Making a game on your own (or even a team) is like trying 2 eat the planet mars with a plastic spoon

[Filly_The_Owl]

@;548873

but maybe what you lack is time. it’s the alltime time vs. money predicament

to the OP: I feel you. I too work on a project by myself. I’ve been working on it for 4+ years, and I should be finished with it sometime this year

• the perfectionist problem - you can learn to control it
• marketing - I’ll face that demon soon enough. but I still think good marketing will give you a very good initial boost, but only a good game can give you spreading via word of mouth
• motivation - if being a dev is really your hobby and you truly like the project you’re making motivation comes easy, and making progress on the project creates a positive motivation loop.
• other projects - it takes discipline to not go astray into side projects, working on multiple projects, mutating your project, or increasing the scope of your project. when starting a fresh new project make completely sure it’s what you want to do and define a scope that works in a self-contained way (without needing more expansive features later). and after that, endure!
• scope - cannot stress this enough: keep a realistic scope. it’s common to think that features X Y and Z will take a few weeks to make and for prototyping it will be true in most cases, but the dangerous part is thinking “the game is pretty much done” after that. making features X Y and Z work together and making them scale properly, make the game appealing and not harsh, adding enough signs and feedback for the player, making it all a smooth experience and a good amount of polish, will all take 90% of your time

Thats good I currently have all time of the world. But no money… and i fear it will get worst soon when have no time and no money.
Its hard! It makes even the smallest thing look giant…

[anonymous_user_cae7faa3]

even the longest journey starts with 1 step-as someone once said.

just keep moving forward.and for a solo dev,time is far more valuable than money.imo.

[I_Create_Art]

@Filly_The_Owl;548847

You are able to pay people… you have it easy.
I dont have money to buy a new PC to have my project have the quality i want… Having huge issues with framerates and a slow workflow.

I mean if you have money then you realy currently have a huge chance.

Well right now I’m broke as a joke, and my only plan for money is successfully completing my game, hopefully the marketing demon won’t be impossible to beat.

I really wonder if online multiplayer is possible with blueprints? Have you guys got any thoughts on that?
I’m asking because a lot of people have been asking if my has multiplayer. The whole thing is going to be a 100% blueprints because I have 0% programming skills, I’ve seen a few tutorials on multiplayer but it really seems like something scary to tuckle.

[I_Create_Art]

@;549997

If Epic ever get around to finishing this, it should help. But the tutorial seems cursed basically…
Apart from that eXi’s posts are insightful, but BP networking feels sporadic, not all encompassing
You may have to handle floating point precision MP origin shifting too, but help is at hand there.
But what if the game is physics heavy? After watching this even shootable barrels must be a PITA!

But the biggest unknown for me by far is, what do you get for free from the engine by default?
In UDK there were rich built-in gametypes such as UTGame that helped simply things greatly.
You pretty much got auto-replication of standard weapons / projectiles, vehicles, characters etc.

Ok, it broke down with physics and crowds etc, but it still helped create fast LAN prototypes.
Even Kismet made basic MP possible… And while Set-Location etc wasn’t replication safe…
If you combined it with the Teleport node it did essentially force updates from server to clients.
But what’s readily included in UE4? Haven’t got a useful picture on that yet, except maybe try this?

But you’re right to look at multiplayer asap, why limit your game to single-player.
You need to either include that or have interesting plans for killer AI in my view!

Lol I’m knocked out, I think if there’s a more solid workflow for multiplayer in the near future I may attempt it. But right now there’s no point in being too overly ambitious just to hit a dead end, making a killer A.I Seems a lot more possible.

[anonymous_user_cae7faa3]

just knives apparently.

[anonymous_user_cae7faa3]

http://.aescustomknives.com/images19/cablesoga3.jpg

I told myself not to do it.but I didn’t listen.

[owenprescott]

@I Create Art!;542659

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.

Plastic spoons are pretty cheap on amazon

Buy a ton of spoons, a chicken and and you have yourself an egg and spoon race indie game. Bye Epic, I don’t need you anymore.

[I_Create_Art]

Well 's what my plastic spoon’s been upto.

Koola’s awesome UE4 cat game is really provoking (and inspiring) me to work even harder.

A walk through The City Of Whispers - Save Our Souls (Unreal Engine 4)

[anonymous_user_cae7faa3]

absolutely amazing.it looks stunning.

sorry the thread now looks disjointed,but one contributor seems to have deleted his posts,making mine look a little out of place.

how odd that someone can delete posts from a thread.

[I_Create_Art]

@661gaz;553166

absolutely amazing.it looks stunning.

sorry the thread now looks disjointed,but one contributor seems to have deleted his posts,making mine look a little out of place.

how odd that someone can delete posts from a thread.

