Game Development

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/63537270

I've wrote about the first few weeks of my hobby project. It's a self-hosted, agnostic cardgame. I've the release on this post (if you want to read about), I'll keep improving, refactoring and generating more information.

All comments, feedback is appreciated.

I've been experimenting with an idea that sits somewhere between a game and a productivity app.

Instead of treating habits like a checklist, I designed a progression system where real-life actions become game mechanics.

• Completing habits earns different powers (Strength, Wisdom, Focus, etc.).
• Powers can be combined on a strategy grid to discover stronger abilities.
• Your hero evolves as you stay consistent.
• Missing a day doesn't punish you or reset everything, it's built around positive reinforcement instead of loss.

As a game developer, I'm curious about the design side of this.

Do you think progression systems that work well in RPGs can create long-term engagement for real-life activities, or does the novelty wear off once players realize there's no traditional gameplay?

I'd love feedback specifically from a game design perspective. What mechanics would you add, remove, or rethink?

If you'd like to see what I've built so far, it's here: Habit Hero

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/48395665

I've rewrote the post to be "more pleasant" to read. Sorry for the unhinged original post.

I've building this for few weeks, this is a agnostic card game table so I can play with my friends games like Uno, Pokemon and such. The idea is to pick a deck and play the game. This the base line. Everything is customized, and most of the stuff needs to be done by it's users.

This is the dev log, and there is links for the places in case you need.
Feedback is always welcome. Thanks for readin.

A few months ago, in my free time, I started a small fantasy card game project in 3D and implemented raytracing to drag the cards around a plane above the "table" as a figure of speech, but I never did figure out the nodes which would have cards in play snap to and become undraggable. Whenever I set the boolean to disable dragging and enable snapping the card's variables passed to the node stayed null.

If somebody can help me figure it out, experience with git is a plus but not required (I can set up the repo and the gitignore myself), I'd be able to spend more time on the artwork and maybe we could start a kickstarter in a week or two.

Sample of my older artwork (from a different project outside of game development that is perpetually delayed for both team and financial difficulties):

For more private conversation please reach out to me at: finitebanjo@yahoo.com

If you lack any prior credit for such work then I won't immediately disqualify you but be prepared to demonstrate capability such as with a script that moves an instantiated 3D objects between 5 nodes in randomized order, interruptible by clicking on it (this demonstrates an active and inactive state and more complex movement than just static A to B)

I got into making games because I love games. Not because I see players as a balance sheet to drain. But somewhere along the way a lot of the industry stopped shipping things you finish and started shipping things designed to hook you, time you, and quietly bleed your wallet on a Tuesday night.

Loot boxes that are just slot machines with extra steps. Countdown timers built to make you panic-buy. Hyped-up trailers covering for a launch that's broken or empty. Full price games that still nickel-and-dime you for the fun parts. That's not design, that's a casino wearing a costume.

To be clear, I'm not mad at charging money. I sell my own game, and there are optional purchases that keep the servers on and pay the people building it. Charging a fair price for real work is honest. Engineering addiction and hiding a hollow product behind a flashy trailer is not. There's a line, and a lot of people sprinted past it.

So here's my flag in the ground. Fair price. Finished game. No psychological traps, no dishonest hype. You buy it, you own it, you actually have fun. That used to be the baseline. I want to make it the baseline again.

Somewhere in a glass tower, a meeting happened. The question on the slide wasn't "is this game fun." It was "how do we get them to spend again before they notice they stopped having fun." That's the part that gets me.

I'm not against paying for games. I sell mine for less than a lunch, with a few optional extras that keep the servers on and let me keep doing this. That's a fair trade. You give me a little, I give you a whole world and I don't pick your pocket while you're standing in it.

What I'm against is the slot machine wearing a game's skin. The blinking timers built to make you anxious. The fun locked behind a wall so you'll pay to feel something. The hyped launch that ships broken because the marketing already cashed the check. Designing a game to drain you instead of delight you is a choice, and a lot of big teams keep choosing it.

So here's where I plant my flag. I'd rather make a smaller, honest thing that respects your time and your wallet than a shiny machine engineered to bleed you slow. If you're tired of being treated like a balance instead of a player, good. Come build the other timeline with me. We're still out here, and we're not selling you back the joy.

