About a month has passed since the Indie Prize Showcase at Casual Connect. It provided a valuable experience worth sharing, mostly because game developers arenât familiar with trade fairs.
First off, being accepted as an Indie Prize finalist was such an honor. As our fellow Bay Area developer, Gary Chao of Formal Sheep, puts it:
âWeâre no longer amateurs making games. Weâre moving into the big leagues nowâthe current gen of burgeoning game developers.â
Our biggest drive is to live up to that image and continue to deliver the highest quality of work we can offer.
Overall, the exhibit was a lot of fun not only because we got to interact with developers from across the world, but also because Casual Connect provided a unique perspective on exhibiting in front of an audience different from the typical consumer crowd.
To be exact, Casual Connect is a trade fair. Most of you are probably familiar with PAX, a consumer fair, where the attendees are a good mix of gamers (casual and hardcore) and developers. Trade fairs, on the other hand, are attended by industry professionals who are looking for clients to do business with. At a ticket price ranging from $200 to over $1000 per ticket compared to the $40 at PAX, the event is clearly tailored to professionals who can be sponsored by their company.
Hereâs a more detailed comparison between the two types of fairs so you can get a better idea on how to tailor your exhibition towards the right audience:
Consumer fairs: The attendees are mostly gamersâyour gameâs potential buyers. They walk around the exhibits getting a feel for upcoming games that would be worth their time and money. These are the people you want to target your promotional campaigns at to gain more followers, newsletter sign-ups, and Kickstarter backers.
Trade fairs: The attendees are industry professionalsâyour potential business partners, such as marketers, investors, and publishers. They walk around the exhibits getting a feel for games that would fit their portfolio and benefit from their products and services. These are the people you want to confidently recite your business and marketing plan to, get into the specifics of what you need and what they can offer, and possibly shake hands on a deal by the end of the day.
A key advice we learned from speaking with publishers was that they pay particular attention to the team behind the product. In a such a competitive industry, anybody can make a good game. But a game that excels is one backed by a determined teamâa team that can be trusted to finish the game and take it beyond. The more prepared you are with speaking with a publisher, the higher the chances are that they will be interested in working with you. Check out my article âHow to Engage Those Who Havenât Played Yetâ on Gamesauce.biz on how we locked in meetings with publishers.
What Exactly is Casual Connect?
Casual Connect is a trade fair focusing on the mobile segment of the gaming industry, primarily on app monetization via mobile ads. Exhibitors included Google, Yahoo!, MoPub and Appodeal.
Throughout the three-day event, these same companies hosted workshops, lectures, and panels discussing market trends, exploring opportunities, and sharing best practices. Example lectures included âeSports - Not New, But On Fire,â âSuccessful Mobile Advertisingâs Secret Sauce,â and âWhat We Learned Moving from Mobile to VR.â
Although a lot of these didnât apply at the moment, they were extremely insightful into whatâs trending, a forecast into potential business ventures for us after Mind the Trap. A favorite of mine was a âCrowdfunding for Indiesâ panel featuring Rami Ismail and Aaron Isaksen, established game developers and investors of Indie Fund.
The Indie Prize is a scholarship for selected game developers to attend Casual Connect for free, providing them the opportunity to visit all the workshops and to showcase their games to the industry professionals at Casual Connect. My team was one of 50 finalists from around the world.
No surprise that VR was a hot attraction at the event.Â
Exhibit Set-up and Presentation
This was our first time demoing at a trade fair, and despite our unfamiliarity with the target audience, it was key for us to primp up our presentation as much as possible. We wanted to demonstrate a higher level of professionalism that reflected our gameâs progress and our growth as game developers.
