[DevLog] Gravity Wolf / Dino's Side Project Circus

[zerofiftyone]

How exciting! Best of luck at PAX, Dino!!!

[Travis]

Best of luck! Materials look great! GTG, there's a game I need to vote for over on the Greenlight!

[Toureiro]

That logo looks sick! Good stuff.

[zerofiftyone]

Congrats on getting through Greenlight Dino!!!

[Dinosaursssssss]

Oh yeah sorry been a bit since I posted. Here's my update:

 

Thanks ZeroFiftyOne!

[Spenny]

                   

 

CONGRATS!

[Twig]

Yay! I'm jealous of your success and your work ethic. You are a role model and a hero.

[Nappi]

Congrats! :tup:

[Dinosaursssssss]

  On 6/3/2016 at 6:59 PM, Twig said:

your success

 

lol this company so far has spent....probably $3000 on software, events, contractors, etc and I've made...I think $100? Not to mention the probably thousands at this point of unpaid hours for myself.

[Twig]

There are different kinds of success!

[Dinosaursssssss]

Yeah sorry looking at it purely economically is sorta shallow and boring. BUT it also points to how few people are playing the stuff I made, which I think is a more meaningful metric. People do seem to mostly think the games are alright though so I guess that's something.

[Dinosaursssssss]

Oh also in case people are curious or end up doing their own Greenlight in the future, here're some numbers.

 

As of being greenlit, Gravity Wolf has:

450 yes votes

49 days on Greenlight

1283 unique visitors

50/50 Yes/No votes

 

I think people were finding it naturally through Steam for about 3-4 days, after that it seems like it was entirely driven by my own marketing. I think my numbers were kinda weak based on the charts and stuff I see on there but it's all such a weird black box, who knows really.

[Travis]

Thanks for sharing the statistics! Looks like very few of the visitors didn't vote. 

[Gorbles]

Odd to see such a large % of downvotes, but I'd imagine that's to be expected? To be fair I don't quite get the concept of downvoting a game unless it's legitimately terrible on some level (political or cultural).

Greenlight is such a black box, appreciate you sharing your statistics. At least you made it!

[zerofiftyone]

50/50 is actually quite a good result as far as greenlight goes.

[Dinosaursssssss]

I got rejected by the Boston Festival of Indie Games today, a show I did last year and enjoyed, which kinda reminded me that I haven't really been looking at this thing recently...I got to a point I was happy with, then started hitting design problems I didn't have good solutions for, and tutorialization issues that required a ton of boring work, so I worked on it less and less, until I was touching it once every two weeks or so. That, plus starting a new job that I'm really trying to put my heart into is making it hard to put the time I need to into ol G Wolf. So I'm thinking I ought to officially take a little break, and make something small and dumb so I can regroup a bit. There're a lot of kinda core decisions in gw that I think need to be reexamined as well, like character progression and procedural levels, that I think the game miiight actually be better without. I donno.

 

I think...also just working on something for this long mostly solo isn't fun for me. Making little stuff and doing jams has always been my true love, and while wrapping up a full Steam PC release is still a goal that I wanna hit for myself, spending a year on a project has just been a real drag for me. And multiple months of working a day job + 6 hours of dev while gearing up for PAX mighta just burned me out too much. The short break I took post-pax after crunching for months never really ended, I never really WANTED to get back to it. I think in those months the fun of doing game dev became capital W Work and stopped being a thing I loved doing for fun. I'm also just at a place professionally now where I'm finally actually kinda satisfied by my day job for the first time in my life, so there isn't a raging fire of dissatisfaction burning in my heart, keeping me up late at night working toward something better.

 

Anyway, so, I'm gonna take a little time and work on Surfenstein, which was a game I made for the first Public Domain jam a couple years ago and started on a tablet version of, then stopped cause my ipad got stolen. And I'll probably just keep posting updates in this thread, cause, why not. So here's a gif of that game from a while ago that I like:

 

[Spenny]

It's a bummer about the rejection, and, it's maybe cold comfort to hear it, but I can really relate to the overwhelming nature of the solo dev. I think there's a lot of naivety in too how much work on a game is iteration and polish, it's grating work! Doing it alone doesn't make it much better. It's tough! 

 

Spending some time with small things sounds like good therapy.

[Dinosaursssssss]

 

Got this working again after updating from Unity 4.6 to 5.4. The question I keep asking myself is...why did I ever stop working on this, it's so perfectly dumb.

[Dinosaursssssss]

Alright I continue to be very busy with work stuff (we shipped a launch game for the Google Daydream in December! woo!) and haven't felt like finishing anything really. But I've been noodling around a bit on some other projects...here are some gifs of tiny bits of other things I'm poking around on.

This is a first stab at making an arcing teleport-y line that seems to be so popular in VR stuff right now. I used a linerenderer, which I think was a mistake...for one, being flat just looks mediocre in VR, but also the line renderer just lags in a weird way (possibly due to bad math?) so I'm going to rebuild this with a 3d mesh instead, and try to use a vertext offset shader to get the arc looking good. 

 

 

Also I'm trying to get a grip on doing shader work (starting in Shader Forge because good lord writing CG seems hard). This shader changes saturation based on distance from a specified position (in this case, the camera).

 

 

[Spenny]

Good stuff. 

 

For your teleporter arc, if you're thinking of using a mesh, there are like half a dozen spline based mesh deformers in the asset store. I was curious about it the other day and had looked it up.

[Dinosaursssssss]

  On 2/9/2017 at 5:30 PM, Spenny said:

Good stuff. 

 

For your teleporter arc, if you're thinking of using a mesh, there are like half a dozen spline based mesh deformers in the asset store. I was curious about it the other day and had looked it up.

 

Yeah, I was just curious to see if I could do it and this was the first method that came to mind. I'd like to take another shot at it, but it is sort of reinventing the wheel at this point.

 

Anyway, I've never used the Unity ragdoll creator thing so I was messing with it last night. It's pretty easy to use! I wanna start messing with IK next I think.