"I won't need math to make games!"

When you watch hunger games and wonder how the database works

Dad is also a dev/architect. Mom barely knows how facebook works. So essentially she thinks I'm either playing games or working hard. Dad knows I'm just playing games.

Who knows that situation?

I’ve been inspired by programming many times, but a few early moments really stand out for me. Some of those most memorable early moments came when I developed Flash games with my friend in high school.

Growing up, at this point in time, around 2005, Flash games were really hot. All the kids in my school played games on addictinggames.com during any classes that took place in the computer lab, and when my friend and I started making games, it was our dream to get a game featured on addictinggames.com.

When one of our early games ended up getting featured, we were absolutely ecstatic and I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing our own work on this game website that we loved for years prior and that so manly people at our school used. It was the coolest thing and I think went a long way to encouraging me to continue to want to create things, after seeing the impact we were able to make with a simple game (as two high school students).

And I think that shows the beauty of the internet today and the power people with few resources have to get stuff out there. I think it’s maybe gotten harder as of late since there’s probably more competition, but I also think the audience is ever-growing and I hope many more people get to experience that awesome feeling of having something you worked hard on become popular.

Let the games begin !

Other people playing games: "Nice graphics!"
Me playing games: "Wonder how they did that shader..."

How to play video games on Mac

This made my day!!!!!

Saw this little games shop on the way home, game font fits perfectly :)

My five-year-old daughter asked me to program her Android tablet today.

Daughter: Daddy, can you make my tablet do something?

Me: What do you want to make it do?

Daughter: I want it to get games for me. I want it to pick games I like and get the different games so I can play them after I get home from school.

My daughter asked me to implement:

1. At the least, a predictive algorithm to choose new games for her based on her likes and dislikes.

2. At the most, an adaptive artificial intelligence that will learn what games she likes to play.

Current specifications are unclear. Need revision.

When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.

I look for a job cuz I want to buy games. Now I have a job I don't have time for games.

Wooohooo! I've finally bought myself an old school CRT TV. Now I can play my retro games like a human being.

Everyone else on discord be playing games, Me:

When a game says "Exit to Windows"...

Friend: "Wow! Is it a Raspberry PI?"
Me: "It's another version called Banana, but yes."
Friend: "I want one too for the games!"
Me: "OK, it's easy. There's a ROM called Retro ..."
Friend stare at me intensively
Me: "Sigh... Ok, I'll setup it for you..."

- "I wanna make games !"
- Bought a book about games and they stated about learning to code.
- learned to code
- never finished one single game :/

Dear EA games.
If you want to tell me my password needs to be “more” secure in your error message, at least tell the fucking truth about it.

- 100 random character password entered on mobile
- response: password needs to be more secure
- WTf!
- loads on pc
- notices password rules
- must be between 8 and 16 characters...
- I think that’s a Wii little Less secure you ass hats, and WHY can’t you show this fucking notice on mobile 😖

My company bought us a Xbox and few games for playing in free time... I am not going home this weekend...

Valve:
*makes good games*
*gets fame and money*
*sells other peoples games*
*announcing future games*
*stops making games*
*sells virtual items for a ridiculous high price*
*get sued for gambling in their games*
---
*getting criticized for not making games*
*people hope*
*devs and writers for their popular games leave*
*people loose hope*
---
*valve experimenting with VR*
*not making games for over 10 years*
*still calling themselves a game developer*
---
*valve buys successful indie game developer*
*valve claims they're making games again*

Give up.

Play games.

The irony

-I told a relative, that I worked with developing software/plugins
-Next time we met: How does it go with playing games?

... Oh well, here we go again.

Curse you Human Resource Machine and your structure programming with GOTOs and no indenting

To stop playing video games and finish the fucking project!

Do you also got any old game, that you're coming back to? Mine is Mafia

What did ms word tell excel?
Dude I don't wanna deal with your sheet right now.

*buys gaming pc*
*good games cease to exist*

Gaming on Linux:

Linux doesn't have many games..
Why? Because the market share is small.. But why is that? Because Linux doesn't have many games. FUCK

Guy i just met: So you are a programmer??

Me: Yaa, i known a few programming languages.

Guy: So can you like, make games and shit??

Me: ...

Just wow...

Unskippable credits in video games should be banned.

"STOP PLAYING VIDEO GAMES ALL DAY"

Mom can't distinguish between me writing GUI and playing video games 😅

Is it just me or has the quality of AAA games declined substantially? Feels like every “good” game nowadays is a remake of another one.

