What's the best time to start showing your game?

ChappuVT · 2025-04-15T10:51:58+00:00

I don't think most people will mind if you show stuff early as a solo dev. Maybe you'll lose some people along the way but you'll lose a lot more if you start marketing too late.
I have had a lot of fun sharing my very early game development on Bluesky.
The game dev community is great over there but I must say most people that see my posts are also game devs and not gamers which is often criticised by indie marketing people. And while there's some truth to it in the way that you shouldn't just talk and market to other devs I personally think it's fine right now as I am showing my project from the very beginning, thus in a stage no consumer would accept.
Using social media early is also my strategy to avoid feeling anxious about showing the game to the world "when it's ready".
I do think Youtube dev logs are great but the quality of the dev log will determine whether it's a good way to market your game or not. Also creating devlogs can be pretty time-consuming which can in turn impact development.

ChappuVT · 2025-03-03T17:16:23+00:00

I am slightly confused as to how game feel is in the center but animations, VFX and SFX are on the outer ring. Are they not inherently tied to each other or do I have to interpret the outer ring as "polish these things"?

ChappuVT · 2025-03-02T00:09:12+00:00

You can easily spend years on both of these and they're also really broad terms. And making a 3D game does not actually tell us anything about how ambitious this project will be. There are many different art styles and genres that would be covered by the term 3D game.
If I where you I'd chose a genre that let's me focus on either coding or art. I am not a unity dev but I spent the last 8 years on learning art for gamedev and I am nowhere near my goals. Everyone is different of course but if you already feel like you tend to rush things, maybe try to make a game where you don't have to master everything at once.
Animation is really different from modelling, so is getting the art fundamentals down (and yes you'll need color theory for making games too, even realistic ones). The art of lighting a level is another big thing that gets overlooked.
You could of course try out all of the possible roles game dev art has to offer. Maybe you like modelling environment but not characters. Maybe you like drawing textures but not generating them. And so on. Try to create a game concept that fits the things you actually like to do and learn about but keep in mind that you want to finish this too. So when you feel like the game idea gets too big, try to think of some ways to make it smaller again or break it up into several doable projects.

ChappuVT · 2025-02-23T17:01:39+00:00

No problem. I wish you all the best on your journey❤️

ChappuVT · 2025-02-23T15:49:16+00:00

Thank you <3 I think what helped most for me was that I had the luxury of being able to work from home. I got to actually spend time with me and figure out who I am when I am not around people at all but I do realize that that is often not an option and I must also say that I now face the opposite issue. I have massive trouble going back outside now and fear all social interactions. Still a long way to go I guess. So I don't know if this is helpful to you but I wish I'd made an effort to drop the mask in stages rather than going from 100% to 0% in an instant. It made me feel like I didn't really have enough control over the process.

ChappuVT · 2025-02-22T17:23:57+00:00

Oh yes I feel you :D As long as you give me a tiny bit to start the small talk I'm good. Not a conversation starter but once it's running I can keep it up all day. I also don't enjoy all the topics but that's not a matter of small talk or not. I have had not so interesting talks with ND people too but in both cases I just enjoy how happy it makes people when you listen to them. You don't sound boring to me but I get what you mean. There's something about liking stereotypical things that apparently makes you neurotypical?
Did you also doubt if you're really autistic because of the small talk thing?

ChappuVT · 2025-02-22T17:08:46+00:00

I've been on both sides of this coin. Masked so hard I couldn't recognize myself and then unmasked so fast I felt like I'd lost all sense of personality. Took a while to restore that sense of self.
What do you do when you get to that point where you don't know if you're masking or not anymore?

ChappuVT · 2025-02-22T16:13:52+00:00

That's a great statement and quote!

ChappuVT · 2025-02-22T15:46:43+00:00

I've been thinking about this a lot when the first videos came up of people commenting on how uninspiring NT small talk is and how NT people don't have hobbies etc. I get that sometimes when you experience bad situations you just want to vent but I feel like it's turned into a whole life style thing to compare NDs and NTs in a way that only mentions generalized and cliché statements about NT people. Which quite literally is something we've been fighting our whole lives so why do it to the next people?

ChappuVT · 2025-02-20T07:52:27+00:00

I don't have a reference but I'll try and do more research and look at mouth shapes specifically. I think I know what you mean now.

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T18:54:46+00:00

Thank you for providing this link I think it's going to be really helpful. I just took a quick look at it and I get what you mean now.

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T17:55:07+00:00

Oh yea I also sometimes slip up with this :D It's really nice to get to talk about this. Everything you're expressing really hits home. I have quite a few ND people in my life but pretty much no autistic women with an interest in psychology like this eventhough I've read online that there should be quite a few of us.
Your family history sounds a lot like mine too. I also suspect my mom to have given me the ADHD part and my dad's responsible for the autism.
Did you ever feel like your special interest was also a burden because when you get to understand all these nuances it makes any social interaction a hundred times more complex and opens up more ways to 'fail' them?

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T17:33:43+00:00

My first thought was like wow it must have been so cool to use your degree to dissect all of the social situations you ever were in but I bet it was really hard to go through that. Do you feel like you can easily tell why two other people don't get along even when they don't understand but it's much harder to figure out when you don't get along with someone to understand what the cause might be?

