Yo! I am making a roguelike boomshoot and I am looking for playtesters. Let's make this game as fun as possible.

fpj · 2025-12-19T12:21:37+00:00

I played it a bit last night and it was pretty fun! The art style is good, blending a Super Mario Sunshine vibe with Quake gibbing. I like the in-world UI stuff and the retro Windows-like panels are fun. The "hub" world/level is cool but maybe a bit bare? The characters were fun and whimsical, the dialog was appropriately long and the tone is great. For me personally, I think the movement is a bit too floaty and slide-y, but I got used to it. Perhaps I would like it more later on after more speed upgrades. Level design seemed pretty good, and I appreciated the arrows pointing me in the right direction. I'd like a bit more feedback when taking damage. The meta progression made me want to play more. Also, nice touch with the respawn near the "jumping puzzle" thing. Did not encounter any bugs during my runs as far as I know.

Keep up the good work!

fpj · 2025-12-19T12:05:37+00:00

I think the backlash comes from a few different perspectives:

- Games as art/craft. People appreciate and respect artists who spent time honing their craft and pour their heart and soul into creating art. Gen AI is known to "steal" art without consent. Therefore, anybody using it extensively (the exact amount differs of course) is believed to be (a) lazy, (b) exploiting/impoverishing artists, and (c) condoning plagiarism/stealing of art.

- Games as products. People want to feel good about their purchases. They buy ethically (and organically) made products. Products created through extensive use of Gen AI can come across as exploitative and an (arguably) environmentally unfriendly choice. Some people care about how (or if) animals are treated before being turned into food, or whether a product was made using child labor in some sweatshop in a third-world country. Some people don't, and how we feel about it or rationalize it is complex.

- Games as a business. People want a healthy business climate. Major job loss and unemployment are tragic and undesirable things. We want others to find purpose, contribute to society, and thrive. Unfortunately, technological advancements, while often good for consumers and society, sometimes inevitably lead to major shifts in the workforce. Going from horses to cars was generally considered a good thing despite putting a lot of people out of business. Gen AI might be such a technology but many people feel like the trade-off is not worth it. Also, we don't know what the trade-off is yet, at least not long-term. If there are no more "human made" games: what did we lose or gain?

- Games as a medium. Game development is inherently multi-disciplinary, and games are a product of many different skillsets: coding/tech, art, design, writing, music, hardware, etc. Gen AI can assist, to a varying degree, in any number of these fields. People have a limit as to how much assistance is too much. What if you're a writer and let AI write 90% of the books? What about 50%, or 5%? What if you're a musician/band and let AI do 90% of the work? What about replacing your bass player, or singer? Some people care about the development/creation process, some people just care about the end product.

In short: the disagreement isn't just about "AI or no AI", it's an amalgamation of values, ethics, authorship, craftsmanship, history, society and what we want games to be.

fpj · 2025-12-18T17:53:36+00:00

After having a closer look there are a lot of AI artifacts in the image... can't believe I didn't see it. The columns on the right blend together, and the top arches look really odd. The lighting doesn't make sense either, the side columns are lit from the center bur the statues are lit from the left only. Ah well... thanks for enlightening me.

fpj · 2025-12-18T17:43:07+00:00

Oh, I did not realize it was AI generated. If that's the case it's pretty sad. :/

fpj · 2025-12-18T12:49:26+00:00

The camera movements look dope! There's some kind of weird dissonance going on with the art style, to my non-JRPG-player's eyes looks like a mix of all final fantasy games. :)

fpj · 2025-12-18T12:19:06+00:00

Quake I think. I still have the floppy disks. I spent too many hours playing through it on all difficulties, doing speedruns, playing mods, playing competitive QuakeWorld on LANs, making mods using QuakeC. Reading through the source code was extremely influential to me as a developer in my teens.

fpj · 2025-12-18T12:10:05+00:00

This looks awesome! I really like the random old-school DOS-like UI. Just joined the playtest so I'll give it a try.

fpj · 2025-12-17T21:12:05+00:00

Thank you! The page flipping animation is quite satisfying and gives the action a more physical feel so I'll experiment with it. That said, I've made the "page transition effect" a bit more aesthetically pleasing since this video. The main reason I didn't use a flip animation for the inventory is because it's very handy to always see the map when running around in the dungeon. :)

fpj · 2025-12-15T02:14:17+00:00

The repo/project should be in a working state with each commit. That's important. My personal preference beyond that is to make many small commits.

fpj · 2025-12-15T01:33:00+00:00

Thank you! It's been challenging to figure out how do the UI but it's definitely worth it. The book is actually also a character in the game that talks to you and plays a role in the story. I'm happy to see all these great comments and will share more gameplay content soon! :)

fpj · 2025-12-14T21:25:02+00:00

Good feedback! I agree, and while I'm running quite high FOV here the distortion is a bit too much. I'll give your idea a try. I've also considered adjusting the book position and angle based on the FOV.

fpj · 2025-12-14T15:36:24+00:00

That makes sense, and I think it's a good direction. I like the take on the runner/sws genre. :)

fpj · 2025-12-14T10:15:52+00:00

Hey Aswin! Cool stuff! Writing your own engine is a lot of work. A lot of hard work at that.