Standby Mode
This was a mode we implemented in the demo in which a gameplay trailer would automatically be played on the screen if the computer was idle for more than 30 seconds. To accommodate the behavior of bystanders glazing by, the trailer was composed to swiftly showcase the main features that we felt our viewers would be most interested in, specifically the core gameplay mechanics, the multiplayer interactions, and the vibrant design of levels. No special effects, no special animations. Just a montage of gameplay footage.Â
The standby mode turned out to be a tremendous addition. The publishers, investors, and marketers walking around the booths, who had years to decades of experience in the gaming industry, had no interest in physically playing the game and just wanted to see if it had the appeal to fit in their portfolio. The standby trailer provided just that. Once the trailer caught their attention, discussions ensued, and for us not having to play the game meant we could focus more on talking about the finite details that they wanted to know about, such as launch date, production schedule, and promotional campaigns.Â
I really canât emphasize how crucial the standby mode is for an exhibition. A still screen doesnât do you any good, so I highly recommend implementing this for all your future exhibits. Itâs also a good practice in streamlining your content into a compact, straight-to-the-point delivery.Â
Other Items
We ordered 400 one-inch pins from Wacky Buttons as a promotional giveaway for Steam Greenlight. Attached to each pin was a small strip of paper with the âVote for us!â message and the gameâs website, which included a link to the Greenlight page. If you think about it, these strips of paper can be quite actionableâmore likely than not the person taking home the pin would take a look at the paper before ripping it off. Given how cheap it is to print on paper nowadays, itâs a worthwhile investment that ensures you get something out of these promotional giveaways.Â
As for the pins themselves, they did not have the best quality. The color was dull, and our websiteâs URL wasnât even visible through the crimpled plastic edges. They were also not a popular item for the older Casual Connect crowd.
As mentioned in a couple sections above, trade fairs are not ideal for promotional campaigns.Â
We also ordered 500 business cards from Vistaprint. A good advice is to not have dark colors. Everybody was jotting down discussion notes directly onto the business cards, and the black background on ours made it extremely difficult to see the ink.
The amount of space each developer had to exhibit was also very limited, but we wanted to make our table as attractive as possible, so we hand-made some neat tabletop props. Check out our DIY post on how we made the treasure chest.
Back-End Analytics to Monitor Player Performance
During our first exhibition at the Sacramento Indie Arcade, we observed from players that any session longer than 10 minutes was too time-consuming. You could also see very clearly the frustration that stemmed from certain sections of the level, whether it was because the platforming was too difficult, a puzzle required too much coordination to solve, or the gameplay was too one-sided between different types of players. However, trying to balance ourselves between watching the players and talking to bystanders was a struggle. Using empirical data was also not quantitative enough for us to decide exactly which areas of our game needed fixes and how much.Â
At Casual Connect, we wanted to take this opportunity to implement some back-end analytics into our demo that would track every quantitative variable available in the game so far. This included cheese distribution between players, time spent per section of the level, and number of times each player won a mini-game. Unfortunately, we were limited on time, but Michael, one of our developers and UE4 specialist, was able to crunch out something quickly.
Itâs a work-in-progress that will be improved in time for the next showcase.Â
When we werenât talking with industry professionals, we were either attending the workshops or networking with our neighbors. Thus, the only playtesting we had was from other developers. Overall, the reception was quite positive, but we didnât get enough sessions to build any valuable analytics.Â
Ice Water Games (developers of Viridi)
NextGen Pants (developers of Refactor) and BHADANA&bros (developers of Proximity)
Indie Prize Awards Ceremony
In a room full of finalists from around the world, we were unsure how competitive our game was compared to everyone elseâs. I sat outside near the bathroom looking nervously at my screen every minute, waiting for Chris and Conrad to update me on who won each award. When I got the message saying that we won the âBest Multiplayer Gameâ award and was nominated for âBest Game Design,â I jumped out of my seat from sheer excitement. After quitting my job a year ago and diving into a career path that had so many unknowns and so much risk, this was a motivational moment that I canât express in words.
You can see how happy Chris was.Â
This event and its outcome was a validation for our team that we were moving in the right direction. It felt great and empowered us even more.Â
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Mind the Trap:Â How to Engage Those Who Havenât Played Yet
During the last weeks of July, our team of Dissonance Entertainment has been hit by a whirlwind of exciting events. Mind the Trap won the Best Multiplayer Game award and was nominated for Best Game Design at the Casual Connect 2016 trade fair. In addition to that, we locked in meetings with publishers, got approached by freelancers and marketers, got the game Greenlit after nine days on Steam, and for the first time had a post hit the front page of Reddit with over 7000 up-votes at its peak.
What we found particularly surprising about these accomplishmentsâminus the award and nominationâwas how in the world did we manage to get so much attention despite nobody actually playing the game?
