we added a legally distinct clippy to our windows 95 themed automation game about making powerpoint decks - his name is pinny #gamedev

I only had one day for #LudumDare #gamejam this time. When I finished up (at 4am 🫩) I realized I satisfied all the requirements for the Compo (aka. "hard mode") so I submitted to that and went to bed.

ldjam.com/events/ludum...

Quite happy with my minimalistic signal decoding puzzle game. #gamedev

Computers back in the day didn't spy on you, you just used them. Then they started spying on you. Now the spying is so normalized that governments pass laws that are incompatible with non-spying operating systems. It's a tragedy in three acts.

US may force operating systems to have mandatory age verification, share info with third parties Here lies darkness.

I've said it before but it bears repeating: the proliferation of these age verification laws popping up everywhere is absolutely toxic to open computing. It basically assumes that every operating system is centralized, corporate controlled, and requires accounts.

www.pcgamer.com/gaming-indus...

A ball being hit on the moon, moving towards a golf flagpole.

A ball flying over the Earth in the upper atmosphere.

In space, the Earth and Moon are visible. The player is planning to hit the ball from Earth orbit into a trajectory that will encounter the Moon.

A ball flying through space near Mars's atmosphere, about to pass by the moon Phobos.

#CelestialGolf #ScreenshotThursday

Celestial Golf Demo on Steam Hit your ball on orbital trajectories around a realistically sized solar system. Discover the secrets hidden in the planets and moons, learn orbital mechanics, and boldly go where no golf ball has gon...

I'm overjoyed to have finally released the public demo of Celestial Golf on Steam (along with a shiny new trailer). You could be playing it now! store.steampowered.com/app/4532530/...

Worked really hard over the past month on polishing. Thanks to all the playtest feedback! #gamedev #indie #space

I constantly have the same feelings. But we've got to create our thing, and tell our development story, and hope that if the AIs clone our work, the market will reward us humans because we have a story to tell.

You know, pre-announcing WWIII only to cancel it right at the last moment might seem like a dick move. But it's also a fantastic way to manipulate the stock market exactly the way you want.

‘Unhinged madman’: US politicians react to Trump’s expletive-laden threat to Iran Marjorie Taylor Greene and Bernie Sanders among those responding with alarm to Trump writing ‘open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards’

Support the Guardian for its open and free press, known for its independent, liberal, and investigative journalism, which is funded primarily by reader contributions and advertising rather than a billionaire.

Here's the article in full:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Celestial Golf Playtest - The UI Update - Steam News Today's update brings a complete overhaul of the game's main UI, and a new "target mode" to help with long-distance planning.UI refresh The old UI was basically a big list of lots of values, with no p...

I just updated my space golf game with a completely new streamlined UI and wow, it feels like a different game. I can feel things starting to finally come together.

store.steampowered.com/news/app/424...

#indiedev #gamedev #godot #space

You can playtest it now at the above link, proper demo soon.

Celestial Golf on Steam Hit your ball on orbital trajectories around a realistically sized solar system. Discover the secrets hidden in the planets and moons, learn orbital mechanics, and boldly go where no golf ball has gon...

If you think this looks cool, you can check out Celestial Golf on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3965730/...

There's a playable demo ("join playtest") and more coming soon.

Artemis II mission in Celestial Golf YouTube video by Jukebox Interactive

I tried recreating #Artemis II in Celestial Golf. It was ... harder than I thought to line up a lunar flyby that goes back to Earth without intervention. Not quite accurate but it gets the idea across. #space #indie #gamedev

youtu.be/6u0LvcZO7PE

Disclaimers:
1. I only have experience as a solo developer. It _might_ be better for large teams who are constantly moving things around to have stable UIDs.
2. This is not an attack on any #Godot team members. They are absolute heroes for making this amazing software free and open for all. ❤️ 7/7

Point is: we already have a human-readable unique identifier for every file, the file path. Yes it is a pain to change one of these and update all the references, but that is a reasonable cost for a thing you shouldn't do often. Compared to having no idea what any reference is referring to. 6/7

And now in 4.6, every single Node having a UID, making it harder to edit scene files by hand, should the need arise (which it does, constantly).

