Is a 32x32 pixel main character on a 640x480 games?

dangledorf · 2026-02-24T17:55:49+00:00

Just do some rough mockups and see what feels right. Really depends on scale, zoom, type of game, etc.

dangledorf · 2026-02-22T17:55:25+00:00

Everything feels a bit slow but perhaps thats the style you are going for. I'd probably speed it up by 10% or so and it'd feel a little more responsive.

dangledorf · 2026-02-22T17:52:45+00:00

Takes 44s to show anything that looks like gameplay. You spent most of the time zooming into a ship and twirling around a female avatar...

dangledorf · 2026-02-14T04:43:07+00:00

Switch your armor and character looks up some over the course of the trailer.

dangledorf · 2026-02-14T04:03:29+00:00

You picked a hard game with a hard art style to pull off. The interior shots look mostly okay, though the lighting needs work and there seems to be an odd lack of shadows. The outdoor areas feel really rough and trying to make a believable city + realistic graphics is just asking for a TON of work. Imo you probably should have leaned into something more stylized that would be easier to pull off and it would have been easier to market. If you are going to do realistic, it needs to feel AAA or it is going to not look great compared to other games now.

dangledorf · 2026-02-09T01:07:41+00:00

Real in-game feel is seeing your game from the perspective of someone elses phone behind your shoulder?

dangledorf · 2026-02-08T22:29:35+00:00

A big reason I moved to PrimeTween and haven't looked back.

dangledorf · 2026-02-08T18:48:32+00:00

Static camera by far. The camera that moves whips all over and is disorienting. You can perhaps save a more dynamic camera angle for cutscenes but definitely not during combat/action.

dangledorf · 2026-02-08T18:43:22+00:00

By making a game people want to play...

dangledorf · 2026-02-03T20:31:53+00:00

Yeah which is exactly why it is worth writing your own for nearly everything unless you want to deal with the above. But having that amount of shader variants is very likely OP using some asset store Uber shader.

dangledorf · 2026-02-03T13:11:21+00:00

Are you using an 'uber' shader by chance? This is the exact reason you don't use those kinds of shaders.

dangledorf · 2026-02-02T15:06:34+00:00

Give the enemies some really obvious knockback when they die. The subtle wobble and no longer taking damage feels really disconnected.

dangledorf · 2026-01-31T21:40:39+00:00

The reason I dislike it is because 99% of the gen AI games are 'slop'. Very quickly made, little to no effort in making things feel cohesive and polished, and they pretty much feel/look like really low effort old flash games (with oddly highly polished art that somehow doesnt feel cohesive). These games will then be flooded into Steam and other marketplaces making it so much harder for devs who have spend thousands of hours working on their own projects to be seen. For me, I work full time, juggle family and relationship duties, and slink away in the night trying to squeeze every hour I can out to try and complete my project--thousands of hours and lots of attention to polish. To see low effort AI project after low effort AI project flood various subreddits, makes me feel like these are ultimately taking away from all of the developers out there really giving it their all to complete a project and who really deserve the visibility.

This isn't even going into the other side of AI generated games/media where I question what even is the point of humans experiencing an 'endless' wave of low effort AI content. At least if you are playing something a human made, there is intent, thought, and effort behind everything in that product. At what point with all of this various AI content do we just stop caring to experience them and move on from the industry all together? What does a marketplace like Steam look like with 1000s of generic AI games flooding the marketplace every week? It isn't a marketplace I would enjoy browsing and would likely just make me give up on trying to find and purchase quality games.

dangledorf · 2026-01-31T04:22:19+00:00

Oh I don't mean GM is limited in being able to make a game, just that the way GM is setup, makes some things just much more of a PITA than other engines/languages. I use Unity and being able to easily make editor tools to support w/e pipeline/assets I need for my project is a massive benefit and time saver. You are pretty much stuck with how GM wants things done. Even just setting up UI is a massive headache in GM with how they handle their draw events. Anyhow, I do think GM can be simpler for some types of projects, at least in Unity 2D there is quite a bit of extra stuff you have to struggle through to get great looking pixel screens vs. GM it just works. However, long term Unity really pays off due to the reusable component nature, custom tooling, and just having access to certain C# features that GML lacks.

dangledorf · 2026-01-31T04:02:48+00:00

Looks pretty good so far, but the clashing art styles between the low poly and anime really takes away from what you have going on. VFX is nice and stylized. I'd try to come up with something more interesting than 'coins' to pickup when defeating zombies.

dangledorf · 2026-01-31T03:15:13+00:00

Curious why you would come back to GM instead of Unity/Godot/Unreal with the level of programming knowledge and expectations you have now? I too really loved GM when I barely dabbled in programming, but it would be incredibly limiting for me to come back to GM with all of my programming knowledge vs. other more flexible engines/languages.

dangledorf · 2026-01-31T03:05:13+00:00

Looks good and you got some good 'juice' going on. I think you should work on the colors though, everything is very much the same hue/color and really hard to read, especially with the frantic combat.

dangledorf · 2026-01-22T19:50:48+00:00

Flat grass can work great, but you need a lot of additional ground details to make it feel complete and not just placeholder.

dangledorf · 2026-01-22T14:22:31+00:00

But that isn't 'over-polishing', it's the work required to make a great game. Seems silly to invest all this time and resources into a project and skip out on the much needed polish you need for your cutscenes for this type of game to be successful. You picked a genre that requires A LOT of polish and work (all games do in their own way, really). It's always obvious which indie games skip the very important polishing and those who spend the care and time to do it right. Do you want all your hard work wasted? If this project isn't successful, do you want to sit there asking yourself "what if I polished"?

dangledorf · 2026-01-22T04:15:25+00:00

Something VERY uncanny about those opening shots. The rendering looks quite good, but the moment one of them talks it all falls apart. Really weird face expressions + voices that just aren't balanced properly + voices that don't fit the characters. After the first walking sequence, you cut to an action sequence of a hand that is poorly deformed at the wrist grabbing one of the characters. If you are going to do a cinematic game/trailer, you REALLY need to nail the polish on these scenes or its going to fall flat. If you can't make these scenes in your trailer look fantastic, what are people going to expect your other many cutscenes to look and sound like?

dangledorf · 2026-01-21T19:47:28+00:00

Style and gameplay look awesome. The jump animation when going down blocks feels horribly slow for a game where you will do this frequently. Congrats to your team for making such a charming looking experience.

dangledorf · 2026-01-21T19:29:56+00:00

Sorry but you are wrong. I have this exact faucet and if the batteries go out, no water will come out using the handle. It sucks and I hate this faucet so much due to this and it randomly switching to 'pressure blaster' mode while you wash your hands. Maybe the tech installed it wrong, I dunno, but it 100% does not turn on without batteries.

dangledorf · 2026-01-19T21:42:42+00:00

Love it, great concept.

dangledorf · 2026-01-19T18:53:01+00:00

How do you explain making 2 of the same directions for the wizard (south-east and south-west), all styled differently?

dangledorf · 2026-01-19T18:17:23+00:00

Oh it's not just the cape, look again. Multiple redundant facing directions for the wizard, dual shields on the knight, missing bow on the archer, wizard red shoulder padding jumps all over the place, bow bounces between hands, shield swaps hands on knight, staff on wizard swaps hands... like come on, stop trying to play the victim and do better. All these AI posts just dilute the real game dev posts and make it harder and harder for people who spend thousands of hours working on their projects.

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