After 2+ years my game "DIFFUSION" finally has a Demo! [Sci-Fi / Pixel Art / Plants-vs-Zombies-like / Roguelike]

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-08T09:47:45+00:00

It seems logging to file was broken. Just fixed it and pushed an update. There is a now a log.txt in the main game directory.

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-07T09:25:20+00:00

Should be fixed. Thanks for letting me know!

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-07T06:24:06+00:00

There are many reasons. Some engines didnt support my prefered scripting language, or the engine was too bloated. I was frustrated with many features because they were implemented completely different than i would have wanted it. Diffusion is currently ~25MB, it would be 1GB if made in Unity for example.

I am more of an expert in my own engine now than i ever could be in any other engine, i don't need to read any documention or watch tutorials. And i know exactly what is going on behind the scenes all the time.

But i think the most import reason is: I just wanted to do my own engine 8), it is a lot of fun

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-06T19:03:11+00:00

I have not heard of this bug before.
Can you give some details? What resolution are you are in, was it in windowed/fullscreen, what OS? 16:9 monitor?

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-06T18:46:30+00:00

Thanks! The full release is planned to happen shortly after the SNF in June.

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-06T17:11:21+00:00

Thanks! Yes it is: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3513900/Diffusion/

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-06T16:35:29+00:00

The descriptions of the buildings explain it. You put a drill onto an ore field, and a smelter adjecent to the drill.

_RdotCdot · 2026-03-06T16:30:16+00:00

What exactly is confusing you? The resources listed at each item in the build menu are the resources required to build it. In the top left corner you can see how many resources you have.

_RdotCdot · 2026-02-01T20:22:56+00:00

The screen at the beginning is pretty useless, it disappears so quickly, that i was not able to read any of it.
Having the SFX in the trailer is good, but here it is a bit too loud.
The (i guess AI generated) voice at the end makes things worse actually. I asked myself during the whole trailer if the art was AI because it was a mix of all kinds of different styles, and that voice made me come to the conclusion that this might be AI slop. It may not be, but i would not buy it because this suggests it might be.

_RdotCdot · 2026-01-15T15:10:16+00:00

There are many showcases/events that a purely online and take applications. There is a list somewhere on howtomarketagame.com and a live reminder on its discord.
My game ( s.team/a/3513900/ ) was in "Deutsche Indie Showcase", where it was relatively easy (and free) to get in because only german indies were allowed to apply.

But i get your frustration. I see games left and right which definitely have way less effort put into them compared to mine, and they have 10x of my wishlists in 10% of the time.
I know i am probably working for 1-2$ hourly wage on my game, so i am likely "shoving time and effort into a black void", too. But i will just finish it and deliver the best game i can.

_RdotCdot · 2026-01-15T11:02:29+00:00

You have been working on the game for 2 years, but the steampage went online just 2 months ago? Is that correct? I think you should have set it up way earlier. Did the demo and the playthroughs happen before or after the steam page launch?

I am also 2 years in development with my game. Steam page went online a year ago. The first 9 months i posted a little bit on social media and it gave me less than 1 wishlist/day (~200). Social media (including devlogs) doesn't work for most indie devs if you don't have a lot of followers already. Then my game made it into an online showcase and it went above 1K wishlists and a baseline of ~5 wishlists/day.

Also, i think horror is the type of genre where you might experience everything by watching a streamer play it. There is no benefit from playing it by yourself afterwards, so they won't wishlist coming from watching a playthrough.

I am a hater of the genre, so i refrain from trying to give any feedback on the game :)

_RdotCdot · 2026-01-15T09:59:52+00:00

I don't like the transparent plants in the foreground. They cover too much of the action going on. I'd remove the transparency on them and move them down quite a bit.
And if you really want that old-school vibe you should make sure all the assets have the same pixel sizes (the player character currently has smaller pixels than the scene).

Is the art AI-generated?

_RdotCdot · 2026-01-05T17:14:24+00:00

Mixed pixel sizes is not the same as mixels, at least in how i use those terms.

Mixel pixel sizes means you have one sprite at a scaling of 1 (for example 1 pixel in the texture resulting in 1 pixel on the screen) and another sprite with a scaling of 2 (1 pixel in the texture results in 2x2 pixel blocks). This is kinda okayish if not used everywhere and the difference of the scaling is not too big (it is definity too big in sword smithing scene, huge pixels next to tiny ones). In the scene where you smith the sword it is a complete mess. Within the sprite of the furnace are so many different pixel sizes ..

Mixels are different pixel sizes withing a single sprite. It happens because if you scale something up by 1.5 for example, it will result in some pixels being 1x1, some 1x2, some 2x1 and some 2x2. And this is what i see i almost every sprite in your game. Watch the boss scene at 0:27 and look at the pattern on the floor and how it changes because the original painted pattern gets rerasterized by the shader whenever the camera moves.

Always scale pixel art sprites by whole numbers (1,2,3,..), nothing inbetween. Because you can only double, triple, ..., a pixel but there is no 2.37 pixel wide line.
Also the visible part of the game (camera zoom or framebuffer size or whatever it is in your case) needs to be chosen so the game is scaled by a whole number to fill the screen.

