A four-panel comic by Skeleton Claw showing a game playtester in a clinical setting. • Panel 1: A male doctor asks a seated man, "So did the gameplay feel more balanced?" A female doctor stands nearby holding a clipboard. • Panel 2: The man rubs his chin thoughtfully and replies, "Shotgun is now pretty op [overpowered]." • Panel 3: The male doctor points at the man and laughs, revealing, "We only added screenshake and bass!" The female doctor laughs along, with a thought bubble reading "SO GULLIBLE." The man looks mildly annoyed. • Panel 4: The two doctors high-five enthusiastically, celebrating by chanting "Game dev! Game dev!" while the man sits looking unamused.

Sometimes it just comes down to feel. #GameDev #indiedev

The one on the left requires effort to read. The one on the right is smooth and easy on the eyes.

Fist bump 🤜🤛 fellow #SoloDev. This looks great. Congrats on your progress!

Yeah, I'm a gameplay engineer -- not a rendering engineer. Lighting and shadows have been a brainful!

Update: Still working on shadows.

Today I worked on anti-aliasing shadow edges, see included images. To do this, I'm sampling four points. Shadow map is 256x256; I can increase that for even better results.

#indiedev #gamedev

Star Spark fan art by Cardin. It shows a hand drawn Leo on screen ready to battle a hand drawn Coda in a grassy battle arena.

Star Spark fan art by Cardin. It shows a hand drawn Mael, Leo, Coda in poses like their in game idles animations. There's a hand drawn Star Spark logo above Mael and Leo.

Unexpected, but someone made fan art #StarSpark!

It's cool that someone liked my game and its characters enough to spend time doing this 🙂

Thanks for sharing, Cardin!

Star Spark is still a WIP, but available to wishlist on Steam:
🌟 store.steampowered.com/app/3639950/...

#GameDev #IndieGame #Art

Made this last night because I wanted to have an example I can point to whenever I see people have bad player ship/plane/vehicle/camera controllers that just 1:1 mirror game input and how much of a difference even a tiny amount of smoothing can make to game feel.

Fist bump 🤜🤛 fellow solodev and Dew drinker.

I find the moats very interesting. Also, if you're interested in feedback, I find the text at certain zoom levels difficult to read.

AI may just be smarter than we gave it credit for...

With the new abstractions in three-mesh-bvh, making a custom BVH is easier than ever! SkinnedMeshes can now have one created directly, leading to an over 2x perf improvement on update vs creating a new static mesh. 🚀

What else needs a BVH?

1/2 👇

#threejs #webgl #gamedev

Introducing The Pentaract: A Comprehensive Set of Video Game Lexicons for ATProto 1. Dev mode I wanted to be able to iterate on my early lexicons, and I didn’t know how that would impact other lexicons in lexicon.community. TBF I didn’t do much research into it either, but I figure...

Hey #GameDev and #ATProto! I'm working on tools to decentralize the ownership and management of video games by putting them (or at least their data... for now) on ATProto!

I'm looking for feedback, so if you have any interest I'd love to hear your thoughts. ♥️ 🎮 ♥️

I read "Rock Bolt" first, and read it as horizontal. Then I read "Rock Anchor" and immediately had no idea which was which.

Bambi: The Multiplane Effect YouTube video by Disney In Honesty

Nice parallax! Bambi would be proud.

youtu.be/x66_BSGEeYY?...

If you include the subset of people who have artificial incentives, you've changed the root question from "What makes games enjoyable?" to "List all the incentives people have for choosing an action."

The first is useful to me as a game designer. It helps me learn and grow. The second does not.

(2/2)

Purpose is:
1) A goal
2) The means to pursue it

Movies and books apply this by proxy. You feel it through the protagonist.

Video games put it in your hands. No proxy. It is pure goal and pursuit. Playing video games fulfills your raw survival instinct.

That is why people play them.

(1/2)
"Because the person's internal decision‑making system prioritized this task above all others"

You need to ask "Why?" one more time. I'll answer here.

Humans are imbued with a sense of purpose. They 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 to feel like they're pursuing something. This is a survival trait created by evolution.

r/IndieDev Wiki: Indie Game Dev Yellow Pages This is the place for indie devs and gamers to share anything, be it game development, their favorite games or just cool images, GIFs and music from an indie game in a casual community-run environment...

Do you offer services to #GameDev or #IndieDev? If so, consider listing yourself on the Indie Dev Yellow pages.

Do you make #IndieGame? Consider bookmarking this for future reference.

www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/w...

r/IndieDev Wiki: Indie Game Dev Yellow Pages This is the place for indie devs and gamers to share anything, be it game development, their favorite games or just cool images, GIFs and music from an indie game in a casual community-run environment...

Oh! There's also www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/w.... It needs updated though. I'll make a post encouraging publishers and the like to add themselves.

Join the IndieGameBusiness Discord Server! IndieGameBusiness® is a Powell Group initiative that strives to teach game developers about the business of games. | 10601 members

In that case, consider discord.gg/indiegamebus.... There's a Discord link in their bio. That Discord has lots of business-y people that may be useful to "meet". It also has dedicated channels for business, publishing, marketing, etc...

How do game developers get themselves discovered these days? Are there community groups to get in touch?

Here's couple of resources:
newsletter.gamediscover.co - 3x Weekly newsletter that analyzes current discovery. Also discovery services for a fee. (Newsletter is strongly recommended.)
howtomarketagame.com - Join the discord and learn via osmosis.

Thank you!

🧵

Link to my post that explains some of the "how it's done": bsky.app/profile/were...

Dear #ScreenshotSaturday,

This week my #IndieDev engine cast it's first shadow. I learned about non-orthogonal transforms, Z-buffer precision, and perspective correct interpolation. To celebrate, I'm taking some headache medicine, then curling up in a ball to cry.

Sincerely,
Frazzled #GameDev

A distant, frozen planet I made for my game 🥶
#screenshotsaturday #gamedev

And yes, also packing. A point light will use twenty of these prisms so I hope to pack many into a single texture.

I'm using vector things, but also DirectX for rendering.

I'm calling it a "light shard". When it hits a wall, it'll bounce off the wall as another shard. If part of it hits a wall only that part will bounce. Given the randomness of the bounces, the shape of the shards become unpredictable, but they all break down into triangles, so that's my base shape.

What's even more fun is when you record video on your computer and only notice the music you had playing after you post the video to social media.