Show HN: Mazelit - My wife and I released our first game
About a year ago my wife and I, both closing in on 40, quit our jobs at Red Hat to start a games company and learn game development. Many things happened along the road, and about a week ago we released our first (small) game on Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2816120/Mazelit/
The demo is free to play up to level 8 (the final game plays up to level 80) and we'd appreciate any feedback you have, whether it's for the store page or the game itself.
We made the game in Godot 4.2 in roughly 3 months and I was working full time next to it. Since we ran into a bunch of roadblocks, we decided to also offer the entire source code up as a DLC in case someone wants to go look how we implemented the game, mod the game, or compile it for a different platform. The only thing we can't redistribute with the game code is the Steamworks SDK, which is available for download from Steam. (The game minus integration is fully runnable without the SDK, though.)
Cheers and happy weekend!
159 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] threadThat being said, it is an engine that works and is used by enough people that you'll find bugs reported on the things that bother you, so you'll at least know if something is broken.
We found that doing as much as possible in GDScript and as little as possible in the editor is the way to go. The only time we had performance problems was when adding nodes (for some reason adding nodes is insanely slow). The multithreading is also still in need of work, but thread groups will, hopefully, solve the problem in the future.
We are currently looking into Bevy and Fyrox for BlockBawks since it needs a custom simulation engine, but we are still unsure. (It currently has a semi-working version in Godot, but spawning several 100k nodes is creating problems and will need optimizations.)
Make sure you've properly licensed the code, people have no conscience sometimes and will release your game again without crediting you...
As far as people re-releasing our game is concerned, the source code DLC is licensed under the Steam Subscriber Agreement with a few added grants for mods and making videos, so legally nobody is allowed to re-release our game as a whole or even reuse the non-MIT parts without asking first. If anyone wants to re-use parts of the game in their own game, they are encouraged to contact us. (We definitely won't make a fuss about minor parts of the code when asked, but re-releasing the entire game is out of the question.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_%281982_video_game%29
I can't speak to it in general, that's just my 2c on the matter/issue without really knowing too terribly much about the game (or game development in generally, really, I'm just a consumer here! XD). <3 :'))))
Games going on sale at launch also makes me assume its just because no one is buying it, but apparently more people buy games at launch if it says they're on sale. I don't get it.
If your product isn’t selling, (paradoxical though it may sound) raising the price can be a much better idea than lowering it and potentially both tarnishing your brand and making less profit at the same time.
And this is without even considering the notion of Veblen goods, which is an even more extreme example.
It’s not that the high(er) price itself makes the product desirable — it just happens to help tell the right story about the product.
As somebody who has released several games and apps where some did well and others were crickets it seems like a combination of randomness/timing, visibility (related to the previous), and simply - is it good or not? If your game is amazing people will jump through hoops to try to play it. You can sell a great game for $40 or $60, and a very great game for $60 then $15/month to keep playing.
But you can't raise the price on a low-quality product and expect a great sales response. A lot of investor types say this out of hopes, or because they want that racehorse to run faster, but IME it's: Is it good? Charge market. Otherwise, free or freemium, you might even have to give away the code to get developer interest to help.
Well… obviously.
My point wasn’t that raising the price is always a good idea; it was that it sometimes is. It’s worth mentioning because even the idea that it’s sometimes sensible is surprising to many.
But I’m talking about products you’d buy regularly rather than one-time purchases like games or music.
The point is, 2.99 is a "no think" price tag, while 9.99 is a "wishlist and consider when discounted" price tag.
Bu that's only my tl;dr of this blog post: https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/01/31/vampire-survivors-su...
A price of $3 may be an impulse buy for some people, while a price of $9.99 may be a pause to evaluate that against other purchases.
Customers with higher disposable incomes can be targeted with additional content (DLC) or digital merchandise.
Additionally, and perhaps perversely, much of a games sale volume tends to be generated during seasonal promotions (Steam Summer/Winter Sale, etc).
Pricing a game at $3 doesn't give you anywhere to go in terms of a discount.
That’s what every customer wants. But game companies that sell at $3.99 don’t tend to release many high-quality sequels.
I am curious what roadblocks you ran into if you'd like to share more about your Godot experience.
The worst part was when I had to rip out a bunch of testing code that used @tool for release as it seemed to cause issues when doing a release build. The engine is generally not great when you want to follow clean software engineering (e.g. dependency injection is not possible, I opened a proposal to that end here[1]).
[1]: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/8850
With the source code DLC it should be possible to compile everything for a Mac regardless, even if it's a bit of work. If we make enough money from the game, we might reinvest it into a Mac. :)
The number of sales is, however, negligeable - Mac has just 1.38% Steam users
PirateSoftware told [1] that the Mac was 0.02% of their sales - one in 5000 sales (and thus he dropped Mac support)
Don't reinvest in Mac for sales before you do the math.
If you just want a Mac, get a Mac. If you don't want a Mac, don't bother
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qRQX9fgrI4s
I would happily test my software on macOS and Safari, but I'm not paying for that privilege. So a lot of my stuff just doesn't work. But Windows, Edge (and previously IE) and Chrome and Linux are all easy to test on so I do even though personally I only use Linux and Firefox.
At one point it sort of looks like a modern version of snake. But that it is not.
It sort looks like they are running over a circuit board. What are those green v shapes mean?
Then perhaps Pacman Seems a bit Pacman. Gobble energy pellets?
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2816120/announcements/detai...
Why did you decide to go with Godot instead of Unreal or Unity?
Are you happy with your decision?
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I recognize and agree with the dislike for this, but if it's inaccurate, I'd love a correction.
Analytics and optimization are things the eu is trying to prevent, so of course you get a popup.
But even GitHub, who proudly declared they had removed all non-essential cookies https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/ added them back https://github.com/github/site-policy/pull/582/files and now if you click either "Manage cookies" or "Do not share my personal information" at the bottom of the page, you'll see they have the common "Required", "Analytics", "Social Media", "Advertising" categories.
(Bummed that they have the Advertising category.)
Also, I'm seeing headlines like "Are Internet Cookies About To Crumble?" (not really, but you know how tech media is!) but I wonder how much longer cookies are even going to be relevant.
When's the last time you did this:
For most modern developers, the answer is never! They're not really used in modern development by us. Apparently about 40% of websites use cookies, and it's almost always for ad re-targeting - the only reason they make you auth again after clearing is really to auth you with the cookie, your auth with the site is usually just HTTP requests and doesn't require cookies.TLDR I think they're going away anyway, they're passe and it makes too much sense for Google to obsolete competitors by suddenly dropping them. GDPR calling out cookies is like the American law that bans "magic mushrooms" - they should have been more specific in identifying a specific unlawful behavior.
Upvoted for the good info btw (it just didn't do anything lol) thanks for sharing
janosdebugs, could you comment on the tech behind it?
[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3648233 [2]: https://spacy.io/
https://github.com/stassa/louise
The referenced papers include some examples on learning a simple CFG for a small set of Magic: the Gathering examples. More recent work looks at solving mazes and taking names (under review).
One of our PhDs is working to implement all this in Rust btw.
Sorry for advertising my work on your post :)