A little over 2 weeks ago, I had once again started working with Godot, determined to finally learn the software so I can bring my many game ideas to life. And then I stumbled and failed as I usually do as my ideas were lofty and my skillset meager. I think it was the Mark Brown video that finally made the (obvious in retrospect) idea sink in that there was no way I can do the more complex games I wanted to make without first having made a bunch of simpler projects to nail down the fundamentals. So instead of trying to follow a grand plan, I just opened up a old tutorial I did and started adding stuff purely by vibes. And it fucking worked because after 2 weeks of intense hyperfocus I was able to put together an actual game that works (so far) and has most of the basics of the genre! Sure it's only 5 minutes long and full of stolen assets but I'm still very pleased with the outcome.

I started with the GDQuest Vampire Survivors tutorial and first decided to change out the graphics and give it a theme. What would be an amusing communist theme? Stalin crushing hordes of fascists. I decided to use Metal Slug assets for most of the characters and weapons (which had the bonus of getting a lot of practice in with animation because holy shit those spritesheets are huge). After I changed the graphics, I gave the solider a death animation instead of just disappearing. I thought the same death every time was boring since the soldiers had so many death animations in Metal Slug, so I made a system for randomly choosing a death scene each time. Then I got nostalgic for cheat codes from old games so I figured out how to add a text input box and made some effects for code matches. Every time I got bored or frustrated with an element I was working on I would come back and add another cheat, sometimes even it was just a bit.

And it sort of fed into itself after that. I went back to the soldier. I wanted an leveling system, so first I needed gems to fall from defeated enemies. Those gave XP which needed to be tracked, then I needed to trigger a level up screen where random options can be chosen. It started with a basic screen where 3 upgrades could be chosen. Then I added dummied weapons into the mix. At first the options could be infinitely chosen, but I was able to limit each option to 5 levels, which each level being a unique upgrade.

I got bored of working on that so I went back to enemies. I made 2 new variations: ones that I thought could have interesting attacks (though I never got around to adding an attack for the pirate variant). Since I didn't want them to appear at the start, I made a game timer and assigned a difficulty counter that increased every minute that changed the enemy loadout and spawning ratios. With all this game info to be tracked I created a UI to track important info. Then I made a boss with multiple attacks, 2 phases, adds, and a custom health bar.

I was creating larger challenges but with my hero only shooting a simple gun, it was time to add weapons. I added 7 in total. An 8th was originally planned for parity with the 8 upgrades, but I never got around to fully implementing it lol.

Then it was just some polishing left, so I added a title screen, credits, game over screen, music, and any sound effects I didn't get around to adding yet. Oh and options, so volume levels and fullscreen mode could be adjusted. And then any last passes for animation adjustments, bugfixes, sound balancing, etc.

I probably did more that I mentioned because it all starts to blur together towards the end. It's still a little janky in areas and I'm sure a lot of my methods and solutions are inefficient but in the end, it still seems to work and that's good enough for a learning project

Here's some screenshots!

Title screen:

Swarmed by enemies:

Using the "gorbachev" cheat:

Level up overlay:

Boss fight:

I have a packed exe that I can put up on a file sharing site if that's allowed here and anyone expresses interest in trying it out

Links to the game:

Windows version

Linux version

Forgive me for the lack of dedication to the Revolution, Comrades. I'm afraid I've had some non-milking related work that needed doing. So, while I've gotten plenty done, I've not had time to do a devlog.

Today is a general gripe session, no behind the scenes CCP secrets today, just wanted to share some of the fun that comes from developing for the Meta Quest.

If you've been keeping up with things at all, you know that the Adult Toy I'm developing for is an internet enabled stroker that connects to a remote server for it's instructions. It uses a Connection Key to interact with this server, which means that for at least one part of my app's configuration a keyboard of some sort is required for the user to enter their Connection Key. Because the Meta uses Android, there's a built in keyboard option available that Unity uses. It takes a bit of finagling, But it works.

UNTIL META BROKE IT A COUPLE MONTHS AGO!

Luckily I found a workaround. Kinda.

https://communityforums.atmeta.com/t5/Unity-VR-Development/System-keyboard-not-opening-every-time-in-Meta-quest-3-device/td-p/1179306

Which introduced a new problem. This workaround messes up the input box so it doesn't make the inputted text readily available. Now I have to a manually get the text from the child of the input game object. Fine, I'm doing it!

Today, as I'm working my way through this and having half rewritten my API interface because for some reason, despite getting the Connection Key, it's still not working.

THEN MY APP SUDDENLY STOPS HAVING INTERNET ACCESS WHEN RUN ON THE QUEST!

