#other's gamedev

[theotherhappyplace]

Finished this pixel art animation loop for The Other Happy Place game!!!

[waytothewoods]

Happy New Year! Hope all is well and that you're treating yourself. Was thinking about your game recently and look forward to hearing whatever you got cooking.

Also unrelated, any indie games you're looking forward to this year? Some of my top ones include Demon School and Morsels. Been hopping on the Horror train more and more since Mouth Washing lol.

happy new year crawjack97 :) how's ur 2025 going so far? >:3 you've reminded me i need to check out Mouth Washing too. -- for Way to the Woods, we kicked off the year with our first team meeting! recently, in the 'cat town' level, i added multiple body types for the citizens. comically, this is on a slider.

will you press 'F' to pick him up? there's a kind of 'cat character creator' i use to generate the townsfolk with different eyes, patterns... plump-ness... (i needed plump cats. for gameplay reasons) surasshu said something funny along the lines of "it's like we've made 3 separate games" which is so true lmao. the current state of wttw has more of the original rpg elements.

on a more personal note, my desk is getting messier than usual lately. but that is usually what happens when things pick up... i also took a break to go visit japan on the new year holiday! the yen is currently cheap, hooray >:3! when i got back home, i was inspired to create these blob mobs, which i'm quite fond of.

-- and to your question, i'm most looking forward to 'Sorry We're Closed'. Those PSX styled games look so fun to me. A smaller game called 'Natsu-mon' was also so charming - it is by the studio that developed 'boku no natsuyasumi' from the year 2000, which many of you may be more familiar with. AND! the people who made 'Before Your Eyes' have their next game coming 'Goodnight Universe' that has such a beautiful art style. some other games that really gripped me in 2024 were Webfishing, and Helldivers 2. I'll let you know what I think of Mouth Washing when I get around to it soon! actually - what are the kinds of other games that you guys think Way to the Woods might play like? i'm curious...

untill then...

[genesis-project-news]

Hello, TGP fans and players! Amidst all the updated enemies, it's always good to have a little more protection... Hopefully our new guardian styles aren't as out to get you as the imps are!

P.S. We do monthly announcements in our Discord, come check out the backlog! We've been going for months, I've been meaning to start mirroring them here for a while but kept forgetting.

[pixellangel]

finally made some more up-to-date art of the mc of my rpgmaker game, magical girl: grim reaper!! her name is yurei, and she's a magical girl who continues serving sparkly justice after she dies by becoming the grim reaper :3

[pixel-bluewit]

A Portal to and from Somewhere

[thehallstara]

The A.D.A.P.T. Entries is an episodic game in 12 parts from @staradavid. Equal parts interactive fiction and narrative adventure, what will ensue is a space thriller about Judiasm, the building and falling of communities, the necessity of resisting dehumanization, and how even the best of intentions can be twisted in the face of systemic corruption and unaddressed prejudices. The first entry will release January 30th, with the consecutive entries releasing on the last Thursday of each month in 2025.

The A.D.A.P.T. Entries follow Rivkah Kadish, a Jewish woman born in what was once west Montreal but raised on The Ostera, the final flagship on the AQA Inaugural Expansion fleet making a forty year journey to the TRAPPIST-1 system. As the ship’s path nears it’s end, join her as she explores her upbringing, falling in love, the less-than-savoury choices she’s had to make as a member of AQA’s adaptation team, and the secrets she’s uncovered over the years. It will be found at staradavid.itch.io, and updates can also be found at staradavid.bsky.social and adapt-aqa.bsky.social.

The past year of my life has been spent planning, researching, and beginning to develop this project, and I'm so excited to start sharing these stories with the world, in whatever forms that may take.

[plisuu]

-emerges from learning gdscript covered in blood-

so i'm a solo game dev now

[vaguely-concerned]

