Game development career thread:

Collector won. I'm doing a game about collecting magic runes. Going to sneak some Odin stuff in there.

Reason I'm here is because I wanted to re-read past stuff. I haven't done much art in months. Dune happened, then I got super into keyboard and esp32 coding. Somewhere along the way my gamerig addon got thrown out or nuked or something.

It looks like the one on github broke with version 4 of blender, but I can see that I'm using blender 4 in my screenshots of the last ludum dare. So I must have already bought it (the developers stopped updating the github and have it on gumroad now).

Damned if I can remember though.

Kharzette said:

Collector won. I'm doing a game about collecting magic runes. Going to sneak some Odin stuff in there.

Reason I'm here is because I wanted to re-read past stuff. I haven't done much art in months. Dune happened, then I got super into keyboard and esp32 coding. Somewhere along the way my gamerig addon got thrown out or nuked or something.

It looks like the one on github broke with version 4 of blender, but I can see that I'm using blender 4 in my screenshots of the last ludum dare. So I must have already bought it (the developers stopped updating the github and have it on gumroad now).

Damned if I can remember though.

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I am a tard. My own readme file links to the right version on github. Someone forked.

Here's my first day. I made this as a 144fps vid from 5fps recordings, so not sure how youtube will mangle it.



Somehow I messed up my blender mirror modifier, had my gamerig nuked (see above), then had a brutal multi hour debug of some linker errors. Super weird. You can see me struggling with it.

Some super unrelated stuff worked together to cause the problems.

So for a long time I've had these really bad makefiles building my stuff. I only knew the very basics of how to get gcc to compile something, and never really understood makefiles completely, so all my libs were being rebuilt every time. This wasn't a super big deal as c compiles really fast but I wanted to fix it before the jam.

To make it work you need (apparently) to build object files as an intermediate step. The old way I just went straight from a .c to a shared library. This intermediate step lacks a little context, and caused some strange behavior in my audio library.

My makefile for my audio lib had the usual shared library make, but also a test program. This was just a simple main function that loaded up any sound effect files in the usual spot and played them. When building a shared library, main() is ignored, so I had a different build target for the test program that made an exe.

The obj intermediate step screwed that up and the shared library was being built with a main function. This was overriding the main in my actual program, but I had no way of knowing that.

I've been way too distracted with esp32 and keyboard firmware lately. My code is in a shit state.

The makefile stuff pissed me off so much I started looking around at other build systems. They are all crap and I hate all of them, but I knew if I made my own it would just make other people hate me as well.

There's this funny weasely little guy on twitch or youtube that does coding streams that made a build system that is just a c program. It is really nice! He made it just an h file with little helpers that can check if a build is needed, concat arguments and such.


Here's my build file that uses it: GrogLibsC/BuildIt.c at main · Kharzette/GrogLibsC

If you add stuff to it, you don't even need to rebuild it, just run it ./BuildIt and it rebuilds itself. Very fancy.

I should add: If you are converting over from make, it has some strange things to watch out for. Sometimes make needs single quotes around stuff that you wouldn't use if calling gcc from a command line. Also I know of one spot where there's a wierd linker variable RPATH you can set to $ORIGIN to have the exe look relatively for shared libraries at runtime. Make needs that as '$$ORIGIN' so you have to watch out for that with this c stuff.

Need some advice. Learning a new art pipeline workflow and trying to figure out if I'm going in the right direction.

Working on Goblins for right now, which do ya'll think is directionally better? Both need some (a lot) of touch up work to be "done" but as far as base colors go. Any specific likes/dislikes would be helpful too. This art thing is hard

Flobee said:

Need some advice. Learning a new art pipeline workflow and trying to figure out if I'm going in the right direction.

Working on Goblins for right now, which do ya'll think is directionally better? Both need some (a lot) of touch up work to be "done" but as far as base colors go. Any specific likes/dislikes would be helpful too. This art thing is hard

Spoiler

View attachment 606429 View attachment 606431

Throwing in a couple assets I intend to use along with them for comparison as to the general "art direction" I think I'm going to shoot for.


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I'm no artist, but the left one feels more flat than the others, especially the mouth area. The tusks look more like decals than geometry.

Haven't been able to work on the game as much recently but when I can been focused on doing level design and getting some textures for environments together that I like. One of the palettes I'm considering for the "hubzone" or the base building portion of the game. Default lighting, postprocessing, etc.

