Tips for all wannabe game developers, compact and useful

CobraPL

NTR PALADIN
Donor
Sep 3, 2016
1,970
3,885
Hi guys, how about making one thread with wise info from experienced gamedevs what to do and what not to do in (adult) gamedev? So, if you know something, you realized, you experienced, espiecially bad decisions to avoid and great solutions to use - please share.

So, in other words, wannabe developer, or even current one could just read this thread and learn some useful info.

Try to be short, specific. You could post both general advices and very specific coding/rendering/etc. problems. Do not shitpost, if you ask questions, do it REALLY related only in this thread. There were few similar threads already, I'll try to copy/paste IMHO worthy content (or link to it) from there in next post in this thread.
 
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thecardinal

Latina midget, sub to my Onlyfans - cash for gash
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2017
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If you use Daz3d, find a render method or style that works for you. And then if possible, use Batch Renderer to render while you sleep as well.

And for any new devs: Listen to constructive criticism and feedback, you will most likely overlook a few things in your 0.1 and some helpful people will point them out. If you have a Patreon, don't expect the money to start rolling in.
 
D

Dr PinkCake

Guest
Guest
I'm still an adept in this world, but here are valuable tips that I wished I knew from day 1.

General advice:
- Don't be afraid to ask questions. Many devs love to help.
- Listen to justified negative feedback and adapt. Your critics are the most valuable source of information you'll find (at least when it's constructive criticism).
- Don't get defensive of your work. Your game is likely a passion project and it hurts to be critiqued, but there are always people who like what you do. These people are your target audience.
- Spell check! It is very important and it will make your game appear much more professional.

Patreon advice:
- Work hard on your presentation; look at successful devs for inspiration.
- Be honest and transparent with your patrons.
- Set reasonable goals and rewards.
- Offer a lot of screenshots of your game. Remember that you are trying to sell your game with your presentation.

DAZ advice:
- If possible, render at double your target resolution (e.g. for Full HD -> render in 4k) using fewer iterations and downsample. It is faster and looks much better than rendering at your target resolution.
- Learn how to use the spot render tool, it can be used to re-render spots of your image where clipping occur. Fix these spots by merging the images in photoshop or other similar software.
- Use the AUX viewport in Iray mode when testing different settings for lighting/poses etc. It is much faster than doing a trial render as it caches all resources once instead of every time.
- In render settings>Progressive Rendering: set Rendering Quality Enable to OFF. It is a timehog.
- As carnalcardinal said, batch render during night. A good script that is super easy to use is "Render-a-lot" by Poison.
- If you need to decrease render times, hide assets not in view and increase lighting. You can dim the scene using photoshop or similar software.
- If you are experiencing black lines in your character's face, it's likely the hair that is clipping. Increase the forehead depth by 5% and it should disappear.
- Learn how to use primitives to light your scene. Ghost lighting is also another useful technique to master.

Ren'Py advice:
- Get a Ren'Py decompile script and decompile a game you think is good. Study the code to learn how to do certain things.
- Don't be lazy when you compile and distribute your game. You can easily create PC/Linux/Mac/Android versions in Ren'Py. It's an excellent downstream application.
- Test your game a lot.
- Get yourself at least one reliable beta tester. Ask around in the forums.

But most importantly, HAVE FUN! This is the key to having a successful product. You must enjoy what you do to 100%.
Good luck!
 

IM6

Erisa's Summer
Game Developer
Aug 8, 2017
431
1,626
DAZ tip:
If you get the "Shadow Terminator" issue where black squiggles show up on your character's forehead when they're far from location 0,0,0, just parent everything in the scene to that character and move them to location 0,0,0. Weird but at least 95% effective
 

CobraPL

NTR PALADIN
Donor
Sep 3, 2016
1,970
3,885


Yup, I know. It is about writing books by AAA author. But still, you may find something for you :)

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience.
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes “The meeting will be held at seven o’clock” because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know. ‘Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.’ There, by God! Don’t you feel better?”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence “He closed the door firmly.” It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.” “While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. “

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”

7. Read, read, read. “You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “Most exercise facilities are now equipped with TVs, but TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhard on CNN while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards on MSNBC, or the sports blowhards on ESPN, it’s time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I’m afraid, that Geraldo, Keigh Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success. “When I’m asked for ‘the secret of my success’ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. It’s a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.”

