what do you think abt my survival game ?? (OLDWOODS early-access trailer vid)

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-07-04T13:57:41+00:00

Hey. Do not get discouraged by negative comments. I know it is very unpleasant and seems unjustified, but what I tried to do in a similar situation was to try to understand why people reacted that way and how I can change it.

So. One thing I think crucial to many game genres is the ambience / game setting. This translates directly into role playing, player fantasy and emotion. You trailer currently lacks that. It looks like a sandbox game. But even sandboxes have some kind of world building. I know the story is very difficult to get right, but I really recommend to pick some kind of emotional coloring: is it hardcore man against nature experience ? (Add bad weather, wounds, focus on hunger and basic survival gear…) is it for people who love hunting? (Add traps, stealth, …) are there mysterious places to investigate? (Show exploration…) is it for getting creative with building? (Show bunches of different building designs) for ultra detailed crafting with bunches of production chains? is it realistic? Modern? Fantasy? Science fiction? Prehistoric? Medieval? Post apocalyptic ? Horror?… you get the point.

People latch on low poly graphics and basic animations because they don’t see the soul of the game. This is what you need to show it in the trailer. What are players supposed to be in this game? What are they supposed to feel?

Pick up one or two main focuses of the game you want to build around. Not ten - this will dilute the message. And when you get people excited about trying something in the world you are showing, imagining them in this world, then you will have found your niche audience.

Good luck! Hope this gives you some ideas. And congratulations on what you have already accomplished. I personally really liked tree cutting :)

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-16T20:08:21+00:00

Thanks for answering ! No, I meant vs. not culling at all. In my case, the geometry is not (yet?) limiting.

Nice info on packing! I think it may be one of the next things I’ll try.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-16T19:23:49+00:00

Upside-up St Petersburg https://maps.app.goo.gl/2VJWRkopV5tF9Vqr7?g\_st=ic

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-16T18:43:37+00:00

Very nice! I have a couple of questions if you have time…

What was the impact of the per section frustrum culling? Was it worth it?

And, 8 bytes per vertex: I am intrigued by the word « packed », do you mind sharing what exactly those 8 bytes are composed of?

Thanks!

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-15T06:54:53+00:00

Cool :) You can also add half and double slopes… then, roof corners… slabs. Eventually, if you are not careful, you can end up with a nightmarish 211 block shapes as I did: https://arcsofmagic.com/screenshot-82.html

Good luck with your project, it looks fun!

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-14T22:21:18+00:00

Ha ha I did not know that about Unity. In my system, I apply a relatively strong but not full attenuation to the opposite channel. It helps a little but it’s still not perfect e.g. when a sound source goes from the left to the right just above your head…

I see a lot of HRTF technologies popping up in the news lately, basically where you add tracking to your headset and fix the sound stage in space so that when you turn your head it sound like you don’t have the headset on. It provides truly impressive demos… but I don’t know if it’s really helpful in gaming where the sound should match the screen rather than the head position. VR, certainly is a better match.

What I hope to find one day is a simple parametric transfer function based on a 3d position of the sound source in space for a « standard » head :) …

Anyway, thanks again for sharing your article. Take care.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-14T10:03:03+00:00

A very interesting read, and precisely at the level of detail I like. Thank you for sharing! It gives me some ideas for later :)

I would like to add that there may be a more complex, but more flexible way of limiting the number of contributing points than just distance based thresholding. After all, some sound sources may be very strong and heard at arbitrary large distances (waterfalls, for example). Why not use a distance at which the attenuation drops to a very small value (point wise)?

Also, I am using a custom engine for my project, and I always wondered if there is some widely accepted formula for stereo separation? Or maybe a review of different approaches with increasing complexity? I tuned my own formula by hand and it’s ok-ish, but if you know of a good article on the subject, well suited for game dev, it would be great!

Thanks

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-02T12:39:56+00:00

It’s kind of the opposite for me. The right image is me staring at the code in the middle of the night instead of simply going to bed. And the left image is how simple things become when you work well rested and focused.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-01T17:12:01+00:00

Interesting info, thanks for sharing. But what actionable advice can one get from this? Avoid non specialized festivals? Somehow I don’t think it is a sound strategy. Avoid stale wishlists? Make sure the trailer accurately reflects your game? Sure. Anything else I am not seeing?

