Game Dev Porn

[Hydropunk: Playtest!] [#dev_log #focus #playable]⁣ After 8 long years, we finally got the build we're happy with. Hydropunk playtest is live! Checkout our isometric souls-like immersive sim, encounter the horrors from the Abyss and tell us what you think. Request Access | Details > Access will be given in waves, but no worries, you won't have to wait long.

[Hexachess Released!] [#dev_log #focus #playable] Today is the day. Hexachess is released on Steam, the only hexagonal chess game on the platform and one I'm pretty proud of. It's been more than 2 years since the jam it all started at, the road's been rather long, but ultimately fulfilling. I'm glad this game exists now. If you're interested in chess - do try it out, you might enjoy that. And if you do find it entertaining - leave a review. Buy a copy for a friend you like to play with. Share the page with others who might be interested. Every little bit helps. Meanwhile I'll keep building. Patches with further improvements and content, sure, but also other games, other original ideas which went unexplored so far. This is only the beginning. That's a promise. And yeah, huge thanks go to everyone whose actions led to this game existing. Wuxriff for crafting some beautiful levels, Featalion for coding a bulk of the underlying chess engine, J-Sec for making a font, my sister Mary for adding some of her charm to texts & sounds, GCP Grey for inspiring it with his video & Władysław Gliński for inventing this variant to begin with. And of course, to every one of you for reading this and being interested in what I build. Thank you. Play on Steam

[#dev_log]⁣ Hexachess incoming, 22.11. Wishlist

[Hexachess 1.0.0 :: Steam Demo] [#dev_log #playable] Hey-hey. Hexachess Demo is live on Steam. Yeah, that chess variant played on hexes with pretty visuals made in UE5, one I conceived of after watching that GCP Grey video 2 years ago, one based on Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. A long road behind me, a ton of improvements from initial jam version, it's going into actual full Steam release soon. Key changes since I last shared any updates: - Online Multiplayer (powered by Quark networking!) - Interactive Chat (Connectivity-style, synced letter by letter) - Move log, move timer, fleshed out move helpers - More maps - Better optimization - Bugfixes, obviously It's not the final form yet either. I wanna add a bunch more features, both before & after release, but everything in its own time. For now it's time to celebrate getting this far. And maybe play a couple. Enjoy. Ash. Play & Wishlist

​[Experienced Game Devs on YouTube] [#dev_diary #interview #must #studio #worth_watching] In recent years there's been an influx of game devs with 20+ years of experience in AAA creating personal YouTube channels & talking about the games they've been involved with in the past, passing lessons on to the next generation of creatives, and just musing on how the industry is doing. Below is a list of some notable ones. Martin O'Donnell - ex-Bungie composer primarily known for making the Halo soundtrack. He left Bungie shortly before the release of Destiny. Lately, he's been doing interviews with various friends from the industry he's accumulated over the years. Mark Darrah - initially a Bioware developer, he became the executive producer on Dragon Age and left the studio after Anthem. He talks about his past experiences & gives advice to upcoming devs on different levels of game production. Timothy Cain - programmer, designer & producer - first at BlackIsle, then Troika Games and finally Obsidian (still does contract work for Outer Wilds 2). Original Fallout creator. Similar to Mark, he tells stories from the days past, comments on how the industry is doing & gives some good advice. Chet Faliszek - ex-Valve developer, known for being one of the writers on Portal 2 & a lead on Left 4 Dead 1/2. More recently, one of the founders of Stray Bombay / developer of Anacrusis. Gives great takes on fresh game dev news, discusses various aspects of game production & occasionally flashes back to Valve/L4D days. Laura Fryer - executive producer who had a chance to work at the biggest corporations in gaming, from Microsoft, producing Gears of War 1/2, to Epic Games (Infinity Blade 3) & Warner Brothers (Shadow of Mordor). More recently, in the 2020s, she was part of Meta's AR project. Reflects on her time in various companies, lessons learned, gives context to news & suggestions on how to do better. Dave Fried - former narrative / level designer from Blizzard, who worked on campaign missions for Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos / The Frozen Throne, and later on some of the original World of Warcraft quests. After leaving Blizzard in 2003, he worked on many other games in various studios including Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, Wasteland 3 and Silent Hill: Homecoming. On his channel, Dave also has a mix of news coverage, career retrospective & opinions on what's broken in the industry. > Yeah... Consistency is still hard, too much actual development in my life still while posting here stopped being a habit for a while. But it's ok. Not rushing anywhere. And yeah, there's gonna be a bunch of updates on the projects I'm working on soon, so stay tuned.

[Tommy Thompson] [How Townscaper Works] [#code #interview #must #postmortem #worth_watching]⁣ A great tech talk by Tommy Thompson (AI & Games) / interview with Oskar Stalberg, the creator of Townscaper. The game is focused on building a town while using the simplest tools possible - clicking in the world and letting procedural generation to figure out what should be placed there / how should surrounding pieces change in turn so that the world stays consistent. There's a bunch of tech solutions that went into making it simple & reactive while keeping the final creations interesting & unique. One of the key ones - wave function collapse algorithm, an approach often used in procedural generation of levels (basically, constraint satisfaction). If you are building procedural level gen - this is a must watch. > Yeah, finding energy for these is still a problem, too much game development itself in my life now. But recalling this one for the Nth time & realizing it's still not here - couldn't cancel out now. Easy does it, step at a time, the only way habits are built.

