The Bump From A "Viral" Post

Getting the word out about a game is tough. Really tough. Try as you might the world is a full of games with "great ideas." The social reach needed for a successful game launch is a huge hurdle for small teams and maybe more so for hobby or solo developers like myself.

Over the last week or so I've posted and shared a GIF and a video of a low poly waterfall. I created the scene to test particle effects for use in my second game. I spent a little extra time making it look nice as I wanted it to be a real prototype - could I actually make a half decent water fall?

Based on the response, the answer is yes, yes I can make a half decent water fall.

The Numbers

I first posted the waterfall on twitter. As of writing this the tweet has been re-tweeted 18 times and been liked 42 times. This seemly earned me 10-20 new followers and maybe a few more over the next several days as the tweet continued to get some attention. Not bad but not viral.

A post on the low poly reddits earned over 500 up votes. One or two people asked questions and I was able to share more info about the game. My website (this site) also saw a bump of about an extra 100 views. Not bad, but still not viral.

Then 10 days or so later I posted on Imgur, a site I mostly use to share images with online friends. I posted the GIF and saw 60-70 up votes before heading to bed. Nothing too exciting. When I woke up the image had over 1000 votes and was featured somewhere on the front page. Imgur classified it as a "most viral" image - at least for a few minutes. 

As I type this post the image has almost 1200 up votes and 290,000 views! Wow. 

So what?

Those votes and views trigger a dopamine rush, but what did they really do for me? How did they move my game forward?

I'll be honest I wasn't prepared. My game's landing page is pretty basic. I was updating a few bits as all the views and up votes were rolling in. I didn't link the game right away, and probably only the last third of the views had access to more info about my game.

Oops. Maybe a big oops!

So the best that I can tell here's my gains from the imgur post:

• Twitter followers - nothing significant.
• YouTube - 7 or 8 followers
• Newsletter - 28 at last count
• Discord - 8 or 9 
• Website - 480 visits and 700 page views

These numbers are small... The Newsletter and Discord were the most exciting as both were essentially at zero before. I had "launched" the Discord server just a few days earlier with zero publicity and the newsletter gets almost no push from me.

While this activity felt good it's not the 1k, 10k or 100k people that I might need to launch a game "successfully," whatever that might mean. 

My Take Aways

I'm writing this post as much to share my experience as to organize my thoughts and what I learned in the process. For me this was a break through in the PR department, even if it's small. It helped me understand and get a feel for what success could look like. 

The value of a good image is worth so much. Sharing works in progress have their place, but maybe not with the general public. People say share and share often and don't wait until the game is finished to share your work. I think this is largely true, but I also think there is something to be said for taking a little extra time to polish what you are going to share. Just because you're excited doesn't mean that very many other people will be too.

Where's the balance? I'm not sure, but I have a better feel for it now after this experience.

Motion adds so much. I've read this over and over, but I'm not sure I really understood. I also shared an image of my river at the same time as the waterfall. The river has motion but it's much more subtle - it got almost no response! At this point I question sharing much of anything unless there is some form of motion. All of our social feeds are full of static images - some are amazing, but the images that have motion are so much more engaging.

Somehow I need to reproduce this "viral" post over and over! It's scary to think what it would take to get to the social reach needed for a "successful" game....

Resources: Processing, Consumption and Inventory

As a solo developer (of an admittedly over scoped game) relying on outside assets is a key to building a game "quickly" and efficiently. I'm not the type of person to subscribe to the idea that I need to build everything from scratch. I have no desire to build my own game engine, but I do understand why folks often prefer to roll their own solution.

I've become very skeptical of assets that run with the game. I have learned that editor tools are more reliable and don't come with performance downsides that many runtime assets do. I've tried using several assets that are overly bloated or have turned out to have poor performance. My snow shader and graphing tool came out of such experiences. It's a tricky to find the balance between using pre-made tools and rolling your own. There are pro's and con's both ways.

Game #2 will allow players to collect and use items - this will in fact be a key mechanic. This means that I need some kind of inventory solution. I did a little research on how to do the basics, but decided to also look at solutions on the Unity Asset Store. If nothing else the Asset Store can be a good source of ideas. 

As a Unity Plus subscriber I get discounts on a handful of assets. One of those assets is Inventory Pro. So I figured it was worth a look since I was shopping for a inventory solution and the reviews were nearly flawless. 

I watched the tutorials and did as much research as I could. While not "cheap" it's an asset that would take me several days if not weeks to reproduce even in the most basic of forms. Plus it has a level of polish that would take even more work on my part.  So why not give it a shot?

I made the purchase and spent some time playing around. My first impression was positive. It has a nice and easy to use editor. Out of the box it handles person inventory, vendors, looting, banks, a skill bar and two styles of crafting. It comes with a pretty decent default look too (but, I suspect almost any developer will want to modify it). What's not to like about it?

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Inventory Pro Editor - Item Editor

Inventory Pro also plays nice with several other popular third party add-ons. This includes Playmaker for those who don't want to dink around in C#. 

