How Close Can Indies Get To AAA Games?

It's a starting point and if he does all of what he stated that would be a lot more than most people have done. All I know man if we all keep knocking each others plans and work down (even though we mean well) nobody will ever do anything. And that is the important thing I think anyway.

Someone needs to actually do something towards the AAA thing. Might be way off but even a tiny playable something is better than us filling pages with screenshots and talking. Which you said that as well I know. lol Sometimes it seems like your posts start out one way like pounding them down and then toward the end you lift them back up and dust them off. lol

You might have made a good drill sargeant.

 

I hit alpha (again... for the 5th time) last month. I am doing quite a lot and have been for a long time.

There are many compromises that need to be made and there's nothing wrong with aiming high as long as you're willing to put in work.

The real challenges tend not to be discussed because not a lot of people make it to the actually hard part (game design) and the "but...its not fun" problem in a mid+ sized project.

 

I thought about you & your project and edited my post just a bit ago. lol

I meant do something on this AAA-like rpg kind of open world but not really game.

All of this discussion about this rpg game makes me want to do some more on my weekend experiment.

I think I just need to not look at it like an either-or thing. Like either I have all higher quality content or I use ultra low poly / primitives and scale and color them to be unique.

Meaning some enemies can be scaled up 75% and textures recolored for giants. Other enemies can be scaled way down like 10% and textures recolors for wee folk. Band of tiny female rangers could be quite annoying.

Then maybe take some normal rocks and have them come to life by tilting and rolling around occasionally grumbling. Normal tree could walk by tilt and rotate and have a spin attack.

If approached from this way it would solve content issue and actually probably add interest if only for being "so weird".

 

@neoshaman I'm still not completely sure what you mean by the structure (in a more literal sense), but we can focus for the moment on the combat.

So action combat. Okay. I didn't play Zero Dawn, but saw a few videos a while before it came out and the bow was the main focus. You thinking a mix of ranged and melee combat? Or just melee? And since we were just discussing it - magic? Any fantasy?

 

@ShadowK
Well if even AAA have to compromise I don't see any problem with doing it myself lol, the first compromise is not mine it's an AAA team one! I'm not trying to OUTDO AAA the AAA here The aggregate of AAA game quality is not the standard I aim to! Maybe I'm more realist that you think I'm ?

A lot of the compromise you pointed at are compromise AAA game have made and I was pointing at them, Horizon don't have a party system, nor does the witcher, nor does zelda which is one generation behind. Witcher combat isn't complex in the sense I mean it (ie devil may cry level of complex) it use the rpg aspects to balance it out, it's not as fine tunes than darksouls, neither is final fantasy XV (which did have a party system). In final the only compromise that set me at distance is voice acting and facial animation. But who know, if I have something promising to show it could resolve itself.

The fun thing is that I'm rather confident into making a party system for an action title ... in design, but I would rather keep the coding simple because code is not my forte (I can do it in a simple prototype though, I did it in the past, not a full party system, but a follower placement system).

Also in the course of all these discussion I have already outline the hard limitation, the thing I think we can achieve, and the thing that need practical validation, I had also announce the thing I had the most interest in, aka "scope". Therefore is no surprise in the plan I laid out. I'm mostly interesting in the planning and production of such scope as a lone dev. Else I would not have taken the distraction.

It's born from the frustration of people undervaluing planning. For example planning will never be seen as doing, but as talking, yet many people failed by jumping straight at making without planing. With scope in mind, you can't really go without planning.

The plan was always how far we can go and can this pass for AAA and what trick to use along the way.

 

Here is a feasible game idea for an indie project with AAA fidelity.

• The entire game takes place in an old victorian house.
• A couple just moved in.
• The couple is having trouble in their relationship.
• You were murdered in the 50s. You are a ghost trapped in the house.
  
• Once every winter you can cross the void and manipulate objects in the world.

It's a sandbox. You can destroy the couples relationship, or fix it.

You see them and the house age, grow and change.