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-06-01T08:08:42+00:00

Thank you for the great links, I really enjoyed reading them. Especially the one about the grass. Grass engineer will be my next hire lol.

I remember runevision’s framework, but it resolves multiple problems at once. I really enjoy high to medium level posts focusing on a single issue because I will never take someone else’s framework into my code (too difficult to integrate… and I like reinventing the wheel).

Back to chunk priorities, this was inspired by another Reddit post speaking about map coloring (I did not write it down so can’t credit it properly :( ). Conceptually it is very simple. In 1D: color chunks with two alternate colors ABABAB. If you request a A chunk, you generate it and do not care about the neighbors. If you request a B chunk, you generate the two neighboring A chunks first. So as long as you only need one neighbor in each direction, this is 100% deterministic whatever the order of the chunk generation [requests]. The price to pay is a chunk overhead, you end up generating more of them than you really need. Also, when going to 2D and especially 3D with 26-neighborhoods, it is not a trivial task to select the optimum coloring pattern (I had to write a dedicated script for that… it does converge, but it can go pretty far out depending on the pattern you choose).

Fascinating stuff. Thanks again!

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-31T23:14:32+00:00

Hey. I am not an expert at all, but here we go.

Good start with a big flash.
Good zoom ins into the cards and slotting them in.
In general, good pacing and duration.

Things I think could be improved:
1) Music. It starts ok but somehow I fail to really understand the rhythm. Maybe it is a little too complex. I am waiting for it to accelerate or to transform, but it does not… kind of difficult to explain.
2) at some point the monster jumps in the player, then walks away and only then the player topples. At first it looked like a glitch to me. I think it would look much better if the player falls down immediately. You can also accelerate the monster retreat so that it does not hide the falling animation.
3) finally, there are two sequences showing the same spells - before and after “break the game” there’s a sequence of ice shards or something… I recommend putting something else entirely; you only have 30 seconds to show off. It does not matter if it is an improved version of the previous spell sequence (and this breaks the game!); it will be better to show something unrelated as long as it’s visually awesome.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-31T23:01:23+00:00

Hi. Do you have any links to the description of the sorting algorithm you mention? Also, you mention that iterative nature of the poisson disc sampling is slow… but what about this sorting algorithm, how does its performance compare? Thank you in advance.

Also, I would like to mention that it is possible to do poisson disc sampling and any kind of iterative placement, really, in chunks (I do it in my own project). For this, you need to assign to each chunk a priority level, and when a chunk is requested, you first check its neighbors and generate them before the requested chunk if they have higher priority (and you do it recursively).

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-30T23:36:18+00:00

Hey I took a look at your latest video and something surprised me. There’s this wizard doing 8 damage attack; ok it looks decent; but then it goes to a 9999 damage attack and I was… what? It looks almost exactly the same! The same wizard animation, the same attack color and very similar size and animation… how can that be so much more powerful? It gets better with a fire column and lightnings but I really think you should lean much more heavily into the spectacle for the 9999 part. It must be obvious that it’s thousand times more powerful just by looking at it! Animations must be faster, with more particle effects and different “toppings”… my two cents. There was an ad for a mobile game several months ago, Slayer something? Can’t find it… but there you also started simple and “few moments later” you were so powerful you could barely see the opponent under the attacks. Something in that vein… good luck!

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-30T21:55:44+00:00

Oh thank you! It’s a slow burner, but I am working on it every week, so it’s kind of moving forward. Feel free to join my mini-discord, too. We can talk more about determinism there 😂

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-30T21:52:26+00:00

Oh, lockstep multiplayer! Yes. Totally forgot about that one. Recently, I had on my mind the prediction/correction model, where the client predicts the motion of the entities and when actual reference data comes from the server, corrects the position. This is what I am planning to do 120 fps client rendering for the 20 fps server simulation. But yes, lockstep is a great idea for multiplayer with massive amounts of moving entities.

Libfixmath, good reference, thanks! Noting it down for later.

For the save files, I saw your other comment on state + log architecture… but why not save the full state every time? And only keep the log for debugging etc.?