12. Write one word at a time. “A radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply—’One word at a time’—seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t. In the end, it’s always that simple. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord Of The Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing lik John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”

15. Dig. “When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.”

16. Take a break. “If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings that it is to kill your own.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”
 

GuyFreely

Active Member
May 2, 2018
663
2,121
I have a long thread on some pitfalls I see in adult games. Here is the short version: Don't waste the player's time.

I don't think you should ever be worried about game length. You should be worried about delivering an enjoyable experience. This is sort of the "all killer, no filler" mentality. If you have thirty minutes of enjoyable content, make a thirty minute game. Don't make a two hour game with thirty minutes of enjoyable content.

The long meandering thread:
 

thecardinal

Latina midget, sub to my Onlyfans - cash for gash
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2017
1,491
4,425
@GuyFreely That's how I ended up choosing to run my game. All stuff, no fluff. Every scene is important, no inventory or stat system, no game overs. Just an experience determined by your choices in-game.
 

CheekyGimp

Active Member
Donor
Game Developer
Mar 8, 2018
841
5,170
I'm still an adept in this world, but here are valuable tips that I wished I knew from day 1.

General advice:
- Don't be afraid to ask questions. Many devs love to help.
- Listen to justified negative feedback and adapt. Your critics are the most valuable source of information you'll find (at least when it's constructive criticism).
- Don't get defensive of your work. Your game is likely a passion project and it hurts to be critiqued, but there are always people who like what you do. These people are your target audience.
- Spell check! It is very important and it will make your game appear much more professional.

Patreon advice:
- Work hard on your presentation; look at successful devs for inspiration.
- Be honest and transparent with your patrons.
- Set reasonable goals and rewards.
- Offer a lot of screenshots of your game. Remember that you are trying to sell your game with your presentation.

DAZ advice:
- If possible, render at double your target resolution (e.g. for Full HD -> render in 4k) using fewer iterations and downsample. It is faster and looks much better than rendering at your target resolution.
- Learn how to use the spot render tool, it can be used to re-render spots of your image where clipping occur. Fix these spots by merging the images in photoshop or other similar software.
- Use the AUX viewport in Iray mode when testing different settings for lighting/poses etc. It is much faster than doing a trial render as it caches all resources once instead of every time.
- In render settings>Progressive Rendering: set Rendering Quality Enable to OFF. It is a timehog.
- As carnalcardinal said, batch render during night. A good script that is super easy to use is "Render-a-lot" by Poison.
- If you need to decrease render times, hide assets not in view and increase lighting. You can dim the scene using photoshop or similar software.
- If you are experiencing black lines in your character's face, it's likely the hair that is clipping. Increase the forehead depth by 5% and it should disappear.
- Learn how to use primitives to light your scene. Ghost lighting is also another useful technique to master.

Ren'Py advice:
- Get a Ren'Py decompile script and decompile a game you think is good. Study the code to learn how to do certain things.
- Don't be lazy when you compile and distribute your game. You can easily create PC/Linux/Mac/Android versions in Ren'Py. It's an excellent downstream application.
- Test your game a lot.
- Get yourself at least one reliable beta tester. Ask around in the forums.

But most importantly, HAVE FUN! This is the key to having a successful product. You must enjoy what you do to 100%.
Good luck!
Excellent advice. I never knew about the spot render tool (don't know how I missed that), so thanks for the tip. Regarding rendering at higher resolution and then downscaling, I've seen this tip mentioned before but never tried it. For Full HD (using 4K renders) what settings do you recommend (e.g. 80% convergence ?) to get equal or better quality than rendering in the actual required (Full HD) resolution ?
 

