The answer to every 'Can it be done?' and 'I've lost my way' post.

Challenge accepted.
I did projects before, but not with unity.
For my unity endeavours, in fact I have 3 projects I want to tackle,
For this challenge I will start with the easiest, a livewallpaper with a (beautyful) twist.

 

Both submitted now.

1 short game under development, 1 new asset under development, 2 small apps under development, 1 small website under development.


Challenge re-accepted

 

I've been working on a single game project for 10 years.

I have other things going on, like freelance work: I develop scripts, art, even entire games, and teach Unity to new users professionally. I have also developed one small game (at just 9 levels it's really more of a demo) which is very fun, but I don't have the patience for it anymore so I use it as a portfolio piece.

This huge project is what got me into game development in the first place. It's been through 4 game engines, multiple re-balances and prototypes, and after 10 years I'm still not finished. But, I'm not giving up on it because I believe very strongly in the game I'm developing. Am I crazy? Probably.

After my experience over the past 10 years, I can definitely say that I would never, ever, recommend anyone else take this route. Why? Because no matter how cool your game idea is, if it's not meaningful to you, and you have no other game projects rolling, you will not make it 10 years. And, my game might take 10 more years to make there really is no way of knowing (but I honestly feel like I'm near the end of the road, finally!).

Before starting that huge MMORPG project, or what ever it is, you need to make sure that developing games is really something that you want to do. Because, I must be brutally honest here:

No matter how much you want to play this game you're making, making games is way different from playing them, and unless you enjoy the development process, you will fail. Miserably. With lots of embarrassment when you have to explain to your friends and family why you're *not* going to be the next "Notch"

That being said, if you are serious, you need to develop something small, but continue to do planning and prototyping work on your big project in-between. It might take you a decade to finish (depending on scope) but if you're at least working on other things as well, those smaller projects will keep you going and give a sense of accomplishment as well as valuable experience that will serve you for years to come.

So, my advice: GO FOR IT! But, also do some smaller stuff in the meantime. This way you can pursue your passion, and build your own skill-set (plus take a break from the big project, sometimes you need that no matter how much you love it).

 

I am very amazed and concerned about your commitment. Care to share your project here? Like videos, etc.

 

Awesome! The more, the merrier!

 

You might want to be more specific who your refers to.

Who? me?
The person who posted below me?
The person who posted above me?

 

I reaccept here, my products out already, i'm going to, hopefully within 9 or 10 weeks, have it released again and quite the lovely thing it shall be, and maybe even possible candidate for money making. But yes my large epic project much like the fellow above, often drags me in, and i'm constantly having to learn new things and look like a buffoon on here when i'm asking questions and being proud of the trivial as i leap from one entire field to another

 

Hey all. M new to Unity development and want to take this thread as an opportunity to say 'Hi'.
I've just started to learn the basics so m not sure how i'll fare. I've done few game projects before, but never with Unity.
I just came upon Gigi's challenge and i'd say, "i accept."

 

i can't believe this, i did it, and.... oh lord how i don't like this game.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/276091649/Dropbox.html

it is not a trojan, worm or other heavy virus, in case that isn't convincing:

http://i.imgur.com/9ukMCp9.png

http://i.imgur.com/hdz4Xu6.png

you, are the latest, high tech Active Ball Bot Of Tractionbeaming Sphere, also known as ABBOT Sphere, or A. Sphere.

you have been sent by the twisted and greedy corporation of WE-A, to collect loads and loads of loot to sell for heaps of money, however, being a robot, you can't go in water without fizzling, and you are extremely fuel inefficient.

i learned a lot with my first project here, for one, i was a bit overambitious even with this, and two, i was trying to learn blender at the same time as make this, three, i didn't plan it out much, most of the choices like the turret, fuel and entire level layout were 100% spontaneous, and four, i honestly didn't and still don't feel this game, it didn't come from the heart, my next project will do this, and it'll be a lot simpler and basic.

 

I would simply like to add/reiterate:

It's only a failure if you didn't learn something from the experience.

 

Due to illness and a company's interest in my other game, I've fallen behind and will miss my deadline. However, I'm going to finish two games in the coming couple of months.

I made a WIP thread for the game I've discussed in this thread: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/234619-Shootin-Stuff!-A-comedy-FPS?p=1557249#post1557249

More stuff can be found on my site: http://timebookentertainment.com/

Thanks for the encouragement, guys and gals!

 

This past Saturday, my wife asked if I remembered the concept, 'Minimally Viable Product (MVP)'? It's a lean business idea to build the smallest thing possible. So we talked and decided that we could use our existing tech, minimal art, and no blocking, and build an MVP in 2 weeks. So, I set aside my other project and we knocked out the recordings and music. Now, I just need to finish a few UI elements and add some polish. Two weeks for sure.

