A local gamedev friend of mine has been making some neat voxel rendering tech. Basically it lets you make super detailed voxel scenes using more traditional mesh based level tooling. www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN9n...

My audio guy gave a talk: "Indie Game Sound On-boarding". Basically what to do as a sound designer at the start of a new project. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZqv... #indiedev #gamedev #audio

So my sound designer, @robertfrostiii.bsky.social, is looking for more projects. He's really quite good and I can highly recommend him. He does the whole shebang from design, to effects, to music. FMOD is his usual jam, but he even puts up with my homemade audio shenanigans. robertfrostiii.com

Well the website/forums for Chipmunk Physics is offline due to "a DDoS attack", but looking at the logs its all just frickin' AI crawlers. Make that another part of the open source web knocked offline by AI BS.

More people should hire Rob tbh

So my sound designer, @robertfrostiii.bsky.social, is looking for more projects. He's really quite good and I can highly recommend him. He does the whole shebang from design, to effects, to music. FMOD is his usual jam, but he even puts up with my homemade audio shenanigans. robertfrostiii.com

Final tallies for Open Sauce, 200+ players, 23+ hours of playtime. 49 people compiled it from source before playing. Need to recheck Steam, but I think it was ~70 the first day. #opensource #gamedev

I’m demoing Veridian Expanse at @opensaucelive.bsky.social with instructions to compile the game before you play it. I wasn’t sure if the gimmick would work, but so far it’s almost half of the players. Hah! Love it. #opensource #indiedev

Veridian Expanse will be at Open Sauce this weekend! I have a suitcase full of Raspberry Pis to run it on packed and ready to play it on. 😀 Given the maker-faire-esque vibes, I'm hoping someone will take up the offer to compile it before they play. Heh. #opensource #indiedev #gamedev opensauce.com

I got new title screen art. There's still a couple effects I'd like to add, but so far I think it turned out awesome! 😁 #indiedev #gamedev

I could never find a good way to deal with importing loop audio so I just made a quick and dirty loop editor in my audio inspector... Includes wave and spectrum view modes Actually works kinda ok? Another 200 lines of code I could have avoided by just using FMOD perhaps. >_< #indiedev #gamedev

Does this count for #screenshotsaturday? :D Demoing Veridian Expanse at the Mall of America. (We can just randomly rename things now and call it the Mall of Minnesota right?) A very different crowd from what I’m used to demoing for, but lots of people told me how much they liked it! #indiedev

Can anyone think of any immersive games that story to the player separately from their character? Specifically, I have an open world game with story progression triggers for the character, but want to allow the player to find easter eggs that reveal more than the character should know.

Today was a very work-from-hammock and disconnect from the internet sort of day. Great for working on narrative. Now time to break for dinner and bike to the taco place…

A bit late for #screenshotsaturday, but last week I got the cargo teleporters to a decent level of polish. Just place them like a power node, and they give you a connection to your fabricator. Drones can use them to shorten their delivery routes too. #indiegame #gamedev

Tune in to the Veridian Expanse devstream! Today I'll be working on making the terrain decorations destructible so you can chew through them with the laser drill. Starts in a little over an hour. #gamedev #indiegame www.youtube.com/@VeridianExp...

I haven't been posting about Veridian Expanse lately... So here's the newly reworked digging mechanic! I changed it from a laser to this plasma drill sort of thing. It arguably looks even cooler and gives the player more input. I might need to tone down the spalling though. >_< #gamedev #indiegame

So here's a new to me #gamedev resource: gameuidatabase.com Try searching for "settings" or "controller" for example. I could spend hours here just browsing...

Streaming last week was fun *and* productive. :D I'm going to try it again tomorrow @ 6 PM UTC on Wednesday. Come watch we flail around in my C code as I make the map decorations destructible. #games #streaming www.youtube.com/live/FSAP-Xs...

I'll be livestreaming in just a moment to work on the laser drill visuals and mechanics. I've never written C code in public before, come watch me make bugs in realtime! www.youtube.com/live/Fjpl29k...

I'm going to try out doing a devstream! I'll be working on mechanics and visual changes for the laser drill in Veridian Expanse. Come and call me crazy for writing a game in C! 1:00 PM Central Time (6 PM GMT) www.youtube.com/live/Fjpl29k...

I'm going to try out doing a devstream! I'll be working on mechanics and visual changes for the laser drill in Veridian Expanse. Come and call me crazy for writing a game in C! 1:00 PM Central Time (6 PM GMT) www.youtube.com/live/Fjpl29k...

Remember #Godot Ocean Waves? Someone forked it and added buoyancy. github.com/ManickYoj/go...

Hey! Veridian Expanse will be at @opensaucelive.bsky.social in July! :D I think I can get my "Oops, all @raspberrypi.com" game demo setup there, and this feels like the right convention to put out a little sign with instructions on how to spend a few seconds compiling the game before playing it. :DD

This is the Story Of The Future #gamedev #indiegamedev #gaming

@husheddreamware.bsky.social Don't mind me pumping the IGDATC playtest event again. :D Even if you can't make it in person, they'll play your game on the stream. It's pretty relaxed too. Like you can show up last minute with your laptop and find an empty desk. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfOd...

