70 percent of devs unsure of live-service games sustainability
Game Developer
APRIL 16, 2024
With so many games fighting for players' attention and interest losing out over time, time sink games are at risk of eventually losing steam.
Solo dev Dr.Kucho fights for true video games: “People play guided tours now”
PreMortem.Games
MAY 8, 2023
Spanish solo dev Daniel Manzano (aka Dr. Kucho !) Manzano endured the rough times though and managed to finish the game and release it on Steam. The games he finds on Steam nowadays are hardly worthy of the term video game according to Manzano. The modern gaming ecosystem is killing true video games”, he says earnestly.
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How to Fight “Tired Mode” as a Game Dev
Brand Game Development
JULY 28, 2017
Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. This week in Start to Finish , I wrote Choose Your Own Adventure: Self-Publish or Not , an article dedicated to the benefits and pitfalls of self-publishing your game. Need help on your board game?
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So long 2023! Thank you for the great game dev stories
PreMortem.Games
DECEMBER 29, 2023
A stellar year for game releases, that’s for sure. But also a dreadful year for job security in game development, with a heartbreaking 10.000 layoffs. We let the creators talk about their own games. On the last working day of 2023 we take one final look over our shoulder to see what we are leaving behind. See you in 2024!
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Roblox says it will fight parents’ lawsuit
Game Daily
NOVEMBER 24, 2023
A group of parents who say they “lost significant money” as their children played Roblox have filed a civil action lawsuit against the metaverse gaming company. The company has countered by insisting it will fight the suit in court. For instance, one user asked her son to perform virtual oral sex on his avatar in the game.
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Solo dev Almar works on debut game Repunk “I’ve had some darker moments”
PreMortem.Games
NOVEMBER 17, 2023
For some, the idea of developing a game alone is daunting. Yet, for indie dev Almar, it offered an escape from the corporate rat race he felt trapped in. Sadly, the reality of the business showed me that the type of games that pay the rent weren’t the type of experiences I wanted to create”, he says. Which are its verbs?
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Wrapping up 2023 • Celebrating the life and works of solo developers
PreMortem.Games
DECEMBER 22, 2023
Because, let’s be honest, creating games is hard. This year we featured over 20 brave game creators in our solo developers-series and we like to share some highlights. It took solo game developer Graham Reid great effort to finish his game. “I Her upcoming game, Spilled! ,
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When we look at FPS games that have a story or a campaign mode, one of the flaws I see is the last boss and making it “feel” like a last boss fight. It always is either make the boss a bullet sponge and take 100 headshots, he dies in a QTE, or the player has so powerful a gun it trivializes the fight. Is this an inherent unsolvable problem with the FPS genre or can you think of FPS games that have come up with interesting, climactic, and “epic” boss fights?
Ask a Game Dev
AUGUST 1, 2023
What you're describing is the dissonance between having a normal human (with all of the common context that carries with it, like "people often die when they are shot at all") as the final boss and the expectation of a final boss fight being a prolonged, memorable, and epic battle that tests the things you've learned so far.
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Do you have any tips on making enemy factions feel different to fight against, without spending too much designer and programmer time making full sets of different abilities for each faction? For context, I’m working on a cyberpunk brawler with 3 major enemy factions (corp, gang, cop).
Ask a Game Dev
MARCH 5, 2024
When players start a fight with Corp enemies, they should have a good idea about what they should expect from Corp enemies. A lot of work needs to go into differentiating the members of each faction - what is common to those enemies and how fighting them feels different from fighting enemies from other factions.
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Ascent of Ashes dev switches to Godot halfway development “Not as chaotic as Unity”
PreMortem.Games
NOVEMBER 15, 2023
Studio owner and Lead Developer Max Hermann originally developed the idea for the game in the time when he was still a computer science student and active in the RimWorld modding scene. “I One with ruins of a collapsed civilization, where you have to fight through raiders and remnants of that civilization to claim your spoils.”
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A common talking point among game critics is in the game devs’ visions and if it was compromised in some way. What do you feel constitutes the developers vision as talked about by game hobbyists?
Ask a Game Dev
MARCH 3, 2023
I think “the developers vision, as talked about by game hobbyists” usually means whatever the particular game hobbyist likes or believes in most. Instead, most gaming hobbyists will project their own desires and thinking onto the dev team because most people are not very good at trying to see things from alternate perspectives.
