yay, finally got a job as developer (w/o studying)

Trying to delete a sql row in one of my player tables which contains a json column like this : Delete from players where (ID,name,jsonData) in ((1,"admin","{json...})) ... it works when i just remove the json column from the query... with it, it just wont delete the row, tells me it sucessfull removed 0 rows... any idea why that happens ?

@Chris Great! Congratulations!

@AlexandreVaillancourt thanks! :)

@Chris What kind of development stack will you be working with?

@Pikalek i'd like to be a game developer, but tbh with my non existing math skills this wouldn't work out. i am a web developer, have to work in the front end (but not like writing html and css files, more like the programming stuff) with perl.

i learned java, so don't know much about perl yet, but im sure i'm getting in to it. just learning it right now

i'm very happy for this job offer, as i have to work a lot with linux too, and i like linux. the perl syntax looks kinda strange, and i know many ppl dislike this language, but for me it's no problem

@Chris perl is great for string manipulations & regex stuff. I'm on only passingly familiar with it, but there have been times when I've been working on unwieldy procedural generation stuff in Java & thought "I bet this could be done in like 5 lines of Perl..."

@Pikalek yea true! but there are also frameworks for web development. we'll use mojolicious and template toolkit

Hey boys, what are your opinions on freemium games?

because i was thinking of making my game work like this:

you are a robot that plays matches against other players in order to win coins. with coins you can buy things like skins (or stuff like that, just like in Rocket League); This way players that pay don't get stronger or better than the ones who don't.

Well if you want to make money out of it, there are only a couple of ways. I don't know which model works the best, but there is certainly a way to decide which revenue option is less annoying for your users :P

:D

i mean, i don't hate making a bit of money out of it :)

I suggest you research if cosmetics only are enough to pay for your servers :P

There's most likely some research or some papers or some "what we learned" articles around the net; I'm sure @DMGregory and @Almo have insights to share about this too.

I'd be glad to read more about this!

@GabrieleVierti realistically: i'm playing matches against other players to have fun and see who's the best or to try out fun strategies. also, as an aside, i win coins which i can use to buy fun skins and accessories. (this will matter because if you celebrate my earning coins more than how well i did in the match, there's a UX mismatch.)

Another model that may work well for you is the rotating champion pool a la MOBAs - here are 5 robots available for everyone to play this week. Next week a different set will be free. Like playing with a particular bot? You can invest some coins to keep access to it permanently.

There was a browser-based robot wars game a long time ago that made various robot parts available to purchase via in-game currency. it was not a large amount so you could customise whatever robot you wanted within the space of a few matches. there were however some accessories that cost a LOT. (i don't remember whether it actually accepted microtransactions, i don't think it did.)

I've talked to designers on some mobile games who've had to field player complaints that the purchasable stuff doesn't cost enough - not exactly what we might expect! ;)

huh!

In economics theory, there's something called a Veblen good: something that is considered valuable because it is expensive.

Nike shoes?

Nike shoes are considered valuable because of their marketing of association.

Expensive watches and pens however are Veblen goods.

Exactly. Famous brands, jewelry and luxury cars or high-end watches tend to fall into this category. They're ways to signal "I have enough wealth to spend on this flashy thing that's not necessarily that much better than the lower-cost alternatives"

@DMGregory I have never played MOBAs unfortunately :( you mean something like - if you keep the right amount of "crowns" you get to enter this special giveaway of equally strong robots that don't give you any advantage but look cooler?

Oh, I guess Nike shoes might be both.

Nike and Adidas shoes pass on almost all of the actual sales price to the shop: the shoe itself only costs $10-20ish.

I think at one point they were only just expensive and people bought them because of that. Now it might have changed.

@GabrieleVierti not exactly. You get to choose a character to play, and each character has different gameplay abilities, so in the right context, it could be a gameplay advantage. The balance is dynamic (see "Dynamic Imbalance")

But since everyone has access to the same pool of characters for free, it's generally not perceived as unfair.

You can then buy a character outright, to secure access to play as that character even when they're not currently in the free pool for this week's rotation.

But because the character was originally available for free, this is viewed more as a convenience, than as purchasing a gameplay advantage.

sup yo

Oh that is so clever :D

So for instance you could introduce "Buzzsaw bot" (or the parts to build one) for free one week. Players who like the buzzsaw can buy it to keep using it, or wait for it to come back in the rotation again.

This sounds League-ish

Yep, exactly. I believe they pioneered this mechanic, or at least popularized it.

In a game as "marathon-ready" as League, it's hard to believe that owning champs is still even a thing

but then again, sponsored pro players just have their sponsors buy them all the champs

This also drives appointment gaming - I want to log on each time a new roster of champions enter the rotation, to get a chance to play with new characters, or play against a different meta as other players draw from a new character pool.

@DMGregory So everyone can get to play every bot only if he meets specific requirements, for free?

Hmm... what specific requirements do you have in mind?