Demoing at @vgmcon.bsky.social has been going great. Forgot to grab a picture before the indie room opened, but the booth upgrades have been nice! Also it’s 100% @raspberrypi.com powered now with both demo stations running Pi 5s and the TV rocking a 4!

So if you are demoing your game at a convention, use Playstation gamepads. Why? I used to demo with Xbox gamepads, but ~25% of players were constantly pressing the wrong buttons. They were Nintendo players, and so the button layout wasn't what they were used to.

The Verge had an interview where Unity's CEO discussed ending their war on their customers. It's all just feelgood nonsense and jargon. I call BS, and so I wrote about how I lost my day job after Unity stuck us with tens of thousands in "industry" license fees. www.slembcke.net/blog/UnityVs...

Made two new sfx for Veridian Expanse today! Check out the stream for how I did it.

@robertfrostiii.bsky.social working on audio for Veridian Expanse. He's streaming it if you want to check it out. :D www.youtube.com/live/nlINcnz...

Made a pair of these sweet demo setups with Pi5’s for my next few events. It’s like a cheap ARM+Linux powered DIY 27’ iMac. Should make setup a snap! :D

Fascinating... So when you lose power in the game I use a boring single pole bandpass filter to make everything sound muted. To me it sounds similar to when I have water or pressure in my ears, and I get a literal physical sensation of it even. It makes me feel like I need to pop my ears.

Oh man! So VE doesn't use "scenes", and the save files load in a couple milliseconds. This makes for a lovely gimmick where the load game menu doesn't need a screenshot to preview it. It just loads the save and shows it to you. The "load" button actually unpauses the game and eases in the timescale.

Pointlessly exciting, but I got the save file size in my game from 90 mb down to ~30KiB. Honestly 99% of it was just down from saving the _entire_ destructible terrain to saving the terrain tiles that have changed. Then deflate got it down from ~1MiB to ~30KiB. Saves in ~10 ms, and loads in ~2 ms!

By popular request, let's do another starter pack: 🦋 Solo Game Developers+ LMK if you want in! Plz be patient, I'm also solo (and should be working on my game lol) bsky.app/starter-pack...

I’m really excited about the sounds I’m making for @veridian-expanse.bsky.social. Really trying to make space for the sounds to come.

#ScreenshotSaturday for some of the new... (checks notes) audio? Not technically a screenshot, but it helps the game look it's best anyway. 😄 @robertfrostiii.bsky.social has started paving over my royalty free placeholders to make a real audio-scape. 🔊 👂 (pew pew!) #indiedev #GameDev #audio

After tons of tedious blocking work, I decided to go ahead an implement warp zones. Hidden portals take you to a strange place! Warp zones are naturally unstable. Take too long or too much damage and they'll kick you right back out again. (Most of this content is placeholder, etc.) #gamedev #nes

Who has two thumbs and just got a couple of boxes of Amiga stuff? (/me gestures 👍👍)

Hey! There's a Fedora package for SDL3 now. I guess I'll flip the switch and start building/testing with that by default for Veridian Expanse now. Still planning to maintain build compatibility with SDL2 since it's been easy enough so far with a handful of ifdefs.

Was going through my feedback and bugs list last night trying to clean out some easy items. The one seemed easy enough, to make a streamlined variant of an existing UI view. Ended up having to store a bunch of extra state to do it, and that led to a fair sized refactoring of the UI code. Oops. haha

Hrm. I stayed up late on a Friday night to do some frequency domain audio filter math stuff incorrectly. It's now 1 AM, and this is all I have to show for it. I guess it does look kinda neat anyway though. >_< (trying to do a non-linear interpolation between filter impulses that preserves shapes)

Cyber Rogue (NES) Still in the debugging/testing phase… hoping to release it soon! ☕️ #NES #homebrew #nesdev #NESmaker #indiegames #gamedev #ファミコン #同人ゲーム

Boba Buddies is live on my website! www.slembcke.net/nes/BobaBuddies This is our game for the 2025 Global Game Jam. We had a team of 4, and we made a homebrew NES game in 48 hours! You can play it in your browser. 😄 #nes #ggj #ggj25 #globalgamejam

Global Game Jam success! We made a mini-metroidvania for NES in 48 hours. I'll post a web playable build on my site later once I get a chance to rest and write it up!

Well, I'm trying out the switch/coro idea from my blog post last week, and it works *great*. I can save in the middle of the tutorial coroutine now. \o/ Ended up mostly deleting code honestly, though I did a refactoring pass at the same time. www.slembcke.net/blog/StateMa...

@nesdoug.bsky.social So I was upgrading my NES game jam template from FT2 to your FT5, which was uneventful, BUT... I tried Dn Famitracker, but text2vol just gives me a "Macros section not found" error. I skimmed the code, and the exported files, but it's not obvious what to do. Any thoughts?

Global Game Jam is coming up in a week! That means I should get my NES project template updated and ready to go. I've made 5 NES games for past jams and it's always a blast! Sounds likely I'll be able to rope someone in this year. :D Play them on my homepage! www.slembcke.net/nes/ #NES #GGJ

Tina is my tiny coroutine and fiber library. Complementing the 64 bit RISCV variant I added last year, I just got a pull request for several 32 bit variants. It kinda runs on everything that isn't "retro" now! (Don't worry, I still have plans for PPC and m68k too) github.com/slembcke/tina