#gamedev is HARD lol

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[tricitymonsters]

CLARIFICATION: TCM will work on Mac on Steam and should also work from Itch.io too once that goes up in July.

Hello. I am here for multiple things.

1.) does TCM work on Mac on steam :( I looked for a download button in hopes steam hadn’t done Mac users dirty in the long run but I think they have.

2.) kicking my feet like a lil freak about raath popping buttons off of my oc’s shirt with a knife with intense eye contact and heavy breathing!

3.) thank you for writing this story for the lil freaks.

TCM does work on Mac! :D

It's been beta tested by several Mac owners I know and the Mac build launching correctly was confirmed by Steam during the approval process. If Steam's not downloading games correctly, you might need to clear your download cache. I recommend looking into this on Mac-specific steam or Reddit forums cause I actually don't personally own any Mac products and can't test it myself. But the Mac build is there and should work like any other game. (Perhaps submitting a steam support ticket may offer some wisdom as well)

ALSO thank you so much. I love Raath but know his violent weird ass is absolutely an acquired taste so it's really heartwarming when people find him as Neat as I do. I'm very excited that he'll have a larger part in TCM's story very soon.

I love the lil freaks. I am a lil freak. I want to write so much porn with plot and I'm so #blessed to be able to share it with yall.

[smoothiethekerfo]

hiii! i went and looked at your stuff after your planetgen post and i am

very, very curious amd interested

my initial thought was something like Scavenger SV-4, Rodina, and VotV in actual space, and from what little i've seen it looks like something i've wanted since childhood (though i'd probably be too scared to play it)

there's so much i'm imagining and wondering but the name isn't even settled on yet and it's being developed by 1 girl

do you know what kinds of visual/atmospheric vibes/feelings you're aiming for? I saw a UI element of what i thought was a rover you can deploy and was immediately reminded of the Mako from Mass Effect 1 and how beautifully vibrant space is in that game, and the planet itself in the image reminded me of Spore

but despite what i'm being reminded of, I imagine there's a lot more of that isolatory, desolate terror in it's vibes? not so colorful/joyful when you think something slipped inside the blast door while deploying the rover.

i'm also a complete and total sucker for things like (functional) ship interiors and i'm :)

i love space games so much and there's so much that gives games like those such strong impressions, visually or otherwise, and i'm really, really curious about the way you want it to *feel*

tumblr u rat bastard stop deleting my hyperfixations ok so the game is heaaaaaaaaaaaavily inspired by subnautica and VOTV, both of which are games that bank a lot on the lack of human NPCs (or in subnautica's case, humans at all, nix the audio logs) to create a spooky atmosphere. I'm a little conflicted on which way to take the game, either towards a more conventional space game, something like Starfield/Pulsar: Lost colony (which you should play) or more like subnautica/votv, with few to no NPCs. One idea I had was to follow a similar method for VOTV in order to have an isolating atmosphere while keeping characters for the community to simp over (=^owo^=) and have the game set in a distant arm of a galaxy, that way there could be radio transmissions (with significant delay) from home base (character would be a prospector? idk). As cool as this sounds though I really want to experiment with a "post-apocolyptic future" setting (fallout in spaaaaaaaaaaaaace). Basically I'm very divided on how I want to take this :3 As for the gameplay and visual style, I really want to go for a grittier, darker style, which is unfortunately kinda hard with how dogshit godot's rendering engine is. Something like Doom 3 (underrated game btw) with it's heavy use of ambiance/low lighting. One issue though with the "no npcs" framework is it makes designing some kinds of gameplay pretty hard or impossible. I'd love to have co-op missions with AI allies/populated hubs with NPCs and side missions but those obviously conflict with the subnautica school of thought. TLDR: Game design is hard. I'm looking for a nice balance between utter isolation and the joy of community that will serve this game well, and while I haven't found it yet, I think I will sometime soon. Sorry for taking so long to respond lmao

[silly-moth-123]

I am dreading tileset work.... But I'm excited to work on mapping so alas, I must deal with the pixel art first

[hauntoadcayde]

Getting to the point where I'm SUPER overwhelmed by how much there is left to do so I'm trying to cut things and minimize scope as much as possible. Right now I'm just popping out one version of 2D assets that were originally gonna be fully 3D with various different versions and just saying Oh Well I'll Maybe Add Newer Versions If I Decide To Update It Later

[bf-rally]

Progress on the interaction page!

