Porting platformer games onto a touchphone. Where's the left/right and jump buttons? No problem, let's just add a picture of a controller.

Using click-to-move-to-location controls on a touchphone. Watch your units disappear under your finger!

When the most important part of the game is how well you control things, let's make it frustrating by giving people really bad controls.

There's a ton of things you can optimize for. If you're so focused on frame rates, just pull a Minecraft and make everything blocks.

There's a lot of things that affect frame rate, but in this day and age it's not really something to worry about. Whatever your idea is, it's probably possible. It's a different issue if you're asking whether it's possible on a SNES. Just depends on how much effort you're willing to throw at different features.

Minecraft also sold for billions, so the PC market is definitely big enough to start with.

PS4 is better than your "average" PC so tech issues are not a problem.

I'd recommend you build the absolute minimum first, and start adding features later. If you absolutely need 200 players, build them first and represent them as blocks, then figure out where the bottlenecks are and where to optimize for speed and art.

I would say it's almost necessary, as your prototype should be fun well before the art is there.

Unless the art is the selling point.

It should still be clean and easy to understand though. And pleasant on the eyes.

There are games like Kittens and a Dark Room which are perfectly fine with no art.

And something like Dwarf Fortress, which is extremely non-trivial, but everyone knows that the lack of art gets in the way. Their ASCII art doesn't really count for art and makes the game world itself unpleasant to use and look at. There are so many DF clones whose selling point is simply "has graphics", so this appears to be an important difference.

Would join an existing indie studio tbh. Then I wouldn't have to reinvent a lot of things including design and code.

Now that I think about it, that's a great way to get rid of budget constraints - just get paid.

There's surprisingly little to spend money on in software development, aside from salaries and a few licenses. I'd probably get a really nice office chair and desk and a big monitor.

Then I'll travel around the world for a few months and work out of a hotel in Bali or somewhere cheap. I've actually done this on real world projects and it's surprisingly productive.

If the main option of the game is killing, I'd choose the non-kill option (e.g. GTA)
If the main option of the game is not killing, I'd choose the kill option (e.g. Fallout, Unreal World).
I'm edgy that way.

If you tell me that all the characters give this cool item or level if I don't kill them, I'm going to do a kill run on the game.

#2 because gradients suck for logos.

As a logo, #2 is actually really good because you hit all the points for a good logo.
1. People can instantly see the link between the logo and the name.
2. 2-3 colors. (maybe drop the cyan color)

Font could be improved but it's not bad.

1. Something cool happens. Guy declares war on me. I get an awesome new unit. I'm on a winning streak. I'm about to turn around a losing streak.

2. The action needed is really easy. Not cumbersome like Xenonaut maps or not needing a 10 min chunk of time.

3. Some acknowledgement or reward for my action. Level up. New loot. Significant rise in rank (if it's a pvp game).

4. Some investment. Plant seeds in farmville. Hire new guy in Football Manager. Unlock a new artifact in RPG. Build train or highway system in a city sim.

5. An element of uncertainty. Random loot drops. 10% chance of aliens killing my best guy. Tank gets destroyed by spearman.

Have a vision. Identify risks. This is basically the innovative stuff - special combat system, NPC interaction, whatever you're not cloning from something that's tried and tested.

Prototype your risks. Play it until it's hella fun.

Make it beautiful but drop ALL optional features. Launch it, act like it's a proper launch, not a prototype or beta or pre alpha. Get it up to 100 players and make sure you get tons of complaints. Lock yourself up and cry.

Look again at how they're playing it (plug analytics if you can like Rimworld). Build your features around that. Your original vision WILL change somehow unless it's a clone of some genre.

I could give you a long answer to this, but my phone isn't cooperating. Short answer: Justify how it'll bring them traffic. It could be something repeatable like Dwarf Fortress. It could be linkbaity like 'guy spends 100k to make his dream platformer'. It could ride a trend like Flappy Bird or Starcraft 2.

Wee... love 12 hour programming binges.

Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Blog and update on Facebook as early as possible. Get out why you're doing what you do. Stealth is not so good.

Build a minimum beautiful product. Release to alpha testers when it's fun for you to play. Don't bother getting ALL the features out yet. It should be about 20% done, but that 20% is the features that people get really excited about.

Also this is why you start advertising yourself early - you want feedback. You'll know what features people love or hate. You shouldn't design for yourself... you want to design for people similar to yourself. i.e. instead of building for 'me', you target '25-35 year olds who grew up with a SNES'. Often you'll need a sample size larger than 1 to make sure you've nailed your target, even if your target is yourself.

Release a demo when you've finalized the gameplay and are doing the boring stuff like building levels and content.

Rimworld did over a hundred prototypes before they started crowdfunding, changing things like the plot, gameplay, etc. Like they later decided not to implement oxygen in buildings, changed the game world to suit the gameplay, and so on. They're still experimenting a lot in alpha, based on feedback from players.

If you're doing something tried and tested, just consider modding instead?

Pretty much everything, from fundraising to hiring gets really easy once you have a functional prototype out.

Probably the most impactful year I've had in my life. It's a business development year for me.

Made a lot of friends.
Found a lot of mentors. I really recommend getting mentors, especially if you go indie, because you don't get to work with smart bosses or coworkers.

Programmed about 6 projects this year. Got paid for maybe 3 projects, because chasing debts is a hell lot more work than coding.
Started doing my own app. Planning to launch within 1-3 months.
Got a bunch of investors interested in it, but basically they're giving me 'it's cool but we're not sure you can do it' answers.

Learned a ton of things, like how to build a multimillion dollar business from scratch. Apparently the higher the business goes, the more they suffer. There's some energy conservation law in place. Like there are guys who work on their dreams for 13 years. They keep failing and on the 14th year they make $100M.

2014 is a year full of fail for me, but I come out of it knowing exactly what to do for the next few years.

Yup, I was a backer. It's a really good game. Actually I'm enjoying it a lot more than DF. It's designed to generate good, chaotic stories and doesn't have the micromanagement that DF does.

There's two difficult parts in creating mobile games: Development and Marketing/Sales.

Sales & support is also underestimated in games. Things like complaints should feed back into development and impact the features.

Both are nearly equal time consuming. You have to go down and do the hard work - talk to journalists, tell friends about the game, get friends to do it. Mention it on sites like this. Be persistent. There's few shortcuts. It's a competition. If there is a shortcut, people exploit it. You actually have to keep doing the marketing for a few months or even years.

One of the best things you can do is write a blog. It could be a Facebook page, a blog, or a proper site. Explain what inspires the game, why you do some things, unique features. People don't buy what you're selling, they buy why you do it.

The best method for growth is still word of mouth. Give incentives for people to promote your game. Things like referral bonuses. Very often the best way to improve word of mouth is to focus on development and improve it to a point people get excited and tell everyone.

One of the most memorable bits of game advice I got was from Chris Crawford. He said he spent a lot of time on polishing Balance of Power before releasing it and that's what turned it into a hit game.

There's a kind of formal term for polish now - User Experience. It's used heavily for web and app rather than games, but I think it's a more accurate term than 'polish'. Polish implies that you're thinking about it only after you finish it. But it should be one of the first things you design.

One favorite example is Firaxis games - the recent Civ games and the new XCOM in particular. Things like hotkeys, numpad movement, shortcuts, icon placement. XCOM simplified the TU system into move-attack. It can be played without the mouse. There's no need for me to think about the controls, it's just automatic after a 5 minute learning curve. It makes sense, because Firaxis's style is to build games with high retention rate (addiction).

People talk about things like 'juicyness', but it should be carefully considered whether it improves the UX.

Y Combinator puts UX as one of the higher priorities in app development, in that it increases user retention, increases the viral coefficient, and thus increases money.

It's a bit ironic since games have been cutting out a lot of details when the 'serious' apps are adding fun bits. And a lot of games do things that disrupt the UX like ads or other pay systems.

Been writing code from 4 PM to 6 AM now. Finally got my signup and login stuff working. I love Parse :D I think it's actually plausible to do a simple text based MMO thanks to Parse.

(Parse did the really complicated stuff in less than 2 hours. The rest of the hours were spent figuring out the dum errors in Android Studio as usual.)

Ick, another programming language war. Well screw you guys, my uni had us learning different programming languages every semester and I did engineering. I can't really imagine why anyone would just stick to either Java or C++. If you're not dum, you can pick up any language you want outside of college. It's not like picking a spouse. I learned Java from scratch in a month, on a paid project - you can see my teething pains on the Technical subforum up there.

Don't do Info Tech if you want to make games. It's a great course... for information technology. IST is higher level. You deal a lot with communications and stuff. You probably learn things like data analysis and writing network simulations. They're fun stuff (IMO) but not useful for game developers.

