Game Development

🧵 origin thread In 2018 I started a thread on Twitter (later renamed X 🙄) where I shared some game development tricks devs used to get around bugs, software, hardware and/or time constraints. Later I kept adding more posts to that thread, and there’s some cool information there. But because I now went through the process of replicating that thread on both Mastodon and Bluesky; it got me thinking, I should probably put this on my own blog, a single post, which is easier to read, also in case those websites are ever gone. If I find more I’ll add them later. This page may take a bit to load due to images, gifs videos etc. ...

📝 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. I had little idea of what to expect, but being on Steam was simultaneously exciting and terrifying. What if people hated it? ...

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. I could have made the game parse the spreadsheet at boot time and create them, but I decided against it, I want to generate this process offline. One of the reasons is because I have more control over not replacing existing items GUIDs (to keep and existing links), and also I can tweak any individually generated files manually, if I need to. ...

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. This will be impossible on mobile and consoles in a short time frame due to SDKs, but for PC should be fine. ...

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. These are based on observations I made on a couple dozen projects that crossed my desk, I don’t expect this to be news for someone who’s been in the field for a while, and might even be “too basic” for many, but hopefully it can help someone, since I’ve seen these many times. ...

> 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. Things changed a lot over the years and the original team is no longer working together, also because of OS updates, like the iOS versions etc or hardware not being around anymore the game has mostly vanished from all stores. The other day I was thinking about game preservation and thought it would be a shame to leave this only in our computers, combined with the 10th anniversary we decided to make it free to everyone, the original game can now be downloaded and played even on the newest Windows versions (thank you XNA). ...

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. ...

As I’m starting to write this post I’m on my way to my home town for the holidays, so I may not post it in a couple days. It’s been a crazy year(s)(?) and I’m taking these near 4h of travel to write down some things. I’m sorry if it’s incoherent, this is mostly a dump of thoughts. For those who follow my work a bit more closely you probably know that for almost 4 years the project I dedicated more time was Quest of Dungeons, which started development in 2013. ...