What do you think about the last Jim Sterling video?

That's the trait of a bad programmer not a good one, I mean sure in most teams I have been there are a UX expert that does the heavy lifting when it comes to UI design etc, but a good programmer must be able to todo this themselves in my option.

 

Are you implying I'm a huge fraud?

 

No, just that I still haven't met another player.

 

You could make the argument that they are. Unless they're completely ignorant, which would only be the case if they have legitimately never played a video game, they should be aware of the sorts of games that most people enjoy and the other games they will be competing against.

If we're going to blame them though then we may need to blame the stores too. Because if it weren't for certain stores allowing any and everyone onto their platform if they just pay a small fee they wouldn't have been able to publish them.

 

I think that'd make sense if these were people trying to sell their games for like... $20-60, but the vast majority of the time the games being railed against are being sold for a pittance. I'm talking like... I think at one point I figured out the average cost of a game Sterling was complaining about was something like $3 or less.

That ends up being another issue I take with him. It's not like he's offering criticism, he's just railing against beginner projects that are being sold for dirt cheap in an environment where getting a refund is a matter of three clicks and a waiting period like they're being sold for AAA game prices. It's just... whining. The kind of whining you'd expect if a game like this killed your dog or something. There's nothing constructive about it. It's youtube fodder, plain and simple.

 

I may be out of the loop bad here I dont know. I dont consider myself a dev really as I have never released a game. I love unity, for me its like the best level editor a video game could have, like little big planet unlocked. From my standpoint, that of a slightly educated consumer, I dont see a problem with crap games. There have always been crap games. I know how to look for what I like. The same holds true for any product I have ever bought. I dont know how it is in other countries but the usa is full of people trying to make a buck off of any cheap easy product they can push. There is a ton of crap to wade through when buying anything and it usually isn't disguised very well making it easy to avoid. I personally never realized unity had an image problem untill unity forums brought it to my attention, maybe I live under a rock. Furthermore what happens if we get rid of crappy games? Where do you draw the line of crappy at? Then when the crappy games are gone some of you with decent games will become the ones with crap games. Do we draw a new crap line? There will always be a substandard bottom of the barrel product and if you remove them the bottom dosent go away it just gets occupied with higher quality stuff now considered bottom level. Its always nice to have someone doing a worse job than you.

 

And UE4 has an image problem with performance, and CryEngine has an image problem with ease of use. Every engine has a perceived image problem. Sterling has an image problem. He dresses like a clown and performs for the camera and you... take that seriously. It's entertainment.

The guy actually dresses normally in real life and walks around, maybe buys a few nice bites to eat from Tesco etc, has a drink etc. I'm pretty sure he doesn't wear that outfit and shout at about how Tesco value range has an image problem to the bewildered checkout person.

This is red vs blue or playground arguments. In the real world - where there are 7 billion people, that's probably going to be 100 people who will obsessively avoid your game because it's in Unity, and make lots of noise. Even if this figure was 1000, it would be a brutally retarded 1000 that would shrink over time, presumably as this crowd evolved from being 12 years old, to 20.

 

To add to that; there have always been crappy games developed with freely avaialbe game engines. People didn't find them because games were stuck on shovelware CD and therefore users didn't rant about game engines, they were just happy that a tool that allowed such easy development was available.

Same here. I don't go on Steam library looking for bad games. It's probably just Jim ranting about his profession (looking at crap games for youtube money).

Authoritarian solutions don't work. Especially because you always have to generalize an defining what a crappy game is purely subjective.

80:20 rule in practice.

Also Jim mentions "image problems" and lists one uneducated consumer's complaint which was already addressed by the

Spoiler: dev

Why would you do that, developer who's name I forgot? If you post to a studio that makes first person shooters "I don't like first person shooters" do you think you will get a reply? NO! Because studios know the rules of PR. Don't respond to negative opinions and inflamatory or generalizing comments!

So I'm still sceptical about the whole statement of "Unity has an image problem,".

