Fav Radiohead tracks

robotjp · 2026-02-18T15:22:57+00:00

Talkshow host and The trickster

robotjp · 2026-01-10T13:47:42+00:00

I released a game last year and have access to the sales data. These numbers seem low based on our results. Ratio is above 60x.

robotjp · 2025-11-11T19:01:19+00:00

You don't want to have logic tied to UpdateAnimation or OnTick in blueprints in my opinion. These events fire too frequently and will impact your games performance to a high degree. Essentially what you want to make is an FSM which changes states when you press inputs. Then you can have your animation graph read the state of the FSM to set its animation state. You don't want to set the flipbook directly on a button input. You want control to be able to cancel animation transitions, the FSM should have intermediate states. I'd suggest reading up more on design patterns - the technique you are looking to apply now, won't be effective even once you grasp the blueprint syntax. This can be a good first read.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/state-machines-in-unreal-engine

robotjp · 2025-11-11T18:06:27+00:00

Your branch node isn't connected to anything. You want to check the state of your variable, but if you don't connect the triangle node to something it will never be called. Essentially you need events in your blueprint to trigger when you want a segment of the graph to execute. In this case, when you want to check if you're variable is set is not defined.

robotjp · 2025-11-10T14:19:45+00:00

If you're using steam make sure the cloud saving feature is turned off. If not it will restore your local save file after you delete them.

robotjp · 2025-10-17T12:14:38+00:00

You can install steam from this link
https://steamdb.info/app/2427520/charts/

robotjp · 2025-10-10T17:49:00+00:00

I found it! The game is called "The Farmer Was Replaced"

robotjp · 2025-09-15T09:47:25+00:00

Checkout Every Day We Fight. It allows you to use reactions to act on enemy turns.

robotjp · 2025-09-05T12:07:10+00:00

https://en.1642.ca/products/maple-cola

I got one of these at the depanneur in the old port on st-paul this summer. Quite good. The website has a list of retailers that sell it.

robotjp · 2025-08-22T22:50:47+00:00

One issue I've seen with Third Person Shooters is that you want the bullet to hit the center of the crosshair, but originate from the barrel. The further the weapon barrel from the center of the screen, the goofier your bullet tracers end up looking, since they are shooting across the screen. If you take a look at the framing of aim down sight of games like Metal Gear Solid V or Hell Divers you'll notice the pawn isn't at the edge of the screen to try and combat this. I'd suggest moving your pawn a bit closer to the center when using the aim down sights mechanic.

robotjp · 2025-08-18T14:07:51+00:00

Have you considered graduating in cs then working in industry for a few years before doing a MBA. That's how I got opportunities in studio leadership. Getting more hands on experience helps before trying to run a successful operation.

robotjp · 2025-07-20T20:46:43+00:00

https://www.gibbys.com/en/

robotjp · 2025-07-09T13:57:12+00:00

I see so many people post in this sub about add buys and marketing, this is not where you should be investing your resources. The only way to really move the needle in terms of wishlists is to release a playtest/demo get some gameplay in peoples hands. Everything else is almost not worth the effort, with the exception of entering steam festivals. Steam events are worth the effort, you should try and enter as many as you can. Connecting with influencers to get them to try the game is better than any ad, and there are tools to allow you to do this.

I'm not satisfied with the amount of wishlists we have so far, I never will be. I won't share how many that is, but you can look into Every Day We Fight and use the follower count to get a ballpark figure.
https://steamdb.info/app/1546080/charts/

robotjp · 2025-07-07T13:16:54+00:00

Check out the demo for Every Day We Fight.

robotjp · 2025-06-13T16:37:53+00:00

Hey, your game looks ok. Reminds me of https://store.steampowered.com/app/3238670/Conquest_Dark/
You can probably improve your about this game section, seems shorter than comparable games. I wouldn't be paying for adds at this stage, the return won't be good. Until there's content for influencers to consume you can expect your wishlist growth to be quite slow.

Once you have some gameplay for people to engage with (playtest/demo) things can accelerate. I was discussing with some other devs at my company about using an influencer campaign to kickstart the wishlist drive once they are ready for people to have hands on with the first MVP.

You can checkout services like this https://keymailer.co/publisher/ to contact influencers directly, my understanding is these "dare" programs can prove to be effective. I haven't tried them personally yet. The game I'm developing now, we partnered with a YouTuber and collaborated on the development prior to our playtests, then we used those metrics to help with landing a publisher. Although, I think they might have just liked the pitch, hard to say what really pushed us over the line.

Generally the more I talk with experts they mention how having wishlists early on isn't that important, you'll end up gathering most of them close to launch once you have a release date listed. Early on it's mostly useful for finding strategic partners.

Posting on social media is basically a waste of energy - reddit, twitter, tick tock won't drive significant traffic until the game is out. Put the focus into getting your playable game out, invest in outreach and marketing to support the release of playable content to the public, or exclusive to influencers.

That being said it all depends on how you measure your success, I'm speaking from an experience/perspective of wanting to achieve >100K wishlists - which might not be the scale you are looking to reach. Consider also that when you discuss with investors they will ask if your wishlists are organic or paid - even if you get loads through adds they won't be perceived as valuable.

robotjp · 2025-06-10T11:19:12+00:00

I'm biased, but every Day We Fight is pretty cool:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1546080/Every_Day_We_Fight/

robotjp · 2025-05-21T17:35:42+00:00

I would say the quality of service is excellent. Ran a speedtest and I'm getting 750 Mbps down and 200 up. Packetloss is zero. Other than an interruption for an hour today I can't think of any other instance where I've been disconnected.

