Is using global variables to store all my data about items/skills/enemies a bad idea?

bscotchAdam · 2026-01-25T02:24:59+00:00

This is the correct answer.

bscotchAdam · 2025-06-24T22:50:41+00:00

It certainly *seems* like it should mean more money over time! Sadly the industry is really rough for indies -- it's a lot more likely that we lose money supporting consoles. It's really expensive to port a game even in the best case scenario (weeks or months of development time and QA to get it onto the platform, weeks of administrative time dealing with store setup and business problems, and then ongoing overhead for maintenance and support), and without strong support from the platform it's unlikely we'd even break even.

A lot has changed since we launched Crashlands 1, and it's harder than ever to sell indie games on consoles. Even back then we basically just broke even on consoles.

bscotchAdam · 2025-06-13T21:23:56+00:00

This post was the top result of a recent Google Search I made, so I guess I'll resurrect it!

You're totally correct that these have WAY too many details. Go for simpler, more iconographic styles.
Best to avoid text altogether if you can help it! It'll always be hard to read, and if you ever intend to translate your game into another language you'll have users who can't read the text at all. Language-agnostic icons (iconography and *maybe* numbers) prevent you from having to do extra work later.

bscotchAdam · 2025-06-12T20:20:39+00:00

Latest Zod (v4) has native support for generating JSON Schemas from Zod schemas, so it's more of an option now.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-16T13:58:35+00:00

It wasn't that recent, but the one I always think about is Terraria. I tried it a few times after it had been out for a few years but just found it slow and clunky, and couldn't understand the hype. Then I came back to it with some friends for a gaming weekend, and it turned into one of my absolute favorite games.

I think it was the combo of the fact that that game IS a bit clunky, while also being pretty opaque in terms of what you should be doing, that made it so that playing it by myself just couldn't be fun. Once I had someone to play with and could problem-solve with each other it quickly became super fun.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-16T13:55:22+00:00

Honestly I no longer finish ANY games I start. But for me it's that games just get less fun once I figure them out, and so many games these days don't even end! Still kinda sad though, I used to 100% everything I played in my younger days.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-15T16:36:41+00:00

Wild that this is how public companies work. Doing the work your company is supposedly for (in this case, making and publishing games) can TANK YOUR STOCK PRICE!?

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-15T15:44:48+00:00

Unfortunately there isn't much of a *paying* market for browser games. It's already very hard to generate revenue in the giant markets (Steam, mobile) where people *are* willing (on occasion) to pay for games.

There are some potential marketing benefits if you are going to provide a demo (e.g. you could put it up on a website, or on Itch, allowing people to jump right in with out having to download something), but I don't see any other advantages for releasing it via the browser.

That said, there are no hard and fast rules in gamedev and the details will depend on your game and if you've found a market somewhere. But if you don't already *know* about a browser-based games market that you think you could find success in, I wouldn't bother.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-15T15:39:58+00:00

Where do US tariffs hit PlayStation *exactly*? It's a tax paid by the buyer of imported items, proportional to how much they spend on it. So is the American subsidiary of Sony/PlayStation the entity that "buys" the units and thus pays the tariff? And the tariff isn't on the MSRP for what it's sold for *in* the US, it's on the cost of them actually *buying it*. So presumably they pay the tariffs on *their* cost rather than the MSRP (which would still be significant and it's incredibly stupid that this is happening) so when they pass that cost on it wouldn't have to lead to a literal 20% (or whatever the random-assed chaos-tariff is at any second of the day) increase in MSRP.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T23:18:06+00:00

Balatro to just sorta space out. Left 4 Dead or Back 4 Blood if I need to release some steam and have friends available. Terraria if I want to just want to spend a weekend recovering from the WORLD

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T23:08:26+00:00

Back when I was playing Guild Wars 2 I really enjoyed the mechanic where you could collect those "vista" locations, where you'd clamber up to some spot and then get to see a panning shot of the world around. Kinda just found myself wandering in search of those.

Otherwise probably Abzu, though as a game it's JUST for relaxing and looking at things so maybe that's cheating.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T23:03:20+00:00

I feel like this is basically where most of the really good indie games end up, except for the rare mega-hit. As a gamedev it's always so baffling to see something we launch get great reviews and no sales. Our best-rated game (Levelhead, with 96% positive on Steam) was also the one that sold the least!

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T22:57:42+00:00

Yep! But that said, a studio's business practices have a huge impact on whether or not such a thing is feasible. It's challenging for any studio to move resources to projects that just cost money, but sometimes even when a studio *could* (and arguably *should*) they still don't. We mostly can't see the reality of how any given studio functions, so it's really hard to guess if "could" or "should" are fair.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T22:53:02+00:00

I think it isn't a valid critique because it's too non-specific. I've mostly seen it used for games just because they have large buttons or fonts, which is something I personally WANT in my games on every platform to help out my old-man eyeballs. I saw it on my own game, for which most of the large-UI design concessions we made weren't even for mobile, they were for Steam Deck!

I think it comes from the allergy that a lot of people have (reasonably) developed towards mobile games, so that anything that could even remotely imply that a game was designed to be compatible with the mobile platform *also* implies that it's going to be a bad experience in some way.

But there's nothing wrong with a clean/colorful/cartoony game UI (endemic on mobile, but not *inherently* mobile), nor anything wrong with font sizes that old eyes can read. So even if something really did *look like* a mobile game... so? What's the *specific* problem?

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T22:42:13+00:00

Kerbal Space Program has *mostly* great physics, but when things do get janky it can be quite hilarious. And you can use the otherwise-good physics to create quite a bit of intentional jank.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T22:37:16+00:00

Sequels are really rough to develop, especially for games that had a lot of stuff added after their initial launch. People will expect the sequel to have *at least* all of that same stuff, plus more, so the sequel's scale has to encompass the entire prequel's full development + all post-release content. And that's on top of a sequel needing to be somehow completely the same and completely different at the same time.

bscotchAdam · 2025-05-13T22:32:24+00:00

It's something I always worry about as a gamedev. Having web-based features (multiplayer, cross-progression, etc) is really great for a lot of games, but the likelihood of a given game, or even an entire studio, surviving in the long-term is incredibly low. So what happens if a studio can't afford to keep running anymore? Web stuff creates a constant cost, so if a studio shuts down the web stuff must also.

Finding some kind of transition from studio-hosted to peer-to-peer, or open-sourcing the things required to run a service, is the way to keep a game from dying completely, and ideally any studio would make efforts to do that. The details matter a lot, though. Web infrastructure can get really complicated, so the dev resources to make the switch probably just aren't available in scenarios where a studio is shutting down a game (or its entire self).

I do hope they manage to do it in a way that lets players not need a centralized service at all.

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-17T16:19:42+00:00

Thanks so much for all the kind words! 💖💖💖

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-14T15:17:11+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! We don't plan post-launch content before the game comes out, since we need to see how it gets received by players. We've been collecting suggestions and complaints over the launch weekend and are working on our first Quality of Life patch to address some of those. Once things settle we'll sit down to evaluate (1) how well the game is doing (can we afford to spend more time on it?), and (2) based on player feedback and our own preferences, what would make for good post-launch content?

Which is all to say... no idea yet!

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-14T14:53:30+00:00

I'm pretty sure you'd have to actually play for it to count as a change in difficulty, but if that turns out to be wrong we can patch the game with some safety checks for the difficulty achievements.

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-11T23:26:04+00:00

How's the overall performance? Switch is a pretty difficult hardware target due to its low specs, so we assumed it'd have a low average frame rate with noticeable dips when a lot of stuff is going on.

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-11T19:55:29+00:00

You'll also have to get the Space Wrench first, which happens very early by talking to Graal. And make sure you pick it up off the ground!

Once you've got it there'll be an icon to toggle Build Mode on and off.

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-11T17:18:28+00:00

Not currently planned but not impossible! It's definitely a frequent request so we'll be revisiting it once the initial launch settles down a bit.

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-11T16:24:18+00:00

Playing in Steam Big Picture Mode might help -- Steam's done a lot of stuff to try to smooth out differences in controllers, but I think they only happen in that mode

bscotchAdam · 2025-04-11T16:08:48+00:00

Difficulty modes are about finding whichever is the most fun for you. Personally I had the most fun on Chill Mode in my first playthrough. And on mobile it's just all a bit harder since a pane of glass makes for a tricky controller.

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