gamedev

I'm picturing a game where you take the role of an arcology planner and are given a certain number of ingame years to prove the viability of the concept as fully as possible. Game takes place on an isometric grid, where you build your arcology out of predefined modules such as living quarters, industries, power plants, greenhouses, etc. You have to manage things like the flow of resources between districts, transit, waste management. You can connect your arcology to the wider world to do things like import resources and export waste, and you will need to do so especially in the early game, but you also gain a growing ability to handle these things within your arcology as you expand its capabilities. Maybe also have the player have to deal with structural soundness and making sure the arcology doesn't collapse. Scoring would probably be based on population, land footprint (smaller is better), and self-sufficiency.

Hmm. Maybe after Guardian Cry.

Hello Comrades. I don't have any affiliation with this game Jam but I thought I'd post it here. Please let us all know if you enter :)

About a week ago I began a futile effort to create a clone of KSP-RP1 in Godot, with blackjack and hookers. Figured I'd start with procedural geometry like cones and cylinders, because if I get stuck on that then I can completely forget about quad-tree LOD planets where you can zip from human scale to orbit in realtime. Slowly working towards a 'craft editor,' but the entire thing is a pile of hacks already.

I've been debating whether I wanted to share screenshots or anything here, but I've realised I'd rather put things out there than debate whether I'm an imposter or not, otherwise stuff like this sits on my harddrive and goes nowhere

this is a screen from my in-development game, Death Tech Reaper :) Taking place on the First Plane of the after-life, you play as Ceres, the newly minted 'Reaper' who's job is to protect the souls traveling through the First Plane on their journey down to their final resting place in the Greater Commune. It's an isometric action game, with a semi-randomised layout, taking inspiration from the rogue-like genre - the catch, however, is that you only ever have 2HP to play with at any given time, however your health can be recovered by taking down enemies, keeping you in the run longer. I wanna keep posting updates as I work, it's getting closer and closer to something I'm happier to distribute wider - I'm just glad I have something to put my name to. I'll post some gameplay footage at some point too!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15508679

Had to share with this community, I decided for my second game to just rip off the band-aid and I entered a game jam targeted at beginners. I placed 3rd - with 1st and 2nd going to more seasoned game developers. I never imagined that, going in, I would be on the pedestal. I just have to thank everyone that participates in game development and indie gaming as a community - including you, reading this.

If you are curious and want to check it out:

The games ranked by overall score

The game itself

A devlog looking back at my first jam experience

I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in the super early days of PC gaming. John Romero has a rather interesting tale, there is a lot of pathos surprisingly. Romero is one of the few katz I think is humble enough to actually talk about his flaws and shortcomings rather openly. I learned a lot about the 90's, game development, and was kinda inspired in a weird way. I was pretty lucky my library had a copy.

Pictured is the Gryphon boss battle. She is fast and aggressive, and victory requires the player to dodge her rapid-fire dives and charges while exploiting split-second openings to hit her. Upon being defeated and purged of her corruption, she bestows the protagonist with the ability to do a diving stab, allowing him to cross large gaps and hit enemies with a powerful sword strike.

Next up is the Unicorn Temple, which I actually started late in March - I'm running a bit ahead of schedule. Goal is to release by the end of 2025, and so far, that's looking likely. Development roadmap is as follows:

• 2023: Engine, UI, Phoenix Temple, Demo (completed)
• 2024 Jan-Mar: Gryphon Temple (completed)
• 2024 Apr-Jun: Unicorn Temple (in progress)
• 2024 Jul-Sep: Minotaur Temple
• 2024 Oct-Dec: Final Dungeon
• 2025: Overworld, intro and ending cinematics, polish, closed beta

Development process for each individual dungeon generally goes like so (with the exception of the Phoenix Temple, since I built many parts of it concurrently with the engine):

• 1st month: Plot dungeon map, design and implement dungeon's unique enemy's puzzles, and other mechanics with placeholder art and sound assets, build and test entire map except for the boss (on track to finish this by the end of April for the Unicorn Temple)
• 2nd month: Art assets, sounds, and animations for the dungeon.
• 3rd month: Program and gameplay test boss; once satisfied, create art, sound assets, and post-fight dialog for the boss. Give the dungeon to a few close friends for playtesting, then make adjustments based on results.

If you're not familiar with the concept of combined arms, it's a form of military organization where different types of weapons are integrated together into units so that they can cover each other's weaknesses. For example, a combined arms formation of tanks and infantry allows infantry to screen for the tanks to prevent the tanks from being hit at close range in their blind spots, while the tanks can provide heavy fire support to infantry if they run up against a fortified position or enemy armor.

