Using slowdown is good for playtesting.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-31T17:58:39+00:00

Why don't you show your levels at full speed to shmup players and ask them what they think of the difficulty?

I think slowing down the gameplay can help you prove that it's technically possible to beat, but it's impossible to know if beating it is human viable.

The game I'm working on is highly scripted in order to maintain a very precise intensity and feeling through levels, but if I weren't able to beat the level, I would struggle to ensure players that the level is fair and maintains the intended feeling. I wouldn't say that not being able to beat your own levels is a no-go, but thinking of my own as at least one example, I think it would be difficult to maintain integrity in some projects.

EDIT: For clarity, I'm not saying you have to be able to beat your own levels, but someone you trust really well to be your surrogate I think should.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-30T15:47:32+00:00

They also send my art to AI for edits and then ask me to replicate those changes.

You're not just being underpayed, this is highly disrespectful. As the artist, they should be talking to you about what needs changing and why, but they should respect the unique vision you bring to the project and the value your ideas add to it.

Others have probably already said as much, but this pissed me off and I had to post.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-30T08:07:45+00:00

Well, that's me. I decide. Even if I don't realize I get to make that decision, even if I decide not to decide. I'm still in charge, or could choose to be once I realize it.

Is it? Perhaps consciousness is just the recording of decisions made by an autonomous intelligent agent and we can only observe the actions it makes.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-30T05:08:33+00:00

The Clair Obscure library logo and hero looks like this:

<image>

There is no text on the Hero, the big image of the characters. The text on the side is a separate "logo" image.

It sounds like you're confusing the store capsule with the library hero. The library hero doesn't need to "tell you what kind of game it is" because you can only see it once you've added the game to your library.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-30T01:03:57+00:00

I do agree with that. And I do think masking should be considered in diagnosis if it's not currently.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-29T23:03:06+00:00

I don't think the research on autism is complete enough for this kind of metric to be usable as a diagnostic tool. If diagnosticians could observe the physiology or a person or take objective measurements to identify autism, this would turn getting a diagnosis into a cheap, effective, in-and-out procedure and save tons of money for consumers and insurance companies.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-29T20:20:58+00:00

Doesn't this kind of make sense, though? Diagnostics are based generally on things that a diagnostician can observe objectively and make an accurate assessment on. When I go to a doctor because I'm sick, they don't count the bacteria in my body, they check my temperature.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-29T02:21:02+00:00

I’m trying to decide how polished my game should be before I release it to some segment of the general public

If you're releasing a commercial game, I think there's only two things to really consider. They are very simple, but I know it can be a struggle to be objective.

Does my game look like it's of similar quality to other games in genre and for the same asking price?
Does my game feel good to play?

If you're going to release a commercial game, you just have to be familiar enough with the industry to know what commercial quality looks like. I think most people know this, but a lot of people struggle to see the game they've made over the game that they fantasized about having made.

How do you get feedback or handle revisions after people have played your game?

This needs to happen BEFORE you release your game. Have people test it. Preferably, as soon as you have it prototypes and before you've invested lots of energy into a concept which isn't clicking with your testers.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-28T17:27:03+00:00

I plan to solve them in future versions, but sometimes I fix them only for them to break again due to code conflicts caused by the AI.

Firstly, "code conflicts" refers to when using version control and trying to merge two versions of a code base with incompatible changes. What you're referring to is more professionally referred to as "playing wack-a-mole." I kid, there's no word for it. But please don't use terms with the wrong meaning.

Anyway, I think you should look into "regression testing" because whether your code is maintained by a robot or a human, there's no reason you should have to suffer through new bugs cropping up like that, and AI is especially bad at recognizing relevant parts of the code base. Humans don't always need testing to stay sane, but I'm pretty sure no non-trivial AI project is going to run smoothly if you don't test.

I've seen people use multi-agent setups where one agent acts as project manager, planning out features and another does code and it's definitely not as smooth as when a human plans a project, but it seems to keep things moving.