I miss the days I actually enjoyed playing games.

6 years of programming later...

I'm always wondering how did they make the game? Once I find out how, I lose interest in the game.

I spend more time reverse engineering/exploiting/modifying the Client of games than actually playing them, more out of curiosity than causing harm.

Am I evil? 😫

Been playing a lot of old NES games lately.
Made me think how did they develop and program such amazing games with primitive 80'-90's technologies, assembly/c and no internet.

Now with all the tech we have most games are crap and based on webshit or mobile.

In today's episode of dR Hunger Games...

Hours spent on playing games?

Today on forgotten games – Ballance.

The game is absolutely outstanding. Graphics is absolutely amazing even though the game was developed in 2004. The sound effects are perfect, I can literally feel the wooden ball rolling on steel rails. The background music is also amazing, we're talking Alexander Brandon level here.

The game is about rolling the ball through the levels trying not to fall off. There are three balls: the stone one, the wooden one and the paper one, different in weight, velocity and momentum.

I admire the clever level design. It uses in-game map features in multi-purpose way, for example some levels use ball transformers (the things that transform the ball from one kind to another) as a trap for your ball to lose momentum. It even seems like that levels were designed by some crazy modders for advanced players, but they weren't, and traveling through them feels like you're a pro gamer playing custom levels.

Even though levels seem simple at first glance, they allow non-linear gameplay and different gaming styles.

The gameplay itself is pure meditation. But even though the concept seem straightforward – just follow the level and don't fall – it's not. You have to use all three ball types: there are air vents to fly above upon, which only paper ball can do, there are obstacles to push, which only stone ball can do, and so on.

For additional sonic satisfaction the levels even feature some metal domes that serve no purpose but to be bumped into just for making amazing gong sound.

I like it that when you get cocky and think like that's easy, I got this, the game quickly puts you into place. It basically says nigga you ain't shit, you got nothing on me.

Overall it's basically a mesmerizing travel through cleverly designed levels surrounded by relaxing music and outstanding graphics.

Definitely a must-have for mechanical keyboard gamers, it's a pure satisfaction playing this game with a great level of precision and control mechanical keyboard allows.

Search for "ballance widescreen fix" for modern displays support.

Board games 🎲 🖤

Some people say they use dark themes because it looks cool, but we all know it's for when you're up late programming and don't want your eyes shot to pieces.

"outdoors".... I don't think I've played on that server before...

God of War comes out tomorrow.

Video Games are my passion, it's the reason I want to learn more about computers and technology. And each new major game title sparks new motivation.

What helps yall invigorated to improve?

Replace one word in movie, game or book title with word "code"

Windows 10 "update" just broke itself... I can't wait for game companies to start building more games for Linux so I don't have to spend my free time fixing my spywar... I mean operating system

Since I just bought a mystery bundle of steam games and received codes for games I already own.... and I'm in a good mood ☺️

I will drop the keys into the comments section for anyone who wants to take them.

Games:

- Star Wars - Knights of the old republic 2

- SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition

Leave a comment once you use the code 😏 don't be a dick!

Game Streaming is an absolute waste.

I'm glad to see that quite a lot of people are rightfully skeptical or downright opposed to it. But that didn't stop the major AAA game publishers announcing their own game streaming platforms at E3 this weekend, did it?

I fail to see any unique benefit that can't be solved with traditional hardware (either console or PC)

- Portability? The Nintendo Switch proved that dedicated consoles now have enough power to run great games both at home and on the go.

- Storage? You can get sizable microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays. So much so that the Switch went back to use flash-based cartridges!

- Library size/price? The problem is even though you're paying a low price for hundreds of games, you don't own them. If any of these companies shut down the platform, all that money you spent is wasted. Plus, this can be solved with backwards compatibility and one-time digital downloads.

- Performance on commodity hardware? This is about the only thing these streaming services have going for it. But unfortunately this only works when you have an Internet connection, so if you have crap Internet or drop off the network, you're screwed. And has it ever occurred to people that maybe playing Doom on your phone is a terrible UX experience and shouldn't be done because it wasn't designed for it?

I just don't get it. Hopefully this whole fad passes soon.

Now I know where my money was going.
:/

Just stumbled across this gem last night. You guys know how biggest online games site in my country (also backed up by largest ISP) handles reset password requests?

