clyde

Amateur Game Making Night

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Well, the built-in unity ad tools don't work for the windows store and the few options that do work with windows either didn't work on both phone and PC or there was some other issue. I think there might be one that will work well enough, but I figured I'd try the free plug-in from a Microsoft guy. It seems to only support Microsoft ads now, but used to support AdMob. I will probably look into my other options now that I see the results of this service. I am pondering porting to iOS just to learn their side of things, and hopefully getting unity ads working will be easier.

Oh, and I am starting to see some ad revenue, so they are working, I just think the PC side has no advertisers. If you're wondering, I have made 140 microdollars so far. The provided income plot's y-axis is literally in microdollars.

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I made a free version of MILE-AGE, since I figured I wasn't gonna sell any more copies of the paid version. It was interesting to go back to, I think it's a better game than I remember. I played a bit last night and had fun. The main things I'd change are that the progression system feels very random and the UI is a little clunky; I think it's the result of the UI work not being fun for me, so I ended up ignoring it until I had to and cutting anything that wasn't necessary. I suspect if I'd put the project down for a week or two and gone back to it, I would have seen that and been inclined to fix it. 

 

I'm still working on a proper post-mortem; Fun Ghost's Haunted Fun Factory LLC turned 1 the other day so I started a write up, but it was very boring so I've been punching it up a bit. 

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I made a free version of MILE-AGE, since I figured I wasn't gonna sell any more copies of the paid version. It was interesting to go back to, I think it's a better game than I remember. I played a bit last night and had fun. The main things I'd change are that the progression system feels very random and the UI is a little clunky; I think it's the result of the UI work not being fun for me, so I ended up ignoring it until I had to and cutting anything that wasn't necessary. I suspect if I'd put the project down for a week or two and gone back to it, I would have seen that and been inclined to fix it. 

 

I'm still working on a proper post-mortem; Fun Ghost's Haunted Fun Factory LLC turned 1 the other day so I started a write up, but it was very boring so I've been punching it up a bit. 

 

Focus on the raucous parties and throw in details about game making in the side bars!

 

I know what you mean. It's one of the problems (I assume and from my limited experience) of working as a one-man team. It's hard to stand back and evaluate the overall picture and evaluate what parts you just got used to along the way that could be better. I hope MILE-AGE does well as a free version. I assume/hope you put some ads in there? Sounds like most games end up making more as ad-supported, which is irritating to me... but yet I hardly ever pay for mobile games, so...

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I ended up basically using the Threes model, which is you get a certain number of plays per day and can watch an ad to get more or buy the game for a buck to play forever. Threes gives you an absurd number of daily plays though, something like 10, which seemed like a lot to me (though, granted, I've played a lot of Threes). I think the developer has said on twitter that it did really well (better than the premium version, at least).

 

My experience with showing the game at events and talking to the general public is that no one buys games on their phone. And especially not anyone under 18.

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That sounds like a fair way to serve up ads for MILE-AGE. I'm sure making it free will lead to a steady flow of downloads at least, which should help your future games and get you on some of the automatic "similar to" lists and what not. 

 

I'm really curious to read your post-mortem when you get it as 'zazzy as you think it needs to be. 

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iyGdds3.gif

 

I made a little idle game in 24 hours for Extra Life, the code is up on github: https://github.com/ChrisMaire/ghost-econ

Pretty happy with this one, a nice benefit of trying to emulate stuff like A Dark Room/Candy Box is that the bar for UI is set real low, and its kind of expected that some mechanics won't really be explained, which is kind of ideal for a jam game.

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I'm going to cram Blender during the month of February and I'm going to make progress-reports here to motivate me and show me that I am actually making progress. I think I'll do an entry every week. Right now I've successfully made, animated, and imported a model into Unity.

 

Goals for the week of February 1st 2016:

This week I'm going to concentrate on learning how to paint UVs and properly import the results into Blender.

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I'm going to cram Blender during the month of February and I'm going to make progress-reports here to motivate me and show me that I am actually making progress. I think I'll do an entry every week. Right now I've successfully made, animated, and imported a model into Unity.

 

Goals for the week of February 1st 2016:

This week I'm going to concentrate on learning how to paint UVs and properly import the results into Blender.

 

 

Some guy at Global Game Jam this weekend was asking me for Blender help (no idea how he couldn't find someone better) and I felt like an absolute idiot trying to help him set up a UV. I haven't been doing as much Blender since I have an artist on my current project and the hotkeys just got away from me. More than almost any other software, I feel like Blender requires you to use it constantly to remember the ridiculous number of hotkeys that open menus that can't be accessed any other way. So good luck, and once you learn it, keep it fresh I guess.

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My plan is to find and document succinct tutorial videos around 10min on each major piece of functionality I need. I already have a video for animation and a video for modeling that includes rigging (under 10 minutes!). Once I find one on UVs, I'll be able to refresh myself in thirty minutes.

That's the plan anyway.

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First week of Blender. I'm not actually sure how much I did versus what I had already done, so I'll just record where I am so I can measure progress in the future. Here is what I've made so far:

0G94LzL.gif

The body (including rig) was made following this tutorial:



I animated it with information from this tutorial:



The bottle tutorial wasn't all that useful compared to the tutorial with which I unwrapped a cube and texture painted it.



Imagine my surprise when I saw that this last tutorial (which was very useful) was the same person who taught me C#.

So I still haven't memorized the steps, but I'm certainly more familiar with the steps and the Blender interface. My goal for this week will be to work through the entire playlist that the texture-painting one came from. It's not all Blender, but I don't care I just like listening to this person talk and no one cares if I actually learn Blender so whatever. I think it starts here:

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Good to see this topic resurface, I was lurking a lot of it before I realised I was in the wrong year (reading through 2014, hah) - is the Google Hangout still used?

 

I'm looking for help around games programming in Java (though to be fair anyone familiar with writing their own simple games would be able to chip in) and writing up an essay on StackOverflow to justify a) my approach (i.e. writing something from scratch) and B) without being told to "use LibGDX" or "have a fully working prototype to paste all the code from" seems like a . . . less useful use of my time than sitting on here :)

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Good to see this topic resurface, I was lurking a lot of it before I realised I was in the wrong year (reading through 2014, hah) - is the Google Hangout still used?

 

 

I don't have experience with your tools and I don't think the google hangout is used, BUT there is an active Idle Forums/Game-dev slack-channel. Sign up here and just ask the chat where the game-dev side-channel is.

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Thanks for that, appreciated! Already familiar with Slack, so I'm glad to hang out on it.

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Progress Report:
I followed along with the first video in that playlist and learned a lot of things about Gimp that I did not know. Also I love that Christina is constantly referring to Gimp as "the gimp".

 

 

Here's my resulting drawing:

Zo4oHmM.png

 

I used layers for coloring even though that was not part of the instruction.

 

Late in the week I was kind regretting only doing one tutorial this week, but I was playing Firewatch and the Moon Knight table in the pinball-tournament during my free moments. Plus, I was sleeping and working more than usual so... it's whatever. I'm not thinking of this as a February project anymore as much as just having a playlist of things I can follow along with if I feel like doing something that has the semblance of productivity.

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Hey @clyde good to see there's some cross-pollination between the Waypoint & Idle Thumbs communities. Enjoyed trying to squirt the passers-by with the bidet. Damn hard though.

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I may have gotten too good at it while testing and tuning. If I make it too easy, I'm worried that simultaneous conversations will be too common. 

I hope people who play it play it with audio. Looking forward to playing your game sometime this week @OneGameDad 

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