Coming back to this, I disagree. If there shouldn't be a problem then there most likely isn't one and the whole statement is probably propped up becasue internet drama and because Jim needs to eat. I only found 3 articles about this supposed "problem". All of them are from 2015. All other google results are connected to Jim.

If my job was sludging through page 10 on Steam, I would think "Unity has an image problem" as well, but that wouldn't make it so.

 

Another thing.
And this is just my theory on how Unity decided to put intro logo on free engine license games;
Maybe they though it would be a great promotion material for the engine if it sent a message like "Look. Our engine is so friendly, easy to use and easy to publish with, even this newbie / incompetent / greedy individual was able to achieve something!".

But that's just my theory.

 

Of course it's entertainment, which is often the best way to make a point.

I thought you agreed that Unity had an image problem, specifically about the logo, maybe I misunderstood. In any case the only point I was trying to make with my reply was that I think Sterling's videos cannot really do harm and maybe even some good. The man is an entertainer of course, so is Pewdiepie and a load of others with huge followings. They still make points sometimes that many people are influenced by.

Like I said, I don't think Unity has done anything 'wrong', they are still the best software for making games and that's a good thing. Yet I do think they have an 'image problem', which may or may not have any impact in the grand scheme of things, from their point of view. It's probably a small burden to bear in exchange for having your software in everybody's hands.

Ultimately, I think talking publicizing the problem of shovelware is a good thing, that's why I think videos like that are generally a good thing. It's funny and entertaining and doesn't have a huge agenda or anything, but it's still relevant (and it gets people like us talking doesn't it, maybe it will get some gamers talking as well).

 

To clarify, that's the problem of a minority with the Unity logo. That's not Unity's problem though. That's the developer's problem. Unity is unaffected by this.

Could it affect developers using the Unity personal logo? Yes it could on steam, but if the game is good, it will quickly get sales. The author can quickly remove the logo within days if it's a good game. Darwin will decide.

That's how people vote if a game is good or not.

Unity profits by this. Developer profits by this. All because people aren't smart. There isn't an actual problem IMHO, just noise for nothing.

Really if Unity had a problem they wouldn't be sitting on 1000 staff pumping out updates. I think we're looking at this being a very narrow "problem" that potentially can last a day for a good game.

I guarantee you that the same gamers shouting about how bad Unity is, have several Unity games they're unaware of, so this renders the entire argument moot.

 

Ultimately whether or not Unity has an 'image problem' is not quite as relevant as the underlying market problem that it is a symptom of. Everybody has an image problem, so does Paris Hilton but it still pays her bills and so it is with Unity.

What I'm interested in is what the problems with the game market are and how to avoid them.

 

Fair enough. I suppose one might say Unity has an 'image problem' with the customers of its customers, which is not exactly an issue they have to deal with directly.

 

There are no problems. Game market is free market. Good games are bought and payed for, bad games are abandoned. Even the worst of games have a function; entartaining the youtube crowd. There would be no supply without demand.

But if you want a "solution" to this non-problem: Don't buy or play games you don't like.

Exactly.

 

There is a problem(s). A visibility problem, a market saturation problem, amongst others. There's always a problem in any kind of business, the question is how to overcome it. A free market does not mean it is an ideal one to enter.

Like I said, there's nothing that Unity need to do. They are a game engine company, and they are good at it. If they consider the logo association not to be a particularly important issue, it's up to them. I would say that the issue exists, but it probably has a small to negligible impact on the company, and is not even a tiny fraction of the problem that other game companies are having trying to keep up with Unity's popularity.

Overall, I hope my point is not lost, that I think it is good for videos to be made about the game market saturation problem, and hopefully influence gamers to be aware of the issue and things they can do about it. Whether Unity comes up in those videos is not incredibly relevant, and probably not really called for.

 

None of those are Unit's problems.
If you didn't market your game at all, you don't get to complain about the lack of visibility.
If you think market is oversaturated then either make your game stand out or dabble in another genre. We are all slaves to customer's whims.

 

Ultimatley you can make rubbish games in anything, there's a lot of "Gamemaker" games out there and I've seen GameGuru etc. which drops the barrier to entry even further than Unity.. I've seen dev's make CryEngine look ugly which is really hard to do, I give them some sort of ass backwards kudo's for it.

