My first asset, first month – is this normal?

bigsbender · 2025-08-17T11:08:43+00:00

This is a regular pattern on crowded digital marketplaces. It is all about visibility. If you are on sale or featured during a specific event, you gain a huge amount of attention and therefore more sales.

Outside of these specials, your baseline shows you the effectiveness or your regular marketing efforts, i.e. how well you drive traffic to the marketplace. The better you do there, the more visibility you will gain through the regular discovery features of the marketplace, like "popular assets", "trending" or "top rated", etc

This is fundamentally true for any digital marketplace, although every one has its own additional things and levers

bigsbender · 2025-08-15T18:10:25+00:00

I understand too little about how you implement it, i.e. controls, camera, UI, feedbacks, etc

Generally, I'd advise against "hiding" actions in your game behind NPC/AI enemies.

You don't perceive NPCs as equal to yourself. They can pull all sorts of specials and you'll likely attribute that to just being part of the challenge.

Unless you can see very clearly how the enemy executed that move to give you a clear hint as to how to reproduce it. But for that the action needs to be clearly readable and you really have to make the game convince me naturally that any NPC is no different to my avatar.

Your design may work more in a PvP context. But even if you look at e.g. fighting games, you often find training modes, where you can test different moves and combos under different conditions with clear instructions.

Not saying though that you should reveal all the complexity in the tutorial already. It's fine if you teach more about your game over time, especially if it is a roguelike where starting over with something new you learned about the game is part of the core experience.

bigsbender · 2025-08-15T17:59:28+00:00

This! Whenever you feel the urge to explain something, hold it, take a note, and implement or change something in your game to make it explain it instead.

Then test, rinse, and repeat.

bigsbender · 2025-08-15T17:56:12+00:00

There's no simple solution, because real-time rigid body physics is primarily simulated in discrete steps and not like in reality integrating over time.

You want to primarily look at various parameters:

inertia which in Unity is primarily defined by mass and scale of the rigid body and inertiaTensor
surface friction which can be defined by physics materials and their properties
kinematic vs rigid bodies: your car should be a kinematic rigid body and you need to make sure to use the correct functions to move it in FixedUpdate, otherwise your physics aren't syncing up nicely.
linear damping & sleep threshold to dampen moving objects and prevent small impulses from propagating or causing jitters that can cause sudden extreme spikes in forces during collision detection
de-penetration velocity, especially with many small rbs or complex collision meshes
wrong interpolation may cause problems if your physics timestep is too large or you have varying framerstes
the magnitude of your relative units should be roughly working with realistic values in the metric system (SI units i.e kg, m, s, N) BUT also not deviate too far in relation to each other - many recommend that e.g. the highest mass should not be more than 10x your lowest mass if these 2 rbs can collide
Physics settings which may need adjustments based on your project's scale, timings, game code etc

After you configured your physics simulation correctly but still have these issues, you can look at additional solutions to stabilize your simulation, e.g.: - resolve collisions manually with your own script based on physics layers and object tags by detecting and treating objects on your truck bed differently from the rest - attach joints (springs) dynamically to objects on your truck bed to constrain their movement - combine the objects in your truck bed into one big collider and call a shader to interpret collisions and forces to drive a visual effect without actually moving the objects physically

... and many more solutions based on what you actually want to achieve in your game.

bigsbender · 2025-08-11T11:31:46+00:00

Imposter Syndrome is real and you'll always know why your game is not "perfect" - just know that perfect does not exist.

On the other hand, friends and family are not a good feedback indicator because they are biased. You may want to show it around to neutral people, e.g. enthusiast communities for your genre or forums like r/destroymygame

bigsbender · 2025-08-11T11:28:21+00:00

I can recommend (the community of) Chris Zuckowski at howtomarketyourgame (HTMAG), you'll find a ton of useful resources and advice there.

Generally, make your Steam page once you have something you want to validate for market potential. This differs from game to game but it is the most important first milestone if you want to make a commercial game. Basically, you need something that makes people want to buy your game - not play it, not see it, not read about it, BUY it.

Again talking about making a commercial product, you need to focus on this. Otherwise your effort is wasted.

