Halfgeek's Forum Posts

    Ashley

    Since its just a huge leap in Chrome, I'm worried about backward compatibility with save-states, ie. NW 0.10.5, upgrade to NW.js 0.13, saves no longer work... should I be worried?

  • Ruskul

    I fully agree and feel the same way. It was way harder before self-publishing became possible.

    OldieSteve

    There's still premium games for you. The masses want free, so there's games to cater to that.

    We as small time developers have to understand and target a niche. If you want to make a paid game, you have to target niches. Mainstream masses will never support a paid game on mobiles.

    This is why I make very niche games, I target a specific audience that appreciates these types of games, these folks are more willing to pay for them upfront as well, they shy away from freemium. I'll see if this approach works with the next launch.. but I fully intend to finally upgrade to the C2 business license.

  • Non curated stores like Android is a death trap for amateur developers trying to make a break.

    It's swamped, there's too many games. There's no proper "New Game of X Genre" list at all. Only top new lists which require your game to compete with others for downloads, ratings & reviews to be on the list. This means its a race to "who can market better" their newly released mobile game. The small developer loses out because we don't have the budget to compete.

    Without being on any list that gamers can easily find, your game is as good as dead on arrival.

    Welcome to Android.

    On iOS, at least you are on lists that everyone can find. There's proper new games/apps list, with its own categories or genres. Want to find new strategy game releases? Done deal, its there, sorted by release date. Boom. Instant eyes on your game. The rest, it's up to whether your game is any good to convince people to give it a go. But you can't say it wasn't discovered or people didn't see it.

    Same for Steam. Newly released games are guaranteed 1,000,000 impressions on the front page. Steam also has categories of genres and tags that is sorted by release date top to bottom. As a small time indie, when you release on Steam and it doesn't do well, you cannot blame anyone but yourself, regardless if you have a marketing budget or not. Why? Because millions of gamers have seen your game. If you fail, it's because they deem it not worth their time and money.

    So if you want to make games to earn money, stop wasting your time and effort making games for Android (Android *only* = no way, just quit and save yourself all the eventual disappointment), particularly when there's just so damn many out there already that are similar to it or even better that are free.

    Note: This is from my own experience, it may not apply to everyone. But IF you want to release for Android a "premium" game, make it free with a single IAP to unlock all content once (restorable), this way, it's like a demo, if players like they buy the rest.

  • Greenlight is simply a question for each user. Would you buy this game? If no then you should click no. No matter the potential of the game. Steam wants to know if YOU want it. So if you don't vote the game will keep popping up in your feed. So you either have to vote yes or no to make it go away.

    That is why downvotes doesn't matter on greenlight. Because it doesn't mean something bad. It just means that this person wouldn't buy the game. So if a game have 100 000 no votes and 10 000 yes votes the game will be greenlit because steam expects that 10 000 would buy the game. (I know that the ones who end up buying it would be far far less )

    Anyway. That is how greenlight is meant to work but people are obviously not using it seriously all the time

    In spirit that's how its supposed to work, but if you track games on Greenlight, a lot of NO votes = never get greenlit. There seems to be some kind of threshold where Valve curators flag the game to not pass, so it can stay there for years.

    If you look at the database site I posted the URL to in the earlier post, you see some games in the top 300 that have been there for ages, they have enough yes votes to be on top of most games, but they have a ton of no votes and so they just remain there.

    It is very rare for a game with <30% yes/no ratio to be lit, in fact for the past few months I haven't seen a single lit game with a poor yes/no ratio.

    There's the theory from greenlight devs, when you submit the game:

    There's a chance a Valve curator sees it, likes it, and it gets in the queue to be lit regardless of votes. This has happened for a few games in the past months.

    Other games have to get enough yes votes to make it to the top 300. Once in there, the curators take their time to go over each submission and judge whether it passes or not. Obviously in the top 50 gives your game priority to be examined, but they do get around to the others outside the top 100-300.

  • It's quite normal, after a few days the natural greenlight traffic is very low.

    It's now up to you to drive it home, anywhere in the top 300 list can have a chance of being lit, from what I've tracked for the past few months.

    Use this site as a guideline: http://greendb.iygamestudio.com/greenlight/

  • Nice, good luck with it!

  • At it's core, programming relates to logic. You tell the computer to do something based on conditions, if, else, loops, triggers etc.