@DMGregory oh, yeah: it also means the metagame changes over time because different bots become common (replacing the previous common bots) and even established players might try out some of the free bots.

maybe reaching a certain amount of victories

Big time. It helps keep the game from stagnating on a single dominant option - at least among the lower player tiers.

@GabrieleVierti if that's a question requesting clarification on the League mechanic DMGregory is describing, that is not how the mechanic works

@GabrieleVierti I'd try it without, and see if you really need that kind of gating.

hmm.. okay

The player-friendliness of this rotation system kind of relies on the promise "these characters are free for everyone" (for a limited time)

Once you start restricting them further, you might find players feel resentful at being excluded.

Sup guyses

Yeah this free cycle thing shouldn't be a thing the players earn; it's the baseline experience everyone has

@Kay Hi!

ah, right.

@Kay Ayo!

Discussing robots

and stuff

Normal thursday night for gabriele i guess

Then you can earn the cosmetics or other perks on top of your baseline choice of warrior / abilities.

But if you get one of these characters in the period they are free, do you get to keep them forever? Do you just get to play with them for a limited time?

@Kay exactly hahahaha :P

Limited time. If you want to keep using them, you buy them (there's the rub)

@GabrieleVierti Costmetics are certainly enough to support servers

Rocket League only sells the game for $20, and then cosmetics after that.

@GabrieleVierti You don't "get" the character in the period they're free, you just have them available.

I can't give numbers for Dead by Daylight since the data is unreleased, but I can say that we do well on the cosmetics.

You aren't selling the character/robot for free during that period, you are just granting the player access to it as though they owned it.

gotcha

It's kind of like there's a set of "loaner" characters you can use for free, in addition to the ones you own.

Like, here's the model: There are 100 characters in the game. At the start of each match you have character select. This character select presents you with all the characters you own plus all the characters available for free that week.

the MOBAs do that

it's called the "free rotation"

@Almo yes, we've mentioned that :)

ah ok

:D

sorry

But yeah, I'm just bringing this up as another interesting model. It's not required. As Almo says, you can do very well on cosmetics alone.

So each week, out of 100 characters, 5 characters are randomly chosen. Those characters are enabled in character select for everybody, in addition to their owned characters. (If they already own that character nothing special happens: it's just enabled in character select.)

Next week, those 5 characters will no longer be enabled in character select (unless you own them) and a different 5 get chosen.

I suspect it's not randomly chosen

LoL chooses a representative sample of roles and difficulties.

I hadn't thought about that.

With regard to cosmetics, look for opportunities that I can stack / combine multiple cosmetic items. Like, rather than choosing a single skin for my whole robot, let me choose a chasis material, and add a decal, and colour that decal, and choose a skin for my sawblade, and a skin for my laser, and a dance I do when I win, and a particle effect that plays when I dance...

That way, having one cosmetic item I like doesn't completely "fill up" my customization slots, blocking me from considering future purchases. The more I can combine/stack, the more each cosmetic item I get makes all the other stuff I have better, and vice versa.

So you get positive network effects encouraging collecting more and more cosmetic options, rather than each one narrowing the list of future purchases I'd consider.

For Honor does this well. Most of their customization options are not mutually exclusive, so you can express a lot in how you mix & match them.

Gaia's Online entire income depends on that.

So many great ideas, i'm going to have to note all these down afterwards ;)

Is there a smart way to make something very customizable without having to do too much work (or having to do the same thing for each robot i want to add)?

I highly recommend cheking out Rocket League's system. The only thing I don't like about it is that they do loot boxes. I prefer a store where you just buy what you want. But RL shows how to make lots of categories so people can mix and match.

I have my first ever playtest on saturday, after that ill have to go back to the drawing board. But alteast I got bear i.gyazo.com/47bb01c01c31a88022915c5fd5dceb80.png

Oiii

Look for stuff that all robots have in common. For instance, if they all have a primary chasis material, you can swap that out in a consistent way. If they can all execute a common set of base movement actions, you can make a dance out of that. Sound / particle effects can fire on common events...

Thank you all so much!

Plan ahead too. If you want to apply decals, try to set up a standard decal slot with a consistently-named texture property on each material you use. It's cheap if you do it from the beginning, but a pain if you have to shoehorn it in later.

Keeping UV layouts / scales similar on your assets makes it easier to swap materials / patterns between them without per-asset changes.

You can try to keep details that are specific to the shape of your models - grime in the crevices, scuffs on the corners - in a separate texture layer that can be blended onto a simple swappable/tileable pattern.

You can also set up your materials with multiple texture/colour/etc variables to swap a base, secondary, and accent layer independently. The material gets more expensive, but if you only have a few player robot objects on screen at a time it should be fine.

Once you've done all that, making a new skin is just a matter of swapping a few properties - the same operation on every robot base - rather than hand-painting a whole new texture for every robot. So it's O(1) instead of O(n) in terms of developer time. ;)

:D

Splitting your models into multiple meshes makes it easier to swap in completely different material shaders for things like animated effects, so that's an option too, but may drive up your polygon / draw call count. Again, for scenes of your size that might not be a problem.