After clicking "Forgot password", it asks you to login to Gmail (cause everyone is assumed to have and use one, right?) and then opens "New Email" window prefilled with some template data which you're expected to finish (in screenshot below).

And I just wanted to play some Ludo with my friends.. 🙄🙈

I could play games, but to make games, all I had to do was see sharp 😂

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

I want a KVM switch for sata cables. That way I could switch between ssd’s without having the other visible.

Win10 could no longer randomly rewrite the boot loader(s) or wipe my Linux drive.

I’m not a fan of win10, and don’t currently have it installed, but might cave for a few rare games that I can’t get working via proton.

Biggest hurdle?
College and video games.
'nuf said.

RANT!
AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

BLOODY FUCK TURD BORN FROM THE BACTERIA OF YOUR MOTHER'S POOP, BRAINLESS WHORE
. JUST ONE SECOND OF YOUR NON EXISTENCE WILL CHANGE THE WORLD FOR ME.

Well this is what I would say to my brain deficient friends who think I don't have a life and sit at the computer all day playing GAMES and that I should get away from my computer and learn to PLAY with them in real life

BITCHES DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW IT IS TO WORK YOURSELF A LIVING, ALL THEY KNOW IS THROW MONEY AND GET THEIR DICKS SUCKED OFF. FUUUUUCCK!! AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE GAMES PART. ALL THESE PUNY FUCKS CAN DO IS TO POST POUT FACES FILLED WITH DOG FAECES AND CRY ABOUT THEIR LOST LIKES.

On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"

"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.

Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!

How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.

The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.

Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.

In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.

Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.

If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.

I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.

-Games (board games or video games)
-Coffee and other beverages
-Enough tech gadgets
But most important of all, love what you do.

When you earn your HOT new stickers from the DevRant team!

Who else enjoys playing Chess or other board games?

I love open source and all that fun stuff but I am very unimpressed by having to use GNU/Linux based OS after the last fuck up... the lack of games, stuff that actually works, the almost constant need to compile something and the need to have DDG open at all times because something broke. I mean why the fuck do I need to install libcurl3:i386(for 32 bit programs and games) if there is already libcurl4 and why the actual fuck does it conflict?!... Why the fuck do I need to glue together and compile drivers for my printer?! And they only have "beta support" so like half of the functions that the printer would normally have... Why the fuck don't any games work? Witcher 2? Nope, you click launch and the launcher just closes itself. osu!lazor? Nope, the game will run but only as a process in the background, no window will open no matter what I do. StarCraft: Brood War? Nope, Wine hates the battle.net client and running it in a VM is a really bad idea, the game flickers like crazy... Any other games? Pretty much out of luck... I would really like to play KCD but I doubt it would be playable...

Playing videogames!

Mostly indie games these days, since I have hundreds of them in my Steam library and haven't played most of them. Last week I tried Factorio and now I'm obsessed with it.

So I got my first computer with all those games, and as I was exploring those games' files I found those HTML-based help files and FAQs for those games, it looked just like the Internet to me with all the links and what not. Especially that I didn't have Internet access at the time. So I wanted to build "my own Internet". Therefore I started hacking on those files by looking into their source code. And that was the very first time I learn to code. Learning HTML.
The video games on that computer were cool tho :3

Hookers, cocaine and video games

Why the hell do so many Android games require internet? I want to play it in undergound when I have nothing better to do! If I had Internet I could be doing something usefull instead of playing stupid games! Even devRant survives by caching in the stations and doesn't f***ing close whenever I'm offline!

I played Witcher 3 for straight 12 hours 😎

Star Citizen.
I have never ever been so excited about a game. It is like a childhood dream coming true.

Engine for console text games.

Friend: So, are you studying computer engineering?
Me: Yes
Friend: Woow cool, and do you make also games?
Me: Not now, there will be a separated module...
Friend: Awasome, if you will frequent that module, can you make for me an economic version of GTA but with a better interface and in little time?
Me: Fuuu...... 😑😑😑

Me : I like making games,I think I will take that as my career.

Dad : *like every generic Indian Parent* Games are waste of time, use your skills to make something productive !

The only reason I ever switched to windows 10 was because I only use it for gaming and because DX12 would only get support for win10.

Then I realized: DX12 has been out for almost 3 years and there's only about 30 games that support it. There's only a handful of games that require it (which are of course Microsoft games I'm never going to play). I did some research and apparently most games even perform worse when running in DX12 mode.