[cbedfordart]

First of all!! Holy guacamole the music for SWC is phenomenal!!! I have some of the songs on my gym playlist they’re perfect for when I workout!!

Secondiy, how long did it take you to make SWC? After playing it I started thinking about making my own game but was curious how the process went for a two person team like yours

Gosh I miss going to the gym ;;! But thank you! In terms of time, we start the project at the end of 2020, but most of the development was between 2022 and the 2024 release. We had full time work still while tinkering away in 2020 - but when we signed with the publisher which allowed us to work on it full time, we were able to expand what the game could be and really focus on it - it would have been a completely different experience had we stayed working with other jobs, that much I'm certain. The process was difficult, and I think especially trying to make something this size our first time around for a commercial project. We did do some game jams in 2021, but that's a different thing all together. They are fun and absolutely worth while to experience a bitesize version of how it feels to finish something, and it may also be a good indicator to see where you might struggle if things become stressful during production (do you try to work till 4 am? Do you avoid the project all together and abandon it? how would you handle people who suddenly can't commit to the project anymore? etc) It's hard work, like, this is the hardest I ever worked on anything in my life - and that's because I really cared about it! But there's so many interconnecting parts, there's so many opportunity for things to break, and when it's all said and done, you have to go through the meat grinder of seeing people struggle with what you've made, dislike parts of it, even if they love it overall that's still hard to see. When your game goes out there, people don't see the developer who's worked 60 work weeks and ate one meal a day in the last three weeks because they didn't have time to eat just to get it done. We are very grateful that people enjoy the game, and I really worry what my mental state would be if the game wasn't received how it has been. Make your own game, but do not make something the size of SWC lol. Not for your first time. And be very realistic about how long it will take, and be extremely realistic about how much work needs to be done. I could write an entire dissertation about what I've learned, what I'd do differently and the whole experience itself - but I can't do that here lol. There are more tools and resources to be able to just get up and make a game - I want you to read this and feel encouraged and feel a fire in your heart burn to make the thing you want to make, but I want you to know it is easy to burn yourself and you must take care of yourself, and you must look out for your health. After the release I was very much thinking "Could I do this again? I don't think I could ever do this again" But there's the drive to want to create and it is hard to extinguish. I hear a few seconds of the Space Channel 5 soundtrack and I'm ready to throw myself to the wolves of gamedev all over again. There are too many worlds in the mind that I must create so that others can occupy them! I must share these worlds, it would be selfish of me not to! So we must be sure to take care of ourselves. If you ever make that game, I wanna see it!!!!

[sadagios]

Hello! Just want to say firstly, I love your Death Game AU, gives me many thoughts and prompts the meta analysis part of my brain. Secondly, I keep connecting Ironina by Niru Kajitsu with the AU, the song just reminds me of it, general meaning behind the song is an artist’s relationship to their art and the complex feelings behind it

But hope you had a good day! Keep doing what you do, it’s really awesome :D

hi! thank you <3 i'm overwhelmed with how much love the AU is getting, and i'd like to hear your thoughts if you are willing to share! i've actually been listening to ironina ever since i got this ask, and i tried so hard to understand the lyrics but only after falling down the rabbithole did i sit down and actually watch the MV.

yknow what, it fits, specifically to gamedev gria. lately i have been trying to draft the first act but i keep falling into the trap of making it too canon compliant, and i'd like to focus on the gamedev side of gria more as it might brew some interesting stuff, though i might have to retcon some things from the 2nd prologue. or not. im in a weird limbo at the moment so dont trust whatever i say. also, im not the best in analysis, so i might not have understood the complexity of the song and mv yet and i might have to give it more listens, but thank you for sharing it!

and speaking of Niru Kajitsu, it reminded me of this one song that i listened a long time ago that might fit the AU or even life series as a whole, especially because of its title lol. i'll link the english cover i really liked below, but if you prefer the original in japanese, here it is as well.

thank you for the compliments and the ask! i hope your days are great too !