I design enemies for Guardian Cry in the same way - each enemy has a distinct niche, and their abilities complement each other to make them more dangerous when combined. I introduce them separately where players can learn and exploit their weaknesses, and then I make the player fight them together.

The enemies in the Guardian Cry demo provide a clear example. Gremlins (the purple rat-looking things that pop out of walls) have a projectile fireball attack that can hit the player anywhere on the screen, but they have a low attack rate, low health, and are immobile. This means that if the player can get close, they're pretty easy to kill.

Fire Snakes, on the other hand, have high health, a large profile, and a short-range spit attack. Their large size makes them difficult to avoid, their spit attack forces the player to pay attention and carefully manage their range and angle of attack, and their high health means they take a bit of time to kill. They're slow and have a low attack rate, though, so they don't present a lot of immediate danger. All this combines to form an enemy that, while not super deadly, makes an effective wall.

Finally, we have Firedancers. These roly-poly lizards barrel toward the player character at high speeds, leaving fire in their wake. Their high-speed charge, and the fact that they make the room more dangerous the longer they're alive, means that they must be dealt with quickly. However, alone, they're easy to manage - stand still, let them roll toward you, then hit them with your sword when they're close enough.

Now we apply the principle of combined arms. The player enters a room. There are gremlins on the far wall, Fire Snakes in the middle, and Firedancers that charge the player. The Firedancers create a threat that the player must immediately deal with. The player cannot simply stand still and hit them as they come because the Gremlins are launching fireballs that must be dodged. The Fire Snakes creep toward the player, slowly constricting the area in which the player can maneuver, which makes it gradually more difficult to both dodge the fireballs and the Firedancers. All of this comes together to form a demanding encounter from simple, complementary pieces.

Hello, everyone!

It's been a bit less than a month since I released the demo for Guardian Cry. I took about a week to solicit feedback, and I've gotten a lot done since then.

The second dungeon, the Gryphon Temple, is fully mapped out. All enemies, room features, and puzzles have been implemented except for the gryphon herself (who will take a considerable amount of dev time to do assets and programming for - likely as much as the entire rest of the dungeon combined!). Most of the new features still use placeholder graphics, but as you can see from the screenshot, I'm making good progress on finalized assets - most of the tilemap is done, though I have yet to start on the enemies.

For the Gryphon Temple, I'm keeping two themes in mind: "The Gryphon is the fierce warrior of the Guardians" and "Her temple is a cave."

For the former, the player enters from the lower right, goes through a short section that introduces the dungeon's enemies and puzzle setups, and then almost immediately enters a room where the Guardian Key is in plain sight, right next to the Guardian Door. The catch? The Guardian Key is behind four regular locked doors, and the player needs to venture into the depths of the Temple to find them. The Gryphon is the warrior of the Guardians: she doesn't hide in the depths of her temple. The way to her is immediately made clear, challenging the player to overcome it. Also tying into this theme, puzzles will revolve around killing enemies - the player will need to come up with creative ways to dispatch enemies that are inaccessible or immune to their regular attacks. (As an added bonus, this means I only had to make new enemies, instead of entirely new puzzle elements like the arrow throwers and braziers in the Phoenix Temple.)

For the latter: caves are strange, disorienting places. You can spend hours crawling through tight, narrow passages only to turn a corner and emerge into an absolutely massive open chamber. The plan for this dungeon includes multiple open rooms, larger than any found in the Phoenix Temple. This is offset by the many winding, claustrophobic corridors that the player will need to navigate to make it to these rooms, often grappling with enemies and hazards like pits in the process. To make the layout feel more natural, I plan to minimize the use of right angles in room design.

Hello, fellow Tankies! Welcome back to my continuing adventure of building a lewd VR communist brainwashing experience for Jordan Peterson and his incel masses as per Xi's personal instructions.

Last weekend I finished up the answer selection solution by using the thumbstick to select the diagonal direction and activating a radial slider that corresponds to the answer of that direction. It gives the user a few seconds before locking in the answer. Major props to @aaro@hexbear.net for putting the radial menu of other games in my head and putting me down that path.

I actually had to take apart my Quest 2 Controller to clean the thumbstick as it was sticking so bad that it just got stuck in Down/Right for a while. Cleaning worked but I've lost the touch sensitivity of where your thumb is supposed to rest. I can't think of a time I've actually used that function, that wasn't just novelty, so it can wait for a while before I take it apart again.