As with a lot of this process I get through the technical configuration stuff then hit a bit of a wall when transitioning to the actual design part. I don't think its necessarily because it harder its just such a jarring transition that I always struggle moving into that mindset. Hoping to get a couple biomes set up, then will probably move into getting a solid hour or so of gameplay in and polished up to see if all this work is going to pay off or not. Q1 2026 demo is probably out of the window though haha, life happened

Flobee said:

Haven't been able to work on the game as much recently but when I can been focused on doing level design and getting some textures for environments together that I like. One of the palettes I'm considering for the "hubzone" or the base building portion of the game. Default lighting, postprocessing, etc.

As with a lot of this process I get through the technical configuration stuff then hit a bit of a wall when transitioning to the actual design part. I don't think its necessarily because it harder its just such a jarring transition that I always struggle moving into that mindset. Hoping to get a couple biomes set up, then will probably move into getting a solid hour or so of gameplay in and polished up to see if all this work is going to pay off or not. Q1 2026 demo is probably out of the window though haha, life happened

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Lookin good! I like your grass tufts, and I don't see any repeating textures. What are you going to do about trees?

My next game is topdown grid based so I'm not sure how I'm going to handle trees.

Kharzette said:

Lookin good! I like your grass tufts, and I don't see any repeating textures. What are you going to do about trees?

My next game is topdown grid based so I'm not sure how I'm going to handle trees.

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I have a few different asset packs I've picked up that I'll probably rummage through for some acceptable trees. Worst case I'll model some myself. The trunk and branches don't seem too hard to sculpt and texture, but I haven't really learned about making leaves so not really sure if it would be worth it. I kind of want at least one biome to have some massive trees so I may end up having to make at least those.

I've been a bit of a humble bundle addict the past year so I've managed to collect a decent little collection and various asset types so I have at least placeholders for most stuff I think I'll need.

The only thing I've learned over the years if you roll-your-own is to use double sided lighting on the leaves. Gives it that leafy shine-thru look.

We don't really have a general programming thread that I've found, so putting it here:


This is fun! I think I had heard of this before but didn't know what it was.

I think it started several days ago and I only started yesterday so I'm a few days behind.

Day 4 looks very dorf forty when you slow it down:

I took a few days away from this and kinda frogot about it while I was slaving and plundering in conan, and Day 8 has defeated me.

I'll have another look after a sleep. It isn't particularly tricksy, it's just a huge pile of data. I've got huge overkill error checking everywhere I make any kind of assumption. I guess the next thing to do if I don't see a mistake with fresh eyeballs is to draw the whole thing (it's a big 3D cube of connected lines).

Drawing didn't really reveal any problems. It looks about like what I expected:

I found this one, looks way more dense than mine, but this could be for part 2. Each "Day" has 2 parts, so far.



They draw the points, and kinda neat how they draw it as the connexions are being formed. I think I'll try drawing the points too. I know there are alot of points that aren't a part of any circuit (this is a puzzle related to elves stringing christmas lights I think).

Toned down the shininess a bit as well:



The answer still eludes me

Kharzette the stuff you're doing is why I'm grateful that these free(ish) game engine exist. If I had to roll my own I'm 99% sure I'd never get anywhere. I can limp through coding most things, especially with AI stuff now, but once you hit a certain level of abstraction its just beyond me. For example I simply couldn't wrap my head around discrete mathematics so once you start getting to that level I just fall apart.

Been focused on level design past couple weeks and in theory at least it seems really fun. The reality of the situation feels a lot like interior design or something and I think I might kind of hate it. On a positive note I do think I'm starting to put something together thats at least passable. Almost certainly went a bit overboard on the contrast and just post-processing in general for this first screenshot but I thought it kind of looked cool. I'm still trying to dial in the overall look and feel. Its honestly amazing how different the exact same scene can look when you start playing with this stuff. Second SS probably a little closer to PP I could actually live with.

Got my workflow from Blender -> UE for the layout stuff down pretty good though so I can iterate fairly quickly. Still hemming and hawing about how large I want this first dungeon to be as I'm anxious to start populating and playtesting. Ideally I'd do the layout once and populate it once and be done with that part, but I'm sure I'll have to just do it, figure out what I did wrong and redo it all over again. Starting to learn that a lot of this stuff really is just how fast can you iterate to get it "right" instead of what I WANT which is doing it right the first time.

Overall idea is I want a relatively small overland area then a dungeon entrance with a moderately sized dungeon to crawl through. First iteration here in my mind is like a mashup between Blackburrow and Runnyeye. Last SS is the first floor of dungeon, thinking about a kind of big ramp overhang of the hole in the middle kind of like how Blackburrow is. Also need to model in the second tier walls so it feels a bit more enclosed but making progress. A lot of the geometry is still probably too flat but slowly adding some curves and volume to stuff as I go along.