Hours of troubleshooting later...

OH LOOK, ANOTHER KNOWN PROBLEM!

https://communityforums.atmeta.com/t5/Unity-VR-Development/UnityWebRequest-Not-Working-on-Quest-3-quot-cannot-resolve/td-p/1093537

Apparently when I updated the XR plugin a while ago, the most up to date version available from Unity still has the bug. And months later it just decided to fuck my shit up, fam.

So eventually, I do all the steps, upgrade the XR plugin to non-public version, I reboot a couple times, I manually update my manifest, I get internet back. What a day... My API still isn't working properly when I manually enter the Connection Key. wtf... Then I look at what my settings script is saving and there's some sort of new line or a line break in my JSON. Weird, but fine whatever, hazards of the keyboard workaround. I trim off new lines and returns and whatnot, IT'S STILL THERE!

Eventually, I figure out that for some reason the android keyboard or TMPro is adding Unicode character 8203 to the end of my Connection Key, which is a Zero Width Space character. I don't know what that is, but it's clearly reactionary. So now I'm Trimming that along with \r \n and that does the trick. Suddenly my Connection Key input flow is working. I can now test all the other stuff I've been working on that came to a screeching halt last month.

Bleah. I'll get a "real" OohAah devlog up one of these days. I've done some pretty cool stuff and despite being way past when I want to release the alpha for testing, things are coming along. I've also been buying cheap adult toys off AliExpress for a future project and have been messing around with that when I should really be working on the milker. Turns out using them are not going to be as easy I hoped. Long story short, for some reason the company making them set their bluetooth up in reverse, so they're not pairable and can only be controlled by making your device broadcast an advertising packet or something. Which is not easy in Unity. Bleah, I'll figure it out tho.

Thanks for reading, just had to vent. Hope y'all are doing well.

Brain hurty but I'm gonna keep at it

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16304400

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16304397

Check out a story about thought processes going awry after ecstasy born from early successes and personal issues hitting.

Still, I decided to release the result of my work so far as a prototype for Fuck Capitalism Jam 2024, to be worked on in the future until it is done. Alongside part 1, which was basically developed within the time frame anyway, and is more than fitting for the theme as well.

Downloaded a sample DEM tile from the NASA SRTM dataset, scaled it down to 1024x1024, and used it to control the height of a 1024x1024 grid of vertices. I am kind of new at this, but 2,093,050 is definitely a new personal record for number of triangles put on the screen... by a LOT. The normal generation needs a bit of work, but it is not too far off. Doesn't make sense to waste too much time getting it nailed down for a proof of concept.

Before I start messing around with LOD algorithms, I need to get my hands on the entire dataset and figure out a pipeline to pre-process it in QGIS.

In a previous post, I mentioned that my schedule for each temple was as follows:

• 1st month: Plot dungeon map, design and implement dungeon's unique enemy's puzzles, and other mechanics - with placeholder art and sound assets, build and test entire map except for the boss
• 2nd month: Art assets, sounds, and animations for the dungeon.
• 3rd month: Program and gameplay test boss; once satisfied, create art, sound assets, and post-fight dialog for the boss. Give the dungeon to a few close friends for playtesting, then make adjustments based on results.

I started the Unicorn Temple at the beginning of April, and it's now close to the end of May.

• 1st month goal has been met. Dungeon mechanics were fully implemented late in April, giving me a bit of a head start on next month's work. That ended up being a good thing, because...
• 2nd month goal will be met or a few days late. The assets for this dungeon ended up being more elaborate than expected, and I struggled with some of the graphics. Most of the work is done, though, with only some enemy sprites remaining.

Visible in the screenshot are a few different features of this dungeon: certain sections are flooded with both shallow and deep water. Shallow water can be safely walked through, but falling in deep water is functionally the same as falling into a pit. Godot doesn't natively support animated tiles (plus I needed to implement little splashes that happen when you walk through shallow water), so this took extra time to take care of.

Also in the screenshot is one of the three new enemies, thornspitters, whose sprite sheets I have completed. Every couple of seconds, these spherical pods spit thorns in four directions. Some of them, like the ones you see here, are placed such that they're impossible to kill.

The streams, the wheel with a handle, and the little caves are part of a water routing puzzle that will form the centerpiece of this dungeon. This puzzle encompasses many rooms, and solving it is required to collect the Master Key that opens access to the Unicorn's room.

