Rant: Offer-Up

     Ok.... I don't usually blog much about my other personal endeavors and would like to keep this closely related to game dev as much as possible. But for Today's blog I break my own rule on this one and I just have to rant on how shitty Offerup is.

For those that don't know, Offerup is a merchant app where people can buy and sell stuff and then meet to pick up said items or ship them if they're too far away. According to Google Play, the app has over 50+ Million downloads, half of what Ebay has, and is one of the most popular apps to buy and sell stuff all around. 

Sounds fine, right? Seems like a good app with a 4.1 star rating and a good place to put your stuff there.

Hahahahahahaha... HELL NO. 

Offerup is COMPLETE TRASH. I'm not even spicing it up for the blog post, this app is actually complete garbage. Everybody... LITERALLY every person I have dealt with on this app... is an asshole. Even the people I tried to buy from gave me shit. Now I'm a little bit of a bargainer. If I can get something for $5 off I will. If not, that's fine. But Christ  almighty... people give you so much shit if you do. I literally asked someone if I could get $5 off on this phone because... I needed a new phone. The person replied back, saying "stop being a cheap fuck and pay full price." 

I was literally BAFFLED. What the hell did I do to piss someone off to not get just $5 off a phone? Why was this person so damn rude!? Not only that, but the people who try to buy from you are the biggest... god damn pricks in the history of the world. I have a whole bunch of electronics on there and had some pretty expensive amps and speakers. I had this $150 subwoofer listed on there and you could not believe the amount of people that wanted it for less than $100. Some asshat wanted it for $70. This shit doesn't even sell for $90 wholesale (price before retail mark-up)! And if they don't get what they want, they try to gaslight you. They always say shit like "Oh I can get this for $40 on Amazon, you're charging too much." 

I deadass go to Amazon, SAME EXACT ITEM... $90. And I'm selling that same thing for $50. Whose charging too much here again? 

I really don't know what it is with this damn app and its toxicity. People ghost you, tell you you're ripping them off, give you bad reviews because you didn't describe the item exactly how it was... even though the item is in perfect condition. No other Online trading market is like this. I've dealt with people on Facebook and got good results, and Ebay is probably the best when it comes to building relationships and sincerity! 

But this app.... this piece of shit app has the worst of customers AND sellers. And you might be saying "it's probably because it's all cash most of the time so it's going to be toxic as hell." That's not true. Facebook is local meet up and cash as well but it's nowhere near this bad. Everybody here is just a cheap fuck!

Honestly I literally don't want anyone to even THINK about going on this god forsaken nightmare and Offerup hasn't been doing anything to stop this shitty behavior. It's like I'm on Gamefaqs back in 2005. 

So in conclusion... fuck Offerup and uhhh... yeah fuck Offerup.

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Assessing Your Financial Priorities And Sustainability in GameDev

 

    So... I've been thinking about the long term sustainability of being an indie game dev. I don't know how long it'll take for my next game to be made, but like all great things, it'll take time. I say this because I look at other game devs outside my group, on Social Media, on Dev Forums, and go "man... they really poured all their eggs into one basket for their game." 

     Now sometimes... it works. A game is successful, critically acclaimed... and finance wise... it's paying off the mortgage and kids' college tuition. But then there's... the "not working" side. Now I can't say without any statistics most indie game devs are doing bad. I really hope not. But for whatever reason some games just aren't successful and... it really sucks. "Among Us" is a prime example of such game. That game released back in 2018 and it only recently got a big surge in popularity. But the rest of those Among Us games, the Ori & The Blind Forests's,The Enter The Gungeons... they're all out on the way side.

   I obviously don't want to deter anyone away from game development. When I first started picking up code, I honestly really didn't enjoy making anything else besides a few desktop applications and little games myself. Plus games are fun to make. Who wouldn't want to make the next Mario or Sonic or Doom? 

    But here's the differences between Nintendo and indies; income... and experience. Heck Nintendo wasn't even a game company at first. They were originally a Hanafuda trading card company that opened back up in 1889. Then in 1966, they went onto make toys. And during the late 70's to early 80's they are now the company we know Today who has made cultural and world renowned franchises such as Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. But even before that, it was literally just some people selling some cards on the streets of Kyoto, Japan. But what did they gather from over 100 years of being in business?

    They know who their audience was and what products they wanted, what sold and what didn't, and made mistakes so that they could produce accomplishments. You can say their practices in recent times as far as products have been... less than ideal. But as far as a business... their net worth as of 2020 is $95 billion. And they make more than just games.

They've had toys, comics, posters, magazines, plushies, and for some weird reason, shoelace holders. 

   The point I'm trying to make is... Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Nintendo dipped their toes into a lot of different fields, genres, and means of entertainment. Every failure they had never put them at a sunk cost fallacy. If a Mario or Zelda game did bad, they had another Pokemon game that would do well and sell millions of copies. 

    I cannot stress this enough, whether you're a part-time game dev or working full-time on your game from 9 a.m. to near midnight, you need to diversify your source of income if you're going to start working on your next project. That current prototype you're working on is guaranteed generating zero pennies. And I have yet to hear somebody charge for a demo of their game. And don't be afraid to delve into businesses like blogging or stocks. It's not going to hurt your reputation as a game dev.

   Sure most of my game dev followers see me for just game development... but I also have a small online business on Ebay where I sell surplus Converse for $30 and write blogs for money. I'm also thinking about making an app and monetizing it, as well as invest in crypto. I'm diversifying my income, half of which I'm doing passively and one just being a one-time project. I don't have to be in an "Ebay store" all day hoping stuff will sell. I don't have to go and make bids for Bitcoin. 

   So I'm telling you again, please... don't pour all your eggs into one basket. Get yourself a shock absorbent place mat so that when you fall, you won't break your legs and never compete for the poll jump again. You just gotta get back up.

That's it for this blog. I'll see you guys around. Happy Game Devin'!

   

My First Game Project Failure and What I Learned From It.

So... I don't update this usually but... I feel that it's very important that I get my reflection across one way or the other, whether that be in a video format or some other way. 

Yesterday I failed to deliver on a game project that I have been working on since... February of this year. I had this idea for a really cool game project that was going to be super fun and unique. I had the premise set up and everything. It was going to be a Megaman Style platform shooter game that used various elements like fire, wind, and air with 9 levels, all with unique bosses. 

So what happened that caused me to cancel the project? Well... Let me get into the technical aspects of why first. 

Pixel art... is not cheap. I spent over $400 on only the first quarter of the game alone, and that is not the kind of money I have right now, especially with this pandemic. It was probably going to cost me over $1500 by itself just for game assets. That doesn't include the marketing that I was going to do, and it was definitely not going to be easy to get a green light on Steam. The next one was marketing. I didn't even bother showing it off at a Game Jam, big Youtube channel or hell, even my peers sometimes. It was a technical and commercial failure the longer I worked on it.

The other reason, which is personal, is that... I really didn't enjoy making it. I hated using Unity for 2D back then for my other game project and I still hated it during the development of my game which lead to me being frustrated really quickly and not working to work on it after 2 hours. I also really found development slow from switching to the IDE and Unity Editor. The 2D physics are not all that well polished either since it's inheriting from the 3D ragdoll physics engine and trying to tweak that to get a good feel is something I would spend a good couple of nights on trying to do. But honestly... I really didn't find it enjoyable for the most part. It also wasn't received well by gamedev and other gaming groups outside my personal circle of friends and co-workers. Now I could blame Unity for this after all the frustration but honestly... it would just be more fair to say that the engine just isn't for me. And that... I didn't like the tools given to me to do the job. 

So... I had 2 options;

Either push myself to continue to make the game and not be satisfied with the end result... or relieve myself of frustration and work on something I know I can deliver on and actually care about. 

So... I chose the latter. Now everybody feels disappointment. It's natural for everyone. I'm REALLY feeling this first failure. Especially after all the time I spent on it and... it not going into fruition... it really cuts deep. But... with failure comes after redemption. I learned a lot coming out of this, and that's:

- Budget accordingly and efficiently

- Market Games Better

- Be prone to frustration when developing

- Don't drag on some thing you feel deep in your gut is going to fail. 

- Don't continue when you're not having fun

So... was it a complete waste? Financially yes, but lesson wise no. I grew a lot from this failed experience and I'll make sure to better about the mistakes and assure they won't happen again. 