Mind the Trap got attention before people could actually play. We believe the secret is correct online presentation.
We believe the spotlight was the result of delivering an effective, targeted presentation on all our web pages and exhibit booths. By doing everything so, we managed to impress viewers, drive traffic to our game, stand out from the competition, and set up discussions with potential business partnersâjust to name a few.
We look back at our own experience, and here are our ideas on taking your presentation to the next level.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT.
As developers, we spend a lot of time building a community around our work by sharing the nude behind-the-scenes of development. Most of those followers are other developers who have an appreciation for the kick-ass physics engine or the voxel world that you spent days crafting. As valuable as the community is, the majority of people buying your game are consumers, not developers. Consumers just want to know if the game is fun and worth their money. Your invisibility as the creator of a game forces you to rethink your marketing approach to target those that really matter when your game sells.Â
In other words,
And give them what they want.
Thereâs a standard set of info that you should always have ready for consumers and publishers:
Headliner: The catchy one-to-three sentence description that explains what your game is all about.
Gameplay trailer: What are the core gameplay mechanics?
Features list: Whatâs so different about this game compared to others in the same genre? What are the features that would make me excited to play it?
Progress: When is the game coming out?
And having the following can mean the difference between making it or breaking it when meeting with publishers.
Team: Who are the people making this game? Do they have the determination and passion to finish it and take it the extra mile?
Business and marketing plan: Who are the target customers and how big is that market? What promotional campaigns will be held and whatâs the timing? What are the launch plans?
Financials: Is the team âstarvingâ or financially stable? What do they need the money for and how much?
Publishers pay particular attention to the team because they believe that a passionate team can be trusted to finish the game and take it beyond. Anybody can make a good game, but a great game is the product of a good idea and the people behind it.
âWhen we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.â â Warren Buffett
If your game is a suitable fit for the publisherâs portfolio and your team exhibits determination, theyâll question you about high-level marketing plans and company financials. The more prepared you are with this information, the more likely theyâll respect you and want to do business with you.
HIGHLIGHT THE TOP 3 GAMEPLAY FEATURES
Recent studies show that the use of smartphones has reduced our attention spans to a measly 8 seconds.
That means people are quicker to identify what they like or donât like and pass over anything that requires a significant time investment. Your job as a content creator is to deliver the most amount of information with the least amount of time and effort required from the viewer.
We achieved this by investing the most effort into the top 3 gameplay features that gamers would be most interested in knowing about. At the top of our Steam Greenlight page for example, we presented each of our chosen gameplay features with a catchy headline, a succinct 2â3 line description, and a GIF that demonstrated the feature in visual form. As a result of the early focus on gameplay, viewers had the info they needed to make a judgement all without playing a demo and with few questions asked.
This is how the representation on Greenlight page was organized to present the game without playing.
These features should also echo in your gameplay trailer. More often than not, the first thing someone glances over when viewing your game is the gameplay trailer â but its length already makes them a huge time investment for somebody with the average 8-second attention span. Thus, you need to highlight the top features very explicitly and as early as possible in the video to hook in the viewer before they move on to the next game.
Even at a convention like Casual Connect, this tactic turned out to be surprisingly effective: it took less than a minute for publishers, marketers, and freelancers passing by to watch the trailer and become engaged. Consequently, follow-up discussions ensued all without them physically playing the game.
So how can you apply this to your own game? Think about what makes people excited to play your game. Once you can clearly define what it is, narrow that down to the top three features and flaunt them. However, be careful: As weâve noticed from many Greenlight and Kickstarter pages, avoid wording your features in a manner that toots your own horn. For example, rather than explicitly stating that your game has a âgorgeous, hand-drawn world,â say âhand-drawn worldâ and show intimate, close-up screenshots of the environment. Rather than stating that âyou and your friends will laugh your asses off,â show a montage of people having a great time playing your game. Donât tell viewers what to feel; show them and let them discover it for themselves!
MAKE IT JUICY
It has become all too common to see games getting canceled despite successful crowdfunding campaigns. As a result, consumers and business partners trust less and become more cautious of who they open their wallets for. Putting in the extra effort to make your presentation more âjuicyâ not only helps you stand out from the crowd but also demonstrates your seriousness and commitment to completing your game.
