Dan Maloney
OK, looks like we're right at noon, let's get started. Welcome to the Hack Chat, I'm Dan and I'll be moderating today along with Dusan as we welcome Kyle Donnelley to the Hack Chat.
Wow, it must be me then
Hi Kyle, are you logged in yet?
Hello
Hey Kyle, welcome!
Thanks for coming along today. Can you start us off with a little about yourself?
Thank you! Thanks for having me on. Hello everyone! As Dan said, I'm Kyle. I'm a software developer that started in the software industry by working on backend software for large companies. During that time I was making games as a hobby but eventually decided to YOLO it and quit to make games full time. My most recent game was released at the end of 2020 for all major consoles and Steam! https://deleveledgame.com
Did you always want to make games?
And kind of related: how much of wanting to make games comes from having played them? Assuming you played a lot of games, of course ;-)
Honestly, no I never saw myself making games. I always played games growing up but it was more about playing with friends than anything else. It wasn't until a year or so out of college I put 2 and 2 together that I know how to program and games are made with code. And then another several years after that until I got good enough to enjoy programming games
1) For Deleveled did you build the physics engine behind the game as well? or use something pre-existing?
2) It supports many different platforms did any of them pose more or different challenges than the others?
Hah, I do play a lot of games. But my desire to make games comes more from the thought of "I wonder if it's possible to do X" or "This game was fun for X,Y,Z but what if it did X differently" So I feel it's more curiosity more than anything else
1) For Deleveled we (it was me and a business partner working on it) used Unity, which is basically the "standard" for small teams of game developers. But I feel like I treated the engine different than most people do. I didn't use the physics engine Unity comes with but wrote the physics need for the game, since it doesn't have traditional physics. It was very basic physics that I implemented, mainly F = M * A
2) There were a lot of different challenges that each platform threw at me that Unity wants you to think "just works" when you use their engine. For example, on the Switch we were using a JSON serializer to load level data. However, Switch doesn't support some of the reflection methods that are part of the C# language. Xbox has a crazy convoluted user flow that must react the exact same way no matter where in the game you are. If the player is in the middle of a dying animation, if they're just sitting on the main menu, etc. Xbox has very strict requirements that if not met will not allow you to release on the platform
Was there something that was more challenging than you expected when making Deleveled?
Since I didn't call out Playstation in the above: They have more strict UI requirements that must be designed around, generally the hardest one is that they don't want the extreme 10% of the screen to have UI on it. Which is surprisingly difficult to do as someone who is not good at UI design
Do you have a next project in the works? If so are you able to share the genre or any other early tidbits about what it may be?
This might be a cop out answer for something more challenging than expected but getting the project done/keeping a good mental state during the project's development. The game took about 1.5 years to make and for about 90% of that time the game was absolute crap. Bugs everywhere, levels weren't fun, animations weren't good. When doing this 8+ hours a day it made it very hard to work and be positive about the project
Hey ToasterFuel, I'm from a tech background and ventured into designing my first game. It's a 2.5D RPG adventure game. What tips would you have for a newbie designer like me?
As far as next things I'm working on, I wish I had a new game to work on :) I think it's a combination of burning myself out/finding the next game that's worth spending another year + on. But I've been doing just random smaller things until I can figure out the next big game to work on. I built a keyboard and I'm doing some DSP stuff right now that sounded fun at the start. Not exactly gamedev at the moment
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/10/redox-redux-split-keeb-gets-a-num-pad/
Redox Redux: Split Keeb Gets A Num Pad
What's the worst thing about split keyboards? If they have one general fault, it's that almost none of them have a number pad. If you can fly on that thing, but struggle with using the top row numbers, you will miss the num pad terribly, trust us. So what's the answer?
So where does the process start with you? Seems like a lot of games are produced like movies these days -- does that mean you kind of have to storyboard the game first?
I mean, I suppose it's different for a sidescroller or physics game than it would be for a big epic FPS/RPG, but it still seems like you need some sort of framework to let you know where the game is going. Is that right?
My daughter and a friend of hers made FartKnight that anybody can play here: https://devpost.com/software/fartknight
It's actually about a Knight that only has farts for weapons!
Sorry, is this the wrong place?
my.... dream game?
OK, that's got me chuckling here. Maybe there's hope for the next generation after all!
hah!
Absolutely the right place, thanks for sharing.
Hmmm, tips for newbie designers.
1) Look for gamedev meet up groups in your area (and start going when it's safe). I've met a lot of people that love games and love discussing designs/features and you can iron out some of the bad designs before you even get to implementation
2) Reading about game design is always a good place to start. Highly, highly, highly recommend Game Maker's Toolkit on youtube He has amazing videos about popular pitfalls with game design
3) Get something playable fast and get people to play it for feedback. This is kind of related to 1. But it's pretty obvious watching someone play your game if they're not having fun
MPG -- minimum playable game
haha FartKnight is great! That's one of the things I love about gamedev, you can take a silly idea and run with it and have an absolute blast (pun intended?) in the process
Thanks a bunch!
wow, that's really fun. there is for sure some strategy to only being able to attack from... behind.
Indeed, it's a big change how you need to move compared to similar games.
Daughter took an edX course: "CS50's Introduction to Game Development"
Have you made any tools to help with game development?
Are you able to enjoy playing your own game(s) or does knowing too much about the internals or being involved in level design end up ruining some or all of the fun? I would think having someone else helping design the levels could help keep it fun since you won't know the solution right out of the gate.
