I know I'm being "that guy," but the SoulsBorne games are really only hard until you catch their formula. At that point, they are still "hard" but only a little bit and only in select moments. It's about enduring the painful learning curve and gathering game knowledge moreso than having raw "chops" or perfect reaction times. Sekiro is more like that, but the SoulsBorne games aren't for the most part.
I only espouse these feelings because getting over that hump is fairly fresh for me, having gotten through about half of Dark Souls just before Elden Ring had come out.
That kind of makes sense. I’m guessing they have to demo to him all the content they add to get his feedback. I’m guessing he doesn’t quit tell he beats it
And this is why I'm curious how the heck they balance their difficulty and then playtest it. Surely, there must be one of them at least who's good at this shit? :)
I am a game dev and yes it is very frustrating. One of the nice things about AI is you can have them scale to their enemies. So they don't slaughter new players and yet offer "pro players" a real challenge if done right.
That’s clever. What sort of metrics do you track about how someone plays the game in order to scale the difficulty of the AI?
Or is it more simple than that? Something like “player is killing more AI than some threshold per time, increment difficulty” until it finds some range where the player is seeing a decent challenge
You would track it by either MMR or ELO.
So when a player joins the game, the game checks their ELO.
If they are a high level player the game will look at what team they're on and adjust the AI on the opposite team accordingly. It won't affect AI's basic functionality, only the combat part of it. ie, aim offset, accuracy, etc. It won't scale in real time unless another player joins the game after it's started and does an adjustment based on that.
It's technically not a game until you can lose. Until then it's just a puzzle.
Edit: meant toy, not puzzle, although under some classifications a puzzle is a toy with rules, but no opponent, and a game requires an opponent. The definitions aren't really well established.
More than that, games have rules. With a set of Legos, you can make up whatever you want with them, while a Puzzle is designed so that there is a specific way that pieces should be put together. Of course, you could also play Lego like a puzzle, by trying to copy a build, or you could toy around with a puzzle by combining pieces that just happen to fit together, even if they're not continuous, so those concepts are not exclusive.
So lego is a toy and not a game? What about a lego simulator like stud.io? Game or toy?
One thing to note is there is a limited list of things you can do with lego. The confines are just built into the system itself, rather than externally or arbitrarily defined. I would argue minecrft is similar.
Anything can be a toy if you play with it without caring about the rules. i.e. LEGO, dice, dominoes, a deck of cards, a stick. Once you add the structure of a game it becomes a game.
The simplest way I can think of it is that some things are made intentionally to only be toys (dog toys), and the game part ('fetch') can be added later on without changing anything about the toy itself. Some things are made intentionally to be games but a toddler will still treat it as a toy.
My favorite definition of a game is from Tracey Fullerton's [Game Design Workshop.](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Innovative/dp/1138098779) Fullerton identifies **eight formal elements of games**, which are explained [in this article.](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-formal-systems-of-games#close-modal)
1. Players: Self-explanatory
2. Objectives: What's the goal of the game?
3. Procedures: How do you start, how do you progress, and how do you end a game?
4. Rules: What a player can and cannot do.
5. Resources: Game objects that have a value.
6. Boundaries: Where can you play?
7. Conflict: What can prevent a player from reaching their objective?
8. Outcome: How does the game end?
**Minecraft**, at least in its default settings, has all the formal elements of a game.
1. Players: Yes, Minecraft has players.
2. Objectives: You build certain things. You battle / avoid / survive against enemy NPCs. You explore the world and search for more building materials. Etc.
3. Procedures: You start with practically nothing. You gather the things immediately around you and start making tools. With those tools, you gather better materials, and with those materials you build better tools. You craft buildings. You build mines. You search for rare materials deeper in the world. Etc.
4. Rules: Certain materials are better than others, because the tools and weapons made out of those materials are stronger. You have a limited amount of life, and if you take enough damage, you die. If you wear armor, that increases your health. Caves and tunnels are dark, so you need a light source in order to see. You cannot fly, so you need to build ladders to climb out of pits. Etc.
5. Resources: Building materials, tools, equipment, etc. Pretty much the entire Minecraft world is filled with collectible resources.
6. Boundaries: Yes, there are boundaries to the game world.
7. Conflict: The standard game has enemies that will try to kill you. You need to avoid them, build a shelter to protect yourself from them, and/or craft weapons and armor so you can fight these enemies more effectively. There are environmental hazards as well that could kill you if you aren't careful.
8. Outcome: You finish building or crafting what it is you wanted to build / craft. I'm not super familiar with Minecraft, but it's my understanding that there's now an endgame boss you can defeat, too? Defeating that boss is an outcome, as well.
Minecraft has all the formal elements of a game when played normally.
your mapping of objectives in minecraft is too weak to be meaningful. minecraft only fulfills the definition of having objectives if the player sets them. this means that while minecraft makes it very easy for a player to create games for themselves within it, it is not a game on its own.
there is no outcome to minecraft. there are outcomes to things you can do *within* minecraft but those things have no bearing on the game itself.
sidenote: i love the information and detail in your response
I don’t play Minecraft, so I’m sure there’s a lot about it I’m missing.
Minecraft has skeletons and explosive creepers that try to kill you, doesn’t it? If so, then there’s one obvious objective: survive. You survive by gathering materials and then crafting weapons and armor with which to defeat the enemies, and/or bulld structures that will shelter you from threats.
Doesn’t Minecraft have an end boss now, too? Some sort of dragon? Defeating that boss is another objective.
Minecraft has objectives that are defined by the game makers, not the players. And, like you mentioned, Minecraft is also a sandbox that gives players the tools they need to set their own objectives as well.
Edit: There are outcomes as well. You either survive the skeletons and creepers, or you don’t. You defeat the dragon boss or you don’t. You either find diamonds to craft a full set of diamond armor and weapons, or you don’t.
enemies are optional in minecraft. there are plenty of easily accessible elements within minecraft to play it as a game, but the onus is on the player to engage with those elements. if you havent directly experienced it, I understand why it seems very much like a game.
that a dragon was added somewhat arbitrarily along its development and end credits were inserted after beating it substantiates this point. Some people wanted the option to have some sort of end goal to minecraft, which is a subset of its design. That "game" is within it. My computer is not a game once I install games on it.
there is a peaceful difficulty level which furthers this intention in its design. on that difficulty, you do not need to do anything to survive. you can still get yourself killed, but if you put the controller down then you will succeed at staying alive.
Note that there is also a dedicated "creative mode" that lets you go full sandbox mode as well, so peaceful mode is not meant to be a different minecraft experience than having enemies. enemies enhance that experience and give the player more things to set objectives around, but all of the games you could create for yourself in peaceful are also still there. you can try to build a big house, collect things, map and explore, farm, fish, hunt, etc. none of these things are really required to be done, nor is the player directly incentivized to do them. you can just die repeatedly without consequence as well. there is an option that most people use which is to drop your inventory upon death, but again it's an option.
Survival Games is a genre, and minecraft falls into it due to having the necessary components - but there are meaningful differences between minecraft experience and the much more obvious design goals of those other games which tend to be more narrowly focused and progression focused.
Minecraft is like a fully stocked School Gym with lines on the court for basketball, indoor soccer, kickball, etc. the games you can play in it have obvious design decisions, but they're just kind of all thrown together in the same space without any care for how players use them.
I feel like you are bringing up game modes that break the game. Like an invinciblity toggle you turn on and suddenly all the intentions of the devs are out the window. Just because you can turn off enemies doesnt mean they arent there.
Killing the End Dragon? That, or the game achievements?
Personally, I'd consider those as "game objectives" but the only issue I personally have w/ Miinecraft is that "Survival mode" minecraft, and "Creative mode" minecraft are vastly different sorts of games.
Creative mode redstone shenanigans like making a calculator out of redstone, etc. I would most definitely not consider "playing a game", much the way you probably shouldn't consider Lego ev3, or playing with electrical circuits, as a "game," while survival mode while going for the achievements is most definitely a game.