How could I keep texture layouts (or uv coordinates) consistent if the robots look different? are you suggesting using general patterns and not robot specific textures?

Yes, general patterns. By consistent I mean things like keeping a convention for which way on the UV map is "forward" on the robot - so if you do a directional pattern like zebra stripes, it comes out in the right orientation on all robots without special cases.

like this one?

ah okay

That is such a great idea, thanks Doug ;)

You can still add robot-specific textures, but then you're back to O(n) if you want a version that works on each robot, so do it where it's worth your time (ie. really cool custom effects you can sell for more coins than the generic patterns)

RL has some car-specific decals

other than that it's one size fits all

This is a skin that only works on the Octane ZSR car. Note the details that wouldn't necessarily look right on another car, like where it says "OCTANE"

Wheels, colors, antennae, hats... all that stuff works on any car

Oh I completely forgot to mention "bolt-on" objects like hats! Dirt cheap to just parent or physics-joint to a particular part of your bot, and you can easily add a little dynamic bobble animation if desired.

yeah

I remember an MMO I played sold lot pets that would pick stuff up for you.

cat lady mmo

They were all functionally the same, but they were all visually different.

Rappelz :P Game based on pets ;)

rappelz the name, pets the game

:P

trying to figure out how to make my game either easier to understand or to simplify the mechanics a liuttle more

@DMGregory oh that's right!

@Kay Yeah, people can't read nowadays, or don't bother, so making things simpler is better.

@AlexandreVaillancourt Well at the moment my game doesnt have all the juice displayed to telegraph to the player whats gonna happen

Gotta have a fun game first, I guess ;)

Thats another issue :P

We will see what the future holds

@Almo I have been playing a lot of RL lately, so that's where I'll be taking most of my ideas :D

:)

I've been playing regularly since it released in 2015

finally hit diamond in 3v3 last season

Nice!

I'm still high gold in 2v2 though

people there think I'm rank-slumming with my diamond tires

I just recently discovered competitive matches, after 36 hours of playing against noobs lol

Just not used to rotation and positioning with 2v2

hahah :D

ranked is where it's at

that's why i was always disintegrating everyone every time

like 9 - 0

:D

now i barely do 2 - 2

matchmaker works reasonably well

when people aren't deliberately sandbagging, which seems to be more common than I would like

My win rate on ~3k games is 50.1%. :D

neat!

:)

lemme see mine

aaaand steam is updating

btw, keyboard and mouse or gamepad?

oh great, RL is updating too hahaha :P

PS4 controller

mouse/keyboard is so fucking hard on that game

it is, but i find it good enough in most cases

not in competitive lol

hahaha no way man

i use an xbox 360 controller

twitch.tv/videos/384172841

there are my 10 (+1) provisional games for 3v3 from two nights ago for the new season

I don't win many

but you get the idea of that level of play

roughly Plat 3 - Dia 1

dropped me into plat 1 div 4, but I've moved up to plat 2 div 3 since then

lol I thought it was live ahaha

hehe :)

Damn you play pretty well

i kinda suck rn

thanks :)

it's a hard game to learn

VERY shallow learning curve

no

i just have to play in competitive

trust me, it's very hard to learn

since i practically never did hahaha

I have almost 700 hours in it now

yeah

i have 36, which are basically wasted

haha nah

if you had fun they're not wasted

sure

:)

but it's no fun if you there is no challenge

yeah

i mean 9 - 0 is pretty much impossible to reach even for pros

let alone me

but hey it's just practice, so no biggie

@Almo One thing i really hate is RL's default camera settings. If you crank everything up you can see so much more stuff, and do stuff like air dribbling much more easily

the defaults are probably to prevent people getting sick

and please remove the camera shake :P

high FoV makes some people (like me) ill

I'm keeping camera shake

I like it :)

ah gotcha

i can't play that close to the car

i have set everything to the max, without cam shake

I bet you could if you did for 700 hours :D

I've been thinking of messing with my camera settings a bit

I can't see my car at all if the ball is high enough above me

lots of pros do that too

yeah I bet

I did reconfigure the controls a bit though

Lethamir is a good example

usually first thing I do when I get in a new game

options, controls

you can see so much more stuff

where every player is, where your teammates are, and it also lets you "read" what someone is doing in advance in order to respond quickly

yeah, but it makes me want to puke

not worth

:D

I depend heavily on audio to know where people behind me are

Well i tried :P

@Almo I hear...

I'm already well-versed in the gameplay advantages of high FoV

I just can't use it

I played quake 3 at 90, while others were at 100, 110, or even one guy who was at 130

I was till competitive on our server, one of the top tier players

just sometimes people would be spectating and say "don't you see that guy?!?" cause they could and i couldn't

:D

yeah, i don't see it as such a drastic difference in RL

in some games it really sucks

@Almo nice ahahahaha

see? that's an advantage! Just don't eat anything before playing.

I know it's an advantage

I'm not arguing that

I just get sick

lol :D

fair enough

:D