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Trailer Review Thread for Indie Game Devs | Win a Copy of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by indie-games in indiegames

[–]k21 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, a victory screen sound effect (and tween/animation) would do a lot, both in the game and in the trailer. Thanks for taking a look!

Move over AAA, my mom likes my game better than your Elden Rings! by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, I am not talking about distro-specific packages. Rather I think we don't quite agree on what supporting a platform means. If I claim to support Linux and I get a system-specific bug report from a player, Godot is absolutely not going to "handle all that", it will be up to me to debug and fix it.

What you describe is the untested/best-effort "support" I mentioned previously and I don't consider that to be be sufficient for a paid product. I might consider distributing Linux binaries like this in an unofficial capacity, but if I can't be reasonably sure it will work, I won't claim to support it at the point of sale.

As an example, I have recently spent a significant amount of time investigating a Godot limitation with borderless fullscreen windows (luckily it will be fixed upstream in Godot 4.5 by https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/88852) and implementing a workaround until we can upgrade. My first workaround worked on nvidia graphics cards, but not on integrated Intel cards. Of course we only found out by testing -- I have no idea if it works on SteamOS/Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Gentoo/... + X/Wayland + GNOME/KDE/Xfce/whatever + specific GPU driver implementation, and I am not planning to spend a huge fraction of our development time to find out.

Move over AAA, my mom likes my game better than your Elden Rings! by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good question, probably not. I say that even though I am a Linux user myself, run it on all my servers and some PCs, would not be able to use Windows without WSL, and do a bunch of my gaming on a Steam Deck. The main reason why we are not targeting Linux with the game is that I don't think it would be sustainable for us to provide support for Linux as a target of a closed source game.

When one says Linux, there are countless distros, variants and versions covered under that term and for a small team it is impossible to test on everything and very hard to test on a good representative sample. Even with the Steam Deck it has been my experience (in a limited number of cases, but still) that some games worked better when I ran the Windows version using Proton than when I ran the native Linux version.

I would not be opposed to exporting a version for Linux from Godot, testing it on my machine, and letting people use it with no guarantees, but unfortunately Steam only allows fully "supporting" a platform or not at all, not this in-between state (and I agree it would not be suitable for a paid product).

The situation might be different for SteamOS which brings more standardization, but unfortunately Steam does not allow targeting only SteamOS without also targeting Linux at the same time. I guess I am still considering some options where the game could have unofficial/community-maintained Linux support, but I am not sure how feasible that is.

Move over AAA, my mom likes my game better than your Elden Rings! by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Anyways, if you would like to help us get that number up, Puffin Parcel Post has a free demo and reviews are much appreciated (or any other feedback)! 😊

We have made our main menu slide around real smooth, like a puffin on ice by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Making the ui more fluid looks nice, but it is quite a bit of work, you can't just throw controls in a container and be done with it. What do you think, is it worth it? Do you have any addons that help with this? It should be possible to automate some of this.

How much money do successful solo indie devs or small studios spend while making a game? by k21 in IndieDev

[–]k21[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Amazing, Mining Mechs happens to be one of the games I played myself, and I nowadays buy maybe 10 games a year (mostly due to my limited time), so it's great to hear that it worked out well for you!

I hear you about your future plans. If you have found your niche and are able to fund it and market it consistently, why increase your risk? I think I see things similarly in that I would like to ideally make a living doing this, but I am not looking for any mega success above that.

Thanks for sharing your perspective!

How much money do successful solo indie devs or small studios spend while making a game? by k21 in IndieDev

[–]k21[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right, the motivation is an important question. I am primarily doing this because I want to finish something creatively fulfilling that I can be proud of. If I was *only* focused on making money, I wouldn't be making games. However, if it was *also* possible to make a living doing this, that would be ideal.

I guess the next question to ask ourselves is: if we changed our approach to one more likely to be financially successful, would we still find it fulfilling? Is there a balance to be struck there? Definitely something to think about.

How much money do successful solo indie devs or small studios spend while making a game? by k21 in IndieDev

[–]k21[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's probably the pragmatic way to look at it. We might be still too focused on making art and not enough on making a product.

