#game development

[tearwolfe]

contrary to popular belief, i work on other things that aren't ruikasa...

this past semester i've been working as the artist for a game called "coffee for cthulhu"!! i joined a team of two other people, our game designer + programmer, who had an idea to make a cozy coffee shop game that combined elderich horrors.. that are cute?

i've been grinding away at the art, and we finally released the game today!! it's on steam (windows pc) for $3.99, we've been working pretty hard on it, it's a cute and short game to play through.

it's our capstone project for our major, the first video game to come out of our specific program! super cool.

#game development #game dev #game design #i'm now officially a game dev... this is so crazy #i've also been working on the art for another game in a different class #but it's a card game. i've been drawing a Lot this semester #on top of all the fanart i've been making... #collapses and dies

[thewakingcloak]

Testing a new method for tall grass :)

(don't worry, there won't be a random square patch of grass on the beach, this is just The Test Grass)

Before, I was using the Game Boy Zelda game trick: grass is a tile, and then I just throw a grass sprite on top of the player to make it look like they're inside it. Clever, and it's surprisingly convincing!

But now, this uses the sprite tilting method, which I've been using heavily throughout, to create "3D" grass, and it works so much better than I expected. Also more consistent with the perspective I'm going with!

Wheeeeeeeee

#gamedev #indiedev #pixelart #pixel graphics #protodungeon #the waking cloak #gamemaker #indiegamedev #game development #zelda #pixel art #indiegames #devblog #devlog

[johanvinet]

I'm happy to reveal my new tiny game: 🏝 CASTAWAY! ⚔

Reblogs much appreciated 💛 If you like what you see please Wishlist!

#pixelart #gaming #zelda #castaway #gamemaker #indiegamedev #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev #game development #links awakening #survival #survivor

[devsgames]

Casual reminder that if you're worried or demotivated about making a game because 'someone else already made your idea', remember some handy tips:

1) There are no original ideas. Almost all ideas in game development are derivative. Ideas are reinterpreted, reimagined, redesigned. Creation is transient and no concept exists in a vaccuum; every game that exists was inspired, conciously or not, by a game that came before it and there are no exceptions. Game design is 99% stealing mechanics and reappropriating them to your context. Embrace that and let them inspire you, not demotivate you.

2) They didn't 'make your idea', they made their own version of a concept, just as you would be making your own version of a concept if you made yours. Concepts are multi-faceted and can have a plethora of interpretations be different people. It's why we have Star Wars, Star Trek, and the 80000 other space fantasy media properties. Make your own version of the thing and it will live on its own merits.

3) No one cares about something being derivative as much as you do. People who like the thing that is similar to your concept will look at your thing and go "wow, now I have two things to play!". Learn to ignore yourself.

4) Enjoy the process of making things, and not just having the final product. Make art for the enjoyment of making it, not just to be the first one past the goal post.

Sincerely a person who has made many games inspired by other things. :)

#ok splitting headache so im going to bed #game development #thoughts #gamedev #game dev #gamedevelopment #indiedev #indie dev #blog

[kcamberart]

the concept art -> the in-game art

bonus: the in-game art in the game

#vollema #gamedev #game dev #game development #wip #work in progress #oc #original character #fun fact: the character in the sketch is a completely different person than the character in the finished poster #i swapped them out for plot reasons. you'll see why if (or when) you play the game

[snackodev]

We've been working on our next update...

#snacko #indie game #cozy games #game development #indiegame #lowpoly

[leoneliterary]

thinking about how those metal folding fans used in avatar the last airbender would be so cool for a dancer mc to use

I like it!

I already have several dance variations in my drafts, so I'll probably add it in!

Another thing I'm trying to be conscious of is that it's easy to give performer MCs the chance to show off, but I don't want to neglect our children of Kreios and Thalia, or Alim. So I need to think more about our scholars and warriors.

