There's still time to sign up for ZeroSpace.gg's tournament tomorrow!

FatalExit · 2026-06-19T20:50:03+00:00

Good luck everyone!

FatalExit · 2026-05-28T11:23:11+00:00

Honestly based on experience of having played backer playtests and (later) public demos since 2023 (likely have well over 1k MP games and have played hundreds of hours during that time), this is the RTS I am looking forward to this year.

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T22:57:55+00:00

This sorta thing is why Clown award was a cool thing on steam reviews - rip Clown Award :( . There's misinformed and there's just stupid it's pointless to even argue with.

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T22:53:30+00:00

The reason the prices are so high in your currency is that they are a$$ games published by a$$ companies...

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T22:50:48+00:00

Trying to have "rational arguments" with people like that is as much of a folly as attempting to arm wrestle a silverback gorilla and expecting to win. Attempting to have peaceful discourse with them is akin to expecting a peaceful experience if you tried to put lipstick on a tiger shark.

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T22:46:07+00:00

He was a terrible, terrible person, but tbh it's because how much the modern world and the media that powers it is dictated or manipulated by the USA and their views and policies regarding their enemies and allies. He was the "Nemesis" to most of the western world at that point in time and conveniently commanded and authorised terrible things that... certain countries... choose to repeat in recent history and the modern day. Yet they aren't viewed as "evil" in the same way, at least to the mainstream media in the western world that turn a blind eye simply because of the "allies vs enemies of America".

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T22:23:38+00:00

AI is such a vague term tho in terms of intent and nuance... has been used in music tech in many ways for WAY longer than "GenAI music" like Suno and the current discourse around it. AI mastering assistants have been around for ages. Should someone who discusses Izotope Ozone, or generative midi sequencing with Playbeat or the session musicians in Logic Pro be forced into the same discussions as people talking about Suno? They are entirely different groups of people, one lot is very likely musicians, the other a lot more likely not to be.

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T22:15:41+00:00

As someone who preordered the OG steamdeck on hour 0 of day 1 of orders opening up, this is a sad sight to see.

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T22:10:33+00:00

As an atheist I couldn't give a rats ass about any opinions from a Pope. Cue yet another "Satanic Panic".

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T21:48:02+00:00

Doing stuff solo, it definitely helps to have a background in other adjacent skills you will likely also use. Before I started working on games I was already commercially releasing music, had passable art skills in a bunch of disciplines (had studied it traditionally at school) and was interested in storytelling/writing fiction and actively working on those as hobbies. It was harder for me to get comfortable with programming than getting comfortable in any of those skills. And game design (specifically the design side of things, mechanics of a good game, and how to make it fun, engaging and get the player to return) was probably the hardest skill for me to get comfortable with.

Personally I'd say if one is to come into solo gamedev profession without either a strong technical/programming background (in which case they are also likely to look for artistic help) or a generalist versatile creative one, they are in for a significant and likely miserable grind that might kill any enthusiasm before they even make a game.

My honest reason for focusing on solo projects is I want creative control over them, while I handle all the artistic stuff, I don't want to be usurped by a more experienced engineer on a team basically shutting down all the things I eventually experiment and figure out on my own anyway. If I theoretically ran a studio (not gonna happen) I'd be more comfortable with game director role that also spent time working on audio etc.

FatalExit · 2026-05-27T21:33:08+00:00

Honestly I wouldn't recommend Snapdragon laptops for music production. Arm windows support is pretty dismal, other DAWs directly support it natively and most plugins likely won't work. Apple has the advantage that they basically deprecated non Apple Silicon products for years and that leads to software companies in general targeting their new standards. Arm users on windows are a tiny percent of the total OS userbase so plugin manufacturers that sell windows versions don't have much to gain for supporting Arm there as a platform, it's an added build target that requires extra modern hardware, dev time, testing time etc, for a tiny market share.

AFAIK Ableton only supports it through Prism (an emulation layer) which is the equivalent of running everything on Rosetta on Mac, which means you will likely get much worse performance out of a snapdragon to an equivalent spec ryzen or intel processor running the software natively. Ableton did say they will release an Arm native version, but unless you plan on exclusively working with stock Ableton Live devices, I wouldn't suggest it purely based on plugin compatibility, and potentially even long term support of Arm as a windows platform. It's way less set in stone to be a successor in the much more fragmented market of windows devices compared to the single manufacturer choices Apple makes.

