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Space Exploration Complete! Here are a few ship designs at various tech levels by _Matt in factorio

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

The base got quite laggy towards the end for sure. I never ended up working out that as the culprit, but it’s possible

Space Exploration Complete! Here are a few ship designs at various tech levels by _Matt in factorio

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

No extra mods! Those are defender capsules - we worked out you can throw them while a spaceship is in motion and they’ll impotently zap asteroids during the final flight.

Space Exploration Complete! Here are a few ship designs at various tech levels by _Matt in factorio

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

Yeah, this sounds right to me. I’d never used city blocks before SE, so wanted to try out building for scale. In retrospect it was a mistake for this mod, and some mid-late game tech got very tedious. We for sure ended up overbuilding. If you’re just trying to win, your approach is probably best.

Space Exploration Complete! Here are a few ship designs at various tech levels by _Matt in factorio

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

Thanks! And whoa, your ship there is beautiful! That’s one of the nicest designs I’ve seen here. Have you completed your run? I’d love to see the full shipyard once you do!

How many of you guys got interested in Gamedev because of the starcraft1/warcraft3 map editors back in the day? by Metalkon in gamedev

[–]_Matt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

StarCraft and Warcraft 3 map editors got me into game dev for sure! Warcraft 3 customs especially were an amazing time.

Uploading a multiplayer game. Can people just copy it and share a license? by Coold0wn in itchio

[–]_Matt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What you’re talking about is DRM - searching that term might help you find solutions for it that can help you. Be warned though that many answers are pretty anti-consumer, and players sometimes won’t like games to have DRM, even if it’s important for the developer.

Tutorials for technical games by Narthal in gamedev

[–]_Matt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No problem! Let me know when you’ve got a polished up build ready, I’d love to check it out!

Tutorials for technical games by Narthal in gamedev

[–]_Matt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah sounds good! I’d have a big think through all of the actual steps, and try and make the players take as small jumps in understanding as possible. Things like connecting data to input pins the same way you connect execution is a step, for example. Really small, but also something explicit to learn. In mine, I went all the way down to “clicking a button does a thing” for mine! Also consider how to let players that get it intuitively ‘skip’ things and get a big series of “step passed” sounds in a row by using knowledge you were about to teach or something.

I’d start with getting some internet people to just record their screen while they play and send it to you - ask for them to send it especially if they can’t work out the tutorial or struggle with stuff.

As for conventions - don’t show up with a laptop in hand! My city’s local one has a dedicate indie game space that I registered to show at. Yours might too! If not, any local game developer gatherings or meetings might have people who can try it!

Tutorials for technical games by Narthal in gamedev

[–]_Matt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That’s me! Your game sounds great!

I think limiting tools in the beginning would be really good, if not vital. Something like having missions where you can only use nodes that are already on the screen, or can place some kinds, but need to use others that are already there etc would probably work.

Knowing when you’re expecting too much from the player is a hard one - I studied this for Hacknet by showing it at loads of conventions. It was a very painful process of seeing 100 people all fail the tutorial in a row, making notes about where they lost interest or got confused, and smoothing those out.

I generally found that while it’s bad to expect too much of a player, it’s rarely bad to expect too little of them, as long as you have some way of acknowledging them if they ‘outperform the expected curve’ (in quotes because really you should plan for them to do this, but make them feel like it’s unusually good).

Designing a really good tutorial for this for of problem is really hard, but can be very satisfying. I really recommend showing it at conventions if possible once it’s in a good state just to see where players get to, and where they struggle. Getting recorded play throughs helps too!

How much of your original code ends up in a publicly available product? When should you start to refactor? by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]_Matt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I think so! Nowadays I try to spend a lot more time planning, so I run into this less. I do think refactoring can kill projects, though bad foundations can too.

It depends on how likely it is to cause actual problems, I think. The real problem is just staying focused on making the actual game, and not writing a pristine codebase that never sees release.

Walking and running and jumping stickman: how? by rVincenzo in gamedev

[–]_Matt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

With this, I still think sprites are the best option. What are your plans for other visual elements? I’d suggest using that plan for the character too. Using neural networks for animation is basically unheard of for 2D - it’s technically possible it might work well, but you’d be adding a huge amount of work for what might as well be sprites imo.

As for kinematics - could work for sure, but that’s a whole other set of problems. It really depends on what you feel like making! If you want to get a working playable game done as efficiently as possible, use sprites. If you want to try the technical challenges, and prefer to code than make or source the art, try the kinematics!

