Game development career thread:

Ludum is 20 days off.

"Every 10 seconds" is the theme. Struggling to think of something I can finish.

Ok so here's my ideas thus far:

An adventure game set aboard a starship headed to investigate the great attractor. The player awakens from a 20 year sleep to prepare the ship for the switch from acceleration to slowdown. Basically the floor becomes the ceiling. The only loose tie to the theme is that I did the math and every 10 seconds of ship time is 2 years back on earth. 125 million years have gone by back there. No idea what the story or anything would be yet.

An RPG with magic powered by a 10 second pulsar in the night sky. Some bits of it would need line of sight, others could be prepared via circle similar to Ultima 8 sorcery.

A mystery game where a 10 second pulsar suddenly changes to 9. The player is sent to investigate. I'm guessing there will be alot of pulsar related games.

Keep it simple.

How about a Gradius-style shooter where every 10 seconds you get randomly generated weapons. And I mean RANDOM as fuck. Like shoots in random directions with random patterns, originating from a random point on or orbiting around your ship.

Hmm I have no idea how to do 2D stuff in Unity. 3D games are kind of my comfort zone.

But you are right, none of those are simple enough. I did do an adventure game or two for LD but that was back when I was young and could stay awake all weekend

So I've been trying to get characters working in Linux, and getting lots of explodey parts and limbs stretched out and such as is usual. So I wanted to check to make sure my assigned bones were right. Art stuff does the bones by name but I convert that into indexes and it's possible they could be off.

A fun abomination, even better animated:


So I load up renderdoc and I pick a random vert on the right foot and notice it is mapped to the left foot. I thought maybe my indexes were corrupted but I checked one on the left hand and it was mapped to the right. Checked a bit more and yes, everything was swapped left to right.

This started a 2 day debugging binge where I incorrectly remembered that I was using a left hand coordinate system, until I read my own documentation and realized it was right (after wasting a day). I'm still seeing left and right backwards in renderdoc, but I check the animation against blender:


And it looks exactly right. This hastily sloppily done animation has a quirk where the elbow bends backwards at a certain point only on the right side. I paused it at that point at they look identical.

So maybe Renderdoc is mirroring in X or something? That is a really common thing to do if you are switching from right handed to left. Most art packages are right and directx is left, but I dunno!

Yep, I dug through renderdoc's bugs on github. Someone eventually added a setting in the mesh viewer. You can see I set it to right handed, and with that vert with 27 bone index highlighted, you can see it is on the right foot.


Bone 27 is right foot for me. Mystery solved!

So a few weeks ago, I started trying to get my bsp map stuff working again. This is my sort of homegrown budget walmart great-value idtech. Anyway, the first map I made caused major problems. My tools would build but leaked and with large chunks of the map missing.

Id's tools threw lots of warnings and such but still built it at least visually fine. Then I tried one of the more recent up to date heavily worked on mapping compilers off github and it built it flawlessly with no problems at all.

A week of really intense debuggery damn near killed me. I never found the flaw (though I did find another bug with my portals) and eventually my brain was so cooked I decided to do something gamey. I fired up Unity.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I just can't seem to stay awake. Something about making stuff in someone else's engine just doesn't give you that same reward chemical mixture. I'm making things happen but it feels like I'm following a recipe instead of solving real problems. There's no creativity to it somehow. I end up falling asleep in my chair.

Cannot imagine someone breathing down my neck while I hustled to crank this kind of stuff out