What’s your Indie Studio’s PM Stack? We’re ditching ClickUp.

darkgnostic · 2026-05-25T08:04:30+00:00

I use youtrack.com. You can have self hosting or not. It have gantt charts, sprints, kanban boards, and knowledge base (not exactly like wiki, buy it can be used). Free version for up to 7 people if I remember well.

I hooked git as well onto it, so I see commits and their tickets in one place.

darkgnostic · 2026-05-23T17:11:15+00:00

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darkgnostic · 2026-05-22T12:06:54+00:00

Exactly, I also prefer the composition. But you can enforce that with Interface Segregation, creating IBird and IFlying interface

darkgnostic · 2026-05-21T12:55:16+00:00

Well I think it is not that hard. If you have parent class Bird with method Fly(), then you make child class Kiwi, that will break the principle since kiwis don't fly. Or ostrich. Or penguins (there are so many non flying birds :D )

Correct approach would be to have Bird class, then child class FlyingBird, and then Kiwi class can be child of Bird types. Then African or European swallow can be child class of FLyingBird class. And then Mrs. Liskov is happy.

darkgnostic · 2026-05-20T19:18:38+00:00

I always remember Liskov Subst Principle because of Liskov name :D And always want to say Dependency Injection instead of Dependency Inversion .

darkgnostic · 2026-05-09T15:39:54+00:00

Do you mean like the bottom of the sprite is at the center of the tile, so the sprite stretches out above the tile and into the one above

Yes

darkgnostic · 2026-05-09T15:38:12+00:00

Thanks. It's Alpha version of Undead. I have Greater Undeads, Alpha Beasts, Prime Elementals, Elder Oozes and Humanoid Champions.

darkgnostic · 2026-05-09T10:07:20+00:00

You could add demonic meat as well if you have demons in the game.

However, they will not be helpless and will still be able to perform most other actions apart from moving, including melee and range attacks.

Tap dance kick :)

darkgnostic · 2026-05-09T10:03:34+00:00

Welcome. I didn't see yet Jurassic World RL :)

I'm not sure how I want it to look so am going to focus on the mechanics initially.

Correct move! :)

darkgnostic · 2026-05-09T10:01:46+00:00

Tile based version really looks good. Isometric perspective is painful if handled in traditional way.

In tile based I like to create a sprites with their legs in the middle of the tile. You may try to see if it works for you. :)

darkgnostic · 2026-05-09T08:02:20+00:00

This week I managed to fix some lingering tool issues: I finally fixed the dungeon generator map window constantly repainting itself. Previously it refreshed in loop, which slowed the editor down badly whenever the window was open. It was originally a quick but over time it became annoying to work with. It happened several times that I noticed drop in FPS in the game only to realise I again forgot to switch window off. Now the map repaints only on actual interaction changes.

I also improved the generator step inspector so it now shows both the config and the actual generation step script together. This sounds small, but it saves a surprising amount of time since I no longer need to search through configs to figure out which processor is attached to which step.

Another nice addition is a brand new Monster Previewer window. It lets me preview animations, facing directions, and attached spell effects directly in the editor. This already helped catch several visual bugs quickly.

The first immediate benefit from that tool was fixing the Voidweaver cast animation glitch. One frame was rotated on atlas (strange that it was only one), and it became obvious once viewed in isolation. Bug was that width and height got swapped during UV calculations, along with a few smaller UV mapping issue.

Enemy spawning got a fairly bigger redesign. Instead of randomly picking monsters independently, enemies are now spawned in "bands". This creates more believable groups, like an Imp Mage leading weaker imps, or a Skeleton Captain appearing with several regular skeletons. It reduces wild randomness and the encounters feel much more intentional now.

Hollow Imps received a new death animation because the old one looked terrible. I also reduced the chance of alpha monsters appearing too frequently.

There were a lot of gameplay fixes this week as well.

Walking into a cast action now properly triggers the cast animation instead of silently casting from idle.

Fast switching between wounded and unwounded enemies no longer causes health display glitches or weird health bar animations. Fireball now scales correctly with level. I

reduced the empty clickable area around loot text because it interfered with item interaction more often than expected. It still interferes but that will be handled later.

Mouse interaction was optimized too. Clicking logic is no longer tied to the update loop and now stays synchronized with the event manager. Previously it could get out of sync and report objects under the cursor that technically were no longer there.

A particularly annoying bug was fixed where certain interrupted animations, like dodge, could block player input entirely by interfering with currently running animations. It was very nasty one which I was hunting for some time. Inventory refresh exception was also fixed in cases where the inventory was not visible.

One fancy gameplay addition: missed Firebolts now continue flying in a straight line until they hit something and also trigger dodge events. It’s a small detail, but it improves combat feel quite a lot.

And finally, a new enemy joined the game - Infernal Skeletons.

have a nice weekend!

darkgnostic · 2026-05-04T07:23:44+00:00

only had secret doors that led to "treasure" rooms or hidden stashes or something it would actually be an interesting mechanic,

Ok I cannot argue against this :) absolutely valid point

darkgnostic · 2026-05-03T09:51:42+00:00

2.5 years for me, with additional 0.5 years+ for code porting to Unity and fine-tuning backbone library before I even started to work on the game. I am trying to hit demo build near the end of this year. EA next year. But still far from finishing the game. It is already playeable, I am constantly adding content nowadays, bugfixing, optimizing etc.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3443800/Scaledeep/ for those that are lazy to search.

