#video game developer | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

Average visit duration of Tumblr.com is 10 mins and 25 secs.

#video game developer

poppitgen · 6 months

Text

We are working on redrawing the old concept piece with an updated style and anatomy! It has been traced for reference and will be fixed up to look good!

#Poppitgen #art #artwork #concept art #video game #video game art #video game concept art #Vandarian #Bluuven #Vandarian Bluuven #Vandarian Rintzu Bluuven #video game developer #video game development #video game design #2d game #2d video game

2 notes · View notes

fishwigstudio · 6 months

Text

What's that swimming towards you? It's a fish in a party hat! Fishwiggles Studio is back!

After a year of being absent, I am coming back to work on Fishwiggles Studio, hopefully full-time. This might seem sudden, but I hope it's a welcome change for most of you!

Fishwiggles Studio will have two missions: First, to develop and finish the video game I started making over a year ago. Second, to make new merchandise and fill the world with delightfully fishwiggly art!

My Etsy shop and Patreon will both be reopening soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that announcement. I want to thank everyone who continued to follow this page while it sat in silence, and I want to thank everyone in advance for your support.

I look forward to reconnecting with the people I met through Fishwiggles Studio, and I look forward to creating again!

#art business #digital artist #video game developer #announcement

6 notes · View notes

ratsliveherenow · 8 months

Text

Hey hey!

I’m just a weirdo on the internet. I’m 25 and you can use any pronouns for me.

I’m gonna try writing a book and making games. I’ll post tidbits about the books here and there but I’d rather focus on my games. Feel free to ask me about my games!

#Video game developer

2 notes · View notes

thatheathen · 2 years

Text

4chan trolling backfires as rightwing losers grift off fake news and racist profiling as always to blame everything on “leftists”. But this hits different. I would die for Kojima. One of my favorite humans. I’m so fuckin livid! … Who the hell is Shinzo Abe??

6 notes · View notes

prokopetz · 1 month

Text

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

23K notes · View notes

destined-productions · 5 months

Text

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

12K notes · View notes

treasure-mimic · 7 months

Text

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

6K notes · View notes

thelazyindiantechie · 1 year

Text

Why I became a game developer

For a long time, I have been a hardcore gamer. No, not that kinda hardcore. There seems to be a common misconception that hardcore gamers are people who play 1 game all their lives and become the best at it. While there’s a case to be made for it, I believe hardcore gamers are ones who play all genres of games and enjoy them. Or not enjoy them. It’s okay to dislike games. But you have to try…

View On WordPress

#game dev beginner #game developer #gamedev #learn game development #ue4 #unity #unity game development #unity3d #unreal #unreal engine #video game developer #video games

1 note · View note

magpieandpossum · 17 days

Text

I'm already about 110% in love with these rough draft character sprites....

these are all unshaded, and will probably be continued to be edited, but I just wanted to share to get feedback! both garak and quark have alternate outfits as well ^^

#is it obvious that kira and bashir are my favorites...#doing game art makes me so happy #doing game coding makes me 😡#star trek #ds9 #deep space nine #star trek fanart #deep space 9 #star trek deep space nine #star trek ds9 #game #design #video games #game development #game design #game dev

1K notes · View notes

koboldfactory · 4 months

Text

It’s tragic to me that the video games industry could be unfathomably successful and provide so many jobs if CEOs took a pay cut and executives stopped pushing for multimillion dollar budgeted hyper realistic 400 gameplay-hour 10 year dev cycle games. No devs ever need to be fired for a higher ups mistakes. Devs need to start unionizing or do something else to execs that if I said would probably get me banned.

It’s very clear that the AAA industry is in a death spiral, and as much as I would love to say “this means devs can find success in the indie space!” That just isn’t gonna happen on a large scale because indie companies cannot afford to give jobs to the mass swathes of AAA devs being laid off. And those AAA devs in general do not make enough money to just go found their own studio and take a risk developing a game with no income for years.

#koboldthoughts #game dev #video game industry #game development

3K notes · View notes

arsuf · 7 months

Text

"You might have made me what I am, but I can be so much more than what you created me to be." 🧛

#bg3edit #astarion #gamingedit #astarion bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #video games #games #this was a pain to color lmao #anyway...i am impressed with his char development

2K notes · View notes

tlatollotl · 7 days

Text

If you don't see me in the lab at Los Guachimontones the next few days it is because I am going to New Orleans to present a paper at the annual Society for American Archaeology conference. But instead of presenting a paper on West Mexico, my paper is on archaeology and video game preservation. Specifically, how archaeology can help save historic video games from being lost forever. I'll be back on Friday!

#archaeology #video games #apparently the session organizer has been approached by two publishers already #but he wants to do something more creative than another edited volume #i pitched the idea of putting our papers in a video game #but the video game would basically be a Developer's Room and not actually any sort of game #i hope my fellow presenters will be on board with the idea when i pitch it to them on Thursday

469 notes · View notes

high-voltage-rat · 27 days

Text

I think it's fascinating that the quotes:

"Have you forgotten sir, we were at war? A fight with an alien race for the very survival of our species. I feel I must remind you that it is an undeniable, and may I say fundamental quality of man, that when faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable."

"When you spend every day fighting a war, you to demonize your attackers. To you, they're evil, they're subhuman. Because if they weren't, what would that make you? What I'm trying to say... is I've been afraid to see you for what you really are. You're our brothers. Our sisters. And the things we've done to one another are unforgivable."

"These guys want to use us, take us away from our families, and send us all over the dad-gum galaxy just to test if their agents are ready for the big fight? Well... guess I'm interested in showin' em exactly what a big fight is all about! So I'm not ordering you to go. I ain't even asking. You do what you gotta do, Private."

came from the same series whose standard fare is lines like:

"What in the hell are you two doing?" / "We're being executed by our own men, sir." / "Cut it out."

"I only drink the blood of my enemies, and the occasional strawberry yoohoo."

"You always said I could sleep when I’m dead, Sarge, and guess what? I am dead. This purgatory is about to become purga-snore-y, yawn!"

...and both categories manage to be a poignant statement about the nature of war and what it does to the people in it.

#everyone always talks about the more dramatic bits of rvb with the speeches and the 8+ seasons of plot development as the anti-war part #but the comedicization of the violence and death that the characters go through. the tongue-in-cheek gung-ho attitudes.#the way that they're so desensitized to the idea of death or gruesome injury to the point that it's!!! a comedy show!!!#all of that is just as much a statement of the fucked up nature of war!!!#it's like Col. Flagg and Frank Burns in M*A*S*H. they're so simultaneously into and detached from the war and it's a STATEMENT #idk I'm just. thinking about my favourite anti-war media. drawing mash-rvb parallels. and suddenly had to scream about it #might reread the paper on rvb being anti-war media. for enrichment.#not video games #late nights with ali #ali watches rvb #rvb #red vs blue

610 notes · View notes

andy-jam-blog · 8 months

Text