Obbe Vermeij

Obbe Vermeij

@obbevermeij.bsky.social

I make games. SpaceStationSV, War the Game (steam), Learnia, GuideApp and Plentiful (steam). Also: gta3, Vice, SA & IV

1,408 Followers 32 Following 88 Posts Joined Nov 2024
3 months ago
Preview
Plentiful on Steam Plentiful is a Human Terrarium — Sculpt the land, redirect rivers, and grow food as you nurture your tribe. Guide your people through a perilous Stone Age and protect them from nature’s whims.

Demo (& wishlist) on Steam:
store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...

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3 months ago
YouTube
Developer Plays Plentiful — Nature Sandbox & Water Simulation YouTube video by Obbe Vermeij

This is my very first 'developer plays' video for Plentiful. Apparently that's how you market games these days.

It has "Geek Builds World To Be Happy In" vibes but anyway...

Hope you like the game.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOVJ...

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5 months ago
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You could do worse than giving the 'Plentiful' demo a shot this weekend.
It's like a 90s god game but with modern world building, dynamic water & visuals.

Demo & wishlist on steam:
store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...

#Indiegame #Indiedev #godgame

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6 months ago

I don't remember why we chose not to affect driving. Yeah, it's a pill because certain drugs speed you up.

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8 months ago

Yes it was a blast.
We probably couldn't have gotten away with it. It was a little glitchy sometimes but still very impressive for a mod.

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8 months ago

I did hear about those but never played them. R*Leeds went and did their own thing and did it well.

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8 months ago

GTA4 is when we finally nailed it. 4 programmers and several level designers worked full-time.

We’d always envisioned a two-game strategy:
First: Basic multiplayer
Then: Online experience

Both North and NY had wanted to make this happen since the gta3 days.

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8 months ago

We pushed for multiplayer again in Vice City. Even hired a couple of network coders. But with tight deadlines, it was abandoned once more.

For San Andreas, we didn’t even try. It was the final PS2-era game — not worth the effort. We added local co-op instead. But yeah... not the same.

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8 months ago

…but we ran out of time. We needed lobbies, scripts working over network etc. We decided to cut the effort.
#ifdef GTA_NETWORK in the source code is a leftover.

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8 months ago

For GTA3, I prototyped a simple deathmatch. Players could kill each other, drag each other from cars, and respawn around the city. It was promising...

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8 months ago

In practice, this wasn’t always reliable. I remember a test match where everyone thought they'd won. Turns out all the games had drifted out of sync. This wasn’t how multiplayer would be built in the future.

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8 months ago
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GTA1 and 2 had LAN multiplayer. To save bandwidth, they only sent keypresses between machines — assuming the game state was 100% deterministic. That meant every game had to run in perfect sync, at the framerate of the slowest PC.

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9 months ago

Wishlist & Demo:
store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...

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9 months ago
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Hey #PitchYaGame,

Plentiful is a wholesome nature sim.

- Shape the landscape by stacking stones.
- Capture water in lakes and ponds.
- Grow fruit and vegetables to feed your people.
- Chill

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10 months ago
Preview
Plentiful on Steam Stack stones to shape the world. A relaxing game about harnessing nature.

store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...

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10 months ago
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The other massive trailer released today.

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10 months ago

Also:
If it was my call I wouldn’t release any additional trailers.
There is more than enough hype around VI and the element of surprise is going to make the release only bigger as an event.

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10 months ago

I’m guessing decision-day for VI will be similar. Fingers crossed for Take2’s August earnings report.
(Before you ask; I have no inside info)

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10 months ago

The original release date was October 16th 2007, in time for Christmas. We made the decision to delay the game in July 2007. Only at that time did it become clear we were going to miss the deadline.

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10 months ago

We finally realized the 32 player network game which later evolved into gta-online.

I left R*North 9 months later. With the project and team getting bigger I didn’t enjoy work as much as I used to. I also thought the game would continue to get darker and more serious. gta5 proved me wrong there.

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10 months ago

The missions were designed to suit the story. Previously it had been the other way around.

The ps3 was difficult to work with so the 360 became the lead platform.

R*San Diego produced their Rage engine to replace the discontinued RenderWare engine.

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10 months ago
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17 years ago, on April 29th 2008 we released Grand Theft Auto IV.

On order to focus on making the game truly next-gen, we dropped a ton of game features from San Andreas.
Stats (fitness, weight), Multiple cities, Stealth, Underwater swimming, Jet packs, Tanks, Bicycles, Monster trucks, Car modding

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10 months ago

No, I just used English phrases. It's just that because of the hash key bug, random sequences also triggered the cheats.

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1 year ago

Map artists just placed the lights, ran the game, and it all worked—no extra setup needed.

Simple, but it still worked this way in IV.

During gta3, I gave players a 1-star wanted level for running red lights. This was not popular with the team. I quickly removed it.

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1 year ago
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In gta3, traffic lights cycle through 3 states:
North/South
East/West
Pedestrians

The traffic light’s model orientation determines its cycle, and at startup, my code stored the cycle in the road nodes. This is why, even if the light was knocked over, cars still obeyed the light.

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1 year ago

Not sure why that got lost. Could be a bug/oversight.

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1 year ago

There must be a misunderstanding. The PC and Xbox version of gta3 and Vice weren't forked. The codebase moved forward as one.
(It may have been different for SA as we didn't do that pc version)

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1 year ago

That was someone else.
I handed over the camera to another coder (Derek Ward) who joined SA after finishing Manhunt.

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1 year ago

There are a few things that can cause the next viewpoint to occur.

The line of sight from the camera to the train is broken (for more than a second or something)
Or the train is far away and also moving away.
Probably a timer in there as well.

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1 year ago

I had a look at it but it's not clear to me why that is happening.

I did the code for the general crimes.

But the level designers also had script commands. They handle the military base for instance. So there's either a bug in the code or in the script.
Sorry I can't be more specific.

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