CheekyGimp

Active Member
Donor
Game Developer
Mar 8, 2018
841
5,170
Make sure you are happy with All characters and All environments before publishing your first instalment because once you commit you are stuck with these. If I could re-start my game there's a specific character/model that I would have changed and at least two environments (that are horrible to light) that I would not have used. I could have had a tragic fire burn the environments and kill the character in an early episode but that would have been too contrived and off- plot :).
Also , if you plan on publishing via Patreon, build up a buffer of episodes before releasing. I didn't, so a fair bit of pressure every month to get a decent release out.
 
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thecardinal

Latina midget, sub to my Onlyfans - cash for gash
Game Developer
Jul 28, 2017
1,491
4,425
Make sure you are happy with All characters and All environments before publishing your first instalment because once you commit you are stuck with these. If I could re-start my game there's a specific character/model that I would have changed and at least two environments (that are horrible to light) that I would not have used. I could have had a tragic fire burn the environments and kill the character in an early episode but that would have been too contrived and off- plot :).
Also , if you plan on publishing via Patreon, build up a buffer of episodes before releasing. I didn't, so a fair bit of pressure every month to get a decent release out.
Think of yourself as a showrunner on TV. If someone needs to be recast, recast them. Or show patrons both and give them a choice to change it or leave it.

This last part is something I just started. Charge pledges per release, not by month. No deadline gives you a few extra days to polish and fix as opposed to sending out an inferior product just to make the deadline.
 

redknight00

I want to break free
Staff member
Moderator
Modder
Apr 30, 2017
4,532
19,975
Always keep moving forward, if a render is not perfect or you can't get that script the way you want, maybe it's time to settle for good enough and move. With volume of work comes experience, and with it better results, what doesn't help is spending more time on a challenge that you may or may not be skilled enough to overcome at a given time.
 
D

Dr PinkCake

Guest
Guest
Regarding rendering at higher resolution and then downscaling, I've seen this tip mentioned before but never tried it. For Full HD (using 4K renders) what settings do you recommend (e.g. 80% convergence ?) to get equal or better quality than rendering in the actual required (Full HD) resolution ?
Then you were like me, I heard it but didn't bother to try it. Trust me, you really want to try it!
Never let convergence be the determining factor. The render settings depend on your hardware; I have a 1080 Ti so if you have less you will have to increase the settings a bit.
I know that some artists may be reluctant to give away their settings but I'm not. These are my setttings:
Max samples 600 - 1000 (600 for brighter scenes, 1000 for darker), Max time 7200 seconds (adjust to ~10000 seconds for lesser than 1080 Ti card), Resolution 4k, Rendering quality enable OFF, Max path length 7, Nominal luminance 400-500. That's it for DAZ.

Then you need to do the postwork downscaling. At its simplest form you just change the resolution to full HD. In Photoshop it's Ctrl+Alt+I, 1920x1080, Ok. But I do more to take care of noise and to enhance the quality.
All the steps below are put into a Macro (So I just press F5 and everything is executed for an image).
1. Filter>Reduce Noise, Strength 10, Details 10%, Color noise 25%, sharpen details 0%
2. Resize image to full HD
3. Smart sharpen, 60%, 0.6px
4. Curves, simple S-curve, opacity 60%
5. Levels, Low tones set to 0.1, mid tones set to 1.05

Result from DAZ with just downsampling:
downsample.jpg
Result from DAZ with downsampling and retouch steps above:
retouch.jpg
 

anne O'nymous

I'm not grumpy, I'm just coded that way.
Modder
Donor
Respected User
Jun 10, 2017
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Don't neglect Honey Studio (or whatever studio from an illusion's game) just because you'll use Daz3D for the CG.
All visual artists start with a draft of their work, and Honey Studio is an easy and fast way to have a draft of your future 3D scenes. A scene never look, nor feel, the same in your mind and when you look at it ; having these previews will ease your work when you'll code the related sequence. It will help you adjust the dialog lines, see if this scene feel right or wrong before/after that one, and globally see if the whole sequence feel like you want it to feel.
In the end, you'll loose way less time redoing a draft with Honey Studio, than redoing the scene with Daz3D. Plus, when you'll finally create the scene in Daz3D you'll have more than just a approximate representation of it in your mind ; you'll already know what you effectively want to reach.
If you aren't the one making the CG, those previews will also say more than words to describe the scene to the artist.
 