What can be done to add âjuiceâ to your presentation? Assuming your game is at the stage where you want to be attracting the attention of publishers, investors, or the general public through media channels, consider polishing cross-sections of your game, such as the demo, to a nearly shippable quality. That means replacing placeholder assets, adding visual and sound effects, implementing a clear UI, etc. In doing so, you will find yourself with a marketable build that confidently echoes the final product and provides you with plenty of solid gameplay footage to primp up your webpages and trailer.
In addition to having a polished build, you can try:
Header art for the web pages. Anything that catches the eye of your viewers will help maintain engagement.
Banner, tabletop props, giveaways. Eye candy applies in real life as well. A publisher we talked to mentioned that it was really easy to point us out from across the conference room.
Standby mode. If youâre at a showcase and your game sits idle for more than a certain amount of time, try having it automatically play a gameplay trailer on a loop. Any time spent on staring at a blank screen is wasted time when you could have bystanders see a trailer instead. We really canât emphasize enough how important having this mode is.
MORE VISUALS, LESS TEXT
Games, like paintings and movies, are visual entertainment. Describing a game in text is like telling people about an art piece without actually showing them the painting. No matter how hard you try, the true value of the painting can never be fully conveyed.
If you pass through the Twitter feed on Saturday for #ScreenshotSaturday, youâll notice that the most highly retweeted posts are GIFs and videos. Thereâs a good reason for that: Consumers tend to respond better to visual cues and are more engaged by visual media because of the emotional substance they provide that text can not. A big block of text comes across as a huge time investment, and very often the viewer will just pass right over it.Â
A good rule of thumb: No paragraph of text should have more than three lines of text without a relevant GIF in between to give some visual context.
A great example about the utility of visual media is our Reddit post that hit 7000 up-votes at its peak. It was a high quality GIF titled âEver wonder what a game looks like before and after the artist takes over?â, and it featured before and after footage of a dungeon level in action. There wasnât any textual info other than that.
Reddit post: âEver wonder what a game looks like before and after the artist takes over?â
The content of the GIF revealed gameplay and, combined with the title, provoked a thoughtful insight into the prototyping process before a game is finished. Based on the comments, this was especially enlightening to the consumer crowd, who almost never sees this side of a game.
As a result, we managed to gain the attention of a new audience separate from the usual developer crowd.
DO THINGS THAT DONâT SCALE
A game cannot take off unless you give it a push. Using whatever limited resources you have, you must be aggressive and tireless on building an early follower base, even if it means hosting a pizza night for local playtesters, staying up late to respond to questions, or spending a few hours a day to learn needed skills instead of hiring a third party. By giving that extra push, you ensure youâre doing everything you can and more to succeed and stay ahead of the curve.
This infographic summarizes it really well what it means to âdo things that donât scale.â
FINAL WORDS
As our experience has shown, delivering a strong presentation can bump up your gameâs publicity, open many doors for you, and put you at a competitive edge over the majority of indie game developers. To summarize our lessons learnt:
Target your content towards what consumers wantâand not what you want.
Highlight no more than the top 3 gameplay features of your game on your web pages and in the trailer.
Use GIFs and videos over text wherever possible.
Make every element of the presentation as juicy as possible.
Do things that donât scale.
If you deliver a targeted, gameplay-focused presentation that hooks in the viewer, respects their attention, and allows them to make a well-informed judgement, then thereâs no absolute need to play the game.
âIf weâre [fortunate] enough to gain knowledge, we have the responsibility to share it.â â Sean Everett
We understand that running an indie business is extremely difficult, and thatâs why we are so fortunate to have made these accomplishments. We hope that by sharing our best practices you will have the opportunity to have similar success stories.
If you enjoyed reading this article, please support my work by clicking that heart and sharing it to anyone who would find this helpful!
Follow my progress with Mind the Trap at my studio page, or connect with me by Email, Twitter, and Medium.
As a game developer, I canât imagine the hell Niantic is going through resolving bugs and responding to complaints. What I really canât imagine is how a company that secured over $30 million from Google, Nintendo, and The Pokemon Company is functioning so poorly. Game-breaking issues spawning when users are most fixated, as well as the lack of PR, created unforgivable frustrations and certainly isolated players from the game.