I accept - March 15, 2014.

Wonder what's next...
Gigi

 

Dam as a beginner who literally just started this is an amazing thread. Honestly unity is Amazing not just because of the engine itself but the community. When I ask for help I seem to get it quite quickly. So thanks everyone and thanks to the unity team for this great engine!

 

It was this thread that got me taking myself, my games, and my company more seriously. A little positivity goes a long way!

 

1 short game under development - 95% ready. Polishing... Showed it to some UnityTech folks who came to meet our staff.

1 new asset under development - Android version of Text to Speech almost ready. Polishing...

 

Again, thanks a lot, Gigi!

 

I'm on my second one now, it's mostly finished, i just need to work on the GUI *shudders in disgust*, god how i hate using GUI texts and textures, they just irritate me to no end, so does using yield to time things, coroutines makes me sad :sad:.

 

Could we build a minimally viable Unity app? She followed through on her inspiration by writing and recording a new meditation. I used existing art, code, and license to polish up a new app called, What Went Well on iOS.

The simplicity of happiness and gratitude combined beautifully with her personal story. I admit I was blown away. And I definitely did not expect the bomb that came next, "I have another app idea, though maybe it'll be too risque, ..." And I won't steal her thunder by sharing the title. I just hope she finds the courage to finish that one too!

The answer to "Can It Be Done?" is simple. I spent seven days in development - half my original estimate - and then seven days in review. To celebrate, all our apps will be free on March 31, 2014 (Not an April fools). Show some love - give her first solo-effort a 5-star review!





WOOT!
Gigi

 

It's done!, I like this one so much more, it has some decent playability.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/276091649/Flatland/Flatland.html

It took a lot longer than it should have, I should have finished it in just two weeks, though I can't change the past, so I'm content with it as is.

 

Heard of flow? It's when we're so absorbed in an activity, that nothing else matters, and it's why we play games. And there's a recipe for Flow, with 4 ingredients: (1) Clear Tasks; (2) Feedback; (3) No Distractions; and (4) Balanced Challenge.

Your game is visually cool, with simple, clean colors. Where it struggles, is the requirements of flow. (1) I truly had no idea what task I was trying to accomplish. (2) The feedback is immediate (things turn red), and yet very confusing about what I did, or why it mattered. As for (3) and (4), well, I'd have to get past (1) and (2) first .

Gigi.

PS - To go deeper, see my chapter, "Flow, Motivation, and Fun."

 

I think it was based on the Flatlander book? I got two greens, a red and some dark blue; why I have no ideal. All I saw were rectangles of various lengths and various shades of grey on an horizon line in pitch dark.

 

Been a lurker here on this thread for a bit..
Made my own "sh*t or get off the pot" commitment to push to app store(s) for MY birthday (XXth one) coming up on May 1.
Very tight schedule...I find myself dropping 'awesome' ideas and features to marry up with my schedule - and while it hurts at first, there IS a sense of relief.
woot woot!

 

Good luck.

 

Very motivational thread! I finished my first game in about 3 weeks and just released it on Tuesday. Its a simple infinite runner for Android. Nothing too special, but I'm very proud to have finally finished something. You can check out the app here if you want: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cobrryse.jumpz .

 

Well - it has a menu, a goal, a scoring mechanism, control scheme, the game ends when appropriate and it has music and sound effects.
good on ya!!!!

Use any assets or is it all yours?

 

Congratulations! Take a moment to relax and savor your accomplishment. And then, make another!

Here's a motivational quote from a blog over at Gamasutra: "Give them a clear goal, give them a simple way to achieve that goal, give them fantastic feedback, and stop there. It might be enough" (Ted Brown).

Gigi

 

Finally took this advice after playing with unity for years and achieving next to nothing, apart from experience. I decided to attempt tetris, but with a little twist of controlling everything through my code rather than physics or colliders. I'm only a few days in so it's pretty rough, not exactly pretty!

I'd recommend using an XMind chart to track progress for anyone in my situation, it gives me great pleasure to score out parts of the to-do list!

I've put it up on Kongregate as a preview as I couldn't get dropbox working, here.

 

Just read the original post (didn't get a chance to read the rest of thread)

Bravo! This is so true. When I first started out making 'mods' many years ago my first attempts were pretty rough and didn't get much attention. But I learned many things and met some guys while making them. Eventually we teamed up and made a great product. You could not charge money for mods but we got lots of nice perks as a result (flown to some major studios and eventually won a contest and earned some money)

It's very true you have to crawl before you walk....

