Hi there 👋

📝 It’s been 10 years It’s around 11 a.m. as start to type this. 10 years ago at this hour, I was at my day job, trying to focus and not be distracted by the fact that later that day, at around 18h, Quest of Dungeons was being released on Steam and iOS. For the first time, players around the world could try it. I was quite anxious about this; it had been a few years in the making, mostly nights and weekends....

Yesterday, I shutdown the VPS that has been hosting all my websites for the last ~10 years. I’ve moved everything to static content, including this website. 📝 WordPress Since the very beginning (~2008) this blog has been powered by WordPress, it served me well, it worked, had a nice backend to make the posts, plugins and themes. After a couple years I moved from shared hosting to a VPS, I had other websites and services I needed running and all in same machine was better and cheaper....

I missed last week devlog, mostly because I did almost no progress but also because it was a bad week overall, personally and in terms of work, nothing too bad but you know that feeling when you barely made any progress, despite tons of work hours? So one of those weeks. But onto game5 progress. Importers I managed to finish some of the importers (spreadsheets -> ScriptableObjects + prefabs) that I was working on, right now I can just glance over values on a spreadsheet, tweak, and have it export all the Scriptable Objects, generating the prefabs with corresponding data and images and test them....

Nothing announced, not even a name decided, but I want to vaguely blog about it as a means of brainstorming with myself. I’ll be vague as heck until I’m sure I have something worth “here’s a new game”, if that ever turns out to be the case. So this week’s it’s progress on my “on-going not yet announced game because not ready and might be bad” game, which I decided to for now on call Game5 here, so it’s easier to know what we are talking about....

After mostly a week of anxiety, for thousands and thousands of developers, Unity changed the rules again, and first glance, it’s better for the immediate problems it would cause for active and in-development games. They removed the retroactive aspect of the “pay-per-game-install”, so only for someone on Unity 2023 LTS+ (launching next year) will that apply, current projects will not be affected. Small relief, as long as we can keep using existing versions with current Terms of Service....

So this was an “eventful” week in the game dev community. Unity, one of the most well know, and used game engines out there, after years of doing mostly good for the community, pulled a reverse card and broke years of trust the community had on them. Unity announced that they are retroactively charging (for example $0.2) for each game install, after developers hit a certain yearly revenue threshold, which sounds insane....

Decided to write a couple things I feel can help a game in the long run when it comes to porting it to other platforms. It’s always inevitable we have to change elements in a game when targeting a new console/device we never considered, but some considerations, if done from start can save a lot of time, headaches, porting budget, and equally important, avoiding introduction of new bugs due to code changing drastically....

> At the bottom of the article I added a couple links that help finding your Twitter following/followers on Mastodon and follow them With the recent Twitter purchase, change of ownership and rules, a lot of people are leaving the platform or just searching for alternatives. Among other platforms one that keeps showing up as an alternative is Mastodon, but change is always hard, some people have been on Twitter for years, so what exactly makes this any different?...

I have no idea how many people, if any, are still subscribed to this blog RSS feeds, but if they are, they probably saw a couple of new posts in burst yesterday, apologies. This happened because I decided to merge all the posts from my studio into this one for “cleaning house”. I’ve been thinking about it for a while that I have these 2 blogs mostly abandoned and it’s a shame, I used to be very active, but IRL stuff and especially Twitter and QoD launch got me busy elsewhere and I mostly abandoned blogging, which I enjoyed a lot....

First of all, Happy Birthday to Quest of Dungeons 7th anniversary, initially released on March 25th 2014 for PC and iOS. QoD eventually got several other versions and big content updates over time, and that’s all thanks to the support of the fans, making it possible for me to continue working on it, so thank you. One thing I got asked frequently was about a physical release, and it took a bit of time but I’m happy to announce that, in cooperation with Leoful, it’s finally happening, and soon too, release date is April 13 and pre-orders are live (begin tomorrow, March 26)....

> Hey everyone, wow ok so first of all it’s been a long time since my last post, I keep telling myself I need to return to do more regular posts, but twitter kinda replaced it in many ways for my daily-rambles. However I’ve been trying to work on something new and gotta get back to more regular blogging, but more on that later. Second, but not least important, Vizati is turning 10 years old today (11 June 2010), feels only yesterday we (me coding and Rita with the art) were doing the first puzzles and trying to figure out the best way for making this a fun game....

Hey, It’s been ages since my last post, feel like things keep getting in the way, also not much exciting stuff lately. But decided to take a break from my current project to participate in Ludum Dare 42, it’s been years since the last time, also I liked the theme “Running out of Space” so I decided to hack something. To try and get out of my comfort zone I made my first game in Unity, so that was a fun experiment....