During this week, Niantic finally released a statement and update regarding the testing of a new tracker system. The word âtestingâ is bothersome enough. Pokemon GO had a soft launch in other countries before entering the US market, which was a smart move. Aside from Ingress, GPS-based mobile games are rare, making it a new field with very little market data to project sales for Pokemon GO.
However, the point of a soft launch is not only to gauge public reception and slowly ramp up the user base, but to also make sure that the gameâs structural features, such as server stability, payment method, and GPS tracking, are stable before launching the game in a much bigger market like the US. For a game that has officially launched in the US, Pokemon GO should therefore NOT be âtestingâ anything new at this point in time.
Pokemon GOâs novelty has practically revolutionized mobile gaming by not only inspiring people of all ages to go outside and be healthy while playing games, but also boosting huge amounts of sales for local businesses. Despite all this, Pokemon GO has been a disaster in every aspect of product management, launch planning, PR, and marketing. This period of damage control will be a nightmare for Niantic, but if they can get all the core issues fixed and take advantage of the nostalgic Pokemon brand, they have a chance of recuperating from what I suppose is a huge loss of users.
For any game developers struggling with marketing I recommend checking out Googleâs Primer app. Itâs a lot of fun to useâquick and easy card lessons on the basics of marketing.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
I love art and design. Iâm continuously inspired by the endless amount of creativity that feeds my Twitter homepage every week. As a result, I created the Indie Revel, an endlessly scrolling, visuals-centric âmuseumâ showcasing the awe-inspiring work created by the community of indie game developers.
You can support my effort by going onto the site and submitting a post (screenshot, concept art, etc.) whenever you see something that blows your mind.
MOO business cards for the 2016 Sacramento Indie Arcade Gaming Expo, featuring concept art, character designs and in-game screenshots from all our projects. Weâre really excited to be showing off a new face for Mind the Traps. If you happen to be in the area come say hi!
Iâve been wanting to get into iPhone app development for some time now. I bought an online course from Udemy and considering the amount of time it would take me to learn the SWIFT coding language, I thought long and hard about hiring a freelancer to do the coding work for me. That would leave me all the time in the world to focus on the design, management, and commercial delivery of the app. Over time I realized that bootstrapping and maintaining my savings was the way to go and that learning to code would be a worthwhile investment for this career path. After all, you canât run a business effectively without understanding the operations and the ins and outs of its products.Â
Given that, I decided to suck it up and blow through the course.Â
Xcode: More Design, Less Coding
Xcode is Appleâs platform for developing apps. Much like the Unity and Unreal Engine game development platforms, Xcode has been around long enough for it to evolve into a more visual design experience than a purely coding experience. This makes app development so much more fun, especially for people like me who are lacking in coding skills. A third of the work is taken care of by simply dragging and dropping preset UI elements (buttons, images, tables, toolbars, etc.) and checking off options.
Thereâs also a humongous online community to leverage from. If you canât figure out how to do something, just Google it and 99% of the time you will find either a tutorial or a forum discussion with detailed solutions.
I recommend anybody taking these tutorials to first have an app in mind that they want to make. Then you can actually see how the techniques youâre learning will be applied to the making of your product.Â
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Where do you see yourself in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? What skills do you want to develop? These are questions I continue to ask myself. Just as important, these are questions I ask my brother so I can better lay out a personal and professional development plan for everyone for next year.Â
We have some exciting activities in mind for 2016 to further enhance our skillsets and portfolio, such as attending local networking events, creating more diverse games that force us to learn new techniques, planning for a Kickstarter campaign, and hosting in-house game jams with friends that are interested in game development.Â
White Rose is a synesthetic beat-âem-up where you must fight the darkness with your fists and color the world. It was made by me (art) and my brother (coding) during the last 24 hours of the Ludum Dare 34 game jam.
You can play it on our Itch.io page at http://dissonent.itch.io/white-rose. Try it out!
