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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperBusinessWhat software is missing for indie game development?
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dirtyhand
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« on: April 20, 2014, 12:07:16 PM »

Hi all,

I'm interested in starting a new software project and I'm gathering ideas from the indie game development community.

So, experienced game developers: what app would you pay for if it existed now?
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erebusman
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« Reply #1 on: April 23, 2014, 07:52:22 AM »

Hi all,

I'm interested in starting a new software project and I'm gathering ideas from the indie game development community.

So, experienced game developers: what app would you pay for if it existed now?

Ah therein lies the rub, you used the word "pay". 

What would indie dev's pay for?  Well from my experience I'll not pay for anything I can reasonably use something else for free even if its not quite as good.

Got a nice tracking software? Oooh awesome ; wait its 4.99 a month?  No problem Google Doc's here I come I can track this in a spreadsheet!

Now understand something ; its not because I won't buy software at all -- its because software seems to be generally expensive and I have a very limited budget as an indie. 

Heck some indie's are straight out of highschool young people with close to 0 budget.

So keeping that in mind the things I have personally paid for as an indie with a day-job is:

- Substance Designer (was 50% sale or I would not have bought it)
- Silo2 3D
- Unity Pro Desktop
- PhotoShop
- a handful of unity plugins
- a  bigger handful of assets from the unity store
- L3DT  (large 3d terrain generator)
- sounds (either as a pack or individual ones)

Things I looked for but did not purchase due to unreasonable prices or my budget or poor choices:

- a better more rounded modelling software ( 3DS Max, Maya ) (so horrible, forget about it even Maya LT pricing is high)
- a good sculpting software  (3d Coat, ZBrush, Mudbox) (3d coat is almost affordable but Im getting by with Blender for free right now)
- Project Task Management Software  (nothing good to say here , its all either huge corporate level stuff that is priced for corporate teams or stuff as low level as notepad or a spreadsheet so I just use google docs)
- Good low end normal/bump/occlusion/etc map generation software.  There's a few choices but none of them got me to bite ... I get along with Xnormal most of the time because its free but it seems like between NDO, DDO, Substance, Crazybump that no one has hit the sweet spot for this software yet (to me) they all either wan ttoo much on average OR are not functional enough.

I'm sure others can add more examples Smiley
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Infernohawke Entertainment
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« Reply #2 on: April 30, 2014, 03:18:30 PM »

Please please don't try to make money from this market.
Have you been reading this forum. 
Read this thread:  http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=33894.0

Do you really want to sell to these people?Huh??   
Sell their wives a drug they can sneak into the food
that makes them forget their insane passion to make games.
and put their families future at risk and go down this crazy path.
This will make money.

joking aside.  I think it is not a good target market.

Maybe I am not a real indie firm because I didn't quit my day job. 
If I did I probably wouldn't have money to buy whatever you built.

But here is what I bought last and what I would buy if it existed.

I am most interested in things that speed up the 3d art asset production pipeline. 

the last program I bought was a photoshop plugin called nDo from a company called quixel.

The tool I would buy now that doesn't exist is a decimation/retopology tool that does a better job retopologizing a high poly character model than topogun or zBrushes 3 tools (demimationmaster, dynamesh, and zRemesher).  That is a pretty tall order though because those products have gone through years of dev cycles and both do an excellent job, but it still takes me a few hours or even days to retopo a high quality character model.  It is the most time consuming tedious part of my projects.

But that might be just me.  a lot of people like to use topogun or do their character model retopo manually because of special geometry considerations for animation deforming.
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Whiteclaws
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« Reply #3 on: April 30, 2014, 04:04:39 PM »

A dark text editor with browser and auto-compiling integrated ...
Makes me think about it, I'll see if there's a browser plugin for Sublime ...
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Mittens
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« Reply #4 on: April 30, 2014, 04:05:44 PM »

As you may have gathered people who call themselves "indie" will generally not have spare income to use on game development tools so I think your question should have been;

"What game development software is missing?"

Because 'game development software' is something a LOT of people are willing to pay for.


Anyway,
here's some things I wish I had as I develop games;

A File-system integrated project manager
Meaning, you can easily make todo lists and tasks like on Workflowy, except better than workflowy, those tasks would be linked in with your game files and the software you use to edit those files.
So let me just give an example of how this would work in practice;

You join a game project, you log in to the manager and you can see all the tasks that need doing, you click on a high priority task called "Finish 3D modeling the hands of player character"
This task expands, displaying any addition detail/notes about the task, then it shows where the Maya file for the character is in the game's project folder. Then you press the button "DO TASK" and it opens Maya, opens the character model file that was linked to the task and then tags that task on the todo list as "In Progress: Currently working on this task: Mittens"
So that anyone else logged into the manager wont do a job that is already underway.