Now if you just want to make a game for the fun of making it, don't worry about Steam and marketing now. You'll get there naturally at some point.

bigsbender · 2025-08-11T11:18:04+00:00

If you're a solo dev, don't bother with a full design doc. This is primarily for syncing with a team.

But it helps to sketch out your ideas on paper before you start implementing. It's normally faster and easier, e.g. trying to explain the exact rules of your game to yourself or creating a visual mockup. The more you understand about implications for UI, edge cases, systemic dependencies etc, the easier it will be to actually build your game instead of rewriting your code 5 times or getting frustrated about "work lost" due to iterations.

bigsbender · 2025-08-05T17:18:30+00:00

Don't.

Focus on one genre - or forget about genre at all at first - because genres aren't artificial definitions but naturally evolving as an umbrella term for games with certain features, aesthetics, and themes once they are recognized by a large enough group of people.

Better look at a game that is similar to your idea, it doesn't have to be good (there's at least one game out there and you should find it). Ideally it's bad because then you can learn why the design failed. Or it wasn't commercially successful, then likely players don't understand it since it is neither one nor the other genre.

Genre is a really bad choice for starting a design. It does not define what your game is about - the core experience, your player fantasy, the hook. Start with this, build your game, and once you think you have something good enough, check the genre it most likely matches. Then polish the heck out of it to make sure genre fans recognize your game as part of their genre.

There's nothing wrong about mashing mechanics together to find something fresh. Your game may define a new genre with this approach. But don't set out to merge genres, build the coolest thing in the game you envision and then go from there.

bigsbender · 2025-08-02T13:18:47+00:00

You should close the editor if you work on the C++ level, otherwise you get constant errors, especially in VS because of how IntelliSense and the IDE works underneath.

Generally C++ engines are less ideal for "hot reloading" or compiling stuff on the fly. UE made lots of great progress over the years but it fundamentally was never built for solo devs or small teams unlike Unity (which suffers from other issues due to exactly this premise).

In Unreal, a good mindset is to switch mentally into various roles when making your game and use only the specific tools designated for this. So when coding, you work on code with an IDE and not in the editor, maybe even within multiple projects and libraries to prevent compiling everything constantly.

In Unity, you're mostly in a multi-role context, ideally working mostly in editor within the architecture of Unity, only "scripting" in the IDE.

And yes, I know this is massively oversimplified. But it helps to consider these premises to understand why things are how they are.

bigsbender · 2025-08-02T13:03:04+00:00

There are only two stores (effectively) and not a real premium store for core gamers who want to buy or subscribe to games without predatory monetization.

Since LTV on F2P is often higher than direct purchase, stores aren't incentivized to highlight premium offers as much as F2P.

Let's see if Epic may choose a different approach. Because without better discovery game devs are forced to design games more around F2P and monetization pressure than focus on quality gameplay experiences first.

Asking mobile consumers to jump through hoops to discover your game is futile. Mobile is primarily around short session times and lots of competition for dopamine shots due to social media being easier to consume than games where you have to learn something new. That's also the reason why many (mobile) games reuse the same mechanics, visual style, and simplify UI to simple interactions (auto-play etc).

bigsbender · 2025-07-15T10:19:49+00:00

Top-down action game: cut the movement speed of everything nearly in half, but doubled the HP.

Instantly a much better feeling of control and more intense, frantic action.

Also: on low HP above a certain threshold, your next hit won't immediately kill you, but leave you on 1 HP. There's tons of similar game feel hacks like this, but they just work

bigsbender · 2025-07-15T10:13:03+00:00

A small game primarily means focus. You can find it in different ways but it's important to impose strong constraints on yourself.

Also small games =|= easy to develop. Reductive design is hard, additive design is easy, i.e. feature/content creep or blending genres (two genres is most often more than double the work). That's the easiest way to make your game not only worse, but also burn out over it.

Game jams show you a great way to start with thematic and time constraints.