So it's not Unity's fault, there's 50 other options to do the same.. It's not the asset store dev's fault because you can choose not to use them, it is squarely at fault with developers and to some extent Steam.

You can bury your head in the sands and this isn't probably much of an issue to hobbyists and gamers as there's a refund policy and at least something to push the sludge to the bottom. It's really a problem to commercial dev's and it has been a problem for years, it's well known (and factually backed) that when Steam first open the gates you could earn far more than you can today.. Not all the games that were realsed on Steam initially were that good, but they still earn't a fortune..

A lot of gamers willing to "try" something different have already been stung once or twice and It's easy to find examples of decent games that today won't sell well.. Although let's not let facts get in the way of opinion right?

No matter how good an algorithm is, you cannot avoid issues that are inherent with en mass flooding.. The issue isn't strictly related to filtering either, you have dev's constantly engaged in a downwards spiral of undercutting each other fiscally. Until it becomes "expected", this ain't news we've seen it before with other markets.. We've seen the effects of game spamming..

Unfortunatley Jim complaining about it ain't going to make a difference, neither is it going to change whats already happend over the last X amount of years.. So it probably is just fiscally prudent clickbait at this point.

@FMark92

You seem to forget there are hunderds of A / AA / AAA developers out there working in seperate markets and genre's, then there's a metric ton of large budget indies also..

It takes time / money to make a game stand out, which most large budget indies have and "not getting to complain" you need viral campaigns and unless you fluke it a couple of hundred K for marketing..

It's not as easy as you make it out to be, try releasing some and tell me how it goes.

 

^This^

More incompetent people using the easiest GameEngine, this implies more "craps" projects made with. Period.
BTY, this is also about prerequisites for using a GameEngine. Unity works well with entry-level hardware contrary to these competitors.

 

Ever buy a bad book and realize after the first chapter that it was not going to work? Every

Yep, too late. In the meantime, people pay to have the logo put on their games made in the Unreal engine so they appear to make mostly good games.

The only response is to make a lot of really good games with Unity Personal Edition. So get crackin', guys.

 

With Greenlight gone how much of this discussion or Jim's channel actually matter? Seems to me with Greenlight out of the picture a lot of this is going to self-resolve because the exposure won't be there for the crappy games unless someone promotes them.

The whole issue [now] seems to revolve around how hard Jimbo wants to dig around for crappy games made with Unity.

 

Lets say i need a new watch. There a millions to choose from. I can buy a cheap 3 dollar watch thats complete junk ant the market has plenty of them. I can buy a 20 dollar watch that might be junk, only way to tell is through keen observation. I can buy a 100 dollar watch that is surely better quality than the 3 dollar watches but there is still a good chance its not worth more than 20 bucks. I can even take out another mortgage on my home and buy an expensive watch that will definitely not be junk. There is a ton of crap in the world for us to sift through looking for gems why should games be different. I still don't see an actual problem. Every type of product has its crap and its gold.

 

It is probably at least few hundred thousands people, but given the size of world population this number is insignficantly small and can be safely ignored.

 

Yep, I used those numbers as they're just insignificant examples. 100, 1000, 10,000 - I can't actually see it being a few hundred thousand as the internet does magnify things incredibly, it's usually just a vocal minority, and of those very few actually act in the manner they threaten to.

Probably too busy playing Rust.

 

If my game sold well I’d just leave the unity logo on.

 

I'm going to leave the Unity logo on because my credit is too poor to get a credit card and Unity doesn't accept paypal for subs :v

 

I think you may be dramatically under estimating the difference between good ux and bad ux. Game's have a very wide range of UX needs, some games like Hearthstone really are nothing but complex UX systems, other games like FPS have most of their UX covered by core game engine rendering.

For games that have more demanding UX needs, the skills required go far beyond programmer dabbling.

 

With the very lacking Unity UI system I'm glad I'm doing a VR shooter with zero HUDs however I guess game mechanics fall under the same category, and I agree with you that's its very hard, still a good dev should be able to pull it off.

