Load time down to six seconds in editor for first load (which I can live with). Humanizer plugin was creating huge sub-resources as textures, saved them all as files and it drastically reduced memory footprint. 🥲

Trying to think of a nice gift for anyone who disassembles my game. Like an ascii cat that says “hack the planet”, #godot

want to keep everything open source, but #Humanizer #Godot plugin is adding some additional loading time and I am not skilled enough to know why. Gonna investigate HumanGen blender plugin to see if it resolves the issue

Playing closing shift by Chilla’s art

WIP - redoing a bunch of stuff to try and improve load times. game has very different vibe now

Getting past mental block and actually working on my game.

Landlord simulator: a narrative game about collecting rent. Collect rent from existing tenants, call SWAT on tenants who can’t pay, screen new tenants

Landlord simulator

I think I'm accepting that there are just no short-cuts in game dev, and that it's actually easier long-term to make my own models when possible. I present credit-card reader with blue shiny lights. #blender

speeding up in #blender. linking materials with ctrl + l menu, and instancing objects with alt + d is extremely based.

My first Steam ready-game is a diamond in the rough. Tim and Eric season 1, Star Trek TNG Season 1, — I just have to remember there is beauty in being a scrappy amateur figuring things out.

The hardest part of starting game development is being ok with promoting and releasing a game I made with my skill-set of a few months ago. Like my gamedev skills have increased dramatically and looking at my older work makes me want to throw up.

Finally learned how to unwrap #blender objects. Yay! But now I have to go back and improve every model I’ve ever made before understanding this concept. 😆

I’m reasonably confident my huge loading time is due to using .tscn and .tres files in #godot. Apparently with larger projects it’s better to use binary formats like .glb rather than text formats. Gonna test it out tonight if changing that has an impact

I think game concept is way more important than I initially understood. There’s multiple ways to do things but I think having a good concept makes every subsequent choice easier, and marketing stronger.

What’s the perception of gambling games that don’t have financial transactions (Balatro, Clover Pit, Buckshot Roulette). Like is this a fine category to develop in or is their a moral level I’m not aware of

Of the myriad of things going on in the US it’s a lower priority but NASA JPL being gutted, and the resulting brain drain is going to take decades to recover from. Like you can’t fire thousands of people who have been there for 30 years and recover.

./badgames.zip/game2 is Piecewise! it's a simple daily-challenge game about putting shapes in holes. it'll be a really polished game with lots of replay value, and i'm exploring design themes of mastery and skill-improvement. wishlist now, if you want! #gamedev #indiedev #solodev #indiegame

I think I’ve gotten some early feedback that my game just isn’t hitting on concept alone. Low wishlists for coming soon page + some Reddit feedback on trailer. I was prepared for this as it’s my first attempt with Steam, so here’s my lessons learned for next game.

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” -Douglas Adams

No, I’m Not a Human is amazing so far. The art direction is so strong, and find myself just getting lost looking at the paintings

wrote a powershell script to crop a folder of 100 4k pbr textures down to 1k, gamedev has so many opportunities for me to flex automation skills.

Digging for Love: a medical dating sim where you must deduce your partner’s health and wealth via a few questions.

I've been toying with new game ideas, the strongest I had were 1. Backrooms Survivors, a power fantasy set in the backrooms, 2. Shut In, a game about being stalked in your own home, 3. Lucky Spin, a game about paying off gambling debts to the mob.

a game called Shut-In where you are being watched in your own home. Every day the player receives a photo of themselves and must deduce where the stalker is hiding. Find the stalker before they find you.

For graphics to feel high fidelity, it feels like the assets themselves do 80% of the work, and then the engine itself is the remaining 20% via lighting. I think the real value prop of Unity/Unreal is how deep the integrations are with their walled gardens of asset stores and tools. #godot

when you hold the baby so that mom can make electronic music

I think Godot has been incredibly helpful in teaching me about Blender because it has serious constraints. In order to run things in real time you have to have reasonable poly counts, and compress textures, and apply textures manually when importing. It forces you to understand the process.

modelled, textured, and applied mixamo animations for the first time ever! until this point I've never actually been able to make my own custom characters, but that is going to change! also I declare copyright on pigs fighting at Stonehenge.

Doing my homework (playing video games)

it has been many moons, but now I finally know what a flipped normal means in Godot, and how to solve it in Blender. The level up is real, just very incremental.

ok finally got the problematic textures out of my game. Now I'm sitting at 1.04 GiB of Video Mem, which is also taking about 13 seconds to load. Getting closer.

Got to talk to some Steam gamers in the family tonight. Things I’ve learned 1. I’m old and out of touch 2. Friend slop horror is what players want. 3. 67?? Gonna do some serious research on if it’s feasible to do multiplayer as a solo dev.

At the point of debugging where I’ve copied the scene, and am now just deleting things one by one to figure out what is creating uncompressed textures at runtime. The good part is it’s actually working to identify the issue

Realizing if I am serious about releasing games on Steam, I need to start playing a lot of indie Steam demos/games. My default is to obsessively play one game at a time (melee, chess) so I have practically ignored trends in gaming as a whole. ~1400 hours of lichess playtime 😆 gonna change that.

a clover pit/shotgun roulette/luck be a landlord blend where you have to pay back gambling debts to loan sharks via a slot machine. Not meeting your $$ quota means loan sharks hammer your finger. Thats all I got so far

Trying to think what’s bad about anomaly spotters to improve. 1. I think the gameplay, which is just a walking sim on a timer, is a weakness. 2. The sameness of only having one environment is off putting for lots of people. 3. Lack of stakes 4. Lack of replay-ability due to repetition of anomalies

Why is it that shaders have stayed so complex? Like why is there not an optional abstraction to use for shaders with common implementations like blur(), vignette(), mask(). Like remove all the linear algebra and beginners could actually use shaders, leave OpenGL for the graphics programmers. #godot

pretty happy with the characters in my game #godotengine #gamedev dance party!

If you are ever in Los Angeles, go to Salsa and Beer #3.

On the bright side I wrote a very twisted script that I’m excited to share

Getting games from 70% complete to 100% is the most draining part of the process. My attention span was not built for this 😆

Steamboat Willie human centipede

an unplayable game?! is OUT NOW on itchio! you can go play it for FREE, downloadable or playable in browser! <3 it's my first *solo* game release, only 5-15 minutes long, with 30+ minutes of developer commentary on how / why i made the game! and ofc, no ai :) #gamedev #indiegame #solodev #indiedev

Yet another reason to make small games. Optimization is way easier.

Dealing with some long initial load times for a large scene which references many other scenes. Gonna try multimesh tomorrow for duplicated props, and using external textures on glb files because I still have some pathless textures taking up vram. Then may try reducing number of scenes in main scene

#godot how should I handle bringing in .glb files in Godot? I think the fact that these resources without paths are 16MiB means that the .glb files I've brought in from asset stores are not being compressed?

my 1st game "an unplayable game?!" reached 100 steam wishlists, so i decided to release it EARLY to celebrate! its a short platformer about accessibility settings, why theyre important, and how it feels to play a game thats inaccessible FREE on itch TOMORROW! #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame #solodev

I find that I’m really good at copying successful games easily. But I tend to copy too closely. I think the way I get out of that is by trying to merge two successful games at once to form a new one.