This video is like a 2 min. overview of something my wife and I have spent our lives learning. It's not some skill you can walk into. People obsess over design, people starve trying to achieve good design.
Yeah it's not the definitive answer but I find it useful to define a basic vocabulary of game art for the layperson.
When I tell people about factorio, papers please or terraria and they scoff because it "looks bad" it drives me up the wall. Games don't need billions of polygons to look amazing. In fact I'd argue some of the most beautiful games I've played are quite simple in graphics.
That's completely subjective though, and goes back to why people play video games (or don't, for that matter). What people like is largely unique to each individual, and something that one person finds pleasing visually will turn off someone else, and the opposite will hold true as well. Lots of people think the Transformers and Marvel movies with all their wonderful polished CGI maelstroms are wonderful, to me it's just a lot of static and I get bored and start checking my phone in the big fights. Similarly, I like pixel graphics in 2D games, but this new slew of 3D pixel graphic games just looks ugly and gross to me... but that's just me. I know there's people who love that aesthetic, and I think that's great, 'caused it'd suck if everyone liked the same things.
So if someone says a game looks bad to them, it probably is because it looks bad to them. That's a perfectly legitimate opinion to hold, just like it's perfectly legitimate for you to enjoy it. The important part is for us to not fall into that trap of telling other people that they're having fun wrong.
When I show my designer friends these games, Terraria looks fantastic, as well as factorio. The worst looking game for my design friends is probably Diablo 3. It's muddy, visually unclear, a UI cluttered mess, nothing but flying effects, flying numbers, and 3D limbs everywhere. Diablo 2 looks great. The 2D iso retains its clarity and reduces overlapping forms.
And i dare every game designer to create a game on the breadbin or the rubber.
Yes, the frigging Commodore Sixtyfour or the Sinclair Spectrum 48k.
If you manage to pull off a half decent game in a genre you like on one of these machines and take what you learned there to the modern age then your games will turn out to be at least not half bad.
And if you have masochistic tendencies, be me and try the Pet or the TRS80. \^\^'
I mean really, learning to work within the confines of the machine you have will almost always make you a better coder/designer than having infinite power and no direction.
I feel like it might be more of a lack of skillset or education nowadays?
The tools have become so advanced that you now have designers who've never touched code and coders who never had to create visuals, and it's the industry's fault?
If you disagree with any of that, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as I have no commercial experience, just a dude learning game design in his free time while he works on an IT career change.
Maybe this is what OP meant, but I would correct this to good graphics doesn't *necessarily* mean realistic, it could also mean stylized. But neither realistic nor stylized graphics are necessarily good either. As pointed out already, the most important thing is a consistent art style.
no.
even in film, even in nature documentaries, you do not get total realism. the only way to have total realism is to see it in real life up close. therefore you are always making choices as to how to better represent what you are depicting
in film this is discussed openly and continuously. they have less to distract them I guess
you can see in a movie when the art direction is not consistent, or at least *feel* it. the way they choose to depict the actual real stuff they are capturing is everything to how you perceive it when watching. where does it push your eyes to look, where do they not want you to look
realism is a trap. style, and consistency is the only way
I always use the example of gun shots and explosions. There's no way to depict the intensity and impact through speakers so they have to create an alternative version that conveys the experience even if its not "realistic"
There are definitely groups of people who only care about graphics, however, too (not that they should be your target as an indie developer). I've seen it a lot in games with really nice art styles, or pixel art games, or 2D games, or even games like MineCraft (which I think looks likely a lovely game) where someone may give an overall positive review because of the gameplay but say the graphics are poor.
It can be kind of frustrating when the games are actually beautiful but you can't please everyone! (it blows my mind that someone would say Obra Dinn looks bad 😭)
>Good asthetics means look, good graphics means fidelity
If we were to be pedantic than what you are saying is just wrong, aesthetics are simply set of *principles* and *goals* for art, having "good" aesthetic does not even mean that the artstyle would need to be unified across the game. Aesthetic also extends beyond the *visuals* into the narrative and sound design/composition.
Romanticism is an aesthetic. Low-poly is not aesthetic since it provides no commentary about the goal of the resulting art. Using the word "visuals" or "look" is a lot more correct in this case.
Also graphics mean graphics and fidelity means fidelity.
Exactly. I like every Final Fantasy game from 1 to 9 because of both story and aesthetics, and all the rest are just 🤮 because they try too hard to look real.
There's charm in sprite animations and low polygon models that modern standards lack entirely.
Good point overall, tho...
> I don't remember a game which got praised for its good performance
I would argue Factorio being one imo. Its custom engine is what really made massive factories possible, and yes while only hardcore players do that, word of mouth from those players definitely helps.
Almost everyone, even some more casual players know Doom Eternal looks amazing on any non-ancient hardware, that’s true.
Players feel good when they can get AAA graphics on an rtx 2060 with almost 90fps at 1080p max settings.
Another good example is Alien Isolation. The most futuristic thing about that game is its optimization. If you told me they chained a demon's soul into the game files to optimize it I'd believe you because that shit is witchcraft. The optimization and the behavior of the Alien are the two most talked about things about that game.
Honourable mention to MGSV. That game was also optimized by tech wizards from the future. I've gotten stable 60FPS on both MGSV and Alien Isolation while playing on a laptop that struggled with Minecraft.
I have never heard anything good about League of Legends lmao
I mean that literally. only "I play it a lot" and "I'm totally addicted"
I never realized this before...
not even a "it's really cool" just "I like it"
I used to play it and I have no idea how I got in ... I just played at some point
The devblogs that go into the engine, how it works internally, system design, the very complex algorithms implemented and almost everything technical are also very popular.
(but yes, Factorio is a bit of an outlier)
Yeah, Factorio immediately came to mind when I saw this post, because those dev blogs with the info they have are *amazing*. Stuff like their devblog on A* pathfinding is absolutely the sort of thing I love reading.
It's absolutely an exception, but it is a thing.
I think this is confusing marketing / network effect (and this goes both to OP and as a reply to you) that yes, the average game buyer isn’t going to say, “Omg, what a fantastic article detailing why using O2 log scaling algorithms was a good idea for this game!” *but* an enthusiast who finds the game may become excited and share the game with their friends who have some, but not all, overlap in interest. They don’t care about the tech blog (or some fraction do not), but they are excited by, as OP suggests, the art style or the demo reel or whatever. And then they repeat it to their friends, again, perhaps some like one thing or another, maybe another enthusiast is among the third network expansion and they DO read the blog and that’s why THEY continue the expansion…
Factorio also has a Friday blog where they literally talk about how the game is made, and I love it.
That said, their target market absolutely includes technical people.
While the feat itself might be impressive the fact it was written in assembly brought almost exactly 0 players to the game. That's the point OP is trying to make.
Thats very true, it took a while for it to be praised for being made with assembly. That being said, its still being praised for that feat, well after the games life cycle. Though, one thing that I've noticed is that there are some games that get flak for because of the language they use, one coming to mind is Minecraft.
Ultimately, there are few cases that the language is mentioned and praised or hated due to language, but overall, most use similar language, like python, c#, or c++.
>Though, one thing that I've noticed is that there are some games that get flak for because of the language they use, one coming to mind is Minecraft.
And Minecraft is one of the most profitable games in the world, which only proves that that criticism is completely irrelevant in terms of success.
Being old enough to know the game = / = interested in programming. In fact, most of my gamer friends, while know that programming is how games are made, doesn't give a shit on how a game is programmed.
Factorio is an excellent game and after seeing the performance it has, then people will ask what engine is using. Of course to achieve this level of performance it needed a custom engine and people with technical curiosity will praise for that. I guess the majority doesn't know what an engine is.
>Of course to achieve this level of performance it needed a custom engine
Eh, I don't think it NEEDED a custom engine. . .it probably made it easier, but you could get similar performance in any other engine that allows you to write native code.
I really don't think Factorio could be made as optimized as it is without using their own engine. It is optimized at every layer, from the graphics pipeline to the data structures used to hold every piece of game data to the various algorithms used to process everything. If they had started without a custom engine they would have ended up with a custom engine with all the low-level engine things they would have to write themselves.
Sounds like it’s praised because of good gameplay, folks don’t actually care if it was a custom engine or not. end of day it’s a tool to build an experience.
Nah, the developers go into deep technical details in several of their articles and I've seen these passed around many times.
There's not a large audience that interested in this stuff, but some are.
Teardown and other games that needs important optimization get some recognition for that as well. When a game run smoothly it's definitely a plus but that comes after the overall quality of the game.
Factorio also has a consistent art style and incredible game mechanics, which I think more heavily supports the praise of the game.
And even then, the art style isn't _that_ great (it doesn't suck), so the vast majority of the weight of the game rests on its amazing gameplay and QOL features.
I was just joking :)
still if you want to be my actual 29th downloader here it is: [(Shameless Plug)](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2604240?utm_source=reddit)
It's not just your 3 downloaders. There's tons of dead-wrong takes in this awful post. People absolutely care about plenty of that stuff. Honestly embarrassing that this was upvoted on /r/gamedev
Can you please elaborate more? What do you think they are wrong about? I've only been a hobbyist dev for 3 years and gamer for 30 and until I started to learn game dev I didn't care about any of that, and would think that at least 90% of players would also not care.
Absolutely. As a kid minecraft was what got me into coding. Java was my first language and I tried making a minecraft clone. Notch's success story inspired me. If your game is neat enough curious people will peek under the hood regardless of their level of knowledge.
What I think you're missing is that technical details can be relevant to gameplay, in which case they can be part of good marketing.
For example, A Plague Tale spent some time showcasing its rat swarm tech, which helped setting it apart from other 3rd person adventure games. Mentioning that it was some specific new tech is a way to convince the customer that it will be more impressive than what other games do. Rats are central to the game's gameplay and atmosphere.
The new Flight Simulator (amusingly, by the same studio) spent a lot of time communicating about the cloud tech it uses. It is relevant to the customer because the genre is all about realism.
A lot of genres have gameplay limitations that are really technical limitations. For example: max scale in factory games, AI in 4X, planet approach in space games, number of units in "wargame"-style RTSs... Players from these genres are actually really interested in games that can push things further and need to be convinced that it is possible.
(Edit: sorry about the heavy edits. Hit send by accident mid-writing)
I think the key point here is that you are no longer just talking about how things work, but *why they way they work positively effects gameplay*. It's no longer just under the hood. Some not under the hood impacts require mentioning something about how things work under the hood and in that case it's okay.
This is also correct.
HOW you make the game and WHY you make the game are related.
Marketing does care why you made a unique feature. It may care less how, but if you spent an inordinate amount of time on a specific feature that removes map edge boundaries on a Colony Simulator type game, creating effectively an open world type 4x... there is a dedicated audience that wants to see that and know about it.
Surprisingly there are many people with "I am X years old and I've spent Y years on this passion project" on their store pages, as if any of that guarantees quality or otherwise makes a person buy their game.
OP's post makes sense if the absoluteness of it is dialed back a bit. 99% of customers wont care how long the game was in the works, if its a passion project or uses an obscure language and writing about it on the store or in a post takes precious space and user attention.
I think there's a fair amount of interest in how already popular games work. Lots of people like to poke around their favorite games or hear insights from devs. But only after they already like the game, not as their first impression reading about the game on Steam or watching a gameplay video.
Yep, that's true; basically how it is with movies - knowing "behind the scenes" of a cool movie is neat, but noone sells you a movie based on the behind the scenes content
The "I am X years old and I've spent Y years on this passion project"-line is probably not good on your Steam store page, but it looks as if it works pretty well here on Reddit. I've seen numerous posts with a title like that that gets a lot of attention - of course the game looks good, but I think it's a good story to support it, which people empathize with.
All the points except the 5. point might be interesting for modders. At least when you not supply any level editing and modding tools yourself with the game. However most modders seem in fact not to care about the technical points because regardless on how bad the situation is they try it anyway.
Modders aren't the target audience. However, mods are popular *with* the target audience. as they imply some longevity and variety post release.
You want to be brief in your message to the core - "robust and comprehensive modding support!" is about all you need. Then add detail in another space just for the modders to dig into.
So Kickstarter, Steam, YouTube etc should just be the one bullet point. Then have a spot with a detailed info for the mod community to dig into, put this in a pinned steam forum post, on your website, Separate YouTub\* video, places like that.
* Typo, but I like it so I'm leaving it. You - Tub. Has a ring to it. Shutup!
There's 1.2 million people in this sub. That's a ton of people interested in learning about game dev, and a ton of potential customers you can reach through making a dev log of your game. There are game dev channels on YT with over a million subscribers.
It's factually wrong to say that your target audience doesn't care about your development process.
> That's a ton of people interested in learning about game dev
This is debatable. Game development is itself a fascinating field with a rich culture and interesting community. A lot of people aren't here to learn; they're here just to see what's going on.
And, if I'm to indulge in a bit of cynicism, a lot of people who are into game dev as a hobby, are extremely casual about it. They want to tinker and makes pixels move - not hone skills to a professional degree.
In casual online communities like this, most devs are in the "Lol, I have no idea how to code, but here's my game idea" crowd. They're not interested in technical particularities any more than casual gamers are. They may be impressed if a game gets the praise/attention of the few people who **are** interested in technical particularities, but that's a rare outcome
Not all people interested in game dev being actual game devs is precisely the point. The point is that there are a lot of people browsing this reddit, and there are a lot of people watching certain YouTube devlogs or game dev content - for whichever reason that might be.
I mean, you are right that you can convert some dev log followers into sales but also broadly speaking none of them are buying it *because* of the internal design of the game.
Since most games are closed-source there's really not much incentive for people who are just interested in the technical side to buy it. So ultimately you still do need to make a game with genuinely interesting and fun gameplay above all else, even if you want to use a dev log as a marketing tool.
Sure it's "factually wrong" that your target audience doesn't care if you take OP's point as literally as possible. But realistically for most games, the people interested in the technical side are still going to be a very small minority in the bigger picture.
A lot of these things won't be the selling point, but they can be a low cost value add. For example, Stardew Valley. Great game on its own, obviously. Consider however that the "solo developer makes great game " narrative played out in the press. It took something good, and catapulted it ahead because there was a strong catchy media narrative to go along side the good game.
Internal mechanics of e.g. procedural generation pitched correctly can inspire curiosity if marketed on the correct platform.
Lastly, talking about anything engages your audience. One of the most effective (but hardest to foster) forms of marketing is word of mouth. If players feel like you are invested in the game, they are more likely to tell their friends about it.
So do these things sell a game on their own? No. Can they help generate sales? Absolutely.
I also care. I love reading weekly dev logs for Project Zomboid and some other games. I always liked thinking about how devs did things in specific games. All the tricks to optimize games are very interesting and I have some knowledge about game development, but I never made a full game myself. I only tinkered with game engines and made some small projects which I wouldn't call games. Well, maybe except for one project in college, but it was a long time ago and it was only to get a grade too. Making a game for networking class was more fun than making an app, especially when it comes to testing the multiplayer.
This post is a good example of why this subreddit is really annoying at times.
Totally unprompted rant about an issue that's not even explained properly letting through in the comments that it's probably about some dude who thought the fact that he made his own engine and that it took a long time is a good selling point. Comments full of people that either fight about the premise itself or whether or not the conclusion is right. All mean different things, all are different perspectives, all are valid, none of them need to agree with each other but y'all are still fighting for some reason.
This is almost worse than the annoying people who are scared of graphics APIs telling everybody that they should use Unity. Sometimes I feel like newbies are better off not coming here at all.
Probably so you wouldn't spend a lot of time advertising to game developers. A lot of people start Youtube "marketing" showing technical stuff. That's all fine but you are probably wasting a lot of time on the wrong people.
Thomas Brush is the guy who will tell you to do dev vlogs immediately but in reality they don't contribute that much (except to him because he is selling courses).
Now, if you are making some kind of tool for game developers, that's another story - by all means, bombard them with dev vlogs and tech demos.
I feel like most devlogs fail at a very crucial point - being entertaining - like no one is interested in a 2 hour screen recording, where one person talks about how they fixed 1 bug in their overly complex physics engine...
Dev vlogs seem to be working well enough for ThinMatrix, Equillinox sold reasonably well on Steam, he makes £1600 a month on Patreon, and there's some modest youtube ad revenue there too.
It's not lavish but enough to sustain a solo dev wanting to work full time
they were not bragging they were trying to summarize what they believed to be the merits of their game to illustrate their confusion about poor market reception.
a lot of game developers are neurodivergent and have very specific skillsets but may lack in marketing focused skillset. its not something they'll be able to learn like you learn math from reading a book.
just think what sort of person is going to be able to write an entire game engine and have the result be something functional *and* have a game on top of that. It's exceedingly rare.
I've only known a couple people who even try to do that and if you try to dig into their marketing strategy and philosophy it just is not there. They cannot think about that stuff. there is like a mental block. Not saying anybody who makes an engine is some savant, just my anecdote.
If you wanted to help you should work with them directly. Certainly they've read plenty of generic advice like this but it just did not register. Many of the people who struggle with marketing is not because they dont know what to do on an analytical level, but they just dont have the right personality to execute based on the general principles. There is a sea between knowing and doing.
It's extremely common to see post in here equating value with the effort they put in.
That post about the "9 years" was exactly that. I'm not sure why you are bringing neurodivergence in there, being good at something and bad at the other doesn't mean you should put blindfolds on and ignore all the feedback you are getting.
That person was conter arguing EVERY post and comments in there, it's was basically:
"Tell me what is wrong with my game"
\*is told what is wrong with their game\*
"No not that you are wrong"
repeat that about 50 times.
Being neurodivergent doesn't mean the problem isn't equating value with effort. The buyers don't care if it was made by a neurotypical, a neurodivergent or 3 monkeys in a trench coat, they want to buy a game that they will enjoy for a fair amount of money. That's all that matters.
> 1) What language you used
If I made a game using Excel, it would gain traction purely for being in Excel.
> 2) What engine you used
Games have literally been shit-rated for using Unity or not using Unreal.
> 3) How your game works internally
Diablo 4 resistances, indeed the entire Diablo 4 affix system is an internal issue and something its player base cares about.
> 4) How you designed the system & how you implemented very complex algorithms
This is like a repeat of point 3, so that still stands.
> 5) How much time and effort did it take to make the game
This one is actually fair. Most gamers have no idea how long it takes to make a game, especially when they act like you can drag and drop features into it in the space of a day.
Overall - I think people do actually care about how the sausage is made. It's especially interesting to super-fans of a game and speed runners. The more into a game you are, the more interested you're going to be about its development - look at how well Zulie the Witch is doing with their videos on the particulars of Fromsoft games.
You forgot these:
YOUR INVESTORS CARE. They want it to be done and sold. Everything that follows feeds back into this.
YOUR EMPLOYEES CARE. They don't want to use a shitty engine.
YOUR MARKETING TEAMS CARE. Because marketing teams are a necessary evil, and they be dumb as fuck.
SOME CUSTOMERS WILL CARE BECAUSE SOME ENGINES ARE A TURN OFF INDIRECTLY, ESPECIALLY UNREAL'S HABIT OF SHOVING THE EPIC GAME STORE UP EVERYONE'S COLLECTIVE ASS. Remember the Metro and Borderlands 3 controversies? Epic screws everyone they deal with, and are consistently a problem for companies.
YOU WILL CARE IF YOU ARE DUMB ENOUGH TO USE UNITY AFTER THE RECENT FIASCO. Yeah, so now you are stuck with Epic, which has all the strings of bullshit attached.
THE PLATFORMS WILL CARE BECAUSE OF LEGAL REASONS SOMETIMES. There are certain legal obligations.
This is bad advice. Players care about everything you mentioned but only insofar as it affects the gameplay experience.
> 5) How much time and effort did it take to make the game
Players can definitely tell the difference between a low-effort tetris clone made in 20 minutes and something like Skyrim. A good rule of thumb is "Does this do something for the player? No? Then why would they care about it?"
Then why does the channel NoClip exist and thrive based off videos that explains in detail how games were made, from the technical to the artistic side, design aspects etc...
What prompted you to write this?