I'm currently working on a sprite sheet for another enemy, the Foxfolk. These magical menaces constantly teleport to your position and emit bursts of magical fire, forcing you to stay on the move. Here is one of the completed sprites:

Just wanted to leave an invite link here. I created the Hexbear Gamedev server about a year ago, so if you're interested in chatting, or want a place to do show and tell, or ask questions, come join us! https://discord.gg/YcrK7gsu

I'm picturing a game where you take the role of an arcology planner and are given a certain number of ingame years to prove the viability of the concept as fully as possible. Game takes place on an isometric grid, where you build your arcology out of predefined modules such as living quarters, industries, power plants, greenhouses, etc. You have to manage things like the flow of resources between districts, transit, waste management. You can connect your arcology to the wider world to do things like import resources and export waste, and you will need to do so especially in the early game, but you also gain a growing ability to handle these things within your arcology as you expand its capabilities. Maybe also have the player have to deal with structural soundness and making sure the arcology doesn't collapse. Scoring would probably be based on population, land footprint (smaller is better), and self-sufficiency.

Hmm. Maybe after Guardian Cry.

Hello Comrades. I don't have any affiliation with this game Jam but I thought I'd post it here. Please let us all know if you enter :)

About a week ago I began a futile effort to create a clone of KSP-RP1 in Godot, with blackjack and hookers. Figured I'd start with procedural geometry like cones and cylinders, because if I get stuck on that then I can completely forget about quad-tree LOD planets where you can zip from human scale to orbit in realtime. Slowly working towards a 'craft editor,' but the entire thing is a pile of hacks already.

I've been debating whether I wanted to share screenshots or anything here, but I've realised I'd rather put things out there than debate whether I'm an imposter or not, otherwise stuff like this sits on my harddrive and goes nowhere

this is a screen from my in-development game, Death Tech Reaper :) Taking place on the First Plane of the after-life, you play as Ceres, the newly minted 'Reaper' who's job is to protect the souls traveling through the First Plane on their journey down to their final resting place in the Greater Commune. It's an isometric action game, with a semi-randomised layout, taking inspiration from the rogue-like genre - the catch, however, is that you only ever have 2HP to play with at any given time, however your health can be recovered by taking down enemies, keeping you in the run longer. I wanna keep posting updates as I work, it's getting closer and closer to something I'm happier to distribute wider - I'm just glad I have something to put my name to. I'll post some gameplay footage at some point too!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15508679

Had to share with this community, I decided for my second game to just rip off the band-aid and I entered a game jam targeted at beginners. I placed 3rd - with 1st and 2nd going to more seasoned game developers. I never imagined that, going in, I would be on the pedestal. I just have to thank everyone that participates in game development and indie gaming as a community - including you, reading this.

If you are curious and want to check it out:

The games ranked by overall score

The game itself

A devlog looking back at my first jam experience

I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in the super early days of PC gaming. John Romero has a rather interesting tale, there is a lot of pathos surprisingly. Romero is one of the few katz I think is humble enough to actually talk about his flaws and shortcomings rather openly. I learned a lot about the 90's, game development, and was kinda inspired in a weird way. I was pretty lucky my library had a copy.

Pictured is the Gryphon boss battle. She is fast and aggressive, and victory requires the player to dodge her rapid-fire dives and charges while exploiting split-second openings to hit her. Upon being defeated and purged of her corruption, she bestows the protagonist with the ability to do a diving stab, allowing him to cross large gaps and hit enemies with a powerful sword strike.

Next up is the Unicorn Temple, which I actually started late in March - I'm running a bit ahead of schedule. Goal is to release by the end of 2025, and so far, that's looking likely. Development roadmap is as follows:

• 2023: Engine, UI, Phoenix Temple, Demo (completed)
• 2024 Jan-Mar: Gryphon Temple (completed)
• 2024 Apr-Jun: Unicorn Temple (in progress)
• 2024 Jul-Sep: Minotaur Temple
• 2024 Oct-Dec: Final Dungeon
• 2025: Overworld, intro and ending cinematics, polish, closed beta

Development process for each individual dungeon generally goes like so (with the exception of the Phoenix Temple, since I built many parts of it concurrently with the engine):

• 1st month: Plot dungeon map, design and implement dungeon's unique enemy's puzzles, and other mechanics with placeholder art and sound assets, build and test entire map except for the boss (on track to finish this by the end of April for the Unicorn Temple)
• 2nd month: Art assets, sounds, and animations for the dungeon.
• 3rd month: Program and gameplay test boss; once satisfied, create art, sound assets, and post-fight dialog for the boss. Give the dungeon to a few close friends for playtesting, then make adjustments based on results.

This took fuckin forever but I feel good to be back in the saddle for reals.

