Game Dev

Bad advice that worked for you?

There's a lot of advice on the internet, depending on the source it can be very good or very bad.

But even very good advice from a very good source might not necessarily be the best thing for YOU. Everyone is different so while there are some general guidelines you can also find success outside of those lines.

There's an interesting thread on exactly that topic, Game Dev Advice that worked well for you but most people consider it wrong.

The OP said how they ignored the advice of "don't build your own engine from scratch" and spent years doing exactly that which eventually meant they got a decent job in the industry. I would absolutely advise you to NOT build your own engine from scratch if your goal is to make games, there's no point in reinventing the wheel, but if your goal is learning then it is indeed an excellent very difficult task that will teach you a lot. And possibly get you a job as a Game Engine Engineer which is very highly paid.

Sometimes it's good advice to "try to be unique", but it's also very good advice to just copy what already works. You need something unique for your game to stand out but only about 20% of it, the rest should be basically copied from other games that have proved it works. Don’t be TOO unique.

Personally I always like giving the advice of "make small games", and "don't start with your dream game", but some people have found success by spending 5 years on their dream game. I wouldn't recommend it because the success chance is so low but it can happen.

So yup advice is great (if it comes from a good source) but remember how it's all just guidelines, these are not unbreakable laws. Listen to what people more knowledgeable than you tell you, but then apply your own experiences on top of it.

Affiliate

Synty Ends SOON! MegaBundles 95% OFF

Unity currently has 3 MEGA BUNDLES at 95% OFF!

There’s one with a Realistic theme, one for Sci-Fi and one Fantasy.

It’s such a deep discount that the bundles are worth if just one asset looks interesting, so check them all out, there’s lots of interesting Assets and Tools. The Realistic one has a great Global Illumination tool.

Check out all the bundles HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is Shapeforms, publisher with lots of sound effects.

Get the FREE Cassette which includes 200 cassette sounds. Speed up/slow down and many more. Great for any game where you have time management.

Get it HERE and use coupon SHAPEFORMS at checkout to get it for FREE!

Do you want awesome Low Poly assets? There’s a sale on the Synty Store!

There’s some packs at 70% OFF like the Mech pack (perfect for a MechWarrior or Titanfall game) or the Shops pack (perfect for a shop/mall tycoon game) or the Military pack (perfect for any first or third person shooter game)

Check out the entire sale HERE! (It’s ending VERY SOON!)

Game Dev

How much is a Streamer worth for game devs?

If you get a proposal from a streamer to play your game in exchange for X amount of dollars, should you take it? How much is a deal like this worth?

Coming up with a price that works is a very tricky subject, it highly depends on your game, the streamer's audience, the price of your game, etc.

In this post, one developer got a message from a big streamer (1 million views) asking for $90k for a 1 hour stream! Is this a reasonable number?

There are some very helpful replies trying to do some math to figure out if this cost could be worth it. If your game is $20 then you'd need to sell 6500 copies, which for a 1m viewer stream would mean a 0.65% conversion rate.

One reply from Tomas Sala (very experienced developer, The Falconeer) mentions how 0.65% might sound small but it's actually an insane conversion rate! From his experience having his game shown during a stream with 200k viewers it netted him a few thousand wishlists, which in turn converted at about 30%. Meaning the total conversion numbers are likely around 0.003%

Even SplatterCat (who is god tier at getting conversions) likely does not convert 0.65%

If you get an offer like this or you’re planning on paying a streamer yourself, make sure you do these calculations beforehand to try to figure out if the deal might be worth it or not.

Tech

Robots working together!

Humanoid robots continue improving further and further, one of the big companies in this space is Figure. Their robots are very capable of both movement and understanding.

Now they have Helix, it's a robot with a generalist Vision Language Action model that unifies perception, language understanding and learned control.

It has controls over wrists, torso, head, and individual fingers. It can pick up basically any small household object, including items it has never seen before. It runs entirely on low-power-consumption embedded GPUs.

And importantly it can interact with other robots! This is really fascinating. In the demo they have 2 robots storing some groceries, and one gives some things for the other one to pick up. This is a very impressive very complex problem to solve.

Collaboration with other robots sounds like it would open up so many more possibilities. Think of it like programming your game and having multiple small classes as opposed to one giant class. You can pass data back and forth between dedicated classes, like these robots can pass in objects.

Fun

Look at this graaaaph

heh this is a dumb funny joke, but it does demonstrate the power of Shader Graph.

Even if you don't know HLSL you can still make some awesome stuff by using this very intuitive visual tool.

If you've never tried Shader Graph I highly recommend you try it, check out my basics tutorial on it. Shader programming sounds very intimidating but with Shader Graph it's very straightforward, very visual.