Talk about anything: Page 19 - Godot Community Forums

Talk about anything

fire7side

@cybereality said: You'd be wrong. Humble Bundle has raised over $200 million for charity since starting in 2010. https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/1/22703917/humble-bundle-200-million-charity-milestone

Yeah, but those games aren't games made in a couple months. Many were made by teams that took years. They just bundled them after the sales dropped. This would be more like the winning games of some contest or something, which are adequate, but I'm not sure would be too enthusiastically appreciated when on sale.

cybereality

Fair enough. Yes, most of those were popular indie games from like 2 or 3 years after they were popular.

jbskaggs

@Erich_L said: It needs to be one game at a time with a small scope but easily separated areas of development. Quality over size. I’ve never seen anyone get hyped for a “bundle”. One leader, two advisors. Here’s one of my game ideas that I could imagine working just fine:

Just Run 100% income donated to Godot Wake up in a tent/crashed spaceship/middle aged cottage (choose one) in the middle of the woods (think northern Canada) An alien/robot/nasty monster (choose one) is chasing you.
Just run. Final score determined by meters between start point and place of death. Challenging/interesting features: the enemy should make interesting use of terrain features such as jumping on trees to scan for you.

With a theme voted for and chosen (medieval, modern, futuristic) who wouldn’t want to add their own thing to the woods? I would add a naked man sprinting through the woods that you can only ever see from at least 100 meters, spawning once every 1000 games. That’s one person for player controller, one person for general terrain spawning, one person for enemy AI, optional person for lighting, and as many people as would be interested for adding nuggets of interesting things in the woods.

Emphasize quality- charge 10 bucks, make it worth it. Ten bucks is a generous donation considering you’re getting something fun in return.

Edit: additional note: with clear leadership, if someone ghosts just cut and move on, it’s not like an accountant needs to mathematically count out the value of their contribution. Design elements can cause arguments- voting first then leader+advisors final say.

hmm at first I thought you were describing Rimworld.

I also hate ads, and even though I use humble bundle a lot I never by bundles for the bundle I buy one thing out of the bundle. Unless its books or tutorials.

But The Idea of a game jam bundle for fundraising could be a good idea- one theme with all the entries as part of a bundle would be a very nice demonstration of the capabilities of the engine and may not be as offputting for noobs trying to contribute to a main project filled with masters. Though there should be nothing in rules that says people cant help with each others entries. Especially if the game genre was open then you cpould have one theme but runners, fpd, tds, puzzle, etc.

Rabbit themed would be really nice too ;)

cybereality

Yes, I still think approaching it like a jam is the best idea. But I agree that jam games are typically simple or prototype-like without fancy graphics. Which might not appeal to a wide audience (aside from other Godot developers that just want to help). I'm not sure there is an easy answer. Also Humble has been successful, but they donate to respected charities like for covid or children's hospitals and things that as easy for people to get behind.

jbskaggs

@cybereality said: Yes, I still think approaching it like a jam is the best idea. But I agree that jam games are typically simple or prototype-like without fancy graphics. Which might not appeal to a wide audience (aside from other Godot developers that just want to help). I'm not sure there is an easy answer. Also Humble has been successful, but they donate to respected charities like for covid or children's hospitals and things that as easy for people to get behind.

i think depends on the marketing aspect. There have been some really nice games that were started in game jams then became very popular later on. Also making one big expensive game for fundraising I think would have the 0a.d. problem- it would take forever to finish as people have bills of their own and other projects to work on. Also I have seen some pretty nice graphics on some game jam entries.

fire7side

@jbskaggs said: i think depends on the marketing aspect. There have been some really nice games that were started in game jams then became very popular later on. Also making one big expensive game for fundraising I think would have the 0a.d. problem- it would take forever to finish as people have bills of their own and other projects to work on. Also I have seen some pretty nice graphics on some game jam entries.

