Why use automobiles when you could use a horse? Your equestrian friends think you are an elitist for driving a car. Stop cars, return to horse!
#horses #luddite #selfinterested #travel #anticar
Hello, all! I know I’m the last person using a Mac these days, and certainly the only Metal developer you’ll ever encounter, but I just released a new app to the Mac App Store for exactly that purpose! Introducing Pixel Forge, a shader playground for Metal shading language! If you are interested in digital art, learning to use Metal, or supporting indie devs like me, please check it out!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixel-forge/id6473090142
#gamedev #indiedev #macos #metal
Updated Radar, MiniMap, and Interaction range displays to improve navigation in
the space and provide more feedback when too far away from interactable objects.
I hope to have a new build with these changes in place soon. In the new year, I
intend to invite some excited players to try the alpha versions of Seeds of
Earth once some more of the features are implemented. If you are interested in
what that road-map looks like and may be interested in testing, please reply
here. Thanks!
#gamedev #indiedev #seedsofearth #gaming
blob:tauri://localhost/745c2006-8556-40cc-baa8-4a1cc417b2de
I've been learning the Defold game engine (and teaching it as I go) and I have
to say that I mostly like it. Godot gets most of the "small game engine"
attention, but Defold seems to be a very worthy competitor. I really like the
built-in messaging system and it provides a TON of flexibility while presenting
a simple concept. My biggest issues with it so far are poor drag-and-drop
support for the editor, and overall the bare-bones nature of the editor in
general. The Lua code completion in the editor is really good, but Lua is a bit
of an opaque language and finding the correct API to use and teaching the
concepts has been quite difficult and time-consuming. Defold has a lot of
promise, but I feel like it presents a higher-than-usual learning barrier and
the messaging concepts can lead to some seriously tangled runtime headaches.
Again, I'm still learning Defold, but I expect to use it for some small 2D
projects in the future to compare and contrast it to UE5, Godot, and of course
my own game engine, Clockwork.
#gamedev #indiedev #defold
I'm not sure Lua fits those requirements. You can probably restrict or remove its I/O abilities, but I don't think it's designed to be computation-budgeted (if I understand what that's supposed to mean). Lua uses a byte-code virtual machine with a very clean, simple C ABI interface (and C library bindings to go with it). Indeed, I would be so bold as to equate Lua to "C script": it's small, simple, and powerful. C focuses on global/static variables, functions, and arrays. Lua focuses on global variables, functions, and tables (Lua tables are really key-value maps). Lua seems to answer the question "what if we turned C into a scripting language that could be re-executed at runtime without recompiling to machine code?" And for that purpose, Lua is great. My gripes with Lua stem from its simplicity and lack of safeguards around certain patterns, very similar to C. For embedded systems, I don't think Lua is a good idea; for games and other "non-critical" software that needs to support quick development and iteration of code and ideas, it's a very solid choice.
I moved some satoshis to a Cake wallet for easier spending (no hardware needed). Now I’m getting and error that is preventing me from sending from that wallet. Super convenient. I understand why so many non-tech people see Bitcoin as a joke: when the tech works, it’s strange and obscure; when the tech doesn’t work, there’s nothing to do but shrug and wait… https://image.nostr.build/c4c29a682cb8c555ad1b69ee16cadee71a85eb8fc867b8245408cf9018a4ac35.jpg
After a bunch of iteration and mocks, here is a new preview of the Jump Carrier
scene in Seeds of Earth! In the Jump Carrier, Pilots can purchase Items for cryp
or antimatter, rearrange their Storage and Loadout, and Unlock more Items
through the Unlocks list. Still a TON up in the air as far as the game design
and the UI/UX flow, but it feels good to have some new progress to share.
#gamedev #indiedev #gaming #programming #seedsofearth
After some prototyping and more exploration, I was able to upgrade the Seeds of Earth project to Unreal 5.3 without needing a new project from scratch. Similarly I think I can more or less rebuild what I need in the current project. So no blank slate restart this time. Whew! I was excited but also worried, and I think this is the right choice.
#gamedev #indiedev #gaming #seedsofearth
I'm at a crossroads for Seeds of Earth: start a fresh Unreal project and move over the stuff I like from the old project, or stick with the current project and re-build things with all of my prior work immediately available. Both have merits. A fresh project allows me to change the organizational structure and remove 5+ years of cruft, prototypes, old assets, and whatnot. However, rebuilding/migrating the things I want to use is a non-trivial process and means that the game is now unplayable, and likely will remain so for weeks while this new start is under way.
It's not clear which approach is the best to take at this time. I have run into this issue more than a few times in my career and it's always a difficult one. In the past, the other engineers and managers would try to ban suggestions to "refactor" or "rebuild" systems because the desire to do so came up frequently, and often did not result in user-facing improvements. The CTO of Backflip once said "We don't make software, we make games. I don't care if the code is messy or unfriendly or old; as long as it delivers the intended experience to the player, we don't need to prioritize "fixing" the code." This is a sentiment I have carried with me ever since, especially since I am prone to falling into this desire to "update, reorganize, and improve" existing code often.
I am still in the process of prototyping and designing the new Seeds of Earth experience, so I have a short while to decide which of these approaches works best. But I can tell that the decision either way will not be an easy one.
#gamedev #gaming #indiedev #programming
Sorry, I didn't see this reply until I changed clients! Snort has been....unreliable at best. Can you send me a DM with more information about the Fedimint UI needs? Thanks!
Massive Material rework to allow for completely customizable fragment function parameters. Still need to fix/implement Material.Mutable with this new workflow.
#gamedev #gameenginedev #dev #development #swift
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