The other great thing about FartKnight that I want to call out is that the one sentence pitch is generally how I like to brainstorm new games. I like to think of how a game would work with forced constraints. How would a game work if the only way of attacking is from behind, instead of facing forward like all other games? This was the exact approach I took when coming up with Deleveled. What would a platformer look like if there was no jump button? I think designing games like this can lead to very creative solutions and can lead to surprisingly complex games with a simple idea
Why all original indie games always have to be platformers?
Is this also a good place to say that I need a game developer to help me develop a special kind of educational game? Will be somewhat like Doom, Counterstrike, other FPS.
RE platformers I can only think that it may be easier to make a good platformer than a good non-platformer, but I'm not sure I'm right.
There's probably a couple reasons as to why they're always platformers. They're fairly easy to make and see the results. Some of the most iconic games are platformers Mario and Sonic. They're easy to pick up and put down for new players to try.
With all that said, as with all things, they're extremely difficult to get right. I spent MONTHS playing with various speeds/friction coefficients/velocity transfer ratios to get it to feel perfect
Ana and her friend will be happy to see the feedback, thank you all.
I think there are plenty of original indie games that aren't platformers. But one reason that platformers may do well is most folks who enjoy games have a basic understanding of the core mechanics already they'll understand a lot about how to play without having to go through a lengthy tutorial or dedicating much time or effort to learn.
make them go left! they'll never expect it!
and thinking of it, we all pretty much loose our minds when that happens in Runbows
I can't enjoy the games I make at all. When something goes wrong I'm too lost in what went wrong or I see a level for a tradeoff that was made for the level to work. My business partner did the level design for Deleveled but when I was playtesting it was always to find flaws in the levels rather than enjoyment like I generally do when I play games
This is one reason why I got into roguelike games development — I wanted to make games that I could play myself and still be surprised by them.
I like to think that my next game would be a roguelike since that's a different type of design that I haven't done. IMO roguelike is designing for the average rather than an explicit feeling or pattern. For platforms I generally think about movements and how the player should be navigating. But for roguelikes it's all about what thing should look like from statistics. The player probably shouldn't get 3 bosses in a row but it could be fun late game if they're extremely strong
There are the averages, but then you also want the occasional outlier to keep things exciting.
Of course the outlier shouldn't have too much actual effect, or it will ruin the balance — if you somehow manage to kill an out-of-depth monster on level one, and get a great weapon from that, the next few levels might be boring, but the difficulty will eventually catch up.
But then you will keep talking about that one time when you killed an out of depth monster and got an awesome weapon for days.
Level-o Baker kills Tarrasque
This was asked several spaces above that I still want to answer: If there's any tools I made.
Most of the tools I made for Deleveled were about getting players to play the game as easy as possible. I made the game playable on the web (again Unity likes to make you think it's a one click build, it's not) so we could send links to friends and people that really like the game so we could get quick feedback.
I made a tool that would take screenshots of all the levels so we could categories them and use our own difficulty ranking on those screenshots
I probably spent about half my time on Deleveled making a level editor for my business partner to make the levels. The goal was to be able to test a level with a single press of a button to figure out if it's fun for him to play.
The more I get into game development the more I like making tools for people to use
Did you consider supporting mobile phones at all? Lord knows we could use more good mobile games that aren't just variations on ways to make micro-transaction sales.
the opposite imbalance is also annoying, death by a gazillion small enemies aka "You've been killed by a slim" -Dragon Quest
@morgan that is the epitome of roguelikes, though
venturing out of the village for the first time is a pain because you're under-equipt and cannot make it far
the original grinding?
like, you play 100 very average games, slowly learning the mechanics to die a little bit later than last time, but once in a while something cool randomly happens and you die really spectacularly
you should have "rogue" installed on any unix-like system, give it a try, it's the game that gave the name to the genre (even though it wasn't first)
point was, that is also a balance that needs to be right, I'd love to replay Dragon Quest but the initial level-up is such a slog I can never get into it
yes, you need it balanced on average, with rare outliers
@foamyguy (I forgot at-ing people was a thing! I know how modern chat clients work) haha I actually hate mobile games for that exact reason and so I was very against putting Deleveled on mobile. The extra annoying thing about the mobile space is that you can't really be the change you want to see since it's flooded with free micro transaction games the average consumer will see "oh this game is 2 bucks, I don't want to pay for that" so you kind of have to play the micro transaction game to even get your foot in the door.
With that said, we did get the game running on Apple devices because we pitched Deleveled to be on Apple Arcade. They liked it enough to continue talks for several months before ultimately shutting us down. I think the game played really well on phones, I just don't like the market to enough to try and be on it
Welp, we're past the top of the hour, so we've got to call it and let Kyle get back to work. Hack CHat is always open, though, so do feel free to keep the discussion going. And I want to thank Kyle for his time today, I really appreciate it. Thanks Kyle! And thanks to everyone for dropping by today.
I think this touches one very important thing about making games for sale — it's very different from just making games as a hobby, because selling them is a whole another skill, and for it to actually sell you have to take it into consideration from the very beginning, thinking about the market and the audience.
You can't just make the game you like.
Thanks everyone! I'll still be around to chat maybe just a bit slower :)
Thanks Kyle!
Thank you.
Thank youse all :-)
@ToasterFuel Thanks for the chat, it was fun and informative
Thank you!
Thank you
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