Last project I worked on is a Sonic-like game. Didn’t get much done, just constant fiddling to get all the physics working.

Before that, was working on an RPG, which has a ton of fiddly menus I need to make…

Sadly, I tend to stop working on things during bouts of depression, and pick up something new later, so I’ve not really finished anything or even got to the point of making content…

I wish we could go back to the days when gamedev was happening on DeviantArt or Newgrounds and it was just a bunch of kids doing fun and slightly cringe stuff. ;_;

https://programming.dev/post/18953119

Its not working well

I’ll start. I’m working on a top down roughly ww2 era RTS. I have two main gimmicks:

The first one is that the front line is persistent, allowing you to start a battle whenever to advance/skirmish/capture equipment/whatever, or be forced to defend when the enemy decides to attack. You’re squads will be where you left them allowing you to prepare defenses in advance and having to think ahead of how the situation can change (and be forced to improvise when it does).

The second gimmick is that you can design you’re squads as you want. You can for example spread out smgs so that all squad leaders have one, improving the close range firepower of all squads. You can also give all you’re smgs to a single squad, making it excel in close quarters, but limiting its efficiency at range and the close range efficiency of other squads.

I want the player to solve their own problems, if they are facing tanks then they can raid the enemy at night and try to capture an At gun, or they can position themselves is forest where tanks can’t reach/are vulnerable to infantry.

I’ve been working on a online multiplayer simulator for the new(ish) card game Elestrals for a year now. It’s Pokémon meets Yu-Gi-Oh with a bit of Greek mythology sprinkled in, with my favourite mechanic being that your health is your resource. You can blow it all on a power play or conserve your health and strike when you spot an opening.

It’s almost done and I’m really proud of it. Obviously excluding the programmer art, the only thing left to implement in the engine is displaying stat changes client side and… The functionality for every card they’ve printed. No biggie lol.

The problem is they announced an official one and it really killed my motivation. That’s still a problem I have yet to overcome 😅

I’m just on a break from working on a game for a PhD student’s research project in psychology.

It’s a sort of work simulator where you play as an internet fact checker for an old county music artist looking to make a comeback. The goal is to stop him from posting things online that are misinformed or blatantly wrong.

The whole thing takes place in a sort of remote login desktop running an operating system called Howdy OS, and you interact with the artist through an instant message interface, so naturally I’ve been having the most fun designing the UI and the interactions.

The messages are constructed similarly to Obra Dinn - you collect evidence and populate a template, then send it. The artist responds depending on what’s right or wrong about what you send. It’s not AI or anything, it’s just very very written 😅

The purpose of it is to teach criticality to people, try and help them understand how to evaluate and verify information online instead of just taking things for granted. We completed the first pre alpha testing before Christmas and it’s been received well so far! Excited to get into the next steps now.

I’m working on an RTS too, there isn’t too much to show yet.

The “inspiration” is supreme commander and other RTS being low on the complexity and planning aspects.

The approach I have seen in the industry is that people take AoE2 and starcraft as a baseline and then switch out or improve different elements. E.g. starcraft 2 massively improved unit movement and pathing. I think total biscuit tried to make a mod where resource gathering was “automated” and easier and more recently “battle aces” focuses more heavily on the skirmish aspect. Many opinions I have also heard boil down to “if you remove micro, you remove the game”. And that’s not wrong, I can certainly see the point and the skill differentiation between someone who can and someone who can’t micro their units.

But what I want to see is all of things that people already do “in their mind”, like picking a build order, certain defined “points” in their own “gameplan” that they decide “X units A Y units B is when I should attack”, or “transition points” and steps, and to make all of that explicit.

MTG “deckbuilding” works the same way, players anticipate certain problems and situations and then they build their decks with specific setups in mind and situations that they want to reach, and if they reach those states, victory gets very very close.

Taking all of that into account, surely there are just “strategies” that work better than others and finding those is more interesting or at least equally interesting as micro to me, but basically no games give you any tools or help to actually do it. You basically have to take out pen and paper to write down what worked in your last game, what didn’t.

What would a game look like that gave you ALL the planning tools and performance metrics?

To me, that’s where the modern “big scale” RTS fail, or rather, why they don’t interest me.

And also, once things are “perfectly” planned and prepared, there are always ways to introduce e.g. random failure into plan steps to keep players solving “micro” problems, they would just happen in a different place.

I’ve been working on a solitaire roguelike!

The open alpha actually started last month, and right now I’m working my way through the many bug reports.

I’m creating a bullet heaven. It will have incremental, and tower defense elements. The big feature is that users will create their own bullet patterns from BulletML scripts. Those bullets will interact with the world and NPCs in different ways. For example you shoot fireballs over grass, it’s gonna set it on fire, and turn into a tile of dirt.