I have been using win10 against my will this whole time now... 🤦🏼‍♂️

That one place i worked at where they made me use windows and after i played with one of the built in games, they told me to not play games at work, just browse facebook instead.

Looks like Steam is launching a beta of a modified version of Wine, so windows games can be played on Linux too.

I'm seriously considering going back to Ubuntu now.

Encourage public schools promoting videos games as a sport.... Hm....

This can't be a good idea... I'm not paying taxes to let (other people's) kids play video games and goto esports competitions...

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

When even IT starts invading your video games

So my girlfriend was Gavin wifi problems and she calls me to fix it with vague description of what's happening (not even enough to google).
"But I'm a programmer?"
"And?"
"That's networking, they're quite different"
"It's computer stuff it can't be that different"

Steam Summer Sale!!!! What should I get? 🤔

Okay, bring me your mobile games that you never get tired of 📱

It's interesting that AAA games are becoming analogous to pop music, as they relate to the medium of which they are part. E3 is just a bunch of trailers for rushed sequels to existing, played-out franchises. The big price tags are almost universally not worth it, as these games typically release with major bugs, and often rely on grind-enforced microtransactions.

Meanwhile, indie games keep getting better, more innovative, and remain reasonably priced. Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Rockstar, and the rest of the big-budget studios can eat my ass.

Love Making Games

Going on a school camp where all the students in the school go.
2 nights and 3 days, planning to bring my laptop and my phone to make games there. (poor 15yo)

Any ideas not to be seen to the teachers? My loyal friends wont tell it because i promised to bring some old android devices for them to play games.

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:

Things common people do while in the toilet:
Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Games, etc...
Things I do while in the toilet:
DevRant

Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??

It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.

Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.

All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.

Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.

Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.

If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.

Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.

Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!

Good job

Whats your favorite game for relaxing and having fun?
Mine is osu!

Laptop broke.

Some personal game projects were lost.

Am I the only one that enjoys cyberpunk 2077 on PC so far?
None of the bugs that I encountered are game breaking or annoying that much.

TL;DR My parents should have known that I was made for computers
Note: I am pretty young. Most of you were probably at least as old as I am now when it happened.
My parents told me about the first time I used a PC. They left me and my older siblings home alone with a movie on and returned later than they wanted to. We were still watching the movie, and when they asked how that was possible we told them that I restarted the DVD twice. I had never touched a computer before.

The first thing I actually remember is me playing Age of Empires II on a PC our family got for free somewhere. Although AoE3 was already out by that time, it ran slow af, but it was the most fun I had in my life up to that point. I was and still am pretty bad in both AoE3 and AoE2, but that was the first step into my preference for RTS games.

Notch.

Not even specifically for minecraft but for the live streams he did for the ludum dares, how he made up games from nothing just inspires me big time.

2d games were and will always be better than 3d games

!dev

Well fuck you Epic Games and Deep Silver!
I was really interested in getting Metro Exodus, but I'm not gonna install that shitty Epic Store!
Fuck off!

Builds software and games for companies for money.
Pirates software and games for own use.

My dad got us a a home computer on ~1995 without video games. But he brought a software where we can program our own games. So, we learn programming.

I fucking love and hate video games

There’s no reason to keep using Windows. Don’t buy games that don’t offer a Linux version. Don’t take jobs that require you use Windows. Eventually as people refuse, businesses will follow or lose out 😁😁😁

Great, they broke it...
Good job Rockstar games

Playing 'old' Flash Player games is my new hobby, I think. Also I suggest "Fancy Pants Adventures" to ones that still play Flash games or like some nostalgia.

Respect to Flash developers, you guys are awesome.

Full HD wallpaper
"Black Kite severely slices KiKi with a sword"

I'm working on a video for dR Hunger Games 3. It takes a heck of time, since I'm learning more video editing techniques. Meanwhile, have this ;)

What games do you play?

GAMES AND THOSE LANGUAGES🤣🤣🤣

Coding is essentially problem solving with almost immediate feedback. Video games are also problem solving with almost immediate feedback.

That's probably why most Coders love video games. That and the fact that most people love video games anyway.

Today on forgotten games – Vangers.

Even though the game is extremely hard and very, very frustrating, it somehow has an ability to make you obsessed with it. A very complex pieces of information, either carefully crafted or accidentally emerged from the void, delivered straight to your brain, making you an addict. If you play it and not delete it after five minutes, there is no way back – you better get used to new, different you.