This beat-âem-up (pun intended) concept was actually one of our first ideas when we started developing games. Ideally, the game is supposed to be a fully immersive audiovisual experience in which how you play the game musically affects how the world looks visually. Weâre not quite there yet, especially in terms of the music-playing mechanics, but this prototype is not a bad start. It was definitely a lot of fun to make and to see an old idea come to life at last.Â
This is part 1 of a three-part series on how to do pixel art. In part 2, we create Red from the game Transistor in a style inspired by Super Time Force Ultra. In part 3, we create a vibrant scene in a style inspired by Hyper Light Drifter. Part 2 and Part 3 are currently in progress.Â
Pixel art is a lot of fun. I picked it up just last week for Itch.ioâs Loading Screen Jam. With a little practice, anybody can get the hang of it and find their style. In this tutorial Iâm going to use the image manipulation program GIMP, which is similar to Photoshop but free and open source. Part 1 of this series will cover the basics and showcase the key tools you need to achieve pixel perfect art.Â
Image Size
Nearly all monitors nowadays have an aspect ratio of 16:9 (width to height ratio), which means that for every 16 pixels in the width, there are 9 pixels in the height. The current standard resolution is 1080p (1080 pixels in the height). To achieve a pixel perfect look, you need a resolution with a 16:9 aspect ratio that scales up to 1080p.Â
For example, Hyper Light Drifter has a resolution of 480x270 (270p with an aspect ration of 16:9). 270p is 4 times smaller than 1080p. This is how it looks in-game:
Character sprites are treated differently and are generally of the size 16x16, 24x24, 32x32, and 64x64. For a size reference, the character above is a 32x32 sprite. Â
LayersÂ
Like most art programs, GIMP works in layers, which helps organize your drawing into parts and allows you to edit each part without affecting the others. Itâs good practice to have each asset or very similar assets in their own layer. If youâre drawing a scene for a town, for example, each building and prop would be in its own layer. A character sprite could have one layer for the head, one for the clothes, and one for the weapons.Â
Pencil (N)
The Pencil is your primary drawing tool because it colors each pixel without any anti-aliasing. The Paintbrush, on the other hand, has anti-aliasing and will attempt to smooth over the pixels wherever you draw. This results in âdirtyâ pixels. The following GIF shows how they look (Pencil on the left, Paintbrush on the right).Â
Remember to set the âSizeâ to 1 under the Tool Options to draw a single pixel. Hold âShiftâ on the keyboard to draw a line.Â
Eraser (Shift + E)
The Eraser is the opposite of the Pencil tool: it will remove the pixel on the current layer. Remember to put a check on the option âHard edge:â under the Tool Options; otherwise, it will enable anti-aliasing. The following GIF shows what happens when you have âHard edge:â unchecked (left) and checked (right).Â
You can also hold âShiftâ on the keyboard to erase in a straight line. Set the âSizeâ to 1 under the Tool Options to erase one pixel at a time.Â
SelectÂ
The Select tool comes in many forms. Shown on the left side in the Toolbox window, there are three options to Rectangle Select ÂŽ, Ellipse Select (E), and Free Select (F). Shown on the right side in the menu is the option to select By Color (Shift + O).Â
You can select an area and restrict any edits you make to just that area in the current layer. For example, here I use the Rectangle Select to color only the body of her shirt.Â
And then I use the select By Color option to lighten up her hair color.Â
To deselect, right click on your selection, hover over to Select, and then click on None.  Â
Move (M)
The Move tool allows you to move layers on a pixel by pixel basis. This is good when you want to shift assets, such as the characterâs head or certain props in your scene. Remember to have the âLayerâ option chosen in the Tool Options. Â
The dotted line around the layer is called the Layer Boundary, which like the Selection tool prohibits any edits on the layer outside the boundary. When you move the layer, the Layer Boundary moves along with it. You can customize the Layer Boundary by right-clicking on the layer and choosing âLayer Boundary Size.â Or, you can automatically adjust the Layer Boundary to fit the canvas by right-clicking on the layer and choosing âLayer to Image Size.âÂ
The Move tool can also work in conjunction with Cut & Paste and Select to move a selection of a layer. In the following GIF, I use the Free Select tool to cut the head and then paste it back into the current layer. When the selection is pasted, it is placed in a temporary layer called a Floating Selection, which you can move around and edit. Once youâre done moving the Floating Selection into the desired position, you must right-click on the Floating Selection layer and choose âAnchor layerâ to place it into the current layer. Â
You can also put the Floating Selection into its own layer by right-clicking on the Floating Selection layer and choosing âTo New Layerâ.