That's it. 2 characters. 1 House. Feasible for indie to do high quality.

(there is also a ton of DLC potential for different residents to move in! )

 

To be frank I had more xenoblade chronicle without teh menu and direct control on attaque as a mental image, like some control setting of last story. I haven't thought much of the range aspects too much yet. I let that decision rest for later, I need an idea of the progression first and what's needed to structure the place functionally in term of gameplay. I want to focus on hi level stuff first because they have the most impact on the scope as of right now, and it will allow to decide how to balance the assets need.

 

Like the idea, but it sounds like it would take extensive character work. Animations and voice acting and just writing to accurately portray their relationship, which sounds like a fundamental part of your design.

Alright. What other specific high-level stuff were you wondering about?

 

I like it but that does change the target considerably. Loads of games can be made if only striving for great presentation no matter how simple.

Why not have top notch characters stand in front of a superb looking tree and player with a beautiful bow attempts to shoot oh so shiny apples off their heads. Lots of speech and some slow mo replays.

 

This is scary to me, it mean deep research (that cost a lot, see my current project), reproducing architecture with minutia, realistic lived place full of personal history, I would rate that "high" as cost and skills. The fact it need referencing creates a lot of pitfalls.

I mean relative to a sci fi house where nobody have any expectation about how it looks like and where you can handwave contrivance by inventing a culture or a tech because nobody has seen the future, and it will be seen as flavor or "originality".

Highly personal character with nuanced emotion, the cost just skyrockted if you go AAA level, there is no sets gameplay for social simulation at that level either, so you are doomed to invents something. The subject matter is not mainstream, you can't justify the cost.

Also it's been done at indie level, it's call facade.

But it has many gameplay flaws we haven't found a way to fixed, still a huge milestone in game design.

Similarly, gone home, sunset, and edith finch are project that have this scale already, and close subject, the one with actual character tanked commercially (sunset).

 

What are you talking about? Facade was a perfectly executed game in every way!

 

I never said it would be easy.

I said it's possible.

Facade is obviously a major inspiration - I was really fascinated with the idea years ago.

If you can do it for inexpensive, I am sure you can make a nice profit. Many people would be willing to review/cover the game.

 

I laid out the problem more largely, I locked a size for the entire game, and you have to fill that map:

To give an idea, imagine you have an image of 750² pixels, that's one region of the game, you have 15 of them in a an 4x4 grid. 1 pixel is the size of the main character footprint (ie one tile units of the world, ie a 2m² space)

You need first to identify the gameplay function to build an experience. For example you may have resources in the field, shops inside settlement or town, where you sell enemy loots, you have npc for flavor, npc for direction, important npc to trigger story events, etc ... all of that is the structure, not a named npc, but the gameplay class of each npc or element. You need a template for all region, the structure is that template.

 

That's debatable, the parser don't recognize everything and some affordance aren't neatly tell. They also don't react or recognize a lot of stuff, which mean you have to read the designer mind. That's why there isn't much clone and people tried different things, with versu being the current champion.

But gameplay flaws has never stop a good game to be good , especially when you can overlook the limitation. I will redirect to IF design community's discussion for more tall about it (and its overall design champion emily short!)

 

Ah, I see. I probably couldn't work on this kind of thing myself because right now I'm a little too wrapped up in building my own game's world so it's hard to look outside of that.

 

I like this, it would work well as a non AAA title as well(2d with garish graphics to isometric in monument valley style etc). A problem with the AAA part of this though might be heavy facial animations required for such a scenario(I honestly dont know how unity is regarding this), though that is one area I've not even dabbled with in unity so IDK.

 

The concept is pretty reminiscent of The Novelist, actually.

 

If you had asked me April of 2016 I would have said I had zero knowledge of Unity or game development in general! Now we have a title in Early access at Steam. Anything is possible! Both me and my brother who is making the game has long time experience as software devs however, which offcourse helps

 

What's the name -- and if you don't mind me asking -- how are you guys doing in terms of sales?