There are many hard but addictive games based on simple mechanics, but Vangers is a different story. Compared to Vangers, Dark Souls seems nice, simple and easy casual game.

One can easily imagine "the hardest game possible", but all of them simply makes you delete the game and not to play it at all. Vangers precisely balance over this, achieving a very fragile equilibrium, being hard enough to frustrate you like no other game does, but not hard enough to simply make you quit instantly. While doing so, the game makes you a junkie, addicted to its eerie psychedelic nature.

This game spits in your face. This game makes you a slave, a desperate addict. All of your previous gaming skill, and speedrun experience doesn't matter.

The plot roughly goes like this: humans fucked up while experimenting with portals and accidentally discovered an advanced hivemind race. Trying to escape they fuck up spacetime and the two incompatible civilizations annihilate each other, creating a primal soup of creatures, from which the whole new world emerges. So there are many different strange creatures trying to survive in fucked spacetime where incompatible worlds are forcefully fused together, and you are the Vanger, one of many other Vangers trying to figure out what they are and how they was created.

The game features a voxel, fully-destructible world mapped on a torus. The game lore and terminology are extremely complex, and no one will explain it to you, you have to figure everything out yourself. Skip the dialog and no one will repeat it, you're on your own now.

Every playthrough is different. There are very many game mechanics and play styles available.

Everything in the game including complex rendering engine was written in C and Assembler back in 1998.

There are two types of Vangers players: the ones who was able to escape early and the ones who think that Vangers is the best game of all time. This says it all.

Last warning – DON'T PLAY THIS GAME. You better watch some playthrough on youtube.

To be motivated enough after work (and not play games) to finally start developing some games and maybe release a game that someone enjoys....
This is going to take a while :/

Best part of the holidays for me has been the steam sales. I grabbed "TIL-100" and "Infinifactory". Both of them are wonderful logic games, and til-100 has you programming in assembly. It's the most challenging yet fun way I've ever programed!

You know you could buy any game whenever you want but they are just way too expensive...

But now you got a paysafecard for christmas... now you have to buy a game... I mean... the money was dedicated for games... it would be wrong not to buy a game...

BEST PRESENT EVER

Sitting in front of the computer playing games

When you are developer and love video games,in your day making a balance between them is very difficult

Epic games got big balls

I've never installed games on my phone (except one or two for testing, from the beginning of my use on phone)

But Google keeps fucking suggesting Games every single time I open Google Play.
And no, it's not just one or two suggestions, it's the all fuckening screen full of games..

I'm not fan of games.. good work google and AI and alll stuff

There's this online game I like to play, basically you can play against 2 or 3 other people / robots. It's been free to play for almost a decade, but recently they decided to limit how many games you can play each day, unless you buy membership. It's not much, about 2€ per month, so I bought it to support the devs, they're doing good work and they're not spamming players with ads, so they need to get money for those servers somewhere.

But now I kinda regret it; there used to be a whole lot of casual players online all the time, now casual players reach their daily limit and when I log on in the evening, there are almost exclusively paying members left, giving you absolute shit for the tiniest mistakes.

On a completely unrelated note, what casual / relaxing multiplayer games would you recommend that don't require too much thinking & long-term skills?

Those days...

Why do game studios force social/multiplayer in single player games?
Single player sandbox? How about we make it a multiplayer co-op?
Just fine 1 on 1 brawl? Hey how about you find a team and tag team? No? Too bad fuck you, no points to you for a whole fucking season.

Ugh.

They think I play too many games as a dev, in reality I play games when I don’t dev and am bored. However, even programming is a game somehow. Oh well, I still love every one of my projects.

a lot of people claim video games cause violence. imo they do.

a lot of the arguments try to prove that because the majority of video game players aren't shooters isn't valid in my opinion, because, in tjis situation, even if 99.99% of gamers with access to a gun don't have a mads shooting, the 0.01% is enough.

add in a loneliness, a bad childhood, mental health issues, and being in a bad place at the time, i think it's possible.

now don't get me wrong - i don't believe video games should be banned or something, i'm just saying i believe it's feasible that video games could be a contributing factor in a mass shooter's choice to do unspeakable actions.

do you guys think i'm being naive or logical ?

For me it has got to be Retroarch/Libretro (or as I've taken to call it etc.).

