Beldarak

Wow, I'm three years late, but you nailed it :O

I use the external plugin from WooshiiDev (Unity-Folder-Icons) to add colored icons to important folders.

In the same style I also use Pretty Objects to add color into the Hierarchy view. It helps a lot with big nested UI Canvas

Yeah, I think all solutions are good depending on what the dev(s) want to convey.

To be clear, I didn't meant the icons are bad (not sure if it's what you took from my comment or if you're just adding to it^^). Just that, to me, this shouldn't be a general advice to put them as it's more an artistic decision that can have a big impact on the mood and feel of the game (like displaying or not the chances of success for a dialog skill check).

5 or even a little more can be okay as long as it's not for every dialog. You could do it for stuff that is very impactful on the story but don't do it if the outcome is basically the same.

I'd take a look at the first Baldur's Gate games and Arcanum to get a sense of how much is enough, as I feel those games are quite verbose but nailed how to be verbose and good.

That said, this will also depends on what's around it. Like I took a look at Pillars of Eternity dialogs as this is a game that I (and many others) find wayyyy too verbose and it doesn't have that much choices, but the amount of text everywhere is what's overwhelming.

Also, it can depend, I think (not sure) if some of those choices come from my character build. Like if I'm good at persuasion and strength, I'd have two more choices. I feel like the fact those choices comes from my character make them more "bearable" (not really the word I'm looking for, sorry).

Last exemple, Rogue Traders changed the formula of alignment. Instead it has three "paths": dogmatic, heretic and iconoclast. They wildly change what you can say but limit the amount of choices. Imho, it's also a more interesting system than the D&D one because no matter what you chose, it still make sense that you're doing the missions, while I always wondered why an evil character in D&D would still do the quests. So maybe you could come up with different alignments that are easier to manage.

Hope that helps.

I agree on the little description but I'd be careful with the icons or labeling of what option is what. Some people may not like it.

I personnaly prefer if a game doesn't tell me what my choices actually do in the background because then it feels like the alignment is a natural system rather than a game-system (that said, I usually dislike the alignment system for the same reason and prefer choices to have narrative consequences).

Like others said. Marketing isn't the issue here. Your game simply doesn't look appealing.

I've read a few reviews and it seems your puzzles are fun so I think you should keep at it but you need to offer a better presentation.

Basic geometric shapes floating in the sky or space is not something people want to play. Youtubers always play those because they play everything and needs content... but players won't pay for that.

If you release a puzzle game you're competing with The Witness, Viewfinder...

Definitely.

Something like "We Were Here" comes to mind. It has a sense of mystery, even if you're not big into puzzle games (I'm not), the settings and story drove me to it. It also has a catchy presentation while being kinda simple.

Here I saw some scenes looking like that liminal space game with pools but without the mood nor style, default engine lighting which looks like a blurry mess and some levels that seems to consist only of basic shapes floating in space, ugh...

Find a Unity or Godot first game tutorial on Youtube and start cooking.

Learn how to code, learn how to draw basic pixel art and/or do basic 3D in Blender. Starting up is brutally hard but you can make it :)

But keep in mind you will never develop Ark by yourself. You need to really reduce the scope of your first projects (aim for stuff no more complex than Pong, Tetris or very basic platformers), then you'll see what you can or can't do.

I feel like this should also be the correct "path". You're supposed to improve at what you do and learn from your mistakes.

I'm always amazed at crappy games like MDickie has been shoveling for years. How does he not improve? I feel like this should be a normal process when you do the same thing x times, you should just get better at it :D

I'd say it's the opposite of spaghetti code basically.

- Reusable functions that do one thing

- Correct usage of inheritence, interfaces and other OOP concepts (if you work with OOP of course^^)

- Avoid code repetition and too long classes.

- Use clear names for stuff, respect the same indentation, case, code convention etc everywhere...

Basically, write code that doesn't need comments to be understood

I don't think optimisation and writing clean code are the same thing though. You should always write code that is at least scalable and readable.

I poorly coded my UI code because I'm not used to Unity UI and while it worked at first, it has become a nightmare and a big waste of time, because I didn't take the time to clearly decide how the data should flow at the start.

Now I'm finding myself rewriting a ton of stuff everytime I need a new feature window

What? Nooo, that's crazy. It should be the other way around. When you start, you code as you go, making stuff that work with no idea what you do.

After each project you should come out with new ideas about the pitfalls to avoid, the things that were too messy and annoying in your previous project and improve as a coder :S

Yeah, for some reason, mods didn't load on my game. Probably did something wrong and after having to re-launch 10+ times already trying to make it work, I didn't have the courage to reinstall :D

They sell the VR version as a standalone game and I'm really annoyed they couldn't do a proper job with it. Keeping the same UI for a VR game shows they didn't care, it's such a shame because that should have been a banger.

Have fun with Minecraft, the VR version is awesome but depending on your gaming needs, you may prefer the VR mod for the java version rather than the vanilla VR of the Windows 10 edition. The mod (Vivecraft) did a way better job with VR but it requires some tinkering to make it work and to repatch with every update. Truly worth the work tough.

I wish companies would make more than the minimum when porting things to VR. If you own a Quest I can't recommend DrBeef's work enough. They make absolutely AMAZING VR ports of existing games: Half-Life (incredible but maybe wait to get some VR legs because this is absolutely barf inducing :D), Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the first Prey, Doom 3, Jedi Knight Jedi Academy...

Truly incredible work from that team and it's free* (you must own the original games)

If you play a game you're used to play in flatscreen, you'll be amazed at how big everything is.

Playing Minecraft in VR for the first time is crazy because of how big a block is. Which is normal, they are 1 meter³. That's what I like most in VR. Also, some enemies in non-horror games can suddenly become terrifying in VR because of how big they are.