[Second Wind] [The Making of Animal Well] [#feel #game_design #postmortem #worth_watching]⁣ Second Wind's first documentary about exactly the game that deserves it the most - Billy Basso's masterfully crafted Animal Well. The game, in case you haven't checked it out yet, is one of the best things to happen to indie handcrafted scene since Toby Fox'es Undertail or Daniel Mullins' Inscryption. Which is to say - it's fucking great. It's a metroidvania brimming with secrets, secrets within secrets & mechanics within mechanics, all deceitfully simple in its premise, yet complex once you get down to uncovering its mysteries and searching for the end. It's also a rare one completely not focused on combat - straight up conflicts with enemies are few and far between, it's not the point here. Instead, the point is exploring this world, meeting the animals within it, solving its puzzles & just experiencing its vibe. Billy was building it for eight long years - a good reminder of the cost often hidden behind the greatness. At some point in the dev cycle when he started showcasing the game at conferences he also lucked out into meeting a popular youtuber, videogamedunkey, who just happened to be searching for some hidden gems he could start onboarding to his new game publishing company, BIGMODE. That turned out well for all involved - BIGMODE couldn't ask for a better debut title while Animal Well got the chance it so richly deserved - a chance to get noticed. Don't miss out. In this weird post-truth success-often-irrelevant gamedev landscape we find ourselves in - it's a rare success story worthy of if not emulating, then definitely - learning from. > Yeah, it's easy to say I'm changing languages to be posting more, but let's try to actually post more. Also do check out our Connectivity game, it is heavily inspired by Animal Well, among other things (far from enough secrets in there yet tho; that's also gonna be a long twisted road to walk).

​[#patch] It's time to just talk a bit. You might've noticed I've switched fully into English here. Reasoning has multiple parts: - I've been sharing English-only game dev materials here for most of the time channel existed; have high confidence most of you can understand it, or you wouldn't be subscribed to this game dev channel specifically - Gives me another reason for posting here more often - if nothing else, it's practice, and I need a lot of it - Removes the internal conflict I always had on "how global can this get, best case scenario"; this way I don't have to be planning to build another one in English in the future, I can just continue fleshing out & supporting Game Dev Porn itself; since it's almost 10 years since it started - means a lot to me that I can stick to it Sorry if this feels wrong or hostile to some of you who are mainly speaking Russian language. Obviously, that's not the intention. The channel group (Game Dev Coffeeshop) is still mainly in Russian, come in if you wanna discuss something. Also if you're not interested in texts / library / main content at all & just want a feed of worthy game dev videos & links - Fiber channel still provides that, feel free to subscribe to it. Another thing you might've noticed is that there's more of kind of self-promotion / what am I building posts, and less of "what's important for (aspiring) game devs to know" ones. That's not me trying to deface the channel & steal the audience for something else. Mostly just me being overworked & not having enough energy to share things I wanna be sharing in a form I consider worthy of them (i.e. not having energy for writing texts) (while not sharing what I'm building in some form at least would feel even more wrong). That's the reason for Fiber channel's existence - I can always drop links to coolest stuff I encounter at least, that's 10 seconds. Another reason is I always enjoyed reading dev logs of people & want to be doing ones of my own, but again, just don't wanna create another place for them - my game dev channel is this one, I've put enough time into it over the years to wanna keep taking care of it. I'm not a fan of the current split tho either, has to be at least 50/50, if not more towards just others' cool stuff. Will be correcting that. Last thing for now. Thank you for sticking by this channel. Means a lot there's thousands of you still reading. Hoping not to disappoint. Love you all. Have a great weekend.

Game Dev Porn pinned «[Connectivity] [#bleeding_edge #code #dev_log #net]⁣ ...and then we went & built a multiplayer game / chat in a week. And then spent a few more polishing it before deploying live, but doing so only on the weekends & evenings. It started as an idea about…»

[Connectivity] [#bleeding_edge #code #dev_log #net]⁣ ...and then we went & built a multiplayer game / chat in a week. And then spent a few more polishing it before deploying live, but doing so only on the weekends & evenings. It started as an idea about chats being not enough real-time, roughly 10 years ago, but back then I knew nothing, as every Jon Snow does. Now not only do I feel way more confident about my skill, but at work we're actually building a ground-breaking networking tech (Quark Multiplayer), which made it a no-brainer. Like, why not then? When a couple of friends joined - building features together & testing them live with each other became an experience of its own - totally looking forward to get more of that. On top of it all - games like Journey & Animal Well became great inspiration. Some key details: - Keeping it live doesn't cost us any extra money since it's running against a server we're already keeping live anyway / it doesn't collide against its data - It has no hard limits on amount of players (likely to start lagging perf-wise when too many people are in the same place, but that would be the case for more or less any game, and we haven't scratched the surface at all in terms of optimization yet) - Took us a week to get to playable MVP, with another 3 weeks after (evenings / weekends' work) spent on properly polishing it & laying down the groundwork for future updates - Was extremely easy to get started: was already working on game features after like 1h of setting the project up New age of multiplayer games is coming & you can sign up for early access of the tech today. Don't miss it. ^_^ Play | Read More | Sign Up for Quark Early Access

[Quark Multiplayer] [#bleeding_edge #code #dev_log #net] Next stage. Bleeding edge multiplayer tech we used to build Edge of Chaos is here. Early access for devs is now open. 100 players / instance is no longer a limit. There is no actual hard limit. Want a game with 10000 per shard? Sure. 100000 - still doable. Imagination, game performance & game design are the limits now. Keeping a game live is times cheaper. Math is no longer "1 dedicated server for a group == 1 VM". For a lot of cases you'll only need 1 VM. Integrated into Unity & Unreal Engine through plugins. Easy to use. Waiting for you to build something with & become part of the next generation of multiplayer games. Join the Revolution | Read More | Discord | Twitter

[Edge of Chaos | Embrace The Chaos] [#bleeding_edge #dev_log #net #worth_watching]⁣ Announcement trailer time. Embrace the Chaos. Website | Discord | Twitter