Видео

Great video that talks through a rationale for taking sales success ceiling into consideration. Also good in a big picture sense in that it talks to the creative side that often gets diminished when talking about making these decisions based on data. It's a sort of alchemy in my experience, part science, part speculative, driven by passion.

A fundamental flaw with Zukowski's genre breakdown is that he mixed apples and oranges, comparing very broad genres like platformer, that have lots of different subgenres and styles, with something super-specific like "roguelite deckbuilder". _Obviously_ one pile is going to be bigger than the other. He also assumes that the Steam genre data is correct, which is far from the truth (probably more than 90% of games tagged "adventure" are not what is traditionally considered adventure games). Being in a crowded genre/market can mean tougher competition, but his numbers kinda lie. As for using (art) assets, as a player my main issue is that it tends to comes across as not feeling personal. Personally, I'd much rather have whatever MS Paint scribbles you made yourself than something that "looks professional" but is generic. That really great music track you picked out also isn't going to have as much of an impact if I've encountered it six times before. I'm probably in a minority to feel that strongly about it, but you should at least consider what you give up in the trade.

smart. ive seen people use splines in conjunction with procedural 9eneration and splines co3e with the 6ult in feature of 6ein a6le to stop thin9s 6ein9 spawned on the spline. 3i9ht e useful for re3ovin walls

Since you strive for video quality, here's a tip: you should disbale auto exposure because if you wave your hands and somehow occlude your main light, the auto exposure is all over the place which is really irritating.

@4:48 thank god you came to the astute observation by yourself that if you can't even recognise Balatro, then you know nothing about deck building games because I was worried for you for a second there.

What about "Bridgeborn"? And then transforming the game mechanic... 1. More about building bridges to expand your empire and/or controlling and maintaining your bridges to defend your empire. 2. You are met with choice, expand your empire or build your existing base. 3. As you're doing this the enemy is doing the same. 4. It's about balancing exploration while maintaining what you have with bridge control being a key battleground.

Very cool! :) great to watch these videos

I went with the "personal brand" approach specifically from watching Thomas. He was my template. I can't say it's made me wildly successful or anything, but I think it turned out better than the alternative, and I wouldn't do that part differently if I could go back and change it. YMMV of course.

How often did you update those games? I think you jumped to advertising too fast usually you need to polish the game more then advertise I know it's not easy I think you did a good job overall it

I think you could have upgraded your games at least visually much more with few easy tweaks For example Just go ASMR way adding sounds and visuals make them more interesting Where you rolled balls you could have added more pickups or some FUN obstacles to avoid like say some random and funny springy mechanism that catapults balls Overall I think you approached this as a business and forgot to make them more fun or artistic to make them worth playing I seen this and it's tragic it's like you just needed to make them more appealing I think you can continue to try in spare time if u can manage time but it's hard on creative side maybe get artist and invest to make money Your game seems to have mostly programer art so it's not appealing Just focus on making them more entertaining no need to focus on hard coding algorithms

You mean I can't use assets! What the heck is wrong with this guy? I'm so mad I can hardly stand up.

You are the best

Love your work brother!

Thomas, you seem to have intuited it, but 'small world' networks where a certain mix of more short links, a few medium, and the odd long range connection reflect patterns in nature and efficient system by humans.

Don't waste your time on making the UI pretty. Stay focused on game design. UI is easy to fix later. Poor game design will kill your game.

Very cool and interesting game design. I'm a little bit sad to hear that the vehicles will be electric. Hopefully later on they will add ice engined or hybrid vehicles too, but for the most part the game sounds super fun. Just think driving around might become a little bit boring or annoying with the electric whine sound or no sound at all from the vehicle 😅 sure if the renewable energy thing is something they really want they could still get that all by powering your greenhouses, and everything in your van with windmills and solar panels. Its just a bit sad we wont have to take into account fuel or getting fuel to drive around

I find myself faced with the "work on aesthetics or gameplay" conundrum all the time. Happen to be working on similar stuff right now too (economy and shop UI). It's tough to balance making something that's functional for playtesting, looks decent enough to show, but also isn't so polished that it's a big waste of you need to change/scrap it in response to playtesting. Good luck!

My first thought was "oh no, now you need graph theory" 😆

MSI sponsor this man!

Hi mate, sounds like you're basically creating a network/graph with nodes (islands) and vertices (bridges). Might be worth looking into as there is a lot of information on this in mathematics and computer science. Concepts like adjusting the length of the vertices and avoiding intersections etc are problems which have been solved many times so could give you some inspiration/ideas.