Bucket Fill (Shift + B)
The good olâ fill tool from Microsoft paint. Use the Pencil tool to draw an enclosed shape. With the Bucket Fill tool chosen, click anywhere inside the shape and it will automatically fill the area with the primary color.Â
Color Picker (O)
The Color Picker tool sets the primary color to the color of the pixel that you click on. Because pixels are quite noticeable, itâs good to use the same color and subtle variations of it as much as possible for a particular asset; otherwise, youâll get a âdirtyâ mesh of colors that doesnât look nice.
Zoom In (+), Zoom Out (-)
Pixel art requires you to zoom in to draw in each pixel (one pixel off makes a huge difference!) but to zoom out to see if your drawing looks good at a macro level. This is especially true when youâre working on a large canvas with a lot of detail.Â
In the following image of Red from the game Transistor, notice how jagged her her legs and arms are when Iâm zoomed in. Itâs unclear to me whether her pose looks good or not, but once I zoom out I get a better feel for the overall look of the picture. Â Â
Blend (L)
The Blend tool applies a gradient over a layer or over a selection. GIMP provides a nice list of pre-made gradients to choose from in the âLayersâ window. Â
Traditional pixel art uses dithering to make a transition between two colors, but an example below from Hyper Light Drifter shows that applying a gradient can give a really vibrant flavor to the scene.
Patterns
GIMP offers the capability to add patterns. I havenât used it personally but I imagine it can be quite useful for assets that use a repeating texture, such as the ground in Spelunky.Â
Final Words
In the next part (will be published soon!), I draw Red from the game Transistor using a majority of the tools described here.
How to Make a Game in One Week | Epic MegaJam Learnings
Building a playable and presentable game in one week is no joke. In October we attended Epic Game's biggest game jam to date, the Epic MegaJam. I would like to share our experience on how we accomplished it through scheduling, prioritizing features, coming up with the minimum viable product, and incremental playtesting. You'll find that it applies to all forms of game development and not just to game jams. To see where it took us, here's a gameplay trailer of our submission, Mind the Traps.
In the end you'll find the download links for the winners of the MegaJam. I highly recommend playing their games for your learning.
Half of our team had school or a day job, so scheduling was key to get us started and to ensure we would finish the game on time. We listed out the phases of development, assigned what needs to be accomplished in each phase, and allocated the number of hours to be spent in each phase.
1. Choose an awards category (30 minutes)
Choosing an award to aim for helped create the framework for our gameâs design. We wanted to make a game that we would enjoy making and potentially sell, so given our quirky personalities and love for multiplayer party games it made the most sense that we target the Addiction (most fun) award.
2. Brainstorm ideas (3 hours)
Games in the Addiction category generally focus on gameplay, as opposed to visuals, music or interpretation of theme. We came up with at least 10 different ideas and went with a voting system to filter the number of ideas from 10 to 3 to 1.
The selected concept was a "dungeon crawler, multiplayer party game. Players have no weapons and bump into each other into the darkness to figure out the path ahead."
Tips:
One week isnât enough time to learn new technical skills, so brainstorm ideas that are feasible.Â
The more ideas you come up with, the more creative you get, the better the game you can make.
Think simple. Throwing around complex ideas has the tendency to impede discussion with your teammates. Letâs say the game jamâs theme is impossible puzzles, so you bring up an idea for a âfirst person shooter in an M.C. Escher-esque world fighting rainbow-barfing unicorns.â Itâs natural for the listener to think thatâs ridiculous and reject it right off the bat because it's so loaded. What if instead you said: âa first person game in an M.C. Escher-esque world?â This concept is interesting but vague enough to give your teammates something to work with. Thatâs how you stimulate discussion and get the creative juices flowing.
3. Plan out the minimum viable product (3 hours)
The minimum viable product is the minimally playable version of your game with only the most important features implemented. The rest of the features that enhance your game are listed in order of priority to be implemented later. This is a risk averse approach to building your game that ensures you have a playable game that fits your vision and is ready by the deadline.
Imagine that making your game is like an RPG: each additional feature you want to add is a new boss you have to defeat. If you come across a difficult boss that wrecks you, do you want to restart all the way back to the beginning of the game and lose all your progress? Of course not! You want to respawn at the previous checkpoint where you killed the last boss and keep all the items and upgrades you made.
