#games design and development

[bugbeast]

Self promo for my newest card game, Jewel Thief; but you can play it for free! First, though, let's cover the basics...

TL;DR - Its a 4+ player competetive card-matching game with four rule variants; buy it here or look for the orange text in this post to learn how to play it with a regular deck

"What is Jewel Thief?"

It's a card matching game with a villain; one player tries to match jewels in a 36 card grid while their opponent, the titular Jewel Thief, periodically steals cards from the board. You can check out its page on The Game Crafter for more information, but it'll spoil the rest of this post

"What makes it special?"

The game's turn structure would theorettically allow you, perhaps via some kind of infinite cloning machine, to play a round of Jewel Thief til the heat death of the universe. While I wouldnt recommend that, its lack of a player cap (and ease of set-up; seriously, all you do is put cards on a table) makes it a good party game choice.

But that's not all!

There are three extra rule variants that drastically alter the gameplay while keeping card matching and stealing as main mechanics. I believe the cards are versatile enough to allow for many custom games, too

"Okay, but why should I buy a silly game from some bug nerd?"

First off, ouch. Second off, that's the best part; you dont have to buy it to play it! Jewel Thief can be played with a standard 52 card deck. Here's how:

Step 1. Remove the 10s, Jacks, Queens, Kings and Jokers

Step 2. Download the free rules from the shop page

Step 3. Play the game, matching cards based on their values. You'll need to designate a value as the Diamond jewel for game 4

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That's it for my little self-promo. If you dont buy the game, I hope you'll at least give it a try and consider supporting my future projects.

I also post art and photography, which you can find under the bugbeast art and bugbeast photos tags. I hope you check them out

Thank you for your time <3

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Edit (Mar. 25, 2024) : Thank you to everyone who liked and reblogged this; if you play the game I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments and/or reblogs (even if you hated it). Feel free to share any custom games or house rules you come up with, too. I'd love to try them!

Edit (Aug. 10, 2024) : Final edit most likely; gonna blaze this one more time for good luck then maybe start work on a postmortem for the project, maybe give a little backstory for anyone who cares. Life is a little rough right now, but fate willing, I'll be able to work on/post about my future projects, including the future of Jewel Thief itself

[prokopetz]

"I wish I could make a game but get other people to do all the art and writing and programming and" you literally can. It's called being the project manager, and all you have to do to get this job is be willing to write all the emails, make all the phone calls, set up and moderate all the group chats, schedule and lead all the meetings, monitor and follow up on all the deadlines, coordinate with all relevant third parties, and personally chase down the answer to every question that anyone might conceivably ask about anything. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, there are any number of projects that would love to have you on board.

[boggsart]

I’ve decided to post all of the progress here as well, not just on instagram. Some people have asked to be tagged once I post some progress, but I can’t remember who they were. So if you wanna see future progress, let me know and I’ll tag you!

This one may not look too different from the previous one, but nothing really turned out the way I intended to.

The colors, the textures, the focus, the sounds, the camera, everything just seems so off, and oh boy the animation… this is the result of rushing and not knowing what I’m doing, just inserting keyframes, tweaking the graph editor and hoping for the best. So maybe signing up for this project wasn’t a great idea after all lol. Plus the datapad’s not even fully textured, you can literally see where I started adding details on the front, then for some reason I just left off lol

One thing I’ll definitely work on in the future is the menu itself, because if this project is for a graphic design thesis, then I might as well try to make the only thing that has something to do with it look more presentable. I’ll definitely be changing up the fonts, and I have some other ideas for the background as well.

But for now, I’ll move on to the remaining 5 character menu animations. Originally there were gonna be 5, not 7. At first I was randomly picking out the characters I wanted to make one for, then I realized, it’d probably be best, if each squad got one animation. The 501st gets Rex, the 212th gets Cody, the CG gets Fox, the 104th gets Wolffe, and the 241st gets Tukk. CF99 got Hunter but I really wanted to make one for Tech as well, since modeling and texturing him took the longest 💀

Once all of that’s done, I can finally move on to animating the trailer video. Which I’m terrified of, but oh well lol

[jess-the-vampire]

Ace Attorney x The Owl House au

I was asking for art ideas on my Instagram and this was one of the request ideas, probably because my AA hyperfixation returned recently

Then I got weirdly into it with its own lore to make these words work together, I didn't even draw all the ideas I had! I wanna do more and draw belos and some of the sprite animations for these guys !