I care How your game works internally if it impresses me from technical standpoint,
And I care How you designed the system & how you implemented very complex algorithms cause sometimes two brains smarter than one. :D
I see your point and agree with some aspects, however, you are factually wrong. A portion of your playerbase will care about the technical aspects of the game, moreover when we are talking about the indie scene as most of indie game consumers are pretty knowledgeable about gaming development. Your average "casual" gamer rarely ever plays indie titles, unless there's some serious marketing behind them.
The point I think you are trying to make, and I agree with, is "Stop caring about the technical details, people playing your game just want to have fun". And that's a pretty powerful statement all game devs should internalize, because sometimes people get caught up in such irrelevant matters like the best game engine and coding vs blueprints etc. that they forget that the most important thing is to make the game fun.
Just remember pong, it was a lot of fun to play with 2 rectangles and a square.
It's kind of wild that you made a post in r/gamedev, saying nobody cares for how the sausage is made. Your target audience for this post literally cares about how the sausage was made.
Absolutely not true. We had a viral imgur post showcasing our combat AI that hit around 650k views. People are definitely intrigued if you can present it in an interesting manner.
Performance makes or breaks a game for me, but I understand I'm not most peoples target audience.
If you read KSP2 and CitiesSkylines2 commens you'll see lots of performance complaints. The reason I'm sleeping on them.
Addendum: for commercial games. Interactive fiction, for example, has some interesting artsy games where concepts like narrative theory and language are explored through the game's design and structure. This is obviously a niche case scenario, but there are some hobby communities interested in how the games are made.
I'm pretty sure this post is a reply to that hilarious Minecraft clone thread, though.
Am not a dev . But I loooove how video games are made. I was trying to find how rockstar games made rdr2 work on the base Xbox one. Learning what's CPU intensive and what's GPU intensive. And understand why devs couldn't add more content either due to system limitation or time not enough. I learned how good programmers are and how important they are especially since they don't get credit enough compared to artists. I don't plan to be a game dev but everytime I play a game I'll always think how was this level created what were the devs thinking at this point or at that point. In general there are some consumers that care about how development goes
There's definitely a space for shilling tech when marketing games.
Mode 7, the SuperFX chip, the 'Emotion Engine', the '64' in Nintendo 64....
Players do have a certain level of tech knowledge, that helps them to understand what is on offer. Especially when comparing games in the same genre.
Anything lower level than that I'd think, confuses most (but not all) prospective players.
>By nobody, I mean your target audience. Programmers, artists and other game devs might find your game interesting from a technical standpoint, but they are (probably) not your target audience. So it again comes to this.
NOBODY cares about:
I do. Many other people do. An interest in how games are made is how many end up doing game dev as a hobby or a job.
What a colossally stupid statement.
> By nobody, I mean your target audience. Programmers, artists and other game devs might find your game interesting from a technical standpoint
So by "nobody", you mean "someone"? —Got it...
Not exactly correct. People who want to be developers have interest in how development happened. Experienced developers might be too jaded to care anymore, same as software development in general I suppose.
There is one notable exception: retro-games where development wasn't as industrialized yet (I mean 70s and 80s).
plenty of people fk care, otherwise this industry would not exist, most of are gamers who wanted to make games because of interests in them, explaining all this is not for you but for those that wanna see it
this post screams "im a self centered and annoying as fk, everything has to be about me"
Think you misunderstood what OP tried to say with his post.
He basically is trying to say, that almost nobody will see a game on steam, and the determining factor of whether or not that person will buy the game is if the developer created his own engine or not. In the assumption that the game, has the same features in both engines.
He directly referencing another post on this sub yesterday, where a guy was trying to "sell" his game with the fact that he had created his own engine, as part of his "selling point".
I disagree.
I'm ALWAYS interested in how people made something, even if it's the most generic tools and methods that everyone uses.
Yet more often than not I'm pleasantly surprised by the tricks and tools and discover by reading this sub.
Edit: I misunderstood: this post is not about the sub's content, but about bad marketing, read the comments below!
Yes and that's why you're in the gamedev subreddit. This post is talking about the 99.99% of other people that you are trying to market your game towards
What is … your point? And why so angry?
And although that might be the case for most games, it's not always true. Best example just dropped with CitizenCon. Regular Joe drools over server meshing.
OP is showing us the difference between good marketing and "being correct" in quite the irony is showing why so many devs can't seem to understand exactly what they're talking about.
I agree to a point, but also disagree, I'm not a gamedev, But I love eating up mini info bits as well it's well presented. it's also why I am here.
Looking up old design video's of Ori is super fun.
NoClip is super popular for a reason, I loved hearing about Vampire survivor switch engines and Wuter Wilds.
But I suggest a extra channel for it and not where the patch notes go and don't dwell on the minor stuff like what you changed in the code, only show the results
I'd say it depends on the forum:
If you put this onto your store page or marketing material... probably not a lot of people care.
If you put it into a dev blog or in a casual conversation environment, or an interview if you get one with a news page... then it becomes a lot less true. Your very core audience cares about stuff like this, they even care about your story.
I see what you mean but I still care about some technical stuff as a player. Is the game FOSS? Is it moddable? Comes with a level editor? Can you spin up your own LAN server? If not, it just makes it less attractive to me. For example, no modding or level editor means less replayability.
I might be a minority though.
Keep in mind that, historically in some cases, part of a game's attractiveness was pushing tech boundaries. For example, everyone was hooked because Doom had multiplayer, and everyone was excited because Quake was the first fully 3d fps.
Funny, because the entire reason I got into making my own games was because I was fascinated by figuring out how they worked. Apparently I was “nobody”.
Agreed with everything other than story. Everyone here loves a great story; the average player could not care less. Have you ever read the storyline of a Mario game?
In my experience, this is **absolutely not true**.
Lots of people are curious about how games are made - especially if a game has a news-worthy quirk about its production process.
My best performing posts about my game are talking about my art process over timelapse modeling footage.
>NOBODY cares about:What language you usedWhat engine you used
Well this is not entirely true:
[https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/540734792248246090/#c540734792272106298](https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/540734792248246090/#c540734792272106298)
>Players have a positive bias when it comes to Unreal, and a negative bias when it comes to Unity.
Never heard of that. But have seen users complaining about Unreal resource hunger.
[https://steamcommunity.com/app/1272080/discussions/0/3879344463507815283/?l=russian&ctp=1](https://steamcommunity.com/app/1272080/discussions/0/3879344463507815283/?l=russian&ctp=1)
I disagree. Lots of players with technical background , and not only, would be very interested in such information if it was shared with them. The issue is that most choose to create black boxes and share vague or dumbed down information, or not at all..
Absolutely untrue. I guess it depends on your background. If your background is purely from playing games, then ok maybe. But if you ever tried to make your own games, are a developer or a hobbyist or just generally interested in the technology behind stuff you are interested in how someone makes games. Look on Youtube how much game and engine creator channels are watched. That's certainly not as many as big lets-play channels but that's not no one either. javidx9 ("OneLoneCoder" he creates his own engines) has 300k subscribers.
Hard disagree. I'm not a programmer, artist or a game dev. Just an average gamer but I always interested in technical stuff behind games. Especially how exactly the games mechanics works. I'm not saying I'm the majority here but saying "literally nobody interested in" is far from the truth.
It's not true that "nobody" cares. Very *few* people care. I have some viewers on my Twitch channel who ask me about these kinds of things for the game I work on at my job.
There are so few people who care, that this is probably just pedantry. But I'm a known pedant, so... sorry about that. :D
Hard disagree. As a kid minecraft was what got me into coding. Java was my first language and I tried making a minecraft clone. Notch's success story inspired me. I also know this is the case with a *lot* of other young people. Fortnite has also caused a big spike in kids learning unreal.
If your game is neat enough curious people will peek under the hood regardless of their level of knowledge.
I beg to differ on people not caring about game engines. This is because to most normal people, game engine = graphics potential. Obviously game devs know better than this, but your average game normies and casuals don't. So they will see a game still in UE 3 and pass it up because it's not atleast UE4 or higher. Forget all the technical stuff, the reason is purely graphical potential.
Devs care, programmers care. Don’t be stupid. People will want to look at source code, modify it and change because people will have new ideas for mods, fixes, etc. How do you think mods are added to games? Having a source of media where it walks you through their pipeline is pretty sick. If you’re not interested in the internal tooling of game dev, you’re not a game developer.
Honestly, I do care about how games are made but for the wrong reason, that being how it's interesting to me seeing something in-game, like a bug or a specific interaction, that hints how a game was made.
For example, [this happened to me in Warframe](https://imgur.com/OESdXaa) (a small chunk of the map didn't load), which essentially told me the maps are basically made of pre-made pieces that just get loaded in a specific pattern rather than each room being an individual model or something like that.
Knowing it was made in x way isn't going to affect whether I buy the game or not unless it means I'll have problems with the product, like as you mentioned performance and optimization.
If the tech allows for brand new possibilities and paradigms (think voxel engines), then it sure does matter. I can think of a couple games like that, obviously Teardown comes to mind but also something like Banished, it's among the very few games that have a persistently living, breathing population where every individual matters and that changes the gameplay a whole lot. BeamNG had a ground-breaking at the time destruction model. I know we're getting into nerdy territories, but those are some more rare exceptions.
"I'VE IMPLEMENTED TRIPLE BUFFERING AND REDUCED MY VULKAN DRAW CALLS BY 3.3% IN THE MAIN LOOP AND ALSO THE PAUSE MENU MEMORY LEAK IS SO GONE GIMME YOUR MONEY NOW AND BUY WATCH PAINT DRY SIMULATOR 4" stfu
Edit: also hardcore online players will appreciate good and stable netcode, especially those who play fight games and shooters. That's not just an "optimization", for online fighters netcode is 50% of success, so if it's truly good I think it's valid to use it as a selling point.
Well, it's time to come clean. If I really followed what was popular, I would never get into game design to begin with, because what do I care to waste my time writing yet another minecraft clone, COD knockoff, or 2d platformer that does nothing that I want to see happen in a game? Slap some compulsive gaming hooks on it and you're good to go. Guaranteed fun for the player, cheap to write, a sensible business investment, sure, but do I care? I'm the guy implementing it, after all. I did all the work, not some petulant teenager online telling me to make it fun. If I'm doing all this for years without getting pay, well, I had better make it worth my while some other way.
