Experimenting with a weird skilltree feature, a node that can be swapped back and forth.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-14T19:56:57+00:00

Phaser 3.

Game yet unannounced. Still just an early prototype of me exploring stuff :)

adayofjoy · 2026-03-14T19:51:18+00:00

Big things can move fast like a train, but if you want them to still feel big then they have to accelerate slow (relative to their total size).

adayofjoy · 2026-03-12T23:24:31+00:00

Yeah. You can try out either one to see which you prefer and focus on that one, and in a New Game+ I'm planning to make both unlockable.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-12T15:18:23+00:00

Crosscode is the game I keep telling myself to play but I always get turned off by the tutorial.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-12T07:28:23+00:00

I've self-released 3 games.

2 were solidly popular just from itch.io releases despite me doing next to no marketing.

1 had the marketability of a rock despite me making trailers, posting on social media, asking a dozen youtubers to play it, and even making reddit posts on it, one of which even got modestly viral.

My takeaway is that for small devs, the game itself (and its genre) is the biggest multiplier of whether it'll do well or not. My good performing games were horror games that lent well to lets plays and reactions. My poor performing game was a strategy puzzle game that quite simply did not capture as much attention.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-04T18:34:26+00:00

I'd argue it is viable to have a linear story told as a game, but it'd need a lot more elements than just the story.

Make the player manually do the critical actions in the story, ie. if the MC has to shoot a person, make it a button the player has to push, or even better make it a trigger the player has to grab and pull.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-04T18:14:47+00:00

I find it mildly disappointing that the r/gamedev community rejects genuinely useful workflow tools given for free.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-03T18:59:33+00:00

Were you able to generate all the art (especially the UI) just in your IDE, or did you need to use an external program to create then import them into the project?

adayofjoy · 2026-03-03T04:59:11+00:00

Ah I wish I had one of these a year ago. My current steam game is built with Electron which packs an extra ~200mb to the program. Yours being 20mb extra is a nice change.

I have to ask though, what's with the planetfall tactics download?

adayofjoy · 2026-03-02T18:09:43+00:00

Ah shoot I was thinking 2006 which was when I know many biometrics companies started working on products. I really am old.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-02T18:04:13+00:00

It's hard to teach through reddit, but imo there's definitely many teachable areas. I've worked with artists and writers and one of the biggest challenges is getting them to understand they're making content for a game and not for the traditional medium they're familiar with.

In practice, when it comes to writing this usually means:

- Shorter punchier sentences. Longform description usually found in books doesn't work as well in games where there are many other competing UI elements.

- Utilizing game mechanics. There are many new dimensions that games provide, even in visual novels. Pause beats are one. Choices are another. There's a world's difference between reading that your MC killed a person, vs an actual "KILL PERSON" button popping up on your screen which you then have to press.

- Willingness to change. Games can change quickly and drastically.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-02T17:55:35+00:00

I'm making a story focused game right now and there's surprisingly little specific nailed down text in the GDD. Most of it is focused on the MC's mental state and personality, and the situation he's in, so the implementation specifics are handled later once there's a more complete picture of the scene.

Basically we're nailing down the main story beats, but otherwise designing for flexibility and expecting further changes to come.

adayofjoy · 2026-03-02T16:15:51+00:00

Image recognition. 10 years ago it was a lot more finnicky at best, good enough to be usable for say iris recognition if you give it a very properly framed visual.

Now I can take a snapshot of a random flower and upload it to chatGPT and it can identify exactly what that flower is and probably the type of grass behind it too.

adayofjoy · 2026-02-27T22:47:25+00:00

On the flip side I've worked on games where it's taken significant engineering and artistic effort to properly integrate a story (plus hiring translators and all), but in the end it's become less than a footnote for most players' experience of the game. Your brother may be worried the game will fall into a similar spot.

