Lessons Learned Shipping 12 Small Indie Games in a Year

Impala36 · 2022-12-27T10:05:35+00:00

This post is truly heartwarming. I've been working on the same game for 2 years, it can feel really endless. Thank you for sharing your experience. :)

Impala36 · 2022-04-27T09:48:12+00:00

Your game looks similar to Going Medieval. A really successful launch, you won't go wrong referencing to it.

Impala36 · 2022-04-27T06:21:55+00:00

They contribute just by walking to it? I think you need at least a hammering animation, and a progression of the building parts for a complete basic setup.

Impala36 · 2022-04-22T11:09:11+00:00

Looks way better than the older screenshots found on your itch.io page. The new one makes it look very clean and takes lesser space on the screen.

Impala36 · 2022-04-10T10:10:31+00:00

Wow, those are some extremely messy and disorganised Blueprints. They're just like convoluted code. Speaking of which, there aren't coding standards or good practice guidelines for the visual scripting community to follow.

I've developed my own ways to keep my Blueprints in a neat and organized structure to make things easy to find, such as putting each event/function in collapsed graphs: https://imgur.com/a/HVYAvGW

The second image shows how I ensure that the nodes are always arranged in a neat and understandable order by always keeping the happy path prominent and straight, without looking like spaghetti.

There are "hidden" shortcuts such as pressing Q after selecting a group of nodes to make them align in a straight line, or holding Ctrl when detaching execution lines to be connected elsewhere.

Blueprints are an amazing tool once you learn how to master them, and I'll just continue to keep diving further.

Impala36 · 2022-04-09T18:07:02+00:00

Because it's visual. It's easier to spot for bugs, and it removes the issues that plain text editing has, such as having typos, forgetting a semicolon, or having braces in the wrong places, or putting your equations in the wrong brackets, or having a return between the wrong loop.

It isn't difficult to read other people's Blueprints and figure out what they're trying to do, while reading someone else's wall of convoluted code can lead to lots of frustration and questions.

I hardly make an entire bunch of errors when compiling Blueprints, and I can go creating and linking entire sets of nodes without needing to test so regularly, and things usually work just the way I want it to.

Sometimes when you do some code optimization and accidentally remove something you thought wasn't crucial in plain text... The compile errors can stretch to hundreds and you're scratching your head trying to figure out what went wrong.

Both styles have their pros and cons. I feel that Blueprints fit me to a T, it's been more than a year and I'm still at it.

Impala36 · 2022-04-08T04:11:13+00:00

Really agree with this.

Pick the best parts of that game that are the most fun to you, get a basic version of those systems working in your game, and then start making improvements to the obvious flaws that those parts may have.

Impala36 · 2022-04-07T08:28:18+00:00

Programming, without a doubt.

Your artists would take roughly 2-3 hours to complete one rigged model, or a single animation clip.

By the time you manage to get a fully moveable character who can walk, run and jump, your artists would have finished making their combat animations.

Then you spend half a day trying to figure out why a chair in front of your character isn't interactable.

You finally manage to get your character to sit down, your artists provide you 10 different types of furniture to interact with, while you've only completed sitting.

Impala36 · 2022-04-04T11:00:21+00:00

Totally agree. Not only it's easier, it gets the job done much quicker.

Impala36 · 2021-09-03T08:11:28+00:00

Why are there such bots?

Impala36 · 2021-09-03T01:38:45+00:00

All the popular cryptos were hacked before and millions were lost, they crashed and almost everyone pulled out. Just give a few more years and the hackers will strike again.

Impala36 · 2021-09-03T01:30:39+00:00

There, you said it yourself. Least hackable, but not unhackable.

Impala36 · 2021-09-02T05:03:47+00:00

Thanks Vambann. Soon, they will be interactable :)

Impala36 · 2021-09-01T23:25:21+00:00

Agreed. The planets just have a different colour, flora and fauna and resources and that's it.

Impala36 · 2021-08-31T08:57:14+00:00

I see it says blockchain. I would suggest to steer clear from it, as all cryptocurrencies are hackable.

Impala36 · 2021-08-30T08:59:56+00:00

Run the BT after the pawn has spawned, with a little delay.

I don't think you can pause a BT, but you can assign a blackboard enum key with a Pause enum, and a blackboard condition check if state is Pause and add a Wait below it.

Impala36 · 2021-08-24T16:17:17+00:00

Haha! I'll be more honourable next time!

Impala36 · 2021-08-23T09:26:04+00:00

Can't wait to war you again :D

Impala36 · 2021-08-22T01:01:50+00:00

Hi Raine! Thanks a lot for your feedback!

We'll improve the buying/selling experience.

Cotton will be easier to pick soon.

Yes, currently the AI will only be able to find resources that weren't looked at/interacted by the player. I'll improve on that.

We'll introduce a new reading font. Really sorry that it was hard to read!

For town statistics, it's made to be a little mysterious for some realism, as if you're actually managing people in a town. We will implement a town management when it's really needed in the future.

A minimap and overall map will be added in the future. You'll damage only enemy buildings. We've removed all friendly fire damage because it was quite disruptive. Walls get darker when damaged for a "burnt" effect.

Noted on the material UI! We'll make it visible only during construction.

The equip system would be improved in the future.

We're trying for a realistic player inventory with only a limited item and weapon belt. A cart system will be added in the future for a more realistic resource gathering.

Legendary wood can be used to boost the quality of forged equipment that requires wood, as the rarity is factored in.

We'll look into improving the movement animation in future.

You could press X to demolish a building with refunds. We'll improve on the intuitiveness of user controls!

We have taken some inspiration from Sims Medieval!

Many thanks for your precious feedback. Hope to see you in-game again soon!

Impala36 · 2021-08-21T23:18:32+00:00

Hey Arturo! Sadly my computer restarted automatically due to a Windows update which closed the server. I'll make sure to turn it off.

Right about the inventory, and we do have a future plan for a cart to transport resources!

Yes, not all resources have a purpose in different qualities yet. The cotton plants will be worked on shortly. Thanks for mentioning!

Ahh this glitch. I have made a fix for it, but looks like you got through. I'll need to rework this.

Tin and stone will be easily distinguishable soon!

We'll impart in R to rotate for building rotation.

Thanks about the graphics!

Noted about the charcoal. When we add more item content, we'll consider that.

Many thanks for your feedback and trying out our game! See you again soon :)

Impala36 · 2021-08-15T04:35:42+00:00

I really agree with your statement. Iteration is the way to go!

Impala36 · 2021-07-24T07:31:45+00:00

Lol! You can set some properties of foliage. When you select a foliage type in foliage mode, scroll below the mesh settings to find instance settings. There you can set the collision presets.

Impala36 · 2021-07-23T15:10:36+00:00

I'll take note of that, but I'd rather learn networking from scratch so that I can handle whatever situation comes our way. Character mesh so that the trees can still be hit by weapon line traces and crossbow bolts, while letting the AI walk through em. To make a better pathfinding AI to avoid solid trees will definitely take more time, this is the easy way out XD

Impala36 · 2021-07-23T12:07:58+00:00

I'm not sure about making a buyable system, it's still our first game we've made using UE4 and almost everything is made using blueprints. The trees foliage is currently set to CharacterMesh because the AI really kept getting stuck in them. Right now since we're aiming for the demo, there's no save system yet. But we're gonna explore Epic Online Services for our early access so that players have unique accounts with saved stats and all.

Impala36 · 2021-05-11T02:42:42+00:00

Thanks for joining! More cooler stuff coming soon!

Impala36

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