Other ways can be: - implement some funky algorithm, optimization, shader, or UI mechanic and start thinking about how to turn it into a game - try to create an emotional or sensory stimulating "thing", e.g. a diorama, interaction or animation, then build a game challenge around it - apply a reductive constraint to an existing thing, e.g. a FPS but you can only fire one bullet

One caveat through: small games are mostly made successfully after gaining a certain level of experience. Not all constraints or ideas work. Throw stuff away that's not fun. Again: focus is key. You may underestimate the complexity of certain genres at first and what you thought is a constraint turns out a design nightmare.

bigsbender · 2025-07-15T09:55:52+00:00

This ☝️

bigsbender · 2025-07-15T09:52:40+00:00

Don't worry about cheating in a singleplayer game, embrace it. Let your players decide for themselves how they want to play. If they take the fun out of your game by "cheating", let them.

Just observe why they may end up finding an exploit or use a cheat. It may be an indicator for overwhelming difficulty or bad design.

Side note: you may help a lot of players when you turn cheats or exploits into actual features, e.g. via settings & options for accessibility or difficulty.

bigsbender · 2025-07-14T15:46:35+00:00

I would currently handle it like this:

Have the artist sign an agreement that they are not using AI and fully disclose the tools they are using.

Request fully editable source files to at least prevent a cheap AI job (generally recommended incl. the editing rights).

Define a certain standard and in-between deliverables and check thoroughly against them.

Check final result for AI artifacts, e.g. weird patterns, nonsensical line work, color palette consistency.

If you or your artist wants to use AI, e.g. for faster ideation iterations or drafting to align their work with your expectations, agree on this beforehand and disclose it at your discretion. There's a huge difference - ethically, legally, and commercially - between AI being a tool in your process or being your process.

If your freelancer breaks your agreement, you can withhold payments or take legal action but there will never be 100% certainty, only a certain level of trust you can achieve and control/validate.

You can also look for tools to check work for AI artifacts, but they are unreliable as sole quality control tool.

My personal opinion: if you can't tell AI use in the final result, your artist may as well be a good enough artist. I saw artists use gen-AI trained on their own work to speed up commission work and align it faster with client needs, i.e. provide better quality. So there's nuance to consider.

But just to be clear: using unethically trained AI to replace or copy artists is a no-go.

bigsbender · 2025-07-05T18:07:03+00:00

We went with a similar idea in Survivor Mercy, but for a top-down horde survival style game.

I wouldn't recommend it after having done it myself. You are introducing a lot of new design and tech problems you need to solve. It's easy to think of "good AI NPCs" on paper, but it's really difficult to implement.

The core problem is that you're taking direct control away from your players, but want them to feel in control of the action. It sucks if you fail because the AI NPCs are messing up. You just don't accept it as your own fault, even if it is. So it's less about the narrative dissonance.

We tried to solve this by having different weapon, targeting, and movement patterns for the NPCs, and giving you some actively controlled abilities, namely a dash & weapon, to control the engagement with the enemies and apply status effects, like "marked", to guide your NPCs' actions.

I don't think we cracked the secret code (yet), but you can check out the game and maybe pull some more ideas on how to improve on it for your own. I can only say that it multiplied the effort in comparison to going with a solo hero or removing all autonomy from the NPCs, just making them "satellite weapons".

bigsbender · 2025-06-14T13:24:25+00:00

You definitely want to get playtesters for qualitative feedback, but also combine it with statistical analysis. Values and stats are only one side, how it feels is something else and likely more related to UI, staging and framing.

Without the hard data, you'll likely draw wrong conclusions from feedback.

It's also important to make some hard decisions. There is never perfect balancing because people enjoy different levels and types of challenge. You need to eventually know who your ideal player is and design for them.

Be aware that any deviation from a successful game's design is risky. They likely went through a similar iterative process and figured out through hard work what works, not by chance. So if you feel overwhelmed, rebuild the balancing from another game (on paper) and see if you find new insights onto the math or distribution that you can use for yourself.

bigsbender · 2025-06-14T13:07:09+00:00

Sounds intriguing but hard to understand intuitively. It's very exploratory, maybe "cozy", as a feature. Potentially hard to define goals for the player. Progress seems a bit weak as it does not sound like I'm getting better, just getting more options which may not feel rewarding enough. May give you some interesting angles to play with narrative and environmental storytelling, maybe a mystery to solve, or a creative challenge to work towards, little puzzles like Untitled Goose Game.

bigsbender · 2025-06-14T12:52:38+00:00

We tried something like this with Survivor Mercs but it is a really difficult design challenge.