[sibyl-of-space]

mannnnn i got a double whammy of mediocre news today. i'm feeling a little better now than i was like an hour ago but still, man.

whammy 1: I got the compensation news for next year if I were to stay at my current job [which I am planning to leave for the record], and it was a bit shitty to hear "so we hired you at the top of the range at $25/hr when the range was $20-25, and now we have done significant market research to define a new range of $20-30, and the CFO and everyone who works with you says you do fantastic work and we have nothing critical to say about you, so you will be making $25.88 (an 88-cent raise) so you are right in the middle of that range and have room to grow." it kind of made me feel like "yep, leaving is the right decision for me."

whammy 2: the position I applied to last week and really really really desperately wanted has been filled. this SUCKED. I had a really good feeling about it and was definitely counting way too hard on landing it so not landing it is a huge blow.

that said, they did invite me to another interview this coming monday for a different shift in a similar role. there are a lot of reasons this shift isn't as appealing for me - notably the night shift I was gunning for would have loads of downtime where they explicitly said it's fine to work on other stuff on shift [ahem, gamedev time] and also the night shift differential means higher pay. so I am definitely still upset I didn't land it. but I am definitely going to interview for the day shift regardless, and it might at least be a foot in the door to something more meaningful than what I am currently doing. It might be possible to move to a night shift if a position opens up once I'm more qualified. And it might just be good to work somewhere I feel invested in. ...and at least I would still get benefits for 4 days a week at work lol.

now, if I don't land THAT either it just means I figure out something else completely. I think I'm giving notice at my current work this Friday regardless - I really just cannot stay here, it's driving me bonkers.

[goddessofblood]

@valkiliar So looking into these claims… First I checked your examples (and a few others) of similar designs. One Eevee-like Pal was just a fluffy dog, the other was pretty eevee like I'll admit, though eevee is just like, a dog lol. And the Lucario-like pal is Anubis. Like even named Anubis. I don't see them as particularly compelling examples of plaigarism since theres pretty good non-pokemon reasons most of these look like their uh, lookalines. I think the only really compelling ones is the blue eevee with a vest and the Meganium lookalike, and having 2-5 fairly similar mons out of 100 is not unreasonable I think. I would personally have preferred more interesting & unique designs, but I wouldn't say the palworld designs are 'immoral' or plagiaristic. I then looked into their older games. The game from 3 years ago is called Craftopia… and uh, its just worse Palworld. So yeah thats extremely shitty development practice. Almost as bad as the Don't Starve Together debacle, I'd say. Whether or not they'll continue updating the old game is unclear though- it got two updates last year, one in January and one in December. I wouldn't be surprised if it has been genuinely abandoned, and fans seem to believe it has been, but a studio big enough to create palworld probably has more than one team- and thus palworld and craftopia could be worked on by separate teams concurrently. Not completely damning, and frankly I do understand the decision to create a new game in a different engine, but if craftopia doesn't get any updates this year then i'd say its indicative of a scam (or at least scammer behavior).

As far as AI generation goes, I've not seen anything that actually suggests this game uses any kind of generative AI. I wouldn't be surprised per say, but it also isn't obvious to me that such things were used. The dev has worked with AI before, but afaik has not indicated its been used in this project. Now the game that has AI is just, a copy of a jackbox game but with generative AI instead of doing it yourself which is. you know, interesting to say the least. Theres a pattern of behavior emerging lol. But that isn't something I'd consider proof AI was used for Palworld.

Finally, regarding NFTs, I found one not-trustworthy source saying Palworld already has NFT integration? But since nobody else is saying that I kind doubt this is the case. However I did see that the CEO is a tech weirdo, including have built an entire crypto exchange. So previous scam experience for sure and a definite possibility that NFTs are integrated in the future. Just no concrete evidence that I've seen.

In all I'd say there is compelling evidence that the company (or at least CEO) behind Palworld is fairly likely to be scummy & I wouldn't recommend people support them (for their own sake, given the NFT stuff and possibility this game might be abandoned). That said, there isn't really anything super concrete there, so its largely speculation as to how & why they might be scummy. I can't say I'd blame anyone for playing it, but I do think its a bad idea nonetheless.

