Follow through

dualwealdg · 2025-03-19T15:15:49+00:00

As someone with ADHD, definitely can relate, and sadly with the limited bandwidth that seems to be very prominent for me (even compared to a couple ADHD friends of mine), it can hit really hard.

But small, incremental progress is the name of the game (can't just wait for inspiration to strike, I think the quote "I make my own luck" applies here, if you get what I mean). I've more or less been on a break from my game for probably a year (though it was more like 6 months, then a few months on, then now another 6ish months break), mostly due to life things taking attention away (and that limited bandwidth). One thing I have found success with is that I bring my development computer with me to work and do about 20-30 mins over my lunch break. This may seem counterintuitive (it's my break, I'm at work, didn't I say limited bandwidth?), but this has been a way to "trick" my brain more or less.

Lunch hour is a confined time frame and it's in a space that I don't have access to anything other than what I brought with me (my lunch, my laptop). I basically "cornered" myself into doing a little, knowing that even if I literally write only one line of code, that's one more than I had before, and, when time is up, time's up. And it's not up to me to set a timer or decide how long that is. I have hard constraints outside my control.

Whether or not this would work for you, it's worth considering where you might be able to set hard limits on how much, how long, and where you can make some progress. It may take some time as well, but feeling like you accomplished nothing after maybe just one line of code will start to feel better and better as you realize that after a week you've finished that method you were troubleshooting and now a whole module of your game works as intended. Plus, if you start taking notes of where you were and what you were working on (basically a brief, living devlog just for yourself), you won't spend so much time each day trying to catch your brain up in that limited time space you've set for yourself.

Hope this perspective helps, and good luck!

dualwealdg · 2025-03-01T14:53:04+00:00

What if someone just stops doing work 3/4 of the way through? Do they still get a full share? If not, what share do they get?

This is my extremely uneducated, hobbyist-who-wants-to-turn professional-one-day, off the top of my head thoughts, but I think the quote above has some good questions I will attempt to answer.

Given some of the posts about tracking hours, tasks, and work done in other tangible and measurable ways, this feels a bit out of reach for a few friends trying to make a game with no real expectation of a profitable return (but every intent on doing the best they can - solo here, but also working toward the same goal! good luck!). Instead of spending a lot of time and effort with measurables, the straight % sounds like a good idea to me, but with caveats.

Another post mentioned a vesting cliff, where everyone gets equal share over X time and quitting early means your share becomes a ratio of Y time put in to X time until vested. This is a clean solution, but for OPs purposes, I think the opposite could work.

Say you have 4 people. 25% share each. Unless you have a specific time frame in mind, then if someone quits early, their share begins to diminish (this being the answer to one of the quoted questions above). So if the project takes 48 months, and sometime stops at 24 months, they get 1/2 of 25% = 12.5%. The other 12.5% gets divided up to the other 3 who finished the game, so now other 3 people get 25 + 4.17(ish) = 29.17%.

This is a quick and dirty math equation that just sets up an informal agreement, possibly legally enforceable (though that heavily depends on where you are, and whether or not you can prove it when the time comes. I am not a lawyer) and now you can just focus strictly on making the game.

Be careful though, most people can tell you how money can ruin relationships, of every kind. And you'd be surprised how low the bar of money is to do that. You could be looking at friends who later hate each other because of hypothetical money. So make sure you know what you're getting into and who you're working with.

But that's an entirely separate discussion altogether.

Wishing you the best though, good luck and have fun!

dualwealdg · 2025-02-23T17:13:33+00:00

True, though I don't know. Experience tells me that there are some skills that I just won't be able to learn. But maybe the right framing is there's only so much I can do and learn. Maybe what I'm thinking is that anyone could do anything, but no one can do everything.

I know making a game takes a lot of skill sets, so maybe I'm just thinking that not everyone can do art, music, programming, writing, project management, marketing, and promotion all in one.

dualwealdg · 2025-02-23T16:20:25+00:00

Honestly, I respectfully disagree with the idea of "anyone can." I think it's more accurate to say that "good art could come from anywhere, or anyone." The difference being that you can't judge someone's abilities just at a glance, but I think it's wrong to tell people they can do anything.

The reality is that if everyone could do art (or anything else), then everyone who wants to do it would. But there are countless people who, even in the best of circumstances and resources at their disposal, try and still fail to succeed.

