Any indie game developers lurking here?
Last year I started a little hobby project: developing a simple 3d-game using BabylonJS. After quite a lot of trial and error I managed to produce what you can find at http://curvebusters.online. You need a mouse and a keyboard to test it. And obviously it's not quite done even now and has quite a few issues.
I used vanilla JS to write it but at some point I'm planning to do a full rewrite in CoffeeScript and include some heavy polishing. Though at the moment most of my time is going to developing an educational 3d-app using the same technology. I hope it will have a better chance of making some real money.
The major issues at the moment:
1 graphics suck
2 so do sounds
3 and the game mechanics
So quite a bit remains to be done if I want to make it enjoyable.
My space requires a game to generate a need
I think my laptop is too weak to run the game (I get like 3-4 fps despite having mediocre specs). Running a game dev company in the past gave me so much experience (despite not doing it anymore). Learn and digest - it will most likely benefit you in the future.
I have a lousy AMD r5 260x and it runs the game in fullHD with a rather mediocre but tolerable framerate (it depends on the browser though). 4k displays do require some serious processing speed. 60fps is actually too much for the game as I haven't optimized the gameplay for it.
Game developer here. I initially built a handful of games with PhaserJs and ported them over to mobile devices. Lately though I've moved on to using Unity as the tooling around it is leaps ahead of anything I've seen in the JS world. I also tend to like C# over Javascript, although using something like Typescript seems like an interesting idea.
Yeah, it might be a good idea for me too to learn some C# as Unity has such a strong ecosystem around it... though CoffeeScript is also decent for hacking simple things using BabylonJS.
I've got a ton of game prototypes kicking around, but currently mostly focused seeing what I can do in the intro maker space (currently https://introcave.com and eventually https://intromaker.com). I'm thinking about building my own motion graphics render pipeline on top of Unity. Realtime rendering is a bit of an underappreciated market right now and very ripe for use in server-side rendering.
IntroCave certainly looks very cool so I understand why you see potential in it!
Hey! I make indie games, too, though a chunk of mine are tabletops or larps.
I always find that graphics are the area that make me struggle the most, as I have no visual artistic ability whatsoever. I combat this by forcing myself to step away from visual games and instead work with things like Twine so that I can get my writing and style to such a high level that a game doesn't need graphics to be enjoyable.
You might get a kick out of this article as well: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-all-of-our-games-look-like-crap.html
Yeah, making things look good is a hard problem for anyone but the gifted. I think I may have to resort to stealing more ideas from the real professionals rather than trying to come up with my own.
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and all that! And there's so many open source art makers out there (especially if you get into 8bit aesthetics), it's a shame not to at least try them.
Do you have any good resources for things like that? Been trying to learn more about 8bit art in development.
I don't have a ton of specific resources for 8bit, since most of my games are focused on text rather than graphics, but there's a PixelArt Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/) you might get some use out of!