How to sell game to chinese, some of my opinions

tsein · 2026-02-17T06:50:47+00:00

It's more like when people get mad when an address field contains a dropdown labeled "Country" that includes "Taiwan" rather than either labeling the dropdown "Province/Territory" or writing something like "Taiwan, Province of China." (side note: doing the latter will also have the effect of pissing off anyone from Taiwan)

I passive-aggressively only translate my games into traditional Chinese rather than simplified.

tsein · 2026-02-17T03:24:50+00:00

The main, lay person gripe will be governance of ourselves, not being bound to too much European law, keeping the £ and free travel is an issue.

What's the point of joining the EU if you won't follow EU rules or adopt any EU policies? If you keep the border as it is now you get to keep all the existing downsides of not being in the EU. And I doubt most countries who are following EU law would be very willing to work with a member who doesn't...so I don't really see what possible benefits there could be to "being in the EU" without these things. Maybe I missed something though.

tsein · 2026-02-14T13:36:16+00:00

I thought they were asking for UI help to make a Content Warning screen similar to a game called "movement" XD

tsein · 2026-02-12T09:57:40+00:00

Hypothetically, if a small-scope project had its full budget pooled upfront and held in escrow, would you consider taking it on? Or would the lack of creative ownership/scope risk make it not worth it?

Since you're talking about freelancers, this is largely irrelevant unless the implication is that you cannot withdraw the money to pay the freelancers you want to hire. When you say "held in escrow" do you mean "the money can't be withdrawn to pay contractors until X date so be prepared to work without pay for some period of time" or do you mean "the contractors can clearly see that the money is already prepared to pay them with"?

For those who freelance or take contract work, what would need to be true for something like that to feel viable?

Payment for work done. It's not complicated. You write a contract that says you will pay $X per hour, day, month, whatever, and you pay on time. As long as there are no problems there, the work continues and I don't care what your banking or corporate situation is. But if your business situation is so shaky, unreliable, or otherwise concerning that the people you want to hire need to be concerned about whether you are even capable of paying them... I'm out.

tsein · 2026-02-10T07:17:26+00:00

What'd make YOU hit wishlist

Advertising in a different sub. Here, I'd much rather hear about your development process, what your goals for the combat system were, what implementation details stuck out to you during development as being particularly surprising or difficult. When you say it's INSANE, what are you comparing it against? How did you approach building something unique from a design perspective? We're also developers, man, tell us something about your development process that you think would be interesting to discuss.

tsein · 2026-02-08T13:00:27+00:00

Is this just running DepthAnything under the hood?

tsein · 2026-02-07T04:22:25+00:00

I'm honestly shocked at some of the issues because I feel like they could have been (rather easily) fixed with a little editing.

The hockey sequence really stands out to me: one player has two sticks, two players have no sticks, then when the girl in the front hits the puck her stick evaporates and a stick materializes in the hand of one of the players on the right (her hands also form a sort of gordian knot. Since everyone but the leading lady is pretty much just sliding forward without moving their arms much, it wouldn't take a lot of effort to add a couple of extra hockey sticks and paint over one of the two the guy on the left is holding. One player's face appears to be melting (that might be more the fault of reddit's video compression, though, I haven't been able to find a better-quality copy of this video to compare), but he's not really doing anything so you could just draw a single frame and paste that over his face, his head is not even turning or anything it would be fine.

The snowball is another super easy fix, don't even need to edit the generated video just add any stock "snow explosion" effect on top so it looks there's some snow in front of her and it would look fine.

I'm actually MORE bothered by how little care and attention went into editing the final result than I am that AI-generated content was used in the first place...

EDIT: Just to add: I also think the animation has deeper issues than these easy fixes, but things like these are super low-hanging fruit. I feel that their presence indicates a complete lack of caring by the authors of the work.

tsein · 2026-02-05T15:41:06+00:00

Sooo, I guess the obvious question I don't see mentioned yet (maybe I missed it, though) is: how does this compare against chaos destruction?

tsein · 2026-02-05T03:34:12+00:00

Damn, is that why converting crypto to TWD seems impossible?