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Hello there. I have a question that still stuck in my mind lately. I have been playing games with an option to turn on “music player” or “custom radio station”. Games like GTA and Forza Horizon 3 (I think?) had this feature. My question is, how difficult is it to implement such feature? Because I rarely see this feature used these days. With the rise of music streaming platforms like Spotify or SoundCloud, wont it be easy to implement such feature?
Ask a Game Dev
FEBRUARY 6, 2024
A jukebox feature isn't that difficult to build, it's just something that doesn't serve the intended experience for certain types of games. Games with a stronger focus on narrative will usually keep a tighter control of music in order to set the stage for the characters and their emotions, especially in narratively-important scenes.
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Rami Ismail • Find your USP by describing the game in one or two sentences
PreMortem.Games
APRIL 15, 2024
This article is part of the game-dev advice newsletter Levelling the Playing Field by Rami Ismail. If you want to know more about the art, craft and science of game development, subscribe here. All we knew was that we liked how handcrafted the game was. Describe it!
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Hi, I’d like to ask something about dlcs. I apologize in advance if this turns out to be a stupid question but I really have no idea about how game industry works. So… do software houses usually decide the plot of the dlcs together with the main game (or at least before the main game is released on the market) or they tend to wait for the audience’s feedback and then start planning accordingly? Like, when the game is out, a certain character ends up being very popular in the fandom. So… will they decide to focus the dlc on this popular character in order to give ppl what they want or they’re still gonna stick to their original plans? In a few words, could fandom popularity influence the plot of future content of a game?
Ask a Game Dev
OCTOBER 16, 2023
Generally speaking, the ease of making changes to the game, its narrative/characters/content is inversely proportional to how close that content is to release. We already have the first several seasons of content for this game scheduled - we plan on adding several significant boss fights and content updates over the course of the next year.
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How do you go about setting time limits when relevant? Does someone just play through the section and set it? Playtesting? Do you put together some formula?
Ask a Game Dev
DECEMBER 8, 2023
Most of the time, we start by setting a target time we think the game experience should take for a first-time player to feel what we want them to feel, and then add about 50% to that. A long fight should feel like a protracted fight and the time limit should reflect that.
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6 Ways to Cope with Kickstarter Anxiety as a Board Game Dev
Brand Game Development
MARCH 16, 2018
Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. You need to make a great game. Just here for Highway s & Byways updates?
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What do you think is best bang for your buck for dev time to player time (besides multiplayer)? Alternately, what’s the worst (but still worth it)?
Ask a Game Dev
DECEMBER 8, 2022
ALT The more times and ways that players can play and replay the game, the more devtime-efficient they are. Continued dev work would be spent on adding new options for the randomized content generator to create even more interesting possible combinatoric results. Player-facing content creation tools (i.e.
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How much paperwork does a game designer or other “trench level” game developers deal with? Does the amount of paperwork increase the higher up the chain you go?
Ask a Game Dev
FEBRUARY 9, 2024
Obviously, the Ice Dungeon is too big for a single task, so we break it down into smaller sub-tasks like "Build the boss fight for the Ice Dungeon", "Build the layout for the Ice Dungeon", "Build the regular encounters for the Ice Dungeon", and so on. Larger tasks like "Build the Ice Dungeon level" are assigned to the Ice Dungeon level owner.
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What are your opinions on the Video Game History Foundation’s recent report that 87 percent of classic games are being lost?
Ask a Game Dev
JULY 18, 2023
I’ve written about the [ preservation of games ] in the past. The loss of these games is tragic, but there is currently little incentive for any of these publishers to do something about it. Game publishers have a huge amount of money invested in their intellectual property. The 87% figure doesn’t really surprise me.
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In fighting games counting (comparing) frames on moves/animations is important, even for players. For other types of games, do developers or animators count or tweak to the frame? And when counting small amounts of time like that, how do most studios do it? Frames? Milliseconds?
Ask a Game Dev
SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
Using a more specific measurement of real time is more helpful, since the game engine can calculate real time from its (variable) frame time in order to maintain accuracy. Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr Frequent Questions: The FAQ
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In the world of Aikyam, special powers are fueled by kindness and collaboration
PreMortem.Games
MAY 27, 2024
Toronto, Canada based indie dev Thousand Stars Studio prides itself on being a culturally diverse studio. Founded in 2017 by Parth Soni and Sally Luc , the company now has five full-time employees and an additional five contractors, all working on their latest game Aikyam.
