Me if i was a game dev

After years of game dev!

When your code game is strong

Client: I want a mobile game with Leaderboards, Social media sign-ins, In-game store, Ads, IAP etc in 2 months

Me: Cool, what’s your budget?

Client: $50

The JS Drinking Game:

1. Think of a noun.
2. Google "<noun>.js"
3. If a libary with that name exists, drink!

Now I want to create some kind of game, a bit like "hacknet" (check it out on steam, really cool), but the one who answers you is your own OS

When the senior Linux engineer puts a terminal game on a server everyone uses which launched at login and after a little you start hearing oh's, wtf's, laughing and everything and then you suddenly have a whole room of Linux engineers playing some kinda terminal space invaders game while doing customer support.

😆

Let the game begin 👹

Unity is my game

I asked my teammates if it would be ok if I made multithreading code for the collisions of our game engine and they just sent me this, I'm going to try anyway. Yolo.

Installs 45gb game

Next day do an update - not enough storage

Sees 28gb free on disk

Googles

Turns out steam copies your entire game during an update so it can roll back of there's an error

Fucking brilliant.

To those who say game is not an art, we paint worlds with ones and zeros in real time that you can get lost in for hours. If this is not art, nothing is.

Me: I'm building for 32 bit.
Me: But I feel like I should be building for 64 bit.
Me: But not everyone has a 64 bit OS.
Me: But who the fuck doesn't?
Jerry: The people who can't run our game.

Let's play Sudo, a Linux board game

TIS 100 the assembly language game.

Recently took a screenshot in a game called Firewatch and out of curiosity tried it out as a wallpaper for my phone. It looks amazing 😍

After one year of procrastination I finally made the game with unity

Ladies and gentleman, spherical voronoi minesweeper

Yes, I made the game before with in c++ which looks quite shitty, but finally, unity

Game of Codes. Keyboard Throne!!

recently started game development... used trigonometry and algebra for the first time in real life..

:') remember this game?

Wierd Domains Game

Like: pornhub + StackOverflow
PornOverflow.Com

Add your entry in comment.

Winner will be get 1 domain + 1 year hosting

Hmm.. Should I work on my game.. ..or play Skyrim..?

Uggg.. Being an adult is hard.. q.q

Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

Let's play a little game.
Your code has been overwritten.

When I was 12 I started programming by makimg games. Then when I was 18 I stopped with a game dev study (because of personal reasons). I went to a web dev study and found work 4 years later. Today my company hired a new sales person who has worked at a few game dev companies and she said she will try to put me on game dev projects.

Im so happy now :D

Hello, world!

Hey, it's me. It's been awhile. How have you been..? :3

For those of you who don't know/remember, I'm the lead developer of a Desktop and (to-be) Hacking Simulator Game. My project should still exist somewhere on here. I just thought I would hop on, and catch you guys up on my progress. ^~^

So far themes are a thing! You can add custom fonts, wallpapers(or just a desktop color) and set the color/opasity of everything in-game!

I have also implimented a modding API. It's under-documented, but it works very well! You can add apps, commands, or even redesign the entire interface using it. It executes modded functions on specific events, so you could really have it do anything.

As of yesterday, there is also a simulated FileSystem. You can navigate it using in-game terminal commands, and you can create and remove directories.

(in-game screenshots are also a thing, you can even set a timer - ps: this is a 100% mod! As are all apps and commands in the current unreleased version. PM me on Telegram @TheCyaniteproject to get a copy~)

Someone played a random game that I'd made. He was really impressed by the story (mostly dialogs). And he asked me:
Him: "Did you pay much?"
Me: "What???"
Him: "Well, I'm sure you had to pull some strings to get that dialog"
I laughed hysterically.

-Let's start making the game!
-Yaay
-We should focus on performance optimization!
-But we don't have anything to optimize yet..
-Performance optimization!!!

1 month later

-OK you were right, we can't focus on performance now. We need to start making this game!
-Finally!
-So we're in pre-production now, let's do some R&D!
-Awesome, I wanted to start designing our workflow for adding new content, and maybe also loca..
-NO! That's unimportant! We must do R&D!
-OK what should we Arr-and-Dee?
-Performance optimization!!!

