As a game developer, your ultimate goal is to create an innovative, engaging, and fun experience for your players. This process requires not only a great deal of creativity and passion but also a lot of sweat and tears, not to mention all those long working days. After all that time and energy, how do you determine if the game is a success? In this blog, we’re going to highlight the metrics you’re going to want to regularly keep track of, and how you can use those statistics to create a better experience for your players, and a healthier business for yourself. All of this is accessible via Unity’s free, fully-integrated Operate Dashboard, giving you all the tools you need to monitor and tweak your game for long-term success. The 3 Rs of live operations In order to achieve success with a free-to-play game, it’s important to keep track of statistics from three categories: reach, revenue, and retention. These are known as the three “R’s” of … [Read more...] about Unity’s Operate Dashboard: How to measure, monitor and optimize your free-to-play game for success – Unity Blog
Free open source games
The 20 best management games on PC
Base-building is de rigueur these days, what with all those survival games, Minecraft, Fallout 4 and now Fortnite, but before all that we had tiny top-down or isometric worlds in which we diligently built cities and dungeons and theme parks and rail networks. The central appeal of management games was and is that they give us an idealised sense of what it is like to create a game – to weave new worlds upon our screens, guided only by our imaginations, ingenuity and the limitations of the in-game taxation system. Magic, right there: the birth of your own universe. For a while there, it looked as though the management flame was fading, choked by the low-grade tycoon games that littered supermarkets’ dusty games shelves. But this is The New Age Of PC Games, which means every near-abandoned idea of yesteryear has been revisited in thoughtful and ambitious new ways. Town sims and theme sims are now healthier and more vibrant than they’ve ever been, expanding. This round-up … [Read more...] about The 20 best management games on PC
Space 4X Star Ruler 2 goes open source and free if you build it yourself
Star Ruler was a 4X space strategy game where ships could be as big as planets, and carry weapons that could punch holes in suns. Its 2015 sequel, Star Ruler 2 flew under our radar, but was a slightly more coherent, traditional game, while still offering conflict on a truly daft scale. Developers Blind Mind Studios have been inactive for a while now, but this week they kindly made Star Ruler 2 (and its expansion, Wake Of The Heralds) open source. Better still: Everything but the music is included, so if you build it yourself, it’s entirely free. Assembling your own copy of Star Ruler 2 isn’t as complex as it sounds. The GitHub page for the game includes full instructions on what to do, starting with (for Windows, at least) downloading and installing Visual Studio 2017. While the self-assembled, free version of the game misses out on the music and Steam achievements, everything else is fully functional, including multiplayer, fully cross-compatible with people playing the … [Read more...] about Space 4X Star Ruler 2 goes open source and free if you build it yourself
Home > Programming > PlayCanvas is the world’s easiest to use WebGL Game Engine. It’s free, it’s open source and it’s backed by amazing developer tools.
Today we are going to take a look at the PlayCanvas HTML5 3D Game engine. While not strictly a tutorial, this guide should give you a pretty good idea of what the PlayCanvas Engine includes,if it is right for you and give you enough information to get you started. There is also a video version of this tutorial available here. First off, what exactly is the PlayCanvas Engine? Well, let’s let them describe it in their own words: The amazing developer tools part isn’t hyperbole either, PlayCanvas ships with an impressive amount of polished and high quality tools. Where it does get a bit confusing is where the open source part stops, and the pay to use it part starts. Getting Started There are three ways to develop with PlayCanvas. Download and run the tools locally, use the online tools and code using a Github or Bitbucket repository or, as I am going to do in this example, work entirely in their online … [Read more...] about Home > Programming > PlayCanvas is the world’s easiest to use WebGL Game Engine. It’s free, it’s open source and it’s backed by amazing developer tools.
Open-source game dev tool Godot Engine adds VR support
The open-source game development tool Godot Engine has released a new build that, among other things, introduces support for VR projects into the mix. Godot Engine is notably a game development engine that is both open-source and free to use, meaning this update potentially gives a wide variety of developers a chance to dabble in creating VR games that they may not have had otherwise. The 3.0 release of Godot Engine introduces ARVRServer implementation. Right now, that means that developers will be able to create VR projects for either SteamVR or Google Cardboard-style mobile VR. But down the line the Godot Engine team says that AR support is expected as well. You can check out the full patch notes on the Godot Engine website for more details on all the new features the 3.0 update brings and download links for the engine itself. … [Read more...] about Open-source game dev tool Godot Engine adds VR support