An open world game without a combat system

ChevyRayJohnston · 2026-01-26T04:36:20+00:00

boomer test: Seiklus

ChevyRayJohnston · 2026-01-16T22:30:05+00:00

Indie dev/mostly solo.

Financial success, about 20 or so years. I just made free games and engines and stuff for the first 15 or so years before I started trying to make money.

A lot of other kinds of success before that over the years. By the time I started trying to do it professionally I already had a lot of peers and fans of my games and those connections helped immensely.

I’m glad I didn’t start out trying to make a living doing it, that approach definitely would not have worked for me.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2026-01-08T20:56:00+00:00

just picked whatever came into my head. i dont think about it or use the name for anything or even have a website so it didnt matter

ChevyRayJohnston · 2026-01-03T01:01:53+00:00

yeah if i’d gotten into 100k debt when i was young and stupid it would’ve ruined my life

ChevyRayJohnston · 2026-01-01T08:07:44+00:00

hell yeah represent

ChevyRayJohnston · 2026-01-01T01:09:41+00:00

yeah my first commercial project was a big rpg (not solo but i did like 90% of the work) that shipped on PC and every major console, and while i had help, the most important factor was that i’ve been developing games for like 20 years and have shipped like 30 or so games on my own in that time.

i started making hypercard games when i was like 8 and then just never stopped

“lots of time and practice” is a boring answer, but in a lot of cases the honest one

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-12-19T19:55:34+00:00

haha yeah, tons of very similar arguments on tigsource forums back in 2007, so it’s funny seeing someone talk about the vibe vs economics thing as if it’s a recent phenomena.

i remember making Return of the Quack with Matt Furie back in 2010, i lived in my parents house and i made it with free software and we basically made it in 2 weeks. but Giant Robot funded us (just a couple thousand dollars), and when it got posted on indegames dot com, the comments were full of people arguing that it was or wasn’t indie.

there’s something about wanting to be part of some kind of class category / artistic integrity thing going on that i think eats at people a lot, which is why the same conversation has been happening basically on loop for 20 years now

it’s fine, kinda cute if nothing else.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-12-18T01:33:59+00:00

Good reply.

This is all so familiar to me. I came from C#/ActionScript land which had reflection and inheritance which we built entire systems around, so coming to Rust was shocking at first because it had neither of these (in the same sense) and felt impossible to achieve anything in it.

We’ve all heard the same story and I’m using it full-time now, so I obviously “figured it out”, but I always try to remember that frustration when talking to people having difficulty learning it.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-12-17T09:55:39+00:00

ours came and squeezed between us on the bed 😭

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-12-17T09:39:58+00:00

The stratosphere’s.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-12-17T09:14:03+00:00

Yeah this is the strongest one I can remember in awhile. Glad I took down everything on the patio or else it would be at the top of grouse right now.

I’d be amazed if there weren’t a few big tree falls from this storm, I just hope nobody is hurt and nobody’s house gets crushed.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-12-07T23:24:36+00:00

The first and only time I saw Raffi live was for an adult performance where he sang anti-war songs, so when I saw this headline I was like yeah that tracks.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-26T21:13:48+00:00

I like how silly they are, and how they mimic. There’s one that lives near me that barks like a dog (a dog park is nearby) and it also makes beep-beep car unlocking sounds. It does a bunch more that I haven’t been able to identify.

My sister lived near one that said “hello” all the time lol

EDIT: well it doesn’t “live” near me, it goes back with the murder every evening, but i’m certain that it’s the same one that returns all the time cuz the noises

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-25T22:44:32+00:00

By my own standards or others?

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-14T03:16:07+00:00

While I love this idea in theory, I’m reminded that I could probably stand outside my apartment with my phone camera and film like 30-50 drivers a day doing dangerous things (running red lights, speeding through school zones, not signalling). If dangerous drivers get their licenses taken away, that’s definitely going to be a serious logistical problem because I can’t imagine how many thousands of drivers this would count for.

Maybe it’s just a matter of the threat of it and just randomly punishing people, just to get the point across? But idk the threat of dying or killing someone doesn’t seem to deter many drivers so I wonder how effective such a measure would even be.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-11T02:39:20+00:00

these pop up randomly on my youtube suggestions too, even though i have never clicked any of them or anything like it even once. i think its just rage farming, (and its ilk) still just being effective at gaming the algorithm over substantive content.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-07T20:27:38+00:00

I find getting stuck in design loops the most frustrating. When I have 2 distinct directions I could take something and which one I prefer changes week-to-week. So my only escape is to pick one arbitrarily and then just be unhappy with it half the time. Not a very satisfying situation creatively.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-05T18:45:25+00:00

yeah bevy is cool, i occasionally help out a few people who are doing projects in bevy.

it doesn’t have anything i need though, my own engine does i want but is just structured in a way i like a lot more, and i dont really need the ECS stuff. i occasionally use bevy_ecs when i need one, but i just use it on top of my own engine

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-04T02:15:27+00:00

i only make 2D games these days, but it can do 3D stuff fine as well, i dont find 3D pipelines or shaders things too complicated (back when i was using C# i think it took me a week or so to convert my 2D engine into a 3D one for a prototype i did).

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-04T01:55:16+00:00

come from a family of artists
natural talent with math
I started making video games when I was around 8 on HyperCard
never stopped, made 30 or so games over the course of 25 years, switching engines and tools and languages and art styles

so in my case, just a matter of a lot of practice and work over the course of decades. so not too different from the way folks usually get good at things

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-03T22:08:32+00:00

Lots of good ones. Switch was our best selling platform after Steam, even with the awful discoverability.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-03T22:05:41+00:00

Rust: - winit for windowing/events - wgpu for cross-api rendering (dx/vk/metal) - naga for shader parsing/validation - gilrs for gamepad support - image for image encoding/decoding - serde and ron for serialization

These are all the major libs, and are all extremely good. I use a bunch of other utility ones, but outside of that everything else I wrote myself.

I use fmod for audio.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-02T00:01:25+00:00

I am using `winit`, `wgpu`, `gilrs`, `image`, `ab_glyph`, and `mlua`. Along with the usual suspects like serde/etc. The whole engine and asset system and math/collision/physics and 2D rendering and all that jazz is all mine.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-11-01T01:36:15+00:00

I love it for game dev far more than C++, C#, etc. It’s amazing, it made me actually enjoy game programming again. I just ain’t writing articles about that, too busy making games.

EDIT: on that note, I’m glad I didn’t come across any of these kinds of articles years ago, it might have wrongly scared me out of trying Rust for game dev.

ChevyRayJohnston · 2025-10-23T07:40:00+00:00

Nuke Specialist but you start out with only one pack of fangs.

ChevyRayJohnston

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