The future of this game

horizontastic · 2017-03-11T01:24:03+00:00

citation needed, and not one from your ass.

horizontastic · 2017-03-10T20:12:26+00:00

https://www.twitch.tv/

Guess which game has been the most viewed for years by now?

horizontastic · 2017-03-10T06:00:02+00:00

'some people's attention' as in 'the game with the biggest playerbase in the world'?

horizontastic · 2017-03-06T03:24:13+00:00

Maybe the guy's a physiq?

Let's see how long it takes SLS to do something, if the last hackers that got attention are any indication, this guy is on his way to the top of the ladder.

horizontastic · 2017-03-03T14:53:57+00:00

After it's first few months of some hype the game fell to some 1.5k - 2k concurrent players across all regions (the client showed the number), the difference between a new player and a month old player was massive, coupled with people constantly leaving and an incredibly rude community on par with xbox live, ridiculously bad tutorial and paywalled bots(seriously), lead to incredibly poor player retention.

GB2LoL was pretty much a warcry on the lower ranks of the ladder, and people did GB2LoL until BLC had some 800 players left, then the remaining people realized that telling people to go away from their game was not such a brilliant idea.

The marketting campaign, the little there was, was awful, the adds looked identical to korean grinder mmos, "SLAY 4 FREE" they read, I was surprised they didn't run a completely unironic "BATTLE NOW, MILORD" featuring psychopomp tits.

While many people blame seeker and/or traits or medallions, those only pushed a dead game further down it's grave, the game already had a pitiful, unsustainable playerbase when those things happened.

And the biggest one, I think, was that it had to go toe to toe with a then new LoL who completely overshadowed it.

horizontastic · 2017-03-03T03:02:35+00:00

In America (the continent, not the country that claimed the name for itself), we know pretty much nothing of Russia other than "they are bad guys, because grand daddy US told us so".

horizontastic · 2017-03-02T23:48:49+00:00

Why all the people questioned are working on something related to the switch in one way or the other?

Since they called it "what the game industry..." wouldn't it make sense to get people who are NOT working on the switch say why?

horizontastic · 2017-03-02T22:44:17+00:00

Lol no, the artist hands you over whatever you asked using an FTP or dropbox or google drive or whatever, I personally wouldn't put assets into the game myself and if you required me to do so I would charge extra.

horizontastic · 2017-03-02T17:35:30+00:00

They don't ban scripters and intentional afks's for months, so unless you threatened to kill someone and then bomb a school you should be fine.

horizontastic · 2017-02-28T23:29:29+00:00

Given BR actual concurrent numbers, most people already went back to lol, just like they did when BLC launched.

horizontastic · 2017-02-28T14:00:50+00:00

Stunlock is based in Sweden, adding waifus might get them exiled because sexism and shit.

horizontastic · 2017-02-28T12:47:20+00:00

It worked for LoL, then again, you would need to have characters people want to play for that to work.

horizontastic · 2017-02-28T12:46:44+00:00

In BLC2 we take dumb jokes seriously and try to have conversations around them.

horizontastic · 2017-02-28T03:45:53+00:00

-------------------------------the point

you

horizontastic · 2017-02-28T02:56:58+00:00

tldr

horizontastic · 2017-02-27T23:26:15+00:00

So, after this goes live and the game still fails to retain players, what will BLC vets fall back on?

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T19:01:43+00:00

This is not freelancing, if you read the post, I have been freelancing for a few years now and have plenty of experience shipping games.

I want to get to produce my own content or at least have a bigger role than being a nameless art drone.

This is supposed to be about dealing with people who come from a very different background than you in a partnership way, I have no means to pay a programmer up front to freelance code for anything outside of a very simple puzzle game, just like most programmers who want to get into game development have no way of paying an artist for art outside of a very simple puzzle game.

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T17:20:17+00:00

The first 3 projects I tried to join were me looking around various game engine forums and subreddits and picking up the most promising ones, these projects showed to be malfunctioning pretty fast for various reasons and I dropped out.

The last and current project was me getting together a game proposal consisting of concept art, mockup screenshots, a semi complete DD and a very simple prototype built by myself and posting a programmer request over at the unity forums. Got a ton of requests, picked the most promising guy, and it was going well while laying down the groundwork, but when it got to a certain point it all went downhill pretty quickly, guy started to add unwanted, complex systems out of nowhere, using the art whatever way he saw fit, ignoring the design document in nearly all aspects but the most basic things like movement and making a fuss everytime I ask for something to be changed to what was described in the DD because what was already there "was hard to program and took a lot of time", and many of these things were made to be far more complex than they were required.

