#independent game design

[martianmuckraker]

Under a Hostile Sun at GENCON!

Are you going to GenCon? Want to try out the game of survival against impossible odds? Saturday August 3rd I will be running two games of Under a Hostile Sun at GenCon! The Saturday morning session is almost sold out, BUT there are still seats at the 4pm game! Under a Hostile Sun uses a currency system to track mined planetary resources and an Opportunity Die to track the health of the party’s…

[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

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[fatedroses]

Man meets Morbol

[anim-ttrpgs]

A.N.I.M. Adventure Art: Benadetta (not to be confused with Burnadette)

Art by @theblackwarden

Meet Benadetta. Benadetta is a 30-something-year-old OSHA inspector who used to chain smoke but now vapes(this is mechanically important, it’s why she has very poor Athletics and other Physical skills and also is tied to her “Comfort Item” Trait.).

This art has been posted here with permission as part of A.N.I.M.’s Adventure Art initiative in our TTRPG book club.

Benadetta is a PC from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy by A.N.I.M.

If you’d like to join the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, you can find the discord invite on our website.

If your art fits he parameters outlined on this post, and you’d like it featured here, tag us or post it in the book club’s Adventure Art channel on discord.

If you’d like to support us and get a prerelease copy of Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy, check out our Patreon! Our Kickstarter is planned for launch in April 2024!

Mild spoilers under the cut, details kept vague so as not to spoil the adventure module this we are using for this adventure, it's a Call of Cthuhlu adventure module (Eureka is compatible with those without much tweaking!) not one of our own.

Benadetta was the one who OSHA inspected the warehouse that then blew up like a week later, inciting the mystery. She feels like she could’ve been responsible for the explosion by not being thorough enough and that’s why she went out of her way to try and find out the cause—along with this weird woman, Yvette, whom she thinks is a V:TM LARPer(she went on like one date with a guy like that in college who also never broke character) from the Internet she met on r/warehouseexplosions.

Investigation ensued.

They found out that Benadetta was not responsible, it was actually a bomb, and this is part of an organized crime thing that much later they have discovered is a radical cult.

Also this weird woman from the Internet has been buying Benadetta things at the drop of a hat, like meals and a whole form-fitting biker suit that costs like $600(was part of a disguise) and Benadetta has been...not discouraging her at all.

Benadetta has been losing Composure rapidly throughout the adventure and is now constantly hovering between 0 and 2. Yvette is...really bad for the Composure of people around her.

The problem is that regular people restore 2 Composure at the end of every day, plus composure from the comfort of fellow investigators. However, Yvette just plain cannot do this. She has a -4 in that skill.

She found out a little more recently that 1. Yvette is a real vampire. and 2. Yvette murdered three armed organized crime enforcers with hardly a second thought when left to her own devices. This brought her Composure down again.

In the morning of the most recent session they went to an architect’s house to get some blueprints, only for Yvette to be lured away from the living room and blasted apart with a shotgun by one of the guy’s assistants with a shotgun upstairs(that’s a whole story), while the other assistant attacked Benadetta with a knife and cut her arm open.

Yvette showed back up in the nick of time, now holding that shotgun, and punched the teeth out of the knife-wielding assistant.

It turned out that the architect had no idea about any of this, the assistants were members of the cult whose job it was to spy on him, and murder anyone who showed up asking about those blueprints.

After visiting an Urgent Care for the knife wound and Yvette treated Benadetta to an expensive meal after Benadetta basically snapped at her and insisted she owed her for dragging her around into involvement with a deadly cult, so they went to a nice restaurant.

They later went to Chili’s after Yvette left Benadetta alone for a few hours to lay on her bed and cry at 0 Composure.) Oh and also Benadetta owns 4 pet rats that she cried with. She has not allowed Yvette to see them.

They had to go to Chili’s because through some cyberstalking they found out a member of the cult frequents it and Yvette thinks this specific guy has information and might even be receiving a bomb to deliver to a certain location soon. (Yvette wants that bomb so she can drop it in the mailbox of the cult HQ, which is something I think Benadetta doesn’t fully realize.)

Benadetta, however, only came along meaning to be moral support while making Yvette do all the work. Benadetta is just getting drunk on watered down bottomless appletinis. But, even drunk, she is quickly realizing what a mistake it was to send Yvette to talk to this guy alone.

Because Yvette’s Interpersonal skills are -3 or worse almost across the board.

