Hi, I'm looking to commission some new Steam artwork for my game (store.steampowered.com/app/740330/Rain_of_Arrows). I feel like the current artwork feels more appropriate for an adventure game or RPG, and I'm hoping to get something that sells the "action" aspect more. Previous experience making art for Steam would be a plus but isn't required. Please contact me at [email protected] if interested. Thanks!

That looks like a really clean and simple implementation, I like it! Wish I'd had this around when I was starting work on my current game, I ended up rolling my own object pooling system which ended up being quite a bit messier than this. Thanks for sharing!

New update!

I just had the opportunity to do some public playtesting of my game. The St. Louis Game Developers Co-op held a "Brutally Honest Feedback Night" for devs in the area to show off their works-in-progress and get feedback. For anyone who reads this who happens to be in the St. Louis area and isn't a member of the co-op, I strongly recommend you check them out, they're a great organization with lots of awesome people to meet!


(I probably should have taken more than this one picture from the event)

Anyway, I got some really useful feedback from putting my game in front of other people who hadn't seen it before:

The good - Everyone who played it had fun with it! Some of this might just be thanks to the novelty of VR, but hopefully some of it is by virtue of the game itself. People especially seemed to have fun with the aiming/dodging system I have in place, which I'm very happy with, because it's one of the gameplay mechanics I have which distinguishes the game from all the other current archery VR games (to the best of my knowledge). People also generally responded positively to the graphics, which I'm glad about, since I'm getting by mostly with Unity asset store models.

The bad - People struggled to learn some of the mechanics of the game, even with a revamped tutorial in place. The reason - as it turns out, people just don't read text! The tutorial is currently broken into sections that each cover one unique piece of gameplay, with a big text box that contains instructions floating over the middle of the river, but people get so engrossed in shooting things/fiddling with the controllers/just looking around that they don't notice when the instruction text changes. Another problem is that the tutorial is probably a bit too much of an information dump all at once - once people get into the actual game, they tend to forget most of what they just learned as soon as they get into combat and get flustered.

The current plan is to hire a voice actor to record dialog to guide players through the tutorial, which should make it go much more smoothly. I think I can also probably work that into the game itself to give the players advice when I detect that they may have forgotten something and need help, e.g., if they've taken a bunch of fireballs to the face and haven't used their shield in awhile they can get a line saying something like "squeeze the grip on your controller to equip your shield and protect yourself!"

In other news, I'm currently working on the last boss I haven't completed yet. It's taking a bit longer than expected, I tried to use Final IK to tweak some of the animations and my first results were not exactly what I expected:



After, well, a lot more trial and error than I expected, I finally got it working, so now I can do things like modify a fire-breathing animation to have correctly aim at the player's position:



Once this boss is done, the game will actually be content-complete, and I enter into a long phase of playtesting, bug fixing, balancing and re-balancing. This is my first serious game, so I don't have any basis to estimate how long this will take, but I'm hoping to release during January/February, so fingers crossed there. Thanks for reading!

Small update: I wasn't quite happy with the Kraken boss fight, it was just a bit too one-dimensional (basically, the kraken is immune to direct damage, so you defeat it by using your arrows to deflect its projectiles back at it). The simple solution currently being tested that seems to work pretty well: the Kraken now spawns in minions during the fight!



This does a good job of forcing the player to split their attention and keep the minion population from getting out of hand, while still dealing with all the projectiles that the kraken is throwing. Another benefit: it forces the player to make a difficult decision on which power to use for the battle. The time slow power is the best way to deal with the kraken itself, but the explosive shot can clear out groups of minions all at once, and the piercing shot is useful for sniping those hard-to-hit minions who spawn far away. I think it's always good to present the player with meaningful strategic decisions when possible.

This hand-rolled engine lets me work with some specific NES platform limitations in order to create a fairly authentic 8-bit feel.

• Every image is created from 8x8 tile elements
• Any individual tile can only use a maximum of 4 colors
• There are a maximum of 8 separate 4 color palettes available for use at one time.
• Only the 64 (56 unique) colors from the original NES are available for use in those palettes

I gotta say, I admire the dedication it takes to hard-code limitations like that into your own engine in pursuit of a genuinely old-school feel 

I like the aesthetic you have going, for whatever reason I get a little bit of a Dark Souls vibe from it even though they're stylistically very different.

