Tag Archives: video game

Online Stores to Sell Indie Games in 2019 – Revenue Splits and Audience Reach

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In December 2018, Epic Games announced the “Epic Games Store,” a direct competitor to Steam to sell digital PC games. To help entice developers, they advertise a 88/12 cut in favor to developers, and a full 100% of profits to games that use Epic’s Unreal Engine. To entice gamers, they made several announcements of exclusive indie titles for the platform. Steam tried to counteract this by offering a new profit-split deal, and Discord’s Game Store announced they would beat Epic’s revenue split (90/10) sometime in 2019. For the first time in nearly a decade, there is genuine competition in the space.

That escalated quickly in just a few weeks, didn’t it?

Just a handful of stores to sell your indie game in 2019…

 

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A History of Pseudo-3D Games – Using 2D Animation With 3D Gameplay (as of 2018)

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In 2014, “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” was released, and was hailed as a revolutionary title for being the first successful case of utilizing 2D animation in a fully 3D game.

… well, not really. It’s been quickly overlooked. But years later, I took some time to look up the idea to see if any other games were using a similar visual concept. Over 7,000 games were released on Steam in 2017 alone, by now there are tens of thousands of indie games across Steam and itch.io to choose from: surely, not all of them are using sub-par 3D models or 2D pixel art?

I’m surprised I haven’t really written a more formal article like this before. It should act as a good resource of existing games (both past commercial and more recent indie titles) that tackle the animation concept. I won’t be including purely 2D games that use 2D animation: while there are several excellent examples (2017’s “Cuphead” and 2018’s “Gris” come to mind), high-quality animation in these genres have existed for over a decade now, with far too many to count. We’re looking at “pseudo-3D” here, from over 30 years of history.

Latest Screenshot for “Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament”

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How To Showcase Your Game: Is E3 Obsolete?

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This week, Sony made a startling announcement: in addition to not having its’ usual “PlayStation” event at the end of 2018, it would not be attending the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in 2019. This would be the first time in the event’s 24-year history that Sony wouldn’t be present.

There are some reasons why this could be a good move, or at least, a necessary one. But as a developer, it makes me question how games are revealed to the mass public in the first place.

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Making Unity3D Applications That Don’t Drain Battery

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If you’ve read this blog long enough, you already know: I use Unity3D a lot, and I love it. Not just for 3D games either! Making a graphic user-interface for a computer program is one of the last things a school ever teaches to Computer Science students, and in most languages, it isn’t easy. In comparison, Unity3D makes it practically instantaneous. Either with their built-in GUI objects, or by programming a custom library of clickable objects, Unity3D is by far the easiest way to make a program that requires any visual interface. Personally, I use it to make a variety of things, the most common I use being a customized text-editor to catalogue my library of DVD’s.

Yes, I used Unity3D to make a text editor. Stop laughing.

… but there are reasons why you shouldn’t use Unity3D for everything (I said stop laughing). For one thing, a compiled build of a Unity3D app has gotten bigger and bigger with each version, currently about 45 MB for an empty Windows game (I made a completed promotional demo recently, coming out to 46 MB… imagine if I had used a lower-level language, I might have been able to create a similar app for less than 1 MB!). Second, while simple Unity3D games can run on low-end GPU’s, it probably doesn’t fair well if you are using an older device without a GPU entirely. And third, and most importantly, is battery life: when using my simplistic text editor made in Unity, my Surface Pro device barely lasts 2 hours, when it can normally run for over 8 hours using other software (Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, Google Chrome, etc.). Even the Unity3D editor doesn’t drain my battery as much as a compiled game does!

I only just recently found a solution to make Unity3D apps use less battery life. It isn’t perfect for all cases, but it works well for me.

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“True King” Development – Strategy Board Game AI

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While I’ve procrastinated on this for some time, I finally got around to implementing a game feature this month. A big part of my game “True King” will be a turn-based strategy mode, held on a map grid between two armies, like “Fire Emblem” or “Final Fantasy – Tactics.” Or, more generally, like Chess or Checkers. I had already made a prototype where the enemy character AI moved randomly (see that article here from… 18 months ago?!?). Now, the enemy AI knows where your players are, and knows to move towards you, to create the illusion of a somewhat tactical army.

How does one create artificial intelligence for this type of thing? It’s a basic concept, and I’ll talk about how I did it.

Trust me, you can’t hide from the AI.

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