Not the least of which is because Cassette Beasts is right there! Its good! Better than Pokemon! Go Play It!

personally I am very turned off by the concept of a mon' catcher where you shoot & kill the monsters. That said, I also don't personally see the validity of the "plagiarism" accusations. From what I've seen, most of the monster designs are fairly unique & the actual gameplay is obviously substantially different. Theres a couple designs I'd say are obvious homages (the luxray like in particular) but for the most part similarities tend to be like, oh thats a sheep. Yeah thats what sheep look like. Not really plagiarizing from pokemon as much as... god?

[warmuse]

Firstly, this post isn't aimed at people who don't rly have an opinion about BALTEUS nerf, or is disappointed that it isn't as hard but it won't affect their opinion of the game in general. If you are these people, it's not aimed at you I promise

Possibly petty and unpopular but I'm mid annoyed by people (mostly in social media and comments so maybe I shouldn't pay attention to them anyway 😅) who claim Balteus is super easy now and how Fromsoft "ruined a good game because gaming journalists, now *casuals* wouldn't get filtered out like it was intended, I want immediate rollback, gonna uninstall" and base their claim at them defeating it easily with chapter1 gears and OS tunes off

1. Yeah, you downgraded your AC, but your game knowledge didn't. You played multiple playthrough of ac6, your gameplay knowledge is miles above than at the point where you faced it first, if you want to claim you as a player learnt nothing while playing ~NG++ of ac6 and your muscle memory didn't adapt at all, congrats, your gamer learning ability is abysmal

2. I am pretty sure fromsoft didn't do this because of a few gaming journalists who complain that it's too hard lmao, if they actually give into whatever western fringe reviewers say we'd had easy mode in ER (easy mode is another discourse in video gaming that's its own can of worms esp. in Fromsoft games, I don't want to deride the convo so I won't go into it) Hardcore gamers may be a bit too absorbed in their clique of fellow aficionados, they don't realize that there are a lot of casuals who got stuck at Balteus, or, more importantly, didn't even try to purchase the game because they saw a streamer struggling or heard the general gamer gossips that Balteus is some Great Filter, maybe the gamedevs want more people to try their games?

Because I assure you, for people who didn't play any FS games at all, or maybe just played ER, it'd not be easy. If you think only high skilled players are allowed to enjoy this game...well, I disagree.

Maybe WE want more people to play this game because this game offers a lot more experience than that mindset? This is a mecha genre game that doesn't get such outputs as actions of other fantastical settings.

3. The perceived difficulty level suddenly dropping after Balteus and not really escalating into the realm of filter-like until you reach CEL (because let's face it Sea Spider wasn't as much bemoaned as BALTEUS) suggests that maybe release patch BALTEUS was a bit harder than their intention. Fromsoft producer's tweet about the patch specifically says they intended to modulate the difficulty level in early to mid game.

4. This is a specific gripe to people who act dramatically that less missile barrage means the boss is giganerfed: if you're so ignorant of the boss mechanics to think missiles make Baltie hard how did u even got past it

It was similar when Radahn in ER was nerfed too, lol, Fromsoft in recent years gave us pretty enjoyable games, but the maturity level of some people in the fandom is disappointing even for a video game fandom

[tomatosoupgroup]

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

screen shot

SO FIRST OF ALL

i started redoing the dialogue system

again

BUT DON'T WORRY i think this is gonna be the one that sticks

this is the run chat

here's a sneak peek btw

also yeah i upgraded to godot 4! things are uh.

things are fine

here's a screenshot from my google doc writing pad thingy

it's subject to change because i'm still very iffy about my writing for some reason

also, remember that spinning globe gif from a while back?

yeah, that one

well take a look at THIS

BAM

UPGRADED

new glob

I noticed I haven't drawn the characters in a while! That's a big no-no

I was thinking of making like. a series of non-canon* comic strips with simplified designs and all that

I think it would help with fleshing out the characters a bit more! I've had ideas in my head for years now, but I've never drawn them or anything like that.