I don't know. I've contributed to one person working on a game while doing my own game, but I can't do that when in a contest. I have to contribute all my time to the contest entry. Right now, I would say I can contribute some modeling or animation work to a main game, but I don't think I would want to drop everything and work on a stand alone entry. I could, but I don't want to drop the project I'm working on for that long and it won't be done in time for an entry. Plus, I think game jams are nerve wracking and I don't like them. I'm also not that much for texture painting and all that, and I don't think getting too fancy would be a good idea. It would probably be all right to use free models also, but it might be a problem if the game was open sourced.

I don't know, really. If it's more smaller games, I can possibly contribute some models and animation work to someone if they need it and they use a simpler, low poly style.

cybereality

Okay, well another idea is to do one big project, but in Godot 4.0. Not a full game, but a small section that looks like a AAA game to Unreal Engine 5 quality. I think it's possible. Like imagine GTA or something with photo-real characters and cars and a city (but not the whole city, maybe just a few blocks or a small neighborhood, but AAA quality). We could release it for free and all open-source code and art. It wouldn't make any money, but it could bring a lot of attention to the engine (and we will have more time since we can launch when Godot 4.0 launches so we have about 1 year). Does that sound better?

Erich_L

@cybereality said: Okay, well another idea is to do one big project, but in Godot 4.0. Not a full game, but a small section that looks like a AAA game to Unreal Engine 5 quality. I think it's possible. Like imagine GTA or something with photo-real characters and cars and a city (but not the whole city, maybe just a few blocks or a small neighborhood, but AAA quality). We could release it for free and all open-source code and art. It wouldn't make any money, but it could bring a lot of attention to the engine (and we will have more time since we can launch when Godot 4.0 launches so we have about 1 year). Does that sound better?

I think that sounds great, keep it open source but sell it for $ at the same time. As you said, Godot needs money. To Godot programmers it could be a great resource, to game enthusiasts it could be proof that Godot is top notch. For gamers it is (should be) worth 10 bucks and fun. If we wanted to aim big we’d best start by aiming small. It would need the same thing that has kept Godot great: over-zealous gate keepers that say no to adding too much or adding the wrong things. If it was open source enough people would eventually find contributing fun (like how tons of people enjoy modding Minecraft).

fire7side

We could maybe use MakeHuman characters which are pretty realistic. They have a million polys in them, but maybe with reducing them automatically that Godot 4 is supposed to do. I'm using a low poly version and decimating the clothing to make them low enough poly, but then you have to reskin them to the skeleton. And just getting super natural animations would be pretty hard to do. There are architecture plugins for Blender also. I don't know about the cars. Where do we get photo realistic cars because that would take a long time? I don't know, that would take some high class modeling work without buying the models. Maybe the Blender forum would do some donations. Maybe just do the inside of a building or something. The trouble is if you open source it you really need to open source the models also. Even if you just tried to do a street, that would be a lot of modeling work. And Unreal 5 is miles beyond Godot 4. They are using it for movies in real time.

Erich_L

I might be wrong but I'd push against starting anything with more than 3 high res characters and 1 high detail vehicle. If it's a high res small part of a city (decay) there's only so much you can do there, so I'd also push against that... well unless you spent most the time in the cafe in Decay playing @xyz 's Cog game on a laptop.

fire7side

You kind of end up with a tech demo there and I think would not be interesting enough for most people to actually pay for it.

jbskaggs

When is godot 4 due out? If it isnt due for another year I doubt I could help out with that project.

On another note... Ive been playing FTL this evening and forgot what an absolute GEM that game is! So simple and so genius!

Concerning game jams: One problem with the current gameapocalypse or gametsunami (the flood of unfinished, poorly made, asset flipping, and garbage games) is how many bad games have been released that the whole market is kinda like a fiction slush pile at an editor's desk. For every good game I see there are 1000's of bad ones that bury all the good ones. I have found some really good games that released years before and went bankrupt because no one could find them. And some of this may have been caused by all the game jams, plus the fact that some distributors gave up filtering or having publishing standards. I forget the word for that when game content is monitored and controlled for a platform to maintain quality.

Of course the problem was so many people could not get their game published as they could not survive the game market slushpiles or worse collusionary(sp?) practices. On the plus side it made game makers best their butts to try and produce quality so they could get thru the slush piles.