Benadetta ended up having to pull Yvette away when Yvette wasn’t checking her text messages (texts like “HE IS TRYING TO FUCK YOU”) and try to talk a mortified Yvette into proposing a ‘ménage à trois’, so that they could get this guy to bring them home and get him even more drunk so they could just search his house. Yvette *could not* do it so Benadetta has to call him over and say it herself while seductively unbuttoning her dress shirt—despite looking almost literally as disheveled as one can look in Eureka(0 Composure) and being drunk and even failing the Seduce roll resulting in her belching loudly and then dying inside, they were just two-drunk-beautiful-women-proposing-a-threesome-to-meathead-dude-out-of-nowhere enough to pull it off and get him to take them home.

I think Benadetta could’ve done anything short of shit her pants and this guy would’ve still taken them home.

[mystybelle]

Truly Cursed WS - a jjk RP(G)

Something cute built on WS - I'll expand it later, but this was a lot for 2 days lol

and the WS SRD again, in case you forgot~

Have fun! I'm gonna crash till I can polish it a lil more

[unusual-suspects]

Hi there!

i don’t post a lot of personal stuff outside of the evening window but i’d like to take this time to make an announcement.

I STARTED AN ETSY SHOP

here are some of the items i offer. all sizes are the same price and some items range up to 5X!

Thank you for your attention and have a lovely day!

[fowlfish]

"Father-Mother"

Loving and careful mother, strong and rule-giving father… head of the greatest family there is.

Zeno Clash is a pretty cool game with truly unique personality and style, especially among its oddball characters. So I enjoyed paying some tribute to it!

[scalpelsister]

idk if you've seen the Lythari elves in astra's Elven Anthology mod? possibly good for Feilan🐺

lythari are so cool, lythari my beloved <3 I didnt know someone had modded them in though- thats super cool!

I've gone back and forth on feilan being properly a werewolf or not bc i think it would be SUPER cool and fun- but her being like..... a shitty in between mix is also fun (and what she is right now in bg canon). I honestly dont remember if I've posted her backstory but- the idea is that her mom was a druid who favored wolves as her wildshape. So its the idea of like- that being passed down to feilan but instead of being a proper druid whos in control and connected to nature, shes a wolf heart barbarian (which like, howl like a wolf every time they rage in bg3. insert furry joke here). She also has like the yellow eyes and a lot of body hair, yada yada.

But shes also definitely been a werewolf elsewhere (in the sims. I fear I am talking about a sims save), and I am almost tempted to explore how that would play out in baldurs gate proper 🤔

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...

[joshthewalkingtrainwreck]

A step by step guide to making something with a niche application in Godot 4, as laid out like a cooking blog giving you a recipe (with art elements I've made for it)

A person has to have influences. Not just in who inspires them to create art, but who inspires them in their planning their avenues of attack, their planning, their sheer fuckin' gumption.  the utter balls they have to even show up after that nonsense they pulled last week. Nobody has ever said that about me, but life has a way of beating every last ounce of shame out of a person to the point where they feel there is the chance that could happen.

In my case, there are the people i think those who know me would say i would pick: people in game shows, people for whom 'bastard' has been an exclamation of both high praise and low curse. People like Jay Wolpert, for being perhaps the most experimental producer in an especially commercial genre (Whew, Shopping Spree, for attempting to make Trivial Pursit somehow exciting to watch instead of just to play); Bob Stewart, for being the man in the right place at the right time (one of those times was hearing Monty Hall tell him that old man goodson was looking for people); Reg Grundy, the aussie tv producer who would go on research trips to new york, spending the entire week in a hotel room with a copy of tv guide, a pen, and a composition book with a masking tape label bearing the caution of "original game show ideas do not steal" —and i am totally not hating on Grundy for that; IANAL but I've observed enough of it to make the opinion that you can protect how a game looks, reads, and sounds, but games are processes, and the intellectual property system here in the US does not protect the processes of baking a cake/formulating a fragrance/giving away merchandise to members of the general public according to arbitrarily set metrics presented as competitions of skill.

There have been at least two or three court cases where somebody *tried* to sue one show for being "a lot like" another game show, but those what weren't settled out of court (most recently Tokyo Broadcasting System vs Endemol over Wipeout being too much like Takeshi's Castle), were dismissed outright (e.g. Chuck Barris vs Haim Saban, over the defendant's “I'm Telling” being  too much like “The Newlywed Game,” the judge said nobody had a claim on inane bullshit  and told both parties to stop wasting the court's  time). Hell, it's the reason why Words With Friends was left unscathed (and eventually bought out) by Hasbro while Scrabulous had to shut down– Scrabulous danced a little to close of the “reasonable person” argument, in that there were actual ways people *could* confuse Scrabulous for Scrabble in that they used a similar board layout, similar scoring, etc.

But my influences extend beyond game shows, like film director/producer william castle, probably the most successful boilermaker hollywood could ever offer out of postwar america; there was a talk he gave to a college class. even though you might be able to tell in the speech that he felt somewhat disrespected by a class who knew him just from the movies he directed, he gave advice that stuck with me, even if the exact quote has peeled off in a couple of places in my mind from age: 'a producer is someone who is willing to step into any role in a project to see it through to completion.’ and I would say that's not just useful for having an understanding of how it all works, but it is incredibly important for a producer to learn patience, especially for anybody a producer works with. By learning how to edit, learning how to direct, and so on, you have an appreciation for the skills you're only just dipping your toes in; these are people who committed to that particular role and they are no less worthy of the patience, respect, and money that you would want for yourself for this.

Which has been why I've been learning Godot 4. That, and I am both too fucking broke to pay anybody else. Also there's the ifetime of neurodivergent trauma has made hyperindependence A Thing for me. That self-reliance, the rural Appalachian definition of it at least, is a Key Sign of Adulthood, and that an inability to do everything on your own is a choice of slothfulness. I can't ask people for help when I am still trying to figure out what it is I need help with. And if I hate being asked to help with no ready instructions on what to do, why would I want to put anybody else through the same thing?

So I try to learn it all and do it all. It's why a man in his 40s is just starting out in a career that most everybody else in his peer group are developing midlife crises over. It's why a man who has worked what was available hasn't been able to work what he wants to do, and why he still weeps at the end of the day over the years where it turned out he wasn't lazy or flawed or worthless, but had to work even harder just to get the same level of normal everybody else had no trouble managing.

I've also got in the habit of writing the stuff I've learned down, so if anybody else is looking to do the same thing, maybe they will have more time and energy to get to places I've not been able to find because I've had to do this, first.

So, if anyone is inclined/interested in making their own quiz projects, or just having a goofy little graphical element to represent a value within a game they are building, here's the workflow I've found so far for making trilons in Godot4:

(1) Make a new 3d scene. Add a new MeshInstance3D node to it, Look in the Inspector for the mesh just created > look for Mesh in the first entry > click the dropdown box next to it > select New Prism Mesh. Set initial mesh dimensions 1:0.866:1-- whatever changes made after this will keep things conforming to these initial proportions.

(2) find center mass: adjust it along your pivot axis by half of the height ( 0.866*0.5, or 0.433; look for inspector > transform > position > y-axis), then take that result and subtract the height, divided by 3 (0.433 - (0.866/3), or 0.144 in the same field)

(3) make your initial positioning; depending on where and how you wanna put it, the info i need to display on this is a maximum of three lines of text with some graphical highlights added. A landscape orientation will be what I need here. to that end, i set the rotation on the y-axis field to 90, so that only one face is visible to the camera when seen from the front. The pivot for its initial/"home" position itself will be done later.

(4) size it to spec; because we set the initial dimensions in step one, we can use the scale fields to size it to the specifications and still keep things equilateral. In the layout I've designed, I will need three of these, the faces of which being 295x95 pixels. Each face will need to be able to fit these proportions, so the x axis needs to stay at 1, the y-axis needs to be requested height divided by 100 (95/100 or 0.95 inspector > transform > scale > y-axis), the z-axis needs to be the width done the same way (295/100 or 2.95, next field over)

(5) create the controller; create a new Node3D, set the MeshInstance3D as a child to it. this will be what will have the animations attached to it later on. I renamed mine to 'controller,' because I lack an imagination at three-thirty in the morning.

(6) Set its starting position; change focus from the MeshInstance3D to its adoptive parent, bringing its fields up in the inspector. The default state needs to have one face as the only one being visible. The easiest thing I have found to do, especially considering the animations I need to set for this, is setting inspector > transform > rotation > x-axis to -90 degrees, as the animation player gets a little screwy if it tries to go beyond 360, plus or minus. it's a thing, i don't sweat it.

(7) Create the animations. Add an AnimationPlayer node to bring up the Animations panel, then choose the controller node. This will move the entire mesh by the center pivot we set earlier. 

You should notice a key icon in each heading of the transform section of the Inspector, that's for setting keyframes. Go to the Animation pane > click the "animation" button next to the greyed out dropdown box. In the menu that pops up, choose "new animation." 

(7b) For this, since I've got 3 faces on this (and it's possible to use more, it's possible to just have one plane, double-sided. I just figured a trilon was as good a starting place as any), there needs to be 3 seperate stops: from the 1st face to the 2nd; 2nd to the 3rd; etc. that's 120 degrees between each stop. For the first animation, I click the key under 'transform' (and it may ask you to confirm that you're starting a new animation track, it's okay). There should be a checkbox with the word 'rotation' and a dot next to the border of the timeline. 

(7c) Next, advance the animation shuttle (it's that blue stick that glides along the animation timeline whenever you hit the play button) to the other, accessable end of the timeline (it defaults to one second but you can change it), and then add 120 degrees to the x-axis rotation (should be showing 30 degrees). Click the key again to set the ending keyframe. Godot will now rotate the mesh from the position you gave it to start on to the position you gave it to end on. 

Repeat that until you've made animations moving along all three stops. A reset animation will be really handy here, as the default state will be showing a 'blank' graphic I made for this, so any time I need to introduce a new category with it, it will snap back to the ready state.

(7d, optional) I went ahead and made duplicate animations to speed up the rotation to make it seem a little more dramatic as mood dictates-- I went through and selected each animation from the dropdown box, clicked the animation button, and chose 'duplicate.'

it will ask you to give this duplicate a name, and I just attached the word 'snap' to it. I changed the overall length to .3 seconds, and adjusted the position of the ending keyframe on the timeline by clicking on the appropriate dot on the timeline, and changing the value for 'time' in the inspector to the end of the animation (.3).

Will I need to snap-flip whenever an ordinary category is played? Probably not, but I will need that snap-flip to happen if a modifier comes attached to the category (e.g. offering free picks at the board or doubling the value of the pot on a successful contract). I'd sooner have something and not need it as need it and not have it.

(8) Save the scene. 

As of right now, I admit this is only half-useful; I have the mechanics but no way of putting graphics on each individual face of this trilon. Trying to set a texture via the MeshInstance3D > Material > NewStandardMaterial3D > Albedo will just use that one graphic and stretch it across the entire mesh.

From what I understand, I will need to build a custom shader that will divide the face into three, and swap the individual graphics out as the state of play and game logic require. 

When I figure out how to do that, I'll put up what I did to get there.

For now, have a couple pieces of my poor craftsmanship:

[killerboyratzmp3]

i read a lot of rulebooks in my spare time, and i am losing my mind over the sheer number of books that don't explain keywords or referenced mechanics at all when introducing them for the first time. like this mechanic, feature, rule etc. is directly referencing some other mechanic in the game that you haven't explained yet. i don't know what a "condition" means in this game, let alone the specific one you've named here. and there's not even a page reference for me to flip to..

basically just wish there was more of a consideration of the experience of reading the book chronologically for the first time. explain your keywords properly, in the order that theyre cropping up in your book. have a solid table of contents, and a summary of the mechanics introduced at the ends of chapters. and if your game is even moderately "crunchy" I.e. has a lot of keywords, please for the love of god include a glossary.

[zachipuss]

Feral Forest hits Kickstarter in 14 days!👀 Mark your calendars, call your loved ones, save the date. The time is near🐺✨

[thefalloutwiki]

Fallout 3: Vault 122 Original Location

Were you previously aware that coc'ing to the “Vault112Exterior” cell will teleport you to a location northeast of the RobCo Facility?

According to Joel Burgess, several locations were moved during the last year of Fallout 3's production, due to them being too close together. The close PoI (Point on Interest) density also led to the map being expanded 10 cells West, Northwest and North.

In the final game, Vault 112/Smith Casey's Garage was moved further Northwest of the RobCo Facility, near Evergreen Mills. You can read about Vault 112 here:

https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Vault_112

[teuzmoonlit]

𝕋𝕠𝕤𝕒 💙✨

— この細い線がとても洗練されていて大好きです 🥰✨

• アズールレーン | ﾑ乙ひ尺 ﾚﾑ刀乇

[lazytrunkgames]

Trivia Independece day

🇮🇳 Time to celebrate Independence Day!

Test your knowledge on geography

How many countries apart from India celebrate their Independence on August 15?

Comment your Answers down below !!!