Valerien's Forum Posts

  • Well, there's another reason not to use another entertainment product's name or something similar : you'll loose visibility in search engines (including video platforms like youtube or vimeo in particular).

  • I'm unsure whether you're talking about the event sheet or the properties editor so here you go :

    • in the event sheet, press enter to edit a higlighted value and then tab to navigate through the options.
    • in the properties panel, tab switches from the description column to the value, back and forth.

    It may not be the fastest keyboard ergonomy, but at least you can do pretty much any change using your keyboard only.

    Cheers,

    Nathan

  • —

    When you want to make an isometric game, you're supposed to virtually program everything on a square, regular grid (imagine a minimap, top-down view). All the pathfinding, gameplay, AI stuff... happens there. Then, you convert the position of your assets to the isometric system.

    You can probably google it or find some resources on the forums.

    Good luck,

    Nathan

  • Truly lovely ! :D

  • And if I remember correctly it doesn't matter if sprites are high or low res, when it's rendered full screen it's being rendered as currently used res.

    Yes. In your case, I'd go for a safe route then. If it's for desktop only, anything around 720 should work properly.

  • You should just run benchmarks on a wide range of computer configurations. In the current state of things, your game will still render virtually at 1080p on lower resolutions. Shaders could also cause big caveats, as they will treat pixels on screen. You can always have parameters to deactivate those though.

    And be wary of the kind of computers your target audience have. Casual gamers are more likely to have slower computers for example.

    In all honesty, after a couple of months working on c2 with an engineer specialized in web technologies, I wouldn't go anymore for complex games with dense visuals. At least until more users get better hardware and/or the engine proposes several more rendering optimizations (like rendering the game at a lower resolution/some mip mapping system ?, and rendering shaders at the game resolution, if these can be implemented in a sprite engine).

    Good luck,

    Nathan.

  • Traditionally, in the movie and video game industry, you can reuse a certain name, as long as it isn't a deposited brand, or that your logo doesn't plagiarizes or partially copy another game name's visual identity. In other terms, as long as there isn't a copyright or other international protection on a brand, you can use it. But that's theoretical.

    In practice, if you don't protect your brand or game in general, a company with enough funds and good lawyers could quickly deposit it as a brand and put you into a lawsuit.

    There is no real jurisprudence for video games in France for example, and I believe games also have some bastard-ish status in the US too. Anyway, every developer commercializing games independently should work with a lawyer specialized into intellectual property. Because, well, this topic is a pure mess.

  • I'm following up with DrewMelton.

    The icon or title of a game isn't on the marketing side of things as much as it is simply illustrative work. The first image the player sees has to convey in a split second :

    • what broad category of gameplay the game belongs to
    • what the setting of the game is

    This is not a place to trick the user into thinking that the game is great, but rather a way of conveying information extremely fast, in an entertaining fashion.

    And this isn't only important as far as users are concerned, but also when you want to have publishers, editors and journalists pay some attention to your games. They are busy people, often receiving from dozens to hundreds of emails per day. So, you might only have 10 seconds of their attention to convince them that your work is worth taking a look at.

    Lastly, PR and marketing are complementary, not opposite. If you don't market your game properly (yet ethically ), for example having a very ergonomic and appealing website to sell it from, it is unlikely that the press will make a miracle out of it.

    Regards,

    Nathan

  • For us indies, quick metrics like the NPS are just way less important than a good PR and other reliable data like conversion rates or tracking ingame stats to some extent. The main reason being that the error margin on small samples is simply huge.

    There are other reasons like the grade of a game - the source of NPS - doesn't predict how much your community will grow, nor does it give you a clue on how the sales will evolve or how much the next game will sell.

    This is still a potential tool though.

    However I totally second you on that part : small teams should worry about marketing, pr and legal aspects of video game creations. It's simply as important as making good games in the first place, and doesn't require as much experience.

    Cheers,

    Nathan

  • I am using iOS 7.0.4 on an iPad 3 here, and it doesn't work when pressing home (the square stays red). When switching tabs inside of safari, it works though.

    We have a machine running on iOS 6 too, and it simply doesn't work there. But if I understand correctly, this is a normal behavior.

    Thanks much,

    Nathan

  • Nobody has had this problem yet ? Or any potential solutions ?

    Cheers,

    Nathan

  • Spriter has a cleaner interface, an easy workflow, a lot of support from the community and is in active development.

    Bonus, construct natively reads spriter file so you can have realtime modular animations in your game, and now it does even work on wrapped games for mobile phones.

  • You probably won't find much about that online, from developers at least : this is a marketing metric, which is more abstract as is than tracking the average score of a game from version to version.

    I would also prefer the "happiness rating" metric with relatively small audiences simply because I doubt the NPS translates well based on a small data sample. Nor does it always work on bigger samples (see the battlefield users metacritics for example, or the call of duty ones).

    Anyway, why not, but i'll leave that to PR/marketing people.

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  • Beaverlicious :

    You can sell very small games on the html5 market (browser-based games) and make it worthwhile. I don't have enough personnal stats to share at the time. Nevertheless, according to our market research, it's mainly a matter of producing short, efficient yet polished arcade-ish games.

    Here we try to bring our development cycle for small games below 2 weeks (being 2 partners). We're also making pretty much everything from scratch at the moment, improving our toolset and workflow on the way forward.

  • x in the example is indeed the current level of your character.

    xpForNextLevel = floor or ceil(factor * playerLevel ^ exponent)

    Cheers,

    Nathan