Retoarch is a frontend for Libretro which is an API that emulator developers can use so that I as the user don't have to worry about configuring each emulator (and some other stuff).
It's a godsend piece of software that makes it possible for someone like me to really just enjoy my (but but expanding) library of old games (that I can only dream of playing on original hardware)
Also, it's multiplatform!

I also tagged it as wk119 since this is my school setup

"great! now you wont stop playing games!" - Dad

Bringing up the classic legend...
My parents think that I'm just playing games on my laptop all day long. :D Well... I'm almost the complete opposite. I barely play games tbh.

!rant
PSA: If you haven't already, check out humblebundle.com/freedom sometime in the next week. About 50 AMAZING games and books (Some notable games including subnautica, stardew valley, stanly parable, super meatboy, and a bunch of other awesome stuff), and books including books on R programming, and stuff by cory doctrow.

The best part?

It's a pay what you want, starting at $30, and 100% of the proceeds go to charity, and you can adjust how much go to which charities. IKR?

I'm in no way affiliated with humble bundle, but I've been recommending it to everyone I know. Super psyched to play everything.

Am i a bad person for getting most of the games i played on pc pirated 🧐

Play games all day long until you miss your work.

Our game project. I wish school wasn't as tough, League not as time consuming.. ^^

I dont have a startup yet but in the future I would love to have a game development company where we make inhouse games, but also make educational games for customers.

Dog enemies in games 🤬

Don't let Epic Games fight alone. Voice your support!

Playing a lot of Forged Alliance Forever lately.

so many ways to play, Offense, Defense, Turtle.
It has an early, mid, end game.. and even game Enders.

Perfect RTS for constantly thinking about ways to defeat your opponents.

Anyone?

I play video games...

Should I start Playing Factorio?

TLDR; WINE+me=system binaries gone. (HOWTHEFUCKDIDIDOTHAT) Kernel panic. Core program files gone. I'll never have it fixed right. Will backup, then install fedora tomorrow.

I really like games and I'm sure there are many of you who can relate. Imagine my perpetual pain, being on the job hunt, no money, and only my Linux laptop for games. (It's only Linux because of a stupid accident and a missing windows installation disk, partly explained in a previous rant). My stack of games my dad and I have played over the years, going back to populous and before, looked light enough for my laptop to run them smoothly. I wanted to see if I could get one to work. My eyes settled on simcity 4 and Sid Meier's railroad tycoon, 13 and 10 years old, respectively. Simcity didn't work as many times as I tried following online instructions. Disk 1 went fine. Disk 2 showed up as Disk 1. Didn't think much of it, so long as the computer could read the contents. I downloaded playonlinux as that could apparently do the complex stuff for me. Didn't work. I gave up with it after an hour and a half.

Next was railroads. Put the disk in aaaand it says SimCity disk 1 is in the tray. Fuck right off, thank you very much. Eject, put back, reject, eject, fiddle in wineconfig, eject, more of this, and voilà it read as railroads :) Ran autoplay.exe with wine, followed instructions, installed it, and it worked! Chose single player, then the map and setting, pressed play, and all the models of the buildings and track were floating in the air over a green plane, the UI is weird and the map doesn't represent anything but trains. All the fkin land is gone, laying track is gonna be a ballache.

I quit it and decided bedtime.
Ctrl+alt+t
sudo shutdown -h now
shutdown not found.
sudo reboot
reboot not found
Que?
Nope, I don't like this.
Force choked my laptop by the power button. Turned it on again.
Lines of text appear.
Saw a phrase I've only ever seen on Mr Robot.
Kernel panic.
Nooooo thanks, not today, this is fiction.
I turned it off and on. Same thing. I read the logs and some init files couldn't be found. I got the memory stick I used to install mint in the first place and booted from that. I checked the difference between my stick's bin and sbin and the laptop's, and it was indeed missing binaries. Fuck knows what else has happened, I only wanted to play games but now I don't know what is or isn't in my computer. How can I trust what's on it now?
I go downstairs and tell my dad. He says something about rpm, but this is Linux so it won't work. I learn that binaries can be copied over, so maybe I can fix it.
Go upstairs again, decide not to fix it. Fedora is light, has a good rep for security, and is even more difficult to get games on, which is my vice. There are more reasons, but the overriding one is that I'm spooked by the fact that something I did went into and removed system binaries, maybe even altered others, so I want something I'm less likely to do that with. Also my fellow cs students used to hate on it but my dad uses and recommended it so I want to try it.

