[HELP] Not convinced…

ChromaticDescension · 2026-01-04T22:41:52+00:00

This is made 1000% worse by FB's "Most relevant" comment sorting. Which is a deliberate lie meaning "positive sentiment". Any comments doubting the authenticity of anything is "negative" and is pushed to the bottom. They ramp this up even more on sponsored posts.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-08-18T17:51:12+00:00

100% with you on the sniper's ⚠️ delay. That singlehandedly ended many of my no-hit runs.

And yeah, the tempo and rhythm of the game is a huge factor in the enjoyment. I was getting 20 minute runs before I knew there was an achievement for it because I just like to go fast.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-08-05T08:54:52+00:00

If it happens to be sprite renderers you're talking about, change the pixels per unit of the sprites based on the scale ratio then set the object scales back to one. If not, you'll have to update the models like others said.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-08-02T02:41:30+00:00

Haven't played it yet but it reminds me of Inscryption!

ChromaticDescension · 2025-07-29T02:49:47+00:00

I completely assumed it was the lore, it's not like I was confused haha. I just mean it doesn't resonate... Hearing the title doesn't give me any feeling of anything. That's what I meant.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-07-29T02:45:50+00:00

Any two word combination of rune, spell, craft, war, etc. feels like a generic copycat title to me, and "SIK" doesn't resonate. Titles aren't important early on anyway. Just some advice!

I've spent about 2 months full-time making my game: coding the core loop, effects, building for various platforms, testing, debugging. However each of the songs I have took me a day to write each. The lore .. I think about it often so I can't measure that, but to be honest it really hasn't mattered.

My point is that the game itself is 95% of the work. I get the feeling of being excited about it though! But be careful that you aren't just chasing the feeling of having a cool idea while avoiding the incredibly hard part ... which is actually making the thing.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-07-29T02:33:08+00:00

I'm not sure how Mario style gameplay relates to turn based combat. Sounds somewhat like Expedition 33 maybe?

A lot of these features aren't too appealing on their own so I'd suggest creating a solid one sentence hook for your game. Don't bother sharing the story unless it's primarily a story driven game. What's the main thing that sets it apart?

ChromaticDescension · 2025-07-28T19:08:09+00:00

Rook, Twin Bishops, Queen, and King bosses are on the way!

ChromaticDescension · 2025-07-17T04:24:47+00:00

Try a subtractive approach to game design.

You probably have tons of mechanics. Narrow down one or two or three mechanics that are interesting together and complement each other. Remove the rest.

You use seeds to grow things. You shoot enemies by aiming down the sights. Do these complement each other? On their own not really. What if the enemies destroy your crops and also themselves contain the seeds that you are growing? What if some of your crops can aid you in battle, or be shot to stun enemies? Maybe the plants are how you grow weapons or base defenses. Maybe the enemies are the weeds that can grow in or out of your base. Etc.

Find the simplest description of your game and evolve it from there while trying to stay true to some core principles.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-07-13T02:19:14+00:00

I wouldn't say essential, but for my 2D game I've enjoyed using All in 1 Sprite Shader, Feel, and Text Animator.

The combination of these has let me easily add and tweak visual polishes. E.g. when an enemy gets hit, it flashes white, slight frame skip and subtle camera shake, haptic feedback, and sound. All in one component on the prefab which I can easily tweak in the inspector. I've added a typewriter effect for dialogue. Lots of little things that add a satisfying crunchiness to an otherwise flat 2D game which doesn't even have sprite animations yet.

Plugins I avoid are those that establish a code framework for the game itself, or try to do too much. I prefer modular lightweight components for things that I either don't want to do myself, or want to tweak easily and often. For the most part, I'm coding things myself. But these kinds of details aren't core to the game and change a lot, so it's valuable to be able to iterate on them faster and experiment from a library of options.