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CobraPL

NTR PALADIN
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Sep 3, 2016
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- a lot of tips for writers/story makers.
 

zerozip0

Member
May 23, 2018
381
617
I like to do my research before I turn an idea into action and the past week or so I have been toying with an idea that I might just act upon. Said idea is this; Starting a guide for us who have no experience at all with creating games. I believe the intent of this thread's creation is about the same as what I had in mind; Teaching or learning how to create games piece by piece. What I would hope to achieve in the end is a sort of library of small guides on how to do specific things related to game making. A guide/library/thread that would contain everything someone would need in order to make their ideas into an actual games. The closest thing I have found so far on this forum is " " by @Bloo .
 

Cigzag

Member
Feb 20, 2020
234
495
I'm still an adept in this world, but here are valuable tips that I wished I knew from day 1.

General advice:
- Don't be afraid to ask questions. Many devs love to help.
- Listen to justified negative feedback and adapt. Your critics are the most valuable source of information you'll find (at least when it's constructive criticism).
- Don't get defensive of your work. Your game is likely a passion project and it hurts to be critiqued, but there are always people who like what you do. These people are your target audience.
- Spell check! It is very important and it will make your game appear much more professional.

Patreon advice:
- Work hard on your presentation; look at successful devs for inspiration.
- Be honest and transparent with your patrons.
- Set reasonable goals and rewards.
- Offer a lot of screenshots of your game. Remember that you are trying to sell your game with your presentation.

DAZ advice:
- If possible, render at double your target resolution (e.g. for Full HD -> render in 4k) using fewer iterations and downsample. It is faster and looks much better than rendering at your target resolution.
- Learn how to use the spot render tool, it can be used to re-render spots of your image where clipping occur. Fix these spots by merging the images in photoshop or other similar software.
- Use the AUX viewport in Iray mode when testing different settings for lighting/poses etc. It is much faster than doing a trial render as it caches all resources once instead of every time.
- In render settings>Progressive Rendering: set Rendering Quality Enable to OFF. It is a timehog.
- As carnalcardinal said, batch render during night. A good script that is super easy to use is "Render-a-lot" by Poison.
- If you need to decrease render times, hide assets not in view and increase lighting. You can dim the scene using photoshop or similar software.
- If you are experiencing black lines in your character's face, it's likely the hair that is clipping. Increase the forehead depth by 5% and it should disappear.
- Learn how to use primitives to light your scene. Ghost lighting is also another useful technique to master.

Ren'Py advice:
- Get a Ren'Py decompile script and decompile a game you think is good. Study the code to learn how to do certain things.
- Don't be lazy when you compile and distribute your game. You can easily create PC/Linux/Mac/Android versions in Ren'Py. It's an excellent downstream application.
- Test your game a lot.
- Get yourself at least one reliable beta tester. Ask around in the forums.

But most importantly, HAVE FUN! This is the key to having a successful product. You must enjoy what you do to 100%.
Good luck!
Look how far you've come, now.
 
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Girm Ork

Member
Game Developer
Aug 15, 2019
181
180
Hey, nice tips, thank you all.
I noticed that there are a lot of DAZ/RenPy/Patreon tips. But what about devs who are not making 3D-render visual novels?
Could you give me some tips for my current project?
 

Kinderalpha

Pleb
Donor
Dec 2, 2019
198
261
Hey, nice tips, thank you all.
I noticed that there are a lot of DAZ/RenPy/Patreon tips. But what about devs who are not making 3D-render visual novels?
Could you give me some tips for my current project?
Looks spectacular thus far. I'm gonna be brutal though because it's raining outside. Your UI/UX design is suffering. Don't let that hold back all the hard work you put into your 3D world. Spend some time or resources on designing an intuitive and complimentary interface that doesn't contrast so harshly. UI/UX makes or breaks a lot of games.

Otherwise, there are a lot of GDC talks in line with what you're asking. Since GDC talks are generally focused toward more traditional games, they're very fitting for what your project is. Highly recommend listening to some about UI/UX.
 
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