Yeah it’s a terribly bad habit deleting posts in threads, especially when it ends up making everything look senseless… not that what we were talking about made much sense in first place, lol.

I’m getting all these comments about how great my Pre-Alhpa looks in VR and it’s really tempting me to sell an organ to get VR.

[I_Create_Art]

@;553404

Koola’s cat game… Got any links…???

Slick looking video! (It was hard to tell a lot about the game from the night-time clip before)

's the blog for the cat game https://hk-devblog.com/ it looks really amazing.
They are a team of 4. 2 men and 2 cats, unfortunately 1 of the cats is responsible for communication and it doesn’t know how to keep the blog updated well.

[I_Create_Art]

Hi guys, I’d like to know your thoughts/experiences on how to go about selling a game through digital distribution. Besides trying to get the game greenlit on steam I haven’t really given it much thought yet, but Now that I’m at the halfway point of development I think I should find out as much as possible.

[anonymous_user_f54268a3]

It’s a grind to finish them, that’s for sure. Have to just keep making features and fixing bugs. We use Unfuddle to track features and bugs and are using a fairly common Game Development process, calling Alpha as having all game features and zero bugs, then Beta only allowing minor features to be added mostly tuning and updating with final art. Lemons should be in Alpha in about 2 weeks, but it’s months behind what we planned. Fell into the trap of wanting to add more and more features as well as redo things trying to make them look perfect.

I have got 2 games Greenlit this year. The first one development is on hold, the Lemons Must die we are doing everything we can to finish it. Both games are 2 person development.

I suggest putting it on Greenlight when you have enough gameplay footage to show and then just leave it there. Don’t make the mistake of putting up any animations that is not actual gameplay because there are trolls that seem to check every single game to make sure the follow every Steam rule or they will downvote you are start a bunch of comments about you breaking the rules. Had trolls on both games actually even though got the animations removed within a few hours.

[I_Am_DreReid]

You need to market your game so that it can be downloaded by a much wider audience

[I_Create_Art]

@;560408

Should you go for Kickstarter / IndieGoGo funding?
Even if its not successful, it is promo proving ground…

thanks for the link, the live stream has some very useful information.

@mikepurvis think there is any disadvantages to leaving an unfinished game on greenlit too long?

To me Greenlit still sounds like 1 of the best options, I hear it also drives a lot of traffic towards your game and the chances of getting successfully greenlit for good projects are much higher, that + some good marketing through social media sounds doable on a low budget. And I want to pull the game through the finish line regardless of whether I get funded or not. I’ve thought of doing a Kickstarter / Indiegogo many times in the past but I finally opted to go for UnrealDevGrants and decided that I wouldn’t go for any crowd funding, grant or no grant, At least not for my first release because I’m sure I wouldn’t have the time to run a successful campaign, failure would just be dragging my game’s name through the dirt, and At The Moment I don’t have credibility either.

Talking about credibility and dragging names through the dirt, I’m also in the process of replacing free assets I’ve used in my project because personally I really believe that old saying that nothing in life is free, I wouldn’t like anything to come back and bite me in the near or distant future. if I leave any free assets in there they will just be from Epic Games like their textures, or things that I absolutely cannot do on my own like foliage :p.

[anonymous_user_f54268a3]

@I Create Art!;561365

thanks for the link, the live stream has some very useful information.

@anonymous_user_f54268a3 think there is any disadvantages to leaving an unfinished game on greenlit too long?

Only remove it if you are not going to finish it.

Even if you don’t get greenlit before you finish it, if you put it for sale on another platform that will drive the chances of it getting Greenlit and you can do a campaign to get people to vote for it.

[WalkingDead]

You created that yourself? noway!!! that is amazing!!!

[I_Create_Art]

@Walkingdead well there’s is a voice actress doing the female voices, and a few assets from epic games, but thanks anyway.

So I was asking about multiplayer earlier, it looks like Epic finally put up a blueprint tutorial series with steam integration. https://.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlv_N0_O1gYqSlbGQVKsRg6fpxWndZqZ
I probably won’t be adding it though, because internet in my country is way too slow and expensive to even play online multiplayer games let along develop them.

[I_Create_Art]

So the voice actress playing both the main characters stopped replying to my messages though she’s usually online. I noticed on her profile that she’s recently landed paid work on a bigger project and I’m starting to think that’s probably why. Problem is she won’t reply or say whether or not she wants to continue working on my game, which makes it hard to know if I should look for someone else.

's the Latest work on the game’s environment and characters.

Save Our Souls - Catalyst (Unreal Engine 4)

[I_Create_Art]

Tried to wake up this morning and a blueprint went through my head, should I be concerned??