It also has custom functions for Behavior Designer which is a major plus in my book as I intend to use Behavior Designer as my AI engine. 

If you are intending on building game with a fairly typical or standard use of inventory then Inventory Pro should be on your short list of assets to check out. However, if your design has some non-standard uses you should keep reading. 

The Other Side of the Coin

As I continued to explore and think more about the custom needs my game was going to have I was becoming discouraged. The code base is all open source, which is greatly appreciated, but it feels like a mess of inherited classes and prefabs. Ugh. The documentation is decent, but doesn't do a great job of describing how to truly customize the tools. The learning curve is moderately steep.

The odd blog post by the developer were very helpful and cut hours out of my work. The needed info is out there, but it can be a little hard to find. 

When trying to setup a scene you can't simply drag and drop UI prefabs in the scene. They don't easily slide into a scene because there are too many connections that need to be made. Too many prefabs that need to be dropped into the inspector or combination of components that are required. It's certainly possible, but it's not easy.  Adding the UI to a scene is best done by copying from a demo scene and then turning off the parts you don't need - a custom editor to add the parts you want and get them all connected correctly would be a major plus and make the product that much more user friendly. 

There is a cost to using someone else's code base... That shouldn't be a real surprise. I got frustrated enough with Inventory Pro that I spent a few hours working to roll my own custom inventory code. It was all going well until I began to write a custom editor to create content. I went running back to Inventory Pro and I'm very glad I did.

Custom Windows

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I mentioned a chicken, so why not include a image of my chicken?

For Game #2 I need some custom windows for resource consumers and resource processors. A resource consumer could be something such as a steam engine from my previous post that may take in wood or coal and produce a more usable form of energy.  While resource processors may be something such as a windmill that will process corn into corn meal that can be used to feed your chickens, i.e. turn items into other items.

Each of these custom windows is easy enough to create from a purely UI perspective, but coding them took a bit more especially as I was to digging through someone else's code. 

A resource consumer is very similar to a vendor in that individual objects in a scene will have there own collection that is loaded into a common UI. The main differences being that the resource consumer needs to do something with the items even when the player is not currently using that object, i.e. a steam engine should continue to burn coal and produce energy when the player is busy elsewhere and I don't want to be selling coal to a steam engine...

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A snippet of the some of the custom code - All in all there's several hundred lines in the new classes some is copied other bits are mine

Rather than inherit from the vendor classes, which would bring functionality I didn't want, I chose to essentially copy the vendor scripts (ItemCollection and Trigger) and modify the scripts once I had basic functionality working.  The result was a custom trigger script, custom UI window (damned ugly at the moment), a custom collection script that controls what is shown in the UI as well as a base class resource consumer that is designed to be extended for a variety of resource consumer objects (steam engine, chicken feeder, etc). 

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I promise it won't be this ugly in a final build

The resource processor is a bit different. At its core resource processing is very similar to crafting. Items go in and products come out - all following a blueprint. Given that Inventory Pro has a built in crafting system it seemed worth the time to fight through the code to create a custom "crafting" window that would meet my design needs. 

The idea here is a that a player (or NPC) drops off some items to be processed and it gets turned into a different item that can later be collected. This means that the UI needs to have an input and a output collection/inventory. It's also required that each individual scene object has it's own input and output collections to that get loaded to the UI when the player interacts with the object. A final two requirements is that the resource processor continues to work when the UI is closed and that the products get assigned to the correct scene object when the processing is done so the product doesn't get lost and the player can collect it later.

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A snippet of the Custom Trigger

This last requirement was the biggest hurdles and required about an hour of hunting through code to follow the flow of the information. Inventory Pro has a "craft info" class that contains all the basic information which gets passed through about 8 different methods before an new inventory object is actually created.

I almost lost it at this point. Lots of deep breaths needed. 

To get it all working required an addition to the CraftInfo class to track what object had ordered the product to be created. This allows a finished product to look up where it was supposed to go and assign it to the appropriate collection. 

Custom Inventory Items

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Default Item Types - Plus 3 of My own

While I found the process of adding custom windows and functionality challenging and frustrating, adding custom inventory item types was easy and almost fun. Out of the box Inventory Pro comes with several default item types, but anything beyond the typical RPG will likely require custom item types.

Different types have different properties (oh, shocking). These properties are not particularly well documented or at least I haven't found the documentation. Thankfully most are self explanatory. 

Game #2 is not the typical RPG with the collection, crafting or upgrading of gear playing a central role. Rather most inventory will have some use in creating something in the world. This might be a shovel that is used to prepare the ground to plant a crop or coal that will be used by a steam engine to power an industrial building. Inventory Pro's items all inherit from a parent class that calls a Use() function. This function can easily be overridden to perform any actions needed. The Use() function is called when the player uses the object. Which can be done from inside the inventory or from the skill bar.

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A sample custom USE() function for a tool item type.

The Use() function returns an integer that indicates whether the object can be used.