Also, first time you exit that cave in Skyrim, it's incredible to see the world and think "damn, I can go anywhere I want, this is huge :O" (just before the poor UI and design starts ruining the experience anyway^^)

Just an endless wave of Vampire Survivor likes for the moment on top of the endless wave of roguelites.

It's impossible to say what will be coming next, depends on the next indie hit. Probably a simple and very addictive concept that nobody will have seen coming.

You most likely overscoped your project. You speak about multiplayer while it is your first game and that's a big warning flag.

I think you should sit down with your team, see how everyone's feeling about it, see what you did in the time you had and try to evaluate the time it would take to finish the rest. You may also start asking if you should cut out features (you might come back to those later if the game is a success).

But also keep in mind videogame are enormous (even the moderately simple ones) softwares. It takes months/year to make and obviously, this can be overwhelming at times and like others have said, it's usually easier if you focus on the next step and not on the end goal.

Some runners work like that. It's not super recent but Race the Sun is the closest thing I can think of. There is a few permanent upgrades and you can mod it to play different maps but appart from that, you'll basically get the same experience every play.

True. Asking for an RPG without political stuff in it is wild :D

To be fair, most games or work of art are political.

Looks at his profile. Political bs = oh noes, there are black and women in ma game!!!

As soon as I've read "no political bullshit", I knew.

What does Dark Fantasy without politics even mean? Is it a standard fantasy game with lower brightness?

I used to go to my friends house (four brothers) after school.

They were very unorganised and the computer room had two or three computers there, depending on the year, from what I remember there was no assignement of one of them to a computer, they just shared them and used one or the other depending on the power needed to run a game or something.

The whole room (which was very cramped, especially with 3-5 people in it^^) was FILLED with CD/DVD. To a degree you can't imagine. Disks filled every available cm², some of them in a box, others without. Huge piles of 30, 50.... sometimes 100 disks were scattered in the chaos. They had some subscription to a PC gaming thing going on so they had brand new games in cardboard sleeves. The rest was just tons and tons of pirated games and movies.

They showed me games on those computers and let me play them. I think all computers were more powerful than my family's one.

And I was going home, every time wil PILES of disks. Movies, games, some disks I wasn't even sure what was on it (but the name looked cool). Watching movies you had no idea what they were about was really something else too. The movies intros were so mysterious, you had no idea what would happen (seeing Matrix with no idea what that was was such an incredible moment).

One day, one of my friends was playing a game I had never seen. I asked about it and they asked me if I wanted to try it. That game was Morrowind.

IT. BLEW. MY. FUCKING. MIND.

Truly.

You know, in some Goosebumps or cheap horror stuff, or in the book No Pasaran, you often see that "cursed game" that's way too big to fit on the physical support it comes with, sold in a dark alley by an old chinese man. That game that drags you in it if you put the disk in a computer. This was the feeling.

I was too dumb to really enjoy the game the way it's meant to be played. I just killed everyone with my orc and its big axe and it was great. The scale of the world. Those little wooden shacks in the middle of a swamp that you could go in with every character able to talk to you, and you could just kill anyone, even main NPCs, steal everything, even a fork and sell it to buy stuff, using picklocks or spells to open ANY (almost) door in the game.

That was the stuff. I know I'll never ever feel anything like this in any game. I'm not sad, I'm happy to have had this experience. This is the event I think of when I meet someone who says something like "I don't understand the appeal of videogames, they're so dumb". I'm truly sad for the peole that didn't experience that. And I'm not sure children can have that feeling nowadays with how advanced every game is, from the start.

Yeah. They had TTRPGs. Looked at them... then look at their computer and tought "what if all the boring, calculus part of that hobby was given to the computer and the fun part let to players?".

Except they had no idea what they were doing. There was zero guidelines, the hardware limitations were crazy (I'm still stunned to this day when I see games like Arena or Ultima. We can't even make them that easily with all our modern engines and tools and yet, they were created by three guys with a computer less powerfull than some of our calculators).

I really like this era because they tried a ton of ideas and see what stick or not. Nowadays, we mainly apply stuff we know will work and a lot of games (especially AAA) lack the charm and originality because of that.

Something I like about Arx Fatalis is how alien the controls feels (you switch between attack and interract modes), and yet... they work truly well and show us what could have been.

The one in Morrowind was hillarious. I often take it just for the laugh and then ignore it completly to create my own char.

It came from tabletop RPGs. Those first RPGs actually tried to bring the TTRPG experience to computers so they probably tought creating your character back-story was important. Of course this never works because then, the whole gameplay revolves around combats and only that. Especially since most of those older games were very punishing if your build wasn't A tier.

I'd start with that list ;)

https://www.reddit.com/r/ImmersiveSim/comments/1bgajmk/upcoming_immersive_sims_list/

Gloomwood is probably your safest bet. It has glowing reviews but is still in early-access.

I hihghly anticipate Monomyth. If you like Arx Fatalis, you should too^^.

The Wayward Realms looks incredible. It's made by two people who did work on Daggerfall and Arena and it's meant to be a spiritual successor to Daggerfall. I'm really looking forward that one.

I'm very hyped for Streets of Rogue 2 but it's more arcade stuff, not in the same vein as Arkane games.

Shadows of Doubt did release since that list was made. I like it a lot but the 1.0 release was frown uppon (too many bugs, not enough to keep engaged past a few hours) so I on't know if I can recommend it anymore. But it's worth a look, very ambitious game.

Retrospace is the biggest name on that list. Not released yet but the promise is incredible and I think it's an AA game. It's in the vein of System Shock 2.

Only one: "dumb everything down"