Also, seriously, fuck wine/PlayOnLinux/my inability to follow instructions(?)/whatever demons haunt me. Take your pick, at least one if not more is to blame and I can't tell which, but it's prooooobably the third one.

It's going to be 16 hours before I touch my laptop again, comments before I backup then install fedora are welcome, especially if they persuade me to do differently.

P.S thanks for reading this mind dump of a post, I'm writing while it's fresh but I'm tired AF.

The Apple TV 4K is a Wii with worse games.

Meeeeh I playing TESO one more time and I'm in a vacation week but I have some side projects. I'm so hesitating on what to do today aaaah

Side projects vs Video games.
My eternal dilemma

Fucking EA Games and their fucking shit mailing system!!
All the sudden they start spamming me emails about their shit games nobody fucking cares about. I proceed to inspect the footer to find an 'unsubscribe' link and there was none, just a 'manage my preferences' link.
So I went there. After waiting a whole minute for a simple page to load (wtf) there is a checkbox saying 'yes please spam my inbox with EA's latest news about their shit games nobody cares about' and it was UNCHECKED.
So I leave it unchecked and click update (thinking it might actually unsubscribe me from this crap) BUT NO! I receive another email saying 'thank you, you stupid moron you just subscribed to our shit and will now receive even more of our useless email about how different the new NFS is and how rubbish the new Star wars game is...
FUCK

So I bought 2 dvd packed with old rpg games.

I didn’t know my first quest will be to get those games working.

To make my life more miserable I decided to convert those dvd to iso.

First I needed to find computer with dvd because those I use apparently don’t have dvd anymore.

Found one with windows 7 inside.
Yeah first mission complete.

Now just find dvd to iso software and burn those bastards.

I need to update date / time to be able to use internet over https.
Checked.

Started looking for the dvd to iso software. Microsoft answers giving links to bloatware with detailed instructions how to install desired things without crap. The link to download doesn’t work but at least I have the name ImgBurn.
They have website so I click on first mirror and run setup.
First fail they’re linking to bloatware that downloads another bloatware that installs some search plugin for firefox.
Uninstalling search plugin.
1 hour passed by.
Clicking last link. Success.
Now time to click it smart to omit any unwanted software and get only what I want. Reading trough install instructions and checking out not wanted checkboxes is like great quest.
Finally I have what I want and I can backup my dvd.
What a great evening.

Not Another Gaming Rant!

In gaming, the keyboard and mouse is far superior to a console controller.

So much so it's almost like cheating, gamers are beginning to notice this on the X-Box where traditionally all players in a game would only use a controller.

Now that console players are up against mouse and keyboard players they are out matched and out maneuvered, a great example of this can be seen in live multiplayer Call of Duty games such as Infinite Warfare where the keyboard warrior will spend more time in the air effortlessly jumping from wall to wall gaining an advantage over their opponent.

Multiplayer games should always be evenly matched providing players the ability to compare their level of skill in a competition on a level playing field.

I love when games don't change their mechanics much between installments. That way, when I play later installments and feel like going back to the previous ones, I don't feel so out of touch due to being used to newer features.

The nostalgic feeling you get when you find an old PC running Windows XP, and you start going through the accessories and games start menu folders, always have to start up the good old MS Paint :3

Games which have a save point or checkpoint system: FUCK YOU!

This is a technical limitation that was present in game consoles in the 90s.

There is no fucking need to implement save points in games made today!

It serves no purpose other than to generate frustration for the player and make the player redo the same section of the game again and again when he fails.
Oh how much fun it is to repeat 20 minutes of tedious shit as a punishment because I fell into your cheap trap and died!

And even if I don‘t fail, I want to be able to stop the game at any time and continue later where I left off. Is that too much to ask?

I don‘t want to be forced to progress in the game until you decide that NOW, after 20 minutes is the time that I am allowed to quit playing.

This is a fucking design decision. Don’t make your design suck to imitate the games from the past that did it for technical reasons!

I've been a long time Windows user, worked with Linux a lot while working on servers.

Installed Linux Mint on laptop. Fell in love. Can't switch because I like to game in my free time and my favorite games are Windows only :/

I‘m curious what you guys think about puzzle games with timers.

I personally hate it to be pressured by the timer. And I hate it when the puzzle resets and I need to start from scratch because I ran out of time.
I prefer to take my time and think about the next move rather than rapid fire my moves by intuition and hoping to get lucky.

