Haven't posted in forever, here is a side project screenshot in unreal #indiedev #gamedev

Side project screenshot

Not trying to gatekeep, but I feel like the youtube gaming tutorial space has too much "the blind leading the blind" - people who haven't shipped a game, who's source is ANOTHER tutorial on youtube, giving advice against best practices, without any explanation on the "why" behind their methods

Doing any custom shader work in Unreal (not authoring materials but changing the underlying shaders) has so much friction, I am convinced it is intentional on Epic's part.

I also think a subset of devs try to have it both ways - spending no money on development, making something very niche, calling themselves hobbyists… and then being very upset they didn’t sell a million copies and become the next Balatro

I think a lot of indie dev “business” advice seems contradictory because there are a lot of different types of indie devs.

Advice around product/market fit makes sense for someone making a living off of indie dev, less for hobbyists #indiedev #gamedev

More character art - finally got the shader to a point I am happy with

Some more character updates - I think it looks much better than the last time I posted.

Taking cycles on hair shading, along with another pass on eyes. I think it's looking "OK" but it will probably take a few more iterations. #indiedev #gamedev #art

More environment work - updating terrain shading

#indiedev #gamedev

I wish we could “turn back the clock” on crowd sourcing for games. I think crowdsourcing as a model has the ability to better align incentives and give gamers more of the games they want, but currently is flooded with scams and over-scoped projects.

More character screenshots
#gamedev #indiedev

I think there is a lot of potential in the RTS and “RTS-like” genre, even in the indie space. I think it’s going to take a smash-out title to show people what’s possible, and then the flood gates will re-open on the genre.

New spaceship enemy models with updated lighting. Liking how it's coming together.

#gamedev #indiedev

When it comes to the topic of making your indie “dream game”, the elephant in the room for me is that a lot of these dream games are MMOs, and making an MMO is a serious technical challenge.

Not impossible, but you should know what you’re getting yourself into.

Make sure to take breaks from programming to be active. Invest in your posture, your game will be better because of it.

Updated my shader, added some bloom, made a new skyscraper. Getting closer to the look I’m going for. #indiedev #gamedev #ScreenshotSaturday

If he can pull it off - awesome, more power to him. I will say I am very skeptical at a minimum.

That is before getting into side topics like the fact he represents himself as a studio head without any details on the other members of his studio, while welcoming public investment with the goal of making a game AND a heavy custom unreal fork to fix these “issues”.

I’ve watched his videos, and I agree some of his points as well, but frankly, I find him unnecessarily adversarial to other graphic engineers in the space.

Congrats

When I was coming up, a major point of discussion was around if "games were art".

I think the overwhelming answer in 2024 is - yes, absolutely.

Looks great!

I agree - I think that mindset comes from discussions where people don’t separate prototyping / “finding the fun” vs. knowing exactly what you need to implement. It makes more sense to have “throw away code” in the context the feature might not be fun.

Controversial opinion time - game programmers should embrace unit tests and integration tests more.

Having a solid unit test suite is soooo nice when you have to make a change to a major system that’s been running in production for years and the original author has long moved on.

Now, I’m not saying code quality isn’t important - it is! I just see a lot of programmers, especially juniors and people who don’t consider themselves programmers who work on solo projects, end up in loop where they always want to refactor the oldest part of the code base, even if it’s working fine.

Don’t get “analysis paralysis” over code quality. In games, and programming in general, end players don’t see the code quality directly in the way they see the art or UI or design of the game.

Players see code quality by proxy via things like how buggy the game is, and the games performance.

Work in progress character concept - spent a lot of time working trying to get that stylized look in lit unreal 5. Not quite happy yet but I am getting closer.

Awesome base model from artstn.co/m/Lrzpn I've modified and rigged. #gamedev #indiedev

Game ideas do have worth, but the real VALUE is in the implementation and execution of those ideas.

QA is one of the most important parts of the gamedev process. Players can feel a well tested game.

“Update()” calls may only be a small part of your frame time. Most tutorials don’t cover GPU vs CPU bound, and ways to tackle both.

300 characters isn’t enough to capture everything, but I’d say “learn your profiling tools in and out, understand your code hot paths, learn about cache memory”