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Game Jam beginner Tips for Success

Nannings Games — Thu, 06 Aug 2020 02:15:58 +0000

I have participated in quite a few game jams over the years and now I want to share my experiences with you. I participated in both online as offline jams like Ludum Dare and Global Game Jam. Game jams are fun and can be a great learning experience but they can also be stressful and tiring.

If you are a first-timer it might be new for you to be working together in a team or you use for this jam a different game engine you normally would. Other reasons for doing a jam is to improve your overall game development skills like speed, planning, iterating, and working in a team under a short deadline.

The game you make will likely not be marketable but it’s not about the product, it's about the process. But there are successful indie games like Titans Souls that were prototyped in a game jam so it is possible to end up with an idea that is a sellable game after some post-jam polish. Through my experience, I have gathered some general tips and advice for people starting to jam.

Prepare in advance

Before the jam starts download and install all applications you might use during the jam. If you are working in a team you can decide beforehand what engine your team will use. Also, be sure to check if your OS got the latest updates installed because you don't want to do it during the game jam. Github is a great way to collaborate, you can set up the repository and show a team member how it works who is not yet familiar with it if there is still time. If you're doing an offline jam, get groceries, and buy other stuff you might need before the jam starts to save extra time.

Brainstorming phase

When deciding on a game idea, keep it simple. Design your game around one mechanic and focus on making it feel good. Introducing too many features only makes you code base complex and can introduce bugs. Also, don't worry about how your code looks, just code dirty, after the jam you can make it nicer if you want to, but for now, focus on how the game plays.

Short and Sweet

Make a short game and show everything good it has to offer right off the bat. The people who are going to play the game have a lot of games to choose from. Most people who play your game won’t even finish it. Focus on giving a good 10-20 minute impression.

Keep it simple

Don't make the game too difficult. When you are making your game you test it all the time and become a pro at your own game. Players who play your game for the first time don’t know anything about it. Make the first part of your game super easy so everyone who tries it will get a good impression of the game. Everyone needs to pass the first couple of minutes of the game with ease and without frustration.

Wrapping up

Make sure to wrap up your game an hour before the closing date So you have enough time to upload the game to the jam site. Because the jam site can slow down all the people trying to get their game uploaded at the same time. You can add a description, images, and team information, etc. to your game page during the jam so you don't have to do it at the last moment.

Have fun

Don't forget to rest enough and don't forget to have fun. A game jam is not only for making games, you also meet new people that may become your friends. Don't forget to stream or post your progress on social media because jams are great for exposure too.

Thanks for reading and please follow my work on Steam, Newgrounds and Twitter.

How to become Great at making Indie Games, make Lots of them

Nannings Games — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:53:20 +0000

If you want to become a good game developer you need to make lots of games. Let’s first start with why you need to be productive. The more games you make the better and faster you become at making games. Every new game you make is a new addition to your portfolio. Publish your games on different portals to see what the players think about your game, see what works, and what kind of ideas don’t.

You can work on a game for years, release it, and then find out that no one will want to play it. If you took your big idea and strip it to the core and release it like that as a game you would know it wasn’t as fun as you think it was. You can prevent making your games too big by keeping a short deadline and the scope small.

Keep it small

If you have an idea to make open-world RPGs or the next GTA then shelf those ideas and think smaller and simpler ideas. Smaller games are faster done which in return minimize the risk. By consistently releasing games you keep motivated instead of burning out on one big project. Every time you release a new game it gives you a sense of accomplishment.

I have a lot of unfinished prototypes sitting on my computer and some of them I spend many hours on. Some prototypes are concepts that are too big in scope to ever finish in a reasonable time frame. One prototype for example is a roguelike but to complete this game I would need more than 1000 different images for the objects in the game.

At the beginning of a project, you are excited and motivated but after a while, you get bored by staring at the same art and testing your game over and over again. Even if you stick to your plan, new ideas keep flowing into your mind, there will be a time when you are too weak to resist starting a new project.

Game Jams

I hear a lot from other devs that they lack ideas. The best thing you can do is train your brain. Organize a mini-game by yourself, open your favorite game dev environment, and try to come up with something fun in a couple of hours. You can think of simple one-button games you play on your phone.

If you really can’t think of something just create an old classic like pong and add something unique to it. Consider joining a game jam like Ludum Dare, visit itch.io to see if there are jams that you can join. or join a game jam in real life like the yearly Global Game Jam.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

You don’t have to know everything, don’t spend time reading the whole engine documentation. Don’t feel ashamed if you use other people’s code from stack overflow. Before you start programming check if it’s already available on the asset store and use that to build upon.