Okay, question;

Can I use ANY phone number in my game?

According to Wikipidia:
"Numbers between (555)-0100 & (555)-0199 are reserved for fictional use."
But.. I'm wanting to have a little phone pop up in my game that you can enter phone numbers into and text the corresponding player (and i hope to have more than 99 players) I would just have contact names, but I want players ti be able to dick around with other players.. Like, post their number to in-game telemarketers and such. What fo you think I should do?

Making graphics is probably the most painful part of indie game development... :(

5 years ago i was working on a 2D game using C and we needed to use the sleep function (I forgot why ) .but however one of my team member did something new , for each second he did an empty for loop from 0 to 1000000 .You never know maybe that's how it's implemented (sarcasm)

My manager just left the company to become a independent game developer. His game is also available in steam as early access.

He just became extra cool to me.

And he is using unreal engine for it.

That made him extra cooler to me 😁

Welp my game dev career is over.

Even during games, I find bugs in it...
Just found NULL in FIFA GAME.
Wonder which object failed to pass it's value

Factorio. The game you didn't know you need.

We need a devRant themed drinking game!

🍺Let's get some ideas going🍺

I had to create a c++ dungeon 2d game as University project.
The spec said "a terminal game made with char"
I and my team made a real game with anemies boss, and balanced stat in 15 days with Qt (we asked if can use external libraries)
We got 6/8 point for the project cuz we forgot to put protected/private the attribute of the player...

To Code or to Game? 😒

Is it working..?
...

I think it's working! ^~^
Tell me if this looks correct, I'm trying to mimic the linux CD command in my game:

After about 2 years and one restart of the project, I am finally finished with my first iOS game, and put it on the app store! Super proud!

Me: yo pass me the photoshop
Friend: You better not make weeb idol game design
Me:

//rant
When you make a mobile game and hope it gets downloads but you suck at marketing.. fml

Wtf? Who parties in the middle of the week?
My Alcoludo game has been installed on 96 devices yesterday, when normally average daily installations are between 1 to 10. Not that I'm complaining 😅

For every game developer out there. Why so? 😂

Promotion by cozyplanes myself

Find my game in play store, and you will get $100 play store credit.

First come, first served.

I wish I had this board game when I was a kid

I'm learning Unity! I don't have a lot of experience with C# or game development but it's fairly simple and super interesting so far so I'm excited!
!Rant, just excited :)

!rant
How many of you guys have played Uplink? IMO it's a game every dev should try. While it's not exactly realistic, especially today, it shows actually how powerful a hacker can be. And YOU are that hacker.

Should i make my game open source? It will be free, but i'm worried about theifs..
(reuploading as their work, or selling)

Programme that simulates the rolling of the dice when playing the Risk board game.

No more dice that fall off the table. No more dice that throw the figures into disarray.

Over the past week I've been working on a game written in JavaScript (in the browser) which can be played with hand gestures seen by a camera (wanted to use an IR camera but couldn't get one in the time I had). It is the well-know Shell Game!

Blood, sweat and tears went into this because I wrote my code extremely bad so it became a huge clutter.

Will refactor some day, but I'm happy with the result!

So my friend is learning the Java. And he says to me "Why would you even need dividing in game developing?!".

Have a somewhat good game idea/concept...

Have no experience with game engines...

This could take a while

I spent two days in a row fixing chairs at work because our whole dev team was waiting for issues (which means helping QA team and playtesters testing the whole game).

Just when everyone left and Im standing up to go as well a playtester comes up with a release breaking bug in the handwriting recognition code...
Since this game is build for a charity which will release it in a country at war we cant push the release date.

Guess who is making overtime trying to fix this bug?

This will be 4chan-r/greentext-ish in format. Also "me" is not me, PTH, it's referring to a game studio.

>Be me
>Be game studio
>Create event for weapon design
>Player base submit in a craptonna designs
>Holyfuck.jpg
>Create an internal service for voting
>Service doesn't check for vote except for a login
>MFW one submission has 6-digit votes
>MFW a lotta submission also start gain a lot of votes
>WTF.gif
>The vote count spiked
>Votebotting is here
>Ohshit.gif
>MFW I don't how to filter votes
>MFW I can't block rerouted traffics (VPNs, proxies, etc.)
>MFW the Discord server of the game gets vocal then Reddit.
>OhshitIfuckedup.mp4

Just finished 2nd year of uni and got a summer placement doing game Dev. I walked in to be the most experienced person there because I am the only one doing it.

