theChief | Dom Harris

I'm even more pleased with this because basically everything I tried worked first time ;) no silly errors with my maths - turns out three years of sleep deprivation haven't entirely killed my ability to do high school level maths

I love @freya.bsky.social 's shapes so much, and now I have fancy non-destructive corner rounding for polylines 😁 now all I need to do is work out how to round the end caps

Thank you! There are many issues, mostly down to me spending less than 10 minutes on enemy spawning 🫠 and I've essentially spent my life training for this exact moment - I've done somewhere in the region of 50 jams that lasted an hour or less. This was almost *easy* in comparison!

it is worse even than that! If you die without scoring, you can continue to play in the background 😂 and then if you die again, the ui freaks out a little. Admittedly it does then get back to the proper state, but if you really want to you can keep playing 😉

and here is theirs. I hate this and everything it stands for 👍
misterm.itch.io/bloodbullets...

A self professed "expert developer" submitted a wholly AI generated game to this year's bullet hell jam. Apparently it took them two hours, so I responded with my own two hour effort 😂 compare and contrast.

wayfarergames.itch.io/2-hour-shmup

Show off your indie dev skills at BULLET HELL JAM 6! About a week left to cram as many projectiles into a small game as you can. The theme this year is "UNSTABLE". Dangerous glitches and random elements! 😱😵‍💫

Entry form and Discord link
itch.io/jam/bullet-j...

5n3k by WayfarerGames, Albertalberto A totally normal snake game, nothing to see here.

A last-minute random encounter with @wayfarergames.bsky.social lead to me handling most of the level design/content for his latest game jam game - 5n3k!

My highscore with 0 deaths is currently around 170k... Can you beat it? >:)

wayfarergames.itch.io/5n3k

#gamedev

Basically, after reading your whole post I remain unconvinced that game loops are the problem, sorry 😂

Without a good core loop, you'd definitely finish fewer games. Runtime is the bigger issue, and AAA risk adverse slop that doesn't really have any meaning and takes no risks. Plus we're in a market where players value $ per hour of play time, which as a metric just suuuucks.

Movies are a couple of hours, you do the whole thing in one sitting. Books are longer than movies, but also less demanding and are _still_ significantly shorter than games. Most games target 20+ hours and you need to be actively engaged and participating throughout!

It's well written and an interesting read! I find the premise of "I finish movies and books but not games, isn't that interesting" a tad frustrating because there is a huge difference in scale 😉

Yeah Pokémon mystery dungeon did something like this, you can pick them up and pay by talking to kecleon, or attempt to steal and run away 😂 I think you could also drop stuff to sell it?

I kid you not, @itch.io has been taken down by Funko of "Funko Pop" because they use some trash "AI Powered" Brand Protection Software called Brand Shield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain

Also this, from a study by stack overflow! Not game development specific, but it tracks with my general experience - more bugs, zero improvement to delivery time.

I just see it as "brain off" programming, which I guess is fine sometimes - especially when you've got a game to release. But it isn't changing the industry in a positive way

In my experience, code produced by LLMs is slower, more prone to errors, and less understandable for anyone working on it. If AI gives you a 10x productivity boost, you're about as productive as 0.1x a normal programmer 😉

Using LLMs to help code basically turns you into a code reviewer, not a programmer. People aren't good at reviewing code by default! You will miss things because it looks "good enough". Also you're no longer solving problems, you're handholding a machine that does not understand the problem space.

Hey nice one! 100 days of dev REALLY helped me get my game over the line, I wrote a blog post every day, with a few saved up for breaks. Good luck! Have you got a link to the jam project? I can give some feedback if that would help!

Not a problem at all, thanks for the response!

This looks awesome! You don't happen to take paid commissions do you? 🤩

VFX artists of bluesky can I pay you to make this lil shotgun energy pulse thing look cool? I suck at this 😂

It also gives you a really nice way to do demo builds that only include specific scenes, or split builds for stage & prod so you can preview changes in a test environment. Lovely stuff

Would love to be added - self published on Xbox!

My post from Tumblr which reads: I genuinely wonder if people realize how many projects get abandoned because the readership "wasn't there", when in reality, the readership just stayed silent. It's a big thing in trad pub that book series get discontinued because readers pirate the books or wait until the series is finished to buy a copy, leading the publisher to think that nobody actually wants the book enough to continue the series, but it happens with indie creators too. I've discontinued a lot of free, online series because it's not worth putting 3-5 hours a week into posting a project for no readers. Sometimes I finish the series for me but just never post it again, other times I don't finish it at all because it feels more worthwhile to put my time into other things. Sometimes I hear from readers who are sad or upset that I didn't finish something they were liking, but the *reason* it never got finished is because I didn't know anyone liked it. If you like something, tell the creator, tell your friends, make some noise about it. If you would be sad if a story never finished, make that interest known because one of my biggest considerations before discontinuing a series is "will people miss this? Will I be letting people down" and 9/10 times, I come to the conclusion of "no, it doesn't even seem like anyone's reading this" only to learn after I've moved on that apparently someone was.

You may have seen this post circling talking about how important it is to tell creators when you appreciate what they do.

The irony is it's MY post from Tumblr stolen by someone else. Please reskeet THIS post & NOT the stolen one bc we support creators making their own work on bluesky.

Oh damn this did not click for me! I think I have some design work to rethink 😂 it's not awful, there are just a few red on black areas that need tweaking, and none of them are required for gameplay. It's an easy fix, a very silly mistake!

Inaccessibility for colourblindness is caused by design choices. A design issue, not an engineering issue. The fix is design choices, not engineering workarounds.

Filters are inherently exclusionary, they aren't the answer. Fix the design instead of trying to fix people's eyes.