So I'll do that later.

Honestly a lot of the names in this show could totally pass for AA names, Tinella Nosa is straight up an AA name.

Why is hooty the judge? Yes.

idk, enjoy this weird stuff i made

Bgs i made under cut:

[sethinthespace]

Yokai Parade

[magpieandpossum]

I'm already about 110% in love with these rough draft character sprites....

these are all unshaded, and will probably be continued to be edited, but I just wanted to share to get feedback! both garak and quark have alternate outfits as well ^^

[arcadebroke]

SEGA SATURN Sophia Development Systems

[wishlings]

As you may have noticed, the project has undergone some changes!

The name 'DigiPet' was just a placeholder (trademark owned by somebody else), and based on our recent lore-building, we have changed the name of the project to:

🌠 Wishlings 🌠

Wishlings is an in-development virtual pet game for mobile (PC planned eventually), with evolution and sandbox mechanics. We are inspired by Digimon World and Tamagotchi!

🌌The team:

Art: @tofupixel @ilta222

Programming: @luckycloverdev

Audio: @theogbaschfire

🌟 As for the world itself:

The game takes place in a dream / imagination land, which you first arrive at in your sleep. These creatures are basically imaginary friends, dreamed up by people all over the world. They can take many fantastical forms, but they all seem to be a bit magical.

They're going through some trouble right now, as Nightmare creatures are threatening their existence!

Treat them well, evolve them, train them and fight the Nightmare entities to bring peace back to the dream world. 🌠

🌟 The gameplay:

At first, you start with a dream egg. It will soon hatch into a baby monster! Treat it right, feed it and take care of it to influence how it grows up and evolves.

There are (so far) 5 evolution levels: Egg, Baby, Youth, Adult and Elder.

You can grow your own food and ingredients in your own backyard farm.

Cook the ingredients to make better meals. Different pets have different food preferences, some are carnivorous, some vegetarian!

Decorate your pet's habitat to influence it's personality and mood. We hope you will experiment a lot with the treatment of your pets to discover more evolutions! 🌠

🌟 Planned minigames:

Farming (growing food and ingredients)

Sky Fishing (catching food)

Walks (exercise your pet and find items)

Cooking (combine ingredients to make better food)

Battling (defeat enemy monsters to make your pet stronger and get items)

We are happy to have you here, it means so much that you're interested in the game!

And if you have any suggestions, or want to keep up with development more, please join our discord server! 🌠

[dad-dumpster]

harry keeps stealing victim’s boots

[mostrovskaa]

Some more art from my bachelor's degree final art project - Urnfield. Here are a few sketches of individual levels and some visual dev ilustrations of them :-)

[kylesaladus]

[prokopetz]

Honestly, the thing that perplexes me the most about the 3D Sonic games isn't the character writing or the platforming mechanics – it's that the default over-the-shoulder perspective hands the developers a solution to the "going too fast to see where the fuck you're going" problem that's historically plagued the franchise's 2D incarnations basically for free, yet they constantly go out of their way to make the player do timing-sensitive shit from goofy fixed camera angles that prevent you from seeing where you're going anyway.

[roadarchie]

follow me if you liked this post :) I made the image

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Shout out to all artists who had to work without any strong direction or instruction.

I wish you a merry “the client likes it anyways”

[from-the-notebooks]

Do other ttrpg designers do historical research when making historical games?

I have to assume the GURPS splat books had some behind them but I'm just wondering if its weird that I plan to have a bibliography for my cute little Fate hack? I just want it to be accurate as much as possible.

[kaiserouo]

Well someone has to give it its driver updates, Gabriel