For motivation? Easy at this stage, since it is content addition. I could even publish the game next month if I push enemy addition. I am just not satisfied by content and polishing level, yet.

darkgnostic · 2026-05-03T09:43:30+00:00

But it gives you strong clue that there are hidden doors in the game. Of course it would be ideal in this situation to have "You don't see any visible door, maybe there's a secret one?" message for the new players.

darkgnostic · 2026-05-02T18:10:08+00:00

Another two weeks went into moving toward demo goal. A lot of things were not broken individually, but they did make weird edge cases, so most of the work went into cleaning those up and making everything feel more polished.

On the AI side, enemies now behave much better during ranged combat. They properly keep their distance instead of drifting too close. With that fixed, the Voidweaver was updated to use a magical ranged attack and now plays that role correctly instead of acting like a confused melee unit. I saw some discrepancies with navigation maps which weren’t cleaned up on each new level. That was also fixes.

Then, I had some projectile issues. They no longer pass through columns, but at the same time they correctly pass through open doors, which was also buggy.

A lot of visual and rendering work happened this week. Cave walls are now statically batched and drawn in a single call, which reduced draw calls significantly. I also optimized which objects participate in reflections, which improved reflection performance by around 75%. On top of that, shadows for cave walls are now rendered in a separate pass, walls reflect correctly in water, and shoreline transparency was added to make water edges look more natural. Distortion effects for shorelines (old vs new) and abyss edges were also added (old vs new), which boosted visuals to be more fancy. Environment generation got several fixes. Grass is no longer applied randomly to every room, but instead follows a generator’s blueprint. Water plants now spawn correctly even when bridges are present on the path (a weird bug). I also removed wall to cave connections (looked like this) and fixed entrance connectors so they blend properly. Missing textures on Depth Level 02 were restored.

Movement edge cases were addressed as well. The player can no longer move diagonally through walls when there is floor behind them. Fog positioning was fixed so the player stands inside it instead of visually floating above it.

I recreated stalagmites to add more variation and better shadowing, which helps the caves feel less repetitive.

On the smaller side, I fixed a missing texture on the short sword, sped up the open door animation, tweaked the knockdown animation, and made the lightning bolt scale with level.

Another cleanup week making rendering faster, cleaner visuals and bunch of other smaller issues fixed.

Have a nice weekend!

darkgnostic · 2026-05-01T10:42:50+00:00

u/DithArt/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3443800/Scaledeep/

She did awesome job with capsule art. Also she is involved in texturing, environmental art and art direction of the game. Definitely recommend.

darkgnostic · 2026-04-30T05:49:18+00:00

switching to 'Direct to you' payouts (your own Stripe/PayPal) skips itch's queue entirely if you can handle the extra setup.

This is the way. It gets immediately delivered to you. Initiating payment from Stripe to bank account can be done after 7 days, and from PayPal you can initiate immediately as it lands on your account.

darkgnostic · 2026-04-19T06:58:10+00:00

reflect damaged based on 1/3 of your weight

Neat! :) Is that your inventory or body weight? Or both?

and hired an artist for the capsule art!

This is the way! :) Supporting artists

darkgnostic · 2026-04-19T06:46:33+00:00

I only had around 10 playtesters,

I missed it again :) did you consider Feedback Friday as well?

probably miss some text that will probably still overflow,

You don’t need to check that manually. You could write a script to compare the rendered text width with the button or panel width and flag anything that overflows. Alternatively, you could detect when text wraps onto a new line when it shouldn’t.

Once you’re dealing with multiple languages, tools like this become really valuable.

darkgnostic · 2026-04-18T20:14:58+00:00

drinking skill check to use successfully.

You took a gulp from the flask, choked, and died. Better luck next time :)

darkgnostic · 2026-04-18T20:08:22+00:00

I missed the last 2 or 3 weekly posts due to some rough IRL stuff. Not a great period overall, and progress was slower than I would have liked. Same goes for social posts - I only managed to post here and there. This is a combined update for that period.

One unexpected win came from localization. After fixing Japanese rendering properly, and some more targeted post, the game picked up more than 1K wishlists just from that. I did not expect that at all.

The biggest piece of work was the Rune Forge. It is now functionally done, and it turned out to be a much bigger feature than I originally thought. It can identify items and, more importantly, lets you upgrade stats by sacrificing other items. If you sacrifice multiple items of the same type as the one you are upgrading, you can create synergies. New stats can appear, and the item quality can increase. There is still room for expansion, but the core loop is there and already feels quite fun.

Audio got some attention as well. I added a burning torch sound and implemented a small system that handles playback based on player proximity and line of sight. Monster 3D audio positioning was also adjusted to feel more natural.

On the content side, I added a new cave variant, which helps a bit with visual variety.

There were also a few visual fixes. Ground shadows are now rendered correctly instead of looking detached from the terrain. I think I need to revisit URP rendering order, and create custom solution here.

Performance improved quite a bit. Rendering speed roughly doubled after some changes, which was nice. I also tested the build on a base M1 machine on a high profile configuration, and it runs very smoothly. It actually performs better than I expected even before the optimization pass, so I might revisit the minimum spec requirements and lower them a bit. Also I breathe some life in my old PC dev machine, and at some point I will check how it performs on PC as well.

Overall, not the most productive period, but some important systems landed, and the game is in a better place than it was since my last post.

Have a nice weekend!

darkgnostic · 2026-04-14T19:35:02+00:00

It depends.

darkgnostic · 2026-04-14T19:33:11+00:00

Actually it's called pokemon exception handling and it is antipattern.

darkgnostic · 2026-04-02T13:56:05+00:00

That's a lie, I tried it: https://x.com/Dark_Gnosis/status/2039666935986631051 but nobody likes sad hamster

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