Gamedev

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45925326

It's amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they're no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.

Official Stream: https://multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/en/webstreaming/committee-on-internal-market-and-consumer-protection-ordinary-meeting-committee-on-legal-affairs-com_20260416-1100-COMMITTEE-IMCO-JURI-PETI

Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en

The author notes that players generally do not finish games and suggests that designing in terms of gameplay loops leads to a certain kind of boring and predictable experience. They suggest that the modern medium of games is much more flexible and capable of more variety.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/48712636

Hi everyone!

I just released my first asset pack called Pixelite Core. It's a minimalist 32x32 pixel art tileset designed for top-down games and quick level prototyping.

Features: • 44 clean tiles • 32x32 grid • Flat + shaded versions • Works with Unity, Godot and GameMaker

I tried to design it as a simple construction kit so developers can quickly build levels for prototypes or game jams.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/48712134

A sale on pixelite core asset pack and Irregular font

Dead Reckoning: The Long Drift is a generation ship management sim where every rational decision slowly corrupts your civilization. If you haven't seen what it looks like in motion, please check out the trailer.

Genuinely grateful to this community — the feedback and signal boosting made a real difference early on.

I know there's a strong sentiment against generative AI, but recently Take Two's CEO spoke positively of AI tools, as is quoted in this article.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick discussed the firm's stance on AI with GamesIndustry.biz, clarifying that it is "embracing AI as we always have."

"I've been enthusiastic since the very beginning," said Zelnik. "This company's products have always been built with machine learning and artificial intelligence. We've actually always been a leader in the space, and right now we have hundreds of pilots and implementations across our company, including within our studios. And we're already seeing instances where generative AI tools are driving costs and time efficiencies."

So don't read too much into this yet. There's no certainty until there's clarification.

I didn't set out to make a game. I set out to expand on an idea that the game seedship planted: what would happen to a group of colonists aiming for the stars? How would they drift over time? Not a new question, but one that not many games had fleshed out.

Dead Reckoning is a colony ship simulation. The passengers are in cryo, sleeping through a voyage that spans generations. You make the system-level decisions — power allocation, resource management, who gets woken up and when. Are you the ship's intelligence? A commander operating through it? The game doesn't answer that cleanly, and that ambiguity is intentional. The distance between you and the human consequences is the whole point.

Why I built it

I work in tech. I spend a lot of time thinking about systems and knowledge architecture — how organizations store what they know and what happens when that knowledge degrades. There's something quietly terrifying about a system designed to do the right thing, operating without oversight, accumulating small errors over a long timeline. That's the game. I'd never shipped one before. Dead Reckoning started as a way to find out if I could.

Solo dev is mostly just decision fatigue

When you're the only person on a project, every decision lands on the same desk. Art direction, game feel, UI layout, save system architecture, what the font size should be on the Factions screen — all of it, all the time, with no one to sanity-check you.

The UX overhaul in v0.1.18 is a good example. The Ship Condition screen was doing too much. I knew it was wrong for weeks before I touched it — not because I didn't know how to fix it, but because fixing it meant twenty smaller decisions and I kept running out of bandwidth. When I finally split it into SYSTEMS and RESEARCH tabs, it took an afternoon. The delay wasn't technical. It was just the weight of being the only one holding the context.

What the game is missing

This is a prototype, and I've leaned on tools to move fast. The in-game writing — event text, colonist bios, the incidents that fire mid-voyage — is placeholder scaffolding. Functional, but not what the game deserves.

I'm looking for a writer to collaborate with. Small budget, revenue share on itch.io earnings. Honest caveat: we've made $6 so far. But I believe a human voice in the writing will change what the game is. If the premise interests you, reach out.

Public beta is live and free: garanlorn.itch.io/dead-reckoning