New levels demand new enemies... Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sludgie, the crawling fatberg of Elevation! Shall we keep him in the game? 🤔 #screehshotsaturday #godot #towerdefense #solodev #gamedev #fatberg

Working on completely generated levels using noise maps - you have to watch out for "islanding" which messes up pathing (in a TD game, broken pathing is a broken game). You have to play around with the noise parameters a lot to ensure map cohesion #screenshotsaturday #solodev #gamedev #godot #noise

Elevation Tower Defense is now available on Steam! 🤯🙏🎆 #towerdefense #godot #solodev #gamedev store.steampowered.com/app/4009360/...

I see GEO is now a thing - that's Generative Engine Optimization for those not in the marketing realm. Its kind of like "do everything server-side, simplify the HTML, and minimize client-side JS cause AI can't parse it". The future of the web is IE 4.0 compatibility 😬🫠😭 #aiStinkyPooPoo

Steam approved Elevation app and now I'm just waiting for the required time periods to pass - between Steam and Apple, Steam had more steps, but also more flexible - Apple was more like "here is the one path - don't stray" #gamedev #towerdefense #godot store.steampowered.com/app/4009360/...

One more AIBlocker test - www.golden-tamarin.com/ai/testf1/ - this is a WebGL export of a single scene godot project that uses a single Rich Text Label to display some Alice in Wonderland as text - neither CoPilot nor GPT can summarize the URL. Godot as a website management tool seems to block ai.

Finally got my Steam page up 🎆😍 - store.steampowered.com/app/4009360/... - Wishlist Now! Respect to everyone whose gone through getting listed on Steam! 💪 #towerDefense #soloDev #godot

The more times I watch Elysium, the more I like it. An entire sci-fi movie about citizenship, universal healthcare, billionaires, and over-automation - almost like Neill Blomkamp was trying to tell us something 🤔

Steam: Upload your logo here Me: What logo? Also Me: Oh yeah, right, "marketing stuff"

Setting up the Steam page - release time is coming up! Here's my first take on a trailer (cause, like, you need one for your Steam page along with a lot of other stuff🥴). #towerdefense #solodev #godot #gamedev

One last #aiblocker demo with an instructional overlay and final decoding to html-ized content with an image. Going to pause on this to finish out my game app, but I can totally see how this and other techniques could be embedded into WordPress and other CMS systems.

#aiObfuscation test 3 - replace the with just tapping or clicking the text until its decoded - only takes 1-5 taps - works waaay better than a UI controller on mobile - now I think it just needs an instructional overlay and a test embedding in a full-out normal webpage. #aiblocker

Second experiment in masking content from AI - text content is sent from server encrypted with a really basic key (like "1" or "2") - user is given a slider that functions as the input to decrypt and can visually see when its correct #noAI #controlAI

Trying something I've been thinking about - you can make a webpage that looks perfectly readable to humans, but AI cannot understand. By taking all the letters in text and assigning them coordinates and then randomizing the sequence, it throws AI on a tangent #noAI

Finally got around to watching some #alienEarth and I am not disappointed

FPS vs GPU - I had assumed that a good FPS was light on the GPU, but this isn't true. Good FPS means lots of quick frames, but you might be railing your GPU (needlessly?) with lots of quick frames that max it out. #gamedev #godot #solodev #performanceengineering #fps #gpu

Discovered a memory leak in my app this week - going from level to level a certain amount of objects were not being cleared out. (a small thread) #solodev #screenshotsaturday #godot #memoryManagement #gamedev

I try to give each level its own biome with distinctive gameplay differences - in the sky level, you get a moving base to defend - this makes the enemies chase after you, but also means there's no classic choke points and you're surrounded😬 #screenshotsaturday #godot #solodev #gamedev

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJhR... The optimism of the early internet is a stark contrast to today. These Anna Paquin ads left a lot of us asking "WTF is she talking about?" and looking into that lead me to Delphi, IRC, UUNet, public FTP sites, and the web. I wish we could get back to "No more there"🤔

Thought this came out nicely - landscape changes with navmesh rebuild (navmesh debug on in this vid). The landscape greatly affects the flow of the enemies, choke points, distances, etc... #gameBalancing #screenshotsaturday #indieGames #solodev #godot #towerdefense

Life can be tough for a new tower just getting started - sometimes it feels like the whole world is against it. To help out, here's 10 seconds of impenetrable shielding, so that new towers have a chance to succeed. #towerDefense #screenshotsaturday #godot #solodev #gamedev

Ah! The ol' "Maybe one maxed out tower can win the whole game" strategy 🫠 Still balancing the levels and difficulty levels - still trying to see if "hard" is too difficult, but its close. #screenshotsaturday #towerDefense #godot #solodev #gamedev

TD games have a lot of points to balance the game: not only life levels and damages of enemies and towers, but the routes the enemies walk, the positions of spawn points and towers, the budget increments, the size and composition of waves, even the delays between waves 🤯 #godot #gamedev

In Elevation TD, there's a "script" the controls the timing of when enemies are added. Its a CSV file that shows game time, # of enemies, and enemy type or message. I created what I thought was a reasonable file and now I can't beat my own game 🤬 I clearly have some balancing to do. #gameDev #godot

Messing around with tower levels last week made me realize i should let the player contribute more to the upgrade path they want - this was all driven by settings in the code so it wasn't that hard to build a UI around it😀 #godot #screenshotsaturday #solodev #gamedev

Testing out some jacked-up towers using way more shots than I originally thought. So you increase the shots, increase the enemies to balance out, before you know it, the battle sounds like popcorn popping! 🤔 #screenshotsaturday #godot #solodev #gamedev

Here's another good visualization from #godot 4.4 camera controls - when off-screen, enemy characters have very coarse-grained movements to keep them positioned correctly while saving on FPS. Moving into the camera's frustum triggers smoothed animations. Here's the exact transition spot.

Upgraded to Godot 4.4 - Elevation TD generates the final visual of each level so I've never actually been able to see a full rendered level in its entirety all at once, until now with the in game camera control 🤯 Thanks #godot! This will help.

Redoing enemy spawn points and visuals - old ones were pretty bland. Now they look better and there's more of them! #screenshotsaturday #godot #towerdefense #indiegames actual #solodev😬

Going through #godot project using Project > Tools > Orphaned Resource Explorer and its generally doing an good job, but its also failing to detect that the default scene is in use and a global script is set to a global script. Backup your project before you purge!

Are we not turtlely enough for the turtle club? 😁 Still adding enemies - this time, the dreaded stone turtle #screenshotsaturday #solodev #towerdefense #godot #gamedev

Workin' bugs - building monsters - maintaining FPS - starting to feel like its rounding a corner 😬 belated #screenshotsaturday #solodev #godot #towerDefense

(sound on) Testing out some soundtrack and effects - they can be turned on/off separately. Its entirely possible I'm overthinking my sound fx at this point 😬 #solodev #godot #towerDefense #audio #gameDev

Trying to put together some semblance of a soundtrack and I'm learning a ton about instruments - I know what *sounds* I'm looking for, but not what they are called. Learning what taiko, frame, and djembe drums are and what throat singing is really helps. #worldMusicIsAwesome

The plus of being a #solodev with a full-time job is you have income not dependent on your project's state of completion or sales. The negative is sometimes you need to go weeks without touching your project and progress can be PAINFULLY slow... 🤪🥶😵‍💫

Adding crunchy impacts to damages (sound on) - plus I might be closer to the soundtrack I was shooting for (going for "ominous and warlike")🤔 #solodev #godot #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #notAMusician

Kinda drives me nuts that I can't listen to music while working on my game's audio... or eat crunchy snacks... Audacity is a nice app! #audio

youtube.com/shorts/Z7aFW... - it’s always the orange cats… looks promising

I find it interesting that the day of daylight savings time is the one time I've seen #godot decide on its own to reimport all my assets on first startup 🤔

This time intentionally posting with audio🥴 and I'm really not sure I'm on the right path. Spent some time looking on sites that sell tracks - spent some time mucking around in garageband. What did the rest of you do for a soundtrack? #solodev #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #godot

Added a basic tutorial to Elevation TD - prolly as much time spent on suppressing UI options to keep people from going "off script" as making the script itself😬 #godot #screenshotsaturday #solodev #tutorial #gameDev

Ever blow 30 minutes working on reproducing a bug only to realize that you already fixed it? Me: I have to fix this bug - why can't I reproduce it? Also Me: (looking at code) Its already fixed and EXACTLY how I would have done it!😁 #solodev (can't blame "the other guy")

Testing out island level boss, Nautilith, who attacks with blasts of water. Gone through many iterations of the island boss, looking for something aquatic/oceanic - this feels like the best one thus far🫠 is it fearsome? #godot #solodev #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #towerDefense

Some days your water blob boss which breaths, ah, fire<?> decides that his seashell legs should walk up to the sky... and if that statement is confusing, that makes two of us... 🥴 #gameDev #gameDevRuinedMe #solodev

Am I the only person watching AppleTV more than Netflix lately? 🤨

Forest battle test - as in, battling the forest. Keep towers healthed up - once they start to go, its a challenge to build back mid-battle! Elevation TD - coming soon. #godot #solodev #towerdefense #screenshotsaturday

Hey everyone! I've created a tower defense #starterpack! If you're a dev making a tower defense game then this one's for you! Please comment if you'd like to be added! Also, please like and share so we can reach more devs! Thanks! go.bsky.app/BPbKDrZ #towerdefense #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame

20 years ago, the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack kind of revolutionized how websites were built. I sometimes feel like Godot/Blender/Krita does something similar for gamedev, but "GBK" doesn't quite have the same ring as "LAMP". Wait a sec... Should it be called "KGB" dev??😂😬

This is probably just me finally getting the memo, but if you use collections in Blender to create a "directory tree" of different characters/objects, viewing them as needed, its much easier to keep everything scaled and oriented consistently🤯 #blender #blenderNewbieAmI

Using Geometry Nodes and various modifiers in Blender to create non-destructive Voronoi tiles. This should make it much easier to make floors and paths! #gamedev #b3d