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/517020/Virtual_Warfighter/

We had a rough start, we sadly used a borked network SDK, it had alot of memory leaks etc, but the biggest problem was that the reliable RPC was not reliable at all Here in Stockholm we have really great fiber connections so we didnt ran into the problems. Naive as we were we did not test with with a low quality network simulator like clumsy (great tool).
Anyway we got alot of bad reviews there in the begging and by the time we had written our own network SDK the game was forgotten So we have workign our way back from that

We focus on bringing really polished stuff in each update and hope it will catch on, VR is a really small business, I hope Oculus recent price drop will bring more players into the market. We are also working on singleplayer / coop bots.

The game is completely physics driven and we have written a pretty cool network solution for networked physics, you can look here for a show case of that

Or arming/disarming the bomb in our game is done with physics enabled copper wires that are networked so the other players will see what you are doing

(Its the same clip twice with different timecodes I hope the forum will support that)

Its luckily we have so darn fun with the game, otherwise I would have gone mad

 

I think you really have something there and I hope that even if full release doesn't go so well, you guys release VW2 with more and more improvements.

I love the bomb and wire manipulation, just sick. Leg animation obviously needs work, but this kind of thing can all be improved with time and care.

Very impressive work.

 

Maybe you can post a message on Steam and / or otherwise contact your existing customers asking them to help spread the word and let them know what you plan to do and then lower the price way down for a couple of weeks to like $5 so you can expand your playerbase. It looks like the biggest complaint right now is not really the game itself but the fact that it is dead as in there is nobody to play the game with.

Or did you already try that with the Steam Summer Sale?

 

May also consider building a lobby system with a "pager" that dings you if there is a game ready to play, so you can play vs bots for a while if you're waiting.

It's almost impossible for a small game to have enough players to reliably populate games in short order. You need to be able to do other stuff while you wait.

 

Yeah, I'm thinking a open world survival game with our mechanics, just need a couple of million in fundings first

Glad you liked the bomb, it was alot of work Obi rope did the heavy simulation lifting, but it was alot of work never the less

Totally agree. we have just outsourced a job that unifies our two character with the animation pack that we use, that will take away some of the F***iness, but it needs more work even after that

Thanks for the kinds words!

 

Good idea, actually we will not let you create a singel player game only If yuo play with bots anyone can join in at any time. We cant let players play on there own when we have so little of them I will see what Steam lobby mechanism offers in that regard. We have idras of building away Steam UDP and Steam lobby match making, that way we could launch on PS4 and PSVR, but thats a completly different ball park.

 

Yeah we did a 50% summer sale. We have some ideas. Key give aways, etc. All the money we get is put back into the game. I hope I can get enough for a larger map soon ,that would be epic

 

No problem, I'm a designer anyway, it's my job to do that anyway.

The funny things is I was graphing the gameplay loop of rpg and it's kind of anti thesis to open world, despite that open world have roots in RPG games lol. I mean character progression works great with linear story because your power curve follow the encounter curve, vs going everywhere and not being able to do anything because level is low or finding useless weapon below your level.

Spoiler: basic analysis of the structure

It makes the distribution of encounter kind of tricky, in the sense there is no "logical" progression (you can go anywhere) and spike of difficulty can happen, and it makes implicitly the experience linear, since you can't do much in hi level area anyway. Xenoblade handle this quite well, by mixing weak and hard monster, and having each monster getting different aggro mechanics (on sight, on sound, if attacking same species, etc ...), so avoiding to aggro end level monster is actually part of the fun, it does also have hi level area where you shouldn't go as the story is linear and loop back to early area. There is a certain fun in avoiding an enemy that is 70 level above you and being finally able to taking down later.

So the solution in general is to level up enemy as you go, which is bethesda do since Oblivion, but that doesn't work because it nullifies level and can pose problem if you specialize in non combat.The new zelda have the world leveling up with you too but since you have linear power scale instead of exponential enemy become weaker but still do "significant damage", also your attaque don't level up, you use weapon that degrade, so you tend to be match for local enemy once your big weapon is gone.

