Greetings, Lightbringers!
Welcome to this week’s dev blog! Hope you’re all well 🤗
It’s been quite a long time since I embarked on this adventure and decided to start the project that would later become Empire of Ember. After 5 years of full-time development, I sometimes still feel overwhelmed when I think about how it all started, the progress I’ve made, the changes the game has gone through, and all the challenges I’ve had to face as a self-funded indie developer.
Today I want to take a look back and share with you a few development tips featuring things I have learned during all this time- most of which, I must say, I learned the hard way! If you are a game developer yourself, you might find some of these issues familiar and can perhaps relate to them. Also, if you’re just starting your game dev journey or are planning to, here are some things to take into account that I hope will be useful for your project, and if you’re just curious about the process of making games, then I hope you find these enjoyable to read!
Here are the 10 game dev tips I wish someone had shared with me when I started:
- Sometimes cheaper is more expensive. People who work for free or ask for an unusually low rate usually have a reason for that. If the work is done wrong, you lose the time and money with the first person, then have to hire the more expensive person later anyway.
- If it’s not working, act quickly. If you feel like a hire isn’t going in the right direction, fire them early. It is better for both of you to split early, on good terms, rather than after acrimony has built up.
- Think twice about Early Access. I thought Early Access would be a free pass on Steam, a way to get feedback without hurting my future sales prospects. However, Steam treats an Early Access launch as any other release, and when you leave EA they don’t give you that initial launch visibility again. Early funding is a bad idea for most developers, and should only be used if your game is basically already solid and you are sure it will sell.
- Professional QA matters. Hire a professional testing company prior to Early Access or launch. Empire of Ember worked fine on my computer, the way I play it. It also worked for about a dozen amateur testers I hired on freelance services. Despite this, I received a lot of negative reviews from people with lower end systems or who played in a non-typical way. Those thumbs down stay around forever. As they say, prevention is better than cure.
- Use a system of unbiased feedback. Don’t rely on friends, family, co-workers, or people you directly pay, as they won’t give you honest feedback about your design. You need to find people genuinely disconnected to write feedback, and it has to be done by paid professionals. A QA team or publisher can be very helpful for this.
- Don’t penny-pinch with your main working tool. Get the fastest computer you can, and keep it upgraded. The fastest SSD harddrive is especially useful. An extra $2,000 for a better computer pays for itself quickly in saved time.
- Understand your game engine’s limits. Any game engine can be optimized for two of three: ease of use, flexibility, and performance. Unity was optimized for ease of use and flexibility. This means some operations, such as animation events, are very slow and you aren’t warned of this in the manual. In Unity, you should profile new features so you fully understand the pitfalls before using them.
- Keep things organised. The default Unity development environment is just a starting point. Setup your tools first. I suggest having most of your game variables in an Excel file, use something like FMOD to manage sounds, use addressables to load assets in and out, and set up a shared component for all game objects, so you can do runtime lookups and queries. If you want analytics, understand what data the events expect. Set up a logging system with tags so you can find the data you are looking for.
- Unity assets can be unreliable. Nearly all Unity assets in the asset store, even 5 star rated, are not written by professional developers who use good coding practices. You might spend weeks integrating and using the asset, only to find out later it’s unreasonably slow, inflexible, or unreliable, and have to back track. Even with the best assets, the authors won’t necessarily support you when it really counts.
- Manage scope. Unity gets slower as your project gets larger, especially the code. Try to set up tools and solve the difficult technical problems either early on or in a separate project.
Hope you find these helpful! If you’re a game developer, do let us know what other tips you would have appreciated being given 😊
You can also share your advice and experiences with the community on our Discord server, and our Social Media channels, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.
Your feedback on the game is always welcome! Try Empire of Ember and leave us a review on Steam -or update your old review-, and rate other reviews if you find them useful ːsteamthumbsupːːsteamthisː
Please remember to wishlist and follow Empire of Ember on Steam, and let everyone know about the game.
Take care and have a fantastic week!