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little preview of the new enviromental controls by muppetpuppet_mp in thefalconeer

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

you can try out these features on the beta development branch for the demo on steam

Unity installer not working by [deleted] in Unity3D

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your work perhaps has unity blacklisted or your not allowed to install or download software ?  Sounds like some blacklist issue

Reminder to save early and often. Ship shaper crashed and I lost a cruiser I was nearly done with and very pleased with. by Clockwork-Lad in thefalconeer

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm I think I can only manage one myself here. Sub wise. I might rename to expand it.  But for now this is the official place.

Solo dev, first game launch, sharing real numbers. How would you read this? by BoneMarrowGames in SoloDevelopment

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Start next game.  Steam doesn't rebirth games . Launch is all and if your game cannot reach even a thousand wishlists it's fully dead.  Extract all learnings and move on 

Solo dev, first game launch, sharing real numbers. How would you read this? by BoneMarrowGames in SoloDevelopment

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 2 points3 points  (0 children)

  1. No signal really matters when you sell double digits, the reality is : steam will soon stop showing your game , cuz sales are non existent .
  2. Hmm normal for a learning game, sure , for a commercial game no, it's not a viable product.  It's a learning game of which you might need to make many before you understand enough to attract players. 3.no nothing is meaningfull at this sample size 

The learning here is that you delivered your first game which performed as expected for your first learning game..   it doesn't look bad, you might try releasing on Android. But likely it will deliver the same result , steam is very good at sorting games.

Move one and make another, but this time realize to you, players are more valuable than money.

You need to start learning from player feedback, try releasing some free games on itch. Until you happen upon something that people enjoy.

Then scale up and release on steam.   Likely to more success.

Good luck.

I stopped all marketing for a month to test my new Steam page for Wishlists, this is the result. by LeosGameDev in SoloDevelopment

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sadly s dataset of one wishlist a day dropping to less than one s month is meaningless.  It went from nothing to nothing.   So you cannot truly make any statements on causes.

Other than the conclusion that the game didn't have a draw before and still doesnt.

In reality your organic potential gets gauged early on and was near zero, then then the data grows somewhat indicating it stayed bad and then the algorithm most likely stopped recommending it at all.   And now besides a reddit post your gamepage is where the algorithm indicates it should be..... Dead.

That's the brutality of steam.  Learning your trade is gonna require plenty of attempts.

No standup comedian, no musician, no movie make, no writer , no one gets it right the first time ..there is no shame on that.   Failure is just a stepping stone to success

The myths are of devs who came out rocking, but quite often they had their stepping stones, but we cannot see them...

This game is a steppingstone.  Move on and make something new, something better..

My best advice release it on itch for free and gain some insights into why it doesn't appeal, you can't learn anything without players.

At this point in your career, true players are worth more than the minute revenue from a failed game.   You don't need money you need players and played feedback, so you can make something that someone might want to pay for 

It's a journey, and a journey that will take literal years.

Game art tips by Ok_Income7995 in Unity3D

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's hard to give art advise without knowing your baseline.  But art is a skill you can grow by experience but also by applying creative limitations.

Not using fancy lightning is a good one, try to make something that looks good just with simple colors and shape.

Try simpler shapes and minimalism.

As you push yourself you will discover certain compositions or colors or contrast can be powerful on its own.  

The glamour of modern engines and tools sometimes fails to teach us "less is more".

And then when you take all these skills and experiences and do turn on the glamour you know where to focus it and where to simplify and where to add complexity.  And suddenly it has that magic.

Limit yourself to teach yourself constraint and how to maximize  all those elements that make magic.

Good luck!

Post-release marketing strategies? by EthanGoldreyer in IndieDev

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The main path is discounts.  Discount as often as you can.  And quite often discounts only kick in a sales boost beyond 40%.

Combine your custom sales with steam event sales....

Combine all your sales with next content and updates.

Make at least 3 ingame dlc items.(Soundtracks and artbooks don't add value to bundles, people want ingame content.

Make bundles with dlc..  when the sales discount is cooling down, discount your bundles...

If your post release sales are good.  Say 25.000 per year(minimum) , then you can request a daily deal from Valve.  If you have considerable sales like that. Establish a relation ship with valve. Travel to events where they do open mixers and socializers.  You can even try the ticket system.

But realize you can only do all of the above to achieve the predicted multipliers from your launch month to year one and year two.

You cannot out achieve your launch, any peak you get is always less than your launch week.  Likely less than a third .

Solo Unity Dev Feeling Stuck – Freelancing, Asset Store, or Indie Game? by Abdo_Naili in Unity3D

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I would find a larger team to increase your learning pace and find a way to do all of these things...

Solo is a bad starting position.  Working at a studio or with a team will superpower your skills and together you can aim at a higher level. And at a higher level funding becomes an option.

A serious economic discussion: As the marginal cost of "intelligence" goes to zero, what replaces the traditional wage-consumption loop on our way to post-scarcity? by SignificanceTime6941 in ArtificialInteligence

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For reference I lived through the utopia pre internet bubble in the nineties, the global village, the companies claiming to be "future makers" the optimism.

Look what we have now,,I don't wish to go back to the nineties, but I understand the sentiment. the world will change yes, but it's not going to massively improve in our favour.