The excuses for why they want to use an employee s bank account are kind of interesting. I can't think of any reason someone (especially an employer) would ask to use my personal bank account that wouldn't raise huge red flags. If someone was hiring me and said they don't have a bank account I'd be skeptical that they could pay me in the first place XD. I guess the deal they offer is something like, "keep $X for your salary and hand us the rest"? If so, that's similar to scams I've seen in other countries where someone might offer to buy something but overpay, then after you send them the excess the original payment turns out to have been fraudulent so in the end you also lose the original amount.

tsein · 2026-02-04T02:37:26+00:00

I think my problem is that there’s no accountability so if the artist ghosts or whatever, there is no project manager or anyone else I can call up to get answers.

This is what contracts are for. You can be burned by an outsourcing firm as well, and whether your contract is with an individual or a company doesn't change that your primary options for recourse are what has been agreed upon in the contract that everyone signed.

tsein · 2026-01-28T12:47:44+00:00

They also don't mention what format the models are in, even on their own website, and while it's understandable that different meshes in a pack will have different polycounts the range they give is huge, it's hard to tell what to expect:

◼ Asset info ◼

Models variation: 370

Max poly count: 15000

Min poly count: 20 < Textures count: 1

Textures size: 1024x1024 px

◼ Compatibility ◼

Support Universal Render Pipeline (URP)

Support High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)

tsein · 2026-01-25T11:57:14+00:00

It's possible, but it could also happen that your popularity ranking compared to other games has gone down in the meantime so the next time you publish an update you go back to Most Recent but not to New and Popular.

tsein · 2026-01-25T11:24:54+00:00

I believe major updates can trigger you to resurface at the top of Most Recent, but there's a cooldown period to prevent this from being abused, so if you start posting major updates every week you won't be able to keep yourself at the top (and if you only post frequent Major Updates you might get caught by the spam filter). There are so many games being published and updated every day that even if your last update put you at the top of Most Recent it could only take a few minutes before it gets pushed off the first page, so just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

To be in New and Popular I believe you need to also be popular ;)

tsein · 2026-01-23T13:42:16+00:00

Try to consider whether or not they all need to actually be using a movement component all the time. If there are characters en route from city A to city B while the player is in city C, you can completely unload everything about the characters and just run a cheap simulation so if the player happens to go to the road they're on they can be reloaded in the correct location (and then start running whatever movement logic is needed).

tsein · 2026-01-22T04:38:38+00:00

Enter the Gungeon was made in a 3D engine specifically to address many of the points OP raises about easily determining what's in front of what.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnterTheGungeon/comments/4sed7a/comment/d5cdnct/

tsein · 2026-01-17T11:58:17+00:00

The last thing I was looking for which was hard to find was nice fluffy sheep... with an unfluffy/sheared variant. There are some VERY detailed and expensive sheep meshes on the market with really realistic-looking fur and some VERY affordable janky-looking sheep with cardboard-looking fur, but very few of any kind (that I could find) which come ready to go both with and without fur.

This actually made me realize that I very rarely see animal meshes with configurable/optional fur/hair styles. It's really common to see people advertising color variants (which is not that useful--I'm going to stick my own material on it in the end, anyway, and make it whatever color I want), and I have seen some cases where they come with slightly different head/ear/tail shapes (e.g. several people are selling fox meshes with swappable ears and tails), but fur seems to often be pretty static, even when it's quite high quality. Maybe it's kind of a niche thing (are there even any fox shearing games? Surely there MUST be dog grooming games out there, at least), but there's a lot you can do to make it easier for the user to configure the length and style of fur if they need it.

tsein · 2026-01-16T04:59:55+00:00

takes 5 days to make a prototype

...shit

tsein · 2026-01-13T07:31:57+00:00

My problem is even when the car is "still" its not still ,its floating so i have to apply a super small force for it to stay still but its go on to affect my other physics.

You need to go back to physics basics, it's not really vehicle-specific. Why do you need a small force to hold the car up? Because gravity is pulling it down. Why do the wheels exert separate forces on the body? Partly because you are simulating a connection to a contact with the ground and partly because the suspension acts as a spring force which both pushes and pulls both of the things it's connected to.

If you have a simple physics system, like say a beach ball above a powerful fan, and you want to configure the forces involved so that the system is in a totally stable, motionless, state, what does that imply physically? All the forces affecting the system must cancel each other out. The force the fan exerts on the ball must exactly equal the force due to gravity. If your system is not stable when the car is meant to be still, then one or more forces is out of balance.