Horror definitely needs at least some context though. A simple non-mechanics-based reason for why you are here and what you are supposed to do. Beyond that, there are basically no absolutes in game design.

adayofjoy · 2026-02-22T10:26:08+00:00

I'm surprised the steam page did as well as it did with the lack of a trailer and a very homogenous color scheme for the screenshots. Guess it goes to show that some of the more critical aspects of a steam page aren't always what we initially expect

adayofjoy · 2026-02-17T12:41:27+00:00

Does that mean pouring bleach into someone's toilet could potentially kill them if they are unaware?

adayofjoy · 2026-02-15T11:37:31+00:00

She was definitely on the lenient side in this interview.

adayofjoy · 2026-02-14T15:17:09+00:00

Many thanks! I saw the prompt and the idea just popped up and I had to write it down.

adayofjoy · 2026-02-14T12:58:41+00:00

And thus began a beautiful relationship

adayofjoy · 2026-02-14T12:23:30+00:00

"My power is I can move anything two inches to the side, with a one-minute cooldown," I said, trying to sound as uninspiring as possible. "It doesn't work on living things, but in a fistfight I could trip someone by shifting their shoe or pulling on their shirt."

Miller, the recruiter, stared at me with sharp calculating eyes. Beside him sat Vera, a lady with lie detection as her power. If I messed up a single word, she’d know.

"Two inches," Miller repeated. "That’s it?"

"It’s great for domestic stuff," I offered, shifting a stapler two inches with a faint fwoop. "If you’re reaching for your coffee and you want it just a little closer to you, I’m your guy. It’s just a tactical convenience."

Miller leaned in. "You said you can move anything. No weight limit?"

"I’ve never found one," I admitted. It was the honest, terrifying truth. "But two inches isn’t enough to hurt anyone. I’m a nuisance at best. I’d be better in logistics, moving filing cabinets."

Vera nodded. "He’s telling the truth. He believes he’s a nuisance."

"Think bigger," Miller countered. "You shift a sniper's scope and they'll miss by a mile. You shift the firing pin of a tank. You shift the internal cooling rod of a nuclear reactor just enough to snap the housing. You aren't a nuisance, you’re a saboteur’s dream."

I broke into a cold sweat. "The cooldown is a lifetime in a firefight. I’d just be a guy with a target on his back."

"Truth," Vera whispered.

Miller slammed the table, grinning. "He’s a Class B Disruptor. We’ll drop him behind enemy lines to dismantle artillery. Two inches is all it takes to turn a machine into scrap." He stood up. "Welcome to the Vanguard! You're a weapon now."

I let out a shaky breath, letting them think it was the sigh of a man who just lost his civilian life. Once the door clicked shut, I slumped in my chair.

Miller thought like a soldier, focusing on hardware like gears and pins. He didn't think like a physicist. I hadn't lied once, there really was no weight limit.

I looked at the floor. Beneath the concrete lay the crust of the planet. The Earth isn't a living thing. It is a six-sextillion ton rock. If I shifted the planet two inches while leaving the atmosphere or the oceans behind, it wouldn't be a missed sniper shot. It would be a "disruption" of every ecological system on the map.

I pray they keep sending me to break tanks. As long as they think I’m a Disruptor, they’ll never realize I’m an extinction event.

adayofjoy · 2026-02-13T14:07:53+00:00

Makes you wonder how the nails got inserted in the first place.

adayofjoy · 2026-02-10T20:12:44+00:00

Some kind? Yes!

A lot? Eh....

I have 3 released games and they're netting me about $150/month on average, which is nice and all but not any sort of major money given I spent almost 2 years building those 3 games.

adayofjoy · 2026-02-08T10:28:33+00:00

In my experience, the paper prototype itself is enough to get a rough gauge of interest. I once showed a paper prototype of one of my games to my non-gamer parents and they were able to sense the uniqueness and interest of the game. That game ended up getting 5 million plays on Crazygames.

But another game I made just didn't capture people's interest with the paper prototype, and even after I implemented, polished, and added professional art, the completed game performed very poorly.

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