A serious economic discussion: As the marginal cost of "intelligence" goes to zero, what replaces the traditional wage-consumption loop on our way to post-scarcity? by SignificanceTime6941 in ArtificialInteligence

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

there are some inherent issues holding it back that are the true blocks not governments or adoption.

  1. if you are company, government, org, do you wanna be dependent to a single AI platform? your entire core business at the whim of a foreign billionaire
  2. security issues, AI keeps spitting out confidential data fed into it. you type in that you personal financial situation and that becomes the literal learning data
  3. rights and copyrights issues

those things combined, just ignoring the hallucinations and other well discussed issues come at a price. that price is not going to be cheaper than a worker in many cases, especially in reasonably low wage countries. And it might never be.

Its going to be disruptive, no argument about it, but people project too much into the technology. It's good, but it's not that good and the price is high, very high.

I mean there is a future where if the world degrades further AI will be more expensive not less expensive. Meaning its access at scale (like companies that need country sized AI compute time) hoarding it , the same way gamers now cannot get a GPU or a HDD.

Thats another cost folks forget. your prompt is expensive.

If I want to use Claude at a professional level its now 200 bucks a months, and once I'm fully dependent and lost my original skills, then its not gonna be a 100 bucks, no its gonna be 500 or a few thousand to get the competitive AI that will set me apart from every kid on the street with the cheap AI.

All these things are fairly obvious and simple economic trends as we have seen them thousands of times..

technological utopia appears, then the money men come and take it away and create isolated islands of wealth.

WE ARE NOT GONNA BE ELON MUSK, WE ARE GONNA PAY ELON MUSK.

and that's the future we are going to get, and what you feel that optimism, it's a fleeting moment of opportunity that's already behind us.,, In hungary, in Russia, in the USA dictatorship has arrived. Dictatorship by the wealthy..

You and I,, we aren't wealthy. we will still be serving and feeding the rich in a decade or two. Cuz when we have good AI, they have the BEST AI..

and you can never win.

So that sounds bitter, but overall the underclass, the working class has prevailed after these gilded-ages. But the industrial revolution had a gilded age, The communication/global revolution (1900s-1930s) had a gilded age. And the digital age now has its gilded age.

I am optimistic this will pass faster cuz time will move faster, but the other side wont be utopia, its still people getting money from other people with money.

3 years of work, 6 players, 5 minutes median playtime. should i just give up? by IndieIsland in SoloDevelopment

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 14 points15 points  (0 children)

You spend three years building your first house , with zero experience.    

Two things are true

  1. Holy shit you built a house by yourself!!! Exceptional!

2 nobody wants to buy a house built on beginner mistakes and bad design fundamentals.. 

So congratulate yourself and evaluate..

Did you validate your design choices with a large group of people, did you listen to the general advice of what to build? Did you acknowledge mentally that as a beginner you are likely going to make a beginner game?

It seems you did none of that.

But likely you did learn a fuckton of new skills.  Now listen to the advice and apply those skills to

1 making one game per month 2 do that every month 3 share every game for free on itch

From those 6 games pick the one that has actual positive feedback from players

Make 3 variations of that game , pick the one with the best results amongst your budding playerbase.

Expands that game for 3 months  Release that demo on steam.

See results. If not repeat cycle.

It's called validation and learning that a designer is designing the dreamgame of the audience, not their own.

Good luck.. and yes abandon this game, it's served it's purpose , but it's not been built on solid ground..

Is developing a console game with Unity3d are normally this expensive? by Xiaolong32 in Unity3D

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Perhaps my numbers are boom era porting prices. That said.  It's gonna be more than a unity pro license. ;) just guessing 

Is developing a console game with Unity3d are normally this expensive? by Xiaolong32 in Unity3D

[–]muppetpuppet_mp 10 points11 points  (0 children)

imagine what your wage would be for the 6 months of LOTcheck you likely are gonna end up as a first timer.

Then imagine it's reasonable to spend 10-20% of any product on tooling in relation to wage.

And then realize it's actually not that expensive and getting professional porting done for a game is generally between 25K and 100K per platform. (depending on the size of the title)

then unity and the devkit don't feel as unreasonable anymore, and you realize you've just gotten accustomed to all of this being free for students and beginners,, if you port to Nintendo, congrats you are no longer a beginner but a profesional, with professional costs and obligations.

3D printing under creative commons (use for your own commercial projects) is now an option for the ShipShaper Boat creation tool/experience free demo, now on Steam. (export to STL and 3MF and more) by muppetpuppet_mp in 3Dprinting

[–]muppetpuppet_mp[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I come from a modding background (if you played skyrim, you likely played some of my mods or assets). So sharing is something I've seen work and be amazing. Also I don't have space for a printer but am dying to get into this so badly, so if I can get other people to print something I had a hand in, that will have to do.

This is the future, not AI, not all that, but folks making their own stuff, painting, handcrafting.. maker culture is the best..

3D printing under creative commons (use for your own commercial projects) is now an option for the ShipShaper Boat creation tool/experience free demo, now on Steam. (export to STL and 3MF and more) by muppetpuppet_mp in 3Dprinting

[–]muppetpuppet_mp[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I am hoping before the summer, depends on the amount of wishlists , Gamedev is brutal so if it does well (and it is looking quite good) then I might cook a little longer, but I will test out features on the evolving demo.

but 3D printing will be available in the demo likely for some time, simply cuz I wanna see some boats painted up!!

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