The structure of rpg is also tightly tied to resources distribution, town is for rest and restocking, field for unstructured challenge and dungeon for structured one, each place's function is tied to a phase of the progression loop with specific resources.

The loop is quite simple, nobody is learning anything here, kill monster (field, dungeon), win currency (xp, gold, resources), buy equip (town) to kill bigger monster, that loop is cloned in multiple progression, generally the gold loop to buy better equip and the xp loop to buy skills.

Dungeon (or structured challenge) tend to have the progress trinket, in linear story it's the general gating mechanism that unlock new places, in open world it can increase the progression counter, which can be used to unlock events in the world, a good idea would be to unlock new stronger monster spawn instead of leveling all monster.

Quest don't add much fundamentally to the gameplay outside of structuring a bit more field exploration with direction, however they add a lot to experience by adding flavor (story). Quest can be organize by guild to have an internal progression.

Another structure to look at is the structure of information flows. Why do we talk to npc (as a gameplay function and outside of flavor)? Basically they informs up of what to do and how to do stuff, where things are and who does what, they allows us to navigate the world and direct around, they hints at secrets through riddle. Some game concentrate all of that in tavern, which also can be a place to hire people.

Important npc help trigger sequence of events or open self contain gameplay sequences that follows the plot. we can make it so important npc can only be interacted once you get the right information that direct you to them, understand the riddle or have quest growing a local progression factor that unlock new events, which unlocks dungeons and finally the plot trinket. Which motivate internal area progression.

The problem is fundamentally, what motivate the player to navigate aside from unlocking the story, how do we keep the reward structure consistent with character leveling?

One early consideration is to make each region specialized in a type of challenge, and the reward of each region are also specialized power. Travel progression should be something to consider, ie gaining better traversal mechanics over time. Equipment progression worry me a bit as it goes counter to freedom, but I have a crafting system where collecting raw resources to upgrade equipment might encourage traveling around with specialized smith in each region, also unique resources to deal with specific external condition like the weather system in the new zelda. Having stronger enemy spawn after some progress might also help gating the stronger reward. It also depend of the rates of progress.

 

Although this is all true and good groundwork, I do not think these are real questions for development or real statements about your game.

From a game designer standpoint, these questions must be tied to your ability to produce content.

You must be introducing new elements to game play constantly in order to keep the player entertained. These new game play elements must be attacks the player uses and new challenges enemies use.

In order to produce play time, you must figure out how to distribute your resources across the game's timeline. This, like many other questions, also has a trade off between quality and quantity.

Some games will choose to have many many skills and many types of enemies, but the differences between all are small. Most of the game play is the same from one point to the next.

Some games will choose to have fewer skills or enemies, but make larger differences between them. Play feels more varied, but all content takes more time to produce. This means less stuff overall.

Both approaches can work very well if executed well.

There are many tools to use in order to create more variety (novelty) from one hour to the next. It is the challenge of game design to compose all of those elements into a cohesive experience.

Character progression can work fine in open world setting without skyrim style scaling, but it needs to be built into the game design to have multiple layers of challenge. The master work in this is Mount & Blade. No other game has come close in the 10 years since it's release.

 

This is very true and none of the statement you made are false either. I'm also a game designer, it's normal I asses the terrain first, identify the problematic to define what decisions are critical.

In that sense I have not yet make any statement about the games nor ask question about the load on the development. I haven't made decision yet, just observation.

But my style of design is to identify problem to solve, so that's why this is just an analysis, I named it as such. And since I'm a game designer first, I derive from the analysis decision and from decision I derive the load of gameplay, aka the real question about development.

After all making the structure will decide how many gameplay elements there is to interact with, these interaction will define the world I can made, from the world I can derive the story structure, events, flavor environment that don't contribute to gameplay.

But Through this analysis I realized something I didn't mention. The way I do things will need to be adapted, because I'm not making stuff from scratch, I'm assessing the possibility of advance asset flips ... which mean my affordances for decisions flip some of the things.

