Hi, so, not really sure what rules if any @NoxiousPluK@lemmy.blahaj.zone has in mind for this community. But just delete this thread if it’s against them, no worries.
With that out of the way, I thought it might be fun for us all to share a bit about our current project(s), along with anywhere people can find devlogs or demos or whatever else.
Sounds like a typical self-promo thread? Maybe. And maybe that’s not allowed. But I have no horse in this race, my only “game” is currently a very janky prototype and my devlog channel exists only in my mind.
I can’t get enough of other people’s devlogs and love to discover new interesting sounding projects, so here we are lol.
Wotcha making?
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I have been messing around with some of C#'s more recent features (like ref structs) to try and make a high performance gamedev library based on relational database concepts.
For ages I’ve felt like that ECS feels like a more restrictive version of a relational database, so it feels like a natural avenue to explore.
But really I’m just another person procrastinating from real game design by doing pointless engine development instead.
Gotta respect the self-awareness, tbh.
I’m working on developing my portfolio, so I’m making week-long game projects alternating with month-long game projects.
Honestly that sounds like a great plan of attack! How long have you been doing it and how many games?
Is this portfolio available anywhere yet for us to check out? Itch? Mastodon? The people demand self-promo 😄
Yeah, you can find my work over at https://mcoorlim.itch.io/ and I post devlogs and gameplay videos to my youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPeDM2RA_lyVQmjuR5Aq5ww/
Well I’ll join in so long as this thread exists (I am expecting self promo to be less aggressively harassed on Lemmy compared to Reddit)
Sorry to make it so long, I wanna try to share what I’m making as well as who I am and what I do.
I’m a primary hobby dev, trying to make a couple bucks from my games but not really living off them. I’ve primarily been making little horror games since they are really fun for me and horror is a very comforting genre.
Now I’m letting myself be “basic” and making a cutesy Magical Farming/Ranching game in the style of Slime Rancher, but with some various farm sim and RPG influences. I’m making it in Godot with C#.
I do all of my games as open source projects under the GPL 3 license (copy-alike license). I see it as a way to give back to the internet which is largely responsible for teaching me how to code and also letting people smart enough to compile it themselves to have my games for free if they so choose. I’ve also had some pull requests for different improvements on some of my stuff which was unexpected but super cool.
One of the intentional design features of the farm game is being very data driven. I’m setting the game up for translation keys and many of the features are using custom resources (Godot’s Scriptable Object equivalent). I’m using Godot’s patch loading feature to allow loading mods fairly easily. So all one needs to do to make a mod is write a few files, which in Godot is super easy to do.
I don’t really have any pics yet since the game is way super alpha stages. I’m still getting some features working properly and there’s a lot to do before it’ll be done. Hoping I can publish on steam but otherwise all my games usually go on Itch.io.
and horror is a very comforting genre
We are very different people 😀
I do all of my games as open source projects under the GPL 3 license
That is so amazing, thank you. Really cool
Hoping I can publish on Steam
I have not published something on Steam myself yet, but I’ve paid the publishing fee ($100) for a game I’m working on yet, so I can test all the Steam API integration and easily update the game for the few people that help me test. The process seems very straight-forward.
Long is good! And “basic” is good too especially when it’s cozy af 😍
I’ve only just started learning Godot after using Unity, and honestly (what I thought was) the lack of scriptable objects was really annoying me so thanks for mentioning that because it’s gonna get researched SO HARD tomorrow.
Honestly love that whole philosophy, I had some open source projects a while ago and it’s such a great feeling having people not only use and appreciate your work, but even contribute to it themselves. What more could a creative want, honestly?
(the answer is lots and lots of money)
I’m glad I could help out! If you wanna check out more of Godot’s awesome features the official docs are really great! It has gdscript and C# examples all over so it’s really helpful
Thanks, I’ve been piecing it together as I go although did ignore the very good advice I was given to stick to Godot 3, so a lot of what I find is outdated. Nothing like a completely self-inflicted problem 😅
Just wanted to check back in and repeat THANK YOU for the mention of custom resources because this was the missing piece of the puzzle for me and has kickstarted what will hopefully be a very productive weekend.
You’re very welcome! When I used Unity I used Scriptable Objects for everything. So when I moved to Godot that was one of the first things I looked for. Best of luck on your journey!
I have been working on a 2d platform shooter game. It uses raylib and clipmunk2d physics. I am a mad man so I am making a lot of in house shit and my adhd brain is slowing it down ):
I am a mad man
Well you know what they say, the first step is admitting you have a problem 😅
Thanks for making the thread!
I’ve been working on a story-driven game inspired by stuff like Naissancee and Event[0]. The idea is that instead of reading stuff like log entries and emails directly, you have to talk to characters that interpret them for you. They might add their interpretation, or twist the truth a bit.
I don’t want to spoil anything but the plot involves the sort of end point for humanity. There are themes of existentialism and what the ultimate end goal for humanity is.
I made a couple devlogs about it. (And a discord server)
Totally spent the first couple mins of that first devlog thinking “that sounds like Outer Wilds”, and then BAM! 😄
Seriously though this is a really cool concept. Off to watch the other video and teaser trailer now!
Thanks! Outer wilds is probably my favorite game, with the dlc being a close second. It’s probably obvious but I’m a huge fan of games that find interesting ways to blend gameplay and narrative, and those games are basically the pinnacle of that.
Absolutely incredible game, probably my second of all time after Link to the Past. So now in this thread we have games at least partially inspired by my top two…will be watching progress with great interest lol
My current project is on the backburner (again) for the time being. It’s a space noir detective game. Instead I’m working on my (first ever) community driven World of Warcraft (Classic) Addon with a narrative focus which I will hopefully release in the next few weeks.
Ooooh I love the idea of a noir detective game with space elements.
Ooh both of those things sound really cool! I’m a recovering WoW addict myself, but despite being able to pick up most other languages Lua always blew my mind for some reason. Respect!
How far along is the detective game?
Oh yeah, I’ve been on and off playing WoW since 2005 (more off though) and with the hardcore play mode I’ve started playing Classic again, although still not as much as back in the day. Lua is strange. I had to look at so many other addons to make sense of it. I don’t like it though, not at all. The Addon will be accompanied by a web app as well which was way more fun to create, because contrary to Lua Javascript/Typescript makes sense to me.
Not very far. Lots of concept work in terms of world and story. The last thing I did was working on a system for Dialogue, NPCs and behaviour that I could feed Articy Draft data into. For once I wanted to build a good framework before getting into the details haha. Made it all the harder to keep fun though with the amount of planning involved.
It’s the curse of the gamedev. No, actually, the curse of the any-kind-of dev. Doing the groundwork is boring as heck, but not doing it will have you hating your past self!
My current project is a spiritual successor to Zelda a Link to the Past. I first intend to recreate that game to a certain extent and then change everything necessary to be unique enough while still retaining enough to give people a good feeling or familiarity.
This is what I have for my character style so far https://i.imgur.com/mX7C3AP.mp4
Here is the starting area outside with all the assets I’ve completed so far https://i.imgur.com/89zbSFk.png
and this is an old screenshot of the interior https://i.imgur.com/MKaRtHt.jpg
I am not maintaining a website but I am likely to post any videos to my youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-g5U2q8sv6F9sxNfXlkjZg
I love the run animation!
It’s like being whisked back in time to when I was 7 😊 Link to the Past is my fave game of all time so consider me sold on that, it’s looks so cute, really looking forward to seeing where you take it!
Thank you! It will be quite some time though, I struggle to work on anything lately.
We’ve all been there, I think, sorry to hear it. Hope you feel better soon <3
I’m terrible about staying on projects. My last game was a Pokemon-type game in Bevy, but I fell off after 1-2 months. I’m starting to get ideas again, but it’s hard to avoid burning out when my full time job is programming as well.
Yeah I used to work in web dev and just had no energy for personal projects on top of that, completely understandable. Maybe the answer is to keep to a game small enough that you could actually complete it in 1-2 months.
Yeah, that’s what I need to do, but scope creep always happens. One issue is that I’m pretty hard on myself and have trouble staying motivated if it’s a game I wouldn’t even play myself. But that lends itself to games that need to be bigger and better than the games I most enjoy, which are many-year team projects. I can have fun in the early stages, creating mechanics and such, but at some point I start to understand the full scope I’ve dreamed up, and then everything seems impossible.
But that doesn’t really demotivate me. I love developing things, and game dev is a chance to learn new stacks and build something I’m totally proud of, unlike my full time job these days… :/
See I would play just about anything other than a typical FPS, so that probably helps because I can get quite into the idea of building all sorts of things no matter how small scale (see our other thread about “dream games”). But yeah that sounds like quite an annoyance.
Still, if you’re enjoying yourself and learning new stuff that’s a win. Completing hobby projects is overrated anyway!
tl;dr: I’m working on a falling sand physics-powered, 2d block-based open-world survival crafting game with spells instead of weapons and tools.
Working on a game that takes elements from Terraria, Noita and Wizard of Legend.
The falling sand physics of Noita intrigued me, but I always wondered what it would be like in a game like Terraria.
I watched the Noita dev talks about their engine (Games Now! Talk and GDC Talk), and they were nice to get started, but they definitely omitted some of the hard details (due to time restrictions I imagine), and for some reason, I found it real hard to find a good lighting algorithm online that worked for block-based games (I ended up finding a simple one that was easily parallelizable, works for day/night cycles and moving light sources that are grid aligned).
Like Terraria, the world is made up of blocks, but for my game blocks can become part of the falling sand physics when they crumble in some way, and they can be interacted with through the falling sand physics too.
So I’ve got the interactions of things like fire burning wood blocks one pixel at a time, acid melting through dirt and stone, flammable gas, water. Example of fire interacting with wood here And a full image of what the game looks like with its basic UI here
Now I’m working on implementing a bunch of spells as well as enemies. Spells have cooldowns unless they’re basic spells. What I really wanted to do with non-basic spells is to have them be cast by taking the element from the world itself and then casting the spell with it, much like bending in Avatar. For now though, I just want to implement something so testing it isn’t boring (falling sand physics alone took a bunch of time).
I really want to see multiplayer in this, too, so I’ve been careful not to make it completely impossible to do later (I did abuse RNG a bit, but I’m hoping I can fix that later ;))
I also decided to make it in Rust, using bevy_ecs (not bevy itself) and Vulkano (Vulkan rust library) with SDL for windowing and fmod for audio.
Since I don’t actually have a dev log or anything, I mostly use my existing (Terraria server) community so at least some people are around to help me test things or give feedback, so I post it all here: https://forum.dark-gaming.com/c/game-testers/54.
If anyone needs details for any of the systems I mentioned, let me know, some of that stuff was difficult to implement (I’m still refining them) and a lot of information is scattered around the web that makes it hard to implement this stuff (seriously with the lighting, did I just miss some obvious post somewhere?).
Gonna be honest with you, about 90% of that went over my head lol. But I looked up what “falling sand physics” is an it sounds like a really interesting challenge! The elemental interactions are cool, and no doubt satisfying to watch something big burn up or dissolve one pixel at a time.
The games that use this mechanic are few and far between. I’m not sure where to find a complete list, but there’s this wikipedia article on it. I can imagine why, though, because it takes what would be a small, simple game to run and turns it into a CPU using monster. I actually found quite a few game projects on github with this mechanic that were left abandoned.
If you’ve not played Noita, Powder Game or Powder Toy, I can imagine why my description doesn’t quite make sense. I think a gif does far better than words in this case ha.
I was hoping that because there were few games that had this mechanic (and not just the mechanic as the game) and none of them were multiplayer, that it would stand out from games like Terraria in the genre.
Did you ever mention what you were working on?
Yeah I’d not played any of those but looked up Noita and immediately saw what you were talking about :)
I’m making a very uninteresting, very basic newbie project. Minimalist, generic low poly city builder where the city builds itself, basically. But very much just getting to grips with Godot at the moment so there’s really not much to share! Still, having fun with it which is the main thing.
Well, that still sounds like a nice project. And a more attainable goal than I’ve set myself possibly. Are you doing it simply as a way into Godot, or are you planning to do something with it? Like, publish it somewhere?
First was just to see if I could in Godot, but now I’ve got to grips with some basics I’m hoping to turn it into a real published game. Still very early on obviously, but the only games I’ve “finished” so far have been jam entries and I think this is about as small as a scope can get while still being worth anyone’s time. We’ll see how it goes!
Generally post about it over on Mastodon since they’re the ones who got me to try Godot in the first place, although I just moved instances there so my profile is kinda empty haha.
Thread is totally fine! Thanks! :D
I’m currently writing my own semi-engineless game (I don’t want to say that I’m building my own engine, but I do have some reusability for my own sake) while figuring out SDL2. Not enough defined of the game yet since I’m still learning where to go while working on the tech stack, but I have some ideas inspired by various games to create an unique mix. Will absolutely show it off when I have something to share.
Well this is a vaguebooking infraction if ever I’ve seen one 😉
Haha my bad. It is also still quite vague in some parts, and I don’t want to pin myself too hard yet :D
But I’m very inspired by games like RimWorld, Factorio and the Shadowrun Returns series, but also games like Hacknet, Sheltered, Zachtronics games and even elements from Rust and Vampire Survivors lol.
Listing them like that makes zero sense, but from some games it’s the specific artstyle or a GUI component, from others its the interaction or gameplay loop. I hope I can mix it together to something unique that will stand out as its own thing.
Well consider me officially intrigued when you have progress to report 😄
My current project is a bartender management game. You have to manage tending bar and giving people the right drinks with handling people getting too drunk and puking/fighting/etc… Still trying to figure out if/how I want to integrate making cocktails rather than just serving 1/4 beers.
Ooh that sounds like exactly my sort of thing! How far along are you with it? Is there somewhere we can keep an eye on for updates? 😄
You know there really should be, but I am awful at socials and never post. I have a mastodon (@hodgepodge_homonculus@mastodon.gamedev.place) where I very occasionally post. I did a refactor recently and that took up a bunch of my time with no visual changes so I stopped posting updates. This is a good reminder that I should get back to regularly doing that!
It’s still in prototype stages, I almost have the core loop implemented. I should open up a beta or something when I get it to a good stage.
immediately stalks you
I have been making a tactical deck building rogue like in Godot. It’s come pretty far and it’s playable and somewhat fun for maybe one hour. Struggling a bit now with more level design, card design, enemy design, etc to make it fun for a longer time.
Whyyyy does nobody leave a link? 😆 I love deck builders tbh and would love to keep an eye on this. You posting about it on Mastodon or YT or anything?
Also, an hour of fun is probably more than I’ve ever managed to build into my own stuff so congrats there! Sounds like you’re really getting into the geometry part now, but you can do it, I believe! 🙌
I have posted a bit in Mastodon but not a lot. I am traveling right now but let me try to find some screenshots: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NO9rTCCIVtHJ9NWRBdN-18cCuOGEMZWq
If you want to run it yourself with Godot I am happy to give you access to the private GitHub repo.
I’m working on a traditional (Wizardry / The Bard’s Tale-style) dungeon crawler with magical girl and horror themes. This is only my second RPG, building on the groundwork from the first, so it is still relatively simple. It’s decently far along, but it is my biggest project so far by a wide margin, so there is still a lot left to do. I realize that it’s a niche game that probably won’t appeal to most people.
I mostly post bits and pieces on Mastodon. Occasionally I post a bigger devlog on Itch, but I’m not very good at those and I don’t know if anyone really reads them anyway, so I don’t do it that often.