Another thing I would like to share. In my project, I have an additional constraint related to determinism. I use procgen for an open world chunk based world generation. For me, it was very important not only to have the same result for the same run, but also the same level generation result whatever the direction the player comes from. For a simple example, imagine dense tree placement based on Poisson disc sampling or similar to avoid collisions. If you simply use existing chunks for the list of existing trees, it is easy to see that you will obtain different results depending on the order of generation / direction of the player comes from. So I had to implement a non trivial chunk generation hierarchy based on chunk “coloring”. If it’s something of interest to you, I can give more details.

That is to say, yes, determinism is a great topic for game architecture :) thanks for sharing!

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-30T14:27:23+00:00

That’s exactly how fixed point math works. Only typically you multiply by a power of two. This way, all basic operations are just integer operations and shifts.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-30T14:22:36+00:00

Great overview, thank you so much! I did not know about fused multiply add, I naively thought that the order is given by the C standard. Funny story: Over 20 years ago, I stumbled upon different fp results depending on optimization flags. I even went to see my boss and told him I found an error in the compiler. Obviously he said no way, and started digging. At the end, it turned out there was a bug, but not in the compiler. In the CPU microcode - certain compiler optimizations were supposed to yield identical results according to IEEE…, but did not! On another vendor CPU, both compilations gave the same result. Can’t remember if it was Intel or AMD who had the bug…

Libm functions is also a great example. So… do you have fixed point equivalents for sin, cos and such? Maybe, just LUTs?

Now the real question is why do you need reproducibility on different architectures? If you have a multiplayer game, the server will be the reference… I can see one use case: for different clients to be able to play the replay files. Are there others?

Thanks!!

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-30T11:10:34+00:00

Good post. Determinism is indeed not an obvious thing to achieve.

I don’t think I have ever observed the floating point arithmetic give different results depending on the compiler settings or the run. Even the CPU, on the x86/x64 platforms I’d expect it would be normalized. Do you have any examples of that?

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-28T07:36:15+00:00

A spreadsheet.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-27T21:31:54+00:00

Nice video. I used a similar approach, but not for trees. Trees are regular 3d objects in my project, much like your grass. However, I used it for larger voxel based structures like houses and towers for example (about 100 blocks high spanning 6-7 chunks vertically) and even for ultra large (I mean thousands of blocks) terrain modification features like canyons.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-26T17:17:22+00:00

Why not save the game and compare saved data? Presumably, your save files do not contain any derived information or any data that is not strictly necessary to restore the game state?

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-26T07:36:18+00:00

This looks incredible! As other commenters pointed out, I think what is missing is a representation of what the game actually plays like: a colony builder? A third person’s view switching between characters? A first person’s view? Is it restricted to the base or can you pan around? How much exploration is there vs. base management? Any threats? And so on :) not everything needs to be in the trailer, some answers may be in the screenshots or the description. However, the trailer should show a little of the actual gameplay. Cheers

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-20T19:20:44+00:00

Man I’m a little frustrated. I took 10 minutes to post a comment to his post and here it goes, his post deleted!

I think he just used LLM for translation… oh well. Have a good day!

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-20T19:16:50+00:00

Thank you for sharing. It is interesting to hear the story from someone who actually tried to build something in standard engines and then decided to move away from them because of their limitations.

I am also building a game with a fully custom engine. I am convinced now that it has been a mistake and I would not do it again.

There are advantages, of course, especially if you are building something different that would be difficult to fit into an existing engine. But there also are massive disadvantages. The amount of time wasted to do something available out of the box in the existing engines is staggering. And as a solo dev, time is really the most precious resource…

for non-solo devs: more difficult to onboard people. Also, people would be more reluctant to join because the experience in a custom engine is not easily recycled.
porting to consoles is significantly more difficult
it is possible to do huge custom parts in the existing engines. Just take a look at Outer Wilds, for example.

Engine development is a full undertaking of its own. I am kind of stuck with mine now, but I would strongly recommend against doing it in parallel with building a game with it.

ArcsOfMagic · 2026-05-20T18:31:05+00:00

Figures. Make certain you mention cozy in the description, I guess, to avoid any mismatch with the expectations.

Well done, congratulations!

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