I can still move to the next step, aka deciding a final structure, most AAA games don't get it super right (the problem I mention are still there in all these games), so by the nature of the things I don't have to solve it to hit my goal. But then I can't just jump to defining the elements, because they will depend on the assessment of existing assets, and that will be the key point to see if I can do the AAA things or just a big "pretty" game. I need to mixed a bit of element building and world building at the same time.

Personally if it wasn't an exercise, I would remove rpg or bend it toward action aventure like the new zelda lol. Mount & Blade is fine, but it's not quite generic RPG either.

I should focus on efficiency rather than reinventing the wheel, this is production not design, and that's where the ego issue I'm talking about start creeping his head My designer sense are so tingling about the fixing the open world stuff but I might mess the production planning ...

I have kind of hit the first big "indecision" moment, what direction should I take the games, they are truly really equivalent. What do you think? What model of progression should I applied?

 

I really question why I am even doing this... because in a way it goes against everything I stand for. lol

Anyway... I made a new game world. A tiny game world. I used the tried-and-true mountain range all around to contain the player. But I thought it would be easy enough to make it a bit more interesting if I just added water all around as well. Kinda like a moat I suppose. Might not be logical but I thought it would add some interest and also I think there might be good fishing spots which may come in handy. And yes the mountain was a quick n easy thing. I could go over it and smooth it down some and then add some more jaggies and then smooth it again. And that is exactly what I am not doing. It is done.

Actually come to think of it I probably should have turned around to show the size. The tree sitting in the corner is because that is how I marked off the area size. Put a tree in each corner. There is nothing in the inner active gameplay area yet (besides those 4 trees). Not even grass (real grass I mean not the textured ground).

Actually no sense in showing a video of this yet because you can't see anything. So there is no purpose for the video. Had I actually showed the size of the area then it would serve a purpose. So after I get some kind of progress made I will throw a video up or something.

It's going to be tiny. Like maybe the objective will be to cross from one side of the game world to the other, get an apple and then come back. Quest complete. Game won! Okay... probably not that tiny. But it will be pretty darn simple so I can get it done. I was joking above about the fishing but I do kind of like the idea. This all would be so much simpler with cubes.

 

Well for what it's worth I think you should go with the game you want to make. I don't see why it needs to be a Skyim / W3 style rpg. You'd want to make yours different from Skyrim & W3 anyway (because there is already a Skyrim and W3) and I definitely believe a person should be making what their heart is into.

I am thinking of the same thing. Do I really want to make an rpg? Maybe it will be a survival game. Or a farming game... ha that would be kind of cool get the crops growing and watch out here come some dragons soaring over the mountain top to burn everything up.

But I will probably make a tiny rpg. Just saying I really don't know yet. I only know whatever it is will be in a very small contained area.

Anyway making a zelda style game would be cool I think. Or Mount & Blade. Or Abe's Apple Picking Simulator maybe.

 

I think the whole goal of what neoshamen is doing is to test out the waters of truly making an AAA game. It's an experiment. He's open to failure or difficulty, he just wants to see what he can do with it.

 

I think so too it is only because he mentioned...

... that sounded like he is not really into the idea completely and I think it is important to really enjoy this stuff and do whatever in hell it is you really want to do.

 

Hehe not sure what you mean by 'panned out' but I still have approximately the same target that I've always had. I think you know what I meant by AAA on 'that thread', it's not a question of current gen or something but rather 2011-2012.
As far as me being around is concerned, I've gone on a crash diet from the forums.


The Gamedev Problem

The way I've always seen game dev is like this:

• A certain amount of stuff is needed to get done to make a game;

• At the beginning, you have an baseline efficiency factor, that you can increase/decrease;

At any given time, you have two options - increase the efficiency of your approach (which involves plenty of work) or just use elbow grease to angle for finishing the work at your current efficiency.

i.e., you can increase 'efficiencyFactor' or you can finish work at a rate of

timeToFinishGame = allTheGameStuff / (workOutput * efficiencyFactor)


What To Do

So what to do? Up to everyone, but for me, it's very very hard to work at a certain level of efficiency when I know that it's possible to do better. My motivation is a (very) finite resource, which is somewhat replenished over time by the knowledge that I'm as efficient as possible or thereabouts.