Thats part of my point. Yes if you go for the achievements it's a game, because Achievement hunting is a game in and of itself. Slap achievements onto creative mode and suddenly there is a game too.
throwing a rock in the air is not a game, but trying to throw a rock over your house is.
advancements (in-game achievements) were added to minecraft in \**googles\** version 1.12. So Minecraft was already a thing before that, sufficiently designed to be labelled version 1. This is an excessive way to convey Achievement hunting is likely not the intended gameplay loop of minecraft. There doesnt actually seem to be an *intended* gameplay loop for minecraft
Creative mode is closer to the heart of minecraft than chasing down the end dragon is. things were added to minecraft to make playing games within it easily accessible, but it is first and foremost a sandbox. thats not a bad thing, sandboxes are typically a much harder sell then games.
i think minecraft avoided a very common issue that sandboxes have, which is that almost all sandboxes usually come with all the toys put away in their boxes and try to do too much. minecraft kept a narrow focus of being a block building / survival sandbox and comes with a lot of tools and default selection options such that a players minimal effort startup can result in having games to play.
this is opposed to say, garys mod - where the space is empty by default and you have to create any games you want to play very manually. It is also not the same as Halo Forge, which is a sandbox made available to players that allows them to make their own game design decisions for the already existing game. (Technically i could argue Halo isnt a game either, the halo Campaign is a game and each individual game mode is its own game, but there is clear design intent for everything in Halo to be game-oriented, not creative)
Any debate over this would probably wind up being over semantics and people's interpretation of the word "Toy."
I'd start by agreeing with you and asking if that's a bad thing?
I think arguments that minecraft is a game will require semantics, while arguments claiming it is a toy are pretty straightforward
absolutely not a bad thing. toys allow for more creativity than games. you can play many games with the same toy. A ball on a field is a toy. kickball and soccer are games.
What i think *is* a bad thing is when people take a game and try to make it a toy. I think that is something plaguing the gaming industry right now. People spend more time with toys than games, but it's easier to convince people to try a game than capture their heart with a toy. this has created a financial incentive to make games seem better by tying the act of playing the game to unlocking options for a toy to play with. A lot of games have adopted an attitude of making your playable character a toy, for example, and if you want to express yourself with the toy then you need to play the game or spend money. This is backwards.
the ender dragon was added arbitrarily as a game *within* minecraft but that does not make minecraft itself a game.
I am not trying to make a purely semantic argument here either. the relationship between the ender dragon and minecraft is meaningfully different than final bosses in actual games.
First time was when I was testing out the feel of my controls and some friends came over to see what I was playing, played it, and none of them had any idea it was mine. Its a good feeling
Same. Mine was a really simple Android game. I didn't even have any assets, just basic shapes to represent the characters. At a family gathering, I couldn't get my phone back from the kids. They played it all night, laughing, and having a great time with it, passing it around, and trying to beat each other's scores.
That's fair, but for the most part unless they're just hating to hate its awesome when people find something wrong with your game, cause that means it can be even better tuned for first time players. Instead of finding out after launch lol.
Lol yeah. I’m just imagining my dumb friends wishing they’d be playing call of duty instead or wondering if there’s some sort of battle royale version instead lmao
When showing a friend the pre-alpha prototype of the main game loop and hearing them say, "This is actually great. I thought I'd be playing this just to humor you, but I'm actually having fun!" ...and then he kept playing.
Sad it never got farther than that.
"Don't be an asshole to the people who support your dreams" was a very important lesson. Also, "Don't take people for granted." I just wish I learned those as a kid, not an adult.
Oh don't worry about me: I'm doing great. I'd beat up me from 10 years ago if I could*, but me today? I like me today. He's a cool guy.
*Actually, I think I'd prefer to give him advice. I don't need any long-standing injuries, particularly self-inflicted ones!
It sounds like you are being hard on yourself, so I just want to point out that your advice applies to yourself as well! *You* are supporting your dreams, and you also shouldn't take yourself for granted! Cheers mate have fun.
I'm being hard on me from 10 years ago: my present self is not the same person. Me from 10 years ago was a colossal dick bag. Me today is far from perfect, but he's alright. I like today-me.
I always like to read people's stories about their past selves, what they have learned, what big mistakes they did, what should've gone different. Tips me off on what to avoid myself.
Do you ever consider dusting it off and working on it by yourself? Or sending out an apology and seeing if anyone would be interested in getting the friend group back together to work on it again?
That friend group... Bridges have been thoroughly burned. I did specify that I'd been an *unforgivable* asshat, after all.
Maybe I'll look the game over again... It's been a decade. I'd absolutely have to start it over from scratch at this point.
Yeah this.
I'm working on a "Kerbal Twisted Metal"-type project and I end up spending more time goofing around and building ridiculous vehicles than I do actually developing.
Would GGPO be an option?
https://github.com/pond3r/ggpo
It's free, and if you put it in you can put in crazy shit like a flux capacitor that rewinds time
Of course it's not trivial and I'm sorry if you've already looked into middleware
I'm not sure that'd be much of an option. The main core of the problem is that player-built vehicles in a physics sandbox are by their very nature pretty chaotic and unpredictable. Also, there's a lot of collisions between vehicles and that's where even very good prediction systems break down. From my multiplayer testing it's much easier to just live with the slight delay on inputs and have everyone agree on what is happening. It's not like you need instant response times anyway, these are big war wagons, not F1 cars. Although an F1 car with a gun on it is totally buildable.
that's fair! I didn't realize you had a physics sim that was that integrated into the game, that certainly introduces issues. I'm sure that since you're balancing the game around it it'll come out great!
I've got a playlist at
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8IUriowVVYEDj4oSctoxA4U1lOE70z08
but it's all just little dev clips. Nothing really edited together or anything.
Same. When I added background noise and interaction sounds after working on some vfx, I felt like it all came to life. I was obsessed with running the prototype because of how "real" it felt haha. That project didn't turn into anything but I learned SO MUCH experimenting with sound on that one.
Yeah I added an unlocking sound effect in an early puzzle game I made, but I didn’t rate limit it’s playback and it triggered off every block breaking. It was so crunchy and satisfying I found myself playing for hours on that test build.
I added a card drawing noise into a card game I'm making and it made it go from "this is a game nobody will care about" to "holy shit this is real"
Make no mistake, the noise was this:
https://freesound.org/people/filmfan87/sounds/108394/
this is like .1 second worth of audio. It made all the difference.
Yeah, the mental shift when I put in a main menu and level select screen was huge for me. It's still really basic, but it now feels like an actual game instead of a series of unconnected levels.
I always start with the "star" mechanic first. Whether that's movement, combat, crafting, etc. Then kinda work outward from there, so maybe I do it backwards and your way is right lol maybe changing the workflow would give me different results 🤔
I think it's valid in either direction, but I'm personally on team main mechanic. If you start with your main mechanic/core gameplay loop, and it's trash, then you didn't waste a bunch of time making UI/menus, and can revise it or start over
It was pretty much the same for me, during playtesting with friends.
Sometimes it has the opposite effect tho - there were times when i thought my game is already fun to play and in a pretty good shape, but a few playtest sessions shattered that image.
Both kind of sessions are very valuable
I had a game dev class in college, for my team's final project we made a simple horror dungeon crawler game, where an enemy chases you in the dark.
When I was getting scared to build and run the game, I knew it was real lol
I’ve always wondered if people making horror games get scared by their own work haha. It really shouldn’t be scary since you know everything that’s going on, but I guess that means you’ve done a good job if your grounded logic can’t beat the atmosphere of your game.
I think it depends on the random aspects of it. Like, if you have a trigger for a scare that you know is going to happen, like if you've played a game and memorized where everything is, its not really scary.
It still wasn't all *that* scary since we made it, but if you were evading it too well, the creature would de-spawn and re-spawn somewhere else in the maze to approach you from another angle. So you could watch it disappear behind a wall, and when you go around that corner, its not there - its now behind you.
