Well I guess it can be a bit easier depending on the scale of your project, but I like to do things BIG!! lol. How’s your experience been so far?, and even if your not making your own game do you have any thoughts on it? feel free to post anything you like.
As for me atm it feels like i’m trying chew more than I can swallow (probably temporary)… but so far so good actually, I just released a Pre-Alpha demo of my game to world 2 days ago and so far its had 132 downloads, its not much but without any marketing I’m surprised it got that many, don’t know how many of those actually played it though. I got feedback from 7 people which were mostly positive and of course telling me what I should work on more like, the game is too easy, make it harder, you need more sfx and she’s not a soldier don’t just throw a girl with a booty in there (haha I’m not much of a character designer). All of it is actually very useful feedback which I will be referring to in the future. And now I guess it’s back to sleepless nights, bad eating patterns and not paying the internet bill.
My download statistics so far in case your interested +40 from my website.
This is pretty interesting, the country map is clicks of interest (crawlers/bots) or downloads?
But overall this is google analytics or equivalent from your dedicated game website, right?
Question: Do you have a break down of actual downloads by country in table form?
So largely Europe is ignored except for the UK which has many…
Then nothing else except for Holland & Romania…???
Equally South America has Colombia & Brazil only…???
The Philippines is there, but nothing else in SE Asia or China!
Lots of downloads in India and some surrounding territories…
Canada, fair enough. Then Africa: Botswana / Zimbabwe…???
I’m asking myself is this data skewed by Bots / VPN’s / Tor / remoted boxes etc…???
But back to topic. Interesting also as by chance had recently this same chat with fellow UDK’ers.
We came to the conclusion that solo dev, especially big idea projects which takes years is brutal!
But its also attractive as you’re in total control with no idea / vision compromises or sacrifices etc.
One hard part is outsourcing parts for royalty that are specialist, too-difficult, too-time consuming.
So specifically what marketing did you do that led to 100-150 downloads…??? (thanks for posting this btw)
One other challenge of solo dev is perfectionitis or never really getting to a deadline, end-goal or completion point…
So the work just goes on forever basically. As you improve one thing, 10 other things urgently need facelifts…
agreed,being a solo dev requires knowledge of many areas.i came to udk as a modeller and had to learn many things.
I started with kismet for almost everything and carried on for years,but as familiarity with uscript set in I have reduced my kismet to virtually nothing.i know kismet I meant for prototyping,but 5 years is a long time.
I use side projects to help me from getting bored and to learn new things to incorporate into my main project.
I create art: great video and the game looks promising.well done.
Heres something that i encountered that i underrestemited.
Marketing.
If you have a big project but a small crowd… then you should make your community and that fast.
Having a great game, great art and a realy good game overall will not make you win. Sadly.
I’ve run into the perfectionist problem as well, it does help better your work but when you over do it you may never finish. In the past I tried to make an animation and never completed it because of that. For this game I gave myself 5 months to get to the Pre-Alpha stage and upload it, I only managed because for the first time I ignored the perfectionist in me.
Yes I’m making it alone. I’ve been developing since January this year but I’ve been learning and planning for years.
: I’m not sure exactly how the data is collected, but it’s from a google link that leads to the download file (2.1GB), it just says how many times the download was clicked. How many of those actually finished downloading and played the game is what I’m not sure about, except for the ones who left feedback. As for the downloads in Africa they are from Zambia and that’s where I live, a couple of friends have downloaded it. As for marketing I get an okay number of views on my youtube channel so I uploaded a trailer video that links to the download thread on Unreal Engine forums.
Filly_the_owl: I totally agree on the marketing side, a good game won’t make you win, that’s just a myth that was busted a long time ago. But Apparently a lot people still believe in myths.
I codevelop with second coder, We also have great character artist but he is losing his motivation.
Biggest trap for us so far is perfectionism. We restarted code 4 times so far. First time it was because some circular function dependency that ruined half of code and we were not that far in. Then we realized that multiplayer needs whole new design of code, and we developed game as singleplayer thinking it will be not that hard to add multiplayer later, we were quite wrong. And last was second restart because of multiplayer, our first try was quite messed up (we were learning all quirks of MP). I think that in bigger team (4 restarts) would be quite hard to do.
Second deadliest trap is going for too big projects. We tried to make as small as possible project that we still want to develop, and it turned out to be huge task. Now we are thinkng about some tiny puzzle game to get some funding so we can pay artists. Because without artists we will never make decent game (our game is top down coop shooter in scifi setting), something very simple, that turned out to be not so small project as we thought. What can be hard in project that needs some multiplayer GUI, and 4 guys shooting hordes of aliens? That looked almost like weekend project. Few tweaks to tpp template, few marketplace assets and we have game. That was dead wrong, for eg. making session manager plus some chat, level travel etc took whole weekend to do but after 2 weeks of following tuts digging into any information we could find etc.
Is MP more stable now or is it still going through lots of changes?
Would be interesting to read more about that reworking…
Did you do a work-in-progress thread at the time Nawrot?
That’s disconcerting, as there are top-down sci-fi templates floating around the forums…
Learning Tab / Community Tools & marketplace etc. But maybe none are MP / co-op…???
Multiplayer is stable, and when you finally understand how it works its quite easy also. But while learning it you will probably fall into one of many multiplayer design traps.
