game designers i 💙 go.bsky.app/D4QViNs

stress testing placeholder art & animations for Hidden Folks in Godot. instead of Sprite2D + AnimationPlayer, we draw folks using the RenderingServer to increases FPS by 80%. and without other objects, all folks are drawn using a single draw call if all body parts use the same texture. #godotengine

rift riff is game of the day in the US! cool cool cool cool cool apps.apple.com/us/story/id1...

the discourse about “making a game that has the same concept as another game” and the discourse about “games touched by genAI will always be derivative and soulless” happening at the same time on my timeline, with strong diametrically opposed opinions, is really confusing to me.

if there’s one thing that just ruins my day, it is shaders. every time i try them, try to understand them, it doesn’t work as expected, and it always leaves me mad and frustrated and angry at everything. shaders can get fucked as far as i’m concerned

Godot Shader / GLSL experts: I know practically nothing about shaders but I'd like all instances of a canvas_item shader to get a random offset to a TIME variable inside its fragment shader, and I want to do this without using a uniform. How would one go about that? #godot #godotengine #gamedev

i think it’s fine, but not ideal, to crunch for a week or two, with buy-in from individuals who can and want to participate because they want the game to be extra on release. but to -order- months of team crunch… for an internal demo?! that is f’ing gross. aftermath.site/naughty-dog-... #gamedev

sokpop stepping out of their comfort zone (kinda'?) is one of my fav things!! like, sure, a juicy-as-heck sequence deduction game, why not

a platform forced me to give them an End User License Agreement (EULA) for one of my games, which I think is a legal vehicle that's basically un-enforceable for a small game studio like mine, but I wrote one anyway: adriaan.games/eula

“play to your strengths” says CEO on LinkedIn before making “use chatgpt” company policy

being a company with employees is stupid expensive compared to being a group of individuals with a revshare agreement. setting up our new company, it's punch after punch after punch: taxes, salaries, software, services, admin, legal, etc… everything costs more, often more than double.

spent the last two weeks on employment contracts. salary, benefits, local laws and regulations – every decision feels deeply economical and deeply political. hardest part for me is wanting and believing that i as employer should be generous, but that we can’t (yet) because the money isn’t there.

who to follow for good game dev stuff

Game studio CEO's: when hiring, do you always ask for and reach out to references? even just indicating wanting to use references may scare away candidates. plus: someone's opinion of a candidate might be out of context. but ofc I want to hire the right person & make the best informed decision. 🤔

Godot 4.6's tracy ↔ GDScript support will be incredible!!! using a few guides I compiled the engine, export templates, tracy, and I exported Rift Riff – tracy is showing everything in an extremely neat overview; see the video! Links to all compile guides & PRs in thread 🧵👇🏼 #godotengine #gamedev

my team and I were sore losers at the Dutch Game Awards last night. Rift Riff was nominated in 4 categories (Best Art, Best Audio, Best Game Design, and Best Game) but it won none of them! we made a solid mediocre game! 😭😭😭 sure, we lost to some really great games. but come oooooonnnnnn 🤡🤡

i’ve seen a bit of what the funding does and it’s only made me want to donate more. the donation model of the Godot Foundation makes it an organization that prioritizes what game devs want and need, instead of what makes the foundation more money. this is rare, powerful, and inspiring. #godotengine

HORSES, the bizarre, funny, and thought provoking game from @santaragione.com, is out now! it was essentially banned from Steam and Epic Games Store for being too weird, indicative of just how bizarre and excellent the game is. buy it for $5 on itch or GOG instead: www.horses.wtf

whoa, awesome

THIS will be my biggest highlight of the upcoming Godot 4.6 update: the ability to profile both GDScript and the engine’s C++ calls in one overview using profiling tool tracy. I REALLY missed this when we profiled / optimized Rift Riff. github.com/godotengine/... #godotengine #godot #gamedev

holy snack – the Steam sale for the Dutch Game Awards looks incredible!!! very proud that Rift Riff is part of it with 4 nominations <3 store.steampowered.com/sale/dutchga...