Game of Thrones fans will know

I'm playing The Outer Worlds right now and came across this on one of the in-game terminals. I think this game dev needs devrant... 😂

Highschool teacher tells us to work on a little text game, gives us 2 weeks. I wrote about 1600 lines of code with enemys, random map, fighting system,... And generally blowing everything out of proportion as always, because I'm so bored

To all the game developers here:
This really needs more attention.

Game devs/other content creation people, how do you version control large asset files? So far I've been using git, but is there a better way?

One of the coolest projects I've worked on recently was this little adventure game I made for a game jam a while back, It was made from scratch with Golang and C over two days. It also features procedural level generation (that technically should allow the user to walk in one direction for at least 7 decades).

In a world full of game engines, only the courageous dare to use OpenGL.

Unnamed hacking game - "terminal" graphics
-Multiplayer. Last man standing.
-Like a tower-defence game but technical
You work for a company that has outsourced their technical department to Bykazistan, a country with good internet and bad laws. On one hand, labor is very cheap! There are no pesky laws protecting workers, so you don't need to pay them what they're worth. Phew. However, there are also no laws against cyber crime. But for a start-up like you, the risk is worth the reward!
...which would be great! If you were the only company with that idea. As it turns out, you aren't. All of your competitors also recently outsourced to Bykazistan, and that could be an issue.
You would be afraid, but you are a hardened businessman. You are familiar with the cut-throat nature of the business world and where others see risk, you see opportunity. Let the games begin.
Your mission is to protect your ciritical assets at all costs, eliminate your opponents, and make ciritical financial decisions - all while maintaining your uptime!
Build a botnet and attack your competition to decrease their uptime and disable their attacks. Port scan your opponents to learn more about their network, but beware of honeypots! Initiate devastating social engineering attacks - and train your employees against them! Brute-force their credentials, and strengthen your own.
Make sure to keep your software patched...

Unity or Unreal Engine... I am a noob to game dev. Please help

!rant

I am so excited, I just got a response from Voodoo.io on publishing my mobile game. Hopefully it makes a decent amount of money!

Pretty cool how space engineers support in game C# programming.

Is there any game developer around here??? :D

In game development feature creep tends to kill games because it's just as much about what's NOT there as what IS there.

Take The Last of Us for example. Would a strategic tower defense segment make sense? No? And if it was a *hugely* popular mechanic at the time of development is there a real chance they would have included such a segment in TLOU? Yes.

Don't just believe me. Go take a look at what happened to the original Fortnite versus the hills-have-eyes inbred offspring that it became all because PUBG and its format were cancerously mega popular at the time.

That's why while developing my game Atom Ranger (now with 100% less multiplayer!), a mix between metro and don't starve, I spent six years *pruning* features. You can click my referral link and get 50% off the opportunity to become an unpaid tester of the pre-prealpha right now, "for hardcore players only!" (Tm)

My game:

So I've been interested in game development for a while, so going to spend the day diving into C++.

Wish me luck 😂

Every Game Dev right now:

*using the patrick meme*

“We should stop updating our games in PC, and move to mobile!”

for game of thrones fans

Found this pearl on the code of the game I made with some friends on a game jam the last week
Beautiful

Who thinks a VR Cable Management Sandbox game would sell really well?

Architects (of real buildings) can work in IT as game level designers.

GAME
The nickname of a person above your comment will be the name of your next project, tell us what it's about (be creative)

I learned computer science so i can create a small game some day. I spend my entire time on web development coz thats what makes money in my lame ass country. I come home too tired to go into game development which is an entire world to explore by itself. Cant apply to other countries coz game development companies wont recruit a web developer (i tried). Fuck my life

yay or nay?
for who are wondering what is on the screen :
i am working on a fish tank simulator gamr, which every fish have different unique combination and/or permutation. i combined this with cryptocurrency, the idea is similar to CryptoKitties and Insaniquarium combined. the implementation is not yet done, but currently i am working on the in-game market front-end functionality.

sorry no in-game preview/screenshot yet :P

curently thinking about considering to open source it and a collab.

