Game Development is a community looking to foster and bring attention to the many efforts by people making games from arcade to tabletop and everything in between. There is so much going on in this aspect and yet it’s scattered among many different topics on Hive and often goes unseen.
I see Hive as the perfect place for people developing a game even if it is non-blockchain to come and share their experience, what they are working on, and pass on knowledge if possible to those interested in making their own game.
I have discovered in my own journey of sharing the making of a game that many either publicly or privately want to or are working on making a game themselves. Gaming, in general, has always had a lot of enthusiasm behind it on the Hive blockchain. A lot of passionate people involved in creating all kinds of content.
In my eyes, it just makes sense that if you are going make a game you should do so where you can build a community around it. The indie game scene these days is exploding with powerful tools doing the work that use to take dozens to hundreds of individuals. As a result, game developers are being empowered to do more with less in terms of time, manpower, and cost. They however struggle to get any attention to the masterpieces they create.
The indie game developer can create, innovate, and move quicker than the bigger and slower triple-A game studios that often take forever to catch up to current trends. Indie game developers have been leading the blockchain gaming revolution for quite some time now. All the way from solo indie developers to teams with dozens of individuals involved.
While there are many websites that game developers in blockchain and other types of games choose to share about making their games on. One place that often gets left under looked is Hive. With the powerful layer zero we have, that seems like something that can be addressed.
In the past, before there was a Hive I lead a gaming community. One effort of that community was rewarding gaming content. One sub-section of that was game development posts by indie developers that were earning next to nothing. Sadly most game developers that came to the blockchain did not last very long before they stopped posting.
Time again and again I noticed some amazing posts being shared on the blockchain from game developers to only be chased off. Many of these game developers were sharing their blogs over to the blockchain. As a result, certain individuals took actions that were seen by those developers as hostile to the point they lost interest and left.
Not to mention since these posts were hard to find they never got any engagement from the many different communities on the blockchain. Quite a lost opportunity in my mind for the blockchain as a whole to gain a bigger foothold in the game development world by getting the outside world more interested in our blockchain itself when they show up.
Many often talk about what can be done to renew the spirit and excitement about the future of the Hive. So many come up with frankly insane theories in how to increase the Hive price that it would require from the very foundation and up massive unwelcomed changes to be made.
Once you chuck out the more extreme thinking you often are left with thoughts that Hive needs more games. Hive is not a financially rich blockchain as of yet. Companies looking to spend 10’s of millions of dollars are looking elsewhere to set up shop, pour resources into, and develop a game. We are however very indie-friendly as we have seen already with a wide range of games on Hive.
How do you get more people talking about game development and perhaps making their own? The answer has always been community. Not to mention as is often the case, games pop up almost out of nowhere near completion. There are several games in development and yet those developers have as of yet to create a single post talking about them. More openness and discussion on the blockchain is clearly needed.
I have wanted to make this community for a while but I have come up with endless reasons of why not. I don’t have the time. I’m too busy with my own game and other projects. I lack experience in game development, and so on.
I have also asked far too many privately if they would finally start talking about their experience in game development, the game they are working on, and so forth. Crickets and excuses are what I get in return. Such as “oh it’s not a blockchain game so there is no reason to share it on Hive,” which is just silly thinking!
Not to mention many have asked other blockchain games to check out Hive or consider sharing their content here. With the lack of a community behind doing so, those asking usually get crickets back from those game developers as they don’t see why they should invest their time in doing so. You would think blockchain projects would seek out using blockchain solutions like Hive.
What Kind Of Posts Are Welcome?
Outside of the general wide gambit of game development, what is a typical post going to be in this community? There are so many different kinds of topics and posts it’s hard to name them all so here are just a few examples of topics that could be seen in the Game Development community.
- Worldbuilding
- Programming
- Art
- Animation
- Sound
- Game design
- Blockchain
- Software
- AI
- Prototyping
- Gameplay mechanics
- UI
- Lighting
- Storytelling
- Networking and servers
- Different phase of testing from alpha to expansions
- Advice
- Development resources
- And, much, much more
The main important takeaway of what is welcome is it’s something you have worked on in the past, or are working on in the present, or plan to work on in the future. It can also be you sharing general knowable and tricks you have picked over the years for those looking to get into game development.
Q And A
Here are some basic questions I have come up with and answers. I might add to this from time to time.
Q: Will you be making a community coin?
A: I have no plans at this time to do such. It’s quite hard and expensive to generate a lot of value around a coin in general. There are also many legal and other aspects to take into considerations that I am not equipped to handle at this point.
Q: Do you need to do anything to become a member and post in the community?
A: Any game developer considered in good standing on the blockchain is more than welcome to cross post game development content into the community. All you need is a Hive account.
Q: Why was my post shared in this community? I’m not a part of it.
The @GameDevHelper Hive account and others manually look for game development related content a few times a week and cross-posts it into the community regardless if you are a member of the community or not.
This helps keep content fresh and makes it easier for content discovery. It is one of our main goals to find and help get amazing game development content rewarded and more views.
Q: Will the Game Development community be a game publisher?
A: No, we do not have the resources or the understanding to pull something like that off at this time.
While it might be interesting one day if a game publisher(s) shows up and offers services within the community. I think with the general decentralized nature Hive enjoys in general most are not looking for something as centralized as that.
Q: Will you be helping projects?
A: It is my general hope over time many individuals will be here to offer some guidance but not to endlessly hold hands either. I will personally be spending some time helping out if and when I can.
The biggest help I see you can offer a fellow game developer is helping them stay motivated with a little encouragement over time. Game development is a time-consuming thing that requires daily and weekly commitment to doing if you ever want to make a game.
Q: Will you be providing any kind of financial assistance?
A: Outside of getting more votes and eyes on content that is more than likely as far as that will go.
You never know if an angel investor or other large stakeholders take an interest in projects being shared about in this community. I make no promises, however.
Q: Will you try and get more game developers on Hive?
A: Absolutely. I also know I’m not alone in that attempt in the past. There was just not a place for them to be or feel welcomed.
Q: How much time will you be spending on this?
A: I’ll personally be spending several hours a week on this time permitting. From cross-posting posts I find that fit the community, supporting content, and promoting the community among many other actives.
Q: What unique qualifications do you have to run such a community?
A: I wish I could say I had decades of experience being a game developer or something along those lines which I don’t. This is however Hive and there are far too many talkers than those who raise their hands to do something. While there are certainly more qualified public individuals they also have their plates full as it is. I would not dare expect them to take on an even heavier load. We need more people lifting.
I am now over a year into the development of my own game. In the past, I have set up and ran several private servers for friends to play different games on. I have also been involved in beta testing since Everquest when I was first invited to test out up and coming expansions before moving onto other games. I have had some minor roles doing odd things around game development that I might talk about at some point.
I also seem to be the person many mentions when it comes to game development discussions in several discords. Along with many people DMing me to pick my brain about this or that. It seems only fitting such future conversations are on the blockchain for others to partake in as well.
Q: Is there a discord?
A: Not at this time. While I can understand the usefulness of having one set up for sharing resources and people getting questions answered. That will require a fair amount of time to manage and will need some far more knowledgeable individuals than myself in such a discord for helping out.
Q: Is there a Twitter account?
Yes, efforts are being made to help promote Hive content outside of our bubble. I’m a strong believer that game developers need to work on their social media game to increase their player user base among other things.
The Game Development Twitter account.
Q: Are you looking for mods or other community roles to fill?
A: Yes, there will be several voluntary roles set up over time to help those who assist others stand out more within the community. More details will be worked out in the future.
Information
The content was written by @Enjar.
Find the Game Development community page here
This is a needed and excellent community you have made. Hopefully there will be more people joining and knowing they got somewhere else they can post in, more specific to all these above mentioned things related to game development.
Hope your game is coming along nicely, always good to see you bringing posts out to show the progress you have done.
My game is going decent. It has been a rather light week so not much to post on that front as of yet. With the weekend I have some time to pour into it now.
How has VR game development been going?
At least you keep at it when you can, slowly but surely!
Haven't done the VR development in a while, but I might look at it again soon, just had so many things I have wanted to do, been busy and been sorting myself out.
Getting back into trying to post a little extra soon, so getting content and sorting out what I will be looking to make in either VR or learning AI.
Excellent idea !
Thanks. Welcome to Hive.
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This is very exciting to read about! I will definitely join your community. I've recently wanted to get back to posting on HIVE, as I was a regular user throughout my last major project.
Thank you for taking initiative :)
Welcome back. I look forward to reading about it.
Thank you :)
Great idea and hopefully it leads to more development and more activity around the gaming sector here.
I for one would love somebody to start making simple builds that are fun and addictive with results posted to the blockchain but run as normal apps.
Lives and powerups can be nft's with an open market.
A simple arcade/ mobile app with 20 games like tetris, word puzzles, ect...
Or a suite of different single games that interconnect through the same nft's which can be bought or sold between games.
Battle against other players for hive/hive based token prizes. Ads or micro purchases fund tournaments and it gets addictive very fast.
Who wouldn't want to play addictive mobile apps with real prizes for winning games.
Thundercore have done a great job visualizing what i have talked about before but the execution is very poor with a buggy mobile app and built on ethereum which has a slow and terrible performance. Built on hive it could have been amazing. Either way they are growing fast as the idea is very good. I still love to play the games and wager/ win tokens.
https://dapps.thundercore.com/
Sometimes simple is better. I will join just to watch out for new progress and concepts anyway. I love seeing new games being built from the ground up.
I do hope we get all kinds of different developers. Hive has not even scratched the surface yet on the simpler side of gaming and meeting those market needs. We also do need some larger games in development. More or less everything is needed.
I have no plans to develop for mobile at this time myself. Due to their walled gardens, I expect them to go after cryptocurrency games in general at some point. Mobile companies don’t like it when things sell under the table without them getting their 35% cut or higher.
I’m sure mobile companies will have a field day when they find out players are selling items for insane amounts of money in some instances and they got $0 from that sale. As we have seen when big tech decides you are done you are done unless you pay them to make up for it.
I suspect one day I’ll need a game launcher for several games I hope to be making over the next few decades. I am planning in my first game for certain special end game items to be “universe” items that will have some kind of purpose in other games I make moving forward. To what end is hard to say for now.
There is the World Building community some mutual cross posting might bee good. @oblivioncubed is a Table top gamer/maker and may be interested. Also another to add mutual support wise might be the Tabletop Roleplaying Community.
With the advent of being able to pin post in communities, you could use your community as the central gathering place then have easy pinned links to more specialized communities.
One thing to not be overlooked in reach-out efforts is the simple fact that Hive Block Chain does have a lot of people interested in games and are willing to try new ones and give feedback, a great Beta Tester group so to speak.
I hope the community takes off, I have followed and will pop in every now and then.
Hey! Thanks for the mention! I noticed this announcement earlier and immediately joined hoping to foster some worldbuilding spirit in this new community. (Plus I also program so I'm interested in that side of things as well). Overall, I am really excited to see this new community take off and I think it's a great initiative by @enjar.
I do love world building as well so I am hoping to see more of it and other content.
I still may one day give a try at world building, I like to read and am learning to write and have enjoyed the world building post that you have done. I still need to learn how to do some plot lines though, but am still trying.
Sometimes to be decentralized people need a centralized water fountain to gather around and talk.
It's been a bit since I did a Worldbuilding post, but I'll make a note here to see if I can talk next about how to use plot lines to fuel worldbuilding, and how to use worldbuilding to flesh out plot lines. That might be a fun article to write. Thanks for the idea!
And one that I will enjoy reading and learning from.
That looks like quite a fun community. World building is something I have enjoyed the most so far in making my own game.
Thanks for the suggestions I’ll keep them in mind as things grow.
It has been quite fun following and reading their post. Even though I am not a game maker, builder, or designer, I do like games from board games to math games to computer games.
Right on I'm definitely being on board with this and have subscribed already.
I absolutely would love to do an open world RPG shooter.
Awesome job and thank you very much.
Do you have a Discord room?
No discord at this time. One will be made later once the community has grown and we can have some volunteers in there that have experience in making games to help answer questions.
Looking forward to reading about your game. I personally found many times posting about making a game got me to work more on it so I would have further content to share about the process.
When it does come time for a discord, if you need someone that has less game-dev experience but some solid writing and worldbuilding experience, hit me up. I'd gladly volunteer. I already am a senior moderator for a ~7.5k member worldbuilding discord so I have some experience at that end of things, and I do have some programming knowledge just not specific to gamedev sides of things.
Awesome I’ll keep it in mind. I do hope we end up with a few people with different expertise and world building is one of them.
It sounds like there are some already interested in that topic from the comments so far.
Come on it took more effort for you to open this community than it will be for you to open a simple Discord.
Which will allow us to connect have fun and really grow the community.
I'm willing to join in and help out because of course it would be amazing to have different games developers and community resource funding.
Let alone you and I could talk more and we can work about delegations and raising more investments to attract developers let alone grow our own...
Awesome! I'm subscribing now. I am in the earliest stages of trying to develop my game (learning to code LOL) on here and it's great to have a community dedicated to this type of thing. I will be sure to post my ideas once I'm at a point where I feel confident I can put them into practice!
Awesome, I’m looking forward to reading about it.
Just starting out can be quite the crazy adventure.
Yeah it's fun and a little stressful but still a good time. Would a website-based game be something you think can run on Python? I know JavaScript and HTLM will be important but just curious your thoughts, thanks!
I have heard about python being used in some parts in web browser based games. I just don’t know enough about the topic to give an intelligent answer.
My own experience is from working on a PC game in Unreal Engine 4 and some exposure to C++.
Thunkgaria is pure python
very cool, I've been pretty into a few of the games here and I've started learning 3D modeling in the hopes of getting into character creation and world building eventually. I'll definitely post anything that might be game related in this community.
I just found out there is a [world building community( https://peakd.com/c/hive-191038/created) on Hive.
I’m looking forward to reading about your journey. 3d modeling is a skill I rather lack in myself so it is always cool to see more about it.
Looking foward to this too, autobodhi.👀
This certainly looks interesting and will for sure be keeping an eye out for future developments. The game I'm helping work on (and the project I'm part of) is on a different blockchain but I've been told in the past that writing about it on here is also encouraged. Fingers crossed that's still the case.
When it comes to that game and most likely future games I'd be more focused on the Narrative Design aspect of a game. Currently doing some online courses that I may even take further after this pandemic. I suppose that would technically fit into World building/Storytelling so is it safe to assume that writers would also be welcomed into the community? It's a field I'd like to pursue and learn more about (as well as seeing games get developed in general which is pretty awesome) and maybe even get a few experiences from. 😊 But also, seeing folks build things like games from scratch is just fascinating.
As long as the storytelling is related to game development it would be welcome here. I feel that is quite an underappreciated aspect of development in general. Some games have a way with words that turn story arcs into an art form.
Games on other blockchains are more than welcome. Even non-blockchain games as well.
There are so many different aspects to a game I hope we get to see a wide range of different topics and things people are working on.
Depends on how much interest there is for these kinds of posts but I wouldn't mind doing some proper write ups, I can at least do some dev blogs for my own game I'm working on, I think this is a good idea.
While I suspect technical posts to have a small readership they do help those out working on a game.
In general, I believe if more people start talking about and showing what they are working on it will get more people excited and interested in things. Lots of fun things going on that many are just not talking about or are hard to find. Time for that to change!
It depends on what it is, graphics stuff definitely attracts the crowds but code just makes people run away even if you show the result. Been learning quite a bit about that side of my work and how to present it to the normies, I don't mind making posts just to help out other devs though I've gained a lot of knowledge over the years.
I can relate to code making people including myself want to run away sometimes.
That is why you lure them in with some shiny screenshots!
It’s also something I rarely show in the game I’m making. It’s an area I need to work on myself.
I'd love to see a launchpad too. Investing in early stage games is really something missing in crypto in my opinion
Keep in mind investing in games has an extreme risk to it. Many people who start making a game never finish. Many set unrealistic goals in terms of scope, time frame, and cost. Some set off on what they think will be a 1-year project and it turns into 5 or 10 years as well.
I have turned down several private offers people have made to invest in the game I’m working on at the moment. I’m just too early into it and have set a release date around Q4 of 2023. While I hope to be done sooner than that I won’t be shocked if it takes that long and I end up trimming down some longer-term goals set in the project itself.
I do hope once people start posting about working on a game a couple of times a month that will create some kind of motivation for them to keep going. They won’t always get questions answered to the degree they want when they hit roadblocks. They will at least have a place to share about them and hopefully how they resolved them.
I thought my game was complete after a few months. I was ready to release it, then I learned to do some new stuff, held off on release and made the game even better. Now I'm 8 months in with no end in sight. :(
That has been known to happen for so many.
Best thing is to work out needs to be in game and you want it to be in game.
If you have not already I recommend you work out a roadmap with everything you need to be in the game and some kind of timeline to finish.
Anything extra can be future game updates for what you feel is not a need.
The game I’m working on I’m expecting to be done by Q4 of 2023. I worked out as much as I can in my roadmap. For the short term 6 months to a year I try and have exact details and dates. Beyond that I have loose ideas and timeframes that get updated when I can better dial them in.
This is great! Game development was one of the first things I ever posted about on Steemit, and I've recently been mulling over the idea of rewriting the game I started a few years back and put down, so this announcement actually comes at a perfect time for me 😅
There is never a good day to start again you just got go for.
I do hope you make some posts sharing about your experience getting back into things.
Great initiative. Look forward to it.
Thanks, I’m hoping we see some amazing stuff come out of this. Have a great weekend.
This is great, programmers will now have a chance to showcase their skills in the blockchain.
Indeed, among many other things needed to make a game. Have a great weekend.
Hey Enjar!
We appreciate your initiative!
We also promote a Hive Gaming Telegram chat, where you can be added as and admin to keep the good work altogether
https://t.me/hivegaming
I don’t use telegram. I don’t trust it.
Shared on Twitter.
Love it!
Thanks, have a great week.