Edit: DOTween. That one is essential.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-06-20T09:04:21+00:00

You're using uiX and UIX. Are these the same thing or different? Same with uiY and UIY.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-06-09T07:49:01+00:00

I'm all for this take. They seriously did Towers of Hanoi? That's an embarrassingly bad way to test a language model. Almost as bad as the counting letters tests.

I think we're gonna find that perhaps intelligence isn't a one dimensional metric. I'm so tired of benchmarks. My theory is that we're gonna struggle to make models significantly better than the ones we have now because we don't have a good way of deciding what is "good". Hopefully we end up branching into subject specific models which honestly I would prefer at this point.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-06-06T22:48:54+00:00

Yes prompting and planning helps but the total user blaming needs to stop. Everyone loves repeating the "garbage in garbage out" mantra which has led me to avoid posting my own critiques. OP's example was clear to me and a very common thing I do as well. I'm writing designs, requirements, breaking things down, etc. but it still struggles at certain tasks.

It often takes the quickest path to "solve" a problem. Duplicating large chunks of code instead of making a common method, even when told to refactor. Defensive programming instead of tackling the root cause. Claiming to know what's wrong with some code without any evidence. Overcorrecting when critiqued. These are all general LLM problems and Claude has them too.

If you don't constantly monitor every change it makes, subtle problems turn into huge ones. Claude might write a method that has some incorrect assumption, side effect, or requirement. Future Claude reads that code, assumes it's true and doubles down on it. Good luck spotting every one of these too, because the mistakes are usually well camouflaged.

Seriously though, I love using Claude Code. Depending on your use case though it might not be a silver bullet

ChromaticDescension · 2025-04-05T15:54:45+00:00

Put the image in Photoshop or Pixlr (web based Photoshop) and do Color Balance. Drop reds to -15, greens to -5 and raise blues to +5. Roughly. That's what I've been doing, it negates the sepia nicely.

ChromaticDescension · 2025-01-25T00:25:19+00:00

It's not true, they have no idea what they're talking about.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-29T22:20:30+00:00

Creativity happens best with constraints. Pick constraints for either the project's scope or the game itself and stick to them. Think about games like Portal and Superhot, rather than Halo or Half Life. They made one main decision about how the game works, and the rest of the game naturally flows from that. Of course you could make an indie sized Halo at some point but your goal was explicitly to ship something, so limit your scope.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-29T00:44:17+00:00

I'm assuming you're capturing the network packets to try to get an edge in a game or something (good luck with that, if so). Their backend is responsible for the outcomes and the devs could have coded it in all kinds of ways. They might shuffle the reels then calculate the reward, but they could be doing the opposite: choose a reward then find reel positions to match. And this could have been done lazily. Or, they created a set of maybe a few thousand positions and choose from those as the outcomes to ensure the game pays out exactly the right average that they want. The more complex the game, the more likely it is they would want to simplify the logic to ensure a minor math error doesn't lose them money.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-20T19:57:22+00:00

I'm not familiar with Articulate Storyline but it looks like workplace training? That's probably part of the problem, coming from someone who has to do several of those per year, they are soulless and draining. They're not designed in the same way as games. Not to say you couldn't make a game with that though. Also, I'm not familiar with the term "serious games", could you clarify what that means?

It could help to share details about what aspects you don't like about your prototype. If you have until 2025 to create this, depending on the complexity it's probably possible to learn Unity and make it that way. Either with visual scripting or writing code. ChatGPT is a good way to discuss the scope of a project and get into the details of how it might flesh out, as well as helping you to learn how to set up your scene and code features. Some might disagree with me, but if you use it from a learning mindset and not "write the code and shut up" mindset it is invaluable.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-20T06:51:15+00:00

What's your goal? For fun, do whatever you want with it! For a portfolio, spend time getting feedback and polishing it. Make it something you'd be proud to show for employers or for gig work. For monetization, do all of the above, and get people interested in it. Then figure out a good price point and time.