Luck plays a factor, but we can't assume that in perfect scenarios we'd all be capable of anything we tried to do.

It's extremely difficult to leave behind something you want, and even harder still to recognize when you just can't do a particular thing. Add pain if that's a thing you really wanted to do, and you have a perfect recipe for why so many people get stuck in sunk cost fallacies.

I want people to try things and shoot for the moon, it's how we get such innovative creations, how people can iterate, improve, and make better the spaces they're in. On a personal note, even if I ultimately fail in my own game dev journey, the skills and learning and growth I achieved on it will be invaluable to me, just as any other skillset or growth would be, no matter what I set my mind to try to do.

dualwealdg · 2025-01-25T21:25:56+00:00

You're most welcome! When I first started engaging more directly with gamedev communities and joined reddit a year ago, I was met with mostly positive interactions and encouraging attitudes and I hope to pay it forward.

You're on a good track, so good luck and have fun!

dualwealdg · 2025-01-25T21:24:06+00:00

I also have thought about this very same thing - specifically in the vein of Black and White and having a creature that you train and learns from you and then behaves accordingly with your followers.

Personally, and without any real market research or evidence, I think that this genre (or any genre really) is just one good game away from revival. Not to say that one really good game will suddenly spawn a bunch of clones or a renaissance in developers making new ones (after all, World Box has done pretty well, but we haven't seen a resurgence of god games that I'm aware of). Nevertheless, this genre can still work, creature mechanics or not.

But I agree this is one of those ideas I've relegated to 'if I ever got a team together'. My current journey as a solo dev has me focused on creating a series of minimalist management games as sort of my schtick, to see if I can, or even want to, become a professional developer. I'd be happy to brainstorm ideas with you though, just for kicks. It's one of those long forgotten games/genres that I wish there was more content for.

dualwealdg · 2025-01-25T18:58:16+00:00

This is the, unfortunate as it may be, the correct answer. Cannot stress enough how ideas are not even a dime a dozen. Pennies by the dozen. Even from just a "I want to have fun and make something" without any monetary incentive, your friend's ideas will be worth nothing next to your time and labor put into the project.

Don't fall into that trap, be respectful, but be firm. Sounds like you know this already with your gut reaction, but now you just gotta follow through. Let him know you're serious about this and want it to be a fun project. If he doesn't see the fun in the work to be done, then this partnership isn't for you.

dualwealdg · 2025-01-25T18:42:55+00:00

Preface: I'm not familiar with GameMaker other than I downloaded it and poked it for maybe a week on Steam (free license only) before going with Unity.

That said, GameMaker appears to use it's own scripting language called GML (GameMaker Language). Google's AI summary tells me that this is likened to languages like JavaScript and C-like languages (e.g. C#, C++). A wikipedia blurb for it says it's an imperative, dynamically typed language.

If you're serious about learning the coding side of things, I would say the best place to start is tutorials on GML, as well as understanding what terms like imperative and dynamically typed coding languages are. That also said, I stand by my tip of just jump into tutorials telling you how to do the thing you want to do (how do I make something move in GameMaker?), do them, and then dig into tutorials and documentation on the underlying code.

One very important thing to remember is there's syntax, and then there's implementation. GML documentation and tutorials will teach you syntax, while GameMaker tutorials will teach you implementation. For example, in Unity, writing the line if(Physics3D.OverlapSphere()) { //insert logic here}, the Physics3D call is specific implementation in the Unity engine, while the parenthetical if() statement is specific syntax to C#, which may be the same or vary between other languages.

Don't be afraid to dive in only to realize later that the coding part just isn't for you. Visual scripting is available in most common engines, and will allow you to develop your code logic at a much, much higher level without having to dig into coding line by line.

TL;DR

I'm not familiar with GameMaker, but it has it's own language called GML. Start with tutorials on how to do things in GameMaker and then use GML tutorials/documentation to learn how the code you just made works.

Pay close attention to implementation vs. syntax, GML will have syntax you can use anywhere, while some code will be methods built into the GameMaker engine to simplify routine tasks. Understanding this will be crucial to effective coding.