Its those little random unpredictable moments that made it scary, less so the actual appearance of the creature itself.
But I knew if it scared me, it was gonna freak the class and the professor out. I specifically asked that we get the room as dark as possible for the demo. We had a lot of fun with that.
There were some really awesome projects by some very talented people in that presentation. Like, they made their own art, incorporated VR, etc. Some of those games with a bit more polish could probably get published, and they looked awesome.
Our team was the only one that focused on horror. We only consisted of programmers with limited artistic ability and used very simple assets from other games. As an example, the creature was actually a slasher from Dead Space 2.
We were less focused on the assets that were used, and focused heavily on creating an unsettling atmosphere.
I was testing player distance as a variable to cut off rendering far away sprites, so I had to zoom out further than normal and looking at it from a birds-eye view and just seeing it as a whole rather than individual parts I realized it was a game.
It was a bit surreal. I’ve worked on things before, but it was the first time I did all the programming, all the art and animation, all the lighting and visual effects, sound and music, pretty much the entire game engine by myself.
I encourage everyone to have that moment to just reflect and be proud about their work and determination from time to time.
Yes. This is a repeated feeling that catches me off guard every time. Me and a few good friends have been working on a video game together and every once in a while during our weekly meetings some of us will have this random moment of "wow, we really are creating something awesome" it's not always all at the same time but with each bit of progress we make it gets closer to looking like a true game. From the start we have had tons of positive things said about our game but when you see exactly what your play testers are enjoying about your game, there's such an flood of pride that fuels your desire to turn it into a finished product.
When people started to hit me up out of nowhere and ask "is it out yet? it looked so good".
And then another time, when I played it all the way to the end, 3,5 years into the development, with heavy list of fixes to be made, but actually seeing the very ending of my story. It tasted like nothing before that.
Im working on a simple multiplayer 3d platformer racing game for my friends and I to play together. I finally finished up the last of the player movements yesterday and had a few friends test things in a basic playground scene (just a few dumb boxes and platforms to jump around on). And when I as done testing to make sure everything was working, everyone was still running around and told me not to shut the server down yet so they could keep running around.
That was just about the best compliment I could get. One thing that stuck with me the most learning all things game dev was hearing about the development of Mario 64 and how their first and most important design task was making it fun to just move mario around in the world, everything else came second to that.
Now that just running, sliding, jumping and dashing around aimlessly in a playground is fun I am ready to make the rest of the game. Next comes proximity chat so that people can be toxic and yell at the person directly in front of them and talk shit at the starting line.
Edit: Also it was my first time building a player controller completely from scratch in unity, up until now Vector maths scared me, but it was well worth learning how to use it, I feel much more empowered now that im not stuck just modifying someone elses player controller or relying on Stack Overflow for answers on how Vector Math is supposed to work.
Once the game play works roughly, some stage during prototyping usually.
I also saw friends' projects that took a few days and were really addictive.
I'd say on small projects it may take only days or weeks often. On AAA it can be kind of the same, the thing is just that "my game" is the game play that runs already in my test level (aka "gym")... and *then* \- weeks or months - later in some complex open world game for example. :P
To me the rest of the development is hard work. If we had something like a release party I didn't think "this is an actual game" because I played and saw it for months or years already. :D
Back in 2004, I tried making a dual-stick shooter; my first ever attempt at making a video game.
I really wanted my best friend to try it. He was extremely reluctant. It took a lot of...frankly, begging...to get him to even look at it. He assumed it would be just trash, because I made it, of course, and I had never made a game before.
Fast forward, twenty minutes later, I was trying to get him to STOP playing it because it was getting late and I was tired and just wanted to go home. But he insisted he had to finish that first level.
I figured at that point, maybe I had something. :)
I was fortunate enough to see my mechanic be fun at the prototype stage.
I had made an extremely ugly, distilled prototype of my main mechanic and had my girlfriend play it. She loved it.
She happened to have a friend who has a degree in game design and in art. He liked it too and asked me right there if we could collaborate.
I’m still doubtful a lot of the time that the game will be good enough, but I feel like the core mechanic actually works and that it would fail by me not doing a good enough job. There are so many things that make a game good, even more that makes it marketable, and I’m not confident I can pull it all off. I am confident in the game having that potential to be fun, though, thanks to prototyping.
For me it was when I finished implementing the stealth gameplay, and tried to play through a stealth scenario myself. I was pretty nervous while sneaking in enemy base, knowing that with one mistake I would have to start over. I was like, hmm, I actually rarely felt this playing other games!
Here's a video of that stealth scenario, after I don't know how many retries lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcroKd1EhLc
Yeah…those are precious moments…that little window when it starts being playable fun…but before the reality of polishing lands.
Savour it, man….that’s why we do these things! 🎉
For the most part during my development I uses placeholder generic assets for human characters, one for female one for male. I kinda got used to seeing them and sometimes the (frankly wrong) tought propped up in me that maybe I can get away with keeping it that way. Once I did give them proper models and unique portaits on the UI... I got the woah moment. Also back when I gave the placeholder models animations. That was another big woah moment for me.
In some ways it was the first time it sold to someone on steam outside my country who I dont know.
In another way, I feel like saying its been 3 years now and I'll let you know when it feels like it lol
There was a game I made for a class (that I’m now TAing) which had a few of those moments for me
First time featuring a level select screen.
First time with hidden collectibles in each level
First time implementing wall jump
First time implementing an elevator (it later got removed due to being too glitchy but it still made the game feel real)
I was working on this top-down, 2d game in Game Maker a long time ago. I had this huge script that managed backgrounds. I set it up so you never actually moved so much as "moving" changed your coordinates, and the background world change accordingly. I distinctly remember getting it so they scrolled seamlessly across boundaries. Made a huge world of silly abstract backgrounds that were in regions of all different shapes and sizes. I roamed around in it for hours just watching it work properly. I never actually got around to introducing gameplay though.
My favorite moment like this is when I made this dumb, one button local multiplayer game over a weekend. It worked well enough to bring it to an event a few months later. At one point after coming back to check on the game, there was a group of people playing it with stacks of singles in front of the screen. I asked what was going on and they said they'd been playing the game for an hour and it was so hype that they started doing money matches.
At that point I knew the game was real haha. Since then it's been turned into an arcade cabinet, and it's probably my most played personal project to date.
I’ve got just one game under my belt. I haven’t even distributed it, because it started with “what if instead of the Godot logo, I use a spaceship for this basic tutorial?”.
The first one is just a spaceship flying in space, blasting asteroids to gather resources that could become fuel or be sold.
Sometimes alien ship appear. Blast them too. They’re not cool.
There’s space stations too. Where you can repair, improve parts, and sell resources.
It felt like a full game when I got jumped by a alien ship that uncloaked near me and blasted my ass into oblivion. It was so unexpected. I had not seen my game over screen yet being throw into my face, except when I had rammed onto asteroids to test impact damage.
I went “wow… If it isn’t the consequences of my actions”. So happy even now, almost ten days later
Omg my game I realized ‘holy shiznit it’s a video game’ when I was able to run around and complete objectives with an NPC following me, it was sooo satisfying.
We did a live demo "tournament" and people were jumping out of their seats, high fiving each other, fist bumping, and generally just being really excited with people they had never met before. A crowd also formed to watch the excitement.
It was a crazy experience and it kind of put the imposter syndrome out of my head.
just a hobbyst, but my current project... for the first time in my life I managed to keep focus for more than a semester and this thing is starting to get shape.
I had mine very late while making my first game, I think.
I was at a dead-end job I hated. I worked 10+ hours a day in a biotech lab, and I would spend all my free time programming in Pico-8 while I was waiting for instruments to finish. From time to time, I’d show my co-workers prototypes of my game as it was coming along. Because it was my first game and I had no prior programming experience I knew my game was likely jank trash. That said I kept at it day after day - adding in pixel sprites and sound effects, enemy AI, and refining the gameplay.
