compile Unreal from source rabbit hole.
Once you and a friend can do WASD, Jump, Sprint and mouse look on a flat plane, you can move on to creating the main menu, spawn in and all that basic stuff, the lobby, transition maps etc.
That is what I would do, just get the networking to work.

Another thing is to study the optimisation and performance profiling for various aspects. There is a blog or a talk with the Valorant team on what they did to get their performance right.

Before you even add in sounds and terrain, you will have to become somewhat of a packaging expert for multiplayer.
And, it seems like you will have to dive into C++ as well.
Here is a place to start:

I know i wrote this before, but (with more detail):

I was member of team doing some “Tactical shooter” game. For whole 2 or 3 weeks, yes i know. They started doing it as mod for UT3 i think, then moved all code to UDK. Team was about 5-7 people doing everything and usually working longer hours on that indie game than in real work. When i joined they were on 5th or 7th year of development. After those 3 weeks i realized that is too much for me to enjoy doing for few hours a day every day, and i just quit it.

So even some tactical shooter like battlefield took them years to create (they finally did it).
However main complain from customers is that “game feels dated”, remember they started on UT3, moved to UDK, and when they released UE4 was just new and shiny, and everybody asked why not doing it for UE4.

Also UDK had script (which is easier to mantain than blueprints), so wait for UE5 with verse.

It’s 2021.
Unless there is a real need, you need peer to peer.
The whole server thing is just a hindrance really.
To the point people won’t play server based games…

Yes and no, you need at least lobby and game wide chat/voip.
What big companies love to forget is that biggest multiplayer games were strong because they had strong community.

WOW decline started when they added crosserver groups, and that LFG system. From that point idiots/jerks and trolls did not need reputation or friends anymore, so they al lacted like idiots, community was killed by it.

Same with Fortnite STW, lack of game wide chat (they had it in beta), makes this game feel empty.

So if biggest selling point of your game is multiplayer you need server side for chat, lobby and cheating protection.