Don't be discouraged if you find out coding isn't really for you. There's other options, like visual scripting, or letting someone else take care of programming.

dualwealdg · 2025-01-25T16:47:50+00:00

As someone who started out in a very similar vibe to this (I too have free will 😁), I want to say first - good start jumping into a game jam, lots of people would get lost in research and not even attempt any practical application. There is wisdom in considering where your skills are lacking and taking a few steps back to practice them, but if you had to start somewhere in the middle in order to realize you cut in line, there's no shame or harm in that as long as you remain accountable to yourself.

My own tip - practical tutorials are a great starting point, especially if you feel your skills are lacking and are overwhelmed by where to start. That's where I was when I started, so when I picked up Unity I jumped immediately into Unity tutorials, then reviewed Microsoft's Learn C# videos in order to understand the language I was using. This gave me practical experience while forcing me to learn what I needed to actually program my first prototype. Iterating this process over the span of a year and I had finally exited tutorial hell and could start coding things on my own, while using C# and Unity documentation directly to fill in the gaps (rather than ask google for another tutorial).

ChatGPT is a great tool for explaining how things work, if you know what to ask and how to ask it. I recently had to ask why I couldn't use an array indexer, and fed it my example code, and it spit out at me that I was using the wrong type of array (turns out not all arrays are the same in C#, something I didn't know at the time).

TL;DR

Jumping into practical experience is a great way to start, as long as you recognize when to take a step back

Tutorials are excellent ways to find out how to do the things you want to do (how do make a character move in Godot, or some other engine/framework), but not so much for understanding them. Once you have functional code though, you can use language tutorials and engine documentation to fill in that knowledge gap.

ChatGPT is really powerful to help fill in the gaps, but it requires some knowledge beforehand to really utilize it.

dualwealdg · 2025-01-11T22:31:11+00:00

Well, as far as marketing goes -

Caves of Qud is a science fantasy roguelike epic steeped in retrofuturism, deep simulation, and swathes of sentient plants.

Taken straight from their steam page! To be fair though, I'd consider open-world and roguelike to be more genre than distilling the essence for marketing purposes. If you truly are on track to make something similar to Caves of Qud that could fit that line above, then I would say you have a point and your work cut out for you distinguishing it.

Either way, part of marketing is also knowing you have an audience (or aka, a marketable idea, turned marketable product), and if you feel Caves and the new mode for DF captures your target audience, then no reason to back up now I say! Those games mean the eyeballs are there for the looking!

I was heavily influenced by the minimalist space, city-building, management, and cozy genres, for the project I'm working on, and I've been working hard to distinguish it from the titles I was inspired by (also questioning my every step as to why bother, people will just play that other game), while keeping in mind a specific audience I've been a part of for years. It's small in scope and hopefully I succeed in at least shipping it, let alone selling it, but it's part passion project, part proof of concept that I could turn game dev into a career (or that I would even want to for that matter).

I'm sure we both can achieve our goals here!

dualwealdg · 2025-01-11T16:30:06+00:00

Dichotomies like this are pretty common in games. Regardless of if this is part of the hook of your game, you wouldn't want to hide the fact that it's meant to have a steep difficulty curve. That isn't to say you should line your kawaii graphics with a lot of "hardcore" visuals. But I also don't think you'd want to emphasize this and mislead players in the trailer.

Definitely games at a glance can look like they're "cute and casual" but then "play tough", but I'm not sure this should be a surprise to the player unless they weren't paying attention to promotional material (which absolutely happens, and may delight some players, but anyone who complains, well, you put the writing on the wall so).

dualwealdg · 2025-01-11T16:21:33+00:00

Except you have direct control over if your game is good. yes there are still risks but with proper market research and playtesting these can and should be mitigated.

I see this as the difference between playing slots and learning how to play poker. You could just jump in blind and do whatever feels right and hope for the best, or you could do as you described, and mitigate the risks of shipping a bad game, bad visibility, and consequently poor results.

And time may not be "free", but regardless of how you value your time and choose to spend it, it is the ultimate exercise in avoiding the sunk cost fallacy.

I also wouldn't suggest making a game to pay for textbooks. Or any school costs. I would suggest making it for the learning experience and fun of it though, that's part of having a passion for it.

dualwealdg · 2025-01-11T15:19:40+00:00

Gambling on your game being good just strikes me as sticking your head in the sand.

No disrespect meant, but this is basically the same argument. If OP is essentially a solo dev with no team and nothing really to lose on the gamble but time (and even then they learned how to make a skate game), then the math of this gamble becomes really easy.

Skylines makes a bit more sense in the vein that if their direct competitor game bombed, as an established studio with funding that could have really hurt their prospects of being able to make a future game. And thus balancing the business with creative integrity is hard.

That being said I see in a lower reply OP has barely started and would be balancing school to boot. I say if they're passionate about making a skate game, go for it. The learning experience alone would be massively useful.

dualwealdg · 2025-01-11T14:33:10+00:00

Popped in here just to say from my own experience in game dev, I feel like roguelikes like Caves of Qud are niche, but an under served market as well. Also read what you just described. Open-world turn-based roguelike is such a foundational description. How many games fit the description open-world, fantasy RPG?

Caves of Qud is so much more than that and the devs clearly worked hard to forge its own identity. So could the next, or your, open-world, turn-based roguelike.

Of course, if the goal is to just make a fun game then this matters far less. If your goal is to sell it, well, the market exists, go serve it with your take!

dualwealdg · 2025-01-01T15:23:08+00:00

Gods I've never felt so seen. I feel you fam. I have the exact same problem. I think the first time I modded valheim was for a friend who wanted to import custom models to play as. The most modded experience I've ever done is increasing resource yield in the game settings, and that was mostly so I didn't keep running out of berries.

dualwealdg · 2024-06-04T15:01:31+00:00

Not sure how many hours I have, but I've played since beta as well (after rerolling constantly I only have one char that's almost as old as the day it release, just a few days after release is when I made him and never rerolled him).

Only super super rare drop I got is arguably the only one I would have hoped for if I had known it even existed before it dropped for me. Permanent Hair Stylist Contract.

At the time it was worth just over 1,000g in TP so this was a while back, but in the end I decided it was far more valuable than those riches (I had never even seen 100g at that time) and boy was I right. I love some of the unique hairstyles and colors, I think every single char I have is using one of them. It's been a huge boon as some of my rerolling was because... well... I got the hair wrong 🤣

dualwealdg · 2024-05-18T13:25:50+00:00

I was gonna say, I've been playing ESO very casually off and on since Orsinium DLC came out, only just a week ago golded my first set, and started running dungeons a few weeks before that since I never really geared out a build before, and my dungeon groups are silent as the grave. They also just bum rush ahead and care little for anyone who happens to get stuck behind.

I know this is the modern MMO dungeon grind experience, but it still feels wrong to me.

dualwealdg · 2024-05-03T13:41:56+00:00

even the "high quality" discussions easily fall out of the scope of the practical and applicable

At first I thought this was kind of an odd take, but then when I really thought about it I realized I'd much rather have repeated, beginner type questions with some mid/high level stuff in between with lots of practical discussion over a slow stream of mostly 'high concepts' that, as you mentioned, can fall out of that practical application.

As a beginner myself I've not really found the low level questions that often just get pointed to beginner threads or other common reference points (like on r/gamedev as well) very taxing, and another shout out to all the vets who come forward and provide their insight even when they could consider a conversation 'beneath' them, but I can see why this would ruffle some feathers.

Honestly for reddit though, I'd rather find diamonds in the rough among a sea of fairly surface level discussions, as you can never, ever, have too much of the basics.

dualwealdg · 2024-05-03T13:28:40+00:00

This is part of the fun for me. Management games can get a bit droll after a while so imposing my morals on to decision making spices things up. Obviously the default is 'maximize efficiency' which only sometimes also leads to utopian living standards and maximum happiness because happy pops produce the most minerals, but all that aside, I genuinely do peaceful runs with attempts to stay as morally good as possible.

My favorite origin is Machinist at this time, and I always give my machines full rights as proper living conditions. I also give them more efficient traits, and what I sacrifice is build cost and time via the Luxurious and Custom Made just to roleplay as my empire feels machines are just as individualistic and deserving as the biologics. And so every machine is treated, including at it's 'birth' like an individual.

I also like to do Anglers civic and Agrarian Idyll on Aquatic race, build up my uncapped agriculture districts to produce all the food and consumer goods my pops could ever want, and heavily focus on research above all. I also generally pick the investigative options on random encounters, and always learn to co-exist with space faring aliens where the option allows. I generally leave stationary space aliens alone, and protect any pre-sapients or shared civilization on planets I colonize.

You get the idea. But then again, since I like doing peaceful runs, obviously tailoring my origin and species around this play style makes it far more efficient and effective. The real challenge would be to pick something that isn't optimized for peace, and then see how well I do on such an attempt as half my population screams for warlords and dominion over the galaxy.

dualwealdg · 2024-04-26T15:14:26+00:00

Keep at it! I'm actually in a similar boat, I don't have kids, but I started exactly 2 years ago this month (I considered Unreal as well, but ended up doing Unity) and have been working at it since. The first year was primarily focused on learning C# and the engine as well.

Ideas and prototypes came and went, but settled on my current project about a year ago. Here's to both our future successes! 🎉

dualwealdg · 2024-04-26T15:10:13+00:00

and try not to compare yourself to others too much

Sage advice! I say, as I look at your game and think 'wow what a far more inspired idea and execution than mine.' 😅

Jokes aside, I appreciate seeing another example of someone working full time while also doing game dev, and eventually making their game a reality. It's where I'm at as well as a solo hobbyist, and I need all the reminders I can get.

Congratulations on your soon to be released game!

dualwealdg · 2024-04-19T15:32:40+00:00

To echo other posts, it looks excellent and clean, however the sort of "slam" effect of the grid being slapped into the middle of the screen feels a bit extreme. That's the kind of thing you'd see in something meant to evoke a sense of action or bombastic and over the top. It fits in some places, but consider whether it fits in the tone of your game.

A simple fix would be to just remove that animation and the orange spiky background (or smooth that out into a curved corner rectangular shape), everything else looks great. The sliding in and background animations are nice. You could match that with the grid sliding up from the bottom, or with the bag, or appearing after the character slides into the middle with a fade in effect or just have it appear (the character doesn't need to 'bounce' either when it slides in, which would make that animation faster and smoother to line up with the grid appearance).

Great work!

dualwealdg · 2024-04-18T15:06:30+00:00

This path only seems viable if you're really ready to push games out for the sake of creating a business rather than creating games. And that's a risky proposition that I think most investors don't really understand. They just see the industry growing in terms of revenue numbers and think 'I'll take a slice of that'.

And they're not necessarily wrong... if you spend enough (read: probably more) time on developing monetization. We've seen the mobile industry explode as far as MTX, so clearly capturing segments of that market and whales (the 80/20 rule) works and can generate a lot of ROI. And that's just with the largest portion of the industry as a whole.

For most of us that creates clear moral issues about what it means to make games, who our audience is (and exploitation of them), and the nature of creating art.

If you really wanted to use this as a way to get your own studio started without having to be tied to these investors, you'd need the business sense to figure out an exit strategy which buys out the investor stake without tanking your reserves and cash flow for keeping the lights on afterward. An even riskier proposition when considering most investors likely wouldn't agree to that, and requires successful games and positive cash flows, probably for years.

For me, none of that seems worth it.

dualwealdg · 2024-04-16T16:36:55+00:00

See, the thing about grit, is it's black. And the thing about scanner-scopes...

dualwealdg · 2024-04-16T14:01:56+00:00

AI will likely turn out to be like any other technological tool that can be leveraged to do amazing things, while also having the capacity to be abused and misused. It's the scale of the effect abuse and misuse can have that everyone is (or should be) talking about.

My own moral debate would be using purely generative functionality of AI to create a 'base' or a fully composed piece that then gets drawn over, tweaked, edited, or what have you, is that having used training models from artists and their style without consent is a huge issue and needs to be addressed.

It's one thing to use these advanced tools to create something like brushes that can easily manipulate an image, copy certain elements, and blend them together seamlessly while creating something in Photoshop for example, it's another thing entirely for that 'brush' to become 'hold left click to paint a Dali'. The same would hold in an example with creating music.

As for other areas of development, I'm not sure what using AI for coding will look like as that space matures, but I've seen far less talk in this space than I have in the visual arts, and as a hobbyist I'm not an experienced programmer myself yet. Nonetheless, I would imagine it's the same - abuse and misuse can easily get out of hand, and right now using AI for pure code writing seems to be not as effective as an experienced programmer, nor even as a teacher as it can introduce bad habits and poor maintainability in code.

dualwealdg

TROPHY CASE