We have worked alot on the mechanics in our game and it has gotten alot of good reviews for this which makes us proud, in VR good mechanics is everything.

 

I would agree with you more on the mechanics.

Mechanics are systems design. This is closer to programming.

UX has a lot to do with communication to user based on color, shape, position and reaction. This is very different. A good programmer can do basic design, but there is a world of difference between basic and professional.
___________________________

To be fair, I originally made the same kind of underestimation of UX that you do, thinking the subject was far simpler than it was and not giving credit to professionals in their field. Most simple application design or web design is a far easier problem space than some game ux design.

The standards in web/app interface have been largely established and are generally limited to dealing with the same patterns. Very good game UX is something much broader, more nuanced with far more decision points, options, and meaningful difference in result.

Again, Hearthstone is an excellent example, with plenty of video discussing the years they put into analyzing the UX for the game before production.

 

YouTubers like Jim Sterling don't serve the same purpose that they used to. A few years ago, Steam was a completely different place and Jim Sterling was literally doing a hero's work that benefited the gaming community. A few years ago, game sellers were not required to post actual video and screenshots, there was no Steam refund system, and Steam featured every new game (regardless of quality) on the front page of the Steam store. Without somebody like Jim Sterling, a lot of gamers were getting taken advantage of back then.

Times have certainly changed. Thanks to the efforts of YouTubers like Jim Sterling, the Steam store is much more consumer friendly today. And ironically, this has made some of Jim Sterling's current videos appear merely self serving. We don't need a super hero to protect gamers from UnitZ asset flips anymore, because there are already decent protections built into the Steam store at this point in time.

At some point in the future, we will probably see a shift in Jim Sterling's focus. Instead of spending time attacking the worst games on Steam, maybe he will start talking about games that have potential but need some improvements. Attacking the worst games on Steam was a great way to bring awareness of which games to avoid, which was important a few years ago before the Steam store became more consumer friendly. The attack videos are hilarious, but I suspend those videos won't always generate the views they once did.

 

I'm not sure there are many professional UX people working any more. The best ones tend to be programmers who have design skills. The mind of the programmer lends itself to efficiency.

The cluster-f of zbrush UI leaves much to be desired, and given the recent non stop fisasco of bad design surfacing everywhere from microsoft windows to games to apps, I think we're seeing a lot of kids fresh out of university trying to impose their view on things and giving everyone a solid step back.

Only when sales suffer do these people rightfully get fired or told. There can be no mercy for egoistical incompetence.

Where the hell is everyone's pride and standards? Sit up boy. Straight back. Chin up. That goes for the girls too. Have some spine and self respect

 

No,no, I do not underestimate UX designers, espiecllity not at my regular job with enterprise systems that UI wise are much.much more complex than any game. But a very good developer do understand good UI too. I do understand how hard it is with good UI's thats why this is review that im the most proud of that we have received

 

I have worked on many enterprise systems for everything from major multinational investment banks to small organizations as well as a variety of complex visualization tools and transactional systems that required very fast user input.

Well executed game UX is operating on a very different level from these systems. The goals are fundamentally different. In business UI, efficiency is often paramount, along with ease of use. In many game UX, efficiency is absolutely secondary to the more subjective 'game feel'.

As much as I respect your work (and I sincerely do), I don't know if your game is an example of a game where (more traditional) UX was a meaningful consideration. Compare the needs of your game to a game like Civilization, Hearthstone, or Total War the focus is vastly different.

The hand interface with VR is a kind of UX, but also quite different. I'm honestly not sure how to categorize this. If the hand interface is UX, then locomotion animation and animation cancelling absolutely also fall into the category. At that point, very little in a game is anything but UX.

If you're saying that any good programmer can make a good game, I think we'd both agree that's silly.

 

I do not think mechanics and UX are the same thing. Same category maybe. UX is the way of making a UI understandable without manuals or tool tips. Good mechanics are also understood without reading any manuals. In that sense they do converge.

