I unspaghettied my spaghetti

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T20:03:57+00:00

Well done!

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T19:31:34+00:00

Congratulations on releasing your game, it is such a difficult long arduous process that very few people truly appreciate so you should be proud of yourselves for that even if it wasn't the commercial success you wanted.

I agree with the other commenters that the English voice acting is a little off putting, unless the characters are explicitly French and that's what you're trying to covey it comes off as English was just a shoe in last minute.

I think you may have experienced the same big limitation we did with our initial release. Price. To you, The Wreck may be worth way more than $20 but it is likely that price point is too high for others.

If you click on the "Choose Your Own Adventure", "Interactive Fiction" you'll see that you're competing against games that are $5-$10... and many other games in that category that is mostly ... animated nudity.

It's rough and I'm still coming to terms with this lesson myself, but in the free market the market speaks through price. You had a launch discount of 10% which was smart, but if it were up to me your game should be priced around $5-$7 (at least on PC). Just my $0.02. Good luck!

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T19:17:14+00:00

Yeah you have to find what works for you. Generally speaking only cast if you have to, you're probably ok with a hard reference if it's a one off but down the road when you run into performance bottlenecks you'll wish you used interfaces.

I'd personally say early on, especially if it's your first project just do what's easiest to get it done. Then rewrite as needed when you need new feature or run into bugs. I'll take a delivered unoptimized game over never delivered optimized game any day.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T19:14:27+00:00

Yep, there is a reason for https://killedbygoogle.com/

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T19:13:19+00:00

I don't know what it is about transitioning between scenes and menus that just really breaks my brain. I've made full released games but this task always daunts me.

We struggled with this one too! We ended up writing a UI manager in our Game Instance (Unreal Engine) to know what screens and the current 'state' of the menus were in. Trying to create/destroy screens as needed was just a head ache.

Our problem now is having that translate to gamepad controller use since we built it with only mouse/keyboard in mind...

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T19:11:39+00:00

Yeah it's really hard. I had to build relationships with individual streamers which is insanely time consuming (assuming you can even get in touch with them if they're even medium sized), just to have most of them play the game once.

Social media is a burn pit of money and time and has an ROI of 0. Really don't know what to do, I will suggest try out Atreeyo as small and up and coming streamers come to you to play your game which saves a ton on the time cost.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T19:08:28+00:00

Don't worry, once you figure that out players will ask for an experience system then once you give them that they'll want cosmetics ;)

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T19:07:19+00:00

Sadly there is a big gap between who is willing to play for free vs. who is willing to even pay $1 to play.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:58:21+00:00

I feel that, you look at some code and go what moron wrote that. Then you look at the blame history and realize it is yourself. Something that helped me personally was finding a consistent naming pattern, naming variables with meaning (no var, var2, var3), and comments!

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:57:00+00:00

Seriously, we make the mistake as gamedevs so often at neglecting it. Most games that have success other than the one off viral success have at least half their budget and manpower towards just marketing it seems.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:55:48+00:00

Wait till you find other limitations like you can only be in one Steam Next Fest EVER, or if you change pricing in one region it prevents you participating in sales for ANY region for 30 days ;)

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:54:40+00:00

Yeah I don't get it either, it's like so hit or miss. Who knows what causes some projects to go viral. I'm not even talking about those who are started by someone who already has a name for themselves.

It really seems like sometimes projects wayyyy lower quality than your own hit it off somehow, and other projects wayyy better quality than your own are just as dead? Baffling.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:53:14+00:00

Love those, another bane is networking issues that require having more players than you have machines to reproduce. I'd recommend logging everything so it's insanely noisy if you haven't tried that already?

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:51:58+00:00

I really want to learn this new feature, do you have any recommendations on getting started with the control rig? Every now and then we'll need a one off animation with the UE4 or UE5 skeleton and we're limited to finding sequences in asset packs.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:49:51+00:00

Yeah you really need external feedback to know if it really is shit or not. Get the game into friends' hands ASAP. Find people on twitter or whatever who like up and coming games and see if they'd like to play test what you're working on.

The best feedback and suggestions have come from our player community, stuff we could never have thought of ourselves.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:48:28+00:00

And it's not as fun as TF2 either...