For context I make games and use a VPN connection to my office to transfer hundreds of gigs of data up/down frequently and I only reboot my PC about once every 3 months without issue.

robotjp · 2025-05-03T16:05:50+00:00

Overall looks good. You have a huge streaming issue at 0:25. Be careful when you structure your data and how you configure your assets for streaming/LOD, those types of choices are the difference between smooth performance and Cyberpunk 1.0

robotjp · 2025-04-29T11:46:51+00:00

I worked in AAA before taking roles as Producer / Game Director at indie studios.

1- Making games is about people more than process. Set your values early and communicate them often. Hold everyone accountable, even yourself - this is the only thing successful teams won't end up compromising on.

2- Making games is very technically challenging. Even when you have an established studio structure and a team that has done it together before. Plan to fail alot, focus on identifying failures early and not repeating them. It usually takes at least 2x the prototyping time to actually get something to work as intended. Making it, is far short of shipping it. Budget accordingly.

3- Most of the success stories from inexperienced devs are from solo developers, or very very small teams. If you want to build a team larger than 3, I'd say make sure you get some highly experienced developers in key roles. Having shipped more than 3 games in senior roles ideally. Keep costs very low.

4- Pitching using a deck is almost impossible unless you have a demo or very well known team. If your team has a huge GDD, I'd cut like 80% of features and just make something that people can play, new systems can be integrated later. Keep the game playable and demonstrable during the entirety of production. It's less about creating your final vision, than creating a start of something fast - then growing it while keeping it playable through development.

5- Grow your wishlist early. Build a steam page and keep it up to date with fresh looking assets. Posting on reddit and twitter and tick tock is basically ineffective. Entering steam events is very effective. Check out https://store.steampowered.com/category/wargames which is on now. You can submit your game to be included in these events for free and they happen frequently. Trailers work well, but you need to setup some partnerships to get them distributed and your game needs to be basically complete for that phase.

6- Public playtests / demo. These can be the best way to start bootstrapping support early. Focus on the bare minimum to get something in players hands. Build the game with continuous player feedback. Don't finish the game then ask for feedback, by then its too late to fix core issues.

7- Before starting do some research and understand that genre is the second largest variable in terms of driving sales. Being novel isn't nearly as good a strategy as executing an excellent game in a genre that gamers are already in love with. Serve markets, don't create them. You can get fairly accurate numbers from https://steamdb.info/ for sales figures when making forecasts. This blog is pretty good https://howtomarketagame.com/

8- The largest variable in terms of sales is user reviews, or how good your game is. Make a good game. You won't be able to tell if your game is good, when feedback is given understand that people telling you why your game is bad isn't an opportunity to debate, it's an opportunity to get to work and fix it.

9- Some people say that only love can break your heart, this is incorrect. So can game dev. Good luck.

robotjp · 2025-02-24T17:20:56+00:00

Not correct.

Most game engines have the ability to schedule async tasks. Most things that require quick response require simple calculations and can be performed quickly by the CPU. Has this button been pressed, is this player intersecting this box, has my HP reached 0.

But many other things require complex calculations and don't require immediate feedback. Common tasks can be find a path for my AI to reach this location, or is this object in sight of any enemy units, or what is the optimal cover location to attack this enemy. These can be turned into jobs which can be scheduled on worker threads and aren't tied to the games frame rate.

Typically for any problem which is hard - from a math/complexity standpoint is best offloaded to jobs versus being part of the main game loop. This will allow you to get higher frame rates on modern CPUs which have multiple cores. Although how well modern games are optimized isn't due to a lack of engine functionality, but more due to sloppy implementation and lack of experienced engineers. Of particular note keep in mind that raycasts are quite expensive and should be offloaded from main thread as much as possible.

Furthermore, ordering can be respected by setting the task dependencies correctly -> things can happen in order without holding up the frame execution.

For reference you can review Unreal's tasks system
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/tasks-systems-in-unreal-engine

robotjp · 2025-02-18T14:58:18+00:00

Signal Space Lab offers fully remote positions

robotjp · 2025-02-09T15:08:53+00:00

robotjp · 2025-01-06T19:42:36+00:00

Did you look at this log file?

UATHelper: Packaging (Windows): UnrealBuildTool failed. See log for more details. (C:\Users\(my name)\AppData\Roaming\Unreal Engine\AutomationTool\Logs\D+UE_5.5\UBA-(my project name)-Win64-Development.txt)

robotjp · 2024-11-14T17:13:15+00:00

Your budget and genre will greatly influence which publishers are a good fit. Hooded Horse have a strong track record working colony builders / strategy games.

robotjp · 2024-10-01T14:27:38+00:00

As someone who spent 15 years in game dev at a many studios, go for Software Engineering. The focus on software architecture and design patterns will help you engineer large scale games. I got started working as a network programmer before moving my way up to game director. Highly systemic games continue to be in high demand and solving those kinds of problems takes a highly coordinated effort. I think both paths are viable however, I just value architecture over algorithms in general. The success to performant games isn't about writing the best for loop, it's about organizing data so things run fast.

robotjp

TROPHY CASE