Yet so many puzzle games have timers. Is this just lazy design? Do you like timers? What do you think about this?

Microsoft you asshole. Why do I have to see an unskipable 30-second ad in your games on Android? Aren't you guys billionaires already to generate ad revenue from Google?

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.

Ive been thinking for a few now that if like to begin a social program to get old people to play computer games.

They are often bored as fuck， cant move much and have no mental challenges.

I mean what else than video games could save the day?

Old homes with puzzles and missing pieces. Dementia neighbours. Ots a no brainer!

Is there anyone who used to Play bit Games like BM, Alladin, Prince of Persia (The Old One), Mario, etc... And still would love to play those versions only, fuck the good graphics, those were awesome games

I used to watch my brother code in Turbo C++, creating console games and doing university assignments. Writing something on the computer which transformed into something animated was such a wonderful revelation to me and that's when I started to learn bits and pieces of programming. Now, I'm a fill stack developer :)

I want to remake hunger games.
But its just that last 2nd or 3rd scene where catpiss everclear is ugly crying and neurotically yelling at her sisters cat, for like two hours straight.

RIP Finnick. The only good character. Otherwise it would have been a completely unwatchable series of movies.

Sometimes I wake up and just choose violence. Fight me.

Was going to work on learning more about creating APIs in ASP. Net core today. Instead playing video games with my son. Much more fun!

Any development on a complex software is like playing Jenga. You make your changes and hope it won't break down the whole structure.

Playing video games on my PS1 when I was a kid inspired me to explore programming 😎

When I learned how Gameshark works I was blown away!

To work in a music/rhythm games company (preferably indie), or one that produces stuff related to music.
I would like to lead a company like that! 😍
One can dream...

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?

My biggest dev ambition:

Coding my own games.

Destroyed competition! The free games seems very appealing 🤔

!rant

I got two comps,
One for the games and one for the code

What are your favorite small but nice indie games?

Mobile fucking games.. --"

When I want to work out a sweat, I play video games.

Any good games for Android?
I have a mate 9 and almost never game because I never found any good games.

Seriously, can we just all agree and fuck Epic Games? And also their shitty EAC. RIP Rocket League on Linux. What's next? Oh wait...there is almost nothing left...

The best thing how they act like their retarded Store is better than Steam. You can suck my dick idiots.

Playing Video Games and Watching Anime. I’m a huge fan of RPGs, and strategy games.

Im thinking of posting/recomending games here on devrant, the kind if games i'll be posting are mostly; indie games, low spec games, and games that'll get you hooked on for days.

What do you guys think?
Go easy on me.

When you first start programming:
"I know how all of these functions work, now what can I actually use that for?.."

idk how, but any games we play at work turn into the freaking hunger games, everyone is too serious lol

Have you ever given up debugging and just thought "my code is perfect, it must be the computer messing it up"

I used to write games on my parents old zx spectrum. I never did end up going into the games industry, but it taught me BASIC and later C++

!rant
Good terminal games beside nethack?

Did you guys play Detroit: Become Human? It's amazing!

when you've been struggling for years to learn how to program to make games but find out everything you've learned is a drag and drop feature

Everyone: *circle jerking over cyberpunk 2077 and Red dead redemption 2*

Me: yeah looks cool but I think it'd be more interesting to build a modern operating system in pure unadulterated ASM...

Am I the only one not getting hyped over those games and just brain-dead or is anyone else in the same boat?

Hi webdev here, who would like to start developing 2d indie games. My main language is JavaScript. Is there any way I could start developing games without learning a whole new language?

I bought a $1 Steam game called Square Brawl some 5 years ago. It's a minimalistic arena battle with forgiving physics, diverse and satisfying weapons and a geometric design based on squares.

It's among my favourite couch multiplayer games, but the programming is shit. The resolution is weird, the launcher is some default config screen that came with the game engine, with a controller it's tricky to avoid picking a second color by accident which spawns a ghost player that is jointly controlled by the AI and the player. Sometimes the game spawns 10 copies of everyone, all of which you control at the same time. Getting stuck inside walls is commonplace.

On an unrelated note, I'm making a minimalistic arena battle with forgiving physics, diverse and satisfying weapons and a geometric design based on squares. It's gonna be FOSS and web-based. I haven't settled on a name yet but I think Tetragon Tussle might be good.