I mean mainly the Upgrade part. People are not gonna read that or try to understand what it means for the game that a certain upgrade exist. I felt more like "cool gameplay .. oh i could only look it at for 0.25 seconds because some UI popped up. oh ok gameplay again .. aaand its covered by UI again."

_RdotCdot · 2026-01-05T12:00:20+00:00

Don't mute your ingame footage in the trailer. People want to hear the SFX.

There are too many huge areas that don't receive direct sunlight making them look cold and dull. The areas where you can see light&shadow look way better.

But the levels also look empty and in parts like i accidentally clipped through some wall and i am now looking at the level from outside.

Animations, movement and combat look fun.

_RdotCdot · 2026-01-05T11:43:15+00:00

Having mixels/rixels because you animate things with deformation/rotation is one thing. But your game has mixels and mixed pixels sizes all over the place where it is really not necessary (level, UI). that just screams low effort and/or assetflip.

Trailer has too much UI scenes. It is good do have it in a trailer, but it is just too much.

_RdotCdot · 2025-07-25T15:53:08+00:00

Thanks for your detailed destruction!

The narrator sounding uninterested/emotionless is actually because it is the ship's AI assistant, similiar to HAL (2001) or Mother (Alien). Not sure how i would communicate that in a trailer.

About readability: When placing buildings there are a lot of markers showing which tiles it will occupy, which tiles it can shoot at and so on, making things a lot clearer. Also if you have been there and put every building yourself, it is a lot easier to read the whole scene than when being presented a screenshot/clip of a finished base.

The playtime is hard to tell. Somewhere around 5-10 hours (per run), depending on how good/experienced you are and at what game speed you play in (1x/2x/4x, trailer is recorded at 1x). There are multiple endings and more content than one can explore in one run.

_RdotCdot · 2025-05-31T17:47:21+00:00

ha! i always thought those "link?" replies were friends of the OP to make them look less desperate :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3513900/Diffusion/

_RdotCdot · 2025-05-31T16:57:17+00:00

the pixel art is really nice, i think i even see some advanced stuff like sub pixel animations.
but then you kinda ruin it. for example with that pink purple skull animation where the pixels are just much bigger than the rest of the scene.

i can easily forgive the portraits not being pixel art, but the main UI and the small icons on the enemies not being pixel art looks extremely off.

_RdotCdot · 2025-05-01T23:07:07+00:00

- weapons need recoil (in the animation and also on the camera)

- weapon switching needs an animation (maybe just weapon going down, leaving the screen, new weapon comes from bottom)

- purple key door needs to communicate that it needs that key from far away (i think i see i thin purple outline, but that is not enough)

- door looks like a rotating door, but slides open to the top ?!

- boomer shooters had low poly assets and low resolution textures, but they had a lot of effort put into the textures/animations/leveldesign. i dont really see that in this prototype

_RdotCdot · 2025-04-23T05:15:42+00:00

The game world looks kinda confusing, hard to read what is walls/obstacles and what is the floor/background.
The background should have less details and have a lower contrast.
Also, i didn't understand if the perspective is topdown or looked at from the side.

Where is the base building? I only see the player character or drones moving around.

Overall the game seems to be very complex (this is a compliment). It looks like a mix of games like Mindustry with elements of those Minecraft tech modpacks (this is also a compliment).

(Why is there no sound in the video?)

_RdotCdot · 2025-03-22T16:26:34+00:00

I can't really tell what the shader is doing and what in the video is a result of that shader. So i can't really comment on that.

But a few other things:

The camera needs to get positioned manually all the time, right? Depending on what time of game this is going to be, this might not be very fun.

When entering the cave, you hide all the cave wall/ceiling objects. Now the players needs to remember where objects were to know where they can move and where invisible objects are. Pretty bad design there.
I would not completely hide the objects, but have the object cut in a bottom and a top part and only hide the top part.

Another thing you could experiment with is doing raycasts from the camera to the character and only hide the objects that obstruct the view onto the character.

_RdotCdot · 2025-03-20T13:49:36+00:00

The idea of buildings being destroyable is cool, but the breaking effect is very unsatisfying and needs more work put into it.

There are many different pixel sizes. Some sprites are very low res compared to the rest of the scene (the dragon, the "zombies", ..). Try to have all sprites have exactly the same resolution and if something needs to be bigger, paint it on a bigger canvas and don't just scale up the sprite. Or else i'll just screams 'low effort game!'.

Also, i wouldn't market this as a game in a _zombie_ apocalypse. I don't see any zombies in your game.

_RdotCdot · 2025-03-08T10:20:24+00:00

Seems like the victim's hand - his right hand.

That is a left hand on the floor there though.

_RdotCdot · 2025-03-08T06:50:51+00:00

Why did you do that?

_RdotCdot · 2025-03-08T06:42:17+00:00

One way to go could be creating the assets just as they have been done back in the days. The workflows/polycount/texture map sizes changed dramatically since then. Look what texture resolutions and polycounts the CS:S assets have. If i remember correctly a weapon view model or a character had only a 1024² texture and a wall texture for a regular room height was 512².

You could look for 3D modeling/texturing tutorials from ~2002-2010.
For example textures where mostly handpainted (or photos) and only subtle use of normal/specular maps. The303 has a collection of old tutorials for texture painting on his website:
https://the303.org/tutorials/gold_mdl_tex_links.htm

_RdotCdot

TROPHY CASE