That last clip was so adorable <3

Why not conquer (make your own) one of the islands that attacks you? Isn't that more interesting than randomly generated islands?

Oh 😮 that's the evolution of tower defense, but island instead of tower, and they are customizable

I really liked this devlog. It's interesting to see how you determine the problems and find solutions for them

You can make it such that the player connects the island to fight and transport. Or the enemies might make a bridge to get to the player for resource, etc

after the intro you should’ve stood up and had a very pixelated view of you wearing just underwear lmao

how can I play your demo to help with feedback?

This video is funnier than your average video, love it. "My Sad Implementio--" made me burst out laughing and scare my cat

Just a thought but instead of starting with multiple islands or expanding one central island. what if you can conquer the enemy islands when you defeat all their troops and towers? I'm loving following the making of the game btw - RTS is my favorite genre!

Thanks for sharing, loved the mix of personal and devlog!

This work looks great and promising! Love how gameplay flow starts working.

What it if... and hear me out here.. you changed the square grid to be HEXAGONS and called the game Hexagod 3D? 😁 Funny enough I spent a lot of this week working on generating islands for Hexagod and I ran into a bunch of these same sort of issues. Nice work!

Sounds like a great change. I love the idea of expanding all your little islands and using areas for eco and having to think about how to manage your areas. However I might just pose the thought that you might be thinking way too much in terms or bridges? The excess of bridges and accessibility to movement might take away some of the player choice for expansion and tactics. I am imagining a version of this where you think "I should really spend my gold from this round to connect a bridge to that nearby island for the extra space". As the game goes on the player would naturally connect up the bridges as they see fit for their defence/eco strategy and give you that satisfying feeling of gaining new land and the late game would look more like the current setup with loads of bridges and difficult multi island defense. I am less keen on the bridges everywhere all the time approach. It made sense in bridges and docks but I think with your new MSI plan the player should have more control of the bridges? Maybe instead of enemy land chunks floating in the enemy lands on the shore of any island connected by land or bridge to your start island. So if you fail to expand to enough islands they will eventually all land on your tiny home island as the rounds heat up. Now you have to think about how quick you expand and what the implications are of connecting to a new island etc. Just a thought. Love the new direction of it all though.

Yo, I'm digging your video format. Nothing flashy, just chill game dev. Keep it up!

Really like gameplay direction you shifting to! Reguarding art not sure is this your final vision or its just placeholder. Anyway for pototyping its easy to make so its good. From marketing standpoint I feel this cube based artsyle can be harder to sell. Since this style relatively easy to make a lot of first time developers using it which can make it look amateur-ish for typical steam user. I would recommend more complicated style, with stonger fantasy. Its just my thought anyways... What do you think?

You should check out the video "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - deconstructing the dungeon generation algorithms" I think some of the techniques used there could apply really well to your game to add some more variety to the islands.

Very Informative Thomas. I'm always excited for when you post, and you give me motivation to continue coding! Thanks again.

Your work looks great. I like this simple, but well crafted gaming experiences. But I have one request. Could you not show your child in your videos? There is currently going on researches about how exhibition of children affect their mental health in future. Also - small child can't consent about being in social media and don't understand potential risks from social media. Also great husky! Sent you a like beacuse of your dev work. Good luck!

Nice™

I can't wait to see the game and also your updated research The gameplay loop looks promising with some tweak and stuff

Wow I’m surprised you got that many replies back, last time I did job hunting I got ghosted by hundreds of jobs and only got two interviews.

Great game! Any way to provide paddle support for the classic joystick on the VCS so that the turret rotation is independent from tank movement? Also the option to add bots with (Y) is not possible on the VCS’ classic controller. Love the game!

Atoll-tal War

Thanks :)

Think this sems like a good project to carry on with! I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. 10/10 for the accent :P

0:51 18+ dating sims I guess

As someone with no credentials, here's what I would do. 1, make games scoped for 3 months of work. I think this might be the sweet spot for small games that still have some meat to them. 2, launch for PC and Switch. I think the community of switch users are so much more accepting and looking to buy smaller titles compared to Xbox or PlayStation. I would also keep doing your market research and creating prototypes and gauge community reactions to see which games to continue making. You're doing absolutely fantastic as solo dev in the first year going all in! Keep it up!

Mobile game markaet is soo big.you should make something good .good game can earn more than pc games .im also a pc gamer and also play mobile games too.

Prototyping is an investment in your future ideas and your skills. Plus, even if it doesn’t become a game, you can flesh it out a bit and sell it as a template kit for some side income.

That game looks so cool!