#GAMEDEV

[twoandahalfstudios]

🎉 The Steam Winter Sale is LIVE 🎉

We have a buttload of games - and a lot of them are on sale for up to ~60% off!

[fadingclub]

Psychopomp Gold is on Sale for the Holidays!

It's the perfect time to grab it for yourself, or get it as a gift for your friends, and spread the ABSOLUTE TRUTH of the world!

The other Fading Club games are on sale as well!

[anarchywoofwoof]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[henmesh]

Rifle animation in progress

[woahmaaan]

The burger

[n0rtist]

I have a new video on Dialogue Boxes is live

Check it out above!

[girlballs]

current mood after an hour of debugging only to realize the issue was just a fundamental limit with how network multicast events work and working around the problem took all of 3 minutes

[milonogiannis]

Since late August of 2022, Barry Topping and I have been working on a shoot ‘em up game called BIRDCAGE.

Now 2024 is wrapping up and – surprisingly – so is the production phase of BIRDCAGE. There’s still plenty of work to be done, but the game itself is all there, playable and asset complete.

Now we’re left with an ever-growing lernaean hydra list of other tasks to handle – emails, wider testing, stability, updating store presences, promotional stuff and in general, just trying to maximize the reach and polish of what we’ve made.

The final stretch of production (roughly the last 5 months?) was really fun. The game had matured enough that we just instinctively knew what would work and what wouldn’t.

We’d become comfortable enough with the tools we built and our process where we’d just be constantly in hyper mode. The game really came together in this final leg of development.

POLYGON BIRD, our studio name, and EXCEL Framework, the name given to the "shmup tools" we made for the game.

I was expecting ending full-on production on BC to be frustrating and depressing, but some switch flipped in my head and now all I want to do is email people about the game, optimize our Steam tags and figure out how to get this in people’s hands – and I’m finding that fun, at least for now. The game isn’t this ideal brainchild piece of art to me, suddenly. We did the work to make the thing, now it’s time the thing worked for us.

It surprises me how often I find myself thinking ridiculous things like “we need to activate our discord members” – but I’ll take this over the usual pit of despair I fall into after finishing a big project.

I guess this is what motivated me to write down these thoughts in the first place – I was bracing to be fully depressed and lost right about now, resenting the game and the time we spent on it. Maybe this will serve as a reminder that finishing a thing doesn’t have to feel so bad?

So now we’re kind of going back into uncharted waters – promoting, releasing, dealing with feedback, hotfixes and support. There’s going to be a lot of “learning on the job”, I guess, but I’m excited to see that aspect of game dev.

I’m really glad we were able to hit our goal of wrapping up this phase of BIRDCAGE as the year comes to a close – it makes it easy to look back on the past 2 years as a whole and see how much we’ve learned. I can’t wait for us to make another game, knowing what we know now.

There is still nothing to announce regarding the release of the game, but it still felt important to make note of this milestone.

For now, just know we’ve made a game and are working on getting it out there! We should have a lot more to say soon.

In the meantime, you can help us out by adding BIRDCAGE to your Steam wishlist.

Thanks for sticking around all these years.

Happy holidays!

-G

[zombielesbean]

Christmas Person is giving the gift of 50% off Electric Prune Juice games for the Steam Winter sale!

Our funny little arcade game Pizza Time Explosion is available for $2.99!

Our creepy cute platformer Grey Area is available for $9.99!

And don't forget to wishlist Twnkl Gft 2: A Lust For Blood, it's releasing later this month!

[wauzmons]

Morphs have been added to a lot of hut parts, allowing you to change their shape in different ways. Valid use cases include:

Building a castle

Imprisoning the imposter

[blueberreads]

The Innkeepers (OFMD advent calendar 2024)

My game for the OFMD Advent Calendar event happening on Bluesky is now available!

It is a fairly short, Holiday-themed cozy game. You can play here: https://eliakon.itch.io/the-innkeepers-ofmd-advent-calendar-2024.

Happy Holidays, pirate friends 💜

[phishcaek]

Animation asset for game I'm working on

[thelettergii]

Meet the Madelines!

At Sugarplum Cafe you’ll attract a plethora of guests, including these schoolgirls. When they're not in class, they’re fangirling over their favorite Ladies. Once their favorite Lady visits, they’ll visit in droves!

Madelines also love to gossip with each other about what their idols are up to, maybe that will come in handy later…?

They are named after the schoolgirl as well as the shell-shaped “madeleine” cakes - I designed their uniform to have scalloped edges as an homage to the madeleine shape! 

Sugarplum Cafe is a merge crafting game where you run a dessert cafe and serve fashionable ladies inspired by sweets 🍰 ⁠It’s heavily inspired by fancy patisseries, tea parties, and frilly fashion - I feel like there are never enough more pastel shoujo aesthetic games out there, and I can only be the change I wish to see! 😤

Check out my #sugarplum cafe tag for more posts!

[molegato]

grandma tier meme go

[bdragon1727]

500 Pixel Bullet 24x24

Download More and Free:

https://bdragon1727.itch.io/