I wasn't actually gonna make a sequel to Kor, but then I had an epiphany on how I could do the combat much more interestingly. I will not elaborate right now except to say that it will be a little more complex and a little more action-y.

For the sake of saving time and because I'm brutally poor right now I will be reusing a lot of stuff from Kor 1 - like moving around outside of combat will still look like Kor 1 with the little 16x16 sprites and tiles, but it's going to be at a higher (standard) res and not be locked to various 4-color palettes. I'm going to stick with this darker limited palette of 142 colors (plus transparent) because it will give the game a unique look, and because I spent literal weeks working on this palette for another game and fuck if I'm not gonna goddamn use it.

Anyway I think this turned out neat even though it's not finished or totally polished. More updates soon.

If you're not familiar with the concept of combined arms, it's a form of military organization where different types of weapons are integrated together into units so that they can cover each other's weaknesses. For example, a combined arms formation of tanks and infantry allows infantry to screen for the tanks to prevent the tanks from being hit at close range in their blind spots, while the tanks can provide heavy fire support to infantry if they run up against a fortified position or enemy armor.

I design enemies for Guardian Cry in the same way - each enemy has a distinct niche, and their abilities complement each other to make them more dangerous when combined. I introduce them separately where players can learn and exploit their weaknesses, and then I make the player fight them together.

The enemies in the Guardian Cry demo provide a clear example. Gremlins (the purple rat-looking things that pop out of walls) have a projectile fireball attack that can hit the player anywhere on the screen, but they have a low attack rate, low health, and are immobile. This means that if the player can get close, they're pretty easy to kill.

Fire Snakes, on the other hand, have high health, a large profile, and a short-range spit attack. Their large size makes them difficult to avoid, their spit attack forces the player to pay attention and carefully manage their range and angle of attack, and their high health means they take a bit of time to kill. They're slow and have a low attack rate, though, so they don't present a lot of immediate danger. All this combines to form an enemy that, while not super deadly, makes an effective wall.

Finally, we have Firedancers. These roly-poly lizards barrel toward the player character at high speeds, leaving fire in their wake. Their high-speed charge, and the fact that they make the room more dangerous the longer they're alive, means that they must be dealt with quickly. However, alone, they're easy to manage - stand still, let them roll toward you, then hit them with your sword when they're close enough.

Now we apply the principle of combined arms. The player enters a room. There are gremlins on the far wall, Fire Snakes in the middle, and Firedancers that charge the player. The Firedancers create a threat that the player must immediately deal with. The player cannot simply stand still and hit them as they come because the Gremlins are launching fireballs that must be dodged. The Fire Snakes creep toward the player, slowly constricting the area in which the player can maneuver, which makes it gradually more difficult to both dodge the fireballs and the Firedancers. All of this comes together to form a demanding encounter from simple, complementary pieces.

Hello, everyone!

It's been a bit less than a month since I released the demo for Guardian Cry. I took about a week to solicit feedback, and I've gotten a lot done since then.

The second dungeon, the Gryphon Temple, is fully mapped out. All enemies, room features, and puzzles have been implemented except for the gryphon herself (who will take a considerable amount of dev time to do assets and programming for - likely as much as the entire rest of the dungeon combined!). Most of the new features still use placeholder graphics, but as you can see from the screenshot, I'm making good progress on finalized assets - most of the tilemap is done, though I have yet to start on the enemies.

For the Gryphon Temple, I'm keeping two themes in mind: "The Gryphon is the fierce warrior of the Guardians" and "Her temple is a cave."

For the former, the player enters from the lower right, goes through a short section that introduces the dungeon's enemies and puzzle setups, and then almost immediately enters a room where the Guardian Key is in plain sight, right next to the Guardian Door. The catch? The Guardian Key is behind four regular locked doors, and the player needs to venture into the depths of the Temple to find them. The Gryphon is the warrior of the Guardians: she doesn't hide in the depths of her temple. The way to her is immediately made clear, challenging the player to overcome it. Also tying into this theme, puzzles will revolve around killing enemies - the player will need to come up with creative ways to dispatch enemies that are inaccessible or immune to their regular attacks. (As an added bonus, this means I only had to make new enemies, instead of entirely new puzzle elements like the arrow throwers and braziers in the Phoenix Temple.)

For the latter: caves are strange, disorienting places. You can spend hours crawling through tight, narrow passages only to turn a corner and emerge into an absolutely massive open chamber. The plan for this dungeon includes multiple open rooms, larger than any found in the Phoenix Temple. This is offset by the many winding, claustrophobic corridors that the player will need to navigate to make it to these rooms, often grappling with enemies and hazards like pits in the process. To make the layout feel more natural, I plan to minimize the use of right angles in room design.