#interactive fiction #honor amongst thieves #if wip #game development #interactive novel #worldbuilding #hat if #mc customization

[glugslove]

Adding conductivity to certain elements so they will conduct and create an electric circuit when touching

#gamedev #game dev #indiegame #indie dev #indie game dev #game development

[notoh-dev]

Showcasing some more sprites! (Perry's my favorite thus far)

Youtube Twitter RMN / Itch.io Tiktok

#rpg maker #rpg horror #pixel horror #game development #indie game #visual novel #interactive fiction #rpgmaker horror #rpg maker horror #indie horror #illustration #rpgmaker #game dev #art by me #art by op #anime #anime art #anime illustration #anime style #anime drawing #danganronpa #your turn to die #corpse party #misao #mad father #ib #digital art #artwork #artists on tumblr

[prokopetz]

The constant rolling disaster that is Overwatch's game development aside, what really perplexes me about how Blizzard is handling the broader franchise is their continual insistence that a canon narrative exists in spite of their equally continual refusal to tell anyone what it is.

Like, okay, the events of the games aren't canon. Fair enough: the games are multiplayer-only, and you can't account for player actions.

Oh, and the animated short films aren't canon either – they're properly understood as in-universe propaganda, not depictions of actual events. That's a little high concept for you guys, but fine.

But surely the comics are canon, right? Well, no; some of the comics (we're not telling you which ones) were canon at one point, but the writing team has decided to go in a different direction.

My dudes, what is left? The weird Source Filmmaker porn? Is that canon? Well, apparently it's at least as canon as anything else!

#gaming #video games #overwatch #blizzard #game development #writing #canon #metatextual wankery #pornography mention #swearing #recording a four-hour video essay interrogating the canonicity of widowmaker's massive hog

[destined-productions]

I am a solo indie dev trying to overcome my anxiety and actually let people know my game exists. It is a cute physics based game where you are the level.

I love making this game with passion and I am so excited to share it with the world, but somehow I need to let the world know. Unfortunately the way steam works is the more wishlists the more visibility, so if you are interested it is super appreciated :)

Wishlist on steam or visit the website to find out more mightymarbles.com

#video games #gamedev #indie games #indiedev #unity3d #game development #indiegamedev #puzzle #puzzle games #rube goldberg #mini golf #marble run #marbles

[dragoneer99]

genuinely, i think we're heading for another video game crash. Triple A games are continually abusing workers while putting out lower and lower quality games at higher and higher price points. Consoles and gaming pcs are approaching the same price as a used car, for games that take up 90% of the memory because they're so poorly optimized.

the constant grind for new games or new content for previous games is quickly becoming annoying and underwhelming, we already have constant complaints about the new day one patch system every game release seems to come with. more and more games are just endless remasters and franchise sequels instead of anything new.

and now unity wants to charge developers for every install

#unity #game development #gaming

[beekeeperspicnic]

Ok you guys are going to think I'm making this up as a joke, but I've genuinely been trying to troubleshoot this for the past hour.

I've programmed Holmes and Watson to walk to these coordinates and sit down

And in my game development engine, I have tested what this will look like by manually moving the sprites to those exact coordinates.

It should look like this:

But whenever I run the game and test it they keep sitting like this:

I swear I'm not making it up, "Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson keep kissing and I don't know why" is a genuine game development conundrum that I am dealing with.

#game development #the beekeepers picnic

[treasure-mimic]

So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

#Unity #Unity3D #Video Games #Game Development #Game Developers #fuckshit #I don't know what to tag news like this

[devsgames]

Just this week in games:

- EA laid off 700 workers

- Sony laid of 900 workers

- Rockstar announces in-person work mandates for all employees (a 'soft layoff' that will force some staff to quit, which likely means that actual layoffs are forthcoming)

In 2023 6,000 games workers were laid off. Now in 2024 over 10,000 workers have been laid off, and there's still 10 months to go.

Not to be hyperbolic, but I think this is perhaps the worst year for video games ever if we're measuring by number of layoffs.

#gamedev #game development #game dev #gamedevelopment #game industry #games industry #sony #playstation #rockstar #rockstar games #ea #ea games

[melblur]

In case you're wondering how the Unity Engine subreddit is doing right now:

#the funny #unity #unity3d #gamedev #game development #unity engine #indie games #indie gaming #unity 3d