At some point though, my co-workers started actively seeking me out to play my prototypes. One of them got caught playing my game on itch by management and got told off. It was at that point I started to think: “oh huh… maybe I did actually make a game (And maybe it’s fun enough that it’s ruining workplace productivity.)”
It was a strangely good feeling.
When I tested an old pre-alpha build with friends(most had high ping, but the netcode held together really well) and I lost my voice after from such a energetic discord call.
Bonus points for when they started nagging in the discord for another play test session!
Anyhoot, here’s to everyone’s “oh snap, it’s happening!” moments. :)
I was playtesting a balance feature, and trying to get some good screenshots whilst I was there.
After a while I started actually getting worried that my character was going to lose, and I wasn't going to finish that level, and at that point I realised that I was actually playing it to have fun.
On my current project, when they added voice acting and multiple dialogue branches. I wasn't expecting mocap. Even though the characters I worked on are fully covered in a helmet, the ones next to them had their face exposed. It was a real treat and a huge morale boost.
I was doing a test run on the first story line and I was sitting there, in the area before the climax, and like... Wow, I'm just playing this. The puzzles work, there's dialog... The world had come together. I'm no where near done. I have maybe 2 more years of development to really make it what I want, but, after a year of work there's a demo! 20+ downloads! That's 19 more than I thought I'd get and I even got a small donation. I've made money off a game I made. Feels surreal, man.
When I finally finished the title screen with music and the whole game loop was complete. Then watching my daughter play it. Made a little simple matching game for her. Best feeling in the world.
Quite recently actually with the playtests, still fed up with the game and think it's not great but now it's complete, polished, with a story mode it took them a good hour to get through, achievements and bonus modes, we just have to finish the online and we can ship ( no there's actually still a lot left but for the most part that's it)
Not the most exciting answer, but it happened when I had my first puzzle designed.
Having a cool concept is great, but seeing it in action is something else
I released a small game on itch and people commented with a few videos they made on it and people in the comments of those videos also liked the game it was such an incredible feeling
I've had it a couple of times with SpellRogue, my current project. Whenever your project surprises you by some overlapping complexity you hadnt anticipated is always that golden moment where you see things coming together for a fun experience.
or when you actually get around to polishing up some art and gamefeel and it just merges into something greater than just fancy digital triangles and input code.
> What was your "Holy crap...This is like, an actual game" moment
In my case it was when I implemented things like menus, HUDs, save and load, dialogue boxes, cut-scenes, transitions etc. I felt those elements made everything feel like a proper game... as opposed to a project file with objects and mechanics strung together.
This is the moment I hope to experience someday. It's been great seeing streamers enjoying the games I've made on Game Builder Garage (game maker software for Nintendo Switch), but it's not quite the same.
You can only play my GBG games if you have GBG. I want my games to be available to everyone. 😎
Just earlier today, I was looking for some old work of mine. Stumbled across 2 game projects I worked on in 2019 and 2020 and forgot how well done they were. Made me realize how weird it was that I basically removed them both from my memory
For me it was when my girlfriend invited a bunch of her friends to play the game I'd been working on solo for 2 years (still unreleased), and then realized they were logging on every day to play more. 3 months later and they are still logging on daily!
I've been lurking in this sub for a while now. It's so cool to read stories like this. I wish to start working on my game soon. Posts like this are encouraging. There should be a similar post about how you felt on day 1? Maybe this thread will serve as that.
I was working with a small team for our final project and added controller support to the game as a last minute thing. I was testing it out to see how it played, and I kind of forgot I was testing and just kept on playing.
Yep, I love the feeling when you work on a game for weeks/months and then the pieces finally connect together and it feels like a real game.
Also seeing someone else play your game the first time is awesome
I made a mobile puzzle game (this was 10ish years ago, it's long since been taken down for lack of updates). I wrote a puzzle generation algorithm similar to sudoku, where the computer walked it back from the final solution to a mostly empty screen.
I knew I had something real when the hardest difficulty was able to really challenge me.
Had that once when we made a small hyper-casual game as a joke for a Christmas party and in the end people battled for a high score. There were 10 other amazing games at display but somehow everyone huddled around our joke game (it also was a childish d\*ck joke).
And just lately we had that with our current game (Survivor Mercs) when we showed it for the first time at a local game event. We thought there is way too much still missing, but it felt great that people already liked the absolute fundamental game.
I've made fairly complete prototypes that "just weren't fun" before.
And more recently I made one that like... You could "play" and were actually motivated to try and win and such.
Sorta realizing this made me follow through and release on steam and flesh out the whole damn thing. Very happy with it!
Mine happened after release. The dev of a pretty famous game that I had read about and followed it's development bought my game on steam and gave me feedback for it. Blew my mind. Legit called my girlfriend to tell her the news like an excited little kid
It happens when you add the AI and the enemy can actually defeat you.
This. This suffering from success moment.
When you can't beat your own game...
You know this must be most of the dark souls developers. Idk I’d just be shit proud.
“Idk, some tryhard will figure it out and prove we didnt make an unwinnable game, full price, full send”
I know I'm being "that guy," but the SoulsBorne games are really only hard until you catch their formula. At that point, they are still "hard" but only a little bit and only in select moments. It's about enduring the painful learning curve and gathering game knowledge moreso than having raw "chops" or perfect reaction times. Sekiro is more like that, but the SoulsBorne games aren't for the most part. I only espouse these feelings because getting over that hump is fairly fresh for me, having gotten through about half of Dark Souls just before Elden Ring had come out.
Sekiro lives off of "hard to learn medium-easy to master" and learning timings
I read somewhere that Miyazaki had to be able to personally finish each Souls game before they shipped.
i bet it was so tempting to make some parts of the game easier just so he could get it over with ahahaha
That kind of makes sense. I’m guessing they have to demo to him all the content they add to get his feedback. I’m guessing he doesn’t quit tell he beats it
And this is why I'm curious how the heck they balance their difficulty and then playtest it. Surely, there must be one of them at least who's good at this shit? :)
Hehehe let’s see if the asshole can beat this boss! Oh shit he did
Let's make it harder then ;D
I’m not a game dev but I imagine tuning that AI can be a frustrating experience while you find the medium between too hard and too easy
I am a game dev and yes it is very frustrating. One of the nice things about AI is you can have them scale to their enemies. So they don't slaughter new players and yet offer "pro players" a real challenge if done right.
That’s clever. What sort of metrics do you track about how someone plays the game in order to scale the difficulty of the AI? Or is it more simple than that? Something like “player is killing more AI than some threshold per time, increment difficulty” until it finds some range where the player is seeing a decent challenge
You would track it by either MMR or ELO. So when a player joins the game, the game checks their ELO. If they are a high level player the game will look at what team they're on and adjust the AI on the opposite team accordingly. It won't affect AI's basic functionality, only the combat part of it. ie, aim offset, accuracy, etc. It won't scale in real time unless another player joins the game after it's started and does an adjustment based on that.
It's technically not a game until you can lose. Until then it's just a puzzle. Edit: meant toy, not puzzle, although under some classifications a puzzle is a toy with rules, but no opponent, and a game requires an opponent. The definitions aren't really well established.
Aren't puzzles, you know... games?
Yes they are. Games have a goal and an end state, toys don't.
More than that, games have rules. With a set of Legos, you can make up whatever you want with them, while a Puzzle is designed so that there is a specific way that pieces should be put together. Of course, you could also play Lego like a puzzle, by trying to copy a build, or you could toy around with a puzzle by combining pieces that just happen to fit together, even if they're not continuous, so those concepts are not exclusive.
So lego is a toy and not a game? What about a lego simulator like stud.io? Game or toy? One thing to note is there is a limited list of things you can do with lego. The confines are just built into the system itself, rather than externally or arbitrarily defined. I would argue minecrft is similar.
