GameDev

Plus switching from the subscription model to a one-time fee for commercial PC-only license. Nice.

I enjoyed this part of the announcement:

We have seen other platforms making awkward moves with their pricing and terms, so we thought, what if we did the opposite

I wonder who they could possibly be referencing 🤔

This was a fun game to make, it's short, and you'll probably finish it in an hour or so. I think it's good some good scares and tricky puzzles! If you try it out, let me know!

Usually coats $19.95.

I slept for most of this offer apparently but it's still available for nine and a half hours as of time of posting! You can claim it with your Itch account then download it later.

As the man himself says, "Get all my game assets in a single bundle, great for learning new engines 👀"

Looking for good resources on scanning mostly flat textures. Tried to use a photograph of a tatami mat and had a lot of problems with the lens distortion. I don't own any professional photo equipment so I have to use my Pixel 6 camera. I have a couple of Ideas but I'm not really sure how to tackle the problem. Using a 3d scan app / photogrametry could be an option, but I have yet to find a fitting application. Another approach could be using a handheld scanner, but the surface has to be relatively flat. A brick wall for example would be problematic.

What is your folks workflow for capturing textures?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/2647820

Full release notes here

Eldiron is currently under active development and a v1 is planned for 2023. Eldiron is open source and licensed under the MIT.

Features of v1

• Support games similar to Ultima 4 / 5 or any game which uses a rectangular grid layout.
• Either render tiles directly or in 2.5D using the built in raycaster. Games can switch between the two modes at runtime or display both at the same time (for example use the tiles view as a mini-map).
• Eldiron comes with integrated tile-maps or your can use your own square tiles with up to four levels of transparency.
• Single-player or multi-player experiences. Eldiron has a sophisticated multi-threaded server architecture to allow for as many player or NPC characters as possible.
• Procedural dungeons and regions using a dedicated node system.
• Cross platform. Eldiron is written in Rust and can nearly run everywhere, i.e. on the Web, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android etc. Eldiron Creator can run on any desktop.
• A sophisticated behavior node graph makes creation of AI behavior for NPCs easy. The node system is backed by a full-featured scripting language.
• Eldiron Creator has editors for tile-maps, regions and node based graphs for character behavior, systems (like crafting), items and the overall game logic.

Retro top-down and isometric perspectives as well as low-poly meshes will be supported post v1.

Join the community on Discord to get in contact.

Goals

• Being able to create games similar to the RPGs of the 80's and 90's.
• Support single-player or multi-player games and even MMOs.
• Over time support more perspectives like top-down and isometric.

I have this idea for a certain game development tool, but before I start another side project I want to check if something similar already exists.

An important part of game development is fine-tuning numeric values. You have some numbers that govern things like character motion, weapon impact, enemy AI, or any other game mechanic. For most of these there is no "correct" value that can be calculated (or even verified!) with some algorithm - you have to manually try different values and converge to something that "feels right".

The most naive way to fine-tune these numbers is to have them as hard-coded values, tweak them in code, and re-run the game every time you change them. This, of course, is a tedious process - especially if you have to go through long build times, game loading, and/or gameplay to reach a state where you can test these values (that last hurdle can often be skipped by programming in a special entry point, but that too can get tedious)

A better way would be to write these numbers in configuration file(s) which the game can hot-reload - at least while in development mode. That way you can just edit the file and save it, and the game will reload the new values. This is a huge improvement because it skips the building/loading/preparing which can drastically shorten the cycles - but it's still not perfect because you have to constantly switch between the game and the configuration file.

Sometimes you can use the game engine editor to tweak these while the game is running, or create your own UI. This makes the context switches hurt less, and also lets you use sliders instead of editing textual numbers, but it's still not perfect - you still have to switch back and forth between the game controls and the tweaking interface.

Which brings us to my idea.

What I envision is a local fine-tuning server. The server will either update configuration files which the game will hot-reload, or the game could connect to it via WebSocket (or some other IPC. But I like WebSocket) so that the server could push the new values to it as they get updated.

