Hello, just wanted to share my story as a reminder with all the lay offs in the gaming industry, it has been terrible outside of it too. I've been working as an automation QA for a pretty decent software company and I was about to hit like 11 years on the job. Also on the side I've been trying to get my own indie game dev studio off the ground with releasing 3 small games in the past 3 years.
After saving for like 10 years and living in small rented apartments, last summer I finally managed to secure enough money so I can get a loan to buy my first apartment. After a year of dealing with contractors (yes, they are that slow!!!) I finally moved and was hoping to be able to focus my free time on my game again. However literally first Monday we have a meeting with a head of our department and they said we are practically being replaced with A.I. So around 60% of the company is gone across all offices in 3 different continents...
I guess my dream has always been to go full time game dev, it's just I was hoping to be able to do it on my own terms and not kinda being forced into it. But with no real money coming in from my previous games I might not be able to make payments for the place I bought and spent most of my adult life saving for.
So now I guess I don't have a choice but to go all in on my current game. If you want to check it out and leave feedback on how it looks or even wishlist, you can so here STEAM
Wish me luck guys and gals!
You may want to try to deliberately get away from the "unreal fivey" look.
I like the underlying style but the strong reflections and resulting high contrast image really hits that "unreal five" look in a bad way, which I suspect will turn a lot of people off.
It's unfortunate but "indie unreal five game" is the new "steam asset flip", in that it is something that makes people skip a game. It's easy to slap realistic lightning into games now, so it has stopped being an indicator of quality, and slowly become the opposite.
Try to find something that works with the games style that you can do to the shading or post processing that sets you apart.
I might mute reflections a bit and add at least some grime and imperfections to surfaces. The cleanliness of surfaces together with unreals realistic lighting is a big part of the "indie unreal five" look.
At this point, if your game has the UE5 look and runs like shit, then I won’t consider it all.
Runs 90 fps for me. I try hard to optimize it, which isn't that hard, but just takes some extra effort.
What are your pc specs?
That isn't the first impression that I got, although of course I'm just one data-point. The composition, lighting, and post-processing of the stills are really good which is not common for games that are actually lazily thrown together assets. Looking a bit closer though, I do see what you mean and I think the main problem is that the level of quality doesn't seem that consistent. IDK what's going on on that 13th still with the monitor. A lot of the scenery in the trailer looks worse that the scenery in the stills, and some of the UI stuff seems a bit meh. I get that as an indie dev it takes forever to do this sort of stuff, and definitely there's very little that looks outright bad, the problem is mostly the inconsistency in quality. People only have so much time to play games, and it's not that easy to judge how fun a game is from it's trailers and description, so they look for any clues they can of less than complete effort, as any inattention to detail could indicate a lack of attention to the actual gameplay parts as well. Unfortunately for both gamers and developers, how fun or engaging your game is doesn't necessarily correspond that well with how appealing it is to people who see the trailer.
IDK, this is all kind of unfounded speculation from someone who really doesn't have much personal experience in the area, so take it with a grain of salt