How do u make a good game

how do u make a good game

thats like asking "how do I become a good artist?". if you have to ask, you'll never know

Don't do stuff you hate in games and include stuff you liked about games

It's so simple it's stupid but games are always made for a common denominator that has very shit taste so that's why Sup Forums is tired of eating out of someone else's hand and hates most new games.

In other words just not being a greedy jew out for gold is a great first start to making a good game and you should be 99% ahead of the curb from this alone.

If you want some dosh while you're at it, just remake an old game/genre that isn't seen much anymore but that people hold dearly.

Hey guys I have a wonderful idea!

I just need some programmers and artists to realize my idea and then we will be rich!

Right now I have no money so we just have to work till we finish my idea for a game!

Trust me, with my idea nothing can go wrong!

Study the art of game design at the best university for this, Full Sail.

How hard would it be to make homm clone?

Lets see:
Basically a lot of the things is simply.
What do set HOMM apart is the sheer amount of content, and how waste is each town.
The core game system is easy to make, the content is hard to make.

Don't listen to any engine-memes. All engines are equal in their abilities to just maek gaem.

Also, check out the 16/2chan agdg board.

It would be hard to make a good one
especially considering there's 1 great homm, maybe 2 good ones, and the rest are shit, so clearly even the dev doesn't know what the fuck they're doing
I think the biggest issues are map rng and balanced armies.

Why do you fags always shill your dead site here? What happened to "we're never coming back!"?

I thought about making it like Disciples only one town for each player and taking villages(+gold and population)

4 Types of towns
20 units(5 per town)
5 neutral units

...

hard work

>how do u make a good game
The best place to start is to read interviews from the developers of the first iconic games, before games were reactions to other games -- when they were wrought from the aether. Jarvis, Carmack, Silverman, Minter, Shaw, etc. Get into the mindset of a pre-wheel environment. How do you make a game that's still fun today in under 40kb. What's left after you've removed all superfluous trappings.

You mean

HAHD WORK AND GUTSU

Unfortunately for Unity, not all engines are equal in their abilities to not make you want to kill yourself.

Just like

Actual game dev here:

Step one: Think of a single mechanic. Only one. Now prototype it.
Step two: ask yourself, "is this fun?" If no, repeat step one.
Step three: build your game around this ONE mechanic.
Step four: polish up your game so there are no bugs
Step five: Ask yourself, "do I want to add more to this game?" If yes, repeat process.

Bullshit.

>build your game around this ONE mechanic.
quit giving people bad advice, shithead

That's a very Edison way of doing things, isn't it. You've got to leave room for intuition.

Yeah UE4 has Unity beat by a long shot in that regard.

The research center for Stockholm Syndrome is over that way, buddy.

Don't need it there's a great example of it right here.

You've never built a game before, have you? The idea behind the philosophy is to avoid the pitfalls most beginning devs have.

Yes, it is, but see the explanation I gave above.

>all engines are equal in their abilities
why would you purposefully lie, user?

Nah he's right

The answer to both of those is study and practice. Everyone knows this, including the people who are asking how to git gud. The only reason to ask is to hope for an answer that takes less effort. It's nothing more than procrastination, and people who procrastinate amount to nothing.

dude i found this thing called RPGmaker, i'm gonna make so many games. Story is the most important thing, right?

make it shit-tier anime, or add porn, and you'll have Sup Forums praising (and pirating) it!

this thread is too meta. TOO meta...

Isn't that the point of directors? I don't understand why or how this is bad if the "idea guy" is willing to work and direct.

what's the difference between directors and producers?

The Idea Guy/Director is useless until you get at least 20 people working together.

The hard part would be designing a balanced game.

Thnx m8, have any links for art i can steal?

Producers manage the financial and resource side, directors manage the creative side.

Directors make a good game, producers make the game hit shelves.

StealableArt.com

A guy who makes his game in unity has more game made than one who bitches about engines all day.

Just
Like
Make
Gaem

>StealableArt.com
Dont go it virus

once again m8 thnx, just wondering what the best anime to copy-paste a plot is?

Sord Art Online is pretty much the most critically acclaimed animu on the air right now.