For eg if you want some autofire gun, which is very common. First thought is to send event over to server when player pulls trigger and when player releases it. But what if player laggs or disconnect when releasing trigger. That event may get lost somewhere. So you need to design autofire around it (we send event of “fire” every 0.2 seconds) servers assumes that player disconnected or stopped firing if that event did not happened for last 0.5 seconds.
Then another major problem with multiplayer is that you cannot be certain of blueprint creation order, thus get all actors of class on server and client will return arrays with correct pointers (locally correct) but order of objects will be probably different. Now squad leader gives order to attack 3rd enemy on list, which enemy it is for clients a and b? You basically need to manually index all such actors.
So my point about multiplayer is, that if you do not know those quirks beforehand, you will make great firing system to just discover later that disconnected player keeps shooting forever. Or that when you give all bots order to shoot first enemy they all happily run trough whole map to shoot second enemy on the list, because their list is differently ordered, and they run on server.
But this is kind of derailing thread. Perfectionism in my case is biggest time sponge, but it will pay off because at some point i will just know what to do and what are traps ahead of me. Maybe not while doing first or second game, but hopefully when i am at 3rd project.
Sounds similar to my experience. Multiplayer blueprints are far more difficult and confusing than singleplayer. I was following a tutorial which fit my project perfectly, and then found out that the author stopped completely a few months ago. So I had to strip out all of the work I did prior to that point and start from my basic system. Like you, I’m trying to stay away from overly ambitious but didn’t realize that also meant what I perceived to be a simple multiplayer coop horde mode. I’ve since had to adjust the overall plan to fit something a little more attainable for one person.
Isn’t it harder to stay motivated and focused if the idea or project becomes a huge compromise though???
I’d rather get a basic LAN prototype up and running. That way you can see if the game has some legs or not.
(Can’t see time for lobby-building or dealing with server-travel or solving every replication bug so early on).
That’s just my 2c based on UDK. So what is UE4 like right now for BP-prototyping a LAN-based FPS shooter?
UDK had UTGameTypes where weapons & projectiles, players and vehicles all replicated automatically.
Crowds were broken, and physics objects had replication pains, but you could paint over the cracks (teleport tricks).
This raises questions about BP, because it should be offering the type of simple networking that Kismet never had.
I don’t want the complexity of Steam etc, until I confirm the game is worth it. Not that Epic are helping loads .
Unless you’re just doing a puzzle, exploration or educational PC game, pretty much solid Networking & AI is a must.
Otherwise congratulations on some nice looking art that doesn’t do much. (So extra depressing reading that above).
I had hoped leaving UE4 dev until 2016 would have solved a lot of these unknowns! (we’re not all ascended to :p)
Well when it comes to game development, there certainly isn’t any shortage of ideas. We all have plenty of them. It’s just a matter of selecting one that fits a certain attainable criteria for the time being.
All post so similar to my experiences, I am also having similar issues, seems to be a theme with new developers, specially ones who are skilled in only one area and are trying to make a game on their own or with a small group. I have already abandoned one game as I am useless in C++ and blueprints is beyond me if I’m trying to do something new. Then there is the problem of outsourcing to others to help develop your game, but if you cant pay them for this work before the game is finished then they either drag their feet or leave to secure paid work, this has happened to me like 5 times already, its quite frustrating. I have also tried looking into buying other UE4 templates that incorporate things that my game will need, only to find out later that that doesn’t work with the way I’ve implemented my game, or its not how I thought it was gonna be and just get stuck with a ton of templates I cant use yet.
So after abandoning my 2D side scroller game, [which I first started as I thought it would be something simple to do] the perfectionist in me turned it into something that will not be finished until I have learn to program and animate or I win the lottery and have the money to outsource talent to help me lol.
So now I’m making a 1st/3rd person sci-fi shooter game and have fallen in the trap of needing AI, gameplay mechanics, which are beyond me, so my project started last september, concepted last march, to still in development today.
Its so frustrating sometimes that so far Ive kicked my PC and blew the fuse box [short circuited my house] the dent on my PC remind me of the struggle
took time off 2-3 weeks because I just could look at it any more, and the story goes on and on,
My main problem is that there is never enough time in the day, it takes me literally all day just to do one thing, and when a problem arises, it takes me the whole day if not longer to sort it, and then of course 2 to 10 other problems crop up from that.
So for me so far there is no light at the end of the tunnel and its depressing to see, that I’ve put so much work into my game and I still have nothing to show for it,
still waiting for some people on UE4 forums to finish templates to put on the market place for me to see if I can use them… in the meantime I just carry on building my level, doing what I can trying to perfect - reiterate on things I can control until I see a light at the end of that F*** tunnel.
Anyway sorry to bore you all, I just wanted to put in my experience…
Every indie feels your pain @AdamF. Game design is a love / hate affair, just wait till you reach … (UDK thread)
When you’re not longtime part of a gaming / modding community, its easy to think that a game engine is a Do-It-Yourself kit.
But it isn’t so, engines are actually just a framework, and no game type is truly all that much easier than any other either…
Totally agree with that, Yesterday I completed the first enemy A.I I actually have fun playing against and was really happy and excited about it, today the thought of working on the project made me feel sick. Its a bitter sweet symphony.
If you don’t like BP or C++ try learning Skookum script, but maybe wait until it is out of beta. Everyone gets frustrated. The ones that make it push through. Maybe start out on a simple a game as possible. When you finish that, make something more difficult.