(Also, if I do end up doing this, keep in mind that updates to the comics are secondary to gamedev updates. This game is still my top priority!!!)

that's gonna be it for tonight

im sorry if the past few updates have been lackluster. my adhd hits hard sometimes (not saying that's an excuse, ofc)

i have been feeling more productive recently, mostly because i got my hands on hrt. like i now feel somewhat hopeful for my future lol

expect something soon!!

love you all

-Callie

[yippee-was-taken]

Puzzle game Godot Project: I was way too afraid of getting back into GameDev

It's been a while, a lot of it was probably burn out, stress and/or my vice on running away from problems. I really need to be more conscious about the hows and whys I need to stop being like that, cause I forgot how good it feels to develop games.

Personal problems aside. I've polished the game up a lot and it looks just that much better!

At this point I wanna finish this for me at the very least, and this game quickly began to look pretty good!

It always feels a little crazy when I can play the game without going through issues, and right now the only stuff I've encounter is with the saves and a minor easter egg not working.

(The default controls are arrows and z,x,c,v. I'm just a wierdo who plays with wasd. That's why I added button remapping in the first place lol)

I feel a little terrible about putting this off for so long but at least now I feel like I've been making a lot of progress this past week.

There are still a few small things I need to fix

Saves are still inconsistent and I don't have a art for the game's cover and title screen but honestly I'm wondering if I should just upload it and move on.

I'm thinking of giving myself a HARD deadline of next week, where no matter what state the game is in I HAVE to upload it. I wanna finish my first real project and move on to something else.

[zombielesbean]

I, who has never worked in any engine other than game maker, have been butting heads quite a bit with godot engine, but slowly but surely, I am making it do what I want lol

it's hard because I have a ton of gamedev experience, but zero experience with this interface or asset formats or programming language or anything, so trying to do what I want/would usually do isn't as simple as just doing it, or even knowing what to look up in order to do it, it's wading through just tons and tons of unfamiliar nonsense, until it stops being nonsense and starts to make sense and I start putting together what I wanted to make ehe,,

[quiet-cabin]

Progress Report 12/3 - 12/9

Hello hello, Jace here!

So before I dive into the progress made this week I want to give a little background info on the process overall. Some of y'all who may be familiar with visual novels or gamedev or both probably know the go-to recommended engine for making VNs is Ren'Py, it just is. And it's pretty dang fantastic, don't get me wrong, but that's not the engine I'm using.

I'm using Gdevelop, which is a no-code, visual scripting engine. I did this for two reasons. 1) Ren'Py has a LOT of functionality that you would expect in a VN already baked in and while that's fantastic, if you want to do some other things or add in other game mechanics, you're looking at learning some code. And I love code, I think it's super cool, but I also have very limited time in my day so I had to pick my battles as a solo dev and no-code engine it is! 2) Ren'Py ONLY makes VNs and I have ideas for at least half a dozen other games that aren't VNs. So if I'm going to learn an engine I want it to be one I can do lots of things in.

I share this because this means that everything we're building into this game, we're building from scratch. So basically if the stuff I share seems kind of basic that's why lol

TL;DR I'm working really hard on this so be gentle and also don't be afraid to maybe gas me up a little 🥺💜

OKAY HERE'S WHAT GOT DONE THIS WEEK!

Brightness slider! I personally have really bad light sensitivity and there's a LOT of games I can't play for more than hour (or at all) because it hurts too much. So I wanted to be sure to include the ability to dim the screen for folks if they needed it.

Dyslexic font toggle! We went with a sans-serif font to begin with in the hopes of making text as easy to read as possible. But just in case we're also adding in a toggle to the settings that will change the font to the Open Dyslexic font. This will change the dialogue, dialogue choices, and the settings menu!

History Log! Just in case you hit the button too fast or didn't really process what was said (or maybe your cat stepped on the keyboard), there will be a log you can pull up that will show the transcript of what you've done so far in the current chapter!

I put together a lil video showing how the brightness and font toggle work! (But not the history log cause all I got down was the code in a test scene and it is... very ugly right now lol)

The brightness slider is fully implemented and the font toggle is well on its way. The history log hasn't been implemented into the game itself so hopefully we won't hit any additional hiccups when that happens.