I'm pretty sure that the reviewer I left as example ment our Menu system UX, create a map cycle list, host a server, join a server, select spawn menu etc, etc. Classic enterprise UI stuff just a little simpler. I do not play RTS/RPG, etc games so no I would not be able to make a good RTS/RPG game. I'm a FPS gamer first, always been. If you understand your genre AND are a good programmer I'm sure you can do a good game. If you are a bad programmer and understand your genre, not so much. Because you do not know how to put your ideas into actual code.

Take our attachment system as en example, it uses rigidbodies and config.joints instead of faking physics. Our closest competition on that area are faking the physics with translating the transform etc, which makes attachments clip into each other. Very technical, but the end experience is the difference from broken immersion or not. Both systems technically do the same thing, only of them deliver none immersive braking experience. If anyone is interested, here is a demo of the attachments system

 

In all honesty, I think we're talking about very different things. If you are talking about your main menu system or whatever, then sure, this is programmer level UI.

This is more of an example of UX as I think of it. The process for designing the overall presentation of the game. This is largely stuff like figuring out what metaphores to use, how the interaction should feel and what kind of story the interface needs to tell.

In terms of coding, I really don't think that anything about game coding is particularly challenging other than managing large numbers of systems at once. Again, some games have different needs than others.

I am a programmer, and I am an extremely skilled programmer. I do not believe that skill programming means you are instantly good at every profession ranging from audio production to art design to game design. It's programmer folly to be as narrow minded.

Honestly, the fact that you bring up the chance of failing to write functional code as a possible issue makes me wonder. Stuff like the UI api doesn't matter in the slightest. The real challenges have nothing at all to do with code.

 

Making a good game has absolutely nothing to do with programming skill (unless things are so unoptimized they're slowing the game down) and everything to do with design.

The programming behind Final Fantasy XII and Dragon Age Origin's combat system is utterly irrelevant. It doesn't matter in the slightest. But the designer who came up with the idea for the combat and iterated and perfected it is the reason those games have good combat.

The programming behind Sim City 4's many systems is utterly irrelevant. As long as it does what it needs to, it doesn't matter at all. What makes that such an excellent game is the design that went into creating the systems and their intersections.

The "programming" behind Sleeping Dogs' story is utterly irrelevant. It doesn't matter one bit as long as it works. But the writer who came up with it - they're the reason it has such an excellent story.

Good programming is absolutely not the determinant skill in making a good game.

 

No, again, you can have a very great idea, and not be able to realize it (in a good way at least) because you do not have good programmers on the team. Even Triple A studios have this problem to a degree, Indes, much, much more..

 

Again, I respect your work (and love your attachment system). I think we should respectfully agree to disagree before this becomes more contentious. It already borders on quite disrespectful to the many disciplines that go into many games.

 

This is so wrong. Real world example. I was asked to help with modernizing the UI of a huge enterprise system. The UX designer had grand ideas (good ones) the current tech used was ASP.NET Web forms. Sure you could probably be able to make the UX designers ideas real with that tech, but it would have cost sustainable time and money todo so, and the end result what still be pretty clunky. It was a fixed price project and the project manager stricly forbid throwing out the old tech. It was summer time and here in sweden that means no one works, so I without permission throw out the old UI platform and rewrote the whole thing, in a at the time, modern MVVM library called KnockoutJS.

Both are equal important, you cant make a good game with only tech, you cant make a good game with only ideas. Its NOT POSSIBLE

 

You can hire programmers to implement ideas and the game is still "yours." You can't hire designers to actually come up with the game ideas and really call the game "yours," unless you're a corporation.

I think @frosted is right though.

 

Rolling out 1000 installs to the worlds largest architecture firm. They do not seem to give a hoot about the Unity logo. Just like I can't seem to give a hoot about a leather drama queen bibulously engaged in inflating his ego by trashing some 19 year old's shot at game fame..

 

Have you tried finding good programmers, trust me, its not easy in this day and age. Things might look nice and dandy first, then you want to add things or change things and the dev replies, not possible. Because the code was written without maintainability in mind. Happens every day.

