i wish i had interesting updates for all of the work happening behind the scenes. stay tuned!

it's raining and I hear dripping in the walls 🫠

38px Sofia #pixelart #indiedev #vanillasky

I wouldn't call myself a pixel artist yet, but I'd rather exercise that muscle rather than use AI, so I'm practicing to get better. #pixelart #indiedev #gamedev Timelapse in next post.

Wrapping up the parallax tool for dynamic backgrounds #pixelart #gamedev #indiegamedev

Took a break from the story and dialogue editors to do a small quality-of-life update to tilesets. Here's the problem: tiles in the palette (the bottom half of the screen), which have been sliced from a tileset (the top half), lose their spatial context to other tiles.

We're in the process of packing and moving. Updates to the dialogue/story system coming once I'm settled in to the new place.

Wrapping up a 1965 Lincoln Continental for... reasons... #pixelart #gamedev #indiegamedev

made my engine visualize depth. looks neat 📸 #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev

[1/5] Have you ever seen the Z-buffer in a 2d game? 👀🤯 A Z-index tells the engine if an object in front of or behind the player. If the player's Z is greater than the object's Z, the player is in front. If the player's Z is less than the object's Z, the player is behind.

"Why are you making your own engine and editor instead of using Unity/Godot/Unreal etc?" Mainstream engines let a team build & publish a game. Get Lost lets *anyone* make new content (art/story/code) for an already-published game. #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev

I added some debugging controls to advance time #gamedev #indiegamedev

I finished adding collisions back to the engine, and you can see them working in the level preview tab. I've also added engine visualizations to help you debug things like collisions.

🧵 I just completed the collision editor. The collision editor lets level creators mark parts of an object that block the player from moving. [1/4] #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegame

Game quality over number of polygons should be a metric #zelda #gamedev #indiegamedev

It's getting closer. The engine can now read editor assets. #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegame

"This study was among the first to identify childlike wonder as an emotional pathway through which mainstream video games could enhance well-being and reduce burnout." #gamedev #indiegame games.jmir.org/2025/1/e84219/

Dmitrii Kislitsin explained how treating art direction as systemic chaos can guide three key principles for creating believable environments. 80.lv/articles/3d-... #gamedev #indiegame

A digital museum of video game levels 🤯 noclip.website #gamedev

I was able to let level designers write their level code in plain old Javascript (or Typescript), instead of Assemblyscript, while keeping the code sandboxed for security. It just meant using a JS interpreter that was compiled to WASM 🙃

🚪gateways are how levels from different creators are linked together

object properties

fill tool 🪣

hidden potion merchant #gamedev #indiegamedev

Animations created in the animation editor can now be placed on the map

Finishing the animation editor. The sliders represent the % of time each frame takes up. The total time for the animation is adjusted separately. Much better than fiddling with individual frame numbers. #indiegamedev #gamedev #pixelart #animation

just realized that "multiply by blue" is perfectly sane to a gamedev but sounds like crazy talk to anyone else #gamedev #indiegamedev

objects that you select are easier to find in the palette

Phenomenal pixel art icons pack. 1400 icons, CC0 licensed (public domain), but give the artist some gratuity if you use it nikoichu.itch.io/pixel-icons #pixelart #gamedev

automating creativity is an oxymoron

Finished the map file format and implemented saving/loading. Now the map doesn't reset every time I refresh the page 😅. Used React's <Suspense> tag (an underrated feature) for the loading overlay.

Object duplication with "ctrl+d"

[1/5] I have a new appreciation for the subtleties of how selecting and moving objects work. For example, it's intuitive to select and move with click + hold + drag:

Two people have told me that Get Lost sounds like Canva for game design. It's growing on me.

[1/4] Map editor updates. Basic single selection:

Tileset editor progress. You can now upload multiple tilesets, switch between them, chop them up into objects, and start placing those objects.

Building tileset grouping in the Get Lost editor. This lets you treat several tiles as a single object. Making levels without it is super painful because each tile in the map is treated as a separate object 🤮

Progress update... update... I am upshifting on a long detour to arrive more quickly at the goal. Specifically, I am writing a dedicated editor for the Get Lost game engine.

No good deed goes unpunished #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev

Objective arrow ➡️ When a level designer wants to give a hint to the player about their next objective, they can add one of these arrows. #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev

Chrome's performance profiling tools are actually really good. You can see the flame graphs of your frames' main thread, background workers, even WASM, to find your bottlenecks. If you've used these tools in other languages, you know they can be a pain to install and instrument into your dev env.

these sneks will mess u up 🐍 music by the amazing Fantasy Fanfare (with @elvgames.bsky.social ) #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiedev

is this what they want? #pixelart #indiedev #gamedev #gameart

I want to share a couple of the behaviors that are happening here. The first is "Random patrol" which randomly selects a waypoint, moves to it, then repeats.

It's starting to feel alive #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev

Added visual debugging for the pathfinding system. The green circles 🟢 are graph nodes that have been discovered to be traversable for pathfinding. Red 🟥 are colliders. #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev