#GAMEDEV

[calcichel]

Ever since I discovered them, I've always enjoyed the creative/expressive potential of idle clicker games. This is an excellent example of that. Hmm, maybe I should make a list of my favorites.

are you frequently overstimulated?

[blacktabbygames]

i have a question about the development of the game!

most environments in the game operate on a two-frame animation where it's the same drawing twice but with tiny line deviations; just a subtle art style choice to make the game a bit more lively.

a lot of games and other such things do this, and it certainly adds a lot of life to the frame, but it seems like an incredible amount of work to have to draw every single thing twice instead of once, even if one is just traced over the other - especially with environments with so many intricate details like in slay the princess.

did you use any tricks or programs to make this process faster? or did you just have to draw every single background twice?

Lol. So I actually asked Abby if she could draw 3 versions of every asset when we started on the very first demo, after which she promptly died to avoid taking on that much work. When that was clearly a no-go, I switched to creating a boil effect out of localized distortions in After Effects, and then applied that to each image, creating a short, looping video file. This was *terrible* from a performance perspective, especially with the degree of layering in Slay the Princess — to maintain the parallax effect, many backgrounds have as many as 4 different layers, which all have to be saved as their own images, on top of the Princess when she's present. Playing that many HD video files is very CPU intensive, and the first demo ran terribly because of it. Ultimately we switched to using an openGL shader (which we hired @manuelamalasanya to code — she is so so talented) that mimics the transform I built in After Effects, and we apply that shader to each image within Ren'py. This works better with the engine in general, and it also means the extra work on displaying that effect is done on the GPU instead of the CPU, so the game's more performant.

[puppytruck]

save-and-a-reset

[miapcain]

Let's be real folks what would be the point of working on a project without sneaking in a bark button

[megalo224]

were currently at 120k and on our 4th stretch goal!

give the mindwave demo on steama shot if u think it looks neat!

Back us on Kickstarter

Play the demo NOW!!!

[dom2d]

Recent sketchbook pages uploaded to my Bluesky!

Come by and follow me there for more doodles!

[daninfiction]

"...cut out your tongue. May your mouth overflow with crimson nectar, spilling upon the baying wolves at your feet..."

[withteeths]

pretty relevant today

My game about AIDS and memory is finished, 10 minute playtime, released on my birthday. Read, enjoy, share! Made in about 2 weeks. It's small but I hope peoppe enjoy.

[mirrutatep]

Orc leader portrait

[anim-ttrpgs]

I and my friends are making a ttrpg for fun, and have come to an impasse. We disagree about the inclusion of an attribute, that dictates the PCs bravery. Therefore I wonder what a gamedev plugged into the TTRPG scene, thinks about mechanics that make PCs act brave/cowardly.

Well if you ask me specifically, I’m going to tell you don’t include anything that can take control of a player’s character away from them, but that does not mean that you can't have any kind of mechanic/stat that governs a PCs fear or stress level.

I personally can’t stand that mechanics that dictate that PCs run away, or dictate that they do anything at all like by falling under mind control, not because I think of the character as myself or some shit like that, I just consider myself to be the person most qualified to know what he or she would do in any given situation, so I’ve never been a fans of passing or failing saving throws or whatever determining if my character takes a certain action or not.

This is not to be confused with, like, regular dice rolls. Rolls to determine if my character can do a certain action well enough to succeed are totally fine, in fact I often want more of those.

This is one of the reasons why the Composure and Tiers of Fear systems in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy work the way they do.

We definitely wanted fear to be something that could affect the PCs and cause them to run away in a realistic fashion, these aren’t supposed to be fearless action-heroes, but I didn’t want it to be just a dice roll and then the GM tells you that your PC has to run away now. So, instead, Composure acts as a “cap” to the PC’s Skill modifiers. Base Skills cannot be higher than the PC’s current Composure level, making them worse and worse at succeeding skill checks the more frazzled and fatigued they are.

This never forces a situation where a player is told “your PC is going to run away no matter what,” but it means that the lower and lower that Composure gets, the more running away or surrender seems like a better and better idea.

That isn’t to say that mechanics that force certain character actions have absolutely no place in RPGs, hell Eureka even has one instance of this with wolfman rampages, but that’s only for one single character type, not a main mechanic which affects all PCs.

It’s well known that I really love AD&D2e, which has tons of that, though I also think that that may be one of the reasons why such a mechanic is so prevalent in TTRPGs in general. I’ve found that for a lot of TTRPGs, if you pick any random mechanic and ask “why is this in the game,” the answer is often some variation of “because D&D did it,” with little thought as to whether it needs to be in this RPG that isn’t D&D, or as to whether it was even a good idea when D&D did it.

Ultimately, study lots of RPGs, and know that there is more than one option besides just "do it the way D&D does it" and "don't do it at all."

[sorasumark]

and as for paper tenko, here's where i got to with it so far. going to continue it again once i get suwa blaster done! (or if i get burnt out on it, hopefully not that)

[ofthedevil]

Tossing out wrong answers will get you more than a slap on the wrist...

You'll also look lame in front of girls.

[fallendev0tionvn]

hey loves, I'm still alive🕴️.

I've been busy finalizing the demo, and now I just need to test everything thoroughly before releasing it (please give me a day or two).

I can't thank you all enough for your incredible support and patience- it truly means the world to me.

I'm both excited and extremely anxious because, honestly, one harsh comment or insult and I'm out (tearing up just thinking about it). But again, thank you for giving me the courage to keep going.

A special thank you/shoutout to my dear boyfriend for putting up with my doubts and endless overthinking- cause really, if it wasn't for that poor man I would've never even thought about actually publishing anything.🏃‍♀️

how it felt adding that last part:

(it will probably give people a reason to cook me alive)

[rightstickdev]

Yesterday was... kind of a day, so I forgot to share the new Music Monday on social media. Here it is now, the main theme of Rebel's Ravine!

[hauntaku2]

I'm planning on making a farming game eventually and you'll be able to date practically everyone if you wanted to.

It's still way too early in development and things are on pause until I get a decent computer though.