In the case shown using the tool will call an outside public function that toggles a mode of the game (i.e. use a shovel and you can dig to plant seeds). 

The inventory item can also have public variables that will be displayed in the Inventory Pro editor. For example the Tool Type enum can be set for each inventory item of this type inside the editor which makes for easy and organized content creation. 

The ease of creating custom inventory items was a stark contrast to making custom windows and triggers. Why can't the rest be this easy?

The Final Verdict - Inventory Pro

Inventory Pro caused me a good amount frustration, plenty of swearing but also gave me a much more functional inventory system than I could have created on my own.

If you are looking to build a game with non-standard use of inventory and aren't comfortable with C# then you should probably look else where or be willing to hire a programmer to code up some custom solutions. 

But if you don't need custom functionality or if you are comfortable with C# and reading someone else's code then Inventory Pro can solve your inventory needs far quicker than you'll be able to roll your own solution. Mucking around with the custom windows wasn't particularly fun, but the end product was worth the time and money.

Energy is Everything

Game #2's design is fairly well established in my head and on paper, but I'm still very much in the stage of exploring what I can reasonably do from a technical perspective - not to mention from a time perspective. (Read as: I'm trimming down the scope by figuring out what I can or can't do.) I'm running through the big picture list of features to make sure that each can be implemented in a way that I like and fits the vision for the game. This is an iterative process. As features are implemented other aspects of the game are getting adjusted or redesigned, but that's not exactly news worthy...

Energy

A core feature/game mechanic of Game #2 is going to be energy. Energy is everything. With more energy we become more productive. With more efficient use of energy we can do more with less. The use of energy is what allows for modern society to function and, to hint at a game mechanic, use of more energy allows for a higher standard of living. 

There's of course a dark side to energy consumption.Increases in efficiency allows more to be produced with less. That might be less workers, less energy or less effort. All of which improve the quality of life. While this can drive down prices, increase production and consumption it also has the effect of higher unemployment or underemployment - i.e. the current stat of the rust belt. 

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A rigged and animated steam engine model. This was also the first animation I'd ever rendered in Blender - GIF made with GIMP.

This give and take concept is something I very much want to explore in Game #2. The first step of which means I need to develop an energy mechanic. The mechanic requires the "generation" of energy (the physics teacher in me cringes writing that), the distribution of the energy, and the "consumption" of that energy.

The game is likely to be set in the industrial revolution time period. So... Steam engines!

Steam engines can provide a local source of energy. They can be fed with wood, charcoal or coal - really anything that'll burn. All of which can be found or produced easily with low tech methods. Steam engines can be built on site in a variety of sizes. Seems like a win. So off to Blender I went to see if I could produce something that I liked. 

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A view of the rig in Blender.

Nothing profound in the modeling department, but rigging and animating is still pretty new to me. I didn't want to "fudge" the animation I wanted a rig that with the rotation of a single object could animated the entire model.  I wanted this for ease of animation as well as for a degree of realism. 

A combination of bones and constraints to tie the mechanism together and allow smooth animation. The constraints of copying location, rotation and or scale were all new to me and opened my eyes to a new world of possibilities. I'm excited to play with more mechanical animations...

There are very few tutorials on mechanical rigging - I might put one together in the future. Who knows?

I'd like to work renewable or at least pollution free energy sources into the game as well. At first glance windmills are a pretty obvious choice - so those will be added at some time in the future. At the moment I've avoided rivers (as I have no idea how to make a good looking low poly river) so water power is more or less out for the moment.  

Energy Transfer

Power Lines - Mostly eye candy at the moment

The industrial revolution largely used mechanical energy which (clearly) has limitations. Moving towards electrical power as a way to transfer energy could help in several design areas, but could break the immersion or at least a sense of believably.

While it may not fit with the (current) intended time period I spent a little time playing around with power lines. Being able to generate power in a centralized location could lead to higher efficiency and more contained pollution. This is further specialization would allow workers (and the player) to spend more time doing something besides feeding fuel into a steam engine. 

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Borrowed Code that when passed an Array of Points with Return a larger but smoother array of points - Don't Remember the Source, Oops.

I can see the game going away from a historically accurate time period (ha, as if I'm capable of historical accuracy), but I don't want to delve to far in to fantasy or steampunk styles either... 

The power poles are just to cubes scaled to look like modern poles. The lines are line renderers that start with three points and then are smoothed by some (borrowed) code to add additional points. 

The performance of moving the poles is pretty bad and will need some optimization if the code makes it into a build. I have to redraw all the lines when a pole moves - at the moment EVERY line is redrawn.

To be honest the power lines came out of frustration (lack of creativity) with another idea. They may just be a short lived idea that goes away.

Some form of energy transfer mechanic will need to make it into the game whether that is power lines or not I have decided. At the moment the energy transfer mechanic is simply the player or hired workers stoking the fires of steam engines - I think a step up in sophistication would be good.

Plenty more to iterate on...