listen I just... this path of harding's loyalty mission with this specific party. the disrupted self squad. the trauma has made me a stranger to myself Have You Seen Me I can't find my way back union. team fractured reality and I'm piecing it and myself back together as best I can (will you keep me company in the meantime?). the echoes and the implications. as above so below, as in you so in me, large cosmic scale to painfully small personal psychological scale. pain from the distant past still alive and snarling to be known in the now, and pain right now and ongoing but forgotten and unseen, supressed by means natural and unnatural (what's a little blood magic to help denial and dissociation along between frenemies huh solas). the extra meaning 'spite' takes on as a phrasing here (because it's all IN THERE this is all in the big text of the game!!! the themes echo back on themselves everywhere you listen for them!!!!). rook who once more doesn't even know that they don't KNOW they're also speaking to themselves as well as harding in this scene, to their own broken self and mind partially mirrored in someone they love (broken by the same perpetrator, even, in this case!!!!!!!!! hello solas once more), harding who doesn't quite know she's also speaking to them as well as to herself, to the dwarves, the titans, the world; everything and everyone that has ever been hurt, but whose stubborn kindness still has room for it all. (even for solas. hello again. we cannot escape you it seems mr dread wolf it's almost like you and your plethora of fuckery are thematically central or something (grudgingly affectionate).) even without perfect understanding of the full picture, the simple intention to be kind matters.

(forgive me for my sentimental nature and everpresent rookanis bias for a moment but ALSO lucanis looking over at rook Like That in this context, while those words are being spoken!!! spite's role in urging him towards escaping, living, thriving, instead of merely numbly surviving, and how it ties in with harding's revelation and decision here. and rook who opens doors and stays to walk through them with you, at the end being found and helped through a door of their own, and lucanis himself being one of the people to do that. do you. do you get me. I feel strange and wild.)

most of all harding just. saying the whole thing. summing the whole game up. 'we're different, but we're not gone. we will thrive -- in spite of you'. I was RIGHT about it all the way back in november actually and I should say it!!!!! the game is saying this on purpose. 'and then... everyone was there. and that's when I knew we'd be okay. that I'd... that I'd be okay'. my friend lace harding might be the only person who really gets it huh. and what a legacy for varric to leave behind in the narrative (and what a common da2 W, the little team that couldn't does it again better than anyone's ever done it by doing it the worst anyone's ever done it, hawke can't stop winning by always losing). no salvation but each other but my god that is plenty. my god. that is enough. once more

my head is in my hands I love this game desperately, it rewards really sitting with and taking in the themes so much. i'm so sorry for dropping a bunch of my own metas in there like that but I'm finding it so hard to say what I need to say all in one go, it's just -- it's so big! it's so much! I have so many thoughts to express about my unified theory of veilguard and only my poor battered neurons to do it with, please look upon me with clemency and, perhaps, forbearance. and it's so interesting that you can bring another companion along with rook and harding in this scene and have it mean just as much with slightly different nuances, have it resonate just as much with the overall meaning the game is trying to get across, because they're truly all tied in with each other that way; they're all part of a larger truth. you think it's one theme after another but the damn things overlap etc.

[evelili]

24 :>

[illusorybread]

I participated in Touhou ~ Fanworks 'n Chill's "Moriya Cleaning Game Jam" as the main sprite artist for Magical Library Cleanup Crew. It's based on Blue Revolver's Scrap Attack minigame. The jam's theme was 'original characters' and I designed two characters for it. You can download the game from the link above.

[theotherhappyplace]

There's something very wrong in the art Gallery

[jakeonaut]

making some collectable outfits you can customize your babushka with... took some inspirations from some great ghibli grandmas.. can you tell?

beautiful forest tileset by @zaebucca !!!

[tagamantra]

Tactical Combat, Violence Dice and Missing Your Attacks in Gubat Banwa

In this post I talk about game feel and decision points when it comes to the "To-Hit Roll" and the "Damage Roll" in relation to Gubat Banwa's design, the Violence Die.

Let's lay down some groundwork: this post assumes that the reader is familiar and has played with the D&D style of wargame combat common nowadays in TTRPGs, brought about no doubt by the market dominance of a game like D&D. It situates its arguments within that context, because much of new-school design makes these things mostly non-problems. (See: the paradigmatic shift required to play a Powered by the Apocalypse game, that completely changes how combat mechanics are interpreted).

With that done, let's specify even more: D&D 5e and 4e are the forerunners of this kind of game--the tactical grid game that prefers a battlemat. 5e's absolute dominance means that there's a 90% chance that you have played the kind of combat I'll be referring to in this post. The one where you roll a d20, add the relevant modifiers, and try to roll equal to or higher than a Target Number to actually hit. Then when you do hit, you roll dice to deal damage. This has been the way of things since OD&D, and has been a staple of many TTRPG combat systems. It's easy to grasp, and has behemoth cultural momentum. Each 1 on a d20 is a 5% chance, so you can essentially do a d100 with smaller increments and thus easier math (smaller numbers are easier to math than larger numbers, generally).