The same goes for you and your gameâs development. Thatâs why the MVP is so important to plan out this early on. The list of prioritized features is a set of predetermined checkpoints that ensures youâll always have a playable game, no matter where you crash during its development.
Other benefits to this approach are:
You have something playable/functional very early.
Customers/followers are aware your game is working.
From this point forward you only have to work on features that make the game better.
You can incrementally playtest and debug.
You always have a working version no matter where your game crashes.
We broke down our game concept into a list of features arranged by "fun" factor and how critical it is to the gameplay. We included additional features that werenât important but would enhance the game if we had time to implement them. The prioritized list of features were:
Basic character movement for single player
Multiplayer on a local PC
Multiplayer interactions (push, bump)
Gems (incentive for players to fight each other)
Traps
Enemies
Items
Because player-to-player interactions is key to the fun-ness of our game, we concluded that the minimally playable version of our game must have the first three featuresâbasic character movement, multiplayer on a PC, and multiplayer interactions.
4. Prototype (1 day)
We immediately prototyped the MVP with placeholder assets and playtested it with friends and family. We were told the controls felt solid, the gameplay was fun, and the playerâs goal was immediately clear. This was a sign that we were on the right track, so we finalized the mechanics and cleaned up the code in preparation for making levels.
Since gems and traps were easy to implement, we included those as well.
Itâs sometimes easy for playtesters to quickly judge a prototype the wrong way because itâs not visually appealing or because itâs not that fun. We had to remind them to focus and provide feedback on gameplay only.
5. Create levels and incrementally playtest (3 days)
We used an incremental build model, meaning we playtested and debugged each level as it was made. This proactive, versus reactive, approach was extremely beneficial because the incremental feedback allowed the level designer to create progressively better levels without spending too much time fixing the older levels. It also allowed the coder to take care of each bug as they popped up before it became too much to handle.
Our playtesting focused specifically on gameplay because we were targeting the Addiction award. We made sure each level was fun, challenging, not frustrating and able to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. The judges were going to look at over 170 game submissions in a week, so we expected their playtime to be around 30 minutes per game.
For level creation, we continued to use placeholder assets for everything (cubes for walls, cubes for characters, spheres for enemies, fire particles in the starter content, etc.).
Tips:
Don't get hung up on small details. Our level designer was a perfectionist and would make sure each wall and platform were placed perfectly next to each otherâno gaps allowed! It added up to a good amount of time wasted. In the end it's better to have a complete game with imperfections than to have an incomplete game.
6. Add custom assets (1 day)
Fortunately, we had an artist and musician on board who were already making assets halfway through the week. But because gameplay was a higher priority, we didnât start incorporating the assets until level creation and playtesting were complete.
7. Buffer time (1 day)
Last but not least, you have to allocate buffer time for a rainy day. Time and time again, history has shown that a game almost never finishes on time, so we took this into account and planned for an entire day of debugging assuming the worst-case scenario happens. How much buffer time you need depends on the scope of your game, skillsets, technical limitations and personal responsibilities.
If no last-minute issues pop up during this time, great! Utilize this free time to add the extra features that will make your game even better.
Final Words
Although we didn't win, the game jam provided such a huge learning experience that taught us how to operate efficiently and with minimal risk. The process of scheduling, prioritizing features, planning out the minimum viable product (MVP), and incrementally playtesting is applicable to game development in general and not just in game jams. We hope you learned something new from our experience.
Listed below are the winners of the MegaJam. Judging is subjective and can vary between game jams; nonetheless, these were really well made games and are worth downloading for your learning. You can check out the other contestants' games on the Epic MegaJam forum.
Addiction Award (most fun): Midnight Mall Race by Sleepless Meatbags V2.0
Philosophy Award (best interpretation of theme): Omnitron by Handkor
Eye Candy Award (best visuals): Guardians by Blazing Badger. You can also check out their detailed post on how they made the game.
Allegorithmic's Pick: (R)evolution Jumpers by Digital Hussars, Sir Isaac Fruiton by Impromptu Pub Giants, Guardians by Blazing Badger
I received approval from Epic Games to share these games.
This article has been featured on GameCareerGuide.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming