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I have been creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout for a few years now. One day another modder wanted to make his own game using Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to learn UE4 anyway and the other members have made many mods before, so I joined in.

Well, it turned out I was the only one with a professional programming background (this is where I should have run). The others were all modders who somehow got their shit working. "It works, so it's good enough right?" On top of that UE4 has a visual scripting system called Blueprint. Instead of writing code you connect function blocks with execution lines. Needles to say that spaghetti code gets a whole new meening.

There was no issue board, no concept, no plan what the game should look like. Everyone was just doing whatever he wants and adding tons of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics that I had to redo because they where not reusable, not maintainable or/and poorly performing.

Coming from a modding background, they wanted to make the game moddable. This was the #1 priority. The game can only load "cooked" assets when it got packaged. So to make modding possible, we needed to include the unpacked project files in the download. This made the download size grow to 20+ GB. 20 GB for a fucking sidescroller. Now, 1 year after release we have one mod online: Our own test mod.

Well we "finished" the game eventually and it got released on Steam. A 20 GB sidescroller for $6.99. It's more like a $2.99 game in my opinion. But instead of lowering the price they increased it to $9.99, because we have spent so much time creating the game. Since that we selled less than 5 more copies. And now they want to make it work on mobile. Guess who will definetly NOT help them.

I have spent ~6 month of my freetime for this project, my rev share is < 100€ and they got me a lot of headaches with all their dumb decisions. Lesson learned. But hey, I am pretty good with UE4 now.

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  • 2
    Name of the game?
  • 0
    @Alice To be fair, the game alone is only around 6 GB and with low res textures and shadow maps we coule probably get it down to 2 or 3 GB. Still way to much for mobile though.

    @CWins Name of he game is Breaking Wheel.

    Just saw he adjusted the price to $4.99, so I guess he finaly believes me that 10 is to much for a sidescroller game :-)

    http://store.steampowered.com/app/...
  • 0
    @DarthDev
    Oh, interesting, i actually remember that. Probably saw that as part of my recommendation list. It's weird and creative, according to steam, i like that.

    The killing factor for me was the light-blue text in the video, that looks like movie-maker. Quality assets combined with some really no-efford elements are a trait of asset-flip games. The game logo also doesn't really match the theme of the content shown which supports that impression.

    What did you do for skyrim?
  • 0
    You should have seen his first early access videos. He only used these ugly 3d fonts, that look like the office wordart special effect fonts. Wasn't easy to get that idea out of his head.

    The logo is actually my fault. A quick draft I have put together one evening, just so we had at least something. I hate it. I told him to hire a real designer to make a decent logo, but the next day my crappy draft appeared on the early access trailer. Shame one me I guess.

    Many of the 3d assets were taken from example resources, so you could call the game an asset flip I guess. This is the main reason why I was'nt OK with the pricing.

    I have made a castle mod for Skyrim (player home with small quest) and some crafting mods for Fallout 4.
    https://nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/...?
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