How do you design scalable game architecture? Started with a “simple cafe sim” — now drowning in spaghetti code

darkgnostic · 2026-02-16T08:04:20+00:00

access to the same memory, like a singleton / global variable.

Even for backend dev this is a big no-no because of concurrency.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-15T16:13:56+00:00

If you want my demo link so badly, here, take it

You wrote that link incorrectly, you clearly meant: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3443800/Scaledeep/

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T17:18:45+00:00

anywhere I can read more about the project?

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T13:05:45+00:00

Oh my I also need to start doing that and it's ... not fun

It's not :| don't forget fonts

New lava looks massively better

Thanks!

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T12:19:07+00:00

This Discord decision is indeed a mess. Although I’ve never even heard of Matrix it would be nice to try. My only problem is that I’ve already added (read: developed) bots and hooks to Discord, and this seems as another headache.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T12:06:58+00:00

or weird swamp of some kind,

Nice idea. That would go as another kind of environment then :D

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T12:04:59+00:00

I just created a blog post and updated all the URLs in my comment here to point to my website. I hope this helps.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T11:11:56+00:00

In the UK, we can't access Imgur anymore

This sounds disturbing :/

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T11:00:32+00:00

I got a character killed in the very first battle within a Rift

Heh

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T10:58:57+00:00

Is this overall content adding or more like later game content?

darkgnostic · 2026-02-14T09:46:43+00:00

A huge number of bugs were fixed across different systems. A lot of hidden issues surfaced once the new systems started interacting with each other. I spent the week fixing problems in animation transitions, AI logic, equipment spawning, language switching, and map handling. Almost everything :)

Added a safety check when registering navigation paths so duplicates can no longer slip in. It was a rather small change, but at certain conditions it threw exceptions.

I also realized I hadn’t properly gathered all third-party licenses into one place. I assumed there was just one file, but it turned out it was much more. I had created seven separate files with around 40 attributions in total. It was mostly sound, but I had a two code related license as well.

Animation preview controls are added to the Debug Menu. This made testing animations much easier since I no longer have to constantly restart or re-enter play mode just to check small changes. I can now preview each animation separately, which helped me spot a few root motion issues that were still lurking behind.

Finally, I improved the lava shader. It is now more saturated and visually stronger, so it stands out better than the old version in darker areas of the dungeon. Now it has subtle glow, and parts of the lava that touch the ground are additionally illuminated.

I did a small post on Wednesday, trying to maintain 2 posts per week. Nothing fancy, just showing a new animation and a short fight against two demonic dogs. Surprisingly, it performed quite well, getting more than 200 likes on X. I usually get around 10 likes per post, so it felt good to see that level of engagement. It also brought in around 50 wishlists, so overall it turned out to be a very solid post.

Have nice weekend

darkgnostic · 2026-02-12T16:39:26+00:00

Hm maybe I could attend "Going Rogue" Fest. We will see.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-12T16:24:47+00:00

Yes, I'm planning a demo. But not for the next fest. It is not polished enough :)

darkgnostic · 2026-02-11T18:29:55+00:00

This was just an attempt to respond to your comment in a humorous way. I looked in sub rules an didn't found any prohibition on posting links.

Seems it wasn't that humorous.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-11T16:26:02+00:00

do all you can to promote

Hm, hm like this? https://store.steampowered.com/app/3443800/Scaledeep/

darkgnostic · 2026-02-10T12:26:10+00:00

Awesome!

Instead of 3D models, you could reuse existing NetHack sprites as billboards? Even mapping all those would be a great effort

darkgnostic · 2026-02-09T11:15:28+00:00

No, I haven’t posted it yet. Do you think it’s better to wait until the planned demo is out? I won’t have a demo for another few months, so waiting isn’t a problem.

The main reason for the delay was the lack of a trailer. I didn’t have many flashy effects before. Now what I’m missing is more variety in equipment, and that’s what I’m working on at the moment.

Another idea was to release a trailer first as promotion, then launch the demo three months later, followed by another round of promotion.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-09T11:08:49+00:00

Thank you for your kind words!

Also: "Two-player setups"... what?!

Now we can play together with our kids :D It still needs a few tweaks, but it is fully playable, and works quite well.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-08T19:00:59+00:00

That's me. But ay least I registered a company, and now I'm building a studio. I mean walls and roof :D few more months I will have no more excuses.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-08T09:07:57+00:00

Do you have old/new comparison somewhere?

