I have a question. How can I know that after my game is done and all the bugs squashed that it will actually be played by people outside my family?

Presumably you'll be playtesting along the way, so you can gauge its appeal?

@DMGregory Ok, thanks for the advice.

@noobprogrammer Pretty much all hosting platforms have a download counter. Usually people who download your game also play it at least briefly.

Yeah. Here's what my Itch.io dashboard looks like, for example. Surprised to see a jam game I made back in 2016 is still getting a new download almost every day!

@noobprogrammer a tip I've seen was that you don't start marketing once it's complete, you have to start really early in the development process to build momentum and a user base.

For a game that you want to be a commercial product / income source, absolutely. For your first few games / stuff you make to learn, it's OK to neglect marketing.

I've also heard that you get 1 free promotion. If you throw a new cool game on the market everyone will talk about it, people will cover it in blogs and lots of people will want to try it just because it's new. If at that point you tell people they can't have it because it doesn't exist yet then that free promotion goes nowhere.

Later when the game is done you tell people again, but this time it's not new, blog posts have already been written and people have moved on.

You can get another promotion through advertisement, but if you don't have the money for an ad campaign consider making optimal use of the free promotion.

Yeah. In AAA we don't announce a game until we have the site up and running to collect pre-orders. 😉

eeeeew pre-orders...

Y'all should preorder the game I'll surely make some day.

:P

I get the reason behind preorders (it helps boasting 1st-day sales, and pay the employees), but I won't buy a game that has not been reviewed by actual players...

That's entirely sensible. I'm not even a day-1 buyer myself. I'm generally picking up games months or years after release. So I'm part of the long tail. 😁

Yep.

Do you get rebates on Ubisoft games?

We can play any Ubisoft game via Uplay/Ubisoft Connect on PC - the whole library is unlocked on our company accounts. 😊 We can also order personal copies through the studio - two free per year, and at a discounted rate after that.

On the other hand you're not making games for game developers, your own preferences are not representative. If people preorder might as well make use of it, even if you wouldn't preorder yourself.

Yeah, that was a lesson I had to learn when working in monetization: just because a thing isn't for you, doesn't mean there aren't real people who want and appreciate it.

Yes. I don't mind either. There are most of the time pre-order perks. I have a dottore-in-a-box from Assassin's Creed Brotherood (?) pre-order. I had money and time back then :P

And if I were to make a game where pre-order could be a thing, I'd probably do it.

I've heard the theory that pre-order effectively provides an additional launch-esque opportunity in terms of getting attention.

I suppose it also helps players to play on day-1.

I remember I started to play Diablo II on day -1; the store decided to sell the game before the release date, and Blizzard servers were up and running already.

Today you'd end up playing something broken that way because the Day-1 patch hasn't been applied yet.... 😆

I mean if a game allowed you to play it before the official live date.

Yeah, well I probably played version 1.0 then :P I don't remember, it's been what.. 20 years now?

The point there was that it wasn't a pre-order, as you say, just that the store decided to not wait until the official release date to sell the game. Maybe that was intentional on the part of the publisher?

I suppose things were different back then.

Yes, those games allow preloading and such. It makes for a smaller day-1 patch, I suppose, and probably gives a good idea of the day-1 load on the servers, if the game is geared toward that.

@Vaillancourt yeah i had d2 day -1 as well

I wonder how I knew the game was being sold that day.. I think I remember going there in the hopes it was there. Maybe some people on the internet said they had it already so I decided to go and take a chance.. /shrug.

The good old days.

I don't think I knew what the release date was.

I think I lived about a 5 minute walk from the mall

that was how I got a PS2 on launch day

you guys.... have a PS2? Yes, actually we do! I'll take it.

I only have a PS1.

Is it still working?

I'm not a nintendo guy, and I hate microsoft, so it's my only option for console since sega died

I don't know. I haven't turned it on in over 15 years I think.

:P

Hmmm.... I think there is a focused issue here to address, but the title is vague and doesn't really identify that issue.

Any ideas on making the wording more specific?

Something like "Structuring dependencies between units and the map they occupy"?

"How do I avoid coupling between the units and their environment?"

Ah, clearer. Want to edit that in or shall I?

Oh you can go ahead :)

"How to I organize my code so it doesn't become a huge mess? I tried to decouple my entities, but then I can't do the things I need to do."

I don't think that edit is good. It doesn't capture what the OP is asking.

The OP can decouple units and the environment just fine, the problem is that making the decoupled units interact with terrain is now impossible without coupling them back together.

Though I guess the title change isn't completely bad. It's just incomplete.

Ah, I already made it. Want to propose an improved edit?

"How do I avoid coupling between the units and their environment while letting the units interact with the environment?"

I don't know, my suggestion sounds like a really dumb question.

I'd assume "...while still accomplishing the things my game needs to do" is implicit in just about any implementation question. Otherwise any problem reduces to "Just make PONG. That works!" Well... it does... but not for what my game is supposed to do...

"My things are naturally coupled, how do I uncouple them while leaving them coupled?"

I think the answer is having a third thing that takes units and environments and does the thing that needs to be done. However, putting that in code without making a mess is non-trivial.

What the OP is actually asking is "Where is 'Gamedev for dummies'?"

It's a "new dev". An appropriate answer to the question would probably include something like "It's nice to decouple. But you can do that only to a certain point."

The original title does sound like that, but their example looks to me like a much more focused topic than an intro to gamedev.

> To be able to notify the chunk we have moved, we need to know ourselves in which chunk we are Chunk *in_chunk; in class Entity. And this breaks the structure I wanted to achieve (independence across classes).

It doesn't. Entity knows it's x and y coordinates. Add static Chunk *Chunk::get_chunk(int x, int y); and you're good. Neither component needs to know about the other.

That looks to me like a sound answer. 🙂

> Another example, suppose we want to attack an Entity on a different Tile. We would need to know there is an entity in the first place, but we would also need to know things about the enemy to then decide whether to attack it or not.

This decision is not made by the Player. It's made by some other component, something like the user selecting their character and rightclicking on an enemy or the AI system. Both of them have a more or less global view of the terrain and the entities in it.

Feel free to copy it or a modified form. I don't have an account and also my time is up for today. Time to go home :D

Although would the implementation of get_chunk need access to Map's data? So then the entity would need to know which map instance they're on? (Unless it's a singleton...)

Maybe it needs to be static Chunk *Map::get_chunk(int x, int y);.

And maybe it can't be static.

I'll defer to someone with a bit more C++ knowledge than me on that front. I think I'm liable to give bad advice here.