BTW if anyone would ever want to help this noob finish his game I'd always welcome a friend. Though I'd be embarrased by my spaghetti code enough it would probably motivate me to actually go back cleanup, condense, and organize better. :)

cybereality

Okay, I understand. No, I wasn't trying to claim Godot could beat Unreal 5 (as I said before I don't think we can) but with a carefully designed level and good art I think it can come close. But yeah, maybe that is too ambitious. And people won't really pay for a tech demo, I was just thinking that if more people started using Godot maybe that would help (more Patreon subscribers, more grants from big companies if they see growth, etc.). But whatever the case is, I think an open-source project that is impressive in some way (doesn't have to be AAA, it could be a really great 2D game, etc.) but something that pushes the limit to show people what Godot 4.0 can do.

fire7side

I think the tech demo and the game bundle are good ideas, but the time limit is too tight. Maybe wait about a year and then anyone that wants to put a game up that they have finished into the bundle can do so and it would be advertised as a form of contribution to the Godot engine creators. The tech demo, the same way but a little more on going. Need a project lead that just designs the thing, like a street and then we contribute models. I think it should be first person and human models would be just for interest, so doing something simple and not talking. We could still put it up as a contribution thing, but name the price or free, or maybe 1 dollar minimum all proceeds going to the godot game engine. So, we could do one or both. I'm not sure the large game would work out because it really is hard to do a game like that with a lot of contributors. Maybe if someone had a game we thought could be expanded on, we could do it.

Erich_L

@fire7side said: You kind of end up with a tech demo there and I think would not be interesting enough for most people to actually pay for it.

You're right, I think a better approached would be divvy it up into classes like in programming. If you're doing vehicles, start with the base class and then make n derivatives. In charge of humanoid enemies? Make the base class and n derivatives. No need to say limit at one vehicle and 3 npcs.

cybereality

So sort of related story. One time I tried to make a 3D MMORPG. This was maybe 15 years ago, I did still have experience but I'd mainly worked on 2D games at the time and barely knew C++. But I volunteered to be the lead programmer on the community 3D MMORPG project. I think there were about 30 of us, programmers, artists, designers, etc. working on it. Honestly, it was a disaster. We all had some skills, but not enough to make an MMORPG. It took us 1 year (before the project fell apart) and we barely even had a decent prototype after all that time. It is really hard to manage something like this, especially with people that don't have a lot of industry experience. But I would say it was worth trying. I think every developer has to at least attempt something crazy once in their life, so they can fully understand why AAA games take hundreds of people 3 years to create. I mean, you can look at the credits on a game, but it is a learning experience if you actually try.

fire7side

@cybereality said: But I would say it was worth trying. I think every developer has to at least attempt something crazy once in their life, so they can fully understand why AAA games take hundreds of people 3 years to create. I mean, you can look at the credits on a game, but it is a learning experience if you actually try.

Yeah, and it doesn't have to be an MMORPG, it can be basically any game. Everyone has wildly different ideas about how it should be done. I think if there was a smaller game that was being expanded, it might put everyone more on the same page. If we started talking about a larger game right now, no one would even agree on the genre.

Megalomaniak

@fire7side said: If we started talking about a larger game right now, no one would even agree on the genre.

Even the size of the game doesn't affect it. Even if we agreed on the genre, inevitably disagreements would likely manifest around the minutiae. A small team of just a few experienced(published/shipped games, not necessarily indie tho, behind them) developers collaborating over the internet might work, but involving many, well let's just say...too many cooks in the kitchen and and all that.

xyz

Imho showcasing Godot with intent of saying "look it's AAA capable!" boils down to a single thing - 3d assets. You could do it with one or two average coders, several good 3d artists and one top notch art director.

cybereality

So I'd be willing to hire an artist. It's not as expensive as you might think. We would have to work things out so we get a CC license and can open source the art. Many artists may not do this, but possibly for the right price. I think there are good community artists, for example on the Blender forums, but getting them to donate quality assets and give up the license would be difficult.

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