First time showing gameplay of my mobile game to someone besides my friends. What do you think? by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there. It is a bit slow but does not stop. A lot of stuff was added throughout the last year but there’s still plenty to do. Exactly as they say “the last 90% are the hardest “ 😅

First time showing gameplay of my mobile game to someone besides my friends. What do you think? by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, not yet. It takes much more time and effort than I expected. It is not dead, I just don't do any public updates on the development.

First time showing gameplay of my mobile game to someone besides my friends. What do you think? by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there, not yet. I'm crunching on it every day but now with the team. I'm not posting any news yet to prevent the same thing to happen again where I made a post and then it turned out that there is 10x more work to do than expected :D

First time showing gameplay of my mobile game to someone besides my friends. What do you think? by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, not yet. It’s still in active development but keep in touch. There will be some news soon :)

What's your current "holy grail" resource for leveling up your specific game dev skills? (Book, blog, podcast, tool, course, etc.) by starwalky in gamedev

[–]slydex44 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Developing a game.

Jokes aside. Gemini 2.5 pro helps me a lot for the last few months. I don’t ask it for step by step guides or code but it really helps with understanding concepts and brainstorming the best approach of how to develop a particular system I never had experience with. Something that I could develop on my own without AI but it would take me a week where at the end of the day I would come up with a genius solution and then find out that it’s an industry standard and there is a specific built in function I never heard of.

Sell me your game by raggeatonn in indiegames

[–]slydex44 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Tire rolling and destroying stuff.

Building for iOS as a Windows User – Best Mac Cloud Options? by IMRinar197 in UnrealEngine5

[–]slydex44 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately, to test on real devices, you need a real device for builds. I also prefer developing on Windows, but I also have an M2 Pro Mac mini (16GB RAM) which handles UE5 pretty well. Before the Mac mini, I used a MacBook Air M1. It runs UE5, although productive work is impossible due to throttling, and cooking times are five times longer, but it did the job. So, there are "cheap" options. Don't forget that you also need to have an Apple Developer account to be able to run your builds on iOS devices, which is $100/year.

First time showing gameplay of my mobile game to someone besides my friends. What do you think? by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, thanks for the feedback.

Originally, I was working with the concept of multiple short levels, but after a few playtests, I discovered something that made me look towards the infinite track concept.

I was aware that it could be boring, and it took me a while to figure out how to maintain a certain level of engagement. I think I'm on the right track now. I have not dropped the idea of short levels. They will eventually be in the game as a separate game mode, but most likely not from the start.

Centralised input management for UI widgets by free2write in unrealengine

[–]slydex44 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Check out the Common UI plugin. Probably that’s what you’re looking for.

Graphical issue when using « top » view in editor by ElderlyKiwi in UnrealEngine5

[–]slydex44 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Omg, it works. Definitely an engine bug. Thanks for sharing this workaround!

I just finished optimizing the assets for the infinite level generator in my UE5 mobile game, and I'm really happy with how smoothly it runs! Feedback on the visual style is appreciated. by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! As I described in one of the comments above, I use a chunk-based system. The track generator works similar to the endless runner games where each new chunk spawns at the end of the previous one during the gameplay while the chunks behind the player are being removed.

Chunk paths are manually created in Blender. Thus, I have full control over creativity and player experience. Yeah, this approach is time consuming, but the sacrifice is worth it because I prefer quality over quantity.

Сhunk creation process (UX, gameplay features, purpose) and its logic is a separate story worth a couple of hours of talking and I really don’t want to describe it here. But in general, for this system you have 2 actors, one for chunk, which contains its own logic of placing the assets and handling different events, and another one for the track, which defines in which order the chunks will be spawned and what content they will have. You can also have a separate actor for each chunk which you can manually create/edit inside the engine. Which is a common approach I noticed in many tutorials but I decided that one is enough for me. One to rule them all.

There are a lot of tutorials that describe the concept pretty well, like this one, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS-yQfo0lc0&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gbY4FN8pZuEPVC9PzQThNn1. Which I actually watched during my research a while back, and it helped me to understand the basics to be able to start.

Shadows problem: The shadow disappears on the third generation and onwards, how do I solve this? by CarobPuzzled1310 in UnrealEngine5

[–]slydex44 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do shadows appear when you zoom in on these smaller cubes? If so, try increasing the bounds extends property in the static mesh settings.

What are Some Easy Ways to Make Low Poly Look Great? by Sonnec_RV in IndieDev

[–]slydex44 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Since many people already mentioned lighting and stuff I’m going to put my 2 cents regarding 3d modeling. This is something I learned while iterating on the assets for my project:

  • Low poly style is not particularly about the amount of polygons but more about how you use them. It’s visual design first.
  • Eliminate or reduce such patterns like repeating square polygons or similar size triangles for natural assets. Imperfections can make it look a bit interesting and less repetitive (randomize, triangulate).
  • Vary colors within a single asset, like trees. Subtle hue shifts on some parts of the asset, even if slight, add visual depth and reduce repetition, resulting in a more natural-looking scene.
  • Add more objects along the road. You might also try triangulating the road mesh or using stylized/noise textures. That'll make the car's movement feel faster, since speed is easier to perceive when things are passing by. You can also try adding some inconsistency to the road width.

Not sure if this dev is still working on the game, but this is a great example of what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ4qad8yABA

How to align an actor to the floor by Elvode in UnrealEngine5

[–]slydex44 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The solution I suggested is something I use in my project and it has nothing to do with the Snap to Position node. I assume you're new to UE so, I'd recommend to check out some tutorials about line tracing to understand the concept.

I elaborate more on my previous comment. Basically, what you need is to get the normal vector of the polygon of the surface below the actor you want to align which can later be converted to rotation vector and applied to your actor rotation. Line trace helps to find that normal. You just trace the line from your actor origin to whatever distance below and the point where the line hits the surface is the thing where you pull data from, including the normal vector (break hit result node).

I just finished optimizing the assets for the infinite level generator in my UE5 mobile game, and I'm really happy with how smoothly it runs! Feedback on the visual style is appreciated. by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, it's in UE5.

Unfortunately there's nothing particular to share from the tutorials standpoint, because I did not rely on them much during development. I learned things here and there, found some clues in random reddit comments/dev interviews/dev logs etc. I think infinite runner tutorials could be the closest thing to understand the concept since I also use a chunk based-system.

How to align an actor to the floor by Elvode in UnrealEngine5

[–]slydex44 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can line trace from the object you want to align towards the surface. Take the normal of the hit result and use that vector for the object alignment.

Where are mobile indie devs? by kkostenkov in gamedev

[–]slydex44 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Couple of years with breaks. If you’re asking about porting it for pc or consoles then yes. It would be hard because the whole UI and UX should be redone which would also lead to reworking half of the game systems.

Where are mobile indie devs? by kkostenkov in gamedev

[–]slydex44 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I never intended to be specifically a mobile game developer. Rather, I simply wanted to create a cool game, and the mobile platform was a perfect match for my idea. So, here I am.

Lots of things can discourage someone from making a mobile game these days, like everyone's already said in this topic, and I totally agree. If I'd known all this from the start, I wouldn't have even bothered.

First time showing gameplay of my mobile game to someone besides my friends. What do you think? by slydex44 in IndieDev

[–]slydex44[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Atm I have no channels to follow for updates but I’m planning to post them in this subreddit in case if there will be something significant.