Like a cult classic movie, Godot 4 has only gotten better with age. The first few releases focused on stability, granting the engine a rock-solid foundation that could be safely and easily iterated upon. Gradually, this has shifted more towards polish and quality-of-life, peaking in Godot 4.6 giving developers the tools to put them and their workflow first.

This brings us to Godot 4.7. With 3 years under its belt, the 4.7 Director’s Cut offers colors of never-before-reached intensity. HDR output radiates bold and brilliant new hues, allowing your projects to shine like never before. Inject some juice to your UI without breaking a sweat using the new Control offset transforms. Find the plugin that will help push your game even further with the new Asset Store, bask in the ease of creation with standalone Android exporting and publishing, and helm a bevy of new features to eliminate any remaining friction between you and your vision.

I'm currently working on a small social platform and I'm trying to make sure I handle notifications correctly before opening it up to more users.

Right now users can send friend requests and room invitations, and I'm considering adding email notifications so people don't miss them when they're offline.

My question is: if I send emails for things like friend requests, room invites, and account-related notifications, do I need to explicitly mention that in my Terms of Service or Privacy Policy? Are there any common mistakes I should avoid when implementing this?

I'm also interested in general feedback about the platform itself. I'm still actively improving it, so honest criticism is welcome.

Link: The Hideout

A few things I'd especially like feedback on:

• First impressions
• Account creation and onboarding
• UI/UX
• Social features
• Anything confusing or frustrating
• Features you think are missing

I'm looking for real feedback rather than promotion, so don't hold back if something needs improvement.

I'm making a web bomberman game in Godot, Mushboom, and I added first person view (shown in video) 😁

https://vimeo.com/1200685412

I recently decided to ditch my ancient WordPress portfolio and build a new site from scratch.

Because I wanted to show off a little bit, I decided I wanted to make it into a 2D side-scroller using Little.js. The issue was figuring out how I could keep the site accessible.

I just wrote the first blog post in a series on how I am making that very site.
The site is still a work in progress; but I felt this could interest people here. And it gives me a chance to test out the blog feature I just coded in.

Hey everyone, any recommendations for ways to get music for your game? I would prefer not to use AI. I want to either pay a musician or get free music made by a real person. I tried making my own music for a bit and I felt totally out of my depth.

Hey everyone! I've been building BritChat (britchat.co.uk) — a completely free, no-adverts social chat site for British people across all four nations.

It has live chat rooms (Lobby, The Snug, The Lounge), 15+ British games you can play to earn coins, a daily British content card, Poker tables, a daily wheel spin, posts and private messages, and The British Vault — 74 sections of British culture, history, music and icons.

No sign up needed to try the chat. Would genuinely love to hear what Brits think of it!

🇬🇧 britchat.co.uk

Saw an interesting upcoming live talk about bugs and code quality in game dev. The topic feels pretty relatable, especially when even experienced teams still end up shipping strange issues from time to time.

The speaker plans to go through reasons why bugs appear in projects, show some funny examples from well-known games, and explain what actually caused them. There’ll also be discussion around ways to catch issues before release, which development practices help reduce them, and what tools can help spot issues early in production.

If you want to join, here's the link.

The next generation engine from Epic Games has been unveiled using Rocket League.

Bevy Game Engine Visually Explained

A visual tour of how Bevy helps you compose complex, emergent games from small independent systems and a data-driven architecture.

This is an early experiment in demonstrating special-relativistic effects in space invaders. I forked a pygame implementation of space-invaders, and adapted in to my OpenGL program for special-relativistic drawing: jarrydac/gl_relativity.

This version is not very playable. But I already like the way that the transverse doppler shift colors the player and enemy bullets differently.

s&box, from the creator of the popular Source Engine sandbox Garry's Mod, released three days ago. s&box is based on the Source 2 engine, and not only a sandbox but a game development and publishing platform, including publishing on Steam.

The news post one day after release openly covers the mixed ratings, public finances, doubling their play fund that pays creators, and public roadmap.

I was surprised to see they openly and transparently publish day-by-day finances.

The public performance stats are interesting too.

Refreshing. I wish more publishers would do these kinds of things with deliberate open communication and transparency.

Their metrics pages:

• Startup Times
• Backend Services
• Game Performance
• Benchmarks
• Stability
• Finance
• Play Fund
• Skins

This is a brand new conference organized by game workers. The program is already partially available.