Tom Brien

If you get sucked into the world of Star Trek, that's called a George Takei

This is such a good question, cos I've been googling game characters for 10 minutes who I remember looking cool, and each one has popped up looking like a scumbag, an idiot or a power ranger.

I just can't land on a good one!

Does Rami know who Phillip Schofield is?

Update on the rain: It's almost done!
#gameart #indiegames #devlog #gamedev

You're so right, that is crazy.

There's a place you can go to with no roads that go there. It flies by once a night and you can catch it, if you try very, very hard.

It's the only place you can 100%, assuredly, absolutely definitely be by all yourself.
But you can't get there alone.

Yeah I was considering putting this behind my local particle rain. I'll see if it works later

I have camera depth, world position and noise, so figured I could render some kind of screen-space rain in 3D.

Turns out it's really difficult to figure out. I guess I'll just use particles like a regular guy😢
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Wow, congrats to the devs, that performance is really cool!

I always thought "live-action" sounded like a very weird name for anything. It makes so much more sense for the opposite of "animated" to be "filmed", but here we are! On planet crazy!!!

How's my jungle environment? Does this look like a real game yet?
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The first game I think of from this description is Citizen Sleeper, but it is all decisions and no combat.

If you like survival horror though, you should probably play Dead Space.

Yeah I use wooden toothpicks.
It's also possible that a lot of USB cables in your house are broken

I loved this water shader I got on the asset store, but unfortunately it didn't understand lighting at all. So I finally got around to making my own!
No more weird, glowing night-water (which you can still see in the background)

Cool! I also have the issue of re-making the art 5 times over.
It's difficult to put a wall between pre-production and production, I really respect people who pull it off.

20 Second Trailer Challenge!
No dialogue no captions, PURE GAME ENERGY!!!!!

#devlog #indiegames #gamedev

Everybody splashes in water now!
(Please ignore that you can unlock purple nail polish, this is not a key feature for promotion)
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This all flies out the window if you're working on a forever game like Warframe or Genshin Impact. These games iron out their stopping points. They prioritise a different type of player, so they don't do credits.
And I think a lot of people play them until they dislike the game!

It's not bad gameplay! Some players just enjoy hunting every last item and some don't. So you need a bus-stop for anyone feeling drained to get off at. Especially if you're running a franchise with a new game every couple years and you need players to remember it fondly.

The 2nd reason is that you play every game differently every few hours. There's a way that you interact with Super Mario Oddyssey at hour 40 that isn't the same as hour 10. A lot of players will walk into that gameplay, and find it difficult, slow and exhausting.

Even if they rate the game a 7/10, they'll remember having beaten it, seeing a climax of action, and feeling invested when the sequel gets announced later.

The first reason is that everybody stops playing a game at some point. It leaves a better impression on most players to put down Pikmin 4 at a boss fight and credits, instead of halfway through some difficult puzzle that's only for sickos.

The Synthesizer is portable now, so you can make items out in the woods!
#gamedev #devlog #indiegames

Finalizing how climbing looks. This has been tough!

Next time I won't design a game where I ask the player to push their eyeballs right up against all the artwork.

#gamedev #indiegame #devlog

I'd dig into the patent stuff, but since it feels like running up to a dog and throwing a shoe at it, I'll just drop the whole thing.

I tried an item where you'd capture animals by throwing a ball at them.
To be honest it doesn't feel right at all. You don't need to pay attention to the animal and understand what it's doing, and it feels mean. I'm gonna take it out.

#indiegame #devlog #gamedev

Today I'm re-doing climbing controls.
They were really loose and dynamic before like a VR game. This was fun, but distractingly deep and demanding. The game isn't all about climbing, so now it's very straight-forward.

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Who is "we" in this message?? The secret gnomes that live inside it or what??

I finally got around to posing all the animals in the research menu. Looks a bit more exciting now!
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Is this a good looking jungle or am I way off?
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Amazing that we call these super ancient progenitors "grass hoppers". This really outs us as cavemen!