Hello, fellow Tankies! Welcome back to my continuing adventure of building a lewd VR communist brainwashing experience for Jordan Peterson and his incel masses as per Xi's personal instructions.

Last weekend I finished up the answer selection solution by using the thumbstick to select the diagonal direction and activating a radial slider that corresponds to the answer of that direction. It gives the user a few seconds before locking in the answer. Major props to @[email protected] for putting the radial menu of other games in my head and putting me down that path.

I actually had to take apart my Quest 2 Controller to clean the thumbstick as it was sticking so bad that it just got stuck in Down/Right for a while. Cleaning worked but I've lost the touch sensitivity of where your thumb is supposed to rest. I can't think of a time I've actually used that function, that wasn't just novelty, so it can wait for a while before I take it apart again.

Yesterday, I hammered out version 1 of Question serving and Answer handling. As the video shows it now tells you if your answer is right or wrong and then serves up a new question. I've only got handful of questions so far which is why sometimes it looks like the question hasn't changed in the video. I've also made it so the answer is randomly assigned to one of the four answer spots with the wrong answers filled in to the empty spaces afterwards. None of this is set in stone, especially not the graphics or timing or anything, but I just want to get everything working enough for prototyping a full alpha version.

In version 1 of the Quiz minigame I'm not doing any weighting or behind the scenes algorithms, things are purely going to be served according to Random.Range, but in future versions I am planning on building an algorithm that incorporates techniques similar to Duolingo and other learning apps to better encode the brainwashing.

Today I'm gonna clean things up a bit and get the audio manager working so next week I can figure out how best to implement the HIIT style rounds of alternating quiz/lewd stimulation. I may make a NSFW post over in askchapo to see if folks have better ideas than what I'm currently playing around with. I figured this post was clean enough that it didn't need NSFW tagging, but if it does, just let me know, mods.

Previous NSFW post on the app for anyone curious:

Coming back to update Hexbear on my last post!

The game is also still on sale for crazy cheap for the steam winter sale plus the second anniversary of its launch for a little bit! (But if anyone wants to play it and doesn't wanna pay, hit me up and I'll send ya a steam key as usual).

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback about the concerns I had with potentially gendering the player character a little, getting a gender-diverse perspective was extremely helpful and relieved the concerns I had. You guys are just endlessly helpful and awesome.

So I'm doing a VR experience and today I'm working on using the thumbsticks of the quest controller more like a gamepad to control selection of a UI menu for a trivia game that's going to be in the experience.

Now Unity returns the thumbstick via a Vector2, easy enough. I literally sketch out an XY graph, figure there's a threshold I need to account for for each direction, a much smaller threshold that we can ignore for each plus and minus on the other vector, and if the Vector2 meets all my criteria I can fire off my functions for the direction. So for UP my code looks something like

if(Vector.Y > pressthreshold and (Vector.X < threshold and Vector.X < -threshold){ Print(up!)}

And then I did that for each direction... And it kinda worked. But it was wonky as hell because my quest is old and the thumbsticks drift. So I spent like an hour and a half trying to find just the right thresholds and it just did not want to be consistent...

So I figured I'd ask chatgpt. And it basically spits out: Just take the absolute value of your X and Y and whichever one is bigger is your plane, and then the positive or negative of the value determines your direction.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

I am in shambles. I have once again overcomplicated the simplest freaking thing.

TLDR: My brain is pudding. Just had to vent.

Poopoopeepee

Good hello!

As many of you already know, my game Kor has 3 player sprite options - the bottom row in this post's image - offering different skin tones, basically. But they all have the same look otherwise. The game is also designed so that no one ever genders the player - all pronouns used are gender neutral (Chumpling, Duckaroo, etc.), because I wanted anyone to be able to connect with the player character.

HOWEVER!

Even though I never assign a gender to the player anywhere in the game, most people assume that it's male because of the short hair. And as such, I've gotten several requests from women to add in a more feminine sprite, and for a long time I resisted because I worried that it would make the gender of the player character too black and white, even if I don't change anything about NPCs never assigning gender to the character (you can pick either look, and still consider your character whatever you want).

So... I designed an alternative sprite. And though I'm not looking forward to all the work of updating promo stuff to include the other sprite, I've gotten very positive feedback from women I've shared it with. And, at the end of the day, I am of the opinion that more customization options are good.

But before I go through all the effort of adding the update, I wanted to come and ask the gender diverse userbase of Hexbear what you all think about this!