Thanks for reading and as always our asks are open if you have any questions!

See ya next week!

[thursdaysrain]

my experience with blender and unity, together, has been a bit of a nightmare, but separately they haven't been bad. unity i've had issues with but they always felt surmountable, like, no matter what i can work around this problem.

blender i just enjoy, it has this reputation as like a weird badly designed software but maybe that's gone away w/ recent (recent as in.. years ago) ui changes. new features have been great and there isn't much for me to complain about here, but idk what a new user's experience is like. it's hard to tell people who ask me how to get started what to work with, bc everything i learned from is out of date.

the real headache comes from the transition between the two, which has been a real nightmare for me. once i'm all done working on wormgrubber 2.0, i need to put together workflow document to reference whenever i'm working on new 3d assets for unity in the future. it's a big list and it's been a real pain to discover each problem one at a time.

first and foremost it is obvious to me now that blender is not gamedev software. when i started gamedev, i split my time between learning shaders and learning 3d, not touching animation and mostly focusing on making little model display art pieces. i did this for a couple years. rigging was always a huge pain in the ass, weight painting moreso, so i just avoided it for a while. when i brought my first fully rigged piece into unity it was a nightmare, nothing looked right at all. this kind of thing honestly traumatized me, lol. i spent so much time trying to obsessively make perfect rigs bc i was terrified by shapekeys and drivers, horrified to spend hours setting something up only for it to be useless. this was wrongheaded for multiple reasons... there are so many features in blender that are just not relevant to unity and/or don't export through the only 3d format unity uses, fbx. this makes sense if you think about it for a bit, blender has a lot of features for rendering 3d animation and art but a lot of this wouldn't work in a realtime game, it's just too intensive. but! if you spend all your time learning 3D instead of specifically learning "3d for game animation" you come to lean on things like corrective smoothing or other modifiers.

3d is a weird mix of like, destructive and nondestructive workflows. blender will often let you work your way into positions you cant easily recover from without a lot of extra work or discarding work, setups that work fine within blender but absolutely will not export to unity. things like being unable to apply modifiers to models with shapekeys, but needing to apply all shapekeys to properly export a model, etc.

unity does this thing where it has very specific ideas about how things should work and it only tells you what it's doing maybe like 20% of the time. everything else is up to you to figure out the hard way. im not sure yet if this is an fbx problem or not but interpolation settings in blender aren't exported to unity, so it just comes up with its own. unity doesn't play the last frame of an animation. this makes sense for some contexts, because an animation is an interpolation between a start point and an end point, but like, nothing in unity tells you this the case. whenever i search for these things i always find forum posts, not unity documents. and you cant really change it without clumsy code slapped on top bc so much of this is below the closed off part of unity's code.

make games this way, not that way. i used to always think that when i was struggling against unity it was a sign i was designing something poorly, but now i know enough to know it's often because unity is itself struggling under the weight of choices made years ago, or half finished projects with poor documentation. arcane rules and practices i don't know bc i didn't go to college and because the knowledge is typically split across like several different jobs in a normal large studio.

i don't know how you learn this stuff other than trial and error. maybe in a college?? i dont know how other self taught indies deal with it. tutorials on youtube/etc seem to be split between like teaching you isolated tricks or teaching you very specific workflows without telling you exactly why you can't do this or that. blender tutorials are often for non-gamedevs, and unity tutorials are about following unity's design decisions without explaining them.

i know creating tutorials is a lot of effort and it's impossible to be fully comprehensive, but for something as common as 'take blender thing and put it in unity' should be for indie gamedev, i dont get why i havent seen more grumbling about this. i feel like every major snag i've come across (ones mentioned here are only a few of them) i was completely clueless about until i started doing some digging and the only thing to save me is some post from like 2016 on the unity forums.

its been a struggle!!!! i know i'm getting closer to the end of the tunnel but like every time i think it's a straight shot some new pit opens up. still, i'm getting there. my short advice to anyone is to always iterate, if you are trying to make art for games, make some art and put it in gamdev software. see what you like about it, how your desired workflow works with the software, etc. these skills arent separate, they have to be tied together.