But in the mean time, I'm going to proofread another game concept. This time for sure I know I'll have something good to show for it. 

Thanks for tuning into my blog and have a great day! 

Returning to Monogame with a different project

 Wow... 2 of these in a month! Crazy! 

Anyways... I want to write about my latest endeavor into Monogame/XNA again. I feel that I have found some good resources that showed how the framework actually works and what you can do with it in terms of Physics and Sprite Effects. It's really cool and honestly, I'm having a blast using it right now. I have a tech demo in the works for a cool shmup concept and I honestly can't wait to share it. But for now it's going back Unity and finishing this game I have. 

    But if you do want to know what XNA is like, I recommend some small tutorials that will help you  understand how XNA works better. XNA is not a proprietary Physics Engine. It doesn't have things like gravity scaling or rigid physics to it, making prototype development a bit harder to manage. Collision is also not handled like in other engines where you have 2 colliders in an engine and have AABB  and OBB collision to choose from and it'll work. You have to explicitly state what interacts with what for every single object or write a function/collision system that handles all your collision for you (In this case however, that also requires different behaviors for different object classes as well). 

    However unlike most engines, Monogame's memory usage is very small and doesn't have much bloat to components like Unreal or Unity to your program. 

If you want to learn how to get started, I recommend RBWhitaker's XNA tutorials on how XNA works and later some beginner friendly exercises like this Shmup game right here. 

Another resource I recommend are the official Monogame and Monogame.Extended Discords. People will help you out if you're new and will give you tutorials on how to learn.

Anyways, I'll post updates soon on the project when it comes out. I'll see you guys around.

Update

Hello everybody. It's me. 

I know I don't update on here and it's pretty blank, but there has been on some issues, both technical and personal as of recent. 

I honestly don't know where to begin on the technical project. The progress for my new game project has been slowed down a lot. I was originally using XNA/Monogame since December and was using someone else's foundation/engine to help me. The problem with their engine though is that.... it's not all that well implemented when it comes to certain things like SpriteEffects and Game States, which... honestly frustrated me to all hell when I was working on the platformer project for over a year now and that basically wasted my time, so I'm taking all the sound effects and assets and am porting them to Unity.

Now I want to stress this... this is NOT THAT PERSON'S FAULT. XNA/Monogame coding/documentation is so rare to find and cumbersome that I don't blame them for wanting to create their own engine from scratch off the framework. That and even Monogame libraries with some documentation are still hard to learn. It's either something like an overload of a function goes unused and I don't know what it's asking because I don't know what that specific overload does or it asking for stuff that I don't want to use because it just bloats memory. Also my lack of knowledge on the framework itself has also really hurt the progress of my project and most of that is definitely my fault. I am however sure to whip up a base prototype of the game by Tonight in Unity and am hopefully able to hire some freelance artists to actually get the game on Steam/Itch.Io at the beginning of 2021.

I did however learn personally though that... you shouldn't rely on others to build your boat. Sometimes... you just gotta find the wood yourself.

Speaking of personal, my overall growth as a programmer has been plateaud for a long time. I don't feel that I've grown at all this Year compared to last year. Some of it is due to lack of motivation, but most of it is due to financial hardships thanks to this stupid ass lockdown that hasn't really done much to prevent the spread of Covid imo. I've been going out and trying to sell stuff on Ebay, but the pay is just not there. 

It's not an excuse for the lack of my own performance, but there are other reaeons besides those want to keep personal that have also affected my learning experience in coding, mostly time spent with other obligations that I cannot seem to get away from. 

Anyways I know this was a hefty blogpost but do know that I will be posting something in the near future about the project. In the mean time, stay tuned for more updates. I know I am active on Twitter and stuff, but that is literally the only rarest of times I am on my phone or social media.  

Anyways... In the meantime, have a wonderful day, stay safe out there and hopefully I will have something special real soon.

Ronin Quest is now FREE!

That's Right! Ronin Quest is now free over on Itch.io. If you have a Windows 10 Computer, you can now play the game the same you pay to breath; NOTHING! So go check it out.


 https://ramimorrar.itch.io/ronin-quest

Game fixed

Hey all. Sorry I haven't updated in a minute. I just had to fix my game.

https://ramimorrar.itch.io/ronin-quest

It should be playable now.