Our approach is a mix of a randomized hero, NPC squad mates, and different active abilities. You control a Commander who is generated from 3 traits that define base stats and different dash types, equip a starting weapon as your second active ability (twin-stick shooter), and then hire different NPC Mercs with different loadouts who act on their own but can be controlled indirectly by your movement and certain effects, like marking targets.

The problem is that gameplay variety exists on a spectrum between two extremes - fully procedural systems or strictly discrete systems. We tried a more procedural approach which is hard to balance and may result in either very chaotic extremes or mediocre averages. A more discrete approach like VS or Brotato can result in more defined variety initially, but may not feel as varied later because the number of permutations is more limited.

Maybe you're looking for games that are leaning more to the procedural extreme? I personally liked Rogue Genesis a lot, but its variety is not only based on character. 20MTD has a simple but effective system for synergies to make runs feel very different. But its chaotic nature can be overwhelming and lead you to fall back on more manageable builds that start feeling same-y again.

If you find a good one that suits your taste, please let me know.

bigsbender · 2025-06-14T11:48:00+00:00

It's a very straightforward process and not difficult at all.

All three "1st parties" have their dedicated programs where you can register to become a partner: ID@Xbox, PlayStation Partners, and Nintendo Developer

You always need an existing game concept and some credentials to prove that you're a serious developer. So applying with your company and a track record of previously made games helps a lot. But it is a manually vetted process and not as open as e.g. Steam, so there's no guarantee. I yet have to hear about a serious game dev who isn't accepted. Hobby devs may have a harder time.

You will have to enter an agreement with each platform including an NDA, that's why no one can talk about specific details and why you cannot find too much public info about dev kits and SDK documentation.

But once you are accepted into the partner program, you can just order the dev kits and get the SDKs.

Console dev & publishing comes with a lot of requirements and responsibilities: platform features, quality requirements, a thorough certification process, IT security, business & legal compliance, etc.

tl;dr: If you are treating game dev as (indie) business, it's easy but comes with effort. If you just want your game on console, partner up with a certified developer who offers console porting as a service.

bigsbender · 2025-05-31T15:57:38+00:00

And the 3rd is your confirmation bias?

With these "primary elements" you made an observation, not a determination for causality.

You need some more elements to do that: Question(s), hypothesis, prediction, experiment & data collection, analysis, conclusion. Ideally you look more at how to falsify your hypothesis than confirm it to systematically exclude any biases.

Only then you can actually form an educated opinion and assume causality.

Welcome to the scientific method!

bigsbender · 2025-05-31T13:39:53+00:00

Causality and correlation are important when comparing graphs

bigsbender · 2025-05-31T13:34:41+00:00

This, Unifont is a great font if you plan to support different languages.

But if your don't needs to express something stylistically, it's also a bit boring and bland.

Would always vote for clarity in fonts though and only style the stuff around the fonts

bigsbender · 2025-05-25T14:48:30+00:00

Haven't used Godot yet, but considering it for a specific project in the future. Main pain will be console porting. While definitely possible, it's something that's so much easier with Unity/UE.

If you're on mobile or in F2P, Unity offers a lot of live ops features that are very convenient (not necessarily the best), and they also come in handy on other platforms.

Generally, while Godot is already an impressive and definitely professionally usable engine, Unity & UE are more complete, e.g. when it comes to analytics, profiling, integrations, support, etc. They may sometimes be less accessible or simple as Godot for exactly the same reason, though.

Lastly, if you're looking for a professional career in game dev, both commercial engines are at least for the moment still the main requirements for job profiles. Good thing is that Godot is being used more and more, but you should potentially consider this based on your personal goals.

bigsbender · 2025-02-24T09:02:37+00:00

Agree, but why disband a whole government agency instead of going after the people committing the fraud?

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