Rune Skovbo Johansen

Fortress

After switching to a huge lazily-generated map, the villagers' ability to dig/fill the terrain was broken, and I finally fixed it! It updates terrain chunks on all LODs, so that large-scale actions are seen from far away.

#indiedev #indiegames #gamedev

YouTube video by owen reiser LISTERS: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching

Unexpectedly good movie about competitive bird watching.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-w...

Help guys, is this a shadow bias issue or a z-fighting issue? There's also some weird bug with the day-night cycle lighting.

Nice fit for the game’s art style

My hair is a staircase
your argument is invalid

This too is just to get the Steam algorithm going. Beyond that, sales success will depend entirely on the degree of interest from people who Steam suggests your game to. The higher click and buy rates, the more Steam will suggest it to even more people.

The streamers etc. will hopefully get the word out much wider than you can yourself. Percent-wise, fewer of their fans will buy the game compared to your own fans, but there's a lot *more* of those other fans. They just have less attention span around your game, so timing is important.

The hardcore fans can help you with things like buying the game immediately upon release, and leaving reviews quickly too. This is important on Steam in order to "kickstart" the algorithm out of obscurity. Getting 10 reviews in a day or two and ideally 50 reviews in less than a week is preferable.

If you have a publisher, you can probably ask them for advise and maybe even support. It's in their interest that your game does well, so it's a win-win for them to help you with their expertise and insight.

The other is reaching a larger audience. This is something you do by reaching out to streamers, YouTubers, and journalists, but only when the game is far along; for example when you have a representative demo at Steam NextFest and prior to full release.

From my understanding there's two somewhat separate parts.

One is building up a following of "hardcore fans" over time, who follow your game's development with interest, join your Discord server etc. Social media, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit can work for this.

Yeah it’s super annoying. Though I’ve had other Google settings that don’t even last a single browser session. They’ve gotten extremely bad at the bare basics.

A street bar with trees and vines in the background in a procedural city.

Found this cozy street bar.

#gamedev #indiegame #vr

Ah just saw the alt text, vines indeed! That’s a cool direction. I’m curious to see the building with vines in more detail (and less obscured). :)

It doesn’t pay for itself. The communication around this initiative has unfortunately been very misleading. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, but it *is* a large expense that’s “competing” with other expenses in the state budget. bsky.app/profile/rune...

Wow, I did not recognize this as being Vuntra City at first. Does the building in the background have vines growing on it or something? A bit hard to see, but it looks nice either way!

Still sounds half way streamer friendly (just not snappy to make). The anti-streamer game must be some slow paced puzzle game with no sandbox / simulation / self expression mechanics at all. Hmm, like what I’m making.

I think the only way for people to be able to judge the degree of success of this program is to compare with the societal value gained per euro spent for *other* state services (health care, education, libraries, you name it); otherwise there's no actual context to be able to judge the number on.

It's not profitable in a fiscal sense at all; it's a large expense. When the reports say society got €1.39 back for every €1, it includes the well-being of the recipients expressed in terms of monetary value. See this post and replies to it:
bsky.app/profile/rune...

New smooth clouds timelapse from the ground 🥰

#indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #screenshotsaturday

Random thing to do: Make the gif/videos in the Steam page description match the new wider Steam page width.

couple days late but, happy 1 month birthday block game! what a difference a month of development makes

#EniBlockGame #GameDev #ProcGen #PixelArt 🎮

When I say quality of life features, I don’t mean functions (those can always be added). I mean site functionality like exposing shader variables to be manipulated with sliders or animated in UI with keyframes. That would make Shadertoy a vastly more powerful tool for presentation.

I thought they didn’t embed on Discord? People use third party services to make it work, eg. Replacing the y in bsky with x.

I had to get used to it too recently. Don’t feel the differences are huge though. In your first and last example, it’s just one character away from being valid (period after the numbers to indicate they’re floats). I’ve been pretty frustrated with other lack of quality of life features though.

Watched it on Nebula, it’s great! I’m a former usability focused developer at Unity (now indie game dev) and an Audacity user too. I found it very interesting as both a user and fellow UX
minded developer, and don’t really know of better videos out there to convey these topics to a broad audience.

Ah ok, I misread your first post. I guess it’s hard to blame it in your case then. But I have tons of games on Steam and the recommendations are still dominated by what’s popular with others.

If your taste is specific and not mainstream it’s very bad indeed, as a lot of the suggestions are just based on what’s popular, or what’s popular among your Steam friends.

GitHub - Raicuparta/static-bsky-feed: Host a custom Bluesky feed on GitHub pages or any other static file host Host a custom Bluesky feed on GitHub pages or any other static file host - Raicuparta/static-bsky-feed

Made this repo to show it's possible to host a Bluesky custom feed fully on GitHub for free. It should be easy to just fork this repo and modify for your own feed.