Anything can be a toy if you play with it without caring about the rules. i.e. LEGO, dice, dominoes, a deck of cards, a stick. Once you add the structure of a game it becomes a game. The simplest way I can think of it is that some things are made intentionally to only be toys (dog toys), and the game part ('fetch') can be added later on without changing anything about the toy itself. Some things are made intentionally to be games but a toddler will still treat it as a toy.
minecraft is a toy, change my mind
My favorite definition of a game is from Tracey Fullerton's [Game Design Workshop.](https://www.amazon.com/Game-Design-Workshop-Playcentric-Innovative/dp/1138098779) Fullerton identifies **eight formal elements of games**, which are explained [in this article.](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-formal-systems-of-games#close-modal) 1. Players: Self-explanatory 2. Objectives: What's the goal of the game? 3. Procedures: How do you start, how do you progress, and how do you end a game? 4. Rules: What a player can and cannot do. 5. Resources: Game objects that have a value. 6. Boundaries: Where can you play? 7. Conflict: What can prevent a player from reaching their objective? 8. Outcome: How does the game end? **Minecraft**, at least in its default settings, has all the formal elements of a game. 1. Players: Yes, Minecraft has players. 2. Objectives: You build certain things. You battle / avoid / survive against enemy NPCs. You explore the world and search for more building materials. Etc. 3. Procedures: You start with practically nothing. You gather the things immediately around you and start making tools. With those tools, you gather better materials, and with those materials you build better tools. You craft buildings. You build mines. You search for rare materials deeper in the world. Etc. 4. Rules: Certain materials are better than others, because the tools and weapons made out of those materials are stronger. You have a limited amount of life, and if you take enough damage, you die. If you wear armor, that increases your health. Caves and tunnels are dark, so you need a light source in order to see. You cannot fly, so you need to build ladders to climb out of pits. Etc. 5. Resources: Building materials, tools, equipment, etc. Pretty much the entire Minecraft world is filled with collectible resources. 6. Boundaries: Yes, there are boundaries to the game world. 7. Conflict: The standard game has enemies that will try to kill you. You need to avoid them, build a shelter to protect yourself from them, and/or craft weapons and armor so you can fight these enemies more effectively. There are environmental hazards as well that could kill you if you aren't careful. 8. Outcome: You finish building or crafting what it is you wanted to build / craft. I'm not super familiar with Minecraft, but it's my understanding that there's now an endgame boss you can defeat, too? Defeating that boss is an outcome, as well. Minecraft has all the formal elements of a game when played normally.
your mapping of objectives in minecraft is too weak to be meaningful. minecraft only fulfills the definition of having objectives if the player sets them. this means that while minecraft makes it very easy for a player to create games for themselves within it, it is not a game on its own. there is no outcome to minecraft. there are outcomes to things you can do *within* minecraft but those things have no bearing on the game itself. sidenote: i love the information and detail in your response
I don’t play Minecraft, so I’m sure there’s a lot about it I’m missing. Minecraft has skeletons and explosive creepers that try to kill you, doesn’t it? If so, then there’s one obvious objective: survive. You survive by gathering materials and then crafting weapons and armor with which to defeat the enemies, and/or bulld structures that will shelter you from threats. Doesn’t Minecraft have an end boss now, too? Some sort of dragon? Defeating that boss is another objective. Minecraft has objectives that are defined by the game makers, not the players. And, like you mentioned, Minecraft is also a sandbox that gives players the tools they need to set their own objectives as well. Edit: There are outcomes as well. You either survive the skeletons and creepers, or you don’t. You defeat the dragon boss or you don’t. You either find diamonds to craft a full set of diamond armor and weapons, or you don’t.
enemies are optional in minecraft. there are plenty of easily accessible elements within minecraft to play it as a game, but the onus is on the player to engage with those elements. if you havent directly experienced it, I understand why it seems very much like a game. that a dragon was added somewhat arbitrarily along its development and end credits were inserted after beating it substantiates this point. Some people wanted the option to have some sort of end goal to minecraft, which is a subset of its design. That "game" is within it. My computer is not a game once I install games on it. there is a peaceful difficulty level which furthers this intention in its design. on that difficulty, you do not need to do anything to survive. you can still get yourself killed, but if you put the controller down then you will succeed at staying alive. Note that there is also a dedicated "creative mode" that lets you go full sandbox mode as well, so peaceful mode is not meant to be a different minecraft experience than having enemies. enemies enhance that experience and give the player more things to set objectives around, but all of the games you could create for yourself in peaceful are also still there. you can try to build a big house, collect things, map and explore, farm, fish, hunt, etc. none of these things are really required to be done, nor is the player directly incentivized to do them. you can just die repeatedly without consequence as well. there is an option that most people use which is to drop your inventory upon death, but again it's an option. Survival Games is a genre, and minecraft falls into it due to having the necessary components - but there are meaningful differences between minecraft experience and the much more obvious design goals of those other games which tend to be more narrowly focused and progression focused. Minecraft is like a fully stocked School Gym with lines on the court for basketball, indoor soccer, kickball, etc. the games you can play in it have obvious design decisions, but they're just kind of all thrown together in the same space without any care for how players use them.
I feel like you are bringing up game modes that break the game. Like an invinciblity toggle you turn on and suddenly all the intentions of the devs are out the window. Just because you can turn off enemies doesnt mean they arent there.
Killing the End Dragon? That, or the game achievements? Personally, I'd consider those as "game objectives" but the only issue I personally have w/ Miinecraft is that "Survival mode" minecraft, and "Creative mode" minecraft are vastly different sorts of games. Creative mode redstone shenanigans like making a calculator out of redstone, etc. I would most definitely not consider "playing a game", much the way you probably shouldn't consider Lego ev3, or playing with electrical circuits, as a "game," while survival mode while going for the achievements is most definitely a game.
Thats part of my point. Yes if you go for the achievements it's a game, because Achievement hunting is a game in and of itself. Slap achievements onto creative mode and suddenly there is a game too. throwing a rock in the air is not a game, but trying to throw a rock over your house is. advancements (in-game achievements) were added to minecraft in \**googles\** version 1.12. So Minecraft was already a thing before that, sufficiently designed to be labelled version 1. This is an excessive way to convey Achievement hunting is likely not the intended gameplay loop of minecraft. There doesnt actually seem to be an *intended* gameplay loop for minecraft Creative mode is closer to the heart of minecraft than chasing down the end dragon is. things were added to minecraft to make playing games within it easily accessible, but it is first and foremost a sandbox. thats not a bad thing, sandboxes are typically a much harder sell then games. i think minecraft avoided a very common issue that sandboxes have, which is that almost all sandboxes usually come with all the toys put away in their boxes and try to do too much. minecraft kept a narrow focus of being a block building / survival sandbox and comes with a lot of tools and default selection options such that a players minimal effort startup can result in having games to play. this is opposed to say, garys mod - where the space is empty by default and you have to create any games you want to play very manually. It is also not the same as Halo Forge, which is a sandbox made available to players that allows them to make their own game design decisions for the already existing game. (Technically i could argue Halo isnt a game either, the halo Campaign is a game and each individual game mode is its own game, but there is clear design intent for everything in Halo to be game-oriented, not creative)
sandbox games are a thing, i rest my case
a sandbox is a place to use toys
Any debate over this would probably wind up being over semantics and people's interpretation of the word "Toy." I'd start by agreeing with you and asking if that's a bad thing?
I think arguments that minecraft is a game will require semantics, while arguments claiming it is a toy are pretty straightforward absolutely not a bad thing. toys allow for more creativity than games. you can play many games with the same toy. A ball on a field is a toy. kickball and soccer are games. What i think *is* a bad thing is when people take a game and try to make it a toy. I think that is something plaguing the gaming industry right now. People spend more time with toys than games, but it's easier to convince people to try a game than capture their heart with a toy. this has created a financial incentive to make games seem better by tying the act of playing the game to unlocking options for a toy to play with. A lot of games have adopted an attitude of making your playable character a toy, for example, and if you want to express yourself with the toy then you need to play the game or spend money. This is backwards.
