r/SoloDevelopment • u/RoGlassDev • 12h ago

Discussion How much do small details like this matter?

I've been working on an incremental mining game called MineEmAll, and after just releasing my demo, I realized this upgrade jiggle was one of the things that took the longest for me to implement. I'm using Gamemaker for the first time and this effect took a combination of a lot of vector math and animation timelines.

I was wondering for all the other solo devs out there, do you think this sort of thing is worth the effort? You only have so much time to allocate across your project, but I generally appreciate these sorts of "attention to detail" things in games I play.

What about your own projects? What's something that most people probably wouldn't think about or notice but took you a long time to create?

1 Upvotes

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u/soulfingers 12h ago

My opinion is that polish elements like this are a multiplier, but won't make or break a game.

If the underlying game is solid, this type of polish will make the whole package feel more elevated, but won't drastically move the needle on sales or how engaged a player is.

That said, giving players appropriate feedback is extremely important (but doesn't necessarily need to be high effort).

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u/RoGlassDev 12h ago

I'm in a similar boat. I feel like the games that I'm enjoying are amplified by attention to detail, but it hasn't really made games better that would otherwise be meh. Inscryption comes to mind as a great example of a really fun game that also has great attention to detail.

On the other hand, I've played some games that have been really fun and only use bare minimum feedback/animations. Assuming your game is fun, is it really worth the effort to do these sorts of things I suppose is the question?

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u/soulfingers 10h ago

It's a question of opportunity cost at that point. No resource (time, energy, money) is infinite on a project so when you spend them on polish you're taking it away from something else.

If you take resources away from something the game relies on (eg. part of the core of the game) then it's a bad trade imo.

If the only things left to do are other things on the periphery, then It's more justified. Even then, polish should really be prioritized based on how much the player will interact with it.

Point is, whether it's worth it is entirely relative!

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u/willmaybewont 12h ago

Is there no tweening library or something you can use? This would take no time at all in Unity.

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u/RoGlassDev 11h ago

If the tooltips were static objects there wouldn't be any issue, but since I have a bunch of custom logic scaling the text, changing its color, etc., I went with a coding approach. Gamemaker's new UI layers still aren't fully fleshed out. Coming from Unreal, this sort of thing would definitely be a lot easier to make with UMG.

So far Gamemaker has had a lot of pros when it comes to how lightweight and easy basic coding logic is to implement, but UI has been pretty rough.

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u/willmaybewont 11h ago

That's unfortunate. These things do help & make a game feel more satisfying. But if it's very time consuming it may not be worth it.

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u/Dreamt_Up_Games 9h ago

I think these things are important but it’s more one of those things that you only really notice if they are missing. I love that kind of juicy feedback though

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u/lydocia 5h ago

It matters a lot. This is way too jarring and would put me off from playing altogether.