Game Dev

Game ideas that sound like they SHOULDN'T work, but do!

Anything can be a game, that's one of the things I love about this industry! Any idea you have can be turned into a game, and if you have good game dev and game design skills then anything can be a GOOD game.

There are plenty of very successful games that if you try to explain them to a non-gamer (or anyone really) it would sound insane. One big one from several years ago was Euro Truck Simulator. Try explaining that to someone, "yeah you work as a trucker and deliver packages from one place to another, you drive at the speed limit and follow all the rules", for a lot of people that sounds insane but it works! It has sold over 13 million copies and made hundreds of millions of dollars!

There's a fun thread on Reddit with more examples of these.

• Papers Please, why would I want to do bureaucracy and be a border guard?

• Unpacking, everyone hates moving, why would I want to do that in a game?

• Prop Hunt, you mean I play as a plant and just stay in one place?

• Octodad, intentionally horrible controls? why?

• Goat Simulator, intentionally buggy game? why would that be a selling point?

• Spintires, you drive soviet trucks in a forest and get stuck all the time?

• Minecraft, horrible graphics and no quests or any story of any kind?

• Supermarket Simulator, why would I want to do a minimum wage job in my free time?

And yet all of these are super successful games!

So yup whatever (silly) game ideas you have, there is a way to make it work, you just have to be skilled enough!

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Game Dev

Game Dev Hot Takes!

Game Development (and gaming in general) is a very opinionated field, there's lots of people with lots of opinions, many of which are not really based on anything objective, just opinions. You might have something you feel very strongly about where other people feel very strongly about the exact opposite.

My main takeaway from this is two-fold. First is how everyone has different ways they like to play/make games, there's no single objective right answer. And secondly is since everyone is different then it helps to give the player options in order to maximize the amount of happy players that play your game.

Here is a fun thread talking about some of these opinions.

• Juice over Realism, a gun should FEEL super powerful to use, even if unrealistic

• Text revealed letter by letter, personally I enjoy this effect, I love Text Animator, but you should absolutely give the player an option to make it instant.

• Game Dev is not for everyone, I would say Game Dev as a job is not for everyone, it's an extremely competitive industry and making games is a ton of work, but I think as a fun hobby it is something anyone can do.

• Holding buttons for interactions, some people hate this design which makes the game feel unresponsive, sometimes you really need it in order to confirm the player action, but if you abuse it then it becomes very annoying.

• Don't start volume at 100%, this one I highly agree with, many times when I start a new game the first thing I do is go on the options and lower the volume, I would recommend you default your games audio level to 50%

• Done is better than perfect, I am 100% a fan of this one, my advice is go finish your games, don't worry about being perfect, remember how perfect is the enemy of good, so just make good games!

Tech

Open Source Robot for $3000!

Hugging Face is a machine learning and AI platform, you can browse all kinds of models and see how they work. Fun fact: Unity has a page with models that you can use with Sentis/Inference engine.

This week they revealed they are working on Robots that they plan to release:

• HopeJr, a full humanoid robot capable of walking, manipulating objects with 66 actuated degrees of freedom, $3000

• Reachy Mini, a desktop unit that can move its head, talk and listen, $300

The best thing about this is how these robots will be open source, meaning anyone can assemble, build and rebuild. Great for learning and also super affordable, $3000 is much much less than any other commercially available robot.

Gaming

Turn Memes into Games!

Every few days/weeks there's a meme that goes viral, a while ago it was 1 Gorilla vs 100 Men, who would win?

As a game developer you have the power to turn these memes into reality, which might actually be a great strategy!

One dev did just that, the upcoming Gorilla Vs 100 Men is already on Steam. In just 3 days it already has 2000 wishlists so it's off to a great start!

If the final game is actually good then this might actually find a lot of success, it's a perfect Streamer-bait kind of game.

Side Note: Steam actually has a Memes tag, so you can see all the silly games that people make, and how some of them are actually quite successful!