After the server deduces the structure of the configuration (or read it from a schema - but providing a schema may usually be a overkill) you could use its webapp UI to configure how the values would be tweaked. We usually want sliders, so you'll need to provide a range - even if the exact value is hard to determine, it's usually fairly easy to come up with a rough range that the value must be in (how high can a human jump? More than 5cm, less than 5m). You will also decide for each slider if it's linear or logarithmic.

The server, of course, will save all that configuration so that you won't have t reconfigure it the next time you want to tweak values (unless there are new values, in which case you'll only have to configure the sliders for them)

Since this would be a server, the tweaking of the values could be done from another device - preferably something with a touchscreen, like a smartphone or a tablet, because tweaking many sliders is easier with a touchscreen. So you have the game running on your PC/console, gamepad in hand (or keyboard+mouse, if that's your thing), and as you play you tweak the sliders on the touchscreen until you get them just right.

Does anyone know if a similar tool already exists?

This one goes out to the hobbyists and the solo devs, as I’d guess anyone employed in the industry is already using such basics.

But it does seem to be a particular problem among less experienced game developers, to avoid using version control (also known as source control) and risk losing progress if not their entire project.

Just in the last few weeks I’ve seen a video from a well-known indie dev admitting he got himself into a tangle through not using it, another one with a guy trying to make a game in a weekend only to have his files irretrievably corrupted on the last night. And endless Discord conversations in which someone has lost a significant amount of work and needs to be talked down from a ledge.

Plus it came up in the game jam advice thread, so it’s been on my mind and I thought it deserved its own post.

Why is this so prevalent in game dev? I have a few ideas, mostly around misunderstandings and perceived complexity. But it’s a bit heartbreaking to see people lose such huge chunks of work, not to mention demotivating for the person involved, so a PSA it is!

Why you should be using version control

• Backups - Each commit is an emergency backup of your code at a particular point in time. Hard drive fails? Well, luckily you’ve only lost the work done since you pushed the last commit. Note: I do recommend taking regular backups to store elsewhere and not relying on just this, but it’s a good start.
• Experimentation & rollback - You can feel free to try new things, break stuff, safe in the knowledge that if it all sets on fire you can just roll back to the last commit and pretend nothing happened.
• Teamwork - Sharing code and working together without overwriting stuff can be a bit of a nightmare. Version control helps to prevent issues and keep things running smoothly in a team situation.
• Branches - Maybe you’re working in a team and want to try adding a new feature without bothering anyone else. Or maybe you’re working solo but want to keep your wild experiments separate to your stable codebase. Either way, sorted.
• Paper trail - Ever discovered an obscure bug and wondered when it crept in and how (or maybe even whodunnit)? Now you can find out.
• Versioning - Clue’s in the name really, but once you start thinking about game releases and versions the ability to differentiate between stable release branch and work-in-progress branch is gonna come in clutch.
• And probably plenty other reasons that I can’t think of right now off the top of my head but hopefully you get the idea.

How to get started

There are two things you’ll need to start, the actual version control software and a place to host your project.

The most popular source control software is Git, and the most popular host is Github. Honestly you might as well learn these first because even if you decide to move to an alternative later, they’re massively popular in the industry and most teams and places of work will expect this knowledge anyway.

This post is long enough already without trying to add an actual tutorial in here but info on the exact process is easy enough to find. You’re smart, you’ll do fine.

You can interact with your project through the command line, but you can also install a more user-friendly GUI. The two most popular tend to be SourceTree and Github Desktop.

You can also find engine-specific help and .gitignore files etc online, so do make sure to search for those.

Before you start your next project. Before you work on that new feature for your work-in-progress game. Before you lose something you’d really rather not have lost. Please, please use version control.

End post.

Hi all! Posting from my alt account on lemmy.blahaj.zone because it's been brought to my attention that we have users here from Beehaw and of course they can't see anything I'm posting with my main account @[email protected].

Sorry Beehaw folks, I'm still getting to grips with mod duties here.

Anyway. As part of the "try things and see what sticks" approach to community engagement, welcome to the new weekly chat thread!

Whether you have progress to show off à la Screenshot Saturday, a Monday morning gripe about unreasonable expectations on your team, or a Wednesday win, this is the place to share how your gamedev week is going.

You know game devs, if there's one thing we love more than making our own stuff it's living vicariously through others, so share away and let's see what everyone's been up to!