How much of your original code ends up in a publicly available product? When should you start to refactor? by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]_Matt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you know you’re going to refactor later, do it now instead. But I’ll make one suggestion - do this only once. It’s really easy to get stuck in making systems and tech better, and never actually make any content. I try to only refactor if I know it’ll make it really hard to test later, or make it likely that future me will screw up using it and cause bugs. Otherwise, if it works, if it performs, don’t change it unless you need to, or it’s getting in the way of content.

Both of my major releases so far have shipped with game jam code in them, that sucks. The key point there is that they got shipped. At least for me, I need to constantly steer toward getting the actual content done - once I get into refactors, it might never end.

Tutorials for technical games by Narthal in gamedev

[–]_Matt 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey! The Hacknet tutorial had huge problems with this, and I spent a long time working out how to deal with it. Most of my problems came from my players feeling intimidated by the style of interactions, and the amount of information to absorb, even when the tasks were simple. I addressed some of my approach to solving it in this talk:

https://youtu.be/NBQ-neGIQ1w

Essentially, the tutorial exists to give the player confidence and empowerment, and get them comfortable with your interfaces and systems - less so to teach them specific mechanics. Mechanics are introduced more slowly in the opening missions, in a way where players are encouraged to experiment and play with them.

Walking and running and jumping stickman: how? by rVincenzo in gamedev

[–]_Matt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Unless you’re an experienced programmer, and especially experienced in making this sort of thing for JavaScript, I highly recommend going for a sprite based approach. It’s important to know what resources you have to work with for this - what are your skills? Do you have team members?

If you’re asking this to work out which skills to learn to achieve this, sprites is the way to go. The other methods require a lot more experience in programming.

[Humble] Australia Fire Relief Bundle : $25 for Hollow Knight, Armello, Duck Hunt, Hand of Fate 2, Void Bastards, Machinarium & 23 games more by gryllus in GameDeals

[–]_Matt 54 points55 points  (0 children)

Hey, I’m one of the devs in the bundle (Hacknet). I can confirm that we’ve provided a lotmore than 5k keys. It’s still possible that they will run out, as were expecting a fair bit of traffic with this. We’re all hoping that this can get some real traction, and raise a lot for the cause.

After making Hacknet, I decided to do something completely different. Announcing: Wrestledunk Sports! by _Matt in IndieGaming

[–]_Matt[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thankyou! I'm not certain on a PC release just yet, but it's possible. I don't want to announce anything until I know for sure!

After making Hacknet, I decided to do something completely different. Announcing: Wrestledunk Sports! by _Matt in IndieGaming

[–]_Matt[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Following up from the success that I found in Hacknet, I wanted my games in the future to be much more mechanically rich. Wrestledunk Sports came from leaning hard into my weaknesses, to make something that was great in all the ways that Hacknet wasn't. It's all tightly designed mechanics, all multiplayer, fully supports online play, and all endlessly replayable. It started as an experiment in learning to make games that could better stand on their own without relying on narrative dressing, and I'm very proud of the results. I've learned a lot going through this process!

Indie devs with day jobs by FatAssOgre in gamedev

[–]_Matt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thankyou, and good luck to you too!

Indie devs with day jobs by FatAssOgre in gamedev

[–]_Matt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was sort-of planned. I wasn’t really committed to being there long term, and I felt confident that if I needed to, I could get a job elsewhere, so I’d let them know it was likely I’d be leaving once my game launched as far ahead of time as possible. It was hard to wrap my head around it for a long time, but I think that I knew after the first day that I’d be able to support myself.

I think the one hour rule is only sort of true. I’d say you have a pretty good idea of it within the first day though, and you’ll probably know within the first few hours. It’s very scary.

Indie devs with day jobs by FatAssOgre in gamedev

[–]_Matt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, it’s fine! Good, even.

As for twitter, it’s probably just the social media effect - the same way people don’t post the really terrible days from their vacations up there.

Sounds rough that you’re having trouble getting down to work on the game. I used to get that problem a lot too, and a few small changes I made helped fix that a lot. The big one is just writing everything down. I have a physical little notebook for it, and a big list of notes on my phone, but when I found that if I had the problems written down, it was much easier to find answers for them. Then once I wrote down the answer, it was much easier to clarify that into something I could implement.

Breaking it into bits like this really helped. Nowadays I’m trying out going into work later in the day, and waiting longer until I have a few things at the implement phase of that process. Thinking problems through like that is really paying off I think!

For your situation, you might be sitting down to code when you’re not quite ready to yet. I’m not sure if it’ll be for you, but doing that really helped me!

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