If you have a great concept in mind, search the internet if something already exists, play it, and learn from it. Even your game idea doesn’t have to be new. Think of one mechanic in another game that you find fun and make a whole game around it.

Reuse past projects

See what code you are going to use in the future. For example, all games have a save and load feature so make this system in a way that you reuse it easily in your next project. Don’t make all your scripts dependent on each other so you can easily take the parts out you need. Every game uses a load and save manager so try to make a system you can use again and again for every new game you make.

Stay focused

Writing design documents is a waste of time. The only thing you need to write down is a to-do list. Use Trello and break down your project in small achievable tasks. Every time you complete a task you feel much better. Instead of writing about your game start building your prototype so you know if your idea is even fun to play, to begin with.

Don’t wait for other team members to begin, always be the one who takes the first step. If you are not an artist don’t wait for him or her to send you the art assets. As a programmer without an artist, start using place holders like the one from Kenny or search through Open Game art.

Finishing

After releasing your first game don't expect a lot of hype, nobody will care because nobody knows you yet. Only some will have success with their first success. If you release a lot of games you increase your chance of making a hit. Not everyone is lucky as Dong Nguyen with his Flappy Bird. Before Rovio released their hit game Angry Birds they made 51 games, never give up, persistence is key.

Thanks for reading and please follow my work on Steam, Newgrounds and Twitter.

6 software tools I use to make Game Art without being an artist

Nannings Games — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 23:46:03 +0000

Being a programmer doesn't stop me from making game art assets. If you go for a minimalism style and use good colors that fit well together you can make a game look good. I will show you the programs I use and the games I used it for.

GIMP

With only simple shapes like rectangles and triangles, you can come a long way. A successful indie game that utilizes minimalism is Thomas Was Alone. The game proofs that you don’t need to be good at art to make a game that a lot of players will enjoy. If you go for a style this simple almost all paint tools are sufficient. GIMP is free and open-source. By using simple art you focus on making the gameplay great. By incorporating a minimalist style and picking a good color scheme you can make a scene that is nice to look at but also fast to make. If you need help with finding a color scheme, sites like colormind can help you out by generating colors that are complementary to each other. By adding juice to your game like screen shake, particles, sound effects, and tweening your characters and game menus players don’t care that your game doesn’t have graphics on par with Crysis.

Pyxel Edit

For Super Blue Boy Planet I used Photoshop and Pixel Edit. Photoshop is great for doing almost everything but for pixel games and especially animations I rather use a dedicated sprite app. Photoshop does come with a frame to frame animator but to turn your animations into a sprite sheet you need customs scripts. Using a dedicated pixel art tool like Aseprite is also much cheaper than Photoshop or if you are using a Game Maker the built-in sprite editor has all the features you need.

Qubicle

With this Voxel Editor, I made all the objects (the player, enemies, etc) that are visible in my game, Voxel Bot. Voxel-based models are just objects that consist of tiny blocks like Lego. Another way to see it is as pixel art as it was 3D. You start with a canvas and you just start placing cubes on cubes as if you are playing Minecraft. A very successful game that is made with Qubicle is Crossy Road. While I like this program there is another free alternative called MagicaVoxel. This free editor is open source and actively maintained so I recommend checking this one out for sure.

ProBuilder

This is a Unity specific plugin I use for all my 3D games. If you are already profound with Blender or other 3D programs you may stick with those but if you're going for a simpler art style or just want to prototype levels then ProBuilder is great. For Cube Mission I was going for a world made out of cubes so I only needed the basic features of a 3D modeling tool. ProBuilder supports extruding, mirroring, vertex coloring, etc. to make all kinds of models. The thing I think is the best of all is that everything is in the editor so you don't need to export your models from your 3D program to your Unity project.

Adobe Animate

In the past, it was called Adobe Flash but the program itself has not changed much except html5 export besides flash player exports. This program is widely used for thousands of flash games on the internet. You could make just the whole game including the code in Animate (coding in ActionScript) if you want to, but I only use the drawing tools. A pro of using vector over pixel art is that you can scale it as big as you want without seeing a degradation in quality. If you want to scale a pixel sprite you have to multiply everything by 2 or else you will see weird artifacts. For Tricky Cat, I went for a simple vector look and I used a very cheap drawing tablet to make everything. After exporting the cat png I used the Unity 2D animation package to rig the cat. Attaching the bones on different parts of the sprite. This is a very fast way of doing the walking and jump poses instead of frame by frame-based animations.

These are all of the programs I recently used. In the end, it’s not about the tools you use but the creativity and time you put into your projects.

Top 5 best Game Engines to start indie game development in 2020

Nannings Games — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 22:34:10 +0000

With so many game engines to choose from it can be difficult to focus on only one. Especially without any experience in the world of game development. That is why I made this list of game engines each with a summary of why it is a great option for beginners.