Been working on this little game for a few months, wanted to share! I don't have my preorder yet so I've been having friends test it on device. The crank is neat!

In case you don't know what a playdate is:

spoiler

It's a cheese-shaped 1-bit gameboy with a crank on the side:

Hi, we wanted to share that we're working on, and since we don't use mainstream social media, it looked like a good idea to share our blog here.

I'll be adding comments to this thread every time we release a new blogpost :)

https://blog.hiddenpeople.club/

I see many Steam pages and social media posts with dithered posterized mess of GIFs. Most GIf encoders are terrible. GIFs could be encoded much better: gif.ski is designed to encode high-color video-like clips efficiently.

Hey, everyone! So, I'm new here and I've been checking out all the super helpful posts in this group. After reading about it being beginner-friendly (totally makes sense with that name, right?), I decided to join the My First Game Jam!

It just kicked off tonight, and I'm going solo on this one. The theme is "cycles," and I'm drawing blanks on good ideas, but I'll sleep on it and hope something clicks.

Basically, I'm crossing my fingers that someone here has some tips for a newbie like me diving into her first jam! I kinda got carried away chatting in the jam Discord till late, so now it's time for some sleep. But I'll be ready to jam in the morning! By the way, can I share what I create here, or is that not allowed?

Thanks, y'all! You're the best! 🙌

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1915905

OP posted their unpopular opinion that game devs shouldn't be using their development time on making games accessible for people with disabilities.

But check out the top comments, which have turned into basically a handy checklist of all the simple accessibility features we can easily add to our games!

Thanks, OP 😄

Sorry in advance

Since Lemmy is a terrible influence, I’ve been convinced to give RSS another go as a means to get at the ~~news that interests me~~ interesting stuff that I’d otherwise miss. It’s actually working surprisingly well, so I thought I’d share some gamedev-specific resources that I’ve subscribed to so far.

My current approach for the feed is to subscribe to basically anything that looks interesting, then prune it later if it turns out to be no good or be too spammy. So I’d very much appreciate suggestions of blogs, magazines, video channels, podcasts, whatever is RSS-able!

READING MATERIAL

Magazines

• MCV / Develop Magazine - News, interviews etc from around the UK gaming industry
• Game Developer (née Gamasutra) - Lots of interesting news and articles among the nonsense here but I can’t find a way to sub to only certain categories, so may be too spammy. We’ll see.

Blogs

• LOSTGARDEN - Self-described as “a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design” and it’s not wrong
• Keith Burgun Games - Basically a personal blog that includes devlog updates, general musings on gamedev, and a podcast
• Blobs in Games - Technical articles that mostly go over my head but are interesting to read through anyway to see what sort of thing actual smart people get up to
• Brandon Cole - Game reviews and other articles from the perspective of a blind gamer who works as an accessibility consultant. Really interesting read, and audio versions of posts are included.

WATCHING & LISTENING

Podcasts

I don’t really do podcasts but would like to get into them more, so any recommendations for this section very welcome!

• The Clockwork Game Design Podcast / Strategy Can Be Fun - By Keith Burgun who I mentioned above already, a combo of discussions and interviews around game design
• Building The Game - “the ins and outs and ups and downs of being game designers in a documentary style”
• Deep Listens - Subbed to this because it described itself as taking deeper dives into what makes games great, but haven’t listened yet so we’ll see
• The Game Dev Advice Podcast - Basically what it says on the tin

Videos

Did you know you can still subscribe to YouTube channels via RSS? This should help with the problem of YT trying to decide what we actually want to see, versus what we’ve literally told it we want to see. So far I’ve RSS-followed:

• GDC - An excellent resource that you all no doubt already know about
• Going Indie - Video essay type content on the business side of games, from a guy who started his own indie studio
• Ask Gamedev - Despite the name this is more of a showcase channel for indie / solo games, but it’s fun for a bit of occasional inspiration
• Grant Abbitt - Actually a 3d modelling channel focusing on Blender but the way he explains things has been invaluable for me and my game

Plus a couple of devlog channels by members of this community that I’d like to make sure I don’t miss:

• QueenOfSquiggles - Making a magical farming sim inspired by Slime Rancher (shoutout @[email protected] )
• JulianH - Making a story-based game about the very far future, with some definite Outer Wilds vibes (shoutout @[email protected] )

If any of you reading this have your own devlog channel, please share, I’d love to check it out too!