    Traditional programming involves typing out instructions manually in that specific language's syntax.

    C2 bypasses this and replaces the manual typing of text with its event system. But it is still logic. It still requires you to think like a programmer. The difference is instead of learning C# or C+, you are learning "C2's event language", which is a lot easier to learn for most people (myself included, who have learnt Java before moving to C2).

    If you want to make a complex game, you have to understand C2's language very well. Like anything in life, to understand it well, one must learn.

  • My setups have R9 280X and 290X as well and I've not had an issue with NW.js exports running.

    I use NW10.5 for Steam.

  • I said it last year and I still think the same now.

    C2/C3 needs to be the BEST 2D game engine, period. Scirra is still a small group compared to Unity or Epic Games (UE4).

    The best thing that can happen for C3, is a native export option.

    No reliance on funky and often broken 3rd party wrappers...

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  • Tinimations

    Interesting why it behaves wildly different on Win 7/8 vs 10.. it's still Chromium underneath NW.

    And yes, this isn't a C2 issue but Chromium, however, we still rely on it for our export.

  • Yup, it certainly does cache everything you've used on your layouts. So despite "per layout" design of C2, the 3rd party wrappers (Chromium) pretty much load everything and holds it in memory as a cache despite C2's active layout having functional garbage collection.

    I didn't even realize that until I investigated it further after Klang's developer mentioned 4GB of memory usage crashing 32 bit OS.

    Because of this, you can forget about making bigger games for mobiles with C2, even if mobile hardware can handle the logic & GPU power is enough, most devices have 1GB memory only, which they have to share with the OS & background apps.

    Has it been on the top 10 sales page? Running with Rifles and Ace of spades both made it to the top 10 list sales list.

    And all we did was work hard for our steam success.

    Maybe you need to work harder?

    Good for you man.

    We just don't work as hard as you do, I'm sure.

    jojoe looks like you still don't get it <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink"> Anonnymitet already understood why I wrote that. So let me explain it to you. What I mean to say is that Steam is not everything. For some reason PC players and most of the new developers think Steam is a holy grail of "publish my game - get rich immediately".

    "Without steam support = no serious game developers" - That statement clearly insult everyone who is interested only in making games for mobiles or web browsers either free or paid. It looks like, if you don't have your game on steam you are not serious game developer.

    Steam isn't everything, but it's a great opportunity for PC/MAC developers. Whether people succeed or not on Steam isn't the point. Game engines need to give them the opportunity to succeed.

    jojoe

    Define "no C2 developer has been successful on steam does not mean the rest of us don't have a chance"

    Our Darker Purpose http://steamspy.com/app/262790

    The Next Penelope also sold nearly 6,000 copies since May this year. Not a huge success, but not abject failure by any stretch of the imagination.

    "2/3 projects I have worked on are successful on steam. (Ace of spades, Running with Rifles) It is not as hard as some people think. It just takes hard work is why most people are failing."

    If only "hard work" is all it took...

  • Tinimations

    Does it crash on 64 bit NW?

    Last time I had a discussion with Ashley about explicit asset control, ie. loading/unloading on command to get fine-tune control over memory usage, he said he doesn't think its a good idea to give C2 users that power, because the potential there for people to "not know what they are doing" and mess it up real bad.

    The current system works fine for most games, since we rarely have so much animated assets of high resolution to use ~4GB of memory (saturating 32bit). Your game is obviously an outlier.

    It would be very useful to have explicit memory control regardless, more tools = good for power users.

  • > That is what I get after playing awhile, the 2nd processes (biggest) reaches ~700MB.

    >

    a separate and somewhat disturbing issue is why that second process grows? so NW forces this caching which negates any benefit the current "Layouts-only-load-into-memory-what-is-needed and frees it when going to a new layout" architecture?

    Well the benefit would be quicker asset spawning on new layouts, rather than reading the file from disk, it reads it from the cache memory. RAM is about 20x faster than even SSDs (but despite that, memory access is still latency bound, around 1 frame's worth for random access).

    I would think if there's insufficient memory for the cache, it would therefore load from disk. If its on a mechanical drive, there would be a very visible stutter. Or big animated sprites, even from SSD, would stutter.

    It's a "good" behavior since it does not allow us explicit control over asset loading & unloading, so it stores it in the cache, as non-vital memory usage, if there's memory available.