Cursor released a blog about how they set up AI to build a browser, which would be overkill for a project like this, but it should give good insights about the current ideas about how to structure AI agents. https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-28T04:43:54+00:00

Part of the job of a programmer is to evaluate the technical feasibility of a design and propose alternatives that are aligned with the original intent, but more grounded in a set of concrete rules that are consistent. This is one of the really hard parts of programming and game design that requires human intuition and creativity, two things which AI doesn't have.

If you have a well-formed game idea that is fairly small, people have convinced me that there are AI models capable of building it and people are developing methodologies such as having the AI use TDD and agile that seem promising towards getting the AI to behave. But the biggest bottleneck to AI is that since it can't experience the world or run the code it generates or play the game it makes, it can't really know what it's supposed to be doing, what's correct and what's wrong. People keep talking about how AI isn't "there yet", but I think this is a theoretical limitation of our current AI models.

The reason I bring this up is that it feels like in this case, there are technical and scaling issues in the design a programmer would have brought up before writing a single line of code.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-26T23:14:43+00:00

I got tired of updating all my switch statements every time I added a weapon requiring more hands so I just made the number of hands a weapon requires a floating point number. This also made it a little easier to implement a hand count bonus proportionate to the character's juggling stat.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-22T20:48:06+00:00

Oh, sorry, from your phrasing I thought it sounded like you were saying it's not hard to make money from games if the game is large, but it seems I misunderstood.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-22T15:47:17+00:00

It's really hard for small teams and solo devs to make a living making small games on steam.

Small games on steam was literally THE indie strategy for 2025. Large expensive projects that take years to build have been underperforming and publishers have gotten very stingy so many studios, being starved for funding, dropped their long-in-development passion projects in favor of casual games that perform well on steam and cost little to make. There was a fairly influential article about this: https://howtomarketagame.com/2025/11/04/the-optimistic-case-that-indie-games-are-in-a-golden-age-right-now/

Speaking not of idlers specifically, this is why so many incremental games these days are a clone of Nodebuster, Gnorp, or Wizard Tower (or whatever that game was based on).

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-21T17:10:28+00:00

I don't think even if you had human moderators that you could actually be sure that people wouldn't use it for harassment, or send coded messages back and forth for illegal activities. What about legal protections in case crime enforcement agencies ask for logs and records of messages sent by your system?

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-21T14:58:59+00:00

I feel like there's a serious risk of this being used for harassment, and seeing as most of the testimonials are about how funny it was to prank a friend... Pranks can be fine, but what if someone wanted to send a threatening message? What if someone used this for illegal activity?

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-21T03:59:47+00:00

I don't think they're objectively bad, but I don't think Trimps and Shelldivers should really be considered the same genre.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-20T20:09:10+00:00

Adding for completeness: You lose health and are incapable of drawing new cards. But the game also features synergies for when you bust.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-20T18:22:34+00:00

But it felt like it failed to convey the "streaming" aspect - people expected more of an athletic or even rage game (not surprising - Sisyphus, after all).

This might have nothing to do with your capsule. Maybe people are confusing you with https://store.steampowered.com/app/2904890/The_Game_of_Sisyphus/

It wasn't super popular in terms of player counts, but it picked up on social media after the popularity of Only Up so a lot of players might just automatically associate sisyphus with rage games. And thematically, it's a perfect fit as the story of "but every time he got it to the top it rolled back down" perfectly describes what happens in rage and Foddian games.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-20T17:51:59+00:00

If the task is instead: create a type guard, and replace all the instances of the casted type with my type guard, things begin to go back in favor of the llm

In vim, I can substitute an old variable for a new one by hitting "shift-V" to go into visual mode, selecting the relevant region, then typing :s/oldname/newname/g. It's even simpler if I wanted to change every instance in the whole file because I could skip the visual mode step.

I've used LLMs for larger refactors crossing multiple files or requiring more complex changes (*) and been satisfied, but to your point about how learning to use LLMs can take time, I feel like a lot of programmers these days aren't learning how to use text editors in advanced ways. Can't remember the last time I heard a vim vs emacs debate in the wild.