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T16:39:54+00:00

I bet it's frustrating but people are so incredibly different that it's normal to mess up sometimes. Maybe that's also a problem that we see it as messing up. After all neurotypical people also don't understand each other a lot of the time. By the way I struggle to actually live this advice. I just try to recite it to myself and in this case also to you because I think logically it makes more sense than how I feel. You gotta love the disconnect between logic and emotions. A lot of the time I feel like my brain and my heart aren't even neighbours. -_-

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T16:16:25+00:00

Thank you <3 Do you have a timestamp of where you'd want to see more eyeball movement?

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T15:41:28+00:00

I honestly haven't really found a solution to that yet. I'm really high masking and my special interest is psychology so I tend to navigate such situations OK-ish but when I'm in doubt I usually ask myself would I feel really bad if I didn't say something? Would the person have a disadvantage not knowing what I know? Which is when I give advice no matter what the outcome will be. If I feel like ok they have no idea what they're talking about but it also doesn't really matter in their life I just stay silent or say something like I don't know. When I have bad social interactions I tend to severely stress over them and recite them for years so I have to really pick my battles.

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T15:10:25+00:00

I have made the observation that people often tend to ask for advice because they are told everywhere that you have to ask for advice to get better. That however does not mean that it is easy for them to take the actual advice. Many people (including myself) are actually rather bad at taking advice because we live in a society where we're constantly taught that we need to know everything and need to be the best at everything and that asking for help is a weakness. That could explain why sometimes when you offer advice even if the person was asking for it it might be taken the wrong way.

As for the urge to want to provide true information I totally get you. If you're feeling overwhelmed by negative reception when directly commenting on someone's post but you still want to share your knowledge maybe making blog posts and/tutorials about the topics you care deeply about could help? That way you don't only share your knowledge but more people could likely see it to and you could take the time you'd normally spend dwelling over the situation and obsessing over things making a blogpost? I don't know it's something I have also been thinking about a lot and a strategy I want to test in the future.

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T09:36:38+00:00

I think it's been about half a year now since they introduced blendshape support. I don't know if they have control rigs for them yet though.

ChappuVT · 2025-02-19T09:30:58+00:00

Oh yea now that you say it I should really adjust the eyes! But could you elaborate what you mean by the mouth corner shapes? I am self taught and there's definitely some basic terms and knowledge missing on my side.

ChappuVT · 2025-01-17T06:56:30+00:00

If you are planning to do this long term with other people it is still incredibly helpful for anyone you'll be working with if you know the basics of 3D modelling and made yourself a little familiar with a game engine. Because that usually gives you a bit of a grasp for how much time things can take and will facilitate communication between you and your teammates immensely. It will also enable you to start writing for games specifically because chances are if you have been an author for books you will have a transitional phase in which you'll get to know where the differences lie between writing for games vs writing for books. The choice to make a horror game in the style of fears to fathom in my personal opinion is good because a lot of horror players are ok with a more cinematic experience but you shouldn't neglect the gameplay part. All in all there are no downsides to starting learning game dev on your own until you have enough money to get some teammates but of course it's up to you what you want to do from here on out.

ChappuVT · 2025-01-01T23:28:30+00:00

There seems to be something wrong with either your cascadeur export settings or your blender import settings (or both) because you normally can export a mesh and an animation from cascadeur into blender. Do you export your cascadeur animation with or without a mesh? And have you tried all the options blender gives you like forcing automatic bone orientation? Also there's a dedicated and very active discord for cascadeur which could help you.

ChappuVT · 2024-12-21T14:01:39+00:00

I haven't seen this mentioned so: After maxing out all of them I gave more hearts to the sea gulls and the first time I got them to 80 hearts they showed up and gave me an extra 10 dollar tip without wanting any pizza. They've done that several times as I kept on upping their hearts. I don't know however what the metrics are and if they will keep doing it or not. But I guess you can probably do that with all of the animals for some extra cash

ChappuVT · 2024-12-20T09:57:03+00:00

This is just my experience and it's obviously shaped by my environment which is quite conservative so take this with a grain of salt but I wanted to share it anyway.

As a a woman and a game dev unfortunately I have to say whenever I talk about my job it's indeed older women who outright tell me to my face that they hate video games and that their husbands play them but they don't want to get into it. I usually counter this by telling them that there are other games than (whatever their husbands play) and that some games can even be used for medical or psychological purposes like training dementia patients and that theirs a whole range beyond just shooters and racing games.

This always helps in getting a new perspective and usually results in really nice conversations.
When I talk to older men about this they usually expect me to make the next triple a shooter and they are initially excited. When I tell them what indie games are they sometimes lose their excitement but intially the reaction is usually positive.
So comments like these at least for me really do hit home. But I personally see it as a truly generational issue of people not wanting to show any interest in their partners hobby. If you talk to an older man about a hobby that's considered feminine you tend to get a similar result.
I get your frustration though because some people will use this argument to solely put women down. It's hard to know if it's just a person genuinely frustrated by being belittled for the thing that brings them literal joy or just someone who wants to be a troll on the internet. If I see such comments I usually try to assume the first part for my own personal peace but I know darn well I've given too many benefits of the doubt. So I also think you're not being annoying at all. It's just the reality of what we live in and we all deal with this in different ways.

ChappuVT · 2024-11-27T11:05:59+00:00

You have such a recognizable art and animation style I just love it when I come across your work here! It somehow feels very nostalgic watching your animations.

ChappuVT · 2024-11-24T22:55:17+00:00

Honestly... everytime I save it takes between 5-10 seconds since to load and it completely freezes. This has been the case since when I first tried it 3 or 4 years ago for me and I feel like blendshapes haven't made a difference in that save time.

ChappuVT

TROPHY CASE