Game Development

Wrote about how I got 2,583 decorative plants down to 3 draw calls using mesh baking and a custom wind shader in Unity. My modeler was a fan of the game who ended up being the person making it beautiful.

Full devlog with screenshots and code: https://cornucopiavideogame.com/devlog/

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1681600/Cornucopia/

I just put Dead Reckoning into public beta. It's a turn-based colony ship sim built in Godot 4, and the central mechanic is Drift — the slow, invisible erosion of your civilization's values across generations.

You start with 1000 colonists, five resource bars, and five drift meters all sitting at 0%. By the time you arrive at a new world, those meters tell a story you didn't mean to write.

What's in the beta: — 20-minute runs — Five interlocking drift paths (genetic, ideological, AI takeover, generational regression, class stratification) — Terminal-aesthetic UI — no HUD outside the fiction — Ten hard-coded events to validate the decision feel — One ending that tells you what civilization you built

It's rough. That's intentional. Looking for people who want to play it and tell me what broke, what landed, and what civilization they ended up with.

Free to play, Windows + Linux: https://garanlorn.itch.io/dead-reckoning

#godot4 #indiedev #gamedev

With the stability gained over the past five releases, the engine has matured enough to enter a new development phase. Godot 4.6 kicks off a period of polish, quality-of-life improvements, tighter integration of industry-standards, and doubled-down effort on performance optimization.

The result: a release that puts you and your workflow first. The new editor theme lets your projects take center stage, while dozens of improvements across the board reduce friction and speed up everyday development. Every aspect, from loading assets to editing, debugging, exporting, and testing, has received some love to keep you focused on creating and minimize the time you spend wrestling with UI, or fiddling with external tools and plugins.

Me & my friends are pretty much good at making games, however, we do not have the time to make full-fledged game let alone afford all the marketing and fees.

So, we thought instead we can make small sized game templates and sell them online.

This was inspired by GDevelop game examples and someone I met who happened to create templates there.

But GDevelop is pretty limited in terms of features and we already love what Godot offers.

However, we could not find any online store that is similar to the link above.

I think Itch could be an option but I am not sure how people are willing to shop there for game templates.

Are there any options that are perfect for sharing Godot game templates? or it is better to ride GDevelop wave?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30302028

video by GDQuest
very awesome to see tutorial and encouragement for 3D game
Godot would get much greater recognition if there were more 3D games made with it.

Some people steal games from itch.io, add some AI crap to them, and put them on console stores.

Here is the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3054440/Short_Snow/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17793232

itch.io link

Hello, I have elected to pop my hosting in event, cherry in the most scuffed way possible. There is money about it.

Right but yet the theme is cute and dark. So cartoonishly cute and dark in theme. Cute with the dark aesthetics only has been done and you know it’s been done well so that’s that’s what’s up. Normal game jam rules. Contributors can vote. We are kind of you know doing this as a form of play. And I think that that’s perfectly fine. So yeah, if you agree and you want to put something in, come on by. It’s going to be open the whole time, and I might even do like Our weekly streaming kind of thing for an hour on Saturdays. I did it today and do you know that was OK.

Check out a story about thought processes going awry after ecstasy born from early successes and personal issues hitting.

Still, I decided to release the result of my work so far as a prototype for Fuck Capitalism Jam 2024, to be worked on in the future until it is done. Alongside part 1, which was basically developed within the time frame anyway, and is more than fitting for the theme as well.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/16600744

My first game just entered Open Beta Test - turn based strategy with toy army men - Bedroom Battlegrounds

Hello all, I'm happy to announce that I've just opened beta test for my first Steam game release, which will be available between 30.05 and 02.06.

This is a turn based strategy game, where you play with toy army men trying to conquer your opponent on the other side of the room. Available in single player mode against the AI, or local multiplayer, also via Steam Remote Play.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2776110/Bedroom_Battlegrounds/

I'd be very happy to hear your feedback, which you can send over here, or through a dedicated feedback form. https://forms.office.com/r/nvt7vAz9kF Your feedback will play a crucial role in enhancing the game before releasing the demo for the upcoming Steam Next Fest, and subsequently full version of the game later this year.

Looking forward to hear your feedback. Happy conquering!

As most of us play games, we sometimes encounter elements or routines that suck all the fun from a shipped product. They can be a dealbreaker, so it's better to be aware of them. I'd exclude platinum challenges and MTX as they are their own beasts, and start with a couple of examples I hated in older titles:

• NFS: Hot Pursuit (2010). Before and after you enter a race, there are motivational unskippable cutscenes about your rating and unlocked vehicles. Instead of inspiring me to play more, it felt like visiting the web without an adblocker. Although it plays nice on Linux and I liked how vehicles drive, I deleted it after a couple of hours.

• NFS: Underground. Besides a difficulty slider you have before every track, there's a trend to make every other race longer. 6+ 1.5 minute laps become a chore and make you notice how broken and random it is under the hood. The strenght of the game in the short flashy arcade runs, but as devs couldn't find any way to make it more difficult, they make it a useless test of endurance.

• TES: Skyrim. Lots of quests are built on a premise of making you explore the global map more without any means of transportation, unlike Morrowind. They probably assumed there'd be some, or that fast travel would solve this, but I remember this one time I was to take the head from the witch and this region was completely unexplored at that time, and there was no obvious way but going there by foot.

• CoD 2+. Replenishing health is a cool mechanic, but it isn't followed by a repercussion for sitting and recharging. Finite number of enemies makes it trivial. I feel like something akin to WW2 southern front could've used the mechanic of endless onslaught before you complete the objective.

• FarCry. It've began as a tacticool shooter where you can choose where to start your infiltration, and it was good at that, but after introducing aliens it went weird. The latter levels are close-quarter skirmishes where only savescumming is a viable strategy. Game loses it's primal value to scale the difficulty in a wrong way once again.

What's your examples of wrong decisions?

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

Hi everyone, I feel like making a little tower defense game next weekend, and I figure I'll see if anyone wants to make it a party - join the jam and get in on the fun :)

A comment on one of those "What's a good game concept you wish existed?" posts got me thinking. It described a game where you start out as OP and slowly lose your stats and gear as the game progresses. They suggested a Fallen champion type theme. This got me thinking about roguelikes, speed runners, and hardcore mode together. If a roguelike added a hardcore mode where you create a character and the character is deleted on death, that wouldn't last very long. However, if the hardcore mode was flipped and a new character had every stat and item maxed out then the player would almost certainly beat the game. Now the goal is to see how many times you can beat the game without dying. The catch would be each time you beat the game you are allowed to reduce your stats or delete your gear. This will mean a Run tracker would be impressive for 2 reasons: how fast it was and how little gear was used. The hardcore aspect would take into account the number of runs risked with the same character. If the amount of power reduction was capped for each run then it would take a few times to get low enough to be impressive and each consecutive run gets more and more risky. Anyway, this seems anxiety-inducing enough to be fun to play and watch. Then the "God Gamers" (ft. Sp4zie) would compete with each other to see how weak you can be to beat the game.

Xposted on the other site