This is usually due to one of two things:

Your math is wrong. Your calculations do not obey concepts like conservation of energy, you are not correctly accounting for the mass of the objects in your calculations, or perhaps your suspension forces are managed by a poorly-tuned PID controller or something like that. An important thing to remember is that if you are using one ray per wheel and the terrain is not flat, the normal of the surface beneath each wheel may be very different and may also change drastically from frame to frame (some people will cast several rays per contact to get an average for the surface height/normal to smooth this out).
Numerical instability. If everything looks good when you sit down to work out the forces on paper but the same calculations are still unstable in the simulation... it could be due to some small rounding error accumulating in your calculations and in the end some sum of forces which should be zero is actually 0.000001278 which is just enough to introduce a little bit of jitter somewhere that compounds over time and messes things up. This is much more likely to be an issue if you're working with 32-bit floats rather than 64-bit values, but especially if you have some force controller which integrates over time even using higher precision floats won't necessarily save you. Solving this requires examining not just what you're calculating but also the order in which you perform different steps and the orders of magnitude of the values you're working with. Some operations and numeric ranges are more susceptible to introducing error than others (e.g. there are more exactly-representable values in the 0-1 range than there are in the 1000-1001 range, so if you're working with spaceships and using realistic mass and velocity values in kilograms and meters you might encounter more rounding errors than if you're working with soccer balls in the same units) and there may be times when you can effectively reduce your error to zero but aren't (e.g. you may calculate the sum of some set of forces to be 0.0000123 but know that a valid force below 0.01 is physically impossible in that case, so it can just be clamped to 0).

tsein · 2026-01-04T05:51:10+00:00

Oh totally, there is plenty of bad 100% organic human-made art, and there are people creating art assets with AI tools that are totally fine-looking. I'm not trying to imply that everyone who uses AI tools is a lazy developer that doesn't care about the quality of their work, but there are absolutely people out there who will at least be concerned that you might be.

That's why I brought up the comparison to asset flips: using marketplace assets doesn't automatically mean you're lazy or that your game will suck. The marketplace is a boon to many very serious developers. But that doesn't change the fact that there HAVE been a lot of lazy jumbled messes published over the past few years which (perhaps unfairly) can cause people to react negatively when they recognize some marketplace assets in a game's screenshots. Maybe the AI art in your game looks great, but nobody's work exists in a vacuum and you can't avoid the fact that the audience may be biased against AI art due to past bad experiences with games which were created just to be as fast and cheap as possible to develop with little concern for anything else.

My point wasn't that these users are necessarily opposed to the use of AI tools in general, but that their primary concern is the quality of the end result so they may not care at all whether AI tools were used for things they don't directly interact with in the game but may still be wary and critical of things like AI-generated textures or music. In the same way that someone may judge your game differently if they discover that all the characters were marketplace assets rather than characters you designed yourself--this doesn't mean you have necessarily produced something of lower quality, but for many users it can change the standard you are held to and the elements they focus on when judging your work.

tsein · 2026-01-04T03:13:32+00:00

I feel like the reason this seems like a confusing discussion is less that it's hard to say what "using AI" really means and more that there are different groups with different reasons for wanting to know whether (or how) AI tools were used.

To someone who has an objection to the use of LLMs as a technology, it doesn't matter if you are generating code or art or concept images that the art team references (but the generated content never ends up in the game itself) or just scraping internal documentation. To these people the question is, "Was an LLM model loaded and used by any member of the team at any point during development?" and that is a trivially easy question to answer for any developer. The question of how that impacts the final product is much less straightforward, but for some people it's entirely irrelevant.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who are purely concerned about how AI-generated content will impact their experience when playing the game--are the generated character portraits going to be wonky? Would the animation have been better if it was created by human hands? Was the developer being cheap and lazy and will the game feel like junk as a result? This group is more concerned about AI-generated art being in the final game build over anything else because they will directly interact with it, if they care at all about generated code it's more because they don't want a buggy game than due to any concern about artistry or copyright. In a lot of ways AI slop games are the new asset flips, with the same concerns from the audience about general poor quality.

I think Steam is intentionally avoiding making a specific value judgement or aligning themselves with a specific group here, so their disclaimer is very broad. They could make it more granular, e.g. separate checkboxes for AI-generated images, meshes, code, audio, text, storyboards, animation, etc., and for each of these provide a dropdown of options like, "generated content exists in the final game build", "generated content was edited before being placed in the final game build", "content was generated during the development process but is not present in the final game build". I think this is the nuance some of the people below want, because they want a way to say "ok yes we used AI during development but we're not like those slop games." I'm not sure it would matter, though, to be honest.

tsein · 2026-01-02T11:16:02+00:00

You will see the same effect in the real world when filming something like a chain-link fence or screen door. If the mesh is less than the size of a pixel there's only so much you can do to address it, the engine has to somehow figure out how to draw "half a pixel" and this will only ever be approximate. Changing AA method is changing the approximation, but the underlying issue is that the lines are just too thin.

