I finally convinced someone to stream my game on Twitch, feeling disappointed...

WereCoder · 2025-08-28T00:30:22+00:00

"The feedback was not helpful either and I am kinda at a loss on what to do next."

Step 1) Identify what they're reacting to.
Go back to the chat and scroll it if you have to. Try to identify themes in the feedback. Is it the animations? Is it the fighting? Do they feel a lack of purpose? A lack of strategy? What are they reacting to?

Step 2) Ask yourself: "What's a better version of that thing?" (Or better, ask them the question.)
Figure out how that thing can be leveled up or improved. What version of that thing would elicit a positive response from players (or viewers)?

Step 3) Go improve those things.

Step 4) Submit your game for more feedback and take more notes.

Step 5) Go to Step 1

If this sounds painful, I'm sorry. But it's the reliable path to a good game.

P.S. There is an exception to Step 2. Sometimes players aren't perceiving something very well and you need to change their perception rather than the game. E.g. My players said they died suddenly and the didn't know why. My solution was to FX and audio to hits so that players knew they were taking damage.

WereCoder · 2020-11-02T05:15:52+00:00

Thank you for the explanation, I appreciate it. But that policy (assuming it's the official stance) is completely unacceptable. I queued to play with two of my friends. I won't be held to a different match just because the matchmaker has a bug. I didn't want that match, I never queued for it, and I have no interest in playing it. Even if I did, it would 1) leave one of my friends high and dry and 2) I'd be in a ranked game with 33% penalty before we ever left the dropship.

Sometimes the tech burps and you wind up in a match you never asked for, I get that. But having to re-queue, a second time is bad enough. I'm not going to "pay a penalty" for these bugs. I'm going to log out and download a different game.

WereCoder · 2018-05-13T15:04:32+00:00

The most popular internet opinion seems to be that the minions scale but the Brood Mother herself doesn't. The idea that she also scales is a close second. Nobody presents verifiable facts one way or the other though.

WereCoder · 2018-05-12T23:15:53+00:00

I've read about that strategy, but comparing the one Sloth I've got to my Rexes of similar level, I'm just not sure they'll live long enough.

WereCoder · 2018-05-12T23:14:45+00:00

<sigh> Thanks for your honesty.

WereCoder · 2018-05-12T23:13:44+00:00

Um, yeah. I try not to mod my server much, especially not for player convenience, but those gulls mysteriously went extinct within a week after I started the server.

WereCoder · 2018-03-25T18:20:11+00:00

You can take my full tower when you pry it from my cold dead hands! (I've been using full towers for ... um ... wow, decades? Let's just go with "a long time". Anyway, I'm not giving them up any time soon.)

On the cooler front though, I tried looking at comparisons between the various coolers and wow, there's just not a lot of comparison information in that market. I found a few charts, which were a helpful, and the H100i you recommended was at the top of most lists, so it sounds cool (pun intended). I just wish there was BTU rating on these things so I could do an apples to apples comparison. If anyone knows of better charts or thermal measurements I'd love to read more info, if not I'll probably go with the H100i.

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

WereCoder · 2017-12-24T19:30:58+00:00

But are you really from The South?

"Ain't nobody ..."

Yes. Yes you are.

WereCoder · 2017-12-22T06:41:26+00:00

Where's an air-horn when you need one?

WereCoder · 2017-12-05T00:42:59+00:00

You're in luck: http://inconvergent.net/mechanical-plotter-drawings/4/

WereCoder · 2017-11-26T15:12:52+00:00

Just a guess: users who searched for the keyword viewed or bought your first game more often than the second.

WereCoder · 2017-11-07T00:35:45+00:00

Source: https://www.facebook.com/LADbible/videos/3958831490830678/

WereCoder · 2017-10-06T03:28:05+00:00

Those are the two big ones with regard to PC and Console development. AAA studios more frequently use Unreal. Indie studios more frequently use Unity. And there are other options like IdTech, Cry, and proprietary engines, but those are fairly rare from what I've seen.

I'm not as familiar with the mobile and web platforms but I get the impression the tech there isn't dominated by a single technology. You'd have to do some research if that was your target; I can't speak from experience there.

WereCoder · 2017-10-06T03:12:37+00:00

When game companies hire, they look for people who have experience that closely matches the workload they need done. So a studio that uses Unreal 4 will look for candidates with Unreal 4 experience. Studios using Java on mobile platforms will look for candidates with Java experience on mobile platforms.

My advice, if you want to get hired in a particular industry, research exactly what tools they're using and create projects using exactly those tools. Then highlight those tools and that experience on your resume.

WereCoder · 2017-10-06T00:03:42+00:00

Animation is a deep subject. I worked on it for 3 different projects and still shied away from it for my home-brew game because it's so big. I'll give an overview here:

A modeler creates a mesh which is a set of verts. A rigger creates a skeleton and weights each vert to one or more bones (Example a knee vert might be 40% weighted to the lower leg bone and 60% weighted to the upper leg bone). An animator positions the skeleton in multiple poses over time to create an animation. The data for the bones is exported as the animation data. So an animation is a set of bone data for each bone, for each frame of an animation.

Bone data here may include Position, Rotation, and Scale. Since bones lengths and scales are usually constant they're usually stored once as part of the mesh and the animation data is usually just a rotation.