Our upcoming game HORSES was preemptively banned from Steam, with no path to appeal. The game will still launch next week on December 2nd and will be available on EGS, GOG, Humble, and Itch for $4.99. Here is a detailed FAQ covering what happened: horses.wtf/BannedFromSt...

everyone steal this. let’s make this a new industry standard

Small announcement: Sylvain and I officially incorporated a new company to make a sequel and spinoffs of Hidden Folks. The company is called Hidden Folks. Took me two years to set this up! I'll be a CEO and studio lead more than a game designer for the company, a terrifying new role for me 🙏🏼

for team chat, we started self-hosting Zulip. after a month of using it I'm really liking it! just added integration with GitHub & Zoom too 💙 we use a €6,- p/m Hetzner virtual server. had some help from a web dev friend because the first time you log in to a server is daunting… but also very cool 😎

i see the Art side (capitalized, not-just-the-graphics-side) of games to be embedded in the creative parts of a game and thus every game is somewhere on the Art spectrum. wholly unique experiences are far and between, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t interesting tidbits inside every game.

time to set up my VR gear again because this looks incredible

if you get to make art today, add something fucking dumb that cracks you up that is the specific humanity in your work everything else, no matter how necessary (and it is!! it's vital!), everything else is redundant context, it's safety you have plenty of tortilla it is time for the meat of joy

game idea for players who aren't parents #gamedev

please help me decipher this game idea I wrote down at 3am

same day upload! happy to be watching some of these from home as i couldn’t make it there this time.

must watch @adamatomic.bsky.social talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGsl...

The Godot 2025 showreel is out! We're so grateful for every submission, vote, and support from our community 💙 www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZwE...

If you're in Lisbon for DevGAMM, my colleague Franz is there showcasing Rift Riff! Talk to the man

@friedemanna.bsky.social ios version coming, too?

Godot community! I spent a week writing proposals for features I'd've loved as part of Godot during our 1,5yrs of working on our multi-platform, multi-input, localized game Rift Riff. Thread with all my suggestions below 🧵👇🏼. Like a proposal? Do a 👍🏼 on its GitHub page. #godot #godotengine #gamedev

what's up with the eggs

I remind myself that frustrated players leaving a review or sending an email is an opportunity to teach them something about making & publishing games, and learn something about myself as well. most of the time it is so hard to admit fault or to disappoint. showing vulnerability is disarming.

Rift Riff nominated for 4⁉️ #DutchGameAwards! 🎨Best Art: @simkaart.co's insane pixel art 🎙️Best Audio: @matthijskoster.com made banger tracks/sfx! 🕹️Best Design: @adriaan.games & @professionalpanda.bsky.social endless tweaks 👑GOTY: teamwork! dutchgameawards.nl/nominees/ #Godot #indiegame #gamedev

business with game stores (steam, app store, etc), summarized: they only care about the audience you bring, the retention your game adds to their service, and the money you game will make them

Incredibly gross behavior by Google: they reject any app update if the gameplay video's description on YouTube mentions another platform (eg. Steam, App Store, etc). Blatantly anti-competitive, cunningly not mentioned in their metadata policies: support.google.com/googleplay/a... #gamedev

disappointing game launch grief. very real among game devs, rarely public. i’m seeing one unfold publicly now, but don’t wanna draw attention to it. it’s sad. i want to say it’ll be ok, but in truth it won’t.

these apple generated “share your update” cards are cheesy af

iOS only has one pre-installed system font for Chinese (simplified and traditional) and apparently they made up their own character table format that Godot can't load because it uses FreeType which doesn't recognize the weird character table format. The fix: add 9 MB of font files to the game :(

the latest horror in mobile UI design: foldable phones. this is _really_ biting us in the butt with Rift Riff right now 😅

game designers seeing this: 🥵 🥵 🥵

Thread on what it took to port Rift Riff, made in Godot, to iOS and Android. 🧵👇 #godotengine #gamedev

You can find most of Rift Riff's major update content here:

Rift Riff released on mobile & it's portrait-only. just look at how sexy portrait is App Store (iOS): apps.apple.com/us/app/rift-... Google Play (Android): play.google.com/store/apps/d...

We just released Rift Riff on Google Play and App Store, and I'm mega proud of the work the team did to get this running smoothly in #godot. The way the game has quick rounds, and how its interaction style is built, may (dare I say) even make it a better fit for phones than for desktop #mobilegaming