—

For anyone thinking of joining the RSS revolution, I’m trying out Inoreader which I’d seen recommended a fair bit around Lemmy. Not too sold on it yet, but the free plan is a decent enough start.

interesting stuff that I’d otherwise miss

Hi all,

I've never shared this publicly though it was my intent. I figure to help contribute to Lemmy, this would be a good first post.

I wrote a 2D game Engine in Java as an undergraduate project. It's fairly simple: audio, sprites, physics, and component based architecture. If you're interested in writing a small 2D game in Java and have past experience with Unity, you may find this to be as a helpful starting point. I will say this: this engine is not meant for serious game development -- I started this project with 'can I do this?' mentality.

Though I no longer work on this project, I hope that someone may find use of it.

Saw the author tooting about this project on Mastodon and I wanted to share it with everyone here.

We’ve all been there. You get to the end of a game jam and realise you need to set up an Itch page asap, or you’re wrapping up a long term project and you’re too burnt out to have the energy to even think.

This is a template pack that aims to take that pesky thinking out of the process. Just follow the template dimensions for the various images on your Itch page, and that’s one less thing to worry about and one more thing helping you stand out from all those unloved pages out there.

Find the download at: https://jannikboysen.itch.io/easy-releasy

[Now Released] Here have a little preview of The Sun Gem

an upcoming choose your own adventure game I'm working on for the #Commodore64 as part of a game jam

Some things I learned when making this:

1. It's better to make smaller games, as my last game was a more complex one that I couldn't finish
2. Developing for a retro computer is easier when you don't use a game engine (luckily I don't really like working with game engines anyways)

Edit: I released the game! Check it out here!

#GameDev #RetroGames #Commodore @[email protected] @[email protected]

TL;DR New moderator, so please do report any problematic posts or comments. What sort of content would you like to see here? Post-mortems? AMAs? And a reminder that we allow self-promo here but only if it adds value from a gamedev perspective.

—

Hi all! You might have seen my name around in the community. I’ve been here since before the Reddit blackouts, which I guess makes me some kind of ancient lemming-witch, and spent the last few weeks trying to kick off discussion threads and shilling our community at every opportunity which is probably how some of you made your way here in the first place.

I’ve recently been appointed as community mod by an instance admin (thank you Ada <3), due to our lead (and only other) mod currently being inactive.

Firstly, please know this isn’t a grab for power, it just makes sense to have someone able to deal with reports and enforce the existing rules already put in place by our lead mod until they hopefully return. I’ll do my best to steer the ship until that happens, but would love to get your feedback on direction.

—

As we’re a relatively new community on a relatively new site, obviously we don’t have a huge amount of valuable content here. YET. I’ve been chatting to some friends on other platforms about potentially making long form, in-depth posts here about their experiences to serve as interesting, educational reads as well as pillar content for the community.

Gamers with specific accessibility requirements, senior AAA developers, solo indie devs who have successfully acquired project funding or navigated their way through Next Fest, employers who can talk about how to get hired, that sort of thing.

We could potentially even go in the direction of AMA style threads rather than essays and make an event out of it, if that’s something the community would be more interested in?

Any suggestions for the sort of thing you’d like to see are very welcome, and I’ll do what I can to make it happen! Personally I’m coming at the gamedev topic from the perspective of a hobbyist solo developer, but I know we have a diverse group here who will most likely want to see different things, so this is your chance to be heard.

—

Lastly I just wanted to touch on the existing rule around self-promo, as I know many people are using mobile apps that don’t show the sidebar info and may be unaware.

Self-promotion is WELCOME in this community. But with a caveat: it must come with added value for our members. I’ll quote the sidebar here, written by our glorious leader:

Self-promotion is fine as long as you do it from a gamedev perspective - share your progress, insights, techniques and mishaps! If you recently posted, update the previous post instead of filling the frontpage with your project

So you want to drop a link to your devlog? Sure! Do it as part of a post discussing the stuff you learned recently during the development process and how we can avoid making the same mistakes you did.