With games, you're building systems. You're working a ton with UI/UX/design/iteration. You don't do enterprise stuff. You deal mostly with users (i.e. players, to use the gaming term). IST is great, but different species.


If you're smart, you can get a job in any software company you like. I didn't do a programming heavy degree and I've been living off programming for the past few years. I even get offered contracts by Google.

A programming degree is not that great outside of college. Some of the biggest companies in the world were built by programmers who didn't have degrees. Often learning through experience is better than learning through a teacher, though the best teachers are so good that you'd be happy to learn from them. Most courses are BS though.

There's two things you get out of college:
1. Hard labor on really boring, time consuming soft skills that you don't have time to master outside class.
2. Find good cofounders to start some project in the future.

Which is to say, DON'T DROP A COURSE BECAUSE IT'S TOUGH.

Tough courses are good. That's why you're paying to go through college. That's why you go through this massive opportunity cost instead of just launching your own thing like Bill Gates. You spend your early years doing things as tough as possible. You'll need that grit/willpower later on in life. Willpower needs to be trained. You can even do a pointless course like Philosophy as long as it builds up your willpower.

Because once you get a job, you no longer have the luxury of training yourself. You spend all your hours trying to keep from drowning.

Some other concepts you should learn early on:
1. How does network security work? Don't memorize the difference between WEP and WPA - learn how to hack into these things and why you can't.
2. How does low level programming work? Learn to use Assembly, learn hex and binary, but don't need to use it.
3. How do pointers (like in C) work? I think this is an underrated skill that many CS colleges drop today, but it has to do with the previous question.
4. Why is Object Oriented awesome?
5. Get a good feel for MVC.
6. Why is waterfall development fail? Why does everyone iterate now? But this you can learn in a couple days maybe.

If you have time, do side projects while in college. And don't do them solo - find someone who is interested in the same thing. Later on, you'll be spending/wasting a lot of time finding similar minded people. Data shows that almost every successful project is built with cofounders. Learn to spot cofounders early. The best way to spot them is through side projects.

Aw hell. Just noticed the transcripts, thanks.

This stuff is awesome. I've actually spent tens of thousands on entrepreneur classes by some top speakers. And this Startup Class is worth way more than most of those. Just because it's free doesn't make it bad.

Much of it does apply directly to indie game developers. It's still iteration in the end. You build a level, you test it with people, ask them if it's fun. See how they're doing. I remember way back... some folks made a few levels, released a demo, watched people play, and decided that they messed up the mechanics because people weren't playing it as expected and had to redo the whole thing. The whole building feedback into design thing can really apply to game dev too.

The first bit has really good advice on why you'd want to start a startup. It applies a lot to people quitting their jobs to make games too.

A friend has this idea about building a location based RPG game. Right now, he's building a prototype where the players punch in a SMS to collect points and resources when they get to a certain store. Then you redeem those points for stuff.

You could give your opinions on his idea here:
http://bitly.com/zephyrASU

(It's designed for Malaysian audience, though the guy thinks in English by default.)


But I think this idea has a lot more potential than winning and redeeming points. Here's my take on the idea...

Take inspiration off Zombies, Run!

Business model: Target players and retail outlets. The retail outlets place ads in the game. The players don't have to pay anything, they just log into the locations to redeem virtual world prizes.

The idea is just that you get people to visit a location. I don't think you actually have to make buying things mandatory, because if people went all the way to a restaurant, chances are decent that they'd stop and eat.


So let's take an alien invasion theme.

You could maybe gather resources at different shops. Like go to a gym to level up, a supermarket/grocery for food resources, tool store for building resources. Every now and then there are missions, which require someone visiting the location to complete; these are really just sponsored promotions.

You choose a common location as your "base". Could be a mall or favorite petrol station. The more people visit it, the more upgrades it has.

There will be PvE, so every now and then the aliens attack your base. Or you could take the initiative and do a mission.

When you do a mission, there might be loot drops, based on the bid placed by the outlet owner. So if the outlet paid $0.50 for an ad, there might be a plasma pistol ammo clip lying around. $3 might net a plasma pistol as loot. So it implements kind of a bidding system.

There might even be PvP, so you can 'raid' someone else by going to their "base", even establish politics and alliances in your city. Idk if this is a good thing when real world locations are involved.

So, anyone think this could work?