It looks nice. Can you move freely or are you on rails constantly moving?

On rails constantly moving, although you can paddle from side to side to avoid obstacles as you move downriver. Theoretically this was supposed to help keep the scope of the project small, but it found other ways to grow instead.

I think it really depends on the genre and what people's expectations are going to be at that price point. In some cases, it can be perfectly reasonable - I've bought local multiplayer games for $5 and felt like I got more than my money's worth after an hour, because it entertained not just me but also my friends. Level of polish matters a lot too - I'd expect to see a lot of attention to detail in that one hour if I paid $5 for it.

One thing I wouldn't do is compare yourself to all the old AAA and rare indie mega-hits that go for $5 and think that you have to price yourself lower just based on that - if that was the case, 99% of indies would be selling their games for $1 and be living on the streets. If you're making a game that's good, in a genre that isn't already saturated to the max, you shouldn't be afraid to charge a fair price for it.

Good gravy, I love that art style. Keep at it!

Egads! My YouTube video isn't embedding right (it's complaining that the link isn't https, but it is when I paste the link in). Anyone know exactly how to get videos to embed properly? (Replaced the embedded video with a plain link for now)

[INTRODUCTION]

INTRODUCTION

Rain of Arrows is a virtual reality archery game currently in development for the Vive (with plans to be ported to the Oculus). It puts the player on a raft making their way down a river canyon, where they must survive waves of enemies and bosses using a variety of powers, and acquiring upgrades to their abilities on the way. Here's some alpha gameplay footage!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZItBayUujQ&feature=youtu.be

Still a little rough around the edges, with a few bugs, temporary sound effects, etc., but I think it gives a good idea of what the gameplay is like.

ABOUT ME

My name is Adam, I'm a solo developer and I've been working on this game in my spare time since June of 2016. I've always wanted to make games, and I've started (but never finished) about 100 of them over the years, but this is my first real serious effort. My initial plan was to start off with really quick iteration cycles, finishing and releasing a tiny game every few months or so, until I gained the experience for bigger and better things. I initially thought that Rain of Arrows would be nothing more than an "introduction to VR" project that wouldn't take longer than a month or two. "You stand in place, enemies come toward you, you shoot them before they shoot you, maybe there are some upgrades, how long can it take?" I said to myself.

Sixteen months and counting later, it turns out it can take quite awhile. As I've learned, just because you can describe your game concept quickly, doesn't mean you can make it quickly, and I've hit my fair share of roadblocks along the way. That said, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel as the pieces are finally starting to all come together.

DEVELOPMENT STATUS

As it stands, most of the content is done, though not necessarily fully tested and polished. The main gameplay functionality and upgrade systems are complete, the in-game tutorial is (hopefully) finally done, and all of the enemies and bosses are finished with the exception of the final boss (which I'm going to start work on as soon as I finish this post!) The game has also been through a few public demos, and some gameplay and balance tweaks have been made as a result of feedback.

What's left:
Finalizing content (final boss needs to be done, and a couple of other bosses need some tweaking)
Buuuuggggggssssss, the never-ending parade of bugs that need to be stamped out  
More playtesting, more balance and gameplay tweaks as a result of playtesting
A beta test to make sure the game runs well on other systems, as well as more gameplay and balance feedback
Marketing/business stuff (my website is half-updated, I'm in the process of hiring an artist for promotional art, and I'm just starting to figure out this "Twitter" thing that all the kids these days are so crazy about)

BIGGEST CHALLENGES FACED SO FAR

I think it goes without saying that as someone creating their first game that's gone beyond the prototyping phase, pretty much everything is a challenge, but a few things stand out.

The first is Unity's physics engine. I generally love Unity, but holy hell, has their physics engine given me some problems. I've spent weeks trying to track down bugs in my code that were causing some or other functionality to break, only to come to the conclusion, after exhausting all other possibilities, that the physics engine itself was just glitching out (and usually finding like two obscure posts from back in 2010 where someone had the same issue). I'd estimate that 20% of my total development time has just been fighting bugs in the physics engine, and let me tell you, I have done some obscene hacks at a few points just to get things working.