This is how LANCER works, this is how ICON works, this is how SHADOW OF THE DEMON LORD works, this is how TRESPASSER works, this is how WYRDWOOD WAND works, this is how VALIANT QUEST works, etc. etc. It's a tried and true formula, every D&D player has a d20, it's emblematic of the hobby.

There's been a lot more critical discussion lately on D&D's conventions, especially due to the OGL. Many past D&D only people are branching out of the bubble and into the rest of the TTRPG hobby. It's not a new phenomenon--it's happened before. Back in the 2010s, when Apocalypse World came out while D&D was in its 4th Edition, grappling with Pathfinder. Grappling with its stringent GSL License (funny how circular this all is).

Anyway, all of that is just to put in the groundwork. My problem with D&D Violence (particularly, of the 3e, 4e, and 5e version) is that it's a violence that arises from "default fantasy". Default Fantasy is what comes to mind when you say fantasy: dragons, kings, medieval castles, knights, goblins, trolls. It's that fantasy cultivated by people who's played D&D and thus informs D&D. There is much to be said about the majority of this being an American Samsaric Cycle, and it being tied to the greater commodification agenda of Capitalism, but we won't go into that right now. Anyway, D&D Violence is boring. It thinks of fights in HITS and MISSES and DAMAGE PER SECOND.

A Difference Of Paradigm and Philosophies

I believe this is because it stems from D&D still having one foot in the "grungy dungeon crawler" genre it wants to be and the "combat encounter balance MMO" it also wants to be. What ends up happening is that players play it like an immersive sim, finding ways to "cheese" encounters with spells, instead of interacting with the game as the fiction intended. This is exemplified in something like Baldur's Gate 3 for example: a lot of the strats that people love about it includes cheesing, shooting things before they have the chance to react, instead of doing an in-fiction brawl or fight to the death. It's a pragmatist way of approaching the game, and the mechanics of the game kind of reinforce it. People enjoy that approach, so that's good. I don't. Wuxia and Asian Martial Dramas aren't like that, for the most part.

It must be said that this is my paradigm: that the rules and mechanics of the game is what makes the fiction (that shared collective imagination that binds us, penetrates us) arise. A fiction that arises from a set of mechanics is dependent on those mechanics. There is no fiction that arises independently. This is why I commonly say that the mechanics are the narrative. Even if you try to play a game that completely ignores the rules--as is the case in many OSR games where rules elide--your fiction is still arising from shared cultural tropes, shared ideas, shared interests and consumed media.

So for Gubat Banwa, the philosophy was this: when you spend a resource, something happens. This changes the entire battle state--thus changing the mechanics, thus changing the fiction. In a tactical game, very often, the mechanics are the fiction, barring the moments that you or your Umalagad (or both of you!) have honed creativity enough to take advantage of the fiction without mechanical crutches (ie., trying to justify that cold soup on the table can douse the flames on your Kadungganan if he runs across the table).

The other philosophy was this: we're designing fights that feel like kinetic high flying exchanges between fabled heroes and dirty fighters. In these genres, in these fictions, there was no "he attacked thrice, and one of these attacks missed". Every attack was a move forward.

So Gubat Banwa removed itself from the To-Hit/Damage roll dichotomy. It sought to put itself outside of that paradigm, use game conventions and cultural rituals that exist outside of the current West-dominated space. For combat, I looked to Japanese RPGs for mechanical inspiration: in FINAL FANTASY TACTICS and TACTICS OGRE, missing was rare, and when you did miss it was because you didn't take advantage of your battlefield positioning or was using a kind of weapon that didn't work well against the target's armor. It existed as a fail state to encourage positioning and movement. In wuxia and silat films, fighters are constantly running across the environment and battlefield, trying to find good positioning so that they're not overwhelmed or so that they could have a hand up against the target.

The Violence Die: the Visceral Attacking Roll

Gubat Banwa has THE VIOLENCE DIE: this is the initial die or dice that you roll as part of a specific offensive technique.

In the above example, the Inflict Violence that belongs to the HEAVENSPEAR Discipline, the d8 is the Violence Die. When you roll this die, it can be modified by effects that affect the Violence Die specifically. This becomes an accuracy effect: the more accurate your attack, the more damage you deal against your target's Posture. Mas asintado, mas mapinsala.