Yesterday, I hammered out version 1 of Question serving and Answer handling. As the video shows it now tells you if your answer is right or wrong and then serves up a new question. I've only got handful of questions so far which is why sometimes it looks like the question hasn't changed in the video. I've also made it so the answer is randomly assigned to one of the four answer spots with the wrong answers filled in to the empty spaces afterwards. None of this is set in stone, especially not the graphics or timing or anything, but I just want to get everything working enough for prototyping a full alpha version.

In version 1 of the Quiz minigame I'm not doing any weighting or behind the scenes algorithms, things are purely going to be served according to Random.Range, but in future versions I am planning on building an algorithm that incorporates techniques similar to Duolingo and other learning apps to better encode the brainwashing.

Today I'm gonna clean things up a bit and get the audio manager working so next week I can figure out how best to implement the HIIT style rounds of alternating quiz/lewd stimulation. I may make a NSFW post over in askchapo to see if folks have better ideas than what I'm currently playing around with. I figured this post was clean enough that it didn't need NSFW tagging, but if it does, just let me know, mods.

Previous NSFW post on the app for anyone curious:

So I'm doing a VR experience and today I'm working on using the thumbsticks of the quest controller more like a gamepad to control selection of a UI menu for a trivia game that's going to be in the experience.

Now Unity returns the thumbstick via a Vector2, easy enough. I literally sketch out an XY graph, figure there's a threshold I need to account for for each direction, a much smaller threshold that we can ignore for each plus and minus on the other vector, and if the Vector2 meets all my criteria I can fire off my functions for the direction. So for UP my code looks something like

if(Vector.Y > pressthreshold and (Vector.X < threshold and Vector.X < -threshold){ Print(up!)}

And then I did that for each direction... And it kinda worked. But it was wonky as hell because my quest is old and the thumbsticks drift. So I spent like an hour and a half trying to find just the right thresholds and it just did not want to be consistent...

So I figured I'd ask chatgpt. And it basically spits out: Just take the absolute value of your X and Y and whichever one is bigger is your plane, and then the positive or negative of the value determines your direction.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

I am in shambles. I have once again overcomplicated the simplest freaking thing.

TLDR: My brain is pudding. Just had to vent.

Poopoopeepee

Mostly just featuring a few preview gifs. I don't know when will be the next time I actually have something worthwhile to show, but this is it so far.

Wanted to give them a plain, unassuming appearance, with only a leather vest for armor - the protagonist is a peasant and can't afford anything on the level of full plate, but they've prepared themselves for the dangers they're facing the best they can.

For having only spent a few hours on the background image, I think it turned out very well. It used to take me days to make those, and they weren't quite as good.

My goal was to have the demo released by the end of the year, and I am definitely on schedule for that.

Hi everyone I'm just posting our game jam here for others to check out. We used Godot and a great pixel art AI plugin for Aseprite that I found called PixelLab. I found old Russian folk midis and used an app called GXSCC to convert them to chiptune sounding songs. As a bit of an easter egg you can also select the USSR anthem in options.

We're looking to expand the game so any suggestions are welcome. Godot 4 was a bit of a pain to work with but hopefully will be more developed going forward.

I can recommend the Seattle Indies Slow game jam next year, you don't have to be in Seattle to join.

Edit: Someone has been impersonating us in the comments on itch, I am one developer here and the other dev AndroidOverlord is the other on itch.io - anyone else responding is not associated with Rabbitariat.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1026770

Four years ago (...jesus) Yahtzee decided to challenge himself to make 12 games in as many months. The videos don't run too long, are nicely edited/paced, and you get to see how he thinks about game design both in principle and in practice.

I'd highly recommend the series to anyone who's thinking about game design, whether that's as a hobbyist or a spectator. I've linked someone else's playlist because the official one is junk.

There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen

Hey, nerds. Still hard at work on my Zelda clone. Based on feedback from many different people, I've settled on a tentative title of Guardian Cry. I hope to have a playable demo with the Phoenix Temple out by the end of the year, which will require me to do a lot in a short timeframe, but so far I'm on track to pull it off.

The big silver emblem you see in the screenshot is how the player will track their progress through the game. On its surface are reliefs of the four Guardians - the Minotaur, the Gryphon, the Phoenix, and the Unicorn. Each time you defeat one of the Guardians and gain its ability, that Guardian's eye glows ruby on the emblem. In the pic none of the eyes are glowing, even though the player would have beaten the Minotaur and the Gryphon by the time they're in the Phoenix Temple - I wanted to show the emblem without any modifications.

I was impressed

There is something satisfying about a number going up. I'm not immune to it.