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Dev snapshot: Godot 4.0 beta 5
Mircosoft Game Dev
NOVEMBER 16, 2022
The illustration picture for this article is a screenshot of Object Wars , an upcoming multiplayer third person shooter in a cute, homey environment where everyday objects fight it off in battle royale or team deathmatch. The game is developed by Vedg Studio / NoirosL and was recently ported to Godot 4.0 Wishlist it on Steam!
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Several genres have gone extinct in the AAA space. Point and click adventure games, plastic instrument rythme games, and others are on life support like RTSes. What other genres do you think are next of being unprofitable at AAA production values?
Ask a Game Dev
NOVEMBER 22, 2023
For example, I think fighting games that aren't Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat have little chance of AAA success nowadays. You are correct about RTS games falling off - genre-adjacent games like MOBAs and Tower Defense games have fallen off alongside them. I think short-form narrative games (e.g.
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Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals dev details dispute with Monster Energy
GamesIndustry.biz
APRIL 5, 2023
Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox Glowstick Entertainment, maker of 2020's Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals, said it is being "bullied" by Monster Energy over the use of the word 'monster' in the game's title. Read more
The Kristala Dev Blog - Issue #30
Astral Clock Tower Studios
JUNE 29, 2021
Thanks for tuning in to another exciting issue of the Kristala dev blog! This is the place where we bring you a monthly peek into the development process for 3D dark fantasy ARPG Kristala, an indie game developed using Unreal Engine 4 by women-lead Astral Clocktower Studios. Astral Clocktower Studios x Game Raven Review.
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Enemy Design Tips: Time to Kill
Ask a Game Dev
MARCH 6, 2024
Players will be interacting with many enemies over the course of their gameplay, so it is important for us to make them engaging and interesting to fight. Even if your game isn’t in real time, consider how many turns should it take for this enemy to go down. For games like Hearthstone, consider how many turns each minion’s lifespan is.
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I feel like in post launch support I see numerical balance changes (eg. X has 10% higher stun, 8% less hp) much, much more frequently than animation balance changes (eg.move now has wider reach, faster startup). I understand animations take more work than tweaking a database, but given that many games will never get a single re-animation it seems like there must be more to it than that.
Ask a Game Dev
JULY 12, 2023
When we build game systems, one common method of differentiating the work is “things we probably will change” (e.g. Most games do not need to tune a particular animation beyond being able to scale the animation playback speed to fit within a certain number of frames. There is more to it than that.
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I don’t really think that’s the right framing of the situation. I don’t think that focusing on a.
Ask a Game Dev
JULY 5, 2023
I don’t think that focusing on a particular specialization necessarily means the complete game must be worse, it just means you need to think about the best kind of game that emphasizes the specialty you want to level up. Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr Frequent Questions: The FAQ
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Makhoba Kamogelo: “Don’t let fear stop you from reinventing yourself”
PreMortem.Games
NOVEMBER 13, 2023
A community manager and new game designer. A game filled with cute armoured babies on a brave mission to save their daycare from a goblin invasion. Now, she’s navigating the world of game development, where each day brings new challenges and exciting discoveries. One of those games was Street Fighter.
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Games That Play Themselves
DameDev.tv
OCTOBER 21, 2022
Join Industry veterans Rick Davidson & Tim Ruswick* in a conversation about games that play themselves! Find out what that actually means, watch them play Despot’s Game and learn new game dev tips as they answer questions from the community. 0:28 - 1:22) Games that play themselves are literally just that.
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I press the exit button to close a menu. The menu closes as expected but, the action in the game world connected to the same button occurs (jump, crouch, attack, et cetera). This has occurred in a few big-budget games I’ve played recently. Do you think this is an intentional choice or programming oversight?
Ask a Game Dev
JANUARY 3, 2023
The worst case scenario in this case is that the player can accidentally break the game state while in such a situation. The player could get into a fight that they did not intend, fall off a ledge, consume a critical or valuable item, or any of a thousand other problems. in a multiplayer game) and behave normally.
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When fighting AI controlled enemies, every now in then it happens that said enemies just stop acting. They don’t react to anything, they don’t act, they just stand there and take hits from me. What’s the technological background of this kind of bug?