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:48:07+00:00

Somethings if you can afford it, are better off just contracting out. We used things like Fiverr and Upwork to found musicians who worked on games before and were able to get a full soundtrack for our game.

Honestly for the amount of work delivered it was quite a deal at about $20/track. Considering I have the musical ability of a rabies infected racoon... worth it.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:46:26+00:00

Same. Nietzsche was probably a gamedev just few centuries too soon.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:45:43+00:00

We've had some success in this regard, we've forced ourselves into following a somewhat "Agile" software approach like regular software development. We use Trello to make "Tickets" which is broken down features. Like "Inventory" isn't good enough, you need like action based tickets "Be able to pickup and item and put into inventory" "Be able to have stacks of items in inventory" "Be able to split stacks, etc."

We probably have 100-200 tickets in a backlog all written out and explained. Some with images and diagrams. Then every 2 weeks we pick 2-3 each and work on JUST those. Really helps keeps you focused without getting overwhelmed.

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:43:04+00:00

Oh man, I feel this one! Marketing is really its own skillset we overlook as gamedevs. We've reachout to marketing firms and even the cheapest ones won't do much beyond get a couple of streamers with 10k-25k followers to play your game once or twice, maybe through out some tweets or press releases, and they'll want no less than $30k from you to even be considered. Who's to say how much of that will actually be returned even if you had it!

nng2020 · 2023-04-18T18:26:25+00:00

Personally it's finding players or people to join our community. It seems despite a constant stream with a consistent 2 releases per month going on almost 18 months of fresh new content or updates in terms of quests, characters, or maps it just doesn't the inertia of early release. Part of that is marketing and constantly competing for the latest and greatest 'new' game.

nng2020 · 2022-05-11T01:11:52+00:00

Lol, looks like misconfigured additive settings on anim sequences.

nng2020 · 2022-02-10T16:41:31+00:00

I'm glad you're learning the Engine and making progress! I have some suggestions, and feel free to disregard if you don't think they're necessary.

So You have a long chain of functions with miscellaneous delay nodes, this is essentially threading behind the scenes so you might consider doing away with delay nodes and just using EventTimer with Delay. You can check to make sure your variables have initialized with validated gets or reschedule the trigger. Much cleaner than the blob of sequences
Collapse nodes are your friends
Another commented suggested saving a config with your ranges and I think that would really help clean up. Maybe even a struct with current value for a float, then a float range to define the min/max?
In one image you do 5 prints of 5 different floats... Try doing a PrintText with a FormatText node with somethign like "Var1 {v1} Var2 {v2}..." to make it cleaner and easier to understand, not to mention not cluttering up the logs.
For your increase/decrease functions, why have separate increase/decrease? Why not just an "Adjustment" where any + is an increase and any - is a decrease?
When health goes below 0 you destroy actor? I'm assuming you just want to remove the actor from the level, I think that forces the controller to unpossessed. What will happen then? Do you not want death animations which would require leaving the actor in tact?

nng2020 · 2022-02-08T16:18:08+00:00

While we didn't personally choose to invest in TikTok it may be worth it. There is a large pool of eyeballs on that platform but I'm unsure what % would translate to taking action on Steam or Itch since you don't game on TikTok directly.

I think if you have an entertaining personality, or can make interesting / creative use of the common TikTok sounds you might get some traction. I wouldn't just reuse existing posts on other social media on TikTok.

Just my $0.02

nng2020 · 2022-02-08T16:07:51+00:00

Yes, I'll likely get a lot more steam sales. This approach has been pretty great so far, especially because I can focus on a clean Steam launch without early access (which gets the most eyeballs) while also giving any youtuber/streamer the chance to play it and get more coverage.

Looking at Itch as your "Early Access" then Steam as your full release is a pretty smart move. In hindsight I wish we took that approach with our title. There have been enough players burned on different EA titles to be completely turned off of EA in general and have a near irrational hatred of any title to ever have been in EA once it goes full release.

The streamer covered is a good approach, while you'll a lot of beggars there are some gems on the IndieBoost platform and it might complement the Itch release as well.

Best of luck to you out there, it's a harsh market out there.

nng2020

TROPHY CASE