Had the exact same experience when I took my two younger siblings with me last week!
Boulder places can be intimidating in the beginning... Fortunately, they tend to gather all the nicest and most supportive people you could find from across the whole city. Literally everyone will cheer for you!
Tbh, the whole reddit post is a nothing burger of generic advice, no idea how it became today's top controversial hot take.
6, 7 and 8 fall into game design. Go against the "advice" there if it serves the game and what you're going for, I agree.
All other points? Basic (technical) necessities. Ignoring them will make the game experience worse, imo. None of those are responsible for making games feel the same.
New Free Game for the Playdate! Original horizontal shooter TWYK SHOT.
Five whole stages!
Power Ups!
Bosses!
Interactive Menus!
Free!
digikerot.itch.io/twyk-shot
We need more unique consoles setting themselves apart by being different again.
If you squint all modern consoles and handhelds are the same, except for Nintendo still being able to hold onto their exclusive power. But even the Switch is just the exact same form factor as everything else.
Yup, we're working on a new Castlevania game.
Thanks to KONAMI, & with Motion Twin's friendly advice, the franchise will be going back to its roots with what we hope to be the best whip traversal & combat ever seen in a 2D action-adventure game! Noooo pressure...
www.konami.com/games/castle...
While also having to spend this time to earn your living, too. At least, most of us who can not live off of their own projects.
Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly
I'm tired of 2FA becoming mandatory for a lot of services. Why can't my password simply log me in like it used to?
Played some diablo 2 with friends (non-resurrected). Something about that game is just right. It's an evergreen for a reason.
I especially love the crunchy sound effects, guaranteed to be burned into your memory forever.
Danny O'Dwyer from Noclip.
Trains! (and menu system logic)
StarBento!
#playdate #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #trains
Having a lot of fun building rooms lately.
I certainly have to keep my own "playtesting" time in check!
Only the connecting tendrils and the white outline around the boss are drawn in-code. The rest are plain old sprites.
I tend to draw large sprites in greyscale before they get converted to 1-bit, whereas I manually dither smaller sprites (e.g. tiles) to get more control over their details.
I'm putting a lot of care into the boss fights of Owlet's Embrace. Here's a preview of what's to come.
Will you take on the challenge?
#playdate #metroidvania #gamedev
This is how it'll play out, gaming will become another streaming service.
While owning your hardware is still pretty easy, getting to own games and software (instead of a license or subscription) is already getting harder. Streaming games is only the next logical step...
I would say making me try is the responsibility of the creator! Rarely did I regret spending a few bucks and 2 hours on something unique once I pulled the plunge. I won't look at reviews for that.
Reviews are more important to me once price and/or time investment gets bigger (TV shows, big games).
I don't care how long the indie dev took to create the game. I do care if the game is good and worth my limited time in the first place.
I can appreciate the efforts to get there, but it's not the reason I'll pay - the game itself is! So just make a great, unique, weird indie game worth playing.
A selection of my fav podcasts, although I only listen to episodes of interest to me:
- State of the Arc - Games with a philosophical touch
- Into the Aether - Games
- The AIAS Game Maker's Notebook - Gamedev
- Two's Complement - Programming
- My Perfect Console - Games
- Wookash - Programming
The feeling of finding a whole new interesting podcast and refilling the listen-on-commute backlog with hours of content again.
A post by c.a.t.y.a.y that reads, "I wonder what my art could've been if I didn't quit". Iggy responds, "I wonder what it will be if you start again"
Going into 2026, a reminder for everyone who's fallen off the creative wagon, game dev, writing, art, music, whatever, no matter how long:
We all like to call ourselves perfectionists. However, I consider it a bad trait.
It shows that you care, but time to create approaches infinity. Because you won't need to prioritize you won't reflect on what about your craft actually matters. Consider leaving an edge, it makes your craft special.
If you stream your game's development, working on the game is your channel's content.
After aquiring enough regular viewers some people seemingly decided to never finish their game to keep the content going and just became YouTubers instead.
Depends, as always. I'm making my game for personal fulfilment. Financial loss all things considered, and not relevant for my career at all. So for me:
- Is it worth the hundreds of hours of free time I could've spent otherwise?
- Is it worth the stress?
These can only be answered in hindsight.
Good talk!
A lot of said discomfort also comes from the question whether your art will be worth all the time you are about to put into it, sometimes years of daily free time you could spend differently.
Showed and demoed Owlet's Embrace in Hamburg. Had a lot of fun watching other people play the game and chat about their experience, a really eye-opening perspective shift.
Let the number of authentifications in a row determine the time you'll stay logged in.
Of course a single sign-in is weak so you only get 30 seconds with your account. You better proof that it's *really* you and stack them.
A Link to the Past
Metrics the program could automatically calculate:
- errors, like for the state shown on the right
- the critical path through the game
- how "open" a game is by the number of new edges at any point, over time as a graph
- density of rewards over time
Theorycrafting a game's level flow logic.
Got hit by an idea for a graph-based level logic flow software. You could assign keys to nodes and (complex) conditions to edges.
You would be able to logically and visually step through the world, and the program would derive all kinds of metrics for for any given state.
This gotta exist already?