Now to make a game like the one I'm (still) aiming for, and considering my extremely low reserves of motivation for expending elbow grease, I'd have to be somewhere in the vicinity of two orders of magnitude more efficient than the standard workflow (especially for asset creation and somewhat less for level design and much less for coding) to get it done in what I consider to be a reasonable time.

Hence the fact that I'm spending most of my spare time (apart from the space kit I'm working on) trying stuff out to increase efficiency. In fact I've decided that my 'unicorn target' (i.e. the one that I would not expect to reach, but is a valuable direction nonetheless) is to create the game fully procedurally in the same way as kkrieger, but at a better quality, and bridge the remaining gap (which may be quite large but who knows) with elbow grease.

PS my mobile game is still going strong, but (fortunately or unfortunately) has been prone to being used as a guinea pig for all sorts of outlandish approaches to things, from which, when things don't go as planned, it takes some time to recover ...

 

I'd like to be corrected here but it seems to me we've essentially gone from creating a AAA game (which make their own games) to a random almagamation straight up of other people's stuff like others to sit in the bottom cesspools of Steam and if your lucky get picked up and pointed at.

I understand the value of the asset store and in many cases think it's a little silly not to take advantage, but at some point it becomes an insult to developers and to the people you're trying to offload your "game" on. Anders who has been kind enough to share his progress, on what's a very good looking game with some interesting mechanics is IMO awesome and it's his game, his style.

The amount of content you're going to need to come anywhere near a AAA game means you'll be incorporating a lot of rubbish and it'll be a missmash of the good / bad and downright ugly. Severe lack of quality for the sake of big is a silly notion, luckily very few follow suite.

With that stick a fork in this thread, it's done.

 

@ShadowK you aren't planning on posting any progress screenshots of your project here to keep the dream alive?

 

Is there any hidden subtext in there? I've got a blog and another thread for that..

 

Not at all! I actually didn't know you had a blog. I guess I missed that. Just checked it out. Man that first screenshot is wicked. I don't recall seeing that before. They all look great. You really do excellent work man.

It almost looks like you have 3 completely different games represented for FS. Each with its own style and all of them look great.

That last one definitely has the sci-fi vibe to it. Didn't get that from the first one at all. The second possibly a bit due to the armor could be kind of hi-tech... could be some kind of elite / royal character.

Well... I'll look forward to checking your blog every few weeks and see how things are going for you!

 

You only say that if you feign not having the discussion so far I can roll back all along and point at many post where I mention asset flip, pcg and hand made for the specific.

But we will see, the result should speak for themselves if I go anywhere, I'm ready for a full public apologize lol I just want to try. And with everything I have said about art direction, maybe it's a bomb waiting to blew up on my face?

I start talking about failure but that's not my goal lol What if I succeed? What would the reaction be?

It doesn't matter, you are motivating me with this demotivational, I like challenge, even if I can possibly fail, I'll try to fail with panache!

Because in the end, I also do it to test some idea I had that has nothing to do with AAA, so it's not a random exercise I picked solely for Hubris™. But there is a moment where we should stop theorizing and start testinig right?

Also for the structure I decided to go KISS and live with the decision. I'll simply go for the standard RPG structure with simple shops, houses and all. It's also KILL because player already know the drill.

I had a speech about fear and indecision and how it prevent project from completion, and how you should live with your decision to not perpetually undo what you have done.

Well time to eat my own S*** right?

 

I don't see anything as really failing. Not that I believe in the whole participation trophy thing either. lol

But it's more just a natural step toward the result you want. You're sure to learn some things. Some what to do. Others what not to do. If that is failure well it's not bad at all. Basically as you said it's all just an experiment. I see my whole life that way in fact but we won't get into all of that. lol

Good luck!