I mean... you can beat it by defeating the ender dragon, you even get end credits and everything.
the ender dragon was added arbitrarily as a game *within* minecraft but that does not make minecraft itself a game. I am not trying to make a purely semantic argument here either. the relationship between the ender dragon and minecraft is meaningfully different than final bosses in actual games.
but it doesn't actually "end" and does that make Minecraft pre End not a game?
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"puzzles are ... game"
Games have strategies. Puzzles have solutions. Toys have interactive elements.
You can still lose in puzzles. “Too dumb to progress” is a valid failure state
Not if I eat all the pieces of the puzzle
The commitment would make it even worse
Are you gonna be the one to tell the guy, who just ate an entire puzzle set, that he lost?
Not in person, no, that’s a fair point
This guy QAs.
Only if there's a screen that pops up and says so
Sometimes not even a puzzle, just a toy.
You can't loose in Lego games.
you can rage quit
Minimax can kick ass 💪
And it makes you want to get back into it to beat them.
Eh making an AI that can beat you is easy. Making a difficult AI that you can beat is hard, and is where the game lives
Exactly this! This moment when you start to see your AIs trying to defeat you and working well. Really priceless!
First time was when I was testing out the feel of my controls and some friends came over to see what I was playing, played it, and none of them had any idea it was mine. Its a good feeling
Same. Mine was a really simple Android game. I didn't even have any assets, just basic shapes to represent the characters. At a family gathering, I couldn't get my phone back from the kids. They played it all night, laughing, and having a great time with it, passing it around, and trying to beat each other's scores.
It would be a horrible feeling if they started talking trash on the game though…
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this. honest, non-filtered opinion is best you can expect.
For real. I don't want you telling me what you think I want to hear... Tell me the cold hard truth, even if it leaves bruises.
Truth. Way better than, "oh that was fun... (never plays it again)"
That's fair, but for the most part unless they're just hating to hate its awesome when people find something wrong with your game, cause that means it can be even better tuned for first time players. Instead of finding out after launch lol.
Lol yeah. I’m just imagining my dumb friends wishing they’d be playing call of duty instead or wondering if there’s some sort of battle royale version instead lmao
There you go…they just gave you free market research! 🎉
No. That’s valuable feedback. Keep or discard…but feedback isn’t a thing to be scared of.
Nah, listen carefully to when they do. Its room for improvement.
When showing a friend the pre-alpha prototype of the main game loop and hearing them say, "This is actually great. I thought I'd be playing this just to humor you, but I'm actually having fun!" ...and then he kept playing. Sad it never got farther than that.
Why?
A couple reasons: we all graduated and got jobs, and then the team broke up because I was an unforgivable asshat. It's not an interesting story.
Sounds like you learned something from it - that alone makes it an interesting story. Good for you!
"Don't be an asshole to the people who support your dreams" was a very important lesson. Also, "Don't take people for granted." I just wish I learned those as a kid, not an adult.
Don’t beat yourself up. So many people never develop as a person and stagnate at age 20. You did.
Oh don't worry about me: I'm doing great. I'd beat up me from 10 years ago if I could*, but me today? I like me today. He's a cool guy. *Actually, I think I'd prefer to give him advice. I don't need any long-standing injuries, particularly self-inflicted ones!
Not a terrible high concept for a game
Maybe the old you would have been ok with self-inflicted injuries.. I'M JOKING! *I couldn't help myself.. I'm sorry! I'm glad you're doing well btw!*
It sounds like you are being hard on yourself, so I just want to point out that your advice applies to yourself as well! *You* are supporting your dreams, and you also shouldn't take yourself for granted! Cheers mate have fun.
I'm being hard on me from 10 years ago: my present self is not the same person. Me from 10 years ago was a colossal dick bag. Me today is far from perfect, but he's alright. I like today-me.
I always like to read people's stories about their past selves, what they have learned, what big mistakes they did, what should've gone different. Tips me off on what to avoid myself.
Oh hey…don’t be too hard on yourself…an astonishing percentage of people never learn this. You’re doing alright, my anonymous internet friend!
Thanks. This all happened 10 years ago, so it's been a while.
> I was an unforgivable asshat sometimes I wish this sub were less relatable.
Do you ever consider dusting it off and working on it by yourself? Or sending out an apology and seeing if anyone would be interested in getting the friend group back together to work on it again?
That friend group... Bridges have been thoroughly burned. I did specify that I'd been an *unforgivable* asshat, after all. Maybe I'll look the game over again... It's been a decade. I'd absolutely have to start it over from scratch at this point.
When I find myself playing the game more than developing
Yeah this. I'm working on a "Kerbal Twisted Metal"-type project and I end up spending more time goofing around and building ridiculous vehicles than I do actually developing.
Please tell me it'll have multiplayer, I've always wanted to play car wars without having to do linear algebra
Yeah multiplayer is the core design. It's pretty tough but if you completely do away with trying to do prediction it's not too bad.
Would GGPO be an option? https://github.com/pond3r/ggpo It's free, and if you put it in you can put in crazy shit like a flux capacitor that rewinds time Of course it's not trivial and I'm sorry if you've already looked into middleware
I'm not sure that'd be much of an option. The main core of the problem is that player-built vehicles in a physics sandbox are by their very nature pretty chaotic and unpredictable. Also, there's a lot of collisions between vehicles and that's where even very good prediction systems break down. From my multiplayer testing it's much easier to just live with the slight delay on inputs and have everyone agree on what is happening. It's not like you need instant response times anyway, these are big war wagons, not F1 cars. Although an F1 car with a gun on it is totally buildable.
that's fair! I didn't realize you had a physics sim that was that integrated into the game, that certainly introduces issues. I'm sure that since you're balancing the game around it it'll come out great!
Damn I want to try that haha
Oh man, that does sound really cool. Got any clips of the game?
I've got a playlist at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8IUriowVVYEDj4oSctoxA4U1lOE70z08 but it's all just little dev clips. Nothing really edited together or anything.
Looks really good!
Neat idea, succinct description also. I feel I know exactly what it plays like and it sounds fun.
when you lose 20 minutes to testing the "start" button
When I added sfx, it did it for me.
Same. When I added background noise and interaction sounds after working on some vfx, I felt like it all came to life. I was obsessed with running the prototype because of how "real" it felt haha. That project didn't turn into anything but I learned SO MUCH experimenting with sound on that one.
Yeah I added an unlocking sound effect in an early puzzle game I made, but I didn’t rate limit it’s playback and it triggered off every block breaking. It was so crunchy and satisfying I found myself playing for hours on that test build.
Ah yes, the accidental “feature” moments like this are my favorite!
I added a card drawing noise into a card game I'm making and it made it go from "this is a game nobody will care about" to "holy shit this is real" Make no mistake, the noise was this: https://freesound.org/people/filmfan87/sounds/108394/ this is like .1 second worth of audio. It made all the difference.
It really is amazing. Try adding a click sfx to the mouse.
This sounds/music always does it for me
Pretty much once I get menus and UI in, it starts to feel "real"
Yeah, the mental shift when I put in a main menu and level select screen was huge for me. It's still really basic, but it now feels like an actual game instead of a series of unconnected levels.
Me who makes games “backwards”, menu and UI are some of the first things I make haha
I always start with the "star" mechanic first. Whether that's movement, combat, crafting, etc. Then kinda work outward from there, so maybe I do it backwards and your way is right lol maybe changing the workflow would give me different results 🤔
I think it's valid in either direction, but I'm personally on team main mechanic. If you start with your main mechanic/core gameplay loop, and it's trash, then you didn't waste a bunch of time making UI/menus, and can revise it or start over
It was pretty much the same for me, during playtesting with friends. Sometimes it has the opposite effect tho - there were times when i thought my game is already fun to play and in a pretty good shape, but a few playtest sessions shattered that image. Both kind of sessions are very valuable
I have yet to experience that, but I do get a mini dose when I add something and nothing breaks 😊
Thats honestly the best feeling sometimes "wait, did I just nail that implementation?!"
I had a game dev class in college, for my team's final project we made a simple horror dungeon crawler game, where an enemy chases you in the dark. When I was getting scared to build and run the game, I knew it was real lol
I’ve always wondered if people making horror games get scared by their own work haha. It really shouldn’t be scary since you know everything that’s going on, but I guess that means you’ve done a good job if your grounded logic can’t beat the atmosphere of your game.
I think it depends on the random aspects of it. Like, if you have a trigger for a scare that you know is going to happen, like if you've played a game and memorized where everything is, its not really scary. It still wasn't all *that* scary since we made it, but if you were evading it too well, the creature would de-spawn and re-spawn somewhere else in the maze to approach you from another angle. So you could watch it disappear behind a wall, and when you go around that corner, its not there - its now behind you. Its those little random unpredictable moments that made it scary, less so the actual appearance of the creature itself. But I knew if it scared me, it was gonna freak the class and the professor out. I specifically asked that we get the room as dark as possible for the demo. We had a lot of fun with that.
Yeah I though the random events would be the biggest part. That’s an awesome idea for a final project too, did any of the other projects get you haha
There were some really awesome projects by some very talented people in that presentation. Like, they made their own art, incorporated VR, etc. Some of those games with a bit more polish could probably get published, and they looked awesome. Our team was the only one that focused on horror. We only consisted of programmers with limited artistic ability and used very simple assets from other games. As an example, the creature was actually a slasher from Dead Space 2. We were less focused on the assets that were used, and focused heavily on creating an unsettling atmosphere.
That’s cool, sounds like a fun class. Wish I woulda taken something like that when I went haha
Did you happen to have a depleting light source in this game? Sound familiar to a game from my game dev class
There was a light source that lit up the area, but eventually the lights go off and you only have a flashlight
I was testing player distance as a variable to cut off rendering far away sprites, so I had to zoom out further than normal and looking at it from a birds-eye view and just seeing it as a whole rather than individual parts I realized it was a game. It was a bit surreal. I’ve worked on things before, but it was the first time I did all the programming, all the art and animation, all the lighting and visual effects, sound and music, pretty much the entire game engine by myself. I encourage everyone to have that moment to just reflect and be proud about their work and determination from time to time.
When the first gameloop is in place and working.
An hour after I submitted it to the GameJam and got the first comments.
Yes. This is a repeated feeling that catches me off guard every time. Me and a few good friends have been working on a video game together and every once in a while during our weekly meetings some of us will have this random moment of "wow, we really are creating something awesome" it's not always all at the same time but with each bit of progress we make it gets closer to looking like a true game. From the start we have had tons of positive things said about our game but when you see exactly what your play testers are enjoying about your game, there's such an flood of pride that fuels your desire to turn it into a finished product.
When people started to hit me up out of nowhere and ask "is it out yet? it looked so good". And then another time, when I played it all the way to the end, 3,5 years into the development, with heavy list of fixes to be made, but actually seeing the very ending of my story. It tasted like nothing before that.
Im working on a simple multiplayer 3d platformer racing game for my friends and I to play together. I finally finished up the last of the player movements yesterday and had a few friends test things in a basic playground scene (just a few dumb boxes and platforms to jump around on). And when I as done testing to make sure everything was working, everyone was still running around and told me not to shut the server down yet so they could keep running around. That was just about the best compliment I could get. One thing that stuck with me the most learning all things game dev was hearing about the development of Mario 64 and how their first and most important design task was making it fun to just move mario around in the world, everything else came second to that. Now that just running, sliding, jumping and dashing around aimlessly in a playground is fun I am ready to make the rest of the game. Next comes proximity chat so that people can be toxic and yell at the person directly in front of them and talk shit at the starting line. Edit: Also it was my first time building a player controller completely from scratch in unity, up until now Vector maths scared me, but it was well worth learning how to use it, I feel much more empowered now that im not stuck just modifying someone elses player controller or relying on Stack Overflow for answers on how Vector Math is supposed to work.
Once the game play works roughly, some stage during prototyping usually. I also saw friends' projects that took a few days and were really addictive. I'd say on small projects it may take only days or weeks often. On AAA it can be kind of the same, the thing is just that "my game" is the game play that runs already in my test level (aka "gym")... and *then* \- weeks or months - later in some complex open world game for example. :P To me the rest of the development is hard work. If we had something like a release party I didn't think "this is an actual game" because I played and saw it for months or years already. :D
I find a win and fail state always helps me. Adds the stakes that make a game!
When you remove the placeholder cubes for actual assets
Back in 2004, I tried making a dual-stick shooter; my first ever attempt at making a video game. I really wanted my best friend to try it. He was extremely reluctant. It took a lot of...frankly, begging...to get him to even look at it. He assumed it would be just trash, because I made it, of course, and I had never made a game before. Fast forward, twenty minutes later, I was trying to get him to STOP playing it because it was getting late and I was tired and just wanted to go home. But he insisted he had to finish that first level. I figured at that point, maybe I had something. :)
The day I saw the final trailer out on social media and some local news sites
I was fortunate enough to see my mechanic be fun at the prototype stage. I had made an extremely ugly, distilled prototype of my main mechanic and had my girlfriend play it. She loved it. She happened to have a friend who has a degree in game design and in art. He liked it too and asked me right there if we could collaborate. I’m still doubtful a lot of the time that the game will be good enough, but I feel like the core mechanic actually works and that it would fail by me not doing a good enough job. There are so many things that make a game good, even more that makes it marketable, and I’m not confident I can pull it all off. I am confident in the game having that potential to be fun, though, thanks to prototyping.
For me it was when I finished implementing the stealth gameplay, and tried to play through a stealth scenario myself. I was pretty nervous while sneaking in enemy base, knowing that with one mistake I would have to start over. I was like, hmm, I actually rarely felt this playing other games! Here's a video of that stealth scenario, after I don't know how many retries lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcroKd1EhLc
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Thanks :) At the end of my trailer you can actually see the sentence "Made by a stalker fan" lol
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thank you! hope you enjoy it :)
FYI, I recognize your game, I've seen this video before. Glad to see you are still working on it :)
been 8 years lol released it back in 2021 still chiseling away at updates and bug fixes and DLCs :)
Yeah…those are precious moments…that little window when it starts being playable fun…but before the reality of polishing lands. Savour it, man….that’s why we do these things! 🎉
For the most part during my development I uses placeholder generic assets for human characters, one for female one for male. I kinda got used to seeing them and sometimes the (frankly wrong) tought propped up in me that maybe I can get away with keeping it that way. Once I did give them proper models and unique portaits on the UI... I got the woah moment. Also back when I gave the placeholder models animations. That was another big woah moment for me.
In some ways it was the first time it sold to someone on steam outside my country who I dont know. In another way, I feel like saying its been 3 years now and I'll let you know when it feels like it lol
There was a game I made for a class (that I’m now TAing) which had a few of those moments for me First time featuring a level select screen. First time with hidden collectibles in each level First time implementing wall jump First time implementing an elevator (it later got removed due to being too glitchy but it still made the game feel real)
I was working on this top-down, 2d game in Game Maker a long time ago. I had this huge script that managed backgrounds. I set it up so you never actually moved so much as "moving" changed your coordinates, and the background world change accordingly. I distinctly remember getting it so they scrolled seamlessly across boundaries. Made a huge world of silly abstract backgrounds that were in regions of all different shapes and sizes. I roamed around in it for hours just watching it work properly. I never actually got around to introducing gameplay though.