Looking for trailer feedback? Sure! Tell us all about the research you’ve done so far and how you used what you learned to structure what you’re showing us. What do you think worked and what didn’t?

Want an excuse to give us your Steam wishlist link? Sure! But do it as part of a post-mortem post of some kind, a brief guide on how you approached making an unusual mechanic, or even a meta-discussion on what you’ve learned about encouraging more wishlists…

…you get the idea.

If promo posts start to significantly overshadow more discussion-focused posts we may eventually revisit this rule, but as a probably temporary guardian of the space it would be weird of me to come in and immediately make changes like that, so here we are.

Thanks for reading my wall of text and I hope you all have a great day!

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/653659

The theme of the game jam voted on by participants is Parallel Worlds

Feel free to share progress of games you're working for it around the fediverse. We have a hashtag on the microblogging platforms #FediverseJam and there are engine specific communities like godot, unity, unreal, etc. that you can find on programming.dev

The jam will last for nine days before submissions to the itch.io page close https://itch.io/jam/summer-fediverse-jam

Ill be streaming games submitted to the jam and will do a video showcasing the entries once results are out

Hope you enjoy! Ill be aiming to run these twice a year as a way to encourage some more game dev activity around the fediverse

When this community was brand new I got to talking with a few people who fancy the idea of taking part in a game jam, but are too nervous. Whether because they’d never done one before, or at least not in a while, or just a general lack of confidence in their ability to “keep up” with more experienced devs.

Well, I’ve taken part in a lot of jams over the last few years. Some of them successfully completed, some of them utter failures, one of them somehow both. And the two jams that I can personally recommend for beginners or nervous folks, both just happen to be on their way. So I thought I’d share!

My First Game Jam

• Dates: July 22nd - August 6th (14 days)
• Itch: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2023
• Discord: https://discord.gg/8p8KtKtDvQ

Why this jam is great:

This was in fact my first ever game jam, back in 2020, and it was a great experience. The community is helpful and welcoming to everyone regardless of experience level, with more experienced folks (including myself, now!), hanging around and responding to pings for help.

The jam runs for two whole weeks which is a much easier prospect for a first-timer than the typical 48-72h ones. It’s well-established, well-moderated, and quite big so if you’re looking to join a team you’ll have a solid chance.

The My First Game Jam actually runs twice per year, so if you’re still not ready to jump in you can look out for this one happening again in Winter.

Rainbow Jam

• Dates: September 8th-24th (14 days)
• Itch: https://itch.io/jam/rainbowjam23
• Discord: https://discord.gg/wyZfC9ddrv

Why this jam is great:

The Rainbow Jam is a jam for LGBT+ folk and their allies, with all the inclusivity and friendliness that suggests. It’s much smaller than My First Game Jam, but has been running for 7 years with the result that most of the regulars get to know each other from year to year. By far the nicest jam community I’ve joined, to the extent that many of us now keep in touch year-round.

As well as just being a lovely wholesome jam, which again lasts for two weeks to avoid stressful time-crunch, the organisers are also very active in finding sponsors and opportunities for under-represented devs and artists. You’ll often see job postings, talks, funding opportunities posted there that aren’t easily found otherwise.

And of course, it’s not starting until September so you have some time to build up the courage to join!

—

Personally I’m so excited for both of these, they’re by far the highlight of the game jam calendar for me. Longer jams tend to attract a more mature audience (in outlook if not in actual age) and are generally just a lot less stressful in every possible way, so they’re a fantastic place to start.

If you have any questions about either of them or about taking part in game jams in general, I’d be very happy to answer. Maybe a few of you fancy taking part and can even team up!

Or maybe you have similarly beginner-friendly jams to recommend, in which case the more the merrier. Just leave a reply with the jam details in a similar format to the above, I know I’d love to hear about them for future reference even if nobody else is interested 😄

I'm making my own game. I'm still trying to make the main place that it takes place in. I won't tell the story for right now. I got the main idea but I wanna flesh it out even though it is not that difficult to explain it. The main place it has place in is Tartarus. I take inspirations from Hades and Persona 3 but I'm trying to make it be more original while making the "go to the top" be the clear goal.