Some morning game dev with my helper

Didn’t stay up for TGAs but think it says a lot that in catching up I saw an article about every game announcement and trailer and only found out who won game of the year on Bluesky

Bopped a fascist over the head with a violin then threw him off this wall, 10/10 game no notes

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.

Thinking about becoming a Qud sicko

I got Him

Gotta hand it to MachineGames for deciding at some point “we are the studio that makes games about killing Nazis” and just running with that forever

Would die for Merrill

Just realised I’d done the last few areas of Elden Ring using not my beloved Uchigatana +18, but in fact an Uchigatana that hadn’t been upgraded at all. Actually lowkey kind of proud of myself

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…

A new APWOT day is a good day.

Rolled credits on Alan Wake 2. I flipped from not really liking the game - I maintain the combat is Bad and there’s too much of it - to really getting invested in the story by the end. The DLC whips too, it transpires. Might even play Final Draft.

Happy Dragon Age day! If any of you spoil Veilguard for me before I can get to it (gotta finish 2 and Inquisition replays first…) then the Dread Wolf will eat you, thanks

Anyone using Moonlight/Sunshine for game streaming and have any tips about getting smoother performance out of it?

Got a real hankering to play Elden Ring yesterday because the freezers at little Sainsburys were humming exactly the same note as the drone on Altus Plateau.

We did it! Total time was right around six hours. I hardly ever get to play dungeons or raids totally blind so this was just wonderful.

Dungeoning with my pals.

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!

Went on a little autumnal walk (to Argos)

Chuckling at this from the new Steam update.

It’s a lovely fresh crisp day here so here are four games with Impeccable Autumn Vibes. What are yours?

700 quid and they don’t even give you the stand, good grief lads

Astro Bot is so so good.

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.

We are so back

Rolled credits on 1000xRESIST. Need to go away and have a proper think about it but safe to say it’s the best game I’ve played this year.

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

Flock is just so lovely

Off on an excursion today

This post brought to you by my rediscovering that the 3DS is simply my favourite bit of gaming hardware ever created.

Become increasingly clear to me that bells-and-whistles graphics do not matter - that much is obvious to everyone - but also, as a Computer Toucher, that the really exciting thing is talented teams pushing underpowered hardware to the absolute limit.

Managed to go the whole way to and through one of the UK’s largest airports yesterday and not a single StreetPass hit. What have we become as a society?

Having a great time getting back into Elden Ring.

Wrapped up Final Shape and, goddamn, they really stuck the landing.

Destiny is so back (shots from opening mission only!)

Starting to get a feel for AC6 now I think. Moved to a lightweight build after this fight and it already feels so much better.

This game is hard and I am bad at it

Armored Phwoar

Not sure how I only just clocked that the gap between Game Boy and Game Boy Color was nine years, that’s wild

It’s sensational, having such a good time with it

It only took me four years but I did it!

Animal Well is 33MB, holy shit

Bloodborne is a cosy game, I will not elaborate

Having a fantastic time with Dragon’s Dogma 2, to my relief

Had a lovely time with Botany Manor. Short and sweet.

I introduced Lucy to Tunic and now it’s 2am and she won’t come to bed

Hell yeah new Pope

God damn, they already got the garbage fake mobile games doing bug killers

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

The challenge with putting an action sequence set to a musical number in your game is that the action has to be really good in order for me to justify listening to the same song for double-digit minutes. Control earns this. Alan Wake 2, sadly, does not.

Might ship a game tomorrow

Rolled credits on Yakuza 0. What a wonderful, brilliant, stupid, incredible game

game pretty

The last game I touched professionally - excited to finally play it

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

cool guys don’t look at explosions (except us)

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

Rolled credits on Witcher 3 after playing off-and-on for about eight years. Just outstanding, sad it’s over.

First Warlord’s Ruin clear!

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

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

Actually just not finishing the demo to not spoil myself for launch

The inventory screen is inspired

Really very impressed by the Pacific Drive demo

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!

Trying to explain mastodon to this guy

Also the little tribute to Super Mario Sunshine in the cassette levels made me cackle

Celeste 64 is just wonderful. They could have so easily made it into a throwaway gag but it’s a tough-as-nails retro 3D platformer with typically beautiful music.

Not sure if I always get the Best Dressed commendation at the end of a Destiny match because I’m the best dressed, or because I’m actually quite shit at the game

Trying to see how far I can get with NieR Reincarnation before it gets pulled offline.

Jusant is just stunning

Ultra Sun was the last good Pokémon game. My mind will not be changed.

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

Just saw the Wide Ocean Big Jacket devs have a new game out - instant buy for me.

https://beforethegreenmoon.com/

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!

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

Sounds like my computer might actually be able to run Alan Wake 2, which is a relief.

Rolled credits on Signalis last night and haven’t been able to get it out of my head, so it’s good this excellent video essay from Sam Greer exists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUnVUXAn-fQ

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

Been playing Chants of Sennaar and it’s really something special.

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!

Alright, I caved. I have a Steam Deck. I also have £45 of store credit to get nice games for it; recommendations please!

I will admit it irks me slightly that my application for a Switch developer license was declined when the eShop is full of shit like this.

https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-eshop-aaa-digital-clock-release-1850205218

Rolled credits (well, you know what I mean) on Lightfall. I actually quite enjoyed the action movie vibe of the campaign as a whole but every complaint about the narrative is valid; it feels like we’re back to the bad old days.