>slap something together and call it a game
any game engine can do that. I was talking about them being equal in terms of performance, creativity, and stability.

All I can do is write, I'm not good at art or programming, but I want to start making a game. My buddy can program and agreed to join me but I'm not sure if I should just keep practicing my writing or move onto learning other things.

directors are usually seasoned artists/programmers

You make rapid prototypes of core concepts until you find something that is really fun and has a good level of scalability.

Then you plan out and produce a minimum viable product around that prototype, so that other will see why it's fun.

Now you can submit it to contests, festivals, trade shows, etc. and if you get a bit of recognition, maybe in the form of winning something or getting special mentions, publishers or development partners might approach you, and you are more welcome to approach them as well.

But you can do whatever you feel like from there.

Copy Minecraft, give it different textures and name, then sell it on steam and android play store.

>Game engine in charge of creativity
Wut?

You don't

Then why the fuck do we have art schools.

Fools and their money

Government sanctioned scams.

By fucking doing it.

If you really don't know, get a program like GameMaker and recreate your favorite arcade game.

As far as art goes, "It's just study and practice" is a massive oversimplification considering the ways people study art/techniques for art have been developed for literal centuries, and responding in that way doesn't help anyone and devalues all the development that has gone into the craft. It's ducking a legitimate question that you don't know the answer to; there is an answer, it's just a really long answer.

>The only reason to ask is to hope for an answer that takes less effort. It's nothing more than procrastination, and people who procrastinate amount to nothing.

Projection or elitism? Both?

find an idea that works

then either add fun gameplay
good music
or good art

or just throw enough money at it like most triple A studios

fire

>writer
you guys are pretty useless for indie games. you're only slightly better than idea guys.

creativity as in the limits of what the engine can do. I'd rather write my own engine than bullshit my way through someone elses code to do what I need for my game.

I think the difference between the idea guy and the director is the director suffers direct consequences and takes most of the blame is the game or his ideas are bad. Most idea guys don't fall in this category, they are just a guy on the team who thinks he knows better than people with actual ability like art, sound, or programming.

On top of that ideas are everywhere. Everyone on the team has ideas. No team needs an idea guy.

Not to say there can't be good idea guys that really are design prodigies. The problem is few of them are interested in actually testing their ability instead of just assuming it. Anyone with an ounce of humility would want their ideas out in the wild getting shat on before they are comfortable with others slaving to make their vision for them. Maybe that means making some games solo, I don't know.

Make a VN or an RPG. A writer is less important in smaller games than in larger games.

because books and "self teaching" statistically don't work and don't prepare people for the basics of having a job, like understanding a problem that isn't theirs, or working with people they dislike.

unity is easy but when you actually want to make a good look game that doesn't run like shit it is a complete nightmare, and it is so full of bugs that have been around for years it's crazy, also as a side note its obsession with the editor means that making a moddable game takes a shit ton more effort that it should do.

Look at papers please as an example of how only a writer and a programmer can make a good game

Don't try to write a book or you'll just have a shitty VN like everybody else

Mostly rely on gameplay to tell the story and have your writing shape it's direction. Implying something through gameplay is always better than stating it in writing and this is the only important difference between a game and a book

>I was talking about them being equal in terms of performance, creativity, and stability.

How many indie developers should care about this? Most indie projects aren't anywhere near ambitious enough that engine performance and stability matters. If there are problems there, its usually horrendously bad code, not engine inefficiency. Not sure what you mean by creativity.

How I personally do it?
Attention to detail, jack of all trades - master of none, having fun.

Fuck I didn't know making an RPG is so much fun

I'm currently trying to design main antagonists and I'm having a fucking blast.

>Then why the fuck do we have art schools.

Because schools need your tuition money

I like this answer though. I wish I saw college as a bullshit challenge instead of just bullshit.

Any of you lads got tips on how to make a shitty phone game that easily gets popular? My welfare isn't cutting it anymore.

what engine should I pick for a 2D SMT style game that will give me a lot of tools?

There's no agreed upon, universal value you have to bring to a development team. If you've got someone who wants to make a game out of your writing then go for it. Same goes for if you're a designer, there's nothing really wrong with it if you're not a dipshit control freak and everyone's working on something they want to work on.