I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.

Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.

1. asset management

2. asset change management

3. behavior change management

4. data management

5. combinatorial design management.

6. Combinatorial Behavior management

7. Feature completion

ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.

ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.

This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.

DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.

COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.

COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.

FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.

I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.

Working on random room code in Godot. I am placing 1m * 1m scenes (meshes). Right now its just a square block. I need to work on occlusion of rooms. Then connecting rooms. I am going to try a 3d, but made of 3d tiles inside areas. Still trying to decide on what to use for outside terrain. I did find a terrain library that allows for digging holes in the terrain. This is where I will have players build a base and dig underground.

I am thinking a really casual game that you can crank the difficulty if you want. A relaxed rpgish game with some rts flavor to it. If someone wants to just chill they can turn off the rts side. Allow for multiple bases for resource gathering. Maybe do some automation of resource gathering using slaves...err...minions. Gonna stay single player for this iteration. I don't really want to spend time working on net code for this.

For now I just gen random rooms:

I've just realized that a game with over 1 million downloads (the ranking list is over 2 million people) has its solutions saved in the preference's file. So anyone with a rooted phone can access this file. This make me so fucking crazy: you make a stupid shitty game and get over 2 million users and don't even bother to make it good.
Now I have to decide whether to write to the developer to inform him that this is a stupid way to store the solutions or to make an app to let everyone know the solutions.

!rant
I laughed more than I should about my own code
Can you guess what small widely known game these textures belong to?

So me and my friend started doing a video game project. To be honest I was expecting it to be nothing but pain and suffer.
But it turned out to be really fun experience for both of us (plus I’m learning Unity) 😁

Finally, after 42 days of in development, I can proudly say my game reached Alpha stage. All core mechanics are in place. I hope I'll be able to say the same thing for Beta in next 6 weeks too!

To be honest, I could do it better, but I didn't had much time.

Found out today that someone who started game dev with a game jam I started in university has a top 10 game on steam!

!rant

Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)

Glad I decided to go and try it out.

Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.

So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.

There's no better feeling than seeing a 5* review on your game after a rough day <3

I'm finally making some visible progress on my Unity mobile game called "it goes number in the night!" gotta add a scoring system then I'll have a playable demo.

Dear Game-Devs,

if your game takes some time to load that's fine but please do NOT let me press a button after starting the game and THEN start loading the menu for some time and instead load the menu immediately! What's the point of that? If I know it takes some time I want to start it and maybe get a coffee and when I come back everything is loaded...

Any other Screeps players here?

for the people running into a "Screeps is not defined":
Screeps is a MMO RTS where you code your "army" to do stuff in Javascript (a la NodeJS).
Code how your harvesters should behave, how your soldiers should behave, how your builders should behave etc. etc.

So far, it is quite a fun game, tho my (Intel Nehalem based) laptop has issues handling it (thanks to a awfully slow GPU...) so it's difficult to play for me at the moment (I'm on holiday, my home PC is a LOT faster).
It costs about 15 euro on steam, and if you're into this stuff, it's well worth it.
Just make sure you finish the tutorial first... I didn't and I regretted it when I bought the game (it's a huge pain in the buttocks to get started if you don't understand the API and such).

Currently just playing on my own localhosted private server to discover how the game works and such, but will be setting up a public server later down the road to play with others.
Tho it would be nice if Screeps would allow for "team-based" gameplay as well so it'll be slightly harder for early players to bully the newer ones.

Took part on the Global Game Jam this weekend :)

Hi guys, I have been accepted into game developing (college), do you have any advice (language, and etc) for someone looking to start learning before even he starts his college course?

I just do not feel that I should waste time to wait for my college to start and then wait for a couple of years before I do something... I would love to progress a bit faster, as I am highly motivated.

@Lensflare how's your game doing? I want to kick some ass

When I'm in bus, I'm bored and I have no game to play... Made my own game using Photo editor xD

Just thought I'd mention that there are some assets and training material for cryengine available on humble bundle right now for those of you who are into game dev

Hi devRanters
I have been working on an android game in my free time as a hobby. It has been 2 years, so I have decided to finally put it up in play store (maybe as alpha or beta). If there is interest I might keep working on it. Any advice? It is the first time I make a game and I am completely green in regards to publishing it and things to take into account.
All advice is appreciated. I am a bit nervous as it has been my baby for 2 years...

