July 8, 2016

What now?

I'm not sure if just developing games by myself is the best thing for me. It's been fun for the past half a year, but it's unhealthy physically (daily steps around 500, between kitchen and man cave), and socially (only communication is with my girlfriend). It is also extremely hard to break through and start generating an actual income (doesn't mean one shouldn't try, though).

I've had the opportunity to work on a few interesting subcontracting gigs while indieing around, and they've been challenging and equally fun. I also made a prototype as a gig for someone else, which was kickassingly fun; I got to develop fast and only needed to deliver a good prototype; a week worth of work.

I've also gotten a few offers to join a company, or start from scratch and co-found a company with others. Some publishing deal negotiations, too.

However, even though I appreciate all of it and many of them are very tempting, here's a few things I've enjoyed the most and could see myself doing. Let me know if you know anyone in need of anything like below:


Helping Others
Whenever I get to use my knowledge of game development to help others, I enjoy it a lot. Whether its been in form of art direction, Unity lessons, programming tutoring, audio design, game design, or even game development mindsets in general. I'm not a master in any of the previous, but I believe I am at least okay or good in all of them, which makes me a good "game development generalist."

It would be awesome if it was possible to do this as a partial business, in form of private lessons, classes, or existing teams.


Prototypes
People keep telling me how fast I develop my games. I try to keep my feet on the ground, but I guess it's at least partially true, considering all my games' development times. As mentioned before, I recently made a prototype in less than a week for a company and they seemed very happy with it. They wanted a proof of concept. I really loved developing it, as it was a quick thing and it seemed to really help the other party.

This is definitely something I'd be happy doing for a living; someone having a high-level idea they want to test in action, and I deliver.


Small Games
I do still get the kicks out of creating complete games, too! But if the game takes more than 2-3 months to finish, or if it's too content-heavy, I tend to get bored with it. I would love to deliver complete games based on others' ideas as subcontracting gigs, as long as they are small and casual. The terms would be obviously negotiable, whether it's a 100% work-for-money, rev shares, or other forms.


Starting Up
Founding my second actual game company would be nice, but it is extremely hard to find the right partners. It's very unlikely this would happen anytime soon. But I'm open for discussions. :)


Aaaanyway...

It's been a cool ~8 months being an indie. Now it's time to take a break, do a little roadtrippin' in the U. S. of A. with my lovely girlfriend and friends, and just chill. Monkey out.

July 7, 2016

Unity + Asset Store = WIN

Recently I've had the chance to work on a cool project as a freelancing designer. We used a bunch of different tools - some in-house and some from Unity's asset store. I knew the power of asset store beforehand, but now it became even more clear.

There are TONS of ready-made tools, helpers, assets, effects, models and whatnot on the asset store for extremely cheap prices. I'll list my favorites here. I'm sure some of these will dramatically effect the development times of yours, too, if you give them a chance.

Dreamteck Splines (26.80€)
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/61926

An insanely designer-friendly tool for creating anything with splines, including extruding meshes, placing objects, animating, etc. Almost any project can take some advantage of it.


Quickbrush (13.40€)
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/15237

Designer- and artist-friendly tool to place objects on meshes with lots of customizability. An absolute must-have if you need to, for example, decorate your levels with prefabs etc.


I2 Localization (40.20€) 
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14884

I was worried that when ultimately I need to start localizing my games, I'd have trouble developing the tools for it. With a quick browse in asset store, I found this gem. Extremely easy and developer-friendly system with a complete localization implementation using either Google Sheets or local files.


Realistic Car Controller (44.67€)
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16296

For games that have cars, obviously. Again very designer-friendly implementation with lots of customizability. Includes not only the car behaviour, but also implementation for dynamic lights, audio, damage system, etc.


EXAMPLE TIME!


To give you an idea on just how powerful Unity can be especially when utilizing asset store, here's a game I made. It took about 3 hours from start to finish. It's not a shippable game obviously, but it has a lot of features that would take months to do from scratch if you wouldn't utilize the asset store.

In this game I used Dreamteck Splines, Realistic Car Controller, Quickbrush, and all the visual assets were bought, or downloaded for free, from the asset store. The visual assets I used cost about $3 to be precise.

The game required programming only to create the UI functionality and the finish line. Everything else was out-of-the-box ready-made Unity asset store magic.

Controls are WASD. It's an executable in a zip-file. Have fun!
http://parttimemonkey.com/private/AssetStoreRules.zip