Code quality is a very real problem, trust me. Especially in the gaming world, most gaming studiso has not even implemented continues integration and continues deployment yet. Heck they dont even know what branching strategies are

 

Corporate customers vs consumers. Ocean(s) of difference

 

I'm not sure what the point of this post is. Knockout was ok (I wrote an alternative that I strongly preferred in a couple weeks that mixed knockout databinding with D3's closure driven templating), I did always like MVVM, but there are fine alternatives.

I would be willing to bet that, if you're a good programmer, you could have used any number of alternatives (or none at all) to achieve the same results.

Good API is important, but it's importance is wildly overblown (especially in web community). At the end of the day, the DOM and CSS were absolutely amazing design, the stuff layered on top or bottom is kind of trivial.

 

Hmm well interesting discussion, after all the commotion what I'm taking away from this thread is I should asset flip myself for promotional purposes.. If nothing else he has us all talking ..

Well, back to it .

 

Its an old tech now, but at a time when Angular 1.x used dirty checking Knockout used pub/sub which made a world of difference. I remember I had to recreate knockouts pub/sub in an Angular 1.x because of a mildy advanced scenario with a button that needed to know if all rows in a grid was at a certain stage. This was at a time before ECMA nativly supported subscribables.

"The stuff layered on top or bottom is kind of trivial." No, its actually the other way around. Its the difference between a maintainable solution and a none maintainable solution. Its the abstraction that is the difference.

Lets not dwell on tech, but game studios would do well absorbing stuff from the enterprise world like SOLID and other patterns

 

I am sure some are familiar with the patterns and so forth but they are too busy completing games to have time to mess around with that stuff. They will release game. Then after release the pressure is off to a degree. So then they release patch to fix some stuff probably refactoring some stuff in the process. Then release another patch to fix more stuff and fix stuff broken by previous patch. OR.... they release and next game project ramps up for production the following week.

For Indies it is basically get the game done get the game out there. Get on to the next game. That is how they can survive and make enough money to keep doing it. Difference is other sectors of IT don't typically see products priced down to a $1 or $2 or even less than $1 on sale. And the options are much less so the value of any one is perceived to be higher in comparison to games.

And all of that means most people really can't afford to waste time doing textbook programming for games unless they do it only for passion & pride and not a business.

 

We are doing it, I'll get back if it was successful

 

Big hint: you don't need "good" programmers.

You need programmers who can write working (semi-optimized) code. The real key is in building systems the users want to interact with.

I've been working on a little game with procedural generation (@Arowx set up a game jam), and I just built a sort of path-finding algorithm to determine if my newly created terrain has a valid path from one end (where the player enters) to the other end (where the player exits).

I thought about how to do this. Initially I was thinking about selecting each "ground" point in the first row of the heightmap texture (I've limited it to min and max heights to create a type of "cave"-like environment), then checking if up, right, and left were available (were the same "ground" type), and if so moving forward. Going through like that, then seeing if we end up at the end.

I wound up doing a flood fill type thing however: I select each ground point along the first row,, then change its color, then fill all positions around it (of the same "ground" type) with the changed color, and move through all of those. Then if one of the points in the last row changes color, I know the method was a success.

Is this faster or slower than the other method? I don't know. I feel like it might be, but I don't know and guess what? It doesn't matter. What matters is it does what I want it to and it doesn't slow down the game.

 

I would say that if a developer needs a specific API to build a maintainable solution, then they could improve their skill as a developer. With access to an API as rich and simple as the DOM + CSS, it's very very easy to put together a maintainable set of code.

For the record, here is a old trailer for my game:

Spoiler

This includes a lot of non trivial code and has a wide number of systems that act together and require strict coordination. It is both real time 3rd person, turn based and has a fairly rich strategy map. I am not speaking as an "idea" guy, I build functional game systems of moderate+ complexity.

I also have finally gotten pretty good at UX, but the process of learning to be good at UX was long and difficult. I would classify it as fundamentally different from most code. I would also still consider myself average skill at best in that domain.

 

It was my sly way of inferring that one can make good money and make a mark without resorting to the fraternity gauntlet of hazing in the game world.