Solo Indie Developer - Telegrams for Guests

Hi Zach, I often give feedback/suggestions for early access games I like and I wonder if you could talk about what it is like receiving the feedback? Even if I like a game, I still tend not to mention the positives, but focus on the things that could be improved. (a review is the exception) I wonder if this sounds negative. The logic is this: a good finished feature may go completely unnoticed. Even if it is noticed, it feels more useful to discuss the next thing to improve, rather than discussing a finished feature. What kind of feedback is useful to you? What can I do to make the feedback better?

Laz

Hey Tom and Zach, Having built a 2D shooter game engine and various mods and small projects over the years, I’ve considered solo game dev too. However, there seemed to be a lot of practical problems: - How do I fund the development period where the game isn’t making money? - How do I market the game since that’s one of the most important considerations in such a saturated industry? - And, finally, how do I maintain my own interest in such a multi-disciplinary process when I only enjoy a subset of the work (programming and game design in my case)? Art, animation, sound design, and UI design are other facets that come mind. What are your thoughts on these challenges and do any resonate with you? Best of luck and I’ll keep an eye out for your studio! Cheers both!

Authoritarrr

I get the impression that game development is a particularly difficult profession to get into. There are a huge number of people actually passionate about games and you need to compete with all the games in the world, not just those made in your vicinity. Do you agree with this analysis?

Laz

I basically asked a similar question about unreal engine 4 stutter, but also asked about unity’s issue with stuttering when moving the camera across the whole screen. Unity has fixed its the newer versions, but a lot of games are affected by it even now as they weren’t able to upgrade the engine for various reasons. Games like Jedi Fallen Order have the worst stutter as it seems to be streaming in new assets. Its so frustrating to get that stutter because you can’t just throw more hardware at it. My computer with a 5800x, 32gb ram, 1TB 980 pro with Jedi fallen order installed on it, and a 3080 TI still gets that stutter. Really hope unreal engine 5 fixed this as it can turn otherwise great games into something I might stop playing because the stutter can completely ruin the experience. Great comment btw.

j Steez

I have read several comments from devs and even Epic, that while Unreal 4 is feature rich, it was a bit of a paradigm shift from UE 3 in learning. UE4 also seems to suffer from a weird optimization issues that manifest as stuttering in some games. Epic has admitted this, and with UE5 they say they are focusing on improving multiple areas. The list includes streamlined tools, better resource optimization, inclusion of new console specific tech while reducing dev input/creation time with things like lumen, nanite, skeletal animations, etc. When I review info on Unity, it really seems to be strong for mobile games and simplistic design but seems require a real dedicated team to even get close to what UE5 can provide. Was your decision to chose the Unity engine over Unreal 5 as simple as, you didn't need all that extra new stuff, or did you have some other challenge with UE5 that pushed you to Unity?

Clint Hoffman

As someone who's only real game dev experience is making XCOM 2 mods with the Unreal 3 SDK and eventually getting some code to work in BattleTech (which is a Unity game), I'd like to get your opinion on the ease of use of current game engines. I've seen some pretty impressive solo efforts and plenty of asset flips, but never anyone or anything actually taking about the the process of making a game with these engines. How easy is it for someone with little to no programming knowledge to actually make a game with these engines? Are modern engines at the same level of ease of use as What You See, What You Get Editors for HTML/CSS? Or is actual programming knowledge (C#, etc...) required if you want to make a good game (on a technical level, at minimum)?

Cleansweep

Do you see implementing Ray tracing and technologies like FSR, DLSS, and XeSS into your games? How do you think little cores heterogeneous CPU architectures, such as Alder Lake with their big.LITTLE, will benefit games?

Benjamin Cannon

In a recent digital foundry podcast they were lamenting over how some unreal engine games have a stutter that you literally cannot make go away even by throwing the most powerful hardware at it (Jedi Fallen Order is a great example of this stutter.) do you know what is causing it? Unity had a similar problem where the camera stuttered whenever you moved the entire camera. Are these issues easy to solve? Are developers just being lazy, or are some issues just so baked into the game engine that to try to solve the problem would involve so much work you lose any advantage of getting to use solutions like unity and unreal if you had to do so much custom tweaks anyway. Thanks so much and glad to see guests like you on Broken Silicon.

j Steez

As a C# developer writing heavy optimized apps (Ethereum node implementation currently), I was always curious about how that compares to writing game code in Unity. How limiting C# is? How much trickery do you need to achieve predictable performance? I heard the crucial thing is to do little to no allocations to avoid garbage collections? Do you use your own threads to have more control over scheduling or thread pool with async and Tasks? Please share your thoughts and compare it to your experience with other programming languages in game dev.

Łukasz Rozmej

With regards to software development, some of the most important decisions are made very early on. From which technology solutions to use; such as hardware choices, programming languages, and the software stack are all key to how successful a game or product will ultimately be. Specifically in terms of efficiency, resiliency, scalability, supportability, and ultimately the profitability and user experience. This is true from games, to productivity software, and all the way up to large enterprise solutions. My professional perspective comes from managing a team where we get to make these decisions for a large software organization. We are responsible for the support of all data and persistence layers, ranging from architectural design choices, deciding which technologies we standardize on, dictating how developers are allowed or encouraged to use these solutions, and even down the to operational support and troubleshooting. So my decisions can painfully come full circle. We operate in various public and private cloud environments, and while this can make choices seemingly obvious, when you're considering the differences between multiple cloud providers, you either decide to design your solution to deal with the nuances of each situation, or you roll your own solutions to more easily run on any cloud or environment. This seems very similar to how an independent game developer would need to think about things and plan for success. So my question is, what is your process around making these decisions that can be very difficult to unwind later on?

I've often thought about how cool it would be to have my own game on steam, but other than tinkering around in unreal for enjoyment. Immediately gave up any real prospects once I realised the mountain of a learning curve, what does you have/need to decide to enter the ring solo vs joining an existing small indie or even a big time studio?

Alex

(Reivec in discord). I have an 8yr son that has been into builder games since he was 2-3. Games like little big planet 2 and 3, roblox, mario maker 1 and 2, dreams (to a lesser extent) and Nintendo garage. He has also expressed interest in wanting to be a game designer. At what age do you think you really started to get seriously into game design and what were some of the early games, software, or learning materials you used that you felt really jump started you into this direction? We are pretty sure he has ADHD and being only 8 it is hard to keep his attention on anything overly text based for too long. I have started to do a little bit of python with him to give a little context into programming. What are some suggestions you may have for a kid that would want to work toward game development?