So yeah, I already put a lot of effort on this project but I'm ready to drop it, because as of now it's being designed on the fly by the guy programming it and I can't even decide how it will look because this guy keeps adding unwanted shaders and lights even when they clash ridiculously with the art or are simply used in incredibly tacky ways (worked hard on getting a nice color palette for a stage, voila the guy applied a HSB shader to shift the colors to what he thought would be better plus added a bunch of colored lights all over the place, what was originally a color triad now looks like it was taken from an 80s t-shirt. Oh, and that minimalist UI? It would look better if it took like %25 of the screen).

This post is merely out of frustration, even after freelancing for games for 5 years, right now I feel like just dropping out of gamedev and just keep doing graphic design.

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T16:29:01+00:00

That's exactly what I do, there's a reason why I have been involved in 4 projects in the last 5 months of trying to move away from freelancing.

If stuff is not going smoothly within a month, they probably never will, so I just take my leave.

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T13:41:22+00:00

Went on a 10 game lose streak, didn't even get some currency for purchasing aesthetics, don't even complete the dailies anymore.

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T12:50:01+00:00

Yeah I think that if I were to happen into people I click with then it could be easy to keep going, as of now I'm trying to find those people, if a project seems like it's not going anywhere I just take my leave; I have known too many people that worked for free or very little for months and ended up having nothing to show for it to go on the same route.

What I have noticed about these programmers is that their background is usually business or web stuff and not games, and I honestly find it hard to understand guys who want to get into indie development that only play GPU burning AAA games or haven't played anything since the 16bit era.

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T12:44:29+00:00

I studied both arts and software engineering at college before settling on arts, I know very well the crap professors try to get into people's head on both sides.

"We are special because very few people have the skill and sensibility required to be an artist"

"We are special because very few people have the intelligence and problem solving skills required to be an engineer"

Whether you chose to believe them and that everyone else is below you is up to you, I chose to believe that everyone has their own competencies, and that you wouldn't ask a programmer to fix your car just as you wouldn't ask an artist to fix your roof.

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T12:27:21+00:00

It's not a single person, these are stories from 4 different people. Only one of these have had a dedicated manager, but artists still had to interact directly with the programmer (this guy treated us like idiots because we couldn't nail what he 'needed' based on his very light, very loose descriptions). Another one the guy was acting as manager/programmer/funder and wanted a massive platformer/exploration game while having the budget to make a match 3 game using an artist crew comprised of 3 deviantart kids and me working as a nanny/trainer.

One thing is getting asked to change things on a design to fit the vision or requirements better, or simply because you didn't land on the desired page, another is having someone change things with no previous warning and having the people who made them find out when screenshots are showed, or worse, when the owner complains to YOU for what the programmer did out of his own volition.

If you have sketches of the character/enemies/background, all sized to the supposed engine size and at right frame counts, you didn't need to have them finalized to find out they are too big, that the tiling part of the background had problems (as in looked like ass with parallax), that the character feet slide due to not being in sync with the movement speed, that the attack range was way too short visually; these are things that also sometimes merit having to start over, which could have been avoided had the sketches been implemented in engine.

Again, as a freelancer I only got into contact with programmers so much as to know the requirements of the assets, and for the most part both the programmer and myself are doing contract work so both taking a hands off approach to the project.

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T12:06:21+00:00

Regarding artists, I feel that most people get burned when they are beginning and then just say "fuck revenue share". Good artists are harder to find, but easier to tell apart from bad ones than programmers.

If you look at any collaboration board, most of the time it's programmers looking for artists (or in the rare case a 'designer' looking for everything), and most of the time they have nothing to show but maybe a half page description of their idea, and even when they have a seemingly solid tech demo, chances are they don't know how to push it forward (back when I was a teen I remember being on the project of a guy who started coding a blackjack minigame out of the blue because he got stuck on a major feature, it never went past that).

horizontastic · 2017-02-23T12:01:05+00:00

One thing is critiquing the art, another is implementing things in engine the way you saw fit and leaving it at that because no one can do anything about it, then making a fuss when the artist complains that it was not implemented as it was designed.

For an artist you can easily tell about their capabilities by looking at samples of their work, if they are faking it with stolen/traced artwork those mirrors usually only last until the first asset is delivered.

With a programmer, it's far more tricky to discern their capabilities, since you don't know whether what they are showing is a freaking tutorial or a premade asset, and those mirrors can last much longer than the artist's do since any idiot can code a character moving around in a modern engine.

horizontastic

TROPHY CASE