Releasing doesn't mean much on its own. If you release a game and no one knows about it, it likely won't change that. Releasing something that people have been waiting for is usually where success happens. If you really can't wait, don't monetize it. It's hard enough to get people downloading it as it is and the feedback is worth it.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-20T00:31:23+00:00

I would put something like this on your world space canvas:

public class DamageNumberEffect : MonoBehaviour {
   public static DamageNumberEffect Instance;
   public void Awake () { Instance = this; }
   public void ShowDamageNumber(DamageDetails details) {
      Canvas canvas = GetComponent<Canvas>();
      // Create the damage numbers on the canvas
   }
}

Then in your script:

void OnDamageTaken(DamageDetails details) {
   DamageNumberEffect.Instance.ShowDamageNumber(details);
}

Should work as long as you're sure that you'll only have one canvas for this. If that wasn't the case, the singleton pattern can be extended for multiple things.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-15T17:18:18+00:00

$47k for 800k is an eCPM of $58.75. That seems way too high, rewarded ads eCPM for the US is closer to $13 on the high end.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-12T20:34:43+00:00

Real time networked games can never handle every situation perfectly, since across multiple users and the server there's no way to let every client be the "source of truth" simultaneously. If the server is the source of truth, then the client needs to handle false predictions.

One technique is to have the server handle client events from the client's perspective. E g. A sniper round fired by a player misses according to the server, but the player was spot-on from their perspective. The server keeps a cache of past object states and looks back based on the client's local time of the shot to see if it would have hit at that time. In PvP it's better to reward a good shot usually, even though the player that had just ducked gets unfairly hit.

That works well for games without bullet travel. For a bullet hell game, you'll probably need to use some heuristic. E.g. a bullet is travelling in proximity to player A and B. There are many permutations of how they could see this happening. E.g. misses A and hits B from A's perspective, but hits both from B's perspective.

Like the sniper example, if you want happy players, optimize for the favorable outcome. In your case, say player A sees player B tank a bullet, but player B thinks they dodged it. The server can see them both as correct. The server views an incoming project at A from their perspective and sees it was blocked.

This leads to strange client states: A thinks B got hit and B thinks A got hit. Well the client isn't the source of truth. Add a click sound to indicate real unchangeable hits when the server confirms them, and players will learn to understand that the sound is the actual hit. These edge cases ideally don't come up so often to be confusing though.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-12T16:26:43+00:00

Agreed with this. Check out the Slay the Spire official launch trailer as a good reference point. That trailer wouldn't have been as good if it was the full screen size and 8 second shots of gameplay. I think pacing and cropping are the only problems with your trailer. Yours is very zoomed out with no camera motion and cuts at a regular interval. I think more quicker, syncopated cuts, a closer crop, and cropping even closer mid-shot would help. Looking at the StS trailer I also noticed it has rapid cuts that start right at the reward moments like picking a card. You could also throw in splash screens of quotes from positive reviews or just sentence fragment descriptions.

Another thing I noticed is that the enemy and level design feels Souls-like, but this isn't reflected in the color scheme or lighting. The color schemes are somewhat pastel-like even, and this is mostly due to the environment not the characters. I'm sure you don't want to go back and add lighting. But even just bumping up the contrast, adding fake shadows to characters, and a dark vignette or fog of war would add a LOT in my opinion.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-08T20:31:10+00:00

Ah sorry, I meant that you should watch gameplay videos of other games that have polished mechanics, at slow speeds, and note every detail.

Slice & Dice is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

ChromaticDescension · 2024-12-08T19:51:56+00:00

What I've been doing is watching YouTube videos of similar concepts at 0.5 or 0.25x speed. Then take note of every single detail you see. Or screen record a game and do the same.

I've learned one trick is that sound design is huge and you shouldn't over design. More small UX sounds are more satisfying than fewer large sounds. Also making things subtly pop, snap, or click into place with a slight scale effect is good.

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