(On the other hand, 4.6 blessedly removed the "load_steps" counter which makes it much easier to edit scene files, so we'll call it a tie.) 5/7

Other recent UID misadventures includes, from 4.4 onwards, forcing every .gd file to have a corresponding .gd.uid file (again, so I can rename .gd files without breaking references), causing endless file system clutter and revision control headaches. 4/7

Code preloading 8 images by file path. First line reads: const JOY_A = preload('res://images/inputs/xbox_button_color_a.png') followed by 7 other similar lines.

Code preloading 8 images by UID. First line reads: const JOY_A = preload('uid://cpfh86mtoik26') followed by 7 other similar lines.

I mean which of these is more readable, maintainable and checkable for correctness? The one on the right is resilient to renaming the files, but ... who cares? That isn't something I'm going to do often enough to worry about. I do worry about having no ability to see what my code is doing. 3/7

I love Godot a lot but the whole UID thing feels like a misstep and every new release seems to do more things related to UIDs. The idea behind UIDs is that you can rename files without having to update all the references, because you always reference files via UID. In practice, this hurts. 2/7

"Files: Drop Preload Resources as UID" checkbox, turned off. An arrow icon indicates "revert to default", implying that the setting is on by default.

My #Godot workflow improved so much after I discovered and turned off "Drop Preload Resources as UID". Turning this off means dropping a resource in code makes it a good old-fashioned file path rather than an indecipherable UID. 🧵 1/7

How my game teaches you orbital mechanics YouTube video by Jukebox Interactive

Full video covering how and why I had to change the tutorial system: youtu.be/-OOr2zUawPE

I'm fixing the tutorial system in Celestial Golf. Dedicated systems for specific purposes. #godot #gamedev #indiegame

You can playtest the new build of the game on Steam now: store.steampowered.com/app/3965730/... (and wishlist to be notified when the game launches).

This is why I have such anxiety about sharing things I make that I care about online. (And already did before vibe coding was a thing but this is on another level.)

You make a compelling point (I don't want a toolbar to do surprise behavioral changes) though admittedly the only thing I've noticed is it breaks fullscreen.

But it is maybe a problem to have a button called "embed" which does nothing obvious other than add a toolbar, but subtly changes things.

Seeing so many DLSS5 posts... I'm assuming some of them are fake. It's so hard to tell what's an AI-generated screenshot and what's a real screenshot of an AI-generated game. 🤦

I get that technically, "embedded" is quite different (it's running your game inside a thing, rather than on its own). But for all intents and purposes the reason you want that is for the debug toolbar, so I agree with the renaming and possibly a redesign.

I'll probably make a devlog video about this later this week because it was an interesting design challenge.

The realization I had with the old tutorial system was that it was creating walls of text that people could (and did) ignore, and they just played the game with half the screen covered up. So the new system has much less text, and forces you to click through tutorials before resuming the game.

Celestial Golf Playtest - The Tutorial Update - Steam News This update completely overhauls the tutorial and dialogue system, replacing the old side-panel of text

Just pushed out a big overhaul of the tutorial system for the Celestial Golf demo. (Accepting feedback on the first few levels before I proceed with updating the rest of the game.) store.steampowered.com/news/app/424...

store.steampowered.com/app/3965730/... to play now! #gamedev #indie

New devlog for Celestial Golf: importing the beautifully rendered terrains for Mars into #Godot. #gamedev #indie

Full video here: youtu.be/er34GrUiXcM

Wishlist the game on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3965730/...

Jordan Mechner - Latest News Blog posts and articles by author and game developer Jordan Mechner

Just posted "On Gameplay Storytelling", my contribution to @jon.inkle.co's cool new anthology "The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope", on my website:
jordanmechner.com/en/latest-ne...
The thing about writing for games is to remember that the story exists to serve the game design, not...