More submissions by icynotesdx for Daily Gamedev

You know, I'd originally been only posting when working on my game, and I definitely fell off of that streak after showing it publicly last Friday. But I just started a contract on Weds doing gamedev for money--that should count shouldn't it??? I'm gonna go back and post retroactively there.

Getting a hold on someone else's code for this project I'll be working on has been gnarly, but I'm starting to see the light.

Programmin' on a game for $$. A whole new world!

I can't even enumerate it all here but the game is looking and playing WAY better. Stoked!!!! Maybe I'll even start posting screenshots here...

Got a ripple shader and an RGB displacement shader going today, and tackled a bunch of Game Maker issues along the way!

Having real difficulties debugging what should be a very simple shader. I've had trouble with shaders in Game Maker before, and now I'm having them again. It could be something fundamental in the shader set up I'm missing--I see posts about the "Use for 3d" box, but that doesn't seem to be present in GMS2. Something like that would correspond with the trouble I'm running into currently. Gonna give up and try again tomorrow.

...but I did a lot of brainstorming and away-from-computer game design.

It's always fun to put new art into a game. I had planned that I'd revamp the power that this art goes with once I got it in there, so I did the first pass at it. Definitely still a lot to be done for it, but it's feeling like an improvement already!

My game will have a showing coming up, so I chatted with my team (just my artist, haha) about what to do for that.

Some weird ones showed up that don't make sense, but hey, I'm fixin' em.

Didn't do any coding today, but talked a while with my artist about some new stuff to try. Did research on various kinds of gymnastics and dancers for inspiration for a movement-based power.

I spent several hours making a particle system work--I like the system, but it might not be useful for this game. A little frustrated at the "time waste" but mostly, actually, it was time well spent in learning and in, well, finding out that sort of FX that I wanted to try here wasn't what the game really wanted.

Balancing necessary but not as fun refactors and fixes with a few playful tweaks to physics, making one of the systems more complicated in a way that should be fun for expert players. Gamedev is fun :D

I'm also a game-focused composer, so I bought a new plug in and messed around with that for a while. I have a game music contract coming up, so I'm warming up as a part of that. As for my game itself, I drew some doodles for some new mechanics I'm gonna try soon.

...and it works really well. Raises other, new questions! But this is a more expedient path. I'll tackle the crazy technical problem some other time when it isn't impeding progress so much. Maybe as a side project.

This thing is complex and I've been stubborn about trying to get this approach right...but really I'm feeling torn. On one hand, I have a good idea for an alt approach that'd be easier to implement and would be at least as cool, maybe cooler. On the other hand, I really feel driven to see this idea through. Gonna ruminate on it.

Nothing super momentous (although I got PS4 controller support working), but sending the game to a few more friends for feedback is good. And a good discussion with my artist about next steps

Likely won't work on the game directly as I have the past several days, but I'm still meeting folks and talking about my game, so I'm going to count that!

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