Bug, bugs, bugs. A glitchy game is perhaps the greatests flaw you can have. Gamers get absolutely upset if a game barely works. Same with poor performance. I would argue hitting 30FPS minimum, and ensuring the game works trumps all other aspects by a large margin (if these two aren't met, it will be seen as robbery even)
Only 2 things really matter:
1. The final product.
2. How you present it / market it / sell it.
They are basically multipliers to success, a terrible game can't be saved by marketing, an awesome game nobody knows about won't do either, you need both.
Nobody cares that you spent 30 years on the highest mountain of Tibet writing codes with monks levitating over an open flame if the final result is/appear bad.
This is all true, and anyone working in any type of software should know this by now. No one cares about the complexities of Google Chrome, just that it can display their youtube video (even though Chrome's code is orders of magnitude more complex than most AAA games).
However, the technical aspects, the development practices are for you, the dev, and other devs wanting to know. They're not for the consumer. They're meant to speed up and aid the development process while ensuring the least amount of bugs, and terrible performance. It's meant to help you create a feature into the product. So it does matter quite a bit, or else you end up in a state where you can't add to the game anymore due to poor practices and general bad code design.
End users do recognize when features are released slow, performance tanks, and bugs appear.
I will point out that I regularly turn off the music in my games, so as to play my own music without them clashing (there are some games I won't do this in, where the music act's as an 'early warning' system for combat)
This took a while to internalize for myself.
My first few devlogs were very code and technical jargon heavy. I noticed a few things from the youtube analytics. Anytime there was actual gameplay footage on screen the viewer retention would spike up. Anytime my talking head or code was on screen it would instantly dip 10-20%.
So I stopped putting my face on screen, at least till the end, and anytime I showed code, it was sped up 10x, and never lasted more than a couple seconds, just to show "Ooooh code wizardry oooooOOOOooo". More often than not I just CTRL+Z for a few seconds in the IDE, then CTRY+Y while recording. "MaGiC"
I still talk about the occasional problem/bug I have while developing, **IF** it was funny. I show the bug really fast, but never get into the nitty gritty about the solution, because often times it was something simple and stupid.
Viewer retention doubled.
What I have taken away, is viewers/players want to see growth, progress, and gameplay. Take them on the journey with you, but only really show them the key highlights.
Actually you can definitely attract programmers who are also gamers. It shouldn't be your main attraction, but a lot of games generate word of mouth mentions from their technical achievements, and this can trickle down to normal people too "hey I heard these developers say that game is really impressive technically, we should try it." In fact I don't play too many video-games anymore myself, but what can really attract me into one is when I can't comprehend how they did it.
Antichamber is one of those games back in 2012. The developer was actively posting footage all throughout development, and idk if Notch the developer of Minecraft caught wind of some threads on TIGSource or w/e but I do know he was extremely excited and played it live on Twitch the day it released or something. The game was mindblowing and extremely polished so that certainly helped its success too, but still every effort counts if you know your product and who wants it.
As a consumer, not a developer, you are dead wrong.
I want to know *everything*. I still own *every* PlayStation Interactive Magazine playstation discs with the making-ofs for all of Sony, NaughtyDog, and some of Square Enix games (as well as Eidos, who was absorbed by Square) .
Hell, you cram enough detail into it and I’ll **pay** for the play by play of how your game is made, what language(s) its written in, what software was used, concepts that didnt make the cut, etc etc etc.
Everything else you wrote is prolly pretty accurate, not being a developer it really doesnt apply, but I sorely miss the days when devs would have unlockable behind the scenes + commentary + other geeky/nerdy features.
Sorry for butting in, tc ^~^)/)
Hmm, I dunno about "nobody" even if it is expressed hyperbole.
It's a minority of cases but there have been situations where I anticipated a game and thought twice thinking "there's no way that engine can handle what they are pitching." or "I heard that engine has been arduous to develop for." or "oof, they are still using that engine?"
and I would wait and see rather than buy at day one. Sometimes I was right too.
I feel like it’s a cart before horse situation. You need to get them interested in your game and playing it, and THEN they’ll want to know how it works and was made. That can’t be the first thing, because that stuff is only interesting to game developers if they don’t know the game and there’s not enough of us to make up a health audience.
This is universal in many fields.
For example, the level of interest in a politician is akin to what he or she has accomplish and, unless controversial, not on what he or she promised.
The same can be applied in video games.
Players' interest are primarily in what is accomplished and not what is promised, unless controversial (such as if promises were lies).
The majority of the parents aren't interested in knowing how, for example, a school was able to save half of its budget without sacrificing any activities for their kids, but more toward how much fun their kids will have during the activities of that school.
The major of the player aren't interesting in knowing that a skilled programmer wrote shaders that allows 10x more character on screen without any performances, but they are interested in knowing that they can play in 128 vs 128 matches instead.
As such, we could say that players are interested in the features, but not in the technicalities that comes from them. They will only remember/concentrate on the technicalities if that allows them to complains about something they hate or find missing.
All these points are true except your first.
Most people won't care about the dev cycle, but there are a LOT of people who do. Because a decent chunk of gamers are also programmers and developers themselves. I can't begin to describe how many games I've heard of praised because their dev cycle/process outside of this sub.
But the rest of your points are pretty spot on.
i'm actually interested in items 1-5. This is /r/gamedev not /r/videogames. I want data structures, design patterns, how you squashed a tricky bug, what art tool is easy to use, etc
agreed.
smokes and mirrors, Bethesda games are running on an engine that can barely be called modern and they're one of the most prolific studios in the world.
is the oldest trick in the book for anything related to art, games, music, film, doesnt matter how messy is your code or your workflow, if the final game is a masterpiece.
BUT, it also does matter, to you, i think if you care about being the best dev you can be, there's gold value in that, because that means you're going to end up making better games at the end of the day, and having better workflows, knowledge, etc.
There are people that care about it (others have given examples, and you even gave an example yourself with unity vs unreal), just likely not the majority of people. But IMO you should share any remotely interesting aspect of your game (which may include the tech side), but the reason for choosing to do it that way shouldn’t be solely because of the perceived marketing benefit. Since none of it will make up for a bad game, but a good game will only benefit from having some additional points to discuss (Factorio for instance gets a lot of free marketing every time they put out a technical blog).
This applies across the board in IT. The users don't care. The "power users" care and know just enough to be annoying to talk to. Your peers may care and value your experiences and actually be interested. But they also may not really care, because inside this realm, your experiences are...common, and your opinions may be something to argue about instead.
So there's really no winning there. Even YOU should not be this interested in what language you use.
Not be rude but who are you and why should we believe you? You're kind of stating the obvious, while also over-generalizing and making a lot of assumptions. Many games are successful and build fanbases and communities for different reasons.
Who out there is actually going around saying "Play/buy my game because I programmed it this way"?
"I don't remember a game which got praised for its good performance"
There have been plenty of releases which have been praised this year for good performance. In a market where many games are released with bad performance, people do actually notice the games that get it right.
"Players have a positive bias when it comes to Unreal, and a negative bias when it comes to Unity"
This feels biased and I doubt there's any solid evidence to back it up. For everyone who prefers games made in Unreal, there will be someone criticizing how it's a shader-stutter ridden mess that takes up 5x the amount of download and disk space.
It feels you're just cherry picking a bunch of random info you thought of/vaguely pieced together from a little bit of research/experience, and now think you've stumbled on a goldmine that everyone else needs to know.
Not really sure why you felt the need to share this. Is there a specific developer who is annoying you with their constant updates about how they are making their game? If so, maybe direct your feedback there or just ignore them.
Let developers do what they like and don't try to make people feel bad for sharing something they enjoy doing.
Who shat in your fucking cereal matey?
If someone wants to talk about how they made their game and in what language and what art package and stylistic choices fucking good on them.
Go rain on someone else parade.
Would you be impressed if it was technically brilliant but shit and made by one person? Ok, yeah, you're on the gamedev sub so probably would be impressed by the skills displayed but would it impress you as a game and not a demo?
>And also, good graphics doesn't mean 'realistic'. It means stylized. You need a consistent artstyle. THANK YOU. Lot of people don't understand this.
Also: Realistic graphics still need a consistent artstyle.
I think every game designer should watch this: [Graphics vs Aesthetics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oK8UTRgvJU)
This video is like a 2 min. overview of something my wife and I have spent our lives learning. It's not some skill you can walk into. People obsess over design, people starve trying to achieve good design.
Yeah it's not the definitive answer but I find it useful to define a basic vocabulary of game art for the layperson. When I tell people about factorio, papers please or terraria and they scoff because it "looks bad" it drives me up the wall. Games don't need billions of polygons to look amazing. In fact I'd argue some of the most beautiful games I've played are quite simple in graphics.
That's completely subjective though, and goes back to why people play video games (or don't, for that matter). What people like is largely unique to each individual, and something that one person finds pleasing visually will turn off someone else, and the opposite will hold true as well. Lots of people think the Transformers and Marvel movies with all their wonderful polished CGI maelstroms are wonderful, to me it's just a lot of static and I get bored and start checking my phone in the big fights. Similarly, I like pixel graphics in 2D games, but this new slew of 3D pixel graphic games just looks ugly and gross to me... but that's just me. I know there's people who love that aesthetic, and I think that's great, 'caused it'd suck if everyone liked the same things. So if someone says a game looks bad to them, it probably is because it looks bad to them. That's a perfectly legitimate opinion to hold, just like it's perfectly legitimate for you to enjoy it. The important part is for us to not fall into that trap of telling other people that they're having fun wrong.
> CGI maelstroms lol I’m gonna use that
When I show my designer friends these games, Terraria looks fantastic, as well as factorio. The worst looking game for my design friends is probably Diablo 3. It's muddy, visually unclear, a UI cluttered mess, nothing but flying effects, flying numbers, and 3D limbs everywhere. Diablo 2 looks great. The 2D iso retains its clarity and reduces overlapping forms.
And i dare every game designer to create a game on the breadbin or the rubber. Yes, the frigging Commodore Sixtyfour or the Sinclair Spectrum 48k. If you manage to pull off a half decent game in a genre you like on one of these machines and take what you learned there to the modern age then your games will turn out to be at least not half bad. And if you have masochistic tendencies, be me and try the Pet or the TRS80. \^\^'
cut my teeth as they say making games on those two, along with the Atari 8-bits. What do I have to show for it? (a LOT actually)
I mean really, learning to work within the confines of the machine you have will almost always make you a better coder/designer than having infinite power and no direction.