Ask a Game Dev
AUGUST 21, 2023
Most of the time, game AI enemies follow some kind of preset decision-making process. Unfortunately, the more obscure edge cases can sneak through our testing and make it out to the live game. Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr Frequent Questions: The FAQ
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The Kristala Dev Blog - Issue #32
Astral Clock Tower Studios
AUGUST 31, 2021
You just left reality and fell into a portal to the fantasy world of Ailur, the fictional planet that serves as the setting for 3D Dark Fantasy ARPG Kristala—an indie game developed by women-owned independent game studio, Astral Clocktower Studios (hey, that's us!). Kristala at Play NYC 2021. We can't wait to go back again next year!
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Analysis • Unity’s decision to raise its prices should not come as a surprise
PreMortem.Games
SEPTEMBER 14, 2023
Even as creatives in other entertainment industries continue to fight to make fair wages, a new front has opened in gaming as developers figure out what to do about Unity’s new fee structure. Based on the number of users installing a game, the platform will trigger a fee depending on specific revenue and installation thresholds.
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what should one focus on, mechanics-wise, so that in the end players will enjoy losing?
Ask a Game Dev
AUGUST 8, 2023
Battle Royale games have only one ultimate winner, but they hand out rewards to all participants. Many games have achievements and secondary goals that grant rewards even if you don't win the match. We can, instead, offer the loser a quick exit and an option to get into a new game quickly.
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How to Make Board Game Rules
Brand Game Development
SEPTEMBER 24, 2019
This week while working on my current board game design, a lot of things have come into focus. Now it’s time to start tweaking board game rules. This is where board game design often becomes very tricky. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.
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4 Lessons from Spirit Island for Aspiring Board Game Designers
Brand Game Development
JANUARY 13, 2020
That is by no means a small amount to raise, but what’s interesting is that Spirit Island has remained on the Board Game Geek Hotness list off and on for almost three years. Clearly, there is much more to this game than what immediately meets the eye. Need help on your board game? You’re next, agriculture games!).
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Emotional intelligence in game development: Let’s talk about responsibility and regret
PreMortem.Games
SEPTEMBER 1, 2023
This article is part of the game-dev advice newsletter Levelling the Playing Field by Rami Ismail. If you want to know more about the art, craft and science of game development, subscribe here. Feelings are a deeply under-discussed part of game development, and an even more deeply underappreciated part of entrepreneurship.
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Tasty Humans Launches on Kickstarter Tomorrow
Brand Game Development
JUNE 24, 2019
The latest game from Pangea Games is launching on Kickstarter. Tasty Humans is a 30-60 minute, tile-laying, pattern-building game for 1-4 players. As you and your fellow monsters toss around the village king, you attract a steady buffet of adventurers who try – poorly – to put up a fight!
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Dev snapshot: Godot 4.0 beta 5
Mircosoft Game Dev
NOVEMBER 16, 2022
The illustration picture for this article is a screenshot of Object Wars , an upcoming multiplayer third person shooter in a cute, homey environment where everyday objects fight it off in battle royale or team deathmatch. The game is developed by Vedg Studio / NoirosL and was recently ported to Godot 4.0 Wishlist it on Steam!
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The Kristala Dev Blog - Issue #36
Astral Clock Tower Studios
MARCH 23, 2022
You're currently tuned in to the official Kristala Dev Blog, a monthly compilation of all the development done on our first game, Kristala: a Dark Fantasy ARPG created by women-owned indie game studio, Astral Clocktower Studios (hey, that's us!). Since we last met, things have legit been poppin' off over here.
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4 Lessons from Everdell for Aspiring Board Game Designers
Brand Game Development
OCTOBER 28, 2019
Last year, Everdell by Starling Games raised nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter. It has remained a popular board game since, regularly topping out the Board Game Geek Hotness and showing up multiple times as a giveaway prize in Pangea contests. Everdell is a worker placement, tableau-building board game.
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4 Lessons from Root for Aspiring Board Game Designers
Brand Game Development
SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
Leder Games really nailed it when they came out with their board game Root in 2018. It’s broken into and remained within the Board Game Geek top 50. Need help on your board game? Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.
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The Top 10 Best Solo Board Games (for Coronavirus Quarantine)
Brand Game Development
MARCH 15, 2021
Board games have been wildly successful in the last ten years. That’s why many are surprised to hear that solo board games not only exist but are very common. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators. How I Chose the Top 10 Solo Board Games.
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