I want to get into game dev, but don't know which engine to choose, Unreal or Unity. Both would be free, because Unreal is free for students. I already know C++, but I think it depends more on the API than the language itself. Maybe I would like to create games for Android too.
Which one would you recommend? Any experience?

Why does everyone hate Unity (the game engine)? I've used it and it's honestly not that bad.

Lets make an app that shows a lot of ads. Oh, people actually have to download and use it? Well, let's half-ass a game and name it [...] of[...]!

-every mobile game studio

I need a good programming game for Android, and I need it now! (Stuck at a party)

Is it OK to punch a game dev who codes stupid numeric bugs?

So my wife got into Stardew Valley, that admittedly awesome comfort game farming simulator.
She went pretty far in the game, and found some item that was supposed to highly increase the damage she could inflict onto cute little monster thingies.
It didn't work as intended.
Since equipping the piece of shit all her hits did 0 damage. She tossed the item away but the problem persisted. And on and on...
She took to the googles to try and find some explanation, and apparently that is a fairly common bug for mobile devs.
Then she called in the big guns (that is how I'm calling myself in this case, you will see why).

Apparently there is some buggy piece of shitcode somewhere in the game with a numerical insecure routine that overflows the attack modifier. I.e. if it was supposed to increase from 1.990 to 2.010, it actually went all the way down to -0.4.
She was lucky her attacks weren't increasing the monsters' HP.

We found a forum post where some dude said that he managed to edit the game save file and reset the negative-value attack increase modifier variable. Seems easy enough at first, but my wife uses iOS. Nothing is ever so straightforward with apple stuff.

We did get to the save file, she emailed it to me (the file has no extension and no line breaks in it, so we facepalm'd on a couple attempts at editing it directly).
I finally manage to get it into my personal 11-yo laptop... that won't open a single line file that big.

Cue the python terminal. Easy enough to read the file into a string var and search for the buggy XML tag. Edit the value and overwrite into a new file. Send it back to her by email. Figure out how to overwrite the file in iOS.

Some tense moments while the game reloads... and it works!!!! Got some serious hubby goodwill points here.
Srsly, this troubleshoot process is not for technophobes. It is out of reach to pretty much every non-techy user.

And now back to the original question: If I ever manage to find the kid who coded a game-breaking numerically unsafe routine and shipped it as if every test in the planet had waved it bye-bye, can I punch them? Or maybe buy them a beer, let's see how I get to cash that hubby goodwill tonight :)

Once upon a time i had a great idea.
Because i couldnt be bothered to do anything productive i created a simple app in the C# that would look into every .js file (from a game that uses it for the gui/main menu) and search for "//todo" lines.

I did it mostly for kicks. I got that idea when i encountered one //todo in a file when i was trying to mod that game.

Yes i know grep exists: fuck you.
It would have taken me more time to learn that than to write that 20 line program...

The result? Over 30 lines of //todo with some briliant pearls in the type of:
>Temp workaround because X
>Workaround for race condition
>Clean that up
>Obsolete

When i return home i will post real quotes. They might be amusing to read...

The game is based on a custom C++ engine. HTML, CSS and JS is used for main menu and some graphical interface in game.

The most amusing thing is that this inefficient sack of chicken shit is powering one of the biggest (no playerbase but unit, world, gameplay vise) rts that i have ever played.

But still in spite of a dead community, buggy gui as shit and other problems i love this game and a lot of other people love it too. It is a great game when it works correctly.

To the interested: JS portion uses jquerry and knockout lib.

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

Arg!

Revenue from ads going downhill and I can't release a new version of a game because it's tied to an event, and I can't even announce it yet.

Sent a proposal for a government grant. Deadline was Aug. 15th, but still no word on it - they didn't even updated the website, which by all means, still have the "send proposal" button active...

Meanwhile also developing another game, but I can't seem to decide on the music and sound fx for it. Can't find some style that will "fit".

Oh the joys of gamedev. :P

Playing at bomberman with my son, a PC game of 1991, has no value.