 

Honestly, why does it matter. If I hire a contractor to make art or I go and buy something royalty free...who cares?

As long as it fits well enough and looks like it belongs, why does it matter?

If it doesn't bother the player - then it works. If you do it badly then it doesn't.

Trust me, making a solid game from asset store stuff is harder than hiring contractors to make content. We're not talking a demo or a walking sim, but a full game. Trying to figure out how to make Jimbo's Brigands work with Ted's Landscape Goodies Pack, and have it not all look like an asset flip is tough work.

In terms of difficulty, simply having more staff to pass stuff off onto is far easier.

 

Links please!

 

@frosted

It doesn't matter, Steam has a refund policy and an algorithm to push flippers to the bottom.. If you use a contracter then you get good quality work for your specific project. If it's harder why use it?

Asset store stuff is great for prototyping, decals and heavy modification to save some time.. If you're essentially dumping pre-made assets and not doing much yourself (as neo said asset flipping) then it shows you're either a lazy dev (which brings into question the rest of your game) or it shows you've bitten off way more than you can chew which also brings into question the quality of your game holistically.

There's no gurantee's you'll earn a dime more making a large game, stastically there's a higher chance of you loosing money and a lot of time on it. So if you have to resort to essentially smashing together stuff in the hopes of achieving something large then you're already on the losing side, if you can't create the game you can't support it. Neo ain't the first to do it and doubt they'll be the last... I've even done it the first proto of the game was M4K assets many years back, released it for alpha and the feedback was not kind.

Although whatever, I've lost a bit of time in thread talking about it.. Can't say it's even a minor issue otherwise.

@AndersMalmgren

I have a thread called "Shadows stuff" and there's a link in my signature for my blog.

@GarBenjamin

Thanks appreciate it.

 

The reason is singular: to cut costs.

Dumping a bunch of assets into a scene and calling it a game or producing a small demo is one thing. Building a cohesive game out of the asset store is another beast entirely.

As someone who has spent thousands of hours attempting to do that, trust me, I know what I'm talking about.

Nobody playing or looking at my game would call it an asset flip, because I've done serious work on making sure that pieces work together. That process is absolutely non trivial and requires huge amounts of attention, huge compromises and creative thinking.

When using a mishmash of stock assets, giving a game a strong aesthetic is immensely difficult.

Games don't need mega high fidelity graphics, they don't need fancy mechanics and super systems, but almost every successful game ever made must have a cohesive aesthetic. Even the little cube based battlefield that @GarBenjamin linked "works" and "looks fun" because there's a consistency to the look, and that consistency creates a cohesive aesthetic. Even Dwarf Fortress has an aesthetic.

Would it be easier to have people build custom assets? 100%.

Why do it if both the results suffer and the path is more difficult? Because it cuts costs. That's the only reason.

Again, making a little demo or whatever is one thing. Making a complete game is another process entirely.

 

On the assets I'd personally be thrilled if all of the assets needed for a game were available at an online store. I mean truly it would be awesome. It would be empowering. Because using canned assets (that fit together well) would require about the same amount of time as using cubes. That would encourage me to switch my focus from cubes to ultra low poly, low poly, high poly whatever form those assets take.

We would run into a problem eventually where people (players) start seeing the same things duplicated as shown in a video in another thread where a YTer is covering different games all using the exact same house. While I don't consider it to be as huge of a problem as the OP of that thread I do think it can be a big problem.

BUT... I think the problem there and maybe this is what @ShadowK is thinking about.... in those examples the reason it can be a big problem is because the same house appearing in different games (particularly games in the same genre) will cause players to become familiar with them. This removes any sense of exploration.... any sense of unknown.

BUT I think that is more of a problem with the devs themselves. Using a canned asset for a major part of your game (here the environment or indeed perhaps entire game world I don't know because I am not familiar with those games) is probably a bad idea.

However, I always think the negatives can be reduced by better game design, focus on behaviors, interaction, adding other details and using audio to style the game. And maybe the real problem in those cases is simply the games themselves being too similar in regards to the purpose of the house. If one game had the player enter a room and there is a ghastly spirit and another game same room had nothing that is a big difference IMO.

If your game takes place entirely inside a house and you want to use a canned asset maybe try to customize it to at least some degree which I wouldn't think would be easy all depends on how the model was built. Or use it as a reference to build your own house. Mainly in this case I think just hire someone to make a house. Then use canned assets to populate it.

TLDR - I think the use of canned assets depends on how much of a focal point the asset is in your game. Something like a house serving as a tiny game world is probably one of the worst examples. Canned assets such as tables, lamps, etc to populate a custom house I think is very different end result. Actually the best solution would be canned modular house so devs can easily assemble their own.

 

In terms of seriously being efficient, the best path is being able to easily and heavily customize stock assets.

The more power to rework inexpensive stock assets the more that you can gain the cost efficiency without sacrificing a unique experience and strong aesthetic.

I'm sorry if that "feels wrong" to some people, but I'm not trying to gain street cred with developers, I'm trying to provide an experience to players. If the players are happy, then I succeed, if they're unhappy I fail.

The cheaper I can produce something that players enjoy, the better chance I have to make more games.

 

I agree completely. I sometimes think the ideal way for providers to deliver these assets is to create some kind of Editor / Builder system instead of one entity such "a house", "a character", etc.

If instead they created a modular system and then went the extra step to create a tool to easily configure, modify these (now) base entities including easily retexturing or at least recoloring the various parts that would be truly awesome.

Yes it would create extra work for them so increase the price because it would also provide so much added value to the end user.

When it comes to game dev I want all of these things to be dead easy. This is exactly why my recent projects are better or at least look more interesting. I am now using tools that are much better IMO (at least for me they are) and make this stuff as easy as I expect it to be.

 

What I'm really looking for most at the moment are good tools for hacking UVs. Doing stuff like remapping textures from one mesh to another.

I need to be able to get more value out of various textures I have access to.

 

We're talking about mid to large scale games at a professional level here, not a flappy bird knockoff.. They are expensive to make and if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen.

Even in terms of "fringe costs" it's expensive, you need test beds (multiple machines) with different hardware for your target platforms.. I've had issues in the past with Unity where it would freeze randomly every so often on AMD hardware with OpenGL, I caught it due to having the right testbeds and reported it to Unity.. It took three iterations for it to get fixed..

So I thought right, if this project is going to happen without getting ground into paste by customers I need a support contract. I looked into it, over the course of development / release support you're looking at bare minimum 60K..

So if you're looking for "cheap" you're using the wrong engine for a start, you could hire a part time engine developer for less and you'd be giving someone a job. Let's not talk about legalities like EULA's from a technical lawyer, general support costs, paying yourself etc.

In the grand scheme of things, grabbing hold of blender and spending a month learning how to kit bash isn't exactly a problem.. I've seen coders endlessly tweak specifics 99.9% of people won't care about and / or appreciate but they won't even entertain the idea of opening a DCC. Actually that is quite rare I've seen it never the less..

Every succesful game developer has near enough built it themselves from the ground up and used some additions as necessary. No, you don't need mega fidelity graphics and we've talked about it before it can do more harm than good, but that begs the further question if the artwork is easier to create, why not make it yourself for your game with your vision?

End of the day, doesn't matter what I think.. I doubt you'll change my opinion on it, I've tried it (for no more reason than to focus on the gameplay as opposed to graphics) and it didn't go well.. The only people you have to justify this to is your paying customers, they will be the deciding factor ultimatley..

For me, there's so many issues business / game wise I'd rather avoid the hassle in the first place.

 

Agreed.

A few posts ago you asked "what is the difference between this and an asset flip?"

The answer is simple: if your players call it an asset flip, then its an asset flip.

That's it.