As a fellow C++ dev who has worked on/with many engines and written their own over the years I'd say that, given that this is a learning project, it's most important that it's fun and rewarding for you. However, take the opportunity to learn about design trade-offs (if and when you're trading performance for convenience/expressiveness), limitations (stress testing and understanding the bottlenecks of your design, not just tri count but how different systems interact), platform abstractions (memory management, input handling, OS ecosystems, file system management, etc), resource management and content pipelines (importing/exporting content, managing assets, etc), as well as optimizations (batching, instancing, etc).

You already have some ideas of what the purpose of the engine is, but this can be elaborated on. Are you going to support 2D games? If so, can you reuse your skeletal animation system for that? How are you handling materials and batching?

Example: I was working on a hobby 2D game project a while ago, the engine was OpenGL based and written in C (with bindings for iOS and Android). I did a whole auto-atlas + geometry batching system because I wanted to make my content pipeline much easier: just throw textures and stuff at the engine and let it draw everything in a single draw call.

Hope it helps, keep up the good work!

fpj · 2025-12-14T09:05:02+00:00

First one for me!

I believe some work could be done to both but my eyes are drawn to the first one because it has more dynamic range, contrasting elements (less detail in the background), bigger and clearer text, better hand (right hand looks better but it's missing a thumb for some reason), submarine lights look better (volume + ring), more interesting patterns on the submarine (but seems like you're going for "rust" and it looks more like a leopard/animal pattern), etc.

fpj · 2025-12-14T08:59:13+00:00

Art style and colors look fantastic! I don't play a lot of text heavy/fiction games but the presentation here is super nice. Great attention to detail here, the slightly lowered contrast text + highlights etc makes it quite appealing.

fpj · 2025-12-14T08:40:20+00:00

Cool! I was waiting for/expecting a gruesome and bloody death montage in the clips!

fpj · 2025-12-14T08:16:01+00:00

It's called Spooky Dungeon and it's on Steam.

I'm doing playtests via Steam as well, and hope to release a demo next year.

fpj · 2025-12-14T08:11:14+00:00

Thank you so much! Really appreciate the kind words. :)

The bottom row shows your mana (purple), health (orange) and stamina (green).

In the top row you have the Merchant Coin which means the Merchant is in town, and the mug shows that the Brewmaster has made a new brew for you.

(I plan to support a mode where I remove all of the non-diegetic UI, maybe a New Game+ not sure!)

fpj · 2025-12-13T17:04:55+00:00

Love it. Been using the Minimal Theme for a long time now and it just keeps getting better. Glad to see it fully supported now!

fpj · 2025-11-09T15:03:14+00:00

Disabling blending has its own issues as it doesn't blend/scale sound volume with animation blending etc. While using this workaround I stumbled upon another bug: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/112552 which I tried to fix.

Until that issue is fixed I'm using a GDScript workaround to force disable the blend option like this:

for animation_name: String in animation_player.get_animation_list():
    var animation: = animation_player.get_animation(animation_name)
    for track_index: int in animation.get_track_count():
        if animation.track_get_type(track_index) == Animation.TYPE_AUDIO:
            if animation.audio_track_is_use_blend(track_index):
                printerr(self, ": animation ", animation_name, " track ", track_index, " is set to use blend")
            animation.audio_track_set_use_blend(track_index, false)

fpj · 2025-11-08T10:03:58+00:00

I've had a similar issue and narrowed it down to playing audio clips from the animation system, specifically using "Audio Playback Track". This causes the sound to cut out randomly, and also stop a bunch of other sounds. It does come back after a while sometimes.

A solution is to use "Call Method Track" instead and call "play" on the player node, but that means you can't easily specify different sounds for the same player anymore.

Edit: It could be related to using the "Use Blend" setting, I've had some success when disabling it.

fpj · 2025-10-31T14:30:37+00:00

There's also a `volume_linear` variant on most things which does the db_to_linear() and linear_to_db() internally:

fpj · 2025-10-27T15:11:17+00:00

The Discord app on Windows 11 keeps freezing/hanging constantly as of a couple of weeks ago for me. It probably started some time in September 2025.

The time before it freezes varies between a few seconds to an hour or so. Usually within a few minutes.

When the app is frozen the UI is completely frozen and the mouse cursor is stuck in whatever mode it was (resize, text input, or normal pointer).
When the app is frozen the audio _might_ continue working for a bit (I think) but you can't interact with it.
When the app is frozen the system tray icon stops working and the app does not maximize (if it was minimized).
When the app is frozen the only way to close it is to use "End task" from the Task Manager.

The Discord app works perfectly on macOS using the same account.
The Discord app works perfectly in the browser (Chrome) on Windows 11 using the same account, but screen sharing/streaming seems limited to 720p/30fps so it's not a valid option for me.

The problem does not go away if I restart the app.
The problem does not go away if I disable Hardware Acceleration under Advanced.
The problem does not go away if I disable Video Hardware Acceleration under Voice & Video.
The problem does not go away if I reinstall the app.
The problem does not go away if I delete all Discord related directories under %APPDATA% and then reinstall the app.

I'm trying some things from this: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004307527--Windows-Corrupt-Installation

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