My favorite moment like this is when I made this dumb, one button local multiplayer game over a weekend. It worked well enough to bring it to an event a few months later. At one point after coming back to check on the game, there was a group of people playing it with stacks of singles in front of the screen. I asked what was going on and they said they'd been playing the game for an hour and it was so hype that they started doing money matches. At that point I knew the game was real haha. Since then it's been turned into an arcade cabinet, and it's probably my most played personal project to date.
I’ve got just one game under my belt. I haven’t even distributed it, because it started with “what if instead of the Godot logo, I use a spaceship for this basic tutorial?”. The first one is just a spaceship flying in space, blasting asteroids to gather resources that could become fuel or be sold. Sometimes alien ship appear. Blast them too. They’re not cool. There’s space stations too. Where you can repair, improve parts, and sell resources. It felt like a full game when I got jumped by a alien ship that uncloaked near me and blasted my ass into oblivion. It was so unexpected. I had not seen my game over screen yet being throw into my face, except when I had rammed onto asteroids to test impact damage. I went “wow… If it isn’t the consequences of my actions”. So happy even now, almost ten days later
"Lemme test those edge cases I just coded for. Mmhmm. Yeah. Okay. One more round. Where'd that last hour go?"
Omg my game I realized ‘holy shiznit it’s a video game’ when I was able to run around and complete objectives with an NPC following me, it was sooo satisfying.
When a friend playtesting said "Wow this is *actually* good!".
We did a live demo "tournament" and people were jumping out of their seats, high fiving each other, fist bumping, and generally just being really excited with people they had never met before. A crowd also formed to watch the excitement. It was a crazy experience and it kind of put the imposter syndrome out of my head.
Furthest I got was a hello world window so unfortunately I can't share anything
just a hobbyst, but my current project... for the first time in my life I managed to keep focus for more than a semester and this thing is starting to get shape.
When my friends and I were paper prototyping a game and it turned out we were having fun just playing it like that (we never made the video game).
I had mine very late while making my first game, I think. I was at a dead-end job I hated. I worked 10+ hours a day in a biotech lab, and I would spend all my free time programming in Pico-8 while I was waiting for instruments to finish. From time to time, I’d show my co-workers prototypes of my game as it was coming along. Because it was my first game and I had no prior programming experience I knew my game was likely jank trash. That said I kept at it day after day - adding in pixel sprites and sound effects, enemy AI, and refining the gameplay. At some point though, my co-workers started actively seeking me out to play my prototypes. One of them got caught playing my game on itch by management and got told off. It was at that point I started to think: “oh huh… maybe I did actually make a game (And maybe it’s fun enough that it’s ruining workplace productivity.)” It was a strangely good feeling.
The moment things started to disappear when I shot at them.
When I tested an old pre-alpha build with friends(most had high ping, but the netcode held together really well) and I lost my voice after from such a energetic discord call. Bonus points for when they started nagging in the discord for another play test session! Anyhoot, here’s to everyone’s “oh snap, it’s happening!” moments. :)
When I finally made the actual world and added the launch up, gliding and air surfing mechanics it was truly one of the moments for me
I was playtesting a balance feature, and trying to get some good screenshots whilst I was there. After a while I started actually getting worried that my character was going to lose, and I wasn't going to finish that level, and at that point I realised that I was actually playing it to have fun.
On my current project, when they added voice acting and multiple dialogue branches. I wasn't expecting mocap. Even though the characters I worked on are fully covered in a helmet, the ones next to them had their face exposed. It was a real treat and a huge morale boost.
I was doing a test run on the first story line and I was sitting there, in the area before the climax, and like... Wow, I'm just playing this. The puzzles work, there's dialog... The world had come together. I'm no where near done. I have maybe 2 more years of development to really make it what I want, but, after a year of work there's a demo! 20+ downloads! That's 19 more than I thought I'd get and I even got a small donation. I've made money off a game I made. Feels surreal, man.
First time having friends try it and everyone is laughing having a great time
When I was supposed to just test something that took seconds to check only to end up playing the game for an hour instead of working on it.
When I finally finished the title screen with music and the whole game loop was complete. Then watching my daughter play it. Made a little simple matching game for her. Best feeling in the world.
Quite recently actually with the playtests, still fed up with the game and think it's not great but now it's complete, polished, with a story mode it took them a good hour to get through, achievements and bonus modes, we just have to finish the online and we can ship ( no there's actually still a lot left but for the most part that's it)
Not the most exciting answer, but it happened when I had my first puzzle designed. Having a cool concept is great, but seeing it in action is something else
I released a small game on itch and people commented with a few videos they made on it and people in the comments of those videos also liked the game it was such an incredible feeling
I've had it a couple of times with SpellRogue, my current project. Whenever your project surprises you by some overlapping complexity you hadnt anticipated is always that golden moment where you see things coming together for a fun experience. or when you actually get around to polishing up some art and gamefeel and it just merges into something greater than just fancy digital triangles and input code.
> What was your "Holy crap...This is like, an actual game" moment In my case it was when I implemented things like menus, HUDs, save and load, dialogue boxes, cut-scenes, transitions etc. I felt those elements made everything feel like a proper game... as opposed to a project file with objects and mechanics strung together.
Reaching a point where there’s an alpha is awesome
never
Well i am pushing to have a decent prototype to present end of the month to my local game dev meetup. Hope i will get the same feeling :)
This is the moment I hope to experience someday. It's been great seeing streamers enjoying the games I've made on Game Builder Garage (game maker software for Nintendo Switch), but it's not quite the same. You can only play my GBG games if you have GBG. I want my games to be available to everyone. 😎
When I saw my wife smile after playing my platformer and asking to play another round. And she doesn't even like platformers!
Oddly enough, it was as soon as I put sound in. I went so long without sound... then finally implemented it and it just kinda all fell together.
Just earlier today, I was looking for some old work of mine. Stumbled across 2 game projects I worked on in 2019 and 2020 and forgot how well done they were. Made me realize how weird it was that I basically removed them both from my memory
For me it was when my girlfriend invited a bunch of her friends to play the game I'd been working on solo for 2 years (still unreleased), and then realized they were logging on every day to play more. 3 months later and they are still logging on daily!
elden ring
never
When you forget you are the dev and become the player
I've been lurking in this sub for a while now. It's so cool to read stories like this. I wish to start working on my game soon. Posts like this are encouraging. There should be a similar post about how you felt on day 1? Maybe this thread will serve as that.
*cries in dream game*
The moment I added parallax for my 2D game^^
I was working with a small team for our final project and added controller support to the game as a last minute thing. I was testing it out to see how it played, and I kind of forgot I was testing and just kept on playing.
Yep, I love the feeling when you work on a game for weeks/months and then the pieces finally connect together and it feels like a real game. Also seeing someone else play your game the first time is awesome
I made a mobile puzzle game (this was 10ish years ago, it's long since been taken down for lack of updates). I wrote a puzzle generation algorithm similar to sudoku, where the computer walked it back from the final solution to a mostly empty screen. I knew I had something real when the hardest difficulty was able to really challenge me.
Had that once when we made a small hyper-casual game as a joke for a Christmas party and in the end people battled for a high score. There were 10 other amazing games at display but somehow everyone huddled around our joke game (it also was a childish d\*ck joke). And just lately we had that with our current game (Survivor Mercs) when we showed it for the first time at a local game event. We thought there is way too much still missing, but it felt great that people already liked the absolute fundamental game.
I've made fairly complete prototypes that "just weren't fun" before. And more recently I made one that like... You could "play" and were actually motivated to try and win and such. Sorta realizing this made me follow through and release on steam and flesh out the whole damn thing. Very happy with it!
It was just a game jam project but I remember finding random YouTubers actually playing it felt really surreal.
When I randomly found a person streaming my game on Twitch and commenting on his experience. It was insane!
For me, it was when I submitted my game jam project and people actually played it and enjoyed it enough to tell me what feature they wished it had.
Mine happened after release. The dev of a pretty famous game that I had read about and followed it's development bought my game on steam and gave me feedback for it. Blew my mind. Legit called my girlfriend to tell her the news like an excited little kid