Building games for people to whom the expression "game design" evaluates to "game UI design", which a fancier way to say "a bunch of static slides with arbitrary screenshots"

Today I found out that my favorite indie game, CrossCode was built using ImpactJS, a javascript/html5 canvas based game engine/library/framework/tumamaencuerada and I was fascinated by it.

The game is absolutely beautiful, plays and works great, badass story mode and combat design. all powered by web tech. I am honestly amazed, I was always under the impression that something like Unity was used to build it.

Gives a bit of hope

Me and a friend starting to program a game in Unity, he's worried and I think we will ace it! How f***ed are we? (5 years of website development experience each)

Its been so long since I had a weekend in which I wanted to be productive and also was as productive as I wanted to.

This weekend everything turned around. Last week I learned to use blender to make basic models while I was traveling to and from work.
Today I was really productive and started working on my VR wooden toy block building game.

I now have an infinite blocks box, with randomly colored blocks which you can color yourself as well.
Gonna do performance and textures tomorrow.

Cant wait until Ive finally made a playable game, its been 4 years now.

Hey devrant!, I'm currently developing a hacker game! herer is a little sneak peak all the graphics are temp will be changed as soon as i get some cash! enjoy!

Just a small discussion topic, if you could look through the source code ad have full access to 1 project/application/game/moon base forever, what would you choose and why?

For me, I would love to go through the source code for the game Hyper Light Drifter, would love to see some of the inner workings and just learn new methods of doing things.

I think one of the hardest part while making an RPG game is setting the prices of the shop items and determining the rewards you get from quests.
Really struggling right now...

Suddenly remembering that you're in a two week game jam and you've only got 3 days to put something together!

Ok, so, serious question.
How the frick do you time a music game properly?
IN C#?

...Ok, maybe in C# it's just impossible, isn't it? Because I've done a metronome, it kinda works, but it's... wobbly... Because the thread stops every time the music effect is being played.
And also how do you make the notes...? ...I should design an entire editor for charts/maps, I guess, but how do I make that in C#?

So maybe I should try in Unity?
What do you think? I want to make a music game so bad ;–;

Hey fellow devs, my friend showed me this Godot game engine. Ive spent 15hrs over the weekend building strategy game client which consumes my api server. Ive done a lot! It was easy to understand custom Gdscript which is okay. But before i dig in, i want to know what you guys think about this game engine? Is it going somewhere? Is it good option for indie games? Is it good option for building android/ios games? I need to make my mind 🤔

Don’t have much to do right before Xmas, so I started learning game theory. Jeez, it’s so easy to create dictatorship in voting🤔

I was trying to build a simple 2D (drag the fish to eat other fish) game in JavaScript, cause why not there are already many libraries i will certainly find one for my use.

I'm already familiar with p5.js thanks to Daniel Shiffman and his coding train sessions.

I thought to build the game with p5.js with the play and 2Dcollide libraries, but it turns out they don't have a custom irregular sprite collision detection neither the other thousands libraries which are rotting on github.

Guess, I need to build somethig own my own.

And I also hate it, cause I have to design those fishes, the main game logic, this collision detection function and levels

I need a coffee with a coding partner

The most fun I've ever had coding was creating a hidden object game in school (with Flash/ActionScript3). I even had a dude do voiceovers, it was dope! I would love to learn more gaming development but no time. :(

I had a brainfart and I can't google it, do you happen to know of a game that deals with inventory in the style of a stack (large, but you can only access the topmost few elements at any time)?

I lost the game. 🤷‍♂️

Can anyone please suggest me a good strategy game for android or desktop. A game which force me to think.

First time joined js13k competition, without concrete reason. Just wanted to try out am I able to use my JS knowledge and fit game into 13kB. And actually, I'm really happy with final shape of game. Did anyone else participated? :)

The fuck-game:

First I write fuck once, then someone answers that saying fuck twice, followed by either me or someone else saying fuck three times in the same comment.

Person 1
Fuck
Person 2
Fuck fuck
Person 1
Fuck fuck fuck
Person 3
Fuck fuck fuck fuck

The game goes on until someone accidentally types "duck" instead of duck. At that point, the world cries.

The good parts of being a game developer: watched E3 all week. Now back to work...

I want to get at least a skeleton made for this game I want to create. I've been putting off starting it for a whole year now.

Congratulations! You WON "The Game"!

Between android studio and Unity, which one si better to make a adventure text game? Why? (i'm learning, dont kill me please)

Okay, going to delve into the world of C game programming. I come from a JS/React background and wondering where to start. I did a C project back in uni so I know some foundations.

Idea is a 4x space game with simple 2d shapes representing ships, inspired by an old game I can't remember the name of (anybody?)

Firstly, I am thinking Allegro as the lib, it seems to be more maintained than SDL. Does that seem good? Though not sure where to start, or any tutorials for someone who is scratchy with C.

Any advice on how to structure my code?

I like the idea of entity component system, is that sensible?

Cheers for any help

!rant
I have a (imo) great idea for a small game, but I have no idea where to start or in what order I should work on certain features...
My programming skills themselves should suffice, I just have no idea what to begin with...
Does anyone here have any suggestions?

Unemployed Game Dev & Co.

Else Heart.Break() has anyone else played this if not. Strap on your modifiers and pick you up a copy because this game is full of spark.

What game engine would you recommend? I heard about Unity is a pretty good start?

It's more of a learning project than something I plan to actually use for anything, but after playing a few classic SNES-era RPGs, I started writing a simple turn-based battle system. I haven't worked on it in ages and would love to get back to it, maybe even turn it into a whole game some day.

Don't play the game, play the players. ;-P

You lost the game (again)

Anyone with game development experience? I'm thinking of doing a game development side project soon. Not expecting the best results, but games like cuphead, hollow knight and salt & sanctuary inspire me (2D platformers).

Will PyGame or LibGDX suit me fine or should I use a bigger engine like Unity or Unreal?

Given a competitive multiplayer simulator game where you can program your own flight computer, what programming model would you like it to support?

- in-game programming with a DSL which can have artificial resource limits to regulate the extent of automation and can maintain the atmosphere of the game in the process of programming

- in-process Webassembly executor which makes artificial resource limits feasible to the extent that people can't just throw image recognition and AI at every problem, but it loses the atmosphere

- API-based unrestricted remote control

Replayed Prototype 2 today. In about 7-8 hours.
It is about to be 4 am rn. My head is like replaying all the voices of the game + my vision is like if I am high :D
Like if I would have a ping of 999 lol

I'm looking for a game recommendation to play with my (non-gamer) dad
What I'm looking for:
- Android
- Online 1vs1
- Turn based (async)
- Simple
- Free
- Lightweight if possible (my dad's phone is kind of old).
Something like checkers or chess but not checkers or chess :)

hi guys.. anyone with game programming experience?
any suggestions to start?

A game lover and anticipator of No Man's Sky. It's the shittiest, most boring, most repetative game i ever played. the graphics sucks. the game assets suck...the game sucks. The apparent lack of variety and stuff you can do will piss you off. This is thr game which could have been one od the best but turned out to be worst.

Working on web VR game for mobile.

"It works on my direction"

Just startet game developing (unity) on the side ! A time sink, but holy cow is it fun ! Any game devs out there?
How long did it take to master and how did you get startet ?

I am making a html maze game 👀 like ... Bruh!

My first game jam,
I was first excited about coding but when I started, I was caring about making my code clean, and I lost too much time focusing on this... You should see the end, such a mess ! Spaghetti code, pointers everywhere but hey, it worked 😊

I wish gamedevs put more focus on the cheating problem in multiplayer games.

When you have to manually ban people in your esports minor qualifier there is something wrong...

I need to find a better game :(

Or start a cheat program company for the easy money but I doubt it's legal.

A music game.

happy rant 😄
just finished our group software project in uni (5 students, a way too complicated game) and just got the highest possible mark of all!!🤩🤩🤩
the project was focused on having a working, bug-free game, so yeah our game was UGLY AS FUCK😅 ... but 99% no bugs😎
best group in years😇
next chapter:
human-computer-interaction(is that the translation for Mensch-Computer-Interaktion?), we'll take our games and bitch about their usability and design😅
by the way i was responsible for the design/ux and did a kinda crap job because of too little time😐😅