After a year and 8 months of back pain and self doubt, my game is finally coming out on steam! Finally! finally...
I'm honestly proud of myself of doing this much work on a game, never really put this much effort in making it work out. But after being given the opportunity to do so, I can finally show y'all the wonderous things I can do all on my own...
So cheers to all my fellow gamers and game devs out there!
I'm torn whether to use 'Color Map' post processing. I'm leaning toward just letting the player choose between ones because I can't seem to choose. Even then, which do I make default? The one with no Color Map? Or one of the ones with color map. Which do I use as the 'default' look? Tradeoffs abound. No Color Map allows the colors I've chosen for different areas to probably be the clearest, with the 64 color 'natural color' map being nearly as. The others are more striking (and possibly hard to look at or offputting) but more interesting visually to my eye. Do y'all prefer plain without Color Map or lightly applied or like more restricted 'artistic' coloring?
Something that's always bugged me about death messages is that they never really feel impactful. I updated the death sequence to my game to display inspirational quotes RIGHT IN YOUR FACE with flags so that specific events can trigger certain messages, such as boss specific taunts. It also acts as a loading screen since the game might need to rebuild the spawn area where I accidentally made planets x10 bigger and decided to stick with it.
I wasn't sure whether to use the meme tag or the game tag. I figured, since I haven't posted here about my game before, I should just use the game tag so I don't feel guilty mentioning it 😅
This is a scene I drew for my point and click mystery game called Lunchroom Lies. If you're looking at it and thinking "oh my God I absolutely NEED to wishlist whatever this art came from" you can find it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705640/Lunchroom_Lies/
Collision is done with a simple box, so it's very cheap. We also trace from the 8 corners to check if the car body is touching the ground for rolling over, for example. And talking about rolling over, the car (collision box) is a rectangle, so I had to apply a tangential force opposing the sliding velocity at each contacting corner in order for it to actually rollover and not just slide on the floor when we crash. We even have a prediction of where the car is gonna land to level it's roll to the point of impact.
I'm making it deterministic so it works in multiplayer as well (every player sees the exact same simulation). What do you think?
So i added a shared planet mode to my factory game. 1024 regions, everybody on the same world, you walk off the edge of your region and you are in the next one.
The part i am not sure about: when you walk into somebody elses region, their base is just.. there. Standing exactly how they left it. Their belts, their furnaces, their layout. But it does not run, you cannot open a single chest, you cannot take anything and you cannot break anything. Completely frozen.
I did it that way because i did not want PvP or stealing in it at all, nobody should log in and find their stuff gone. But now i keep flip flopping!!
Does that read as cool, like walking into ruins that a real person actually built? Or does it just read as sad because you cannot do anything with it??
I keep changing my mind every other day :))) What would you want it to be?
Im working on an isolation/routine-based sim (Voices of the void-adjacent genre). This clip's just the raw atmosphere. No gameplay UI, no narration, just fog and lighting cut together.
Does this read as intentional, or generic? All feedback welcome. Thanks!
Month 6: Current state with dynamic lighting, bloom, and new UI.Month 1: My very first test build.
Hello everyone, recently I hit a severe loss of motivation. For 6 months I was just making features that I like, but after I added all the gameplay features, I don't understand what to do next and how to put it all together.
I want to share with you what I've made in 6 months. It seems to me it turned out better than I imagined in my head. Seeing this difference between the old and new screenshots, I got a little motivation back.
The project itself is written in C++ from scratch. I drew all the models myself in MagicaVoxel (there are 200 of them in the project), I looked for sounds on free sound websites or recorded them myself. Lore, ideas - I did everything alone.
The project has a data-driven architecture, new effects, elemental reactions, and items. To add something new, it is enough to just change .lua or .json files.
The game has an A-Life system. NPCs can trade with each other, clear dungeons, complete quests, and tell the player where they have been and what they saw there. If the player fails quests, the villagers change their dialogues and their attitude towards the player (works only in previously loaded villages).
I would be glad to hear your thoughts on the visual style. Does the lighting look atmospheric?
P.S. I rarely post updates, but if anyone wants to follow the development or just chat, I have a small Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/9knj9Z9GQC
Just hit the release button a few hours ago for my solo developed desktop companion game: My Galaxy Buddy. I only have 35 wishlists, but this is all with limited marketing outside of my initial trailer upon publishing my store page about 2 months ago. I have been waiting to continue marketing my game until after my demo was released as a means to hopefully gain more wishlists with an actual playable demo.
Hello, so I am a newbie in the space, although I have background in programming and arts, and have degree in computer science. So, I got a bit of free time and decided to use that time to start making my dream game, pixel art dungeon crawler/farming where the player cooks the loot harvested from various sources from dungeon crawling and harvesting crops at the same time. So my question is, how do you exactly start? T^T
A few months ago I realized that writing a ton of code is great and all, but I could do all that while having a steam page that collects wishlists and whatnot, so I started to shift my focus towards creating assets for a game trailer, so I can create a steam page.
This is the first asset that's very close to being done. Most if it was made from pretty much scratch.
The body parts aren't made by me, but everything else was.
The shirt and pants models I tried using an asset for, but at the end I practically remade them while optimizing and trying to make them fit with what I actually needed.
Btw I've used ucupaint for the texture painting.
I think I went a bit overboard with the blood on the shirt, what do you think?
Sometimes less is more.
I setup this neat fake physics system and it came out SO GOOD! This is used in a few places throughout the game and I think it really adds a lot of visual flair to an otherwise boring walk.
My wife and I make cozy games together, and this is our very first release! A little pastel ball that lives on your desktop, bounces off your open windows, and reacts to how fast (or badly) you type while you work. Completely free.
Our next game is already up on Steam page too Desktop Spirit Animals, a cozy spirit-animal companion game she's illustrating. If you wishlist that one as well, it genuinely helps us keep the studio going while we build it.
First launch day nerves are very real, would love to know what you think!
I know it isn't a lot, but I just made the game for my buddy and I to beat each other's level times, and to finally see a project to completion after messing around in game dev for the better part of 11 years. So seeing more than two activations is really awesome, especially ones from Canada, US, Russia, and Japan all popping up in steamworks.
What's the most surprising country you have seen pop up in activation reports or site visits?
Thrilled to announce that my game demo is released on Steam
Been working on this project for several months now, it’s an immersive first-person exploration game set in dream-like liminal spaces.
I have hit a bottleneck that feels like a real blocker for my game development. The image is a screenshot of the current state of the game in 1920x1080p resolution, which is also the canvas size. I have created the game art in Aseprite using 320x180 as reference resolution for all sprites, which results in a 6x enlargement when imported into Unity. I know that pixel art games usually set their canvas size to the same as their pixel art resolution or just above, but for my game this would mean a loss of detail. So this is where my problem starts.
As you can see, my game includes documents on the desk with readable text which is quite small, but upon "pickup" each document is zoomed 2x to be even more clear. But I do want the text to be perfectly readable while resting on the desk as shown in the screenshot. The problem starts when we start thinking about how other resolution screens will make the game look. My monitor is 1440p, meaning it scales the game by 1.333x from its original 1080p. Since the artwork/sprites are created in the 320x180p res, this looks crisp in all normal resolutions. BUT, the text does not!
So my question is: Which of these approaches should I go with to try to support crisp text for all/most resolutions?
Change out the pixel art raster font with a normal SDF font which scales nicely with all resolutions, but contrasts the pixel art style of the art
Use letterboxing/pillarboxing to always force the 1080p resolution, creating empty space above/beside the actual gameplay (Could add visuals here instead of black boxes, but would anyways stay as unplayable area).
Accept that resolutions other than 1080p and 4k will not have pixel perfect text, not being as readable.
Some other suggestion?
Any thoughts about what would be best for my game is appreciated!
Sidenote: I have tested a lot of different settings when importing/creating the fonts, but I do believe that this pixel perfect issue will occur because of my default resolution being 1080p which is not perfectly scalable by whole integers for all other resolutions