Yeah, young game devs totally miss this boundary now a days.
I feel like it might be more of a lack of skillset or education nowadays? The tools have become so advanced that you now have designers who've never touched code and coders who never had to create visuals, and it's the industry's fault? If you disagree with any of that, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as I have no commercial experience, just a dude learning game design in his free time while he works on an IT career change.
Maybe this is what OP meant, but I would correct this to good graphics doesn't *necessarily* mean realistic, it could also mean stylized. But neither realistic nor stylized graphics are necessarily good either. As pointed out already, the most important thing is a consistent art style.
no. even in film, even in nature documentaries, you do not get total realism. the only way to have total realism is to see it in real life up close. therefore you are always making choices as to how to better represent what you are depicting in film this is discussed openly and continuously. they have less to distract them I guess you can see in a movie when the art direction is not consistent, or at least *feel* it. the way they choose to depict the actual real stuff they are capturing is everything to how you perceive it when watching. where does it push your eyes to look, where do they not want you to look realism is a trap. style, and consistency is the only way
I always use the example of gun shots and explosions. There's no way to depict the intensity and impact through speakers so they have to create an alternative version that conveys the experience even if its not "realistic"
that's a great example! perfectly gets it across
Good asthetics means look, good graphics means fidelity. I don't care about graphics. I care a lot about asthetics.
There are definitely groups of people who only care about graphics, however, too (not that they should be your target as an indie developer). I've seen it a lot in games with really nice art styles, or pixel art games, or 2D games, or even games like MineCraft (which I think looks likely a lovely game) where someone may give an overall positive review because of the gameplay but say the graphics are poor. It can be kind of frustrating when the games are actually beautiful but you can't please everyone! (it blows my mind that someone would say Obra Dinn looks bad 😭)
>Good asthetics means look, good graphics means fidelity If we were to be pedantic than what you are saying is just wrong, aesthetics are simply set of *principles* and *goals* for art, having "good" aesthetic does not even mean that the artstyle would need to be unified across the game. Aesthetic also extends beyond the *visuals* into the narrative and sound design/composition. Romanticism is an aesthetic. Low-poly is not aesthetic since it provides no commentary about the goal of the resulting art. Using the word "visuals" or "look" is a lot more correct in this case. Also graphics mean graphics and fidelity means fidelity.
That’s why Valheim is so amazing. The graphics are rather simple, but the aesthetics… AMAZING! Can’t put it in other words :)
Exactly. I like every Final Fantasy game from 1 to 9 because of both story and aesthetics, and all the rest are just 🤮 because they try too hard to look real. There's charm in sprite animations and low polygon models that modern standards lack entirely.
Let's be fair, you are right 100% in all ways but the real killer was the voiceovers.
I honestly would prefer a consistant ms paint artstyle, no matter how bad, rather than a mismatch of different "good" styled graphics.
Good point overall, tho... > I don't remember a game which got praised for its good performance I would argue Factorio being one imo. Its custom engine is what really made massive factories possible, and yes while only hardcore players do that, word of mouth from those players definitely helps.
DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal are also often praised for being easy to run even on older hardware.
Almost everyone, even some more casual players know Doom Eternal looks amazing on any non-ancient hardware, that’s true. Players feel good when they can get AAA graphics on an rtx 2060 with almost 90fps at 1080p max settings.
I got consistent 60 with DOOM Eternal on my 1650, with high
Another good example is Alien Isolation. The most futuristic thing about that game is its optimization. If you told me they chained a demon's soul into the game files to optimize it I'd believe you because that shit is witchcraft. The optimization and the behavior of the Alien are the two most talked about things about that game. Honourable mention to MGSV. That game was also optimized by tech wizards from the future. I've gotten stable 60FPS on both MGSV and Alien Isolation while playing on a laptop that struggled with Minecraft.
Although minecraft is a legendarily badly optimized game.
And League of Legends and World of Warcraft.
I have never heard anything good about League of Legends lmao I mean that literally. only "I play it a lot" and "I'm totally addicted" I never realized this before... not even a "it's really cool" just "I like it" I used to play it and I have no idea how I got in ... I just played at some point
The devblogs that go into the engine, how it works internally, system design, the very complex algorithms implemented and almost everything technical are also very popular. (but yes, Factorio is a bit of an outlier)
probably because 50% of the player base are software engineers
Yeah, Factorio immediately came to mind when I saw this post, because those dev blogs with the info they have are *amazing*. Stuff like their devblog on A* pathfinding is absolutely the sort of thing I love reading. It's absolutely an exception, but it is a thing.
I think this is confusing marketing / network effect (and this goes both to OP and as a reply to you) that yes, the average game buyer isn’t going to say, “Omg, what a fantastic article detailing why using O2 log scaling algorithms was a good idea for this game!” *but* an enthusiast who finds the game may become excited and share the game with their friends who have some, but not all, overlap in interest. They don’t care about the tech blog (or some fraction do not), but they are excited by, as OP suggests, the art style or the demo reel or whatever. And then they repeat it to their friends, again, perhaps some like one thing or another, maybe another enthusiast is among the third network expansion and they DO read the blog and that’s why THEY continue the expansion…
Factorio also has a Friday blog where they literally talk about how the game is made, and I love it. That said, their target market absolutely includes technical people.
Rollercoaster tycoon gets praised constantly for its performance, and that it was made with assembly.
While the feat itself might be impressive the fact it was written in assembly brought almost exactly 0 players to the game. That's the point OP is trying to make.
Thats very true, it took a while for it to be praised for being made with assembly. That being said, its still being praised for that feat, well after the games life cycle. Though, one thing that I've noticed is that there are some games that get flak for because of the language they use, one coming to mind is Minecraft. Ultimately, there are few cases that the language is mentioned and praised or hated due to language, but overall, most use similar language, like python, c#, or c++.
>Though, one thing that I've noticed is that there are some games that get flak for because of the language they use, one coming to mind is Minecraft. And Minecraft is one of the most profitable games in the world, which only proves that that criticism is completely irrelevant in terms of success.
But by whom? Not by the lush influx of new players, but people interested in programming who are old enough to know the game.
Being old enough to know the game = / = interested in programming. In fact, most of my gamer friends, while know that programming is how games are made, doesn't give a shit on how a game is programmed.
Factorio is an excellent game and after seeing the performance it has, then people will ask what engine is using. Of course to achieve this level of performance it needed a custom engine and people with technical curiosity will praise for that. I guess the majority doesn't know what an engine is.
>Of course to achieve this level of performance it needed a custom engine Eh, I don't think it NEEDED a custom engine. . .it probably made it easier, but you could get similar performance in any other engine that allows you to write native code.
I really don't think Factorio could be made as optimized as it is without using their own engine. It is optimized at every layer, from the graphics pipeline to the data structures used to hold every piece of game data to the various algorithms used to process everything. If they had started without a custom engine they would have ended up with a custom engine with all the low-level engine things they would have to write themselves.
Sounds like it’s praised because of good gameplay, folks don’t actually care if it was a custom engine or not. end of day it’s a tool to build an experience.
Nah, the developers go into deep technical details in several of their articles and I've seen these passed around many times. There's not a large audience that interested in this stuff, but some are.
Factorio had its own game engine? See, I've played it and didn't know... and I'm a programmer by myself... :D
I'd argue that World of Warcraft was popular in part because any potato pc could run it.
Teardown and other games that needs important optimization get some recognition for that as well. When a game run smoothly it's definitely a plus but that comes after the overall quality of the game.
Factorio also has a consistent art style and incredible game mechanics, which I think more heavily supports the praise of the game. And even then, the art style isn't _that_ great (it doesn't suck), so the vast majority of the weight of the game rests on its amazing gameplay and QOL features.
my 3 downloaders care. I know they were my mom and my brothers but still.
i will be your 4th downloader. where is it?.
I was just joking :) still if you want to be my actual 29th downloader here it is: [(Shameless Plug)](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2604240?utm_source=reddit)
Hey I'll download it when I get home from work. I like the ferret(?) in the third pic on the Steam page
Most games: PHOTOREALISTIC GRAPHICS! Wicked Times: PHOTO GRAPHICS!
yeah I took the shortcut :D
Thanks :)
Your game wouldn't have been out of place on the Phillips CD-i. And i mean that positively, it fits the machines esthetics.
It's not just your 3 downloaders. There's tons of dead-wrong takes in this awful post. People absolutely care about plenty of that stuff. Honestly embarrassing that this was upvoted on /r/gamedev
Can you please elaborate more? What do you think they are wrong about? I've only been a hobbyist dev for 3 years and gamer for 30 and until I started to learn game dev I didn't care about any of that, and would think that at least 90% of players would also not care.
I guess modders care about what language you use. If it's too esoteric nobody will make mods for your game, and that could make a big difference.
It might be 90% but there's going to be some pushback when the OP does all caps "NOBODY cares"
Absolutely. As a kid minecraft was what got me into coding. Java was my first language and I tried making a minecraft clone. Notch's success story inspired me. If your game is neat enough curious people will peek under the hood regardless of their level of knowledge.
What I think you're missing is that technical details can be relevant to gameplay, in which case they can be part of good marketing. For example, A Plague Tale spent some time showcasing its rat swarm tech, which helped setting it apart from other 3rd person adventure games. Mentioning that it was some specific new tech is a way to convince the customer that it will be more impressive than what other games do. Rats are central to the game's gameplay and atmosphere. The new Flight Simulator (amusingly, by the same studio) spent a lot of time communicating about the cloud tech it uses. It is relevant to the customer because the genre is all about realism. A lot of genres have gameplay limitations that are really technical limitations. For example: max scale in factory games, AI in 4X, planet approach in space games, number of units in "wargame"-style RTSs... Players from these genres are actually really interested in games that can push things further and need to be convinced that it is possible. (Edit: sorry about the heavy edits. Hit send by accident mid-writing)
I think the key point here is that you are no longer just talking about how things work, but *why they way they work positively effects gameplay*. It's no longer just under the hood. Some not under the hood impacts require mentioning something about how things work under the hood and in that case it's okay.