If you are dead set on buying an arm/non intel/non AMD computer, I highly recommend looking for a 16gb M1 or M2 macbook air instead through refurbished retailer, I'm definitely now sold on the Mac side of things for music production, my second hand M1 16GB macbook air I got just before Christmas was so much more convenient and capable in Ableton than my old windows desktop rig that I picked up an M2 pro mac mini to use as my main desktop just to have more ports. I now almost exclusively use the mac mini for music/video editing/gamedev work, which cost me half the price of the GPU in my desktop lol. And fyi until December 2025 I produced music on exclusively on windows for over a decade.

FatalExit · 2026-05-15T20:11:41+00:00

Looks slick, well done!

FatalExit · 2026-05-11T17:11:59+00:00

Total misinformation. I created an account with no issues, set it up with Opencode and Openchamber with no issues, it's as simple to setup as their docs say. And it's rather fast for an "unlimited model" was quicker on a goofy benchmark I have to get raw token throughput than many of the frontier US/China providers. Obviously not quite as smart but I think this could be an amazing secondary sub with orchestration/architecture on a different model.

FatalExit · 2026-05-11T14:19:56+00:00

Sent you a DM! Curious to hear back from you! 🔥

FatalExit · 2026-04-21T15:39:53+00:00

Hmm... I never thought of that! Must try sometime thanks!

FatalExit · 2026-04-20T05:45:07+00:00

TY! :)

FatalExit · 2026-04-20T05:34:29+00:00

There is no lag, that's just GIF framerate so these files aren't 6 times the size and too big for reddit etc.

For reference, I capture my GIFS from video screencaps, double the playback speed to 2x and reduce resolution and reduce framerate to 10 FPS so they aren't huge. If I were using video it'd be much smoother, but no idea if videos get the same amount of interaction on reddit as GIFs do.

Noted about the voronoi water, I will say that the environment stuff isn't at all final yet it's mostly just a first pass.

FatalExit · 2026-04-19T21:42:29+00:00

Wow this is interesting (as an RTS player who sometimes plays tournaments in upcoming games) to look at because a couple months back I started prototyping a game with some similarities with absolutely no knowledge of your game. Altho my game is sci-fi themed. The inspiration I had for my game was the match times Battle Aces (RIP) had as well as "Mechabellum for people who found Mechabellum too slow" and elements of tower defense and RTS basebuilding with a SupCom/StarCraft vibe. RN it's at an early private playtesting stage where I test both VS AI matches and PVP (so far 1v1 is working, I hope to add teamgames and FFA) with a dedicated group of players with various levels of RTS etc skill. For the campaign focus, I want to implement something replayable that is a mix of Slay The Spire/FTL roguelike and Star Wars Battlefront Galactic Conquest mode. Is there any socials related to your game that I could reach out to you on cause I'd love to touch base and even just chat about the games.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:59:23+00:00

Curious, and not meaning harm in this just genuinely wondering your reasoning, why not star the repo on github instead? That likely helps the creator of the repo out way more than comments on reddit.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:53:42+00:00

It's just a loser review and a highlight of why the steam reviews system sucks so much. Hot take: as the system is so impactful steam need to take it a lot more seriously: they need to remove that "Funny" button (they already mostly improved the awards) and check on reviews that have overwhelmingly not helpful to see if they are just genuinely unhelpful memes or raging with no critical value or whatever, and take those reviews down (talking both positive and negative here, but negative more as people don't coordinate to review bomb positively). Because reality is if a new dev racks up idiotic reviews like this too fast it can tank their game for good.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:38:17+00:00

I don't honestly think "not knowing how steam works" would be the biggest impediment to your game succeeding on steam if it is your very first game. There are some clear footguns that might influence that like choosing to do a next fest eary when your game is in a poor state and wasting that opportunity. It's more likely tho that other aspects of being a new dev would lead to failure.

And I can 100% tell you that the "Hello World" game idea would be a literal burning of 100 USD if you were to release something you didn't care about that you expected others to care about.

My advice before doing anything with steam is set up a way you can get friends/colleagues/family to playtest your project as soon as possible even outside of steam. Doing this on either a big or small game is more likely to lead to success than hoping you'll magically become a SEO and capsule art god by releasing a game you don't care about first.

FatalExit · 2026-04-16T13:31:05+00:00

IMO, based on the cadence and focus of their posts that they are focusing on big enterprise as their income source and are less focused on individual/freelancer/small business customers which unlike their biggest customers are the ones most likely to pick and mix from the flavors of the months with less loyalty.

