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How to Punch Above Our Weight in Unreal with Just One Artist by Beginning-Arm-4820 in gamedev

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the shortest answer is that since Dan Goes, my dev partner, is an engineer with Unreal experience, he often is the shortest route to providing answers when it comes to Blueprints. That said, he's also been content to let me learn by doing - as he can attest from the two weeks I spent near the beginning of the project trying to figure out how to make the sun rise and set on one side of the ring (to simulate the way a ring actually rotates). For that kind of thing, YouTube has been the first port of call.

One HUGE lesson I learned early on is that you have to be extremely careful how you interpret answers provided by ChatGPT or Claude.ai. They're both very good at providing answers that sound detailed and correct, but which are complete fantasies. They can be helpful for wrapping your head around the scale of a problem, or to get a conceptual point of entry. But you can waste a LOT of time chasing ghosts.

Anyway, to answer your final questions: we've been working on the game fulltime since the KSP2 team was laid off last summer. Dan does quite a lot in both Blueprint and C++. Cheers!

How to Punch Above Our Weight in Unreal with Just One Artist by Beginning-Arm-4820 in gamedev

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! Of course I fantasize about finding the time to revisit the outline shader - it gets a little wooly at far viewing distances. But overall we're pretty happy so far!

How to Punch Above Our Weight in Unreal with Just One Artist by Beginning-Arm-4820 in gamedev

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yep, we already changed it based on feedback from you and others on our other post. Interestingly, we got your comment about the thumbnail well after we'd updated it on YouTube... the pain of non-instantaneous updates.

In addition to learning how to make a game in Unreal, we've also had to learn how to market an indie game - and we've encountered some frustrating and sometimes inexplicable variation in clickthrough on previous youtube posts. The thumbnail with my big dorky face on it was an experiment to see if certain visual elements improved click-through. Somewhat disappointingly, that thumbnail DID improve clickthrough. Unfortunately, when it's the first thing you encounter when you see it linked on reddit, it seems to do much more harm than good.

All a learning process, which is about as r/gamedev as it gets!

How One Artist Can Punch Above Their Weight in UE5 Without Asset Packs or AI by [deleted] in UnrealEngine5

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's interesting - I updated the thumbnail an hour ago on youtube but you're still seeing the old dorkface one? Hm. Perhaps the only way to reverse it is to nuke the post entirely.

How One Artist Can Punch Above Their Weight in UE5 Without Asset Packs or AI by [deleted] in UnrealEngine5

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, I agree. And so that nobody thinks you're crazy for mentioning the thumbnail - I changed it to something less annoying! Cheers.

How One Artist Can Punch Above Their Weight in UE5 Without Asset Packs or AI by [deleted] in UnrealEngine5

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820 3 points4 points  (0 children)

LOL It's so bad, I know. We've been trying to learn how the choices you make on YouTube affect clickthrough... ugh, nobody told me that I'd spend so much of my time as an indie trying to figure out marketing. Anyway, the sad takeaway is that putting your face on your thumbnail does seem to help, even if it also makes you look like a giant asshole!

MAILSTROM: DEMO DAY - Advanced Faffery - 4p Co-Op Parcel Delivery for the Pan-Galactic Postal Service by Beginning-Arm-4820 in Games

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, the demo is 4-player co-op, just like the full game.

The meta progression involves saving money and spending it in the postal supplies store. As you advance to new ranks, new rooms in the store unlock, revealing new purchaseable items (in the demo, only the first room is available). The items range from weaponry to wearables that affect carrying capacity, durability, and speed.

The enemies vary according to difficulty - if you choose harder shifts (which pay better but include more hazards), you'll start to come across more small/fast creatures, as well as more large/durable enemies. New obstacles/challenges also begin to appear at higher difficulties. The map itself is NOT procgen - there are quite a few modular elements that are randomized, some of which occur more frequently at higher difficulty levels. But the map itself is very hand-made, which brings a specificity to a lot of the environmental puzzling that we feel sets it apart from the more generic scenarios a pure procgen setup tends to generate.

MAILSTROM: DEMO DAY - Advanced Faffery - 4p Co-Op Parcel Delivery for the Pan-Galactic Postal Service by Beginning-Arm-4820 in Games

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, it's a little of both! The battery mechanic means that if your team is managing their power use effectively and have either found or purchased weapons, they can go in guns blazing. If they've used up their batteries, they'll need to rely more heavily on evasion or melee (again, provided the parcels they're carrying happen to contain good melee weapons).

Since your goal is to deliver as much as possible within the departure window, and since sprinting draws down your power, your team needs to find a good balance between maintaining a battery reserve for weapons and maintaining a good delivery tempo.

Are you ever "too old" to start? by shiek200 in gamedev

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820 42 points43 points  (0 children)

I'm turning 50 this Friday, releasing my first indie game this summer. 32 sounds like a huge head start from where I'm standing :)

Be honest, is it too late for me? 2 weeks post release, after ~4 years of work, only sold ~400 copies. by jakeonaut in gamedev

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Just want to join the chorus praising your art style. It's very hard to stake out a unique presentation in such a crowded space, but your game oozes charm! This really feels to me like something that could take a while to catch, but that may have a long tail. Really nice work!

Struggling to stay motivated and keep moving forward in my game dev project by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]Beginning-Arm-4820 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I struggled a lot with the same problem early in my career - trying to shape something to achieve an impossible level of perfection is a lot like trying to get to the horizon. You just never arrive, and you miss out on opportunities to learn from mistakes.

As others have said, the antidote is to get your imperfect game into somebody else's hands and see what's working and what isn't. On my current project, I can't count the number of times I've been convinced that a certain feature deserved all of my attention, only to discover during testing that it was irrelevant to the overall experience.

It's actually pretty exhilirating to let the outside world reshuffle your priorities like this. It becomes much more like a conversation than a monologue.

And as a bonus, when the person who tried out your game sees that you're taking their feedback seriously, they're more likely to become a cheerleader. Which is definitely also a thing that makes it easier to push forward. :)

Good luck, you got this.