Trevor of Salty Squad Games

Heading home tomorrow with a head full of new ideas and a heart full of renewed passion for my art. Hugely successful trip by every metric!

Had an amazing time at #GDC. It's always so affirming being here with all my industry colleagues.

Highlight was by far @celiahodent.com 's master class on designing for User Experience and Player Psychology. The only shame is that it was "only" 4 hours!

If all canvas items in Godot just have an in-built `draw_circle()` function that you can just use at any time, then explain why I've had Circle.png in my UI folder for the last year and a half.

Alert: Balling has been added to Strike the Earth

Nothing much, just taking a little work trip to see some comrades.

He's from Spain without the A

Here's a look at some gameplay.

One strong takeaway from the Strike the Earth playtest is that the Flint Knapping system is positively remembered by most participants. That is the best possible result. It means my design was solid from the start, and we can keep moving forward. Amazing feeling as a game designer! #gamedev

All this in spite of my daughter having to go to the hospital for a seizure (very scary, but she's ok!) and me being horribly sick for basically the whole week. We persevere though!

Very satisfied with the outcome of the playtest! got 20 responses out of the 35 people who initially expressed interest in participating which seems pretty good!

Now I just have to sort through everyone's response survey and see what information I can glean from it...

The first playtest for Strike the Earth is finally happening! My excitement is only matched by my nerves, lol. If nothing else, I'm really hoping it'll provide a lot of useful information

UH OH

Boy, sure the mirror stops breaking so I can download the export template for Godot 4.6 before the playtest on Monday!

I reloaded the repository after changing nothing and it fixed itself. Incredible

What's with bugs suddenly appearing the day before release? Suddenly the build menu is empty and a random light source keeps spawning out of nowhere.

None of this has happened before and I didn't think I'd changed anything that could cause this!

One week before the first closed pre-alpha playtest for Strike the Earth and there's something so zen about just bug fixing during a code freeze. No pressure to design and implement new features and every bug I squash is something firmly checked off a to-do list that's been piling up for weeks

missed a set of parentheses when setting the shape key on my pickaxe mesh and ended up with the shortest pickaxe ever.

Well I hope it wasn't anything important

"Man, my lights aren't casting shadows. I wonder if this is just a weakness of the Godot engine. Dang, guess I'll just have to figure out how to make that work later."

Meanwhile the nefarious checkbox:

Man... Now that the title screen shows me with the more dynamic "real" lighting every time I open the game, testing things with the flat "Debug" lighting on is just that much more bland... I gotta get player lights in the game ASAP

Making a passable title screen feels like a good project for a Friday.

I can't tell if Godot's AnimationTree is actually as awful as it seems, or if this is just a skill issue and I don't know what I'm doing. All I know is right now trying to build a robust animation state machine is like pulling teeth. Really hoping I'm just missing something.

These caves are all hand built using dev tools, but procedurally generated caves is high on my to do list

In two years of development don't think I've ever actually looked at the caves from the outside before. It's strangely satisfying.

How many games is too many games to put inside the games already in your game is the real question...

Notice how the shape of the flint changes gradually as it is developed! A key design philosophy of Strike the Earth is that a tool's mesh and material should be directly affected by its stats. This is still very early on, but the results are already very promising

I've overhauled the way items and inventory works. I wanted to try something other than the regular grid based inventory, but that turned out to be reinventing the wheel. I like this more.

Also experimenting with a hands-on crafting system: Knapping flint into a blade in-game rather than in a menu

Happy New Year everyone! I'm very much looking forward to what Strike the Earth is going to look like in 2026. I feel so refreshed after a week of vacation and all the symptoms of burnout have for now slipped away.

I strongly believe that the first closed playtest is right around the corner :)

And yes, the animations do sync up in multiplayer too. I've been successful so far in forcing myself to make every new system work in multiplayer too, avoiding the headache of having to go back and fix everything all at once later.

Feeling a lot better about this iteration of metal refinement. Now you can actually see the pulverizer, well, pulverizing the ore into ore dust. It already feels a lot more satisfying than just clicking through menu prompts and watching a progress bar fill.