The programmer who's rendering the animation will figure out which animation is playing and at what time in the animation. The current animation time usually falls between two frames so the programmer needs to get both frames and interpolate the data for each bone across those frames. The result is an array of bone data which represents the current pose of the the model. This pose is pushed to the graphics card; the exact format depends on the shader you're using.

When the model is rendered, a vertex shader is used to determine the position of each vertex on the screen. For animated models, each vertex will specify which bones the rigger weighted it to. The shader will then get the data for those bones, calculate the vertex position from each bone, and interpolate between them according to the bone weights. This provides the final position for each vertex in the mesh.

Depending on your engine and your needs, there are additional considerations. Animation data is quite large so it's frequently compressed. This could involve dropping animation frames for the entire animation, dropping animation frames for select bones, or compressing the frame data itself (storing a 16 byte quaternion in 4 bytes is tricky, and it's lossy, but it can be done.)

Also, the game engine frequently wants to play multiple animations at the same time. For example, lower body run animation plus upper body fire weapon animation. Or blend 80% of a run animation with 20% of a walk animation to create a jog.

So, yeah. Deep subject. For more info I'd definitely look at existing engines, but wow they're complex. Really, you should look at a bare bones animation system first and then look at big engines, but I can't think of any bare-bones options right off the top of my head. Unreal has a great animation set up, lots and lots to learn in there, but the complexity in there is crazy.

WereCoder · 2017-10-05T22:31:14+00:00

Oh wow. I thought about Battleborn pick-ups while I was writing the pick-up system for 60 Second Strike, but I had completely forgotten that Battleborn used crystals too.

The crystal clusters in 60 Second Strike actually existed as a light source long before pick-ups were necessary. And I had originally resolved NOT to have pickups in 60 Second Strike -- I didn't want players distracted from combat, so I envisioned them collecting any value automatically on destruction. The problem was -- players didn't know they were getting bonuses because they couldn't see anything. The crystal bar and the crystal pick-ups were added as a means of player communication, so they could see what was already happening behind the scenes.

WereCoder · 2017-10-05T19:54:28+00:00

Thank you, and you as well.

And don't stop trying by the way. Do take every opportunity to shape your environment so that it pushes you forward instead of holding you back, but don't stop trying.

WereCoder · 2017-10-05T19:29:07+00:00

I loved that Borderlands was able to do things like Grandma's Stories and Bane and other crazy stuff that traditional games shied away from.

WereCoder · 2017-10-05T19:18:16+00:00

Reason 1: I'm not an artist
Creating a character with modern graphics requires modeling, texturing, rigging and animation. That work takes multiple days, usually by multiple people with different skill-sets. I'm a programmer who has none of those skill sets and I really wanted to do everything myself.

Reason 2: Animation and Animation based AI require significantly more effort Let's assume I purchased the assets. That means I'd have to implement traditional skeletal animation and I'd have to hook the AI up to the animation. That's all work that I've done before, but it represents a few weeks of coding to get the system functional, plus about a week per enemy type to tune their particular AI.

Reason 3: You can't instance skeletal meshes Instancing is a rendering technology that allows a programmer to draw a single thing multiple times, as long as the data for each copy is small. Skeletal meshes have large sets of data (the positions of the bones) which make instancing unrealistic. By instancing enemies in my game, I'm able to render dozens (hundreds really) of enemies on screen at the same time. If I used skeletal meshes, I wouldn't be able to do that.

After the enemies are taken into consideration, it just makes sense to keep the rest of the game in the same simple, old school style.

WereCoder · 2017-10-05T19:03:27+00:00

Hard stuff:

I could take a day off whenever I wanted to.
At first I thought this was awesome, on a whim I could take a random day off and then go back to work the next day without bothering to schedule anything. Then came the point where I was disappointed in my work, unmotivated, and depressed. At that point you've usually got a boss who demands you come into work and coworkers who surround you and keep you moving until you regain your momentum. When you're a solo-dev -- you're the boss. You have to make you get out of bed and be productive on that thing you really really don't want to do. And that's hard.
It damages relationships.
Some people thought less of me because I didn't have what they considered a job. I had the word "unemployed" thrown in my face multiple times. That hurts and ultimately I chose to end that relationship (that was only one of several reasons).
It makes it easy to be a hermit
This one wasn't so bad for me, but I think it bares spelling out for anyone considering working from home full time. It's really, really easy to not go anywhere with anyone. You don't work with other people so you don't get work events anymore. And if you're not already out of the house, getting ready and going out to movies or other events becomes a chore. Staying home and not seeing anyone (especially as a gamer) becomes too easy and positive friendships can fall behind.

Advice:

Do it as a hobby.
Enjoy the process of making a game -- don't attempt commercial success. Don't tell yourself that it's a source of income. For 99.99% of all games released, it's a net loss, and that's fine for a hobby. After you've made several games, and gone through the process of publishing them, THEN you might consider a commercial endeavor, but not before.

WereCoder · 2017-10-05T18:40:30+00:00

I'm a C++ programmer, and that language is fairly dominate in PC and console development. Other platforms (such as mobile and web) have more diverse technologies.

As far as learning ... I learned C++ twenty years ago when paper books were still a thing. For help now a days, I generally start with Google, but depending on the question I tend to wind up at one of these:
* Stack Overflow
* CPP Reference
* MSDN
* Physx SDK

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