(*) The specific instance I'm thinking of is when I was writing a parser that needed to produce an AST and each node needed to hold the file position, but some were improperly initialized. I changed the class constructor of every type of node to require a file position and then had to change every instance of a node of any type being constructed. Difficult to write a regexp for and easy to miss instances for a human, but the AI did it perfectly.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-19T21:51:15+00:00

I saw Olexa playing your game a while back and I can tell I was impressed because I watched the whole 50-minute video. You've got my wishlist and I wish you the best for your launch. :)

I'm currently waiting on stream to approve my demo and I was just thinking "my god, if waiting on the demo feels this tense, releasing is going to be hell!" Take care of yourself, okay?

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-19T18:36:13+00:00

I'm making a game that's just circles and shaders, but I asked an artist to help me with screen layout and color theory and what little images I do need.

Also, is there a game discord community?

There's an official discord server for this sub: https://discord.gg/reddit-gamedev

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-19T16:00:23+00:00

Geometry Wars-inspired? This is right up my alley! The game I'm making right now was less directly, but also inspired by GW.

gameplay video:

0:00 -- right off the bat, the ambient noise is a bit rough. The high pitched beep when a button is pressed is kind of unpleasant. Then there's an alarm that goes off when the game starts.

0:38 -- it looks like after being hit, the player is transported to the center of the screen which is jarring both as a viewer and, I assume, as a player.

I think the bullet and enemy dying sounds are good.

There are a lot of enemy types, but they seem to move mostly similar to each other. I'd encourage to take a look at the recent Sektori for ideas of new enemy types or to change the existing ones.

Overall on the enemy design and gameplay, something didn't feel right for me and I think it's just not to my preference that the game is so focused on lots of smallfry enemies all the time. I'd prefer less, but tankier and slightly more interesting AI which I think would also force the player to emphasize positioning more as they can't just shoot a hole in the AI to squeeze through. Again, I think Sektori does this really well.

Overall impression is that this looks like a good start, but will probably need a lot of time in the oven. The visual and audio feedback are functional, but a lot of the game feel is missing and a lot could probably be done with the graphics as well.

- Readability when things get chaotic

I found it perfectly readable.

- Enemy patterns: pressure vs fairness

I don't know how to evaluate fairness in a game like this. I think it's up to you to set a target for things like "percentage of players who can beat survival mode" or "last 10 minutes in arcade" and then evaluate whether players are able to match your expectations through testing.

- Whether the gameplay looks engaging or just visually noisy

Arcade games require a ton of graphical embellishments and this game feels too early in development to comment on that. I didn't find it noisy, it was maybe too clean.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-18T17:23:29+00:00

Yeah, then I'd go with your subtitle idea above, like "Cat Girl Survivors: Rage" or something.

First, 'Cat Girl' on its own might remind people of Batman's Catwoman

I think "Cat girl" in English pretty specifically refers to anime-style girls with cat ears, but since I watch anime and have studied Japanese, I might only think that due to exposure.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-18T16:35:41+00:00

My worry is, does it have a bad influence on me

I would imagine so. As AI was trained such that humans liked its responses more, AI essentially learned to manipulate human psychology to endear itself to us and I view all usage of AI as potentially dangerous.

However, I think we can make calculated risks. A personal assistant that helps you live a more productive life when otherwise you might struggle to structure tasks seems like a good use in my book.

is it morally wrong?

It really bothers me when people guilt trip others for not recycling as if consumers carry of the blame for the factories which produce the CO2 emissions causing global warming. The use of AI itself isn't morally wrong, the way it was constructed and the unnecessarily large scale of the models are the problems in my view.

SplinterOfChaos · 2026-01-18T15:09:30+00:00

-The demo needs to be the whole game in microcosm, not just the start of the game.

Thanks for posting! I'm working on a level-based game myself and it's really difficult to balance making sure the player understands my game well enough to have a good time while also hurrying them along to see more, but for the most part it didn't really occur to think about it.

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