Unity

The Unity game engine is seen as the rival of the Unreal Engine because there is always a hot debate among fans which one is the best of the two. Unreal is considered to be more solid for 3D games and better in the graphics department than Unity which happens to be more versatile, great for mobile app development, and 2D games. Popular games made in Unity are Heart Stone, Pokemon Go, Kerbal Space Program and Ori and the Blind Forest. With Unity, you will be using the C# programming language and that one is much easier to pick up than let’s say c++, the language of Unreal. If you already have experience with Java than you will have an easy time picking up C# because C# is Microsoft’s version of Java. If you don’t want to do any coding Unity has a couple of visual scripting options like Bolt, Playmaker, and Adventure Creator. With the new Unity 2020 update, Bolt is now included for free with every plan. Another pro of using Unity is its big community. On Udemy but also on YouTube there are many free tutorials available. Even on their website, they have a learning section where a lot of the content is free. The one thing Unity is most famous for is the number of platforms it exports to with relative ease. PC, Mac, mobile, and all the major consoles from Playstation to the Nintendo Switch. This is why Unity is the best option to use if you are an aspiring independent game developer.

Unreal Engine (Epic Games)

Unreal is the game engine probably every gamer has heard about because it’s used by a lot of triple A game development studios. Notable games are the Gears of War, Fortnite, Rocket League, PUBG, and Borderlands. It is one of the best game engines because of its graphical capabilities. Like unity, it can be used to build a game for almost every platform out there. The pros of using this engine are that you don’t need to know how to program. The editor has a built-in tool called blueprints that instead of making you code, uses a visual system of nodes that you can drag around. The different nodes contain the logic for what happens in the game like the movement of the player. With the blueprints, you can create any game you want but if you want specific functionality that is not possible in a node then you need to learn c++. C++ is a great language but compared to Python it can be a hard language to start with, so it may be advisable to first learn something like C# or Java. If you first learn the basics of another programming language then it’s easier to get a full grasp on c++. Unreal is great if you want to focus on 3D games and not 2D.

Godot Engine

Godot is an open-source game engine that is great for creating 2D games but it can also make 3D games to a lesser extent. It is relatively new compared to the other engines mentioned in this article and there are no examples of games that are big commercial successes. But that doesn’t mean this engine is not highly capable of making great games. On the engine’s website, you can find a couple of examples of what is possible with the engine. The main programming language Godot uses is GDscript, which is a Python-like language. It also has support for c# and other languages. It even has a visual system like Unreals blueprints for beginners or people who just don’t want to code. Unlike the other engines, Godot is completely free whereas the other engines you may need to pay royalties if you or your company makes a certain amount of money with a game. All in all this engine is great for people just starting in the world of game dev.

Game Maker Studio 2 (YOYO games)

This engine is around for a while now, first released in 1999, and produced a lot of successful indie games like Nuclear Throne, Hyper Light Drifter, CrashLands, and Hotline Miami. The engine is in my opinion the easiest to use out of all engines in this list. It has some 3D capabilities but it doesn’t come near to what the other engines have to offer. So if you want to do mainly 3D games you have to look somewhere else. Game Maker has its own Python-like scripting language and a built-in visual drag and drop environment that is very straightforward to use and you can mix dragged blocks and your scripts together to control your game. The pixel editor that is included in the Game Makers development environment is feature-rich, it has support for layering and frame by frame animation. You can create art in the game maker itself instead of going to another app like Photoshop or Aseprite. Although this game is very well suited for aspiring indie devs who want an easy time creating their game you do need a big wallet because for every platform you want to publish to you need to buy a separate license. So I recommend this engine to people who want to make 2D games and are able to spend some money.

Construct (Scirra)

This game engine may be the easiest to use of them all. I used Construct 2 for a while before moving on to Game Maker and Unity. Now with the third major release of Construct, the user interface runs completely in the browser. So you can potentially work on your games wherever you want, on your smartphone or pc, every device that has a browser. Like Game Maker the engine is best suited for 2D games and is great for games that will end up running in the browser. There are a couple of great examples that are made with this engine but none are big names. The one I found looking and playing awesome is The Next Penelope. You don’t need to code because the game has a drag and drop event system that looks like a spreadsheet. For people making their first game, it comes with a lot of free templates to get started with. The engine is not free however and you will need a subscription to unlock constructs full potential. The free trial does let you export your game but has a limit on the events you can add to your project so you will eventually need to upgrade as your project is going to become bigger. This engine is great for people who don’t want to code now or in the future and only want to focus on art and or game mechanics.