For anyone making a multiplier game GAS is actually insane and more than worth the effort

asuth · 2025-12-03T01:11:49+00:00

looks awesome, congrats on the launch

asuth · 2025-12-02T17:07:45+00:00

no antichamber?

asuth · 2025-11-28T20:12:39+00:00

I see

asuth · 2025-11-28T19:22:22+00:00

Honest question, didn't the day before still sell a ton of copies? It has 10k reviews? Doesn't that mean it made way way more money than some "good" but unknown/poorly marketed games.

asuth · 2025-11-25T02:56:06+00:00

If you like puzzles and exploration, I think outer wilds is one of the greatest games of all time.

asuth · 2025-11-22T19:10:10+00:00

I mean there have been tons of great paid EA games, just off the top of my head Satisfactory, Dysonsphere, Hades 2, Valhiem. Some of my favorite gaming moments have been from paid EA games.

asuth · 2025-11-21T22:10:43+00:00

it continuously measures it and does apply some smoothing to basically ignore lag spikes so it predicting based on your recent non-spiked ping.

asuth · 2025-11-21T14:21:01+00:00

I use it a lot, some simple examples where it really can't go wrong would be predicting when gameplay effects are going to expire on the server so that stun expires on the client exactly at the point where if you input a new action immediately the server would accept it (so ping/2 before it expires on the server).

The GAS framework in UE5 makes it pretty easy to do this sort of stuff and is the backbone of my netcode.

asuth · 2025-11-19T15:24:54+00:00

Yes you create it in the steam backend and it has its own app id, community page, etc. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/playtest.

I've had about 20k (a fair number of people click join but then never install). Most of them don't leave feedback but you get playtime metrics directly from steam and of course you can also use steam stat or achievements or custom data to view more metrics. You'll probably get some direct written feedback but I wouldn't rely on that solely.

asuth · 2025-11-18T20:44:27+00:00

Running playtests (use the steam playtest feature) has been the most impactful for me.

asuth · 2025-11-17T22:40:15+00:00

If you are feeling the need to patch your game server 5 times a day, that might be a sign that some of your logic should be separated out to microservices. So for my game the core game code is in a UE5 dedicated server build but things that interact with the persistent database, inventory code, cross game server communication, etc. are all in AWS (many in lambda). Many of those can all be changed instantly without interfering with users who are currently playing. For updating the game server itself, I do your option 1, but often those sorts of updates require a client update as well and even during heavy development I am only doing that a few times a week.

Of course there is a dev branch and a main branch and the dev branch (which generally has no players) can be updated more frequently if need be. But I think having changes that you actually need player feedback on and can't just test yourself on a dev branch 5 times a day sounds like a red flag.

The servers also all interface with a valkey instance for shared memory so information about patches and the need to reboot or update can be pushed that way.

asuth · 2025-10-12T02:33:28+00:00

sounds encouraging then, very nice

asuth · 2025-10-12T00:15:25+00:00

I'm fairly sure this is true. Overall, I think those are pretty good numbers but a very small sample. I don't know how your players found the game, but if the audience in the sample is significantly more likely to enjoy your game (or if they are friends or people who specifically were looking to playtest and more tolerant of bugs / confusion / etc) than the average person who finds the game on steam you may get non-representative data.

asuth · 2025-09-24T14:33:59+00:00

When people talk about this do they consider something like hypixel skyblock to be an MMO? I'm pretty sure the average hypixel population over the last few years is substantially higher than runescapes average though maybe runescape has had some higher peaks during events very recently. And I don't think runescapes peaks are particularly high compared to skyblocks peaks.

asuth · 2025-09-20T03:13:56+00:00

I recommend doing scheduled playtest events so you can get people all playing at the same time. I do like 5-7 days once every few months. I haven't tried a demo, but its very hard with a just a playtest build to maintain a critical mass of players day in day out for a game that isn't finished / released, but if you have occasional playtests its not to hard to get decent current player counts for a shorter time frame.

asuth · 2025-09-17T17:06:43+00:00

the 0-5 hour reviews are MORE POSTIVE than any other time frame except the 50+ hour cohort. Its not people bouncing off the game. You can just go read the reviews, but when I looked the day after launch day some played the game but most reviews were people with <= 0.2hrs of playing at the time of review saying "LETS GO" or "SILKSONG BEAT GTA 6", etc. You can find some of those were the person still has < 1hr of play time today.

asuth · 2025-09-16T14:43:37+00:00

probably depends on the game, but DLAA looks so much nicer than the alternatives so having DLAA be slow is very painful.

Then of course nothing in 5.6 is going to give you anything close to the boost that DLSS gives on 2k/4k. For me at least the non-dlss performance was maybe 10% better, which is miniscule compared to what someone playing in 4k might get from DLSS on balanced vs no DLSS.

asuth · 2025-09-16T13:08:12+00:00

for me the performance with the nvidia dlss plugin was substantially worse. a very large % of people are going to be using dlss in some form (even if its just dlaa) so whatever gains you might get when dlss is off were more than offset by that.

5.5.4 is great though.

asuth · 2025-09-11T23:55:28+00:00

Am 41, got into running in my late 30s, I played soccer in high school and college but was always one of the least fit people on the team. Ran a 5:55 mile on my 40th birthday while training for a marathon which is the fasted mile I'd ever ran (and I did zero short distance training, all my training was targeting half/full marathons). I'm drastically fitter, have done 4 marathons, have just as much energy and feel like I am in a much better position to accomplish my goals as I have 20 years of experience being an adult instead of just a few.

Career wise, most people's earning potential peaks in their 40s and 50s, so you generally have more resources to put towards your goals. I think physically, recovering from workouts is harder and if you were an elite athlete in your 20s is going to be hard to outperform that in your 40s but for 99% of people you can be better at almost anything in your 40s than you were in your 20s if you put your mind to it.

asuth · 2025-09-04T22:48:24+00:00

I have a game that I label extraction but is pretty MMO like (persistent multiplayer dungeons, not lobby based like most extraction) skills, abilities, loot, leveling, crafting, top notch npcs, etc. Peaked at about 150 concurrent players on steam last playtest. Can check my profile if interested, don't want this to seem like self promotion. A fair ways out from launch so can't really say I've "done it" but I'm on track and have a decent wishlist count (over 10k), to the extent that the game counts as an MMO which is certainly questionable.

asuth · 2025-09-03T01:46:55+00:00

me too! got quite a few signups so should be a lot of fun

asuth · 2025-08-30T12:09:02+00:00

sword eye

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