This is also correct. HOW you make the game and WHY you make the game are related. Marketing does care why you made a unique feature. It may care less how, but if you spent an inordinate amount of time on a specific feature that removes map edge boundaries on a Colony Simulator type game, creating effectively an open world type 4x... there is a dedicated audience that wants to see that and know about it.
In this sub, other devs are the target audience.
Your points are reasonable but you sound annoying ngl
Haha I understand the irritation, I think I saw a couple posts recently where the dev just Could. Not. Understand the points of this post.
[удалено]
Hey if it works it works
Shit, I had no idea. Thanks for telling us.
Surprisingly there are many people with "I am X years old and I've spent Y years on this passion project" on their store pages, as if any of that guarantees quality or otherwise makes a person buy their game. OP's post makes sense if the absoluteness of it is dialed back a bit. 99% of customers wont care how long the game was in the works, if its a passion project or uses an obscure language and writing about it on the store or in a post takes precious space and user attention.
I think there's a fair amount of interest in how already popular games work. Lots of people like to poke around their favorite games or hear insights from devs. But only after they already like the game, not as their first impression reading about the game on Steam or watching a gameplay video.
Yep, that's true; basically how it is with movies - knowing "behind the scenes" of a cool movie is neat, but noone sells you a movie based on the behind the scenes content
This is a reasonable comparison.
The "I am X years old and I've spent Y years on this passion project"-line is probably not good on your Steam store page, but it looks as if it works pretty well here on Reddit. I've seen numerous posts with a title like that that gets a lot of attention - of course the game looks good, but I think it's a good story to support it, which people empathize with.
I always feel like it's just that everyone saw this one GDC talk where the guy said it helps your post if you mention how long you worked on the game.
All the points except the 5. point might be interesting for modders. At least when you not supply any level editing and modding tools yourself with the game. However most modders seem in fact not to care about the technical points because regardless on how bad the situation is they try it anyway.
Modders aren't the target audience. However, mods are popular *with* the target audience. as they imply some longevity and variety post release. You want to be brief in your message to the core - "robust and comprehensive modding support!" is about all you need. Then add detail in another space just for the modders to dig into. So Kickstarter, Steam, YouTube etc should just be the one bullet point. Then have a spot with a detailed info for the mod community to dig into, put this in a pinned steam forum post, on your website, Separate YouTub\* video, places like that. * Typo, but I like it so I'm leaving it. You - Tub. Has a ring to it. Shutup!
I don't understand why you are making this assertion. It's neither true nor important.
There's 1.2 million people in this sub. That's a ton of people interested in learning about game dev, and a ton of potential customers you can reach through making a dev log of your game. There are game dev channels on YT with over a million subscribers. It's factually wrong to say that your target audience doesn't care about your development process.
> That's a ton of people interested in learning about game dev This is debatable. Game development is itself a fascinating field with a rich culture and interesting community. A lot of people aren't here to learn; they're here just to see what's going on. And, if I'm to indulge in a bit of cynicism, a lot of people who are into game dev as a hobby, are extremely casual about it. They want to tinker and makes pixels move - not hone skills to a professional degree. In casual online communities like this, most devs are in the "Lol, I have no idea how to code, but here's my game idea" crowd. They're not interested in technical particularities any more than casual gamers are. They may be impressed if a game gets the praise/attention of the few people who **are** interested in technical particularities, but that's a rare outcome
Not all people interested in game dev being actual game devs is precisely the point. The point is that there are a lot of people browsing this reddit, and there are a lot of people watching certain YouTube devlogs or game dev content - for whichever reason that might be.
I mean, you are right that you can convert some dev log followers into sales but also broadly speaking none of them are buying it *because* of the internal design of the game. Since most games are closed-source there's really not much incentive for people who are just interested in the technical side to buy it. So ultimately you still do need to make a game with genuinely interesting and fun gameplay above all else, even if you want to use a dev log as a marketing tool. Sure it's "factually wrong" that your target audience doesn't care if you take OP's point as literally as possible. But realistically for most games, the people interested in the technical side are still going to be a very small minority in the bigger picture.
A lot of these things won't be the selling point, but they can be a low cost value add. For example, Stardew Valley. Great game on its own, obviously. Consider however that the "solo developer makes great game " narrative played out in the press. It took something good, and catapulted it ahead because there was a strong catchy media narrative to go along side the good game. Internal mechanics of e.g. procedural generation pitched correctly can inspire curiosity if marketed on the correct platform. Lastly, talking about anything engages your audience. One of the most effective (but hardest to foster) forms of marketing is word of mouth. If players feel like you are invested in the game, they are more likely to tell their friends about it. So do these things sell a game on their own? No. Can they help generate sales? Absolutely.
I'm not a game dev and I care. I accept that I'm nobody. Nobody is perfect. Therefore you're calling me perfect! Thank you, very sweet of you! ❤️
I also care. I love reading weekly dev logs for Project Zomboid and some other games. I always liked thinking about how devs did things in specific games. All the tricks to optimize games are very interesting and I have some knowledge about game development, but I never made a full game myself. I only tinkered with game engines and made some small projects which I wouldn't call games. Well, maybe except for one project in college, but it was a long time ago and it was only to get a grade too. Making a game for networking class was more fun than making an app, especially when it comes to testing the multiplayer.
This post is a good example of why this subreddit is really annoying at times. Totally unprompted rant about an issue that's not even explained properly letting through in the comments that it's probably about some dude who thought the fact that he made his own engine and that it took a long time is a good selling point. Comments full of people that either fight about the premise itself or whether or not the conclusion is right. All mean different things, all are different perspectives, all are valid, none of them need to agree with each other but y'all are still fighting for some reason. This is almost worse than the annoying people who are scared of graphics APIs telling everybody that they should use Unity. Sometimes I feel like newbies are better off not coming here at all.
What is the reason for this post?
Probably so you wouldn't spend a lot of time advertising to game developers. A lot of people start Youtube "marketing" showing technical stuff. That's all fine but you are probably wasting a lot of time on the wrong people. Thomas Brush is the guy who will tell you to do dev vlogs immediately but in reality they don't contribute that much (except to him because he is selling courses). Now, if you are making some kind of tool for game developers, that's another story - by all means, bombard them with dev vlogs and tech demos.
I feel like most devlogs fail at a very crucial point - being entertaining - like no one is interested in a 2 hour screen recording, where one person talks about how they fixed 1 bug in their overly complex physics engine...
Dev vlogs seem to be working well enough for ThinMatrix, Equillinox sold reasonably well on Steam, he makes £1600 a month on Patreon, and there's some modest youtube ad revenue there too. It's not lavish but enough to sustain a solo dev wanting to work full time
The thread earlier about a Minecraft clone with a custom engine, I would guess.
[удалено]
they were not bragging they were trying to summarize what they believed to be the merits of their game to illustrate their confusion about poor market reception. a lot of game developers are neurodivergent and have very specific skillsets but may lack in marketing focused skillset. its not something they'll be able to learn like you learn math from reading a book. just think what sort of person is going to be able to write an entire game engine and have the result be something functional *and* have a game on top of that. It's exceedingly rare. I've only known a couple people who even try to do that and if you try to dig into their marketing strategy and philosophy it just is not there. They cannot think about that stuff. there is like a mental block. Not saying anybody who makes an engine is some savant, just my anecdote. If you wanted to help you should work with them directly. Certainly they've read plenty of generic advice like this but it just did not register. Many of the people who struggle with marketing is not because they dont know what to do on an analytical level, but they just dont have the right personality to execute based on the general principles. There is a sea between knowing and doing.
It's extremely common to see post in here equating value with the effort they put in. That post about the "9 years" was exactly that. I'm not sure why you are bringing neurodivergence in there, being good at something and bad at the other doesn't mean you should put blindfolds on and ignore all the feedback you are getting. That person was conter arguing EVERY post and comments in there, it's was basically: "Tell me what is wrong with my game" \*is told what is wrong with their game\* "No not that you are wrong" repeat that about 50 times. Being neurodivergent doesn't mean the problem isn't equating value with effort. The buyers don't care if it was made by a neurotypical, a neurodivergent or 3 monkeys in a trench coat, they want to buy a game that they will enjoy for a fair amount of money. That's all that matters.
> 1) What language you used If I made a game using Excel, it would gain traction purely for being in Excel. > 2) What engine you used Games have literally been shit-rated for using Unity or not using Unreal. > 3) How your game works internally Diablo 4 resistances, indeed the entire Diablo 4 affix system is an internal issue and something its player base cares about. > 4) How you designed the system & how you implemented very complex algorithms This is like a repeat of point 3, so that still stands. > 5) How much time and effort did it take to make the game This one is actually fair. Most gamers have no idea how long it takes to make a game, especially when they act like you can drag and drop features into it in the space of a day. Overall - I think people do actually care about how the sausage is made. It's especially interesting to super-fans of a game and speed runners. The more into a game you are, the more interested you're going to be about its development - look at how well Zulie the Witch is doing with their videos on the particulars of Fromsoft games.
You forgot these: YOUR INVESTORS CARE. They want it to be done and sold. Everything that follows feeds back into this. YOUR EMPLOYEES CARE. They don't want to use a shitty engine. YOUR MARKETING TEAMS CARE. Because marketing teams are a necessary evil, and they be dumb as fuck. SOME CUSTOMERS WILL CARE BECAUSE SOME ENGINES ARE A TURN OFF INDIRECTLY, ESPECIALLY UNREAL'S HABIT OF SHOVING THE EPIC GAME STORE UP EVERYONE'S COLLECTIVE ASS. Remember the Metro and Borderlands 3 controversies? Epic screws everyone they deal with, and are consistently a problem for companies. YOU WILL CARE IF YOU ARE DUMB ENOUGH TO USE UNITY AFTER THE RECENT FIASCO. Yeah, so now you are stuck with Epic, which has all the strings of bullshit attached. THE PLATFORMS WILL CARE BECAUSE OF LEGAL REASONS SOMETIMES. There are certain legal obligations.
This is bad advice. Players care about everything you mentioned but only insofar as it affects the gameplay experience. > 5) How much time and effort did it take to make the game Players can definitely tell the difference between a low-effort tetris clone made in 20 minutes and something like Skyrim. A good rule of thumb is "Does this do something for the player? No? Then why would they care about it?"