 

I accept...kind of. ;-)
The thing is that I am not working on a small project. Before you say anything:I am fully aware that the road ahead isn't an easy one. My challenge is a small, but important part of the project. A milestone that is so close already. Unfortunately I feel that for every step I make towards it, I make another step back. I fix one bug, a new one pops up. I empty my ToDo-list, then reflect and feel that I could have done <x> better. And so on...you should get what I mean.
Two friends of mine (a sound- and a graphics-designer) already joined me, but said that I'll have to wait till next month.

This is my challenge: Reach the milestone within one week.
I need to finish my player, add missing features to the inventory- and survival-systems and balance the whole thing.
As for what I am going to release:
Since it's just a small part of the project, I won't release the whole thing next week for obvious reasons. Instead I will open-source parts of it, and share some of my knowledge in form of tutorials.

See you in one week!

 

So one week passed and here I am.
I am pleased to present you the player: Web player link

This is obviously part of something larger. GUI, sounds, menu. All just placeholders!
Based on the FirstPersonController from the new Sample Assets.

Controls:
WASD for movement
Q, E for leaning
F for picking up items
Tab for the inventory
C for crouching
Left shift for sprinting
Left ctrl for sneaking
Space for jumping
G, H, J, K still have some debug features (but you'll see )

Feature list:

• Physics based controller
• Leaning
• Head-bobbing
• Footstep-sounds
• Sprinting, sneaking, crouching, jumping
• Take damage from high acceleration (i.e. the proper way of implementing fall-damage)
• Gamepad support
• Stamina
• Animated damage system
• Inventory-system
• Bunnyhop prevention
• Simple system to prevent getting stuck on ledges when slowly moving towards them

Nifty extensions for developers:

• Easily implement item behaviour for the inventory (with multiple actions per item)
• Toggle the character movement/input without disabling the entire script (allows for mouse input in menus like the inventory)
• Limit the rotation speed without reducing the sensetivity (cap instead of dampen)
• Relative rotation ranges for the mouse rotator (see leaning and jumping for example)
• Additional factors for various variables exposed to the outside (get slower when low on health for example)
• Lots of other settings exposed in the inspector...

​

I'd love to get some input on this one.
Oh and if you people are interested, I will release the sourcecode for free.

 

Ok, I accept this chalenge now 16. 5. 2014.
It's gonna be my first project ever so I'll have to go through a lot of painful learning.
So let's see what will I have 12 weeks from now.

 

Quoting myself is weird. And yet, it's the simplest. I accept the 12 week challenge on 5/28/2014.
Gigi

 

Ofcourse it can be!

 

I very much want to reaffirm this post.

I suggest everyone give themselves an hourly rate. It's a made up rate, and it means nothing to other people. The point of it is, you can estimate how long it would take YOU to do something. Then you can look at how much it costs in the asset store. In this way, you can say to yourself, "It would be better if I did this. The asset is too expensive." or "I could do better, for cheaper." or the more likely "This is dirt cheap! BUY! BUY! BUY!"

If you are a newbie especially, you can divide by your hourly rate and say something like, "Could I make this asset in 4 hours?" The answer is probably no, so then you can think "8 hours? 12? Oh gosh, this is a great deal! BUY BUY BUY!"

For example, I could have spent a few minutes searching how to do better tooltips. I could have tried to write my own tooltip class. Yet why? For $2, there was an asset that did this for me with a single line of code. I knew that $2 was worth it, even if it only saved me from some light googling.

Then I've created over and over again tile classes, an entire 2D tile engine, etc. I could just port over my old code. Yet why would I want to do that, when I could pay the price of a video game to have it setup for me- in a format that is more reusable than what I had done in the same way. Yet this saved me from translating C++ to Unity3D. What a great deal!

And then the Dialogue System? Oh gosh, what an amazing asset. It would take me so much longer to program the same thing myself. Yes, I CAN do it. Yet why should I when I could buy an asset which is constantly updated that does the same thing but better- with more features!

In the end, even if you're just being lazy, it's nice to treat yourself to an asset which saves you time. Time is not money, but time is more valuable than money if you have money to spare. I often think of it as "I'd rather pay the price of a video game and NOT do this work, than to do it and get bored or burned out with the more boring programming."

Assets really help speed things up, but that isn't where their value lies.

Their value lies in preventing burnout. Their value lies inside of "You don't have to do this, so you can focus on the FUN part!"

 

I accept this challenge as well. Want to finish my current game by the end of summer!

