This is incredible. They took this picture down, not because its a nightmare ai monstrosity, but because "it looks like immigrants a bit. maybe." Like 2 different strains of insanity colliding and somehow cancelling each other out

Truly smart devices would choose not to connect to the internet.

Even with advancements granted by Ruhetek, planetfall is still rather risky. Better have a good Cloning Contract before venturing forth. #playdate #indiedev #gamedev

Added a log-overdue feature to Hyper Vector: an explorable map. #gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev

Playdate game developer Keith Baker has created a super handy, unofficial Mac app for managing a Playdate device. Easy access to screenshots, achievements, logs, and lots more. Check out pdmanager! 🍎 apps.apple.com/us/app/pdman...

I've made a few improvements to trade in Hyper Vector, completely overhauling the Market to provide much more information, which should make profitable trading much easier. There's also more information in the Manifest on good routes! #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

In a long ago place, in a far away time, The villagers cast out one whose song didn't rhyme... Defeat the Mysterious Monsters! Retrieve the four Mysterious Musical Notes and collect the Mysterious Gems! sing-song ding-dong coming to @play.date Catalog on the 9th of December! #playdate #gaming

A playtesting build is available for Hyper Vector! If you'd like to give this rather rough version a go I'd appreciate any feedback! #gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev discord.com/channels/675...

The Sunken Bell is an unpleasant pub. Grim men, salt-scarred and edging mania, hold to its tables as if to let go would cast them adrift in some terrible storm. Even the local farm perries cannot compensate for what can only be called an atmosphere of doom. - Hookland Fruit Cider Pub Guide, 1980

Hyper Vector is nearing public playtesting! I'm working my way through the game end-to-end personally first, and finding/fixing a lot of bugs and performance issues. Device Info is my new friend! #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Things were better when computer was in room. Now everywhere is computer. This is bad. Computer should never have escaped room.

Fewer updates on Hyper Vector recently, but that's because it's getting close to something play-testable and I've been head-down! I'm down to a handful of blockers, I've invested a bit of time sorting out perf issues and it now runs smoothly on-device too! #playdate #indiedev #solodev #gamedev

I will never apologize for a post

Refactoring how the starmap is rendered. Previously it was one sprite with everything drawn onto it - which was eating fps as any kind of update involved a lot of work to run the draw method of the whole thing. #playdate #gamedate #indiedev #solodev

Hyper Vector is gradually filling out with more sound effects, the latest is for when you jump between systems. I added a new animation for it too, it feels a bit more like an event now! #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Working on better hitboxes for long thin ships in combat, a proper bounding box is now computed which should make for more satisfying combat. #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

When you've completed combat training with either faction, you get to visit the simulator as many times as you like to practice combat scenarios. #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

The good: Hyper Vector has some music, just a couple of tracks so far but it adds so much to the feeling that it's heading towards something releasable! #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

This every day. Always have to interrupt my inner critic and just get on with creating stuff. #solodev

Not many updates recently, I've been working on the Archonate quest. It's now largely written - at least a first draft. Now I'm playtesting and finding all the things that have broken along the way! #gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev

Just spent an hour refactoring how I reference things, now it's all with keys rather than names. This makes save files a lot more robust to minor changes in the game, and has helped procrastinate writing more quests for another night.

Playing around with some portraits. I think I've got a style that I like that works with the feel of the game. There's a lot to do but this feels like a good direction. #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

Added stats to the game over screen, a nice thing to have - although it turns out adding it was 99% tedious text formatting! #playdate #indiedev #solodev #gamedev

First stab at a main menu for the game, and a logotype. Couldn't resisit throwing in a 'high res' spinning planet for good measure. #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A big moment, the game has an ending, a credits screen and... a name! #gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev

I've added a significant amount of pew pew to combat. Lasers in particular look a lot better. They're still just line segments to avoid collision testing, but I'm only drawing 1/5th of it per frame. All running smoothly on-device! #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

More work on the combat engine. A couple of new things driven by the story: battles can now have allies, and there can be conditions that cause the enemy to flee! #playdate #gamedev #solodev #indiedev

The pirate ships are more of a mixed bag. Can you spot the Escape Velocity Nova tribute? #gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev

More ships, this time for the Archonate faction! Ships have reputation requirements to purchase. To unlock the more capable ships, you need to get your faction reputation high enough (which may lock you out from purchasing ships from other factions!) #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

A batch of ships modelled. I'm sticking to the same basic chassis for each faction, these are for the Alliance. You lose a bit of detail on the really big ships, but I think the animation still helps see some of it. #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

More work on the ship models, I'm happy with these! Fixing the animation frame while toggling makes it much smoother too. #playdate #indiedev #solodev #gamedev

Today I fell down a rabbit hole and into Blender... I've been unhappy with the shop/shipyard graphics, and I think I might be happy with this approach finally. #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

It turns out my angular difference check was missing a math.abs... With it in, enemy ships now behave much more sensibly! There's also now the start of a basic HUD for combat too. #playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev

The AI can now decide to attack. I'm sticking to simple lasers for now, as I'm worried about the performance impact of projectiles, although so far it's holding up in on-device testing! #playdate #gamedev

I've been building an AI for enemies - something new to me. As ships can only rotate or thrust forwards (like the player), the polar calculations weren't fun, but I've got basic 'move towards target' figured out. The player is the central ship here, the other ship is AI. #playdate #gamedev

Starting implementation of my third attempt at a combat system. The game supports many different ships, with custom loadouts of weapons/shields etc., and I really want to be able to stage fights with multiple enemies/allies. A big ask of a 400x240 1-bit display. #playdate #gamedev

Still at the stage where adding each new quest requires engine tweaks. For example you need to fight a battle but what happens if you lose? The game can now branch and offer different routes through the narrative depending on what happens! #playdate #gamedev

Some good progress on fleshing out quests. The game now has a main story (for each faction) scoped out, and about a dozen side-quests so far. I'm hoping to make most of the 100 or so star systems relevant in some way, so that during a playthrough you should end up visiting most! #playdate #gamedev

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

I could keep reworking this, but the planet display now has a spinning planet with moons, all with a solar shadow. So stars are now planets and planets are now moons! Still not perfect, but a step in the right direction I think. #playdate #gamedev

Coming to a spaceport near you: Galaxy Spins!

Playdate now has its own TV service. We don’t deserve @panic.com blippo.plus

Uesama, a hyperrealistic head on legs, promotes Sof’ ice cream.

Some days you're working on story and dialog, other days you're doing scrollbar arithmetic

*Amy sedaris Princess Carolyn voice* Hegseth regrets opSec as SecDef, suspects hefty SecDef seat set to be left bereft.

Stop Forcing A.I. into Fucking EVERYTHING!

Being online can be hard sometimes. Just today I had to apologise to someone called Jon.

Absolutely not authentic at all