>trying to design a HUD for a twin-stick shooter

motherfucker
HUDs should be simple to lay out in the sense that they should follow the eye's natural path line without covering the game's action, but the action in open-ended, all-direction shooters is all over the place and it's making this task a horrible thing

>As far as art goes, "It's just study and practice" is a massive oversimplification considering the ways people study art/techniques for art have been developed for literal centuries, and responding in that way doesn't help anyone and devalues all the development that has gone into the craft. It's ducking a legitimate question that you don't know the answer to

Just rephrase all of this because I don't understand the beef. Of course there are a lot of ways to study and practice, but how is someone supposed to know how you need to study and practice? Find shit you like, man.

>there is an answer, it's just a really long answer.

Well save in notepad for occasions such as this.

>Projection or elitism? Both?

Definitely projection. Whenever I would ask someone how to git gud, I knew there was no magic pill, but I asked anyway. All the while I knew I had the ability to fucking google it, I'm just lazy as fuck.

A Director handles the majority of the company/teams business and coordinates the entire team with a theme or vision of what the game would be like while a idea guy will just walk around going "HEY, GIVE EVERYONE JETPACKS, IT WOULD BE AWESOME!" without considering the work it would take, balancing, design, time, etc in the middle of development.

one button controls

add a bird in it

The HUD gets embedded into the floor, silly.

I was thinking a plane dodging towers to get into that edgy memekid audience but all the app stores would probably pull it so I might make something with harambe instead.

As far as design, make the game you would want to play most, that has all the qualities you personally desire from a game. Focus on the most essential aspects if you were in a position to make the game, then build out from there. Maybe think about the games you like best and what makes them so good.

Video games are still new and there are no rules. Remember there will always be people who don't share your tastes or like your ideas. But don't lose sight of your individual vision.

What is the main mechanic of a jrpg?
What is the main mechanic of zelda?
What is the main mechanic of an rts?

>jrpg
turn based battle through commands
>zelda
hitting shit with a sord
>rts
issuing orders to units to do warfare

>Video games are still new
They're really not.

Jesus that's great
why don't more games do this?

None of which are easily implemented/fun to do at their barest level of implementation.

Looking for an atom of fun, a simple mechanic to reiterate on, only works for some games. It's poor advice to recommend looking for it, if you don't care about games with such testable mechanics.

Here but to give a more precise example. Say you came up with an idea where the main gameplay mechanic is you control a wizard that can manipulate terrain to his advantage. You then google to see if engine X has template or example code for it. It doesn't, so you go to step 2 which is directly changing the source code IF you have access to it. You spend a significant amount of time to finally realize it's impossible to add the feature without breaking engine X. Since the feature is integral to the game, you figure it would be best to cut your losses and search for an engine that can do what you need. You now have struck out as no current commercial engine available has example code for terrain manipulation. Which means you either do step 2 for a different engine or write your own.

Make an edgy politically charged game

>harambe
>Game is a third person survival game with the child
>Got to keep the child protected from the other gorillas while avoiding gunshots
>Collect bowls of food pellets to keep stamina up
>Craft simple tools to shield you from gunshots or climb better
>Throw some 2deep4U quotes and sad music when you die
>Goes on forever until you get shot, the child dies, or the other gorillas kill you
>Submit the game, claim it wasn't greenlit, get some animal activist sites to support your game
>Submit a link to Kotaku or Polygon about it

or you can just go the humor route of having Harambe use the child as a human shield and you defeat the zookeepers by throwing your poo at them

Interactivity.

If you make a little 2D car that can drive around the screen, yawn, boring, who cares

If you make an environment for the car to drive around, it looks prettier, but it's still just as boring

Now you make the environment destructable, you can smash down trees, run over people, drive through buildings.

Now you can get out of car and walk around, oh wow, it's grand theft auto

This principle doesn't mean you necessarily have to add lots of stuff. Flappy Bird was a popular game because the one interactive action, flapping, is compelling enough to be interesting

Well yeah, that's why you make the mechanics cohesive. Individually they're probably not the greatest, but the sum is always greater than the parts.

Alright sounds good m8. How do I make it then?

I want to make a mobile game to fight the mobile gaming cancer, but I have no idea what I want to play on a touch screen. All I know is:

1) An action game that pretends you're not playing on a touch screen. There's enough games where you just press buttons or swipe shit. Probably controller compatible because why not.

2) No ads

3) Bright and easy to see and doesn't rape your battery

4) Drop the player in the action immediately and don't waste time. I hate downloading a game and fucking with it for 3 minutes before I get into gameplay and realize its shit.

5) No microtransactions. A free demo thats good enough to be a complete product, and a developer charity version with extra shit.

I just don't know what you can do with #1, what mobile games have managed good movement with a touch screen? Emulated d-pads and analog sticks are ass. Gyroscope is ass. Is it just impossible?

You can make it using Unity as it's a small area with very little variation. There's plenty of videos so you can get 1:1 layout of the gorilla pen. Also use audio from the video so you don't have to pay voice actors and generic gorilla sounds.

>I just don't know what you can do with #1, what mobile games have managed good movement with a touch screen?
I don't know, Angry Birds? You can't do good real-time movement on touch screens because you can't see the fucking screen while you're using it

You can make turn-based games or games where you tap.

Trying to copy controller controls on a mobile won't work. Use a control scheme that benefits from from being able to quick tap and swipe anywhere quickly. Two games to check out are Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword for the DS and Hook Champ (Lite) for iOS. Both manage to have skillful, fast paced gameplay without needing to pretend to be a controller. In fact, its hard to imagine these games with controller controls.

>Flappy Bird was a popular game because the one interactive action, flapping, is compelling enough to be interesting

It wasn't compelling or interesting

It was a game that anyone could play, and got a reputation for being hard, basically the dank souls of mobile gaming, for kids who grew up with smart phones and had no idea you were supposed to fail a lot in video games.

When we had the helicopter flash game equivalent in the early 2000s, it was just a flash game with no fortune to be earned from it. And we never used the words interesting or compelling, it was just a good time waster like any other.

Not trying to throw poo at you. I just want to make it understood that flappy bird was successful because of a retarded audience, not because the developer hit the nail on the head.

This is new chris brown game?

German here. Games are fun because they act as a central point with which you can generate an entire universe and story for yourself to play around with.

For example, I enjoy Woodcutter Simulator 2015. In the game you chop down trees as one of the main game points. I really like to write up stories on a notepad about what happened to each individual tree. Where does the wood go? Is it used for paper? What happens with this paper? I might, for example, write down about how a tree is chopped down and converted to paper, and some of these sheets go to an office block. I might then write about how this paper is put into a printer, but it jams when somebody attempts to perform a bulk print of child pornography. What happens to the person doing this printing is not relevant, but what is relevant is what happens to the paper. Do the police take it and destroy it? If they do, I can reflect on whether or not it was really worth chopping down that tree. I give each tree chopped down a future story and then rate based on its future whether I can say that this was a day well done.

I'm starting to feel that Germans are the only people with real imagination. We need games that open up world inside our mind. I have gone through over 200 sheets of paper writing about my woodcutter simulator trees. I have even considered a story where the paper from one of my trees end up in my desk, where I write one it about my stories of woodcutter 2015, however I chose not to in the end as this doesn't really make any sense because I do not exist in the gameworld.

The games exist for for creative minds to expand themselves. They are fantastic and there is one for everyone.

How do you get your textures and shit?

I know programming but in order to make a game don't you need to draw certain elemens? Or you just use public libraries?

>The hard part would be designing a balanced game.
>I think the biggest issues are map rng and balanced armies

That's the easiest part you nerds

Alright lad it's proper happening. My dad will properly throw me out soon so I better get shaking. Thanks for your help. I'll post it in one of these threads if I actually make anything.

can't keep down the brown
can't miss the chris

...

I have to disagree, I can respect that Flappy Bird and the helicopter game had a nice fundamental mechanic, which is to me far more interesting than a lot of the dull shooty shooty generic gameplay in every game.

That doesn't mean I played Flappy Bird for more than two minutes, however if you have any sense you can understand why it became a phenomenon and not disregard millions of people