A little update from me and Bearwaves: our as-yet-unannounced Game Two is well underway, and while we’re not ready to show anything publicly yet we’ve been testing with friends and family and the response has been really positive. DM if you’re interested!

Must be using LinkedIn wrong - every time I see one of those “why game X was destined to fail” posts I click into the profile of the post author and cannot for the life of me find any record of the games they’ve shipped? Any pro LI users have advice?

Coming to the disappointing conclusion that developing games for Android without any Java at all is impractical enough as to be impossible.

Having to use Perforce is a form of slow torture. Who invented this? What’s their address? Just wanna talk

Some morning game dev with my helper

We fixed this in Bridgy yesterday. Here’s the PR, if helpful: https://github.com/snarfed/granary/pull/844

If you click through the linked issues you’ll see discussion on the Bluesky side. They might be able to retroactively fix existing images, but unsure

A PSA: Bluesky changed their API recently so that image uploads need to include their aspect ratio, otherwise they’ll appear letterboxed (like the first image). If you use a third-party tool it’ll need updated.

Baffled by how difficult it is to render a rectangle outline using a shader without pixel alignment going all wonky. GPUs were a mistake

Trying to get an animation framework in place for Game 2 and struggling - some animations can happen in parallel while some need to effectively pause state updates and structuring this in a neat way is proving tricky. Feud’s wee state machine won’t cut it.

I use harfbuzz for layout, which uses Freetype metrics, so the hard thing was getting those to line up with the glyph metrics emitted by MSDFgen.

Finally got my engine’s distance field font rendering (top) looking PRETTY MUCH as good as bitmap fonts (bottom). Already starting to think about what it might look like to move away from atlases altogether and just rasterise glyph vectors on the GPU…

Playing Metaphor: ReFantazio which has some of the most stunning UI work I’ve ever seen. Meanwhile I can’t get the text boxes to reflow properly in my own game engine.

Got my layout being actually flexible now with preferred dimensions, expand, and fill. Alignment next. Loosely basing it on GTK because I like using GTK!

Starting to get the flexible layout stuff implemented in Growl, my pet game engine. Very early days yet!

Chuckling at this from the new Steam update.

Finally got around to reconfiguring the debug UI in Growl, rendering the game scene into an Imgui window - starting to look like a real engine now.

Just got myself unstuck from a tricky Lua-C interop thing that I’d been going round in circles on for weeks now. Pleased!

Can anyone recommend a Google Analytics alternative that isn’t a privacy nightmare for a personal website?

Been playing with shader support in Growl - shaders can now be edited in realtime, and have built in uniforms like resolution and time. Goal is to be able to paste in whatever from Shadertoy and have it work!

A thoroughly wasted evening trying to make Wi-Fi work on a Raspberry Pi Zero. I’ve been using Linux for nearly two decades and Wi-Fi still baffles me.

Very pleased to discover several games recently ported to the Epic store are using eos4j!

breathe in, breathe out, new Krazam

Might ship a game tomorrow

Just submitted the final build of Feud 2.0 for review to the stores. It’s real, it’s happening, we’re doing it

A bit buggy but I now have Lua scripting inside Growl’s debug UI!

Some lunchtime shader learning

Not sure yet if we’ll get any kind of boost from visibility on Steam when we leave Early Access but here’s hoping.

I just realised that Feud has crossed the 70,000 players mark! Very pleased

Just spent ages messing around with diagram software trying to get my network diagram to look right, only to give up and just do it on a whiteboard and take a picture of it. My handwriting aside, it’s far more readable

Working out who to contact for press stuff in games now seems so much harder than it did five years ago. How does this work? Who do I talk to? Aaaahhh

brid.gy’s Bluesky integration now supports publishing! This post was published by Bridgy! Wow! There’s some code of mine in there, do have a go.

Any games press types On Here who would like to try out a prerelease build of Feud 2.0? Get in touch if so!

Quite a nice day of Feud polishing and bug fixing. Still got a couple of localisations to review and import but other than that I’m feeling good about the release on the 23rd!

Me when I start reading Perl documentation

brid.gy I would obviously keep, because brid.gy is incredible

What I think I’d like is some sort of simple web server that sits next to Hugo and provides the Micropub/Webmention endpoints and serves the site. I think having the content live in Git rather than a DB is definitely something I’d want to keep.

So at this point I’ve got:

• Hugo website hosted on GitHub Pages, deployed by GitHub Actions
• Micropub and media endpoints running on AWS Lambda, with API Gateway stuff
• Brid.gy to syndicate things and backfeed interactions
• Webmention.io to collect webmentions

Does it work? Yes! Is it better than if I’d just written a fucking server? hahahaha no

I ended up moving my Micropub endpoint from DigitalOcean to Lambda - I usually prefer working on DO (the AWS console/config is just painful) but the lack of support for custom domains, plus the 1MB limit on POST requests, kind of made the choice obvious.

If you’re reading this post on Mastodon, it’s gone through a fairly baroque sequence of steps:

• A Micropub endpoint running as a serverless function
• Hugo to build for my website
• A hacky GHA script to run the publishing
• brid.gy to do the actual publishing.

Still, it’s nice to be able to write on my static site and have it syndicated without touching Git.

eos4j v1.2.0 has been released! This new version adds support for the Ecom interface in Epic Online Services. It also fixes a bug with conversion from timestamps to Java Date objects.

https://github.com/Bearwaves/eos4j/releases/tag/1.2.0

Quite liking where I’ve got my Vim setup to now. I don’t really miss an IDE, which is a first.

I replaced the debug cat image in Growl with a picture of our actual cat. So long debug cat, you served us well.

Well, there’s still a fair amount of work to do - bugs to fix, translations to review - but as of today Feud is feature-complete for graduating from Early Access. It’s nearly eight years since we started working on it - longer than my professional game development career lasted!

🦦 test note pls ignore 🦦

https://www.joelotter.com

Just played a tiny prototype of what might well become the next Bearwaves game and I am very energised.

I’ve lost two entire days of work to Terraform lockfile nonsense

eos4j v1.1.0 has been released! This new version features support for the Leaderboards interface in Epic Online Services.

https://github.com/Bearwaves/eos4j/releases/tag/1.1.0

Had my first report on eos4j this weekend from someone actually using it in their game! Very exciting.

https://github.com/Bearwaves/eos4j

I worked at Improbable in 2019, when Unity tried to change their TOS to screw us over. They ended up backtracking and put their TOS on GitHub, saying they would not change TOS retroactively.

It appears to be gone.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/

lol, lmao

Since launching on the Epic store a couple of months ago, Feud has had something like 28,000 new players. That feels significant!

I always get a kick out of explaining to people how #golang’s magical, mildly terrifying timestamp formatting works.

Thinking of writing a GitHub bot to replace me at work that just comments “could you please split this up” on every PR.

Been attempting to integrate a native C library into a Java project and it’s proving to be a total nightmare, even with jnigen. Once again cursing myself for choosing to write a game in Java.