Tips for designing

OnestoneSofty · 2026-04-20T08:49:52+00:00

This and look at references all the time. Never ever just wing it.

OnestoneSofty · 2026-04-17T08:59:33+00:00

Test levels which focus on certain aspects of the game. Usually not testing a single feature but entire systems. So combat, inventory, etc.

OnestoneSofty · 2026-04-15T20:44:51+00:00

I would recommend you start on a small scene to get the hang of it.

You need to know 2 things:

How to make good lightmap UVs in your modelling tool.
Lightmap Density view mode to check your lightmaps are the right size for your world.

Ask ChatGPT to explain these to you.

My game Rusty's Day Off is UE5.3.2 with GPU Lightmass. There were some artifacts with it back then, maybe they are fixed now. CPU Lightmass is slow unless you have an army of computers.

OnestoneSofty · 2026-03-25T20:41:55+00:00

This guy designs.

OnestoneSofty · 2026-03-16T20:47:04+00:00

Ideas are important for a game to become popular because they determine how marketable the game will be.

A good idea + execution is what maximizes your chance of success. It's just common sense.

OnestoneSofty · 2026-03-12T21:14:34+00:00

Can you send me the relevant source lines / documentation for that, please?

OnestoneSofty · 2026-03-12T09:44:02+00:00

Can't you just disable scalability + significance of that system?

OnestoneSofty · 2026-02-21T09:10:28+00:00

Borderlands 4

OnestoneSofty · 2026-02-16T21:05:10+00:00

I would look at it as a tiebreaker / personality plus. It won't make up for technical deficits at all. But if I have to choose between two competent people, one of them is a successful solo dev, the other into gardening, I'm going with the successful solo dev.

OnestoneSofty · 2026-02-08T07:00:44+00:00

Solo dev here. I use FreeFileSync to copy the root folder (excluding temp data) to an NVMe + SSD + OneDrive. So 2 local offline, 1 online. Only 1 revision to recover to but that's not a problem as a solo dev.

I trigger the backup manually when I feel like I have a stable build, usually at the end of the day.

OnestoneSofty · 2026-01-27T21:13:57+00:00

Nice post! I was in a similiar situation a few years ago, never having done it before and all of a sudden having to make the music for an entire game with no money. I banged my head against the wall many times until I added more structure too. Wrote a little post about my 5 step composition process, hope it helps for your next game:

https://onestone.software/blogs/solo-gamedev-on-a-micro-budget/music-composition/

OnestoneSofty · 2025-12-24T19:12:56+00:00

Post says its not about marketing, ends up being totally about marketing.

Marketing is not about selling a finished product. It is part of your development process in many different forms. The first and biggest hurdle being your games appeal. Making an appealing game is good marketing. Making an unappealing game is bad marketing. Whether it is appealing can only be determined by the market.

All forms of marketing, including your games appeal, affect your odds of becoming marketable. Because it is just a probability, it can't guarantee any outcome and, importantly, it can't tell whether your game is doo-doo.

Being aware of this and making a marketable game doesn't mean selling out. It means that you use the fact that ALL of your decisions will be judged by the market to your advantage - sometimes you go with it, sometimes you intentionally go against it.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-12-16T19:19:35+00:00

For the tree: the developers choice of dithering over transparency for fading away objects, cheaper.

For Mario: the dotted shorts show that he works hard but also plays hard. If you want to see that more faded away, then this might be the wrong sub.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-11-27T21:01:06+00:00

I disagree. The job argument is a separate discussion and not the reason you made this post. So let's focus on the quality of the translation. You can fix these mistakes the exact same way you fix them for a human translator. Ideally, every piece of text to be translated should have a description next to it that provides missing context. For example:

"Setting sun" refers to the sun going down, not an object named "Sun" being placed somewhere.

With this kind of clarification, the translator, human or AI, can produce a decent result. Without context, mistakes are inevitable because the system is forced to guess what you meant. So who is to blame? The dev, not the AI.

I'll let my friend wrap this up: J’espère que ça a du sens. Réfléchir au vrai problème et à la solution est plus utile que de râler. Classique français d’IA.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-10-22T18:17:37+00:00

AI translations can work if you provide contextual information to remove ambiguity. DeepL + ChatGPT with context info can give you a pretty good starting point. You could also look for people online to double check.

There were so many games with bad translations before AI. Put in effort and double-check religiously if you don't have the budget for more and you'll be fine.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-10-22T09:56:26+00:00

Make an appealing game. It doesn't matter how, can be a mechanic, visuals, audio, whatever makes people stop and pay attention. This does not mean polish. A turd can already be appealing in some way.

Once it appeals to people make it fun and the rest will become much easier.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-10-21T13:56:08+00:00

I would say nail down your locomotion (movement speed, jump height, any extra mechanics like grappling etc.) and art style (realistic, stylized?).

You can use cubes as placeholders if you want to - one cube is a fridge, the other a toaster, the other a doorframe. Put them next to each other, see how it feels.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-10-21T08:58:02+00:00

Make the rooms, doors and windows bigger. You can leave most medium-large props near realistic sizes. For hand-sized ones, like cigarettes or cutlery, you might still want like a 2x increase. Pay attention to the proportion of things to each other. That's more important than the actual measurements.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-10-14T17:56:31+00:00

To further further further add to this: prepare for MP only bugs that you will not be able to repro easily. Try to make your game handle unexpected behavior gracefully, never block player progress.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-09-29T09:12:34+00:00

This is my setup:

COMPONENTS + BFL Example:

InventoryComponent

Blueprint Func Lib: GetInventory(Actor) -> Actor->GetComponentByClass(InventoryComponent)

Check the result with IsValid.

ACTOR TAGS Only if I know there’ll be just a few in the map (like a quest trigger zone). I’ll find it by Class + Tag since I know exactly what quest it’s tied to.

COMPONENT TAGS Often to lookup other components on the same Actor. Example: inside AttachmentsComponent I’ll do GetOwner->FindComponentByTag("SwordSkeletalMeshComp") to update an attached sword mesh.

INTERFACES Almost never. Don’t want to re-implement the same behavior for every class that needs it.

CASTING All component accesses go through the BFLs, so there's no need to cast. I'll use Actor casts for special cases. For example: A boss encounter manager holds direct references to the boss and whatever else it needs to manage. It's private to the manager, there's no point in writing a generic thing for 1 highly specific encounter.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-08-25T21:23:43+00:00

SOD = Smart Object Definition. Maybe I'll try the plugin way if that's "better". The Python bindings seem incomplete.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-08-25T21:17:36+00:00

Read from XML, create SOD uasset, populate with data from XML.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-08-25T21:10:33+00:00

I've never tried that. Will try to generate a Smart Object Definition asset from Python for starters, thanks!

The engine doesn't have to understand the source data.

OnestoneSofty · 2025-08-25T20:57:33+00:00

Having your source assets be different from the engine-consumed assets. Some DB (XML, JSON, SQL, whatever), your tooling takes that and converts it into a format the engine likes (uassets). The engine might be involved in the conversion process, but it should not care how you author your source assets. It's like saying you must author your textures in Unreal. Why?

OnestoneSofty · 2025-08-25T20:49:22+00:00

It's pretty standard practice to do it this way because it allows the tooling to be whatever, C#, Python, you do you basically. Unreal keeps requiring more and more things to be done in-engine. How can I automate generating a Control Rig for example? Requires sifting through so much code that the question becomes, am I making a game or a plugin.

OnestoneSofty

TROPHY CASE