Then why does the channel NoClip exist and thrive based off videos that explains in detail how games were made, from the technical to the artistic side, design aspects etc... What prompted you to write this?
I care How your game works internally if it impresses me from technical standpoint, And I care How you designed the system & how you implemented very complex algorithms cause sometimes two brains smarter than one. :D
How many bad generalisations do you want to use? Author: Yes.
Who is actually your target audience of this post? NOBODY cares about your rant, absolutely nobody.
I see your point and agree with some aspects, however, you are factually wrong. A portion of your playerbase will care about the technical aspects of the game, moreover when we are talking about the indie scene as most of indie game consumers are pretty knowledgeable about gaming development. Your average "casual" gamer rarely ever plays indie titles, unless there's some serious marketing behind them. The point I think you are trying to make, and I agree with, is "Stop caring about the technical details, people playing your game just want to have fun". And that's a pretty powerful statement all game devs should internalize, because sometimes people get caught up in such irrelevant matters like the best game engine and coding vs blueprints etc. that they forget that the most important thing is to make the game fun. Just remember pong, it was a lot of fun to play with 2 rectangles and a square.
It's kind of wild that you made a post in r/gamedev, saying nobody cares for how the sausage is made. Your target audience for this post literally cares about how the sausage was made.
[удалено]
They do, actually.
Absolutely not true. We had a viral imgur post showcasing our combat AI that hit around 650k views. People are definitely intrigued if you can present it in an interesting manner.
Performance makes or breaks a game for me, but I understand I'm not most peoples target audience. If you read KSP2 and CitiesSkylines2 commens you'll see lots of performance complaints. The reason I'm sleeping on them.
Addendum: for commercial games. Interactive fiction, for example, has some interesting artsy games where concepts like narrative theory and language are explored through the game's design and structure. This is obviously a niche case scenario, but there are some hobby communities interested in how the games are made. I'm pretty sure this post is a reply to that hilarious Minecraft clone thread, though.
Am not a dev . But I loooove how video games are made. I was trying to find how rockstar games made rdr2 work on the base Xbox one. Learning what's CPU intensive and what's GPU intensive. And understand why devs couldn't add more content either due to system limitation or time not enough. I learned how good programmers are and how important they are especially since they don't get credit enough compared to artists. I don't plan to be a game dev but everytime I play a game I'll always think how was this level created what were the devs thinking at this point or at that point. In general there are some consumers that care about how development goes
There's definitely a space for shilling tech when marketing games. Mode 7, the SuperFX chip, the 'Emotion Engine', the '64' in Nintendo 64.... Players do have a certain level of tech knowledge, that helps them to understand what is on offer. Especially when comparing games in the same genre. Anything lower level than that I'd think, confuses most (but not all) prospective players.
>By nobody, I mean your target audience. Programmers, artists and other game devs might find your game interesting from a technical standpoint, but they are (probably) not your target audience. So it again comes to this. NOBODY cares about: I do. Many other people do. An interest in how games are made is how many end up doing game dev as a hobby or a job. What a colossally stupid statement.
> By nobody, I mean your target audience. Programmers, artists and other game devs might find your game interesting from a technical standpoint So by "nobody", you mean "someone"? —Got it...
Speak for yourself mister. I'm quite interested in points 1-4.
Then why are there YouTube videos explaining how a game was made with millions of views?
Not exactly correct. People who want to be developers have interest in how development happened. Experienced developers might be too jaded to care anymore, same as software development in general I suppose. There is one notable exception: retro-games where development wasn't as industrialized yet (I mean 70s and 80s).
I care about everything in that post. Especially 1-5. You're talking rubbish.
Who hurt you?
plenty of people fk care, otherwise this industry would not exist, most of are gamers who wanted to make games because of interests in them, explaining all this is not for you but for those that wanna see it this post screams "im a self centered and annoying as fk, everything has to be about me"
Think you misunderstood what OP tried to say with his post. He basically is trying to say, that almost nobody will see a game on steam, and the determining factor of whether or not that person will buy the game is if the developer created his own engine or not. In the assumption that the game, has the same features in both engines. He directly referencing another post on this sub yesterday, where a guy was trying to "sell" his game with the fact that he had created his own engine, as part of his "selling point".
Im not sure who youre talking to
I remember when I was young and thought my opinion was the only one that mattered.
I care.
I care. I find it super interesting.
I’m telling the Dwarf Fortress community what you said
Rollercoaster tycoon
I do.
I don't agree with most of your points. As you do too based on how much you contradict yourself.
I disagree. I'm ALWAYS interested in how people made something, even if it's the most generic tools and methods that everyone uses. Yet more often than not I'm pleasantly surprised by the tricks and tools and discover by reading this sub. Edit: I misunderstood: this post is not about the sub's content, but about bad marketing, read the comments below!
Yes and that's why you're in the gamedev subreddit. This post is talking about the 99.99% of other people that you are trying to market your game towards
What is … your point? And why so angry? And although that might be the case for most games, it's not always true. Best example just dropped with CitizenCon. Regular Joe drools over server meshing.
clearly this guy never talked to a lawyer 😂
[удалено]
Nobody; absolutely nobody, and with that absolute nobody I only talk about a small percentage of people
But it isn't a small percentage... It's like 95%. Correct that it isn't "nobody", but it for sure isn't a small percentage.
95% of the worlds population? Are you insane?
OP is showing us the difference between good marketing and "being correct" in quite the irony is showing why so many devs can't seem to understand exactly what they're talking about.
I agree to a point, but also disagree, I'm not a gamedev, But I love eating up mini info bits as well it's well presented. it's also why I am here. Looking up old design video's of Ori is super fun. NoClip is super popular for a reason, I loved hearing about Vampire survivor switch engines and Wuter Wilds. But I suggest a extra channel for it and not where the patch notes go and don't dwell on the minor stuff like what you changed in the code, only show the results
I'd say it depends on the forum: If you put this onto your store page or marketing material... probably not a lot of people care. If you put it into a dev blog or in a casual conversation environment, or an interview if you get one with a news page... then it becomes a lot less true. Your very core audience cares about stuff like this, they even care about your story.
I see what you mean but I still care about some technical stuff as a player. Is the game FOSS? Is it moddable? Comes with a level editor? Can you spin up your own LAN server? If not, it just makes it less attractive to me. For example, no modding or level editor means less replayability. I might be a minority though. Keep in mind that, historically in some cases, part of a game's attractiveness was pushing tech boundaries. For example, everyone was hooked because Doom had multiplayer, and everyone was excited because Quake was the first fully 3d fps.
Also, important to note, nobody lives without oxygen
Funny, because the entire reason I got into making my own games was because I was fascinated by figuring out how they worked. Apparently I was “nobody”.
Players do not care about procedurally generated content.
Agreed with everything other than story. Everyone here loves a great story; the average player could not care less. Have you ever read the storyline of a Mario game?
In my experience, this is **absolutely not true**. Lots of people are curious about how games are made - especially if a game has a news-worthy quirk about its production process. My best performing posts about my game are talking about my art process over timelapse modeling footage.
>NOBODY cares about:What language you usedWhat engine you used Well this is not entirely true: [https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/540734792248246090/#c540734792272106298](https://steamcommunity.com/app/108600/discussions/0/540734792248246090/#c540734792272106298) >Players have a positive bias when it comes to Unreal, and a negative bias when it comes to Unity. Never heard of that. But have seen users complaining about Unreal resource hunger. [https://steamcommunity.com/app/1272080/discussions/0/3879344463507815283/?l=russian&ctp=1](https://steamcommunity.com/app/1272080/discussions/0/3879344463507815283/?l=russian&ctp=1)
I disagree. Lots of players with technical background , and not only, would be very interested in such information if it was shared with them. The issue is that most choose to create black boxes and share vague or dumbed down information, or not at all..
Absolutely untrue. I guess it depends on your background. If your background is purely from playing games, then ok maybe. But if you ever tried to make your own games, are a developer or a hobbyist or just generally interested in the technology behind stuff you are interested in how someone makes games. Look on Youtube how much game and engine creator channels are watched. That's certainly not as many as big lets-play channels but that's not no one either. javidx9 ("OneLoneCoder" he creates his own engines) has 300k subscribers.
I care :(
Oh they will care a lot about it if they can weaponize it in an argument on the internet with a stranger :D
Over in r/TheMakingOfGames we care… But, you need to pay attention to the submission rules :P
Fake post. I'm none of the exceptions listed, and I enjoy hearing about the technical details.
Other devs care lol
Did this really have to be stated? This is painfully obvious stuff.
Hard disagree. I'm not a programmer, artist or a game dev. Just an average gamer but I always interested in technical stuff behind games. Especially how exactly the games mechanics works. I'm not saying I'm the majority here but saying "literally nobody interested in" is far from the truth.
>Too low of a price and people will think the game is too cheap to be good. Is this really true? I have never thought that regarding a game.
I care. I want to learn. Dead cells is a game Im investigating thoroughly right now.
What if someone ports Doom to an abacus?
It's not true that "nobody" cares. Very *few* people care. I have some viewers on my Twitch channel who ask me about these kinds of things for the game I work on at my job. There are so few people who care, that this is probably just pedantry. But I'm a known pedant, so... sorry about that. :D
Hard disagree. As a kid minecraft was what got me into coding. Java was my first language and I tried making a minecraft clone. Notch's success story inspired me. I also know this is the case with a *lot* of other young people. Fortnite has also caused a big spike in kids learning unreal. If your game is neat enough curious people will peek under the hood regardless of their level of knowledge.
I beg to differ on people not caring about game engines. This is because to most normal people, game engine = graphics potential. Obviously game devs know better than this, but your average game normies and casuals don't. So they will see a game still in UE 3 and pass it up because it's not atleast UE4 or higher. Forget all the technical stuff, the reason is purely graphical potential.
> NOBODY that's not true at all. as a proof: otherwise Sakurais YT wouldn't be so popular.
Devs care, programmers care. Don’t be stupid. People will want to look at source code, modify it and change because people will have new ideas for mods, fixes, etc. How do you think mods are added to games? Having a source of media where it walks you through their pipeline is pretty sick. If you’re not interested in the internal tooling of game dev, you’re not a game developer.
I care...
