17:14 I'm a game developer and I 100% agree with this. Adding even a small amount of decent looking placeholder and polish feels really good and makes your playtesting more enjoyable
Totally agreed. I can only stare at wireframes (I'm doing low poly 3d) for maybe 1 day or two at most. Just take some models and replace them later but it's at least something decent to look at.
If I remember correctly when the "super upgrade" pops up (don't remember the name) the music there (I'm pretty sure it's the same but it may be just very very similar) is used by the most popular radio station in Hungary. It was used way before the game :)
I watched that first video the day it came out, I was part of that spike. So happy for this guy. He made something amazing. You're probably going to cover this but using the casino style sounds really helps the dopamine loop, made to be addictive in the best way.
Regarding Thor and raising the price from $3 to $5 for VS, he said he didn't like it. It was coming from the perspective of taking advantage of your customers, a cash grab basically. I mostly agree with Thor's point, but disagree in the case of VS specifically, because I think $3 was undervalued. If I'm not mistaken, the $5 version of the game has a lot more content than the original $3 release. I don't think anybody who would pay for the $3 version will feel taken advantage of for the $5 version.
27:54 what do you mean? According to the Christian tradition, Christmas decorations are supposed to be put down at feast of Epiphany which is typically the 6th o January.
The idea of having a group of friends to do a show and tell with personal projects they made is so cool. Wish some of my buddies care enough to create some things!
for what it's worth the star is called a pentagram regardless of its orientation, but wrapping it in a circle like that turns it into a pentacle which is one with sussy connotations to some
I wrote some code for taxes, and it also was fun in a weird way. Tax laws have exceptions, and exceptions in exceptions (i made it 5 exceptions deep). Sometimes laws are twisting basic math, you need to divide 10 by seven without a reminder 😅
he worked from 2:00 a.m. on his project and the worked 8 hours in the office , so relatable... i work 12 hours, 4 days a week, including night shifts and last months i am working on pretty much big project at home in free time wherever i can, i must say it is very exhausting, but until i still have a drive - i will be doing it.
i just had an idea for a video format. something in between an interview and a reaction. the interviewee would have a script and maybe a slide show, and the interviewer would react as it's being presented, but also ask questions, but then they would go on tangents and eventually get back to the script (not questions at the end but like an in person style reaction
"Making the game he likes" - solid win here. This is key in so many creative pursuits. The book *Steal Like an Artist* hits on this point (and Gandhi, so that's cool - "Be the change you want to see in the world," which includes making games 🙂)
The reason so many people pushed back on the "use ai generated images for prototyping" is because we shouldn't be normalising using stolen artwork, even if it's not for the final product. I agree, it's super important to have your game look good in the development stage for motivation and testing. But a free asset pack will do that way better, take considerably less time, and use art on the terms of the artist, without costing any money. People will eventually show off their prototype to their friends or social media, even if it might not be the best thing to do, but that advertises the artist who made the pack and it's one of the reasons they make free assets. Also, you might be unintentionally persuading people to spend money and time on midjourney to get their art to look better or how they want it. Where as that transitional stage of starting to spend money on your project would be better spent supporting the artists on asset packs these AIs steal from.
@@fanshaw oh god yeah I forgot about cassettes as media carriers, they where awful. They’re called cassettes for the same reason though, from the French word for little box.
28:00 If you're a traditionalist, the Christmas season ends on the Epiphany (5th of Jan, the "12th day of Christmas"), so 7th of Jan doesn't seem particularly late?
15:44 He says you should know when to continue or walk away and my first thought is "The Gambler" Shout out to hattybin for hitting the mark on that one. You da real MVP. You gotta know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em, know when to walk away, know when to run. Lol
That feeling when you're trying out something new your kid is in to, and you remember playing it 30 years ago The popularity of neo-retro games has been a pleasant surprise to us old farts
Bro, imagine the amount of "vampire survivors" that we would have if ppl does'n have to wake up 2 am to be able to work on what they love? We really need more free time to follow our passions...
Imagine how it collapses like an ML model during training because there will be so much good stuff out there that everyone will be 100% busy just consuming it all :D
@@black-snow That doesn't make any sense... Stop making claims about everyone. Unlike a ML model, people are different. Some like to consume, some like to create, some like to reinvent the wheel... just because there are something good doesn't mean that you can't do better or just different... the point is that most of us only have time to work in mc donalds and if we wanna to build anything we need to wake up at 2 am...
Wow that Battletoads memory is so real. I was the tunnel kid. My dad and brother would hand me the controller to get to the next level. I think there was a warp that skipped the ice level right? And went to the snake level. Then you could warp on the snake level too and skip to the upward elevator level.
I have a different take on only building things to "prototype stage": It really depends on what your goals are. I often work on projects just as a research project to learn something new or better understand how something works. I also write code just purely for entertainment. There are also things I write as a utility for my own use that I never make into something someone else will ever use (example: Photoshop's radial blur sucks so I wrote my own radial blur as a command line program that only reads and writes raw images. Same for gausian blur, fractal noise, etc. They are much easier for *my* workflow than using Photoshop.)
21:35 This (investing time for things that others don't care about) applies to so many things: at least to music and photography (for those I have personal experience). Eventually you'll care about details that no one else will notice or care about excluding, obviously, some other musicians and photographers. You still have to do it because otherwise what are you doing? Producing stuff that you don't care about? That you think is basic shit? And you'll just continue doing stuff that you can do in your sleep? I.e. something you'd do for minimum wage. It's fine if you're getting paid but in most cases, you're not.
What Thor said was that no one should just increase the price because their game got popular, it is trying to squeeze extra money from people after you already made a lot of money, the only excusable reason would be because a currency depreciated a lot really fast. The argument is not that the game is not worth 2 usd more, the argument is that the original price is what the dev/publisher thought it was worth, and after the fact they change the price, alienating new users because it costs more.
Bruh he said it was because the game got a lot of content. And that is better than slapping on a DLC after a paywall. Good on them the mobile version is f2p even tho there are pay to play games too, but with much smaller customer base.
I just started watching splattercat vids for a short time and saw the vamp survivors vid when it came out and went ahead and bought it straight away b/c is was looking for some little cheap fun things to fill some time with. Fun in retrospect to have been able to ride this little wave from so close to the origin.
39:35 "Vampire Survivors 2 will be in PHP." Sure...why not? The only downside is that PHP doesn't really have a lot of extensions to interface with graphical libraries like OpenGL and what does exist are mostly prototype sorts of things. So that will be the major pain point, but PHP can handle a game loop just fine. Is it the best language for writing an action game in? Probably not. Then again, Kingdom of Loathing still exists and no one's really sure what language it is written in.
When you were thinking about the word for level scaling, were you maybe thinking of Skill Based Matchmaking (SSBM) like where it tries to match similar MMR players? I guess it could be kind of argued that level scaling NPCs is SSBM but for PvE games
Ah yes, the game that melted my phone's battery. I remember gold farming in winter, leaving my phone outside on the balcony, in order not to overheat. Good times!
Maintaining the JS version seems ridiculous, but Luca seems to be acting like a classic artist... Prototype as fast as possible with the media you know. It's like his version of a napkin drawing.
6:00 my favorite game for playstation was Dynasty Warriors. I haven't played any of their games since. Maybe I should try one out, I haven't played a one on one fighter since Soul Caliber 2. I wonder how the new Dynasty Warriors will compare to Soul Caliber 6.
Dynasty Warriors 9 is absolute garbage because they completely changed to a different formula and it's a very different game, plus incompetently executed. If you want to try playing, Samurai Warriors 5 and Dynasty Warriors 8 are still pretty good. But the PC ports of all Koei Tecmo games are absolutely horrendous.
21:55 that feeling of releasing a game but no one caring hurts so much lol. You spend all this time on something, you know all the issues but you still publish it because you hope that you're just overly critical and then you put it out and dead silence. My game wasn't complicated or particularly pretty but I put in work to make it feel as good as I could, and it's still not enough. I'd recommend putting a number of small games out and just burn through that feeling a few times, eventually you'll build an audience (they say).
Been trying to use Stable Diffusion for game art for weeks. News Flash: It always sucks. It won't make sprite sheets. The negative prompts for 2D pixel art are trash. Recommend AI when it actually produces good results. Right now it's an absolute waste of time. I gave up and bought some $2-$7 assets. Assets I bought came with a character generator. I hacked the generator to produce even more animations! Couldn't be happier!
You are thinking of McDonalds jobs in the United States. It's not the same in Europe. In the USA you go to McDonalds if you can't afford real food. Here going To McDonnalds is an indulgence if you have disposable income.
@@michaelvivirito it was 12y ago. $1 doesn't mean much when looking at relative to income. 12y ago McDonalds was more expensive then, than it is now in Europe. Even though the prices increased quite a bit. Relative to income, this might also be true in NA, stayed the same or gotten more expensive. I didn't do the math on it to be honest.
I've gotten rally good at getting what I need from ai at to speed up my game Dev. I make reference images for blender, textures, etc. I'd still rather have someone Goff at art, but that'd not me.
The worst thing is when you have to play a 2 hour tutorial to just GET TO THE GAME. Sometimes you want to spend an age customizing your character, but not always.
flip is a pandora box. Sometimes he cuts when prime tells him to sometimes he doesn't. Man is showing who does the cuts.
Flip! Delete this comment thread.
FLIP IS A WIZARD AND DOES WHAT HE WANTS! YOU SHUT YOUR FACE! ❤
His name is his reality
you ain’t even seen what flip has deleted
I do it for the people🙏
17:14 I'm a game developer and I 100% agree with this. Adding even a small amount of decent looking placeholder and polish feels really good and makes your playtesting more enjoyable
And anyone who has a problem with placeholders being AI generated needs to get a life, and get out of mine.
Totally agreed. I can only stare at wireframes (I'm doing low poly 3d) for maybe 1 day or two at most. Just take some models and replace them later but it's at least something decent to look at.
I love the classic arcade feel of the game, and I honestly think the sound design is the big reason for it being so addicting
Soundtrack is great. Restarting is quick. The idea that you will only ever go for 30 minutes (albeit, you know) is superb. Good game overall.
You can really feel his background in gambling when it comes to sound effects and ui/special effects, it's all so addicting/rewarding
If I remember correctly when the "super upgrade" pops up (don't remember the name) the music there (I'm pretty sure it's the same but it may be just very very similar) is used by the most popular radio station in Hungary. It was used way before the game :)
the list of things done right in this is huge
I wonder how many generally good solo games are on steam that never caught attention of some media person and remain unknown for public.
Lots. They're easy to find if you look. I like Lumencraft.
Too many each month. They don't even get more than 10 reviews after a year. There are even really good-looking games that don't get any attention
among us was released in 2018 and had like 30 players on release
The game is very addictive, It makes sense that they worked for a gambling company before VS.
I KNEW IT! More precisely I was split between this possibility and the gamr being a social experiment about gambling mecanics
and for the record, specifically slot machines.
I watched that first video the day it came out, I was part of that spike. So happy for this guy. He made something amazing. You're probably going to cover this but using the casino style sounds really helps the dopamine loop, made to be addictive in the best way.
0:42 before FPS genre got it's name all 3D FPS games were called Doom-clones
I just had Duke Nukem 3D flashback.
Thanks bro. :)
Didn't remember that in decades.
actually they looked like Doom-clones, no varielty, lol
And the change was caused by Half Life.
Regarding Thor and raising the price from $3 to $5 for VS, he said he didn't like it. It was coming from the perspective of taking advantage of your customers, a cash grab basically.
I mostly agree with Thor's point, but disagree in the case of VS specifically, because I think $3 was undervalued. If I'm not mistaken, the $5 version of the game has a lot more content than the original $3 release. I don't think anybody who would pay for the $3 version will feel taken advantage of for the $5 version.
27:54 what do you mean? According to the Christian tradition, Christmas decorations are supposed to be put down at feast of Epiphany which is typically the 6th o January.
The idea of having a group of friends to do a show and tell with personal projects they made is so cool. Wish some of my buddies care enough to create some things!
4:20 I can't describe how perfect this is .. made my day :D
Dude takes the Christmas tee down the day after Christmas.
Prime: classic taking the Christmas tree down super super late.
for what it's worth the star is called a pentagram regardless of its orientation, but wrapping it in a circle like that turns it into a pentacle which is one with sussy connotations to some
I wrote some code for taxes, and it also was fun in a weird way. Tax laws have exceptions, and exceptions in exceptions (i made it 5 exceptions deep). Sometimes laws are twisting basic math, you need to divide 10 by seven without a reminder 😅
he worked from 2:00 a.m. on his project and the worked 8 hours in the office , so relatable...
i work 12 hours, 4 days a week, including night shifts and last months i am working on pretty much big project at home in free time wherever i can,
i must say it is very exhausting, but until i still have a drive - i will be doing it.
i just had an idea for a video format. something in between an interview and a reaction. the interviewee would have a script and maybe a slide show, and the interviewer would react as it's being presented, but also ask questions, but then they would go on tangents and eventually get back to the script (not questions at the end but like an in person style reaction
"Making the game he likes" - solid win here. This is key in so many creative pursuits. The book *Steal Like an Artist* hits on this point (and Gandhi, so that's cool - "Be the change you want to see in the world," which includes making games 🙂)
5:58 been playing ridge racer 7 a lot lately, I love it. The techno music pushing you forward, screeching wheels while drifting... amazing :D.
FYI In italy we have the tradition to keep the Christmas tree until epifany.
So no, he was not late in removing it.. perfect timing actually lol
The reason so many people pushed back on the "use ai generated images for prototyping" is because we shouldn't be normalising using stolen artwork, even if it's not for the final product.
I agree, it's super important to have your game look good in the development stage for motivation and testing. But a free asset pack will do that way better, take considerably less time, and use art on the terms of the artist, without costing any money. People will eventually show off their prototype to their friends or social media, even if it might not be the best thing to do, but that advertises the artist who made the pack and it's one of the reasons they make free assets.
Also, you might be unintentionally persuading people to spend money and time on midjourney to get their art to look better or how they want it. Where as that transitional stage of starting to spend money on your project would be better spent supporting the artists on asset packs these AIs steal from.
phaser mentioned let's gooo
"Commodore 64 cassettes..." shows new fangled 3.5" floppies... 💀
The floppy part is in a cassette!
@@luipaardprint Not for commodore 64 it isn't. :D That would audio cassette or 5 1/4" floppies.
@@fanshaw oh god yeah I forgot about cassettes as media carriers, they where awful. They’re called cassettes for the same reason though, from the French word for little box.
☝️🤓
28:00 If you're a traditionalist, the Christmas season ends on the Epiphany (5th of Jan, the "12th day of Christmas"), so 7th of Jan doesn't seem particularly late?
The psychology of this is quite easy to get. Combine dopamine trap and power fantasy.
and then simmer it in the most braindead controls, just moving the character in 2 dimensions. No jumping, no attacking, just moving.
15:44 He says you should know when to continue or walk away and my first thought is "The Gambler"
Shout out to hattybin for hitting the mark on that one. You da real MVP.
You gotta know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em, know when to walk away, know when to run.
Lol
yooo ridge racer is soooo good! also i found your channel recently and it's great stuff - great blend of informative and entertaining!
An hour long video about my favorite steam deck game? *grabs popcorn*
Never forget: Minecraft started as an indie game.
And became literally the biggest game in the world BEFORE Microsoft bought it.
In java
What a legend. Just going out there and doing it. Whatever it takes
As an Asmongold Mod (and simp) my Primeagen pipeline was Asmon -> PirateSoftware -> Now I'm here.
It's interesting that devs are now selling the experience of flash games to zoomers
OH LOL
That feeling when you're trying out something new your kid is in to, and you remember playing it 30 years ago
The popularity of neo-retro games has been a pleasant surprise to us old farts
Zoomers grew up with flash games.
I have an unhealthy obsession with survivor style games.
Bro, imagine the amount of "vampire survivors" that we would have if ppl does'n have to wake up 2 am to be able to work on what they love? We really need more free time to follow our passions...
Imagine how it collapses like an ML model during training because there will be so much good stuff out there that everyone will be 100% busy just consuming it all :D
@@black-snow That doesn't make any sense... Stop making claims about everyone. Unlike a ML model, people are different. Some like to consume, some like to create, some like to reinvent the wheel... just because there are something good doesn't mean that you can't do better or just different... the point is that most of us only have time to work in mc donalds and if we wanna to build anything we need to wake up at 2 am...
good job flip i like when you leave fun stuff in
Primeagen and Asmon, my two reactors that burn on a 16, 20 or 30 min video for 1 hour least
Crimsonland was my first introduction to these types of games
Wow that Battletoads memory is so real. I was the tunnel kid. My dad and brother would hand me the controller to get to the next level. I think there was a warp that skipped the ice level right? And went to the snake level. Then you could warp on the snake level too and skip to the upward elevator level.
I have a different take on only building things to "prototype stage": It really depends on what your goals are. I often work on projects just as a research project to learn something new or better understand how something works. I also write code just purely for entertainment. There are also things I write as a utility for my own use that I never make into something someone else will ever use (example: Photoshop's radial blur sucks so I wrote my own radial blur as a command line program that only reads and writes raw images. Same for gausian blur, fractal noise, etc. They are much easier for *my* workflow than using Photoshop.)
21:35 This (investing time for things that others don't care about) applies to so many things: at least to music and photography (for those I have personal experience). Eventually you'll care about details that no one else will notice or care about excluding, obviously, some other musicians and photographers. You still have to do it because otherwise what are you doing? Producing stuff that you don't care about? That you think is basic shit? And you'll just continue doing stuff that you can do in your sleep? I.e. something you'd do for minimum wage. It's fine if you're getting paid but in most cases, you're not.
What Thor said was that no one should just increase the price because their game got popular, it is trying to squeeze extra money from people after you already made a lot of money, the only excusable reason would be because a currency depreciated a lot really fast. The argument is not that the game is not worth 2 usd more, the argument is that the original price is what the dev/publisher thought it was worth, and after the fact they change the price, alienating new users because it costs more.
It does feel scummy. Remember I thought that when Minecraft did it. But both of these really increased in scope which is also a factor I feel like.
Bruh he said it was because the game got a lot of content. And that is better than slapping on a DLC after a paywall. Good on them the mobile version is f2p even tho there are pay to play games too, but with much smaller customer base.
I'd imagine that after hiring several people he needed some more money.
before the 30:00, me : why Thor say it need to raise $2 ?
after the 30:00, me : why it only cost $3?
"His arms were wheels" LMAO
The specific name of "level scaling with protagonist" is rubber banding, in case you are still wondering
It's really ironic how nowadays you are less scared to draw a pentagram than a cross.
Wait, you're right lol
Flip flip flip flip
I just started watching splattercat vids for a short time and saw the vamp survivors vid when it came out and went ahead and bought it straight away b/c is was looking for some little cheap fun things to fill some time with. Fun in retrospect to have been able to ride this little wave from so close to the origin.
It feels like prime's gonna make a 30 min video for a 30 sec short reaction.
The fact you never played MKI is actually more outstanding than Vampire Survivors being developed in JS !
Hopefully Prime reacts to other game documentaries like this :D
39:35 "Vampire Survivors 2 will be in PHP." Sure...why not? The only downside is that PHP doesn't really have a lot of extensions to interface with graphical libraries like OpenGL and what does exist are mostly prototype sorts of things. So that will be the major pain point, but PHP can handle a game loop just fine. Is it the best language for writing an action game in? Probably not. Then again, Kingdom of Loathing still exists and no one's really sure what language it is written in.
When you were thinking about the word for level scaling, were you maybe thinking of Skill Based Matchmaking (SSBM) like where it tries to match similar MMR players? I guess it could be kind of argued that level scaling NPCs is SSBM but for PvE games
Parasite Eve was one of my favorites, I hardly hear people talk about that one.
I would like to see you talk with thor about the vampire survivors price increase
Ah yes, the game that melted my phone's battery. I remember gold farming in winter, leaving my phone outside on the balcony, in order not to overheat. Good times!
Made the cross on the bible into a plus sign. Not to avoid controversy, but because vampires hate arithmetic.
Regarding the work sounding awful but being fun in practice, manufacturing companies are a ton of fun.
Maintaining the JS version seems ridiculous, but Luca seems to be acting like a classic artist... Prototype as fast as possible with the media you know. It's like his version of a napkin drawing.
Vampire
6:00 my favorite game for playstation was Dynasty Warriors. I haven't played any of their games since. Maybe I should try one out, I haven't played a one on one fighter since Soul Caliber 2. I wonder how the new Dynasty Warriors will compare to Soul Caliber 6.
Dynasty Warriors 9 is absolute garbage because they completely changed to a different formula and it's a very different game, plus incompetently executed.
If you want to try playing, Samurai Warriors 5 and Dynasty Warriors 8 are still pretty good. But the PC ports of all Koei Tecmo games are absolutely horrendous.
"be normal" - the guy has all nintendo console history in his shelf...
9:28 what the f is that ad
made me spit out my tea
battletoads mentioned!
It's an iteration of tower defense except your tower is moving with you.
Holocure mentioned!!!
love this
Nandor the Relentless
21:55 that feeling of releasing a game but no one caring hurts so much lol. You spend all this time on something, you know all the issues but you still publish it because you hope that you're just overly critical and then you put it out and dead silence.
My game wasn't complicated or particularly pretty but I put in work to make it feel as good as I could, and it's still not enough.
I'd recommend putting a number of small games out and just burn through that feeling a few times, eventually you'll build an audience (they say).
Build thing what drive you - work not only in game dev, look at today cars - and compare with old car maded not by managers but by enginiers
mozambique is a pewpew? i thought it was 2 to the chest, 1 to the head?
Omg I just applied for Workiva 😂
Playstation games: Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
Silent hill series
Fatal frames series
Breaking news--- this game was hot like 2 years ago. You gotta keep up with the times, bro.
Wow, prime was a fatality-junkey? 😮
Late comment but it's normal in the UK and Ireland to take the tree down on the 6th or 7th of jan
Animal Well documentary next 🙏
Been trying to use Stable Diffusion for game art for weeks. News Flash: It always sucks. It won't make sprite sheets. The negative prompts for 2D pixel art are trash. Recommend AI when it actually produces good results. Right now it's an absolute waste of time. I gave up and bought some $2-$7 assets. Assets I bought came with a character generator. I hacked the generator to produce even more animations! Couldn't be happier!
"Thanks Biden" for the inflation. Classic!
You are thinking of McDonalds jobs in the United States. It's not the same in Europe.
In the USA you go to McDonalds if you can't afford real food. Here going To McDonnalds is an indulgence if you have disposable income.
Not true. McDonald’s is more expensive than in n out now. McDonald’s isn’t cheap anymore. No more dollar menus
@@michaelvivirito it was 12y ago. $1 doesn't mean much when looking at relative to income. 12y ago McDonalds was more expensive then, than it is now in Europe. Even though the prices increased quite a bit.
Relative to income, this might also be true in NA, stayed the same or gotten more expensive. I didn't do the math on it to be honest.
NOCLIP!!!!!
You know Parasite Eve?
Played as a 9 year old with my friend and boy we were scared to sleep lmao
I've gotten rally good at getting what I need from ai at to speed up my game Dev. I make reference images for blender, textures, etc. I'd still rather have someone Goff at art, but that'd not me.
Pentagrams aren’t demonic, the use of pentagrams was to create barriers and protection.
Garlic Andy here. Garlic and Bible are the best, don’t listen to anyone who says something else ;)
teapots
Parasite eve was amazing!
Made with phaser. I love phaser.
42:00
Those aren't even Commodore 64 disks, and he said cassettes :)
i use arch btw
no one remebers jet moto, twisted metal, final fantasy, legend of dragoon. ps1 was amazing
I follow Splattercat, and he sold the game for me, esp at that price point
love this game
I could never beat race with a rat in battletoads, it was impossible
ThePrimeagen: "I never played Monkey Island"
Shame on you.
feels illegal being this early to a video
Nice
Your mom is amazing
I can't get the motivation to do anything
The worst thing is when you have to play a 2 hour tutorial to just GET TO THE GAME.
Sometimes you want to spend an age customizing your character, but not always.
0:00