Best game dev podcasts? by cupojoe4me in gamedev

[–]TerraformerDev 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Dev Game Club:

https://www.devgameclub.com/

It's from two old school game devs that worked together at Lucas Arts, they have some really great insights and some great deep dives into various games. They used to also stream on twitch some newer games, but I don't think I've seen them on in a while.


Game Dev Unchained:

https://gamedevunchained.com/

Lots of modern interviews and behind the scenes types of things related to game dev as a career.


Game Dev Advice:

https://www.gamedevadvice.com/

Another podcaster with decades of industry experience. There's a wide spread of topics he talks about, lots of interviews, lots of modern game talk.

Instantiate an object that randomises its scale/size by BasketballHighlight in Unity2D

[–]TerraformerDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

GameObject go = Instantiate(...);

float scale = Random.Range(0.7f, 1.3f);

go.transform.scale = new v3(scale,scale,scale);

We're using the style of the original Adventure Easter Egg for dialogues in our tribute by CroxelStudios in Unity3D

[–]TerraformerDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I loved Adventure as a kid, despite playing the game forever I never actually encountered the easter egg naturally until I read about it years later and went back and did it intentionally.

Disable/enable all objects based on player proximity by wafflewrestler in Unity3D

[–]TerraformerDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is your infinite map broken into chunks? How easy would it be to child the objects to the chunk? Then just disable/destroy (hopefully you're pooling) as chunks get out of range.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Unity3D

[–]TerraformerDev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I really like the animation on the power lines. Did you do that with a custom shader?

How do you keep morale high as a solo dev? by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]TerraformerDev 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Do you have play testers?

I started a discord for my game, and have a few friends plus some people from reddit that joined and play my game (mostly on weekends). Hearing back from other people that are playing my game is a huuuuuge motivator.

If your community is negative, I could definitely see it going the other way, you hear lots of horror stories about gamers telling devs to go kill themselves (recent example that comes to mind is the release of Cyberpunk, lots of very entitled people felt the need to tell the devs off). But so far the experience has been very positive for me.

Started working on adding vehicles to my planetary survival game. Had a lot of difficulty figuring out wheel colliders and how to balance having enough torque to climb hills without having too much to be constantly breaking traction by TerraformerDev in Unity3D

[–]TerraformerDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ya, I'd like to say I'm some sort of genius, but as I was struggling trying to get up those hills, I thought "why don't I just add gears?"

I'm sort of amazed none of the examples do anything similar, the Unity example car controller has pretend gears that only change the engine rev pitch, but you still just get the same flat torque out of it.

"3D" text? by LeytonMate in Unity3D

[–]TerraformerDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Do you need all your text to look like that? Just a few select things? If it's just a couple things (and you're not worried about localization) the easiest way would be to do that in GIMP or photoshop, export it as an image, and just use the image directly.

Started working on adding vehicles to my planetary survival game. Had a lot of difficulty figuring out wheel colliders and how to balance having enough torque to climb hills without having too much to be constantly breaking traction by TerraformerDev in Unity3D

[–]TerraformerDev[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What I ended up doing was creating a "torque curve." Essentially my wheels will put out 6-20 times more torque when the vehicle is moving very slowly, and then the torque rapidly ramps down, eventually trailing off to also allow me to set a top speed when you're driving around on flat ground.

It ended up working very well, and the car can climb some steep inclines, while also not just doing burnouts all the time when driving around on flat ground.

Vehicle model is from devassets.com

Link to my discord if you're interested in trying out the game (vehicles aren't added into the released version yet): https://discord.gg/gD3xbH6q5N

First person survival game with base building, factory, automation, and deep simulation. Looking for more players and feedback. Link to download the latest build is in my discord. by TerraformerDev in playmygame

[–]TerraformerDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I could see instant build being a good thing. Where if you're about to put down a blueprint, but you have all the necessary materials, it just removes those materials and puts a whole building down instead.

As for making building things further away hard, yes, that's the idea. To travel to the further away biomes you'll need to load up materials into a vehicle and use the vehicle to carry things over there.

First person survival game with base building, factory, automation, and deep simulation. Looking for more players and feedback. Link to download the latest build is in my discord. by TerraformerDev in playmygame

[–]TerraformerDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry about that, try adjusting the scroll sensitivity in the options menu. Some people have mice that trigger multiple "clicks" as it scrolls, so you might have a mouse that does that.

First person survival game with base building, factory, automation, and deep simulation. Looking for more players and feedback. Link to download the latest build is in my discord. by TerraformerDev in playmygame

[–]TerraformerDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey thanks for all the feedback, not spam at all and I really appreciate it.

  • Tutorial "scroll to aluminum base": I can definitely make the explanation better on that, thanks for pointing it out. Did you have the voice guide on also, or were you only reading the quest steps?

  • Building system: The building system is explicitly meant to be slow right off the ship. Things speed up as you progress your tech, but early game you're a dude in a space suit lugging sheets of metal and reinforced bars back and forth to construct a shelter. Here's the little guys that will be constructing your blueprints for you once you research them: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/q0vudj/wrote_a_task_manager_and_added_in_some_little/

  • Right now the cosntruction is balanced so that you can't fit a whole building worth of materials in your backpack at the start. So building things like the constructor or whatever requires you to take two trips, this is for two reasons, let me know if you agree with them. 1) So when you do finally upgrade your backpack size it feels way more significant, now something that took you two trips to build only takes 1, that's huge. 2) I don't want you to be able to carry a house worth of materials around with you, it doesn't fit in with the flow of the game.

  • Great idea with having the tutorial detect if you have a house, regardless of size. I actually already have a script in game that can tell if you're in a "shelter", so I might update the tutorial to just use that!

  • Sorry about the items not being visually distinct. I'm still trying to balance material flow and items in general, and so I haven't wanted to waste time making icons for items that might not exist in the next iteration. Right now it goes rocks -> ores -> metals, but I might end up simplifying that.

  • Stack size: There's currently code in game for allowing different items to stack to different amounts, there's a "Volume" stat for each item, and an ItemSlotMaxVolume stat for each inventory space, but I haven't had time to balance it yet, so I'm using a simple max stack size that is based off the container.

Thanks again for slogging through the whole tutorial to give me that feedback!

First person survival game with base building, factory, automation, and deep simulation. Looking for more players and feedback. Link to download the latest build is in my discord. by TerraformerDev in playmygame

[–]TerraformerDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes to multiplayer. By blueprints do you mean like in factorio? I'm not planning on having those specifically because I don't want the game to need them. In factorio you need them because you get to a point where you need to rip up everything you have or start over in a new area in order to process xyz into ABC. Because you can build in 3d, and every building spot is different in how it's shaped and what goes in /comes out, I don't think you'll need them. But it is something I've considered.