You compare your Violence Die roll to your target's EVADE [EVD]. If you rolled equal to or lower than the target's EVD, they avoid that attack completely. There: we keep the tacticality of having to make sure your attack doesn't miss, but also EVD values are very low: often they're just 1, or 2. 4 is very often the highest it can go, and that's with significant investment.

If you rolled higher than that? Then you ignore EVD completely. If you rolled a 3 and the target's EVD was 2, then you deal 3 DMG + relevant modifiers to the DMG. When I wrote this, I had no conception of "removing the To-Hit Roll" or "Just rolling Damage Dice". To me this was the ATTACK, and all attacks wore down your target's capacity to defend themselves until they're completely open to a significant wound. In most fights, a single wound is more than enough to spell certain doom and put you out of the fight, which is the most important distinction here.

In the Thundering Spear example, that targets PARRY [PAR], representing it being blocked by physical means of acuity and quickness. Any damage brought about by the attack is directly reduced by the target's PAR. A means for the target to stay in the fight, actively defending.

But if the attack isn't outright EVADED, then they still suffer its effects. So the target of a Thundering Spear might have reduced the damage of an attack to just 1 (1 is minimum damage), they would still be thrown up to 3 tiles away. It matches that sort of, anime combat thing: they strike Goku, but Goku is still flung back. The game keeps going, the fight keeps going.

On Mechanical Weight

When you miss, the mechanical complexity immediately stops--if you miss, you don't do anything else. Move on. To the next Beat, the next Riff, the next Resound, think about where you could go to better your chances next time.

Otherwise, the attack's other parts are a lot more mechanically involved. If you don't miss: roll add your Attacking Prowess, add extra dice from buffs, roll an extra amount of dice representing battlefield positioning or perhaps other attacks you make, apply the effects of your attack, the statuses connected to your attack. It keeps going, and missing is rare, especially once you've learned the systematic intricacies of Gubat Banwa's THUNDERING TACTICS BATTLE SYSTEM.

So there was a lot of setup in the beginning of this post just to sort of contextualize what I was trying to say here. Gubat Banwa inherently arises from those traditions--as a 4e fan, I would be remiss to ignore that. However, the conclusion I wanted to come up to here is the fact that Gubat Banwa tries to step outside of the many conventions of that design due to that design inherently servicing the deliverance of a specific kind of combat fiction, one that isn't 100% conducive to the constantly exchanging attacks that Gubat Banwa tries to make arise in the imagination.

[bf-rally]

hii

Boyfriend⭐️Rally is a virtual boyfriend collector I'm trying to create. I'm hoping to make it into a full fledge web game in time.

i feel like im like 75% or 80% of the way to having the site at a "bare minimum" for use

so i wanna share my form again!

im looking for anyone interested in joining and using the site in its super early days and giving feedback on any issues they run into.

here is the form for anyone interested. once i publish the most recent version of the site, i'll start inviting people to try it out 🫡

also any boyfriends you get on purpose or on accident you can keep lol

[pixel-bluewit]

Move-in Day!

[roseverdict]

thinking about my frustrations with the current system we live under and realizing my experiences (constantly having very little money, thus preventing me from buying things except once in a blue moon unless there's a free option available) are not universal. however i am charging headlong down making a mobile game, and while i probably will put ads into it bc im a broke bitch i refuse to let it be just another of the hundreds of half-assed tutorial projects with a quadspillion ads in them apiece

but this leads me to a conundrum.

i want to have cute little skins for the player character that can be "bought" through one of two things: achieving a cumulative score high enough to unlock it, or by watching a certain number of ads willingly. notably, i refuse to use the ones that interrupt the gameplay out of nowhere and do nothing except pay me, even if they technically pay app makers more than any other kind of ad.

i'm just not sure exactly how to implement it:

should the "unlock via Playing The Game" skins be completely separate from the "watch x number of ads" skins?

should the "unlock via Playing The Game" option be available on the same skins that have the "watch x number of ads" option?

should the "watch x number of ads" thing be reworked into just "watch an ad to add x amount to your current spendable score"?

should i go the scummy route and implement flat-out in-app purchases for if someone doesn't want to watch an ad to get a skin??? does anybody actually do that????? i'm too broke to comprehend the existence of that kind of person but they have to exist if half-assed apps (and tbh whole-assed apps) keep on acting like they're real

should i forfeit my dignity and integrity and do lootboxes