Jouko

Threading the needle

#indiedev #gamedev

Save 30% on Super Pinball Adventure on Steam A colorful casual pinball game for all ages and skill levels. Delight in knocking out enemies, collecting coins and solving the puzzle of each level! A fun and quirky reimagining of a beloved arcade c...

Super Pinball Adventure is out now! ☄️

#indiegames #pinball

store.steampowered.com/app/3684910/...

Been pretty happy making a game in @rust-lang.org, but lately I've had frustrating debugging experiences with it in VS Code: breakpoints randomly stop working and when they do, it shows garbage values for local variables. Really trips you up when you can't be sure if it's the code or the tools.

Working on a better system for creating rocky terrain in Tiny Climber. It's starting to yield some interesting results, and I feel like I'm only starting to learn how to design for it.

A fellow game dev just released their demo. 🔥 Go check it out if you’re up for some quirky pinball madness!

Been experimenting with lighting in Tiny Climber. Somehow the shadows also call for more visual variety and richness. 🤔 This might be the completely wrong thing to focus on right now, but I probably can't help it! 😅

The level "terrain" is still edited as a PNG file in Photoshop. Maybe one day I'll make the terrain editable in my custom editor too, but for now, Photoshop works just fine and is actually pretty handy.

The level editor is implemented as a custom editor extension in VS Code. I run the game in a small window next to VS Code to see my edits live when I save the file. It currently only works on certain types of game entities like moving platforms, levers, containers etc.

I've been working on a level editor for Tiny Climber to allow doing some more complex level design. I made do pretty far with just a PNG file where different colors represented different level blocks, but stuff like levers and moving platforms can't be represented like that.

Super Pinball Adventure on Steam A colorful casual pinball game for all ages and skill levels. Delight in knocking out enemies, collecting coins and solving the puzzle of each level! A fun and quirky reimagining of a beloved arcade c...

⚠️ Looking for feedback on my Steam page:

Things I could improve
Things that suck
Things that work!

#indiegamedev #pinball #gamemarketing

store.steampowered.com/app/3684910/...

I'm turning Tiny Climber into some kind of mix between a precision platformer and metroidvania. I added some new elements like moving platforms and unlockables. This decision probably extended the development time by at least a year. 😬 jouko.itch.io/tiny-climber...

Save 15% on Without a Dawn on Steam Without a Dawn is a dark, psychological, and philosophical visual horror novel featuring hauntingly beautiful pseudo-ASCII art.

I've put all my heart and soul into this experience. I'm happy, nervous, and relieved to release my work finally. You can now purchase Without a Dawn on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3145620/...
Thank you for all the support! 💚💛
#indiegame #visualnovel #gamedev #steam

This looks so very, very cool.

☝️ Thanks @xordev.com for a great article on blurs that helped me get started!

GM Shaders: Blur Philosophy How to write a better blur shader

For the nerds interested: along the way, I implemented every kind of blur there is, starting from box blur, going through 2-pass gaussian blur and finally arriving at dual Kawase blur to make it performant enough with the kind of large blur radius that I wanted.

Spent the last week implementing a bloom filter to my game. Would've taken 5 minutes with Unity or some other sensible game dev stack rather than the fully custom Rust stack that I have. But I enjoyed every minute making it! 😁

Fun fact: I've made most sound effects to the game by tapping on various surfaces around the house. 😅

This was a productive game dev weekend: recorded footstep and ladder climbing sounds, composed a new background music and managed to tidy up the code too! jouko.itch.io/tiny-climber

Inspired by Animal Well, I have wild ideas of turning the game into a metroidvania. I've been a bit stuck for a while trying to extend the game as a precision platformer. Maybe the grappling hook mechanic would work better for exploration than precision platforming.

Screenshot of the mountain peak in Tiny Climber with a tree at the top and a bird sitting on it

Lately been adding some eye and ear candy to Tiny Climber. This scenery now opens up to you when you reach the peak of the mountain. Still don't know how the game should end. 🤔 jouko.itch.io/tiny-climber

The Balatro Timeline — LocalThunk It’s been approximately 3 years since I began work on Balatro - and in that time I have personally documented almost nothing about the journey. This is something that has bothered me since the game la...

I've had parts of this written down for a while - but I thought it was about time to document the detailed version of what happened during Balatro development

localthunk.com/blog/balatro...

I've started a public discord server for Helsinki-based indie (and aspiring!) game devs

discord.gg/XU7GVEfe

#helsinki #gamedev #indie

Made the swoosh sound with Oscillot modular synth. 🤓

Working on a boost mechanic for my game. Feels pretty nice already, but needs more juice!

Now, here on Bluesky, I'm slowly and carefully letting myself engage again, but I'm constantly being wary and expecting everything to turn to shit again.

I remember how long time ago, liking or reposting on social media felt like a good and harmless thing to do. Then social media turned into a weird shit show and I became cynical about it and stopped engaging entirely.

Tower Wizard by Barribob Construct the mightiest wizard tower!

This little incremental game feels quite fun! Having not played incremental games before, I was confused at first, but then it sucked me in. barribob.itch.io/tower-wizard

This is great, I want in! I’m working on a little game all by myself and intend to keep at it for a long time.

If you want those itch.io views - start working on a horror game

tobaschco.itch.io/cheval

Oh hi @tcbasche.bsky.social you're on Bluesky too! 😂