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There’s a rise in the popularity of cozy games, the ones that are not about just hard challenges, combat or adrenaline, but about comfort and attempt of well-being. Those are great, and it’s incredible to see the indie scene doing many interesting things in that department. But I always have this on the back on my mind as one of my favourite things, one thing I’m usually very interested in, cozy feelings/atmosphere that can be found in unexpected places. ...

🕛 2024 I initially intended to do a “end of year” post BEFORE the EOY talking about some stuff, but that never happened because work and other things kept getting in the way. 2024 was a weird year, from work, to personal, to world, to finances, to game dev, to everything really. I just feel tired honestly, that’s the best way I can describe 2024! Ok that started in a weird way, but allow me some latitude here… The world is in a weird state, economy, layoffs everywhere, the game dev industry in a very fragile state; and suddenly every company is betting all their chips on “AAAAeee IIIIII”, politics seem wacko, climate change, social networks going bananas, overall everyone trying to find their feet. ...

👽 So, is it back? I like the Alien franchise a lot and tend to talk about it more than I probably should. But if I narrow it down, my focus is mostly on Alien and Aliens — two of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Then we had the weirdness of Alien³ and Alien Resurrection, which had some cool action but also a ton of questionable decisions. Prometheus started as something separate but eventually merged into the Alien universe; and while I think it has its merits (especially the visuals and large-scale sci-fi world-building), there are plenty of head-scratching and plain dumb moments. And Covenant? Oh I don’t even want to talk about that one, it exists. ...

🧵 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? ...

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. But WordPress needs a lot of things, PHP, MySQL, maintenance in all those moving parts. ...

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. ...