3 Gamedev Ideas (April 13, 2020)

Hello,

Here are this week’s ideas!

3 Gamedev Ideas

I.

You’ll learn massive amounts of things during your first months of game development.

That’s one more reason why you should make small games. 

If you start out with a huge project, you’ll be stuck for years with all the poor decisions you made while you were a beginner.

The bad code systems. 

The animation style that’s too demanding and slow to create. 

The poorly designed game mechanics that limit your level design possibilites.

With small games, you can create things that reflect your current level of skill at all times.

And you’ll avoid 80% of issues that show up only when your project reaches a certain size.

(I definitely wish I started out with a smaller scope for my first game)

II.

A technical tip to avoid troubles: if you’re checking number values, I’d say use >= or <= instead of == whenever possible. 

I’ve had a player report a weird issue that no one else managed to reproduce. 

I suspect it’s because the calculations are off by a few decimals on his machine. Not sure why…

But the stopping condition is never matched. 

So he’s getting stuck in an infinite loop – when hundreds of other people are not.

In the same token, always have a counter that’ll stop a while loop after a set number of times. 

That’ll help you avoid some potentially disastrous issues. (like having your player’s computer freeze and have to reboot it…)

III.

Working hard on a game doesn’t mean it’ll be successful.

You could make 1% of someone else’s effort and get better results than them.

Rising Hell development has started more than 3 years ago and it’s made by 5 people.

Gutwhale was made in 1 month by 3 people.

Now compare the number of reviews they each have: 38 and 62. (at the time I’m writing this)

Accounting for the difference in price, it seems to me that they’re in the same ballpark in terms of sales.

One of them just got that result with way less efforts than the other.

Until next week,

Thomas Gervraud,
Developer of Space Gladiators: Escaping Tartarus