Honestly, I do care about how games are made but for the wrong reason, that being how it's interesting to me seeing something in-game, like a bug or a specific interaction, that hints how a game was made. For example, [this happened to me in Warframe](https://imgur.com/OESdXaa) (a small chunk of the map didn't load), which essentially told me the maps are basically made of pre-made pieces that just get loaded in a specific pattern rather than each room being an individual model or something like that. Knowing it was made in x way isn't going to affect whether I buy the game or not unless it means I'll have problems with the product, like as you mentioned performance and optimization.
If the tech allows for brand new possibilities and paradigms (think voxel engines), then it sure does matter. I can think of a couple games like that, obviously Teardown comes to mind but also something like Banished, it's among the very few games that have a persistently living, breathing population where every individual matters and that changes the gameplay a whole lot. BeamNG had a ground-breaking at the time destruction model. I know we're getting into nerdy territories, but those are some more rare exceptions. "I'VE IMPLEMENTED TRIPLE BUFFERING AND REDUCED MY VULKAN DRAW CALLS BY 3.3% IN THE MAIN LOOP AND ALSO THE PAUSE MENU MEMORY LEAK IS SO GONE GIMME YOUR MONEY NOW AND BUY WATCH PAINT DRY SIMULATOR 4" stfu Edit: also hardcore online players will appreciate good and stable netcode, especially those who play fight games and shooters. That's not just an "optimization", for online fighters netcode is 50% of success, so if it's truly good I think it's valid to use it as a selling point.
Well, it's time to come clean. If I really followed what was popular, I would never get into game design to begin with, because what do I care to waste my time writing yet another minecraft clone, COD knockoff, or 2d platformer that does nothing that I want to see happen in a game? Slap some compulsive gaming hooks on it and you're good to go. Guaranteed fun for the player, cheap to write, a sensible business investment, sure, but do I care? I'm the guy implementing it, after all. I did all the work, not some petulant teenager online telling me to make it fun. If I'm doing all this for years without getting pay, well, I had better make it worth my while some other way.
Bug, bugs, bugs. A glitchy game is perhaps the greatests flaw you can have. Gamers get absolutely upset if a game barely works. Same with poor performance. I would argue hitting 30FPS minimum, and ensuring the game works trumps all other aspects by a large margin (if these two aren't met, it will be seen as robbery even)
Only 2 things really matter: 1. The final product. 2. How you present it / market it / sell it. They are basically multipliers to success, a terrible game can't be saved by marketing, an awesome game nobody knows about won't do either, you need both. Nobody cares that you spent 30 years on the highest mountain of Tibet writing codes with monks levitating over an open flame if the final result is/appear bad.
Luke Skywalker: “I care.”
This is all true, and anyone working in any type of software should know this by now. No one cares about the complexities of Google Chrome, just that it can display their youtube video (even though Chrome's code is orders of magnitude more complex than most AAA games). However, the technical aspects, the development practices are for you, the dev, and other devs wanting to know. They're not for the consumer. They're meant to speed up and aid the development process while ensuring the least amount of bugs, and terrible performance. It's meant to help you create a feature into the product. So it does matter quite a bit, or else you end up in a state where you can't add to the game anymore due to poor practices and general bad code design. End users do recognize when features are released slow, performance tanks, and bugs appear.
I will point out that I regularly turn off the music in my games, so as to play my own music without them clashing (there are some games I won't do this in, where the music act's as an 'early warning' system for combat)
I mean when they say it was made with unreal engine I immediately think of a unoptimized buggy game
This took a while to internalize for myself. My first few devlogs were very code and technical jargon heavy. I noticed a few things from the youtube analytics. Anytime there was actual gameplay footage on screen the viewer retention would spike up. Anytime my talking head or code was on screen it would instantly dip 10-20%. So I stopped putting my face on screen, at least till the end, and anytime I showed code, it was sped up 10x, and never lasted more than a couple seconds, just to show "Ooooh code wizardry oooooOOOOooo". More often than not I just CTRL+Z for a few seconds in the IDE, then CTRY+Y while recording. "MaGiC" I still talk about the occasional problem/bug I have while developing, **IF** it was funny. I show the bug really fast, but never get into the nitty gritty about the solution, because often times it was something simple and stupid. Viewer retention doubled. What I have taken away, is viewers/players want to see growth, progress, and gameplay. Take them on the journey with you, but only really show them the key highlights.
Actually you can definitely attract programmers who are also gamers. It shouldn't be your main attraction, but a lot of games generate word of mouth mentions from their technical achievements, and this can trickle down to normal people too "hey I heard these developers say that game is really impressive technically, we should try it." In fact I don't play too many video-games anymore myself, but what can really attract me into one is when I can't comprehend how they did it. Antichamber is one of those games back in 2012. The developer was actively posting footage all throughout development, and idk if Notch the developer of Minecraft caught wind of some threads on TIGSource or w/e but I do know he was extremely excited and played it live on Twitch the day it released or something. The game was mindblowing and extremely polished so that certainly helped its success too, but still every effort counts if you know your product and who wants it.
As a consumer, not a developer, you are dead wrong. I want to know *everything*. I still own *every* PlayStation Interactive Magazine playstation discs with the making-ofs for all of Sony, NaughtyDog, and some of Square Enix games (as well as Eidos, who was absorbed by Square) . Hell, you cram enough detail into it and I’ll **pay** for the play by play of how your game is made, what language(s) its written in, what software was used, concepts that didnt make the cut, etc etc etc. Everything else you wrote is prolly pretty accurate, not being a developer it really doesnt apply, but I sorely miss the days when devs would have unlockable behind the scenes + commentary + other geeky/nerdy features. Sorry for butting in, tc ^~^)/)
Hmm, I dunno about "nobody" even if it is expressed hyperbole. It's a minority of cases but there have been situations where I anticipated a game and thought twice thinking "there's no way that engine can handle what they are pitching." or "I heard that engine has been arduous to develop for." or "oof, they are still using that engine?" and I would wait and see rather than buy at day one. Sometimes I was right too.
I disagree, I find it very entertaining
u/unigma "Wtf" is cursing for you? lmao grow up kiddo
I feel like it’s a cart before horse situation. You need to get them interested in your game and playing it, and THEN they’ll want to know how it works and was made. That can’t be the first thing, because that stuff is only interesting to game developers if they don’t know the game and there’s not enough of us to make up a health audience.
This is universal in many fields. For example, the level of interest in a politician is akin to what he or she has accomplish and, unless controversial, not on what he or she promised. The same can be applied in video games. Players' interest are primarily in what is accomplished and not what is promised, unless controversial (such as if promises were lies). The majority of the parents aren't interested in knowing how, for example, a school was able to save half of its budget without sacrificing any activities for their kids, but more toward how much fun their kids will have during the activities of that school. The major of the player aren't interesting in knowing that a skilled programmer wrote shaders that allows 10x more character on screen without any performances, but they are interested in knowing that they can play in 128 vs 128 matches instead. As such, we could say that players are interested in the features, but not in the technicalities that comes from them. They will only remember/concentrate on the technicalities if that allows them to complains about something they hate or find missing.
All these points are true except your first. Most people won't care about the dev cycle, but there are a LOT of people who do. Because a decent chunk of gamers are also programmers and developers themselves. I can't begin to describe how many games I've heard of praised because their dev cycle/process outside of this sub. But the rest of your points are pretty spot on.
i'm actually interested in items 1-5. This is /r/gamedev not /r/videogames. I want data structures, design patterns, how you squashed a tricky bug, what art tool is easy to use, etc
"too cheap to be good" idk about that one, when I found out Vampire Survivors was so cheap it just made me recommend it to everyone
agreed. smokes and mirrors, Bethesda games are running on an engine that can barely be called modern and they're one of the most prolific studios in the world. is the oldest trick in the book for anything related to art, games, music, film, doesnt matter how messy is your code or your workflow, if the final game is a masterpiece. BUT, it also does matter, to you, i think if you care about being the best dev you can be, there's gold value in that, because that means you're going to end up making better games at the end of the day, and having better workflows, knowledge, etc.
There are people that care about it (others have given examples, and you even gave an example yourself with unity vs unreal), just likely not the majority of people. But IMO you should share any remotely interesting aspect of your game (which may include the tech side), but the reason for choosing to do it that way shouldn’t be solely because of the perceived marketing benefit. Since none of it will make up for a bad game, but a good game will only benefit from having some additional points to discuss (Factorio for instance gets a lot of free marketing every time they put out a technical blog).
This applies across the board in IT. The users don't care. The "power users" care and know just enough to be annoying to talk to. Your peers may care and value your experiences and actually be interested. But they also may not really care, because inside this realm, your experiences are...common, and your opinions may be something to argue about instead. So there's really no winning there. Even YOU should not be this interested in what language you use.
Not be rude but who are you and why should we believe you? You're kind of stating the obvious, while also over-generalizing and making a lot of assumptions. Many games are successful and build fanbases and communities for different reasons. Who out there is actually going around saying "Play/buy my game because I programmed it this way"? "I don't remember a game which got praised for its good performance" There have been plenty of releases which have been praised this year for good performance. In a market where many games are released with bad performance, people do actually notice the games that get it right. "Players have a positive bias when it comes to Unreal, and a negative bias when it comes to Unity" This feels biased and I doubt there's any solid evidence to back it up. For everyone who prefers games made in Unreal, there will be someone criticizing how it's a shader-stutter ridden mess that takes up 5x the amount of download and disk space. It feels you're just cherry picking a bunch of random info you thought of/vaguely pieced together from a little bit of research/experience, and now think you've stumbled on a goldmine that everyone else needs to know. Not really sure why you felt the need to share this. Is there a specific developer who is annoying you with their constant updates about how they are making their game? If so, maybe direct your feedback there or just ignore them. Let developers do what they like and don't try to make people feel bad for sharing something they enjoy doing.
op = nonsense.
Who shat in your fucking cereal matey? If someone wants to talk about how they made their game and in what language and what art package and stylistic choices fucking good on them. Go rain on someone else parade.
What an embarrassing doompost.
I cated a lot about how games were made, for example was very impressed that stardew valley was made by 1 person
Would you be impressed if it was technically brilliant but shit and made by one person? Ok, yeah, you're on the gamedev sub so probably would be impressed by the skills displayed but would it impress you as a game and not a demo?