The second major challenge has been optimization. VR requires you to maintain a constant 90+ fps to avoid dropping frames (which is a big no-no for a good VR experience), and it's been a big challenge to stay over that limit (some early versions were dipping down to 30 fps during big battles). I'm honestly glad that I went through this though, because it's forced me to learn a ton about how to optimize in Unity, and that knowledge will no doubt be useful in any future game I work on.

The last major challenge, and one I'm still working on, is the entire business and marketing aspect of indie game development. I've been programming since I was a kid, and I'm a software developer at my day job, so I'm very comfortable inside of Unity, even when dealing with new systems, but marketing is entirely new territory for me. I've read a few articles, but at the moment I'm sort of just throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. I'm still figuring out how to engage people with Twitter (I'm up to 13 followers!), I've been updating my website and starting to learn a little about SEO, I'm starting to get more active on game development forums (hi), and I'm currently talking with a few artists about getting some promotional art done. Whether or not I end up being successful with any of this has yet to be seen, but either way I'm sure I'll learn some good lessons that will help me with future endeavors. Sometimes you just have to dive in and learn as you go!

RELEASE TIMELINE

The current plan looks like this: finalize game content, squash the remaining queue of outstanding bugs, do a few more rounds of gameplay tweaks and balances, and have the game ready for a limited closed beta by early November (which is yet another thing I'm still figuring out). Assuming I hit that schedule, and the beta isn't too disastrous, try to have the game out the door just in time for the Steam winter sale (with a launch discount, of course; I'm not crazy enough to try to sell a full-price game during a Steam sale!). That timeline sounds possible to me, if a little bit tight, but I've definitely blown past virtually every other deadline I've set for myself during development, so who knows, it may be a spring release instead. I'm gonna try my best to push and hit that winter deadline though.

FURTHER DEV LOG STUFF

I'm not really sure exactly what I'm going to be posting here and how often yet, but I'm probably going to be posting a mixture of "stuff I'm currently working on/just finished and want to show off" and "here's an important lesson I learned during development". If there's anything that anyone's curious about (whether related to VR, Unity, or whatever) don't hesitate to ask here, and I'll do my best to respond!

Thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to being a part of this community!

I really like the environment in those new GIFs, and the animations look really nice, as almost everyone has already pointed out. One thing that may un-clutter that massive animator graph: depending on exactly how things need to work, you may be able to simplify things by having a lot of those states get transitioned to out of the "Any State" node, and then just have a different trigger assigned to each transition to let you pick which one.

Trying to figure out how to convert my gifvs into regular old gifs that I can embed here without them coming out with gigantic file sizes, but you can see a little bit more of this boss here: https://imgur.com/LKm3uuy. This is for a virtual reality archery game I'm working on called Rain of Arrows, I should hopefully have a proper dev log up and running soon.

I also like Trello quite a bit, though it took me a little trial and error to figure out the best way for me to organize all my tasks in it. I'm just a solo dev though, so I'm not sure how well it holds up in team environments. Still, can't argue with free.

I'm looking at your game for the first time, and I think your animations look great! I really like the fluidity on a lot of them, for example the treant summoning and attack you've got in the first post. Also, maybe it's a small thing, but I really like the look of your movement and LOS arrows; they look nice and clean while also making it immediately visually clear what's going on.

Hi everyone, my name is Adam, I'm a software developer (and former professional poker player) who loves games, puzzles, science, and generally just nerdy things in general, if my picture didn't give that away. It's been my dream to make games since I was a kid (it's the main reason I learned computer programming to begin with), and after about five years of dabbling with Unity I'm finally close to releasing my first game, a virtual reality archery game called Rain of Arrows. It started out as what was supposed to be a small VR learning project that I expected to take one or two months, and now 16 months later there's finally a light at the end of the tunnel. I've learned an absolute ton about game development while making it (primarily that everything takes way longer than I expect it to), so however it does after release, I'll consider it a victory just for having completed a game and gained so much knowledge. I'm hoping to get a proper DevLog going this weekend to go more into the development process and some of the things I've learned along the way. Looking forward to getting involved in this community!