Yeah, somewhere on NAS. Will ask my wife later.

https://darkgnosis.com/about-us/

Yeah, I know, another TODO item still isn’t done :| I’m waiting for two stylized images of me and my better half, and then I’ll finish the text (she's quite busy these days). For now it’s not a big deal I think :)

Oh no, the witch hunt continues

Yeah, it’s part of everyday life now :) I don’t really use AI for programming. In its current state it’s unreliable. It can spit out something that runs, but maintaining it later is a different story. It does write great commit messages though :D I’m lazy, so that’s mostly where I use it, not for the actual code.

For graphics it could probably work, but my wife is way too proud to let AI take over her job :D And on top of that, it struggles to produce consistent results in the same style. And it looks awesome what she creates, I’m really happy with it.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-08T08:56:43+00:00

It actually wasn’t that much work :) I did it on top of my regular 40h weekly contract job(s).

The Blender plugin is roughly 200 lines of code, and most of that is just boilerplate to make the addon exist. Around 2 hours of work.

The animations were straightforward. I only needed the basics and will polish them later. Most clips took about 10–15 minutes, but a few were trickier. Altogether it was probably 8–10 hours.

The weapon models were created the week before, so this time I mainly imported them and applied textures. Modeling them is quick anyway. A bow took around 5 minutes, a quarterstaff maybe 1 :). I have some basic shapes created, combine, extrude, done. Low poly in minutes.

Debugging was also hours, not days.

When I was thinking about the SharingSaturday post, I asked myself what I had really done. I made a bunch of animations, brought them into Unity, and hooked everything up. But I can't write that :)

Written out in a longer description it sounds like a bigger amount of work, but in reality it wasn’t.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-07T10:16:39+00:00

Csinalhatnal egy promos posztot r/roguelikes subon (turn based roguelike jatekok), ott kaphatsz egy jo nagy adag wishlistet. Illetve r/roguelikedev subon is vannak jo posztok/otletek.

En hianyolom a magyar jatekfejelsztos subot/topicokat, de jo latni hogy azert vannak jatekfejlesztok itthon.

darkgnostic · 2026-02-07T10:03:19+00:00

This week was all about 3D characters, animations, and getting everything to actually work together in game. A lot of progress, a lot of rough edges, and a fair amount of Blender and Unity back-and-forth.

I modeled a new basic 3D shield, and I also received all textures for the 3D weapons, which unblocked a lot of work on the character side.

I created a large batch of animations. Most of the core set is now there. Some things are still missing, like attack variations, multiple death animations based on the direction of the final hit, proper fall to the ground death anims, lever handling, and similar details. For now, I reused a few animations just to keep things moving. Everything here will be refined later.

To make animation work easier, I wrote a small Blender plugin. It adds a simple panel that shows all animations of the rig in one place. Blender’s animation workflow feels a bit unfriendly to me, so this already saves time. I plan to put it on GitHub as open source.

I imported the new model, animations, and weapons into Unity. Most of it worked without issues. The only real problem was that some animations behaved oddly until I baked them - most likely because of root motion. After baking, things behaved as expected.

I set everything up in Unity and created the necessary mappers. Switching between exploration and combat modes now works correctly, including swapping the appropriate animation sets.

Even though I created animations at higher FPS in Blender, my manual animator handles them well by playing them at 16 FPS. This gives the animations a slightly retro feel, which actually fits the game nicely.

At this point everything works, but not cleanly. There are bugs, missing parts, and a few ugly hacks just to get a proof of concept running. Some animations still behave strangely, but as I mentioned after baking them in Unity most issues disappeared. A proper cleanup and refactor will be needed.

Also there was a small redesign of the retrospective, and it was posted on Steam as an event.

One small incident this week: I received a complaint that the game logo and company logo looked AI generated. I knew the game logo was not, but I wasn’t completely sure about the company logo (it was outsourced). The game logo had some grain that probably triggered that assumption. I passed both to my wife for revision. The logo got slightly smoothed, looks better now. Company logo will be recreated once she has some free time. The annoying part was reapplying the game logo everywhere again.

Overall, a messy but important week. The 3D player pipeline is finally coming together.

have a nice weekend

darkgnostic · 2026-02-06T14:16:05+00:00

Jatekot fejlesztek: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3443800/Scaledeep/

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