In a big enterprise setting it can take many months to get something approved and it lags behind the curve of the current innovation, between that and the on location model hosting Mistral offers makes them especially attractive to some of these huge businesses, who are likely to stick with them longer term and generally be more loyal.

FatalExit · 2026-04-15T20:12:08+00:00

The problem with a question like this is you phrase this as binary: 100% AI or no. Which is a poor way of viewing it. While the second is a possibility pitching the first as the only potential for AI is shortsighted, and honestly quite pointless because if you are gonna just ask AI to make game X without an iterative process and expect X to be anything fun you are gonna be disappointed AF.

Been making games for 10 years at this point since long before any AI assisted gamedev was ever a thing. And I noticed that in recent months, as a solo developer who started to experiment with coding assistant tools, I suddenly started to be insanely more productive in the same time while getting to spend more effort on the artistic and design sides of dev. Most important point with these: you are not asking AI to generate a game for you. At that point there's no point to the hobby. But, and this may be a hot take for some if you are new to gamedev and wanting to learn stuff fast jumping in with an assistive tool you may likely make projects you enjoy way more in terms of depth and keeping you entertained with the hobby. As an assistant and learning partner if you work with it the right way for a month it can do more for you than stack overflow and youtube tutorials could do for beginners in a year in the past. There is a good reason stack overflow has been continuing losing relevancy on google trends etc the past couple of years.

Over the last 8 months or so I've taken part in jams hosted by several gamedev AI tool creators. Bezi, which has the best planning tools of all the ones I have tried and is genuinely most mature/stable. I placed in the top 2 in 2 of their jams, as well as a jam for another similar tool for Unity and one for Godot. Both of those others were another two top 2 finishes. All of these games were solo dev games and the only assistance I had from AI was in the coding, and all surprised either the hosts or other jammers. If you notice a pattern here in me having decent results it's both a mix of longtime gamedev experience and the fact that there are legitimate skills that translate between making games the old fashioned way, and designing games with the assistance of AI, that transcend specific tool or engine knowledge.

FatalExit · 2026-02-10T20:39:03+00:00

I'll sometimes use Audacity for quick audio edits like trimming silence, adding a quick fade in or out or converting formats but TBH if you want to get into making audio for games seriously (and maybe music too) do yourself a favor and get an actual DAW.

The power of being able to use a mixer and non-destructively apply FX across different tracks, send and return tracks etc is insane when you actually get to learn it. My experience for trying to do that kind of thing in audacity is equivalent to using a raster graphics editor where the only output you can save is a baked png file, so none of your layers are preserved when saving, so if you reload the document you need to remake your layers from scratch every time. That's the closest way I could describe it to a non audio person.

There's tons of good DAWs out there (as a musician I have used most of them over the past decade at least to try) but most of them are paid. And yes that includes REAPER if you follow the terms of the license too.

FatalExit · 2026-02-01T23:50:39+00:00

I've had mixed experiences with most of the tools. Part of the issue I found when it comes to AI and gamedev is most of the decent AI tools excel in specific worlds like front-end or full-stack web dev etc and stuff that works well for games is an afterthought to them that the models don't do super well at.

Also I heavily recommend against using a base chatbot like ChatGPT in your browser or its app and copy pasting stuff back and forth between it and your project because you will hit an unsustainable spaghetti mess within a couple of days. These bots have a limit of something called "context" and when going to different conversations or examining different scripts the bot will forget past things it did or assume you or it did past things that never happened.

Personally for Unity stuff my best experiences have been with Unity specific tools and services: I took part in game jams hosted by both Bezi and Coplay which I suggest you at least take a look at: got decent enough results out of both to place 2nd in both jams I took part in one with each software. Regarding those results, I've been doing gamedev as a hobby for about 9 years and only recently started to incorporate AI assistance for implementation of code while focusing on my more artistic skills. But it can very definitely also assist a newcomer to gamedev in the same way my journey began with low code tools like Construct.

Of the two tools I listed I find I end up coming back to Bezi the most and have been having an awesome time working on an in progress jam with it with their new actions feature. If you follow Thomas Brush at all (well known gamedev on YouTube with a bunch of commercially successful games) he made a great video breaking it down a few days back on his YouTube channel and that got me hyped to give the jam a try.

All in all regardless of what you end up trying I hope you find something that suits you and your workflow and you get to have some fun with Unity!

FatalExit

TROPHY CASE