 

With much efforts, I created a game Aqua Bird: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ideadam.aquabirdgame
Its got amazing graphics and gameplay. I love it and hope people will like it more than Flappy Bird. But I am not getting many downloads as I hoped for. How to make a game popular? I am not expecting it to go viral but how to make it popular enough so that I would have enough courage to start enhancing this game or start a new one.

 

Gigi asked me to share my story, so apologies, in advance, for the manuscript.

I've always messed around with games programming from the ZX Spectrum days but I couldn't figure it out, tried some game creator on the Atari ST but never finished anything. When i got my PC I found DarkBasic, tried that and couldn't do anything with it. At that time I'd become a hobby film maker/VFX artist & musician so put all my creative energy in to those.
I found Unity by my usual random searching for game engines that I might be able to understand, it wasn't free & I had no confidence in that I'd be able to make anything worth releasing, so I never bought it & moved on A few years ago 1st March 2012 to be exact that time I bought an ARDrone quadcopter that you control with your iPhone. I took it out for a test flight whilst recording the footage, which is here. I crashed it about 10 times and broke it. So pissed off I looked for a simulator that I could use on my iphone to practice flying it, there wasn't one.

I decided I'd try and make my own and checked out Unity again. At that point they were giving away the iOS & Android basic licences for free, so I signed up for those and made a simulator with help from the internet and my cousin.

Anyway, I released it and it sold pretty well & still continues to sell. I then released a top down driving game which flopped, a space invaders type game which flopped, a spin off of my ARDrone Simulator with Zombies in it, that flopped too. All through that I was working on various prototypes and tests,

Lastly I made a fishing simulator, something I'd always wanted to do but couldn't. I aimed for realism rather than those horrible arcade Bass fishing games that always get made. If you don't know how to fish in real life, you'll catch nothing in my simulator.

Anyway, turns out I wasn't the only person who wanted that type of game. Originally it was PC only, I released a early accesses version through my own website & promoted it through a facebook page. It began selling pretty well. More and more people were asking if it was coming out for mobile devices. In the end due to demand, i released it on iOS & Android. It's been in & around the top 10 in sports on both platforms in the UK and other countries since it's release on Jan 31st this year.

I contacted Microsoft & Sony when my game was at number 1 in the charts, Microsoft fed me the same jargon about their ID@Xbox scheme which i was already a member of, Sony however were great & I'm now a licensed Sony dev & working on releasing the fishing simulator for PS4 & PSVita.

So to sum it all up, the one thing I've learnt the most from my failures and success is to give players what they want, if that happens to be what you want to make, then go for it! Find out what players are asking for, it's usually something obscure that the bigger studios won't touch but would have enough demand.

 

Accept it! - I never finished anything, but now i want to finish what i began!

 

I had the same problem... I always worked on some prototypes, got bored after some time and started a new one. And no one played them or even saw a screenshot.

The most important thing that helped me sticking to a single project for the last year was to show it to my friends and let them play it right from the start. It's just insanely motivating if someone actually plays your game and gives you feedback.

Another thing that helps me alot is to force myself to write a blog post about the progress each two weeks.
This motivates me further to work on the game in order to be able to show new features each time I post about it.

I hope I will stick to the plan and not let this game become another unfinished prototype.

 

So I have my super ambitious game.... i always take my "small" ideas and make them too big! So while I work on my assets for that game, I accept the challenge and want to make a simple 2d platformer for this challenge.

 

(bookmarked)

 

problem augmented reality website


I am new to this and I have really wanted to learn, my problem is that when compiling for export (build and run) for a website I can do but to run in a browser gives me error
any suggestions please is important

 

I accept.

 

I accept.

 

Only time will tell if we'll see new releases from those "Accepts". Though every path is different, here's a path I've used while finishing six personal projects, getting publications in five books, and winning four national awards (excerpted from a recent "How to Start" thread):

Whether or not this fits your reality, at least you'll know it's a successful approach learned from the school of hard knocks. As past performance is the best predictor of future performance, you're mileage may vary.

Gigi

 

Are we suppose to finish and release a game in 12 weeks? Or just finish it? It takes some time to market the game and get it out there as well as get it approved for app stores, steam, etc...

 

Doesn't really matter. The exact time frame isn't the issue so much as getting into the habit of actually finishing things and getting them into other peoples' hands.

 

Great motivation, Gigi. Challenge accepted!
I already started my current project on June 29th. This is my first real Unity project, I started playing around in Unity a bit in March 2014. For this project I also looked into 3D modeling with blender for the first time. Progress so far is pretty good in spite of working fulltime for a company. Looking forward to the results.

 

Lovely rant from Mike Bithell at the Develop Conference:

Worth a look,
Gigi