martin pichlmair

I cannot WAIT for more of you folks to get your hands on this. Watching it develop has been a treat. It's challenging in all the right places and makes you wanna play more and more.

FREE THE BIRBS.

Hello friends! Happy #TurnBasedThursday to all & especially to you @ichigoichiegames.bsky.social for hosting!!

It's an big week for us as we're launching our DEMO for SPARROW WARFARE tomorrow!

Birds, tiles, & freedom - what more could you want of a Friday?!
store.steampowered.com/app/3473440/...

I have an IMDB entry that confirms that I'm a stunt man.

Google him at your own risk, for his paintings are a delightful hippie fever dream of Boticelli and Bosch, which means they are as safe for work as the Sistine Chapel, work place of the pope.

My uncle's name is Robert Zeppel-Sperl and his wicked painting career is one of the main reasons why I knew I can become who I want and don't have to follow any established paths.

(Yes I've assumed the gender of a painted bird but he was a "him" and a person for me as a kid, so here we are)

This tile is based on a painting my uncle, a painter, gifted my mum, his sister, when I was born. I grew up with it hanging in my room and it's still my most cherished piece of art. That bird, with his miraculous stare, has puzzled and delighted me for my whole life.

Reading your 5 Ws makes me want to say "oida" after each of them.

Yes I just saw that too. I just keep forgetting the beginning of the sentence while reading...

Copenhagen has built a neon-lighted hipster zone over the last years with ramen, a craft beer bar, pizza, poke bowls, kebab, smoking corner, and overpriced coffee from a place called Coffee Lab or something (it's not filter coffee it's "drip coffee"). It's ... actually it's very nice ...

Play button of the video game Sparrow Warfare

In the days before a release I try to not touch anything too deep in the system. So I busied myself with button design instead and thanks to a lot of help from our playtesters and people on a nice Discord we are getting somewhere!

A segment of a shader that discards a processing if a value is below an arbitrary number

How to deal with rounding errors.

Only two more days until it's Sparrow Warfare demo o'clock!

This all sounds simple but in the heat of writing a good store description and/or when you make your first game as a student hardly anything is simple and the whole forest/tree situation is all-encompassing.

Analysis of the Steam description of Untitled Goose Game

To find the best game description in the history of video games stick to the formula requires squinting but it kind of still holds.

Analysis of the Steam description of Luftrausers

Another example is @vlambeer.com's chaotic description for Luftrausers that does get the vibe across though it is going entirely too far.

Analysis of the Steam description of Fall Guys

A good example of this is the Fall Guys description.

The hook line formula: (what) is (who/what) with (how) set in (where)

For teaching how to write succinct one line descriptions of games I developed a formula many years ago. It's not perfect but good for checking your taglines.

Also this is something @nifflas.bsky.social would totally do right?

don't think they have any tbh...

Love it. Wouldn't be surprised if it violates some guidelines but maybe sneak-in-able in a game?

Nice! Congrats!

If you are a streamer and want to join in, drop me a note – happy to give early access to the demo to anyone who wants to play the game with an audience!

Only 3 days until our demo launches. Just made an even better build. Time for us and our playtesters to give it a final spin. Crazy how far this game has come with only two developers.

Ah! Ok! And, yes, there's fun in the "being seen"-ness too!

Yes that's what I mean with teaching: showing what crazy stuff is possible!

Alamut (Bartol novel) - Wikipedia

Book recommendation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamut_...

My main gripe with achievements – apart from what they do to a codebase – is that they always communicate that the designer already thought about what you're doing. So sometimes I feel let down if I pull off something I think is genius and unique but the *ding* it was always planned...

The fourth secret purpose of achievements is of course easter eggs in hidden achievements but there is nothing to generalise from that.

The third kind are basically show-off achievements. It's nice to see how far your friends made it into the game and how they're doing that. This purpose can usually be served by the two others – except hidden achievements don't work for this, of course. Plus optional content completed.