When you close Maya down the manager could then bug you asking "Is the task now complete?" and if not, you write some notes on how much progress was made and then link it to the latest version of the file/folder being worked on

Would be pretty awesome right?
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Mittens
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« Reply #5 on: April 30, 2014, 04:06:59 PM »

A dark text editor with browser and auto-compiling integrated ...
Makes me think about it, I'll see if there's a browser plugin for Sublime ...

That would also be awesome,
50% of the time while coding you are Alt+Tabbing to the online reference / forums
Having the browser inside the editor would rock
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ink.inc
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« Reply #6 on: April 30, 2014, 04:38:53 PM »

not necessarily indie gam related but it'd be rad to have a raster based animation software with flash's workflow (fuck vectors)
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feminazi
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« Reply #7 on: April 30, 2014, 05:58:08 PM »

you cant come up with an idea??
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Klaim
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« Reply #8 on: May 01, 2014, 02:15:58 PM »

Personally it's a decentralized source control system focalized on non-code files, art assets etc, big binaries that I would like to use. Perforce is centralized, SVN too, git mercurial and bazaar are not appropriate...

But:

 1. I don't see yet how it would be technically feasable, in particular if it's decentralized it needs to focus on merging tasks and that's the problem with art assets... except if these assets sources are in some mergeable formats, which can happen but is also problematic for artists depending on the tools and importers/exporters available.
 2. I wouldn't pay for it until I'm sure it's totally worth and I do have money.

The kind of deals like "if you make more than xxxxxxxxx a year you have to buy a license, otherwise it's free" is totally ok for me and seem to work for most non-free tools I'm using in my current project (like RakNet), but ONLY if you don't ask for royalties but for a fixed price.


Note that DropBox and GDrive are nice but are also problematic when you want to make sure your data are owned by yourself, so not everybody needs what I'm suggesting here.
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Julien
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« Reply #9 on: May 05, 2014, 01:26:58 AM »

I would pay for soemthing that would convert a png to a xml/json/whatever file with position and colors of each pixels inside
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Mittens
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« Reply #10 on: May 05, 2014, 05:04:06 PM »

I would pay for soemthing that would convert a png to a xml/json/whatever file with position and colors of each pixels inside

That sounds like something anyone could code in a few hours
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Julien
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« Reply #11 on: May 05, 2014, 11:34:22 PM »

Yeah, it turns out that I took more time to look for something that suits my needs than  coding it.
Sorry  Shrug
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Ant
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« Reply #12 on: May 06, 2014, 12:24:35 AM »

few things

- nice intuitive image editor designed specifically for pixel art & ease of animating
- a tool to randomly-ish create music which i can then easily edit
- bfxr but better i guess (such as much wider randomiser variation)
« Last Edit: May 06, 2014, 11:02:46 PM by caiys » Logged
InfiniteStateMachine
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« Reply #13 on: May 06, 2014, 07:41:53 PM »

Personally it's a decentralized source control system focalized on non-code files, art assets etc, big binaries that I would like to use. Perforce is centralized, SVN too, git mercurial and bazaar are not appropriate...

But:

 1. I don't see yet how it would be technically feasable, in particular if it's decentralized it needs to focus on merging tasks and that's the problem with art assets... except if these assets sources are in some mergeable formats, which can happen but is also problematic for artists depending on the tools and importers/exporters available.
 2. I wouldn't pay for it until I'm sure it's totally worth and I do have money.

The kind of deals like "if you make more than xxxxxxxxx a year you have to buy a license, otherwise it's free" is totally ok for me and seem to work for most non-free tools I'm using in my current project (like RakNet), but ONLY if you don't ask for royalties but for a fixed price.


Note that DropBox and GDrive are nice but are also problematic when you want to make sure your data are owned by yourself, so not everybody needs what I'm suggesting here.

What is the reason you would prefer it decentralized? I don't really see much of an advantage for content files. Also I wouldn't want to be merging content files. I'd rather just deal with checkout locks and do full overwrites.

Perforce is awesome but obviously there's a ton of roadblocks keeping the average person from using it. I've been on teams that have made it work with SVN but it's also expensive.

few things

- nice intuitive image editor designed specifically for pixel art & ease of animating
- a tool to randomly-ish create music which i can then easily edit because i'm musically illiterate and can't afford a musician
- bfxr but better i guess (such as much wider randomiser variation)

What the? Bfxr? I've been using sfxr this whole time.
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Julien
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« Reply #14 on: May 06, 2014, 10:55:10 PM »

few things

- nice intuitive image editor designed specifically for pixel art & ease of animating
- a tool to randomly-ish create music which i can then easily edit because i'm musically illiterate and can't afford a musician
- bfxr but better i guess (such as much wider randomiser variation)

What the? Bfxr? I've been using sfxr this whole time.

Me too !  Who, Me? Thanks !!
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s0
o
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« Reply #15 on: May 07, 2014, 02:45:27 AM »

3d modeling and animation programs for stupid people like me
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