Right, with couple of toots already out it's time for an #introduction!
We're the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference: we're a small independently run annual event that specialises in short-form, written papers on how medievalisms and medieval societies are used in modern games and gaming.
If that sounds good, do follow us and read along as we post links to our papers! Boosts on this welcome so we can find interested people.
Random game thought: I’ve been thinking about a game controller with three joysticks, but I can’t come up with a good enough reason to have the extra one. Two joysticks seems to cover everything, right? Have we reached peak game controller? What could we map to a third stick? The closest to a good reason I could think of would be radial menus, but you can easily do those with a modifier and one of the other sticks right? #gamedev
clickyland by my friend Aran (part of Sokpop) is out on Steam now!! It's a really fun and very underpriced tower defense game / village builder where clicks are your main resource. Check it:
This project is turning two this month. More charitably maybe only 11 months of that have been spent actively developing and even then that is less than 20 hours a week.
Nonetheless it's hard to not beat myself up about what I have to show for two year's work. Especially when considering the mountain remaining.
I kind of felt like I was going fast and it'd be done soon but here we are two years later. So it goes for solo hobby dev it seems.
Still trying to make this UI pop a little. But, maybe this is too much? I'm quite undecided. Let me know what you think. #gamedev#madewithgodot#indiedev
I haven't drank alcohol for several years... The last time I drank 0-alc beer was six months ago. My wife and son went on vacation for a month and left me alone at home. Therefore, I will be a Troglodyte for a whole month, living in a cave and do #gamedev
On the left can of #beer it is written that it contains vitamins, the best format of taking vitamins... this is the most delicious non-alcoholic beer I have ever tasted
Hi! It's time for this week's edition of the #bevymergetrain. If this is your first time here, every week a do a round up of the community-reviewed PRs for @bevy, the #opensource#rustlang engine for #gamedev that it's now my full-time job to help maintain!
There's a whopping 20 PRs ready this week; let's check in on and each of them and I'll make the final call:
More fun with math, the texture mapping isn't perfect, I have some corrections to do to it still, but my little renderer now supports off-grid objects of arbitrary sizes and positions (only real restriction is they have to be convex). While the game itself is intended to be grid based I thought it'd be nice to be able to do some more complex scenery outside of billboards, sprites, and texture tricks.
This week in the Bevy ecosystem we see Tiny Glade ship a Steam demo, live VJ sets powered by Bevy, screen space reflections in the deferred renderer and more.
We've also got the usual showcases and a couple really interesting crate release for 2d lighting systems and gpu particles.
Quick video of where my Berzerk-alike is at now. Be warned: Terrible placeholder audio might be loud, so maybe turn down the volume!
I know there's a dodgy wall collision in this vid, but tidy ups like that'll get sorted later.
I like the slow pace of it, which I didn't expect. It's very slow but it's still fun to play and quite exciting when you get caught up in it. I may end up making a separate, flashier, faster version eventually tho.. we'll see! https://youtu.be/MoRgdnJK8Ac#gamedev
If you follow my (now-)friends-only account, you may remember me wondering how I can make vertical transitions between rooms in a dungeon flow well. I didn't want to use elevators, because Zelda II's lifts are so iconic, and I'm already copying so much from that game.
But, I said "heck it." Elevators just plain make sense. But I decided to put a visual spin on it -- these have a much more elaborate design (especially that ironwork at the top), and will be pulley-operated. I'm going to include an animation of Zalia working the pulleys. Probably with an exaggerated pose and sweat flying off her head 😅
As far as the player is concerned, they work exactly like Zelda II's lifts do (press up or down on the d-pad to move; let go to stop), but visually, they're going to have a distinct flavor that works for Enigma Heart.
I finished laying out all the rooms for the first dungeon in Enigma Heart last night. My Zelda II influences are really showing -- but I think I'm also starting to expand on it a little bit and come up with my own ideas. In particular, I'm placing hidden areas and items that the player can't get to until they acquire certain items, spells, or skills later in the game.
(In Zelda II, when you beat a dungeon's boss and get its item, the dungeon becomes inaccessible thereafter)
This map is drawn in Aseprite as an RGB-color PNG image, at a scale of 1 pixel per tile. The blue tiles are solid, the white ones are non-solid, pink are breakable, orange are platforms, etc. I do it this way because I find high-level sketching to be easier as an image than in the map editor. My map editor can read this image, look for the appropriate colors, and generate a map "skeleton" that I can then texture and add objects to.
Bug fixing today for Stardust Survivors. Turns out our Shooting Stars ability was super broken! The level 5 version now properly has a large star with double damage, size, and pierce, as well as a nice spread firing pattern! #indiedev#gamedev
Here's a look at my process designing upgrades for Rootin' Tootin' Lootin' & Shootin'. I have one big image file where I sketch out new ideas and refine them.