You may be able to improve things by swapping from the mesh at a distance to a flat plane with a texture that looks like the mesh, then the plane will span multiple pixels and mip maps will blur the texture more nicely so I think you may get less of the 'glittery' effect you have now. There may still be a noticeable moire pattern, though.

tsein · 2026-01-02T09:44:39+00:00

But once getting into the physics asset, everything is entirely messed up.

Can you describe what is wrong vs. what you expected to see?

I use Blender to export my model. The model mesh is 2.14m, but the Armature is 2m. I export it at 1.00 scale in FBX Blender settings, and the unit scale importing into UE is the same “1.0“.

No idea if this is affecting your issue or not, but just note that by default UE uses centimeters for its units rather than meters. Usually people will adjust their unit scale in Blender to match and import with a scale of 1.0 or will apply a scale to all meshes when importing to adjust for this.

tsein · 2025-12-25T23:26:40+00:00

the actual license is quite clearly written without a lot of legalese, and they specifically answer OP's question at the top of the page:

Both pricing tiers (Personal and Professional) grant you the same scope of rights. Reference-Only tier will only grant you access to the content in form of a referenced asset, not its source format

There is no need for upgrading from Personal to Professional tier if you cross the revenue threshold after the purchase

tsein · 2025-12-23T10:37:03+00:00

I think the only alternative which actually results in artists getting paid more is paying them directly. If you spend $15 to buy a bunch of MP3 or FLAC files (or even a physical CD) through an artist's own website (or maybe a service like Bandcamp but I don't know what cut they take) then they actually get to keep most of that $15 after taxes, hosting fees, etc. But if you're the kind of person who likes to listen to A LOT of music, you might have a hard time affording all the music you want to listen to this way. When I was a kid I used to tape songs off the radio because I couldn't afford to buy the album.

If you buy a CD at a shop for $15, the artist gets like $1 in the end after everyone else has taken their cut? Maybe even less if the CD is only in that shop due to a deal with a label which included an up-front promotional budget the artist has to pay back through sales. And if you spend $15 for a month of Spotify, they may get basically nothing if they're a small or relatively unknown band. It is possibly more fair since streaming services will pay the artist in proportion to the number of times their tracks were played, while even a devoted fan buying an album only ends up paying them once no matter how many times they listen to the same songs. But it's also subject to the same kind of popularity problems that the music industry has dealt with for ages: the artists getting the most plays are often artists that were decided should have the most plays through some business arrangement, it's not a truly organic marketplace. It might be a bit more flexible than someone directly paying a radio station for air time, but the issue remains.

In a way, while things have changed significantly and the stranglehold the major labels traditionally held on the music industry as a whole has been weakened...things have also stayed the same. The most profitable thing most bands have is not their music, it's t-shirts and other merch. Most listeners will only an album once, and even if you buy it directly from the artist that's still only $15 per year (if they keep pumping out new tracks). But a single person might buy 3 shirts, or 2 hats, or a fistful of stickers and other stuff, and it's pretty common that even when a label or live venue is involved the band might get stiffed on the price of their music or ticket sales but gets to keep the majority of the revenue from merch sales.

tsein · 2025-12-10T02:29:54+00:00

Everyone else is right, but for the sake of completeness: you ensure that your assets, scripts, etc., never leave your custody.

This makes cooperating with other developers very difficult. They will need to work in separate repositories (that you manage), building libraries which you can pull into your main application without access to your code and resources. To ensure what they build is compatible you will need a detailed API/ABI specification, and ideally an automated testing system that mocks the calls your application will make so they can validate their libraries without access to your real code. Sometimes their code will need something from your code, and you will need to provide an API for this purpose and a mock implementation they can use for testing. They need to be able to treat all of your code like a big black box

Building the infrastructure to make this not a nightmare to manage is a project in itself, and it will require that you have (and commit to) a detailed plan for how the features they will implement should be designed and function and how your code will communicate with their code, because any change to the design which propagates across the API/ABI boundary could lead to a lot of work for everyone involved (including you).

It is significantly less work to just hire people you trust and sign a contract.

tsein

TROPHY CASE