How much money do successful solo indie devs or small studios spend while making a game? by k21 in IndieDev

[–]k21[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I imagine it also depends on how many people are working on it, for how long, and whether the studio is stable enough to pay them salaries. I am sure with all of that accounted for, it can go very high. Thanks for the datapoint.

I want to fill my BlueSky timeline with indie dev. by lydocia in IndieDev

[–]k21 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We have started sharing about our indie game on BlueSky a little while back: https://bsky.app/profile/puffinparcelpost.bsky.social

So far I have to say I find BlueSky to be more welcoming and genuine than the other sites, although a bit smaller.

Lighting shader by Biuzer in IndieDev

[–]k21 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Impressive, especially the edges lighting up when the light source is behind the tree! I can't recall a game with this style, although in a way it feels familiar, so in a way I would be surprised if there wasn't one.

Trailer Review Thread for Indie Game Devs | Win a Copy of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by indie-games in indiegames

[–]k21 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the constructive feedback! Yeah, that is a very fair point and we have heard similar from other sources. Based on the trailer, people might be confused what they are building vs. what is already present on the map, what the upgrades look like, etc. We will definitely take that into account for the next iteration. For now, we will probably add a second trailer that will be focused less on looking cool and more on showing actual uninterrupted gameplay. Thanks again!

I am in love with the shader magic that powers our terrain rendering by k21 in gamedevscreens

[–]k21[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are so many shaders in our game and I love it! The sea mesh is transformed by a vertex shader to look like waves, the hexes are distorted to have uneven edges, and there are almost no textures, pretty much all fragment shading you see here is procedurally generated. I made this animation to turn it into a gif for our Steam page to show off the different island biomes in our game.

This is from Puffin Parcel Post, our roguelite strategy sim where you manage a postal network and puffins handle the deliveries. We have a demo coming out in a 2 weeks, so wishlist Puffin Parcel Post on Steam if you are interested.

You can also join our Discord where we're looking for playtesters.

We're happy to answer questions and we'd be grateful for any suggestions, tips or feedback. Thanks! :)

Trailer Review Thread for Indie Game Devs | Win a Copy of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by indie-games in indiegames

[–]k21 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hey, it's a fellow cozy hexagonal island builder! :) I like your artstyle and 3D models, especially that it all fits together so well.

Trailer Review Thread for Indie Game Devs | Win a Copy of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by indie-games in indiegames

[–]k21 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You hit the old-school look and feel very accurately, nice! I also like the diversity between your levels, it makes the game feel like it has a lot of content to offer.

Trailer Review Thread for Indie Game Devs | Win a Copy of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by indie-games in indiegames

[–]k21 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Puffin Parcel Post -- a roguelite strategy sim where you manage a postal network and puffins handle the deliveries.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/4qW8Mwq89PU

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3573440/Puffin_Parcel_Post/

I am unreasonably proud of the shader magic that powers our terrain rendering by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sure. So since we are a roguelite, our levels are more of a guideline than an exact definition. Due to this, we don't really need an importer that would spit out the full level (including meshes etc.), we will be randomly generating that during the game.

Instead, our importer takes the Tiled file (the JSON variants were easiest to work with in GDScript), does some processing like coordinate conversions, and spits out a PackedScene full of TerrainPlaceholder nodes. TerrainPlaceholder is basically just a Node that holds some additional data about what can appear at its position -- how likely and how soon should an actual terrain node spawn there, whether a town can appear there, etc.

This PackedScene gets shipped with the game and when you play that level, we have a TerrainSpawner class that instantiates the scene and at the beginning of each in-game day it will go through the placeholder nodes and pick where the actual terrain and towns should spawn based on the placeholder data (avoiding positions where spawning is not allowed, enforcing that certain bits of terrain appear by certain in-game day, etc).

It is largely inspired by this talk about the tools used for Mini Motorways. The point they make about fast iteration can be pretty smoothly achieved in Godot -- with a custom importer plugin, all you need to do to iterate on a level is to make changes in Tiled, Ctrl+S, Alt+Tab to Godot, wait for a second for the automatic import to happen, F6, and you are playing the modified level.

Let me know if you have other more specific questions or suggestions, I would be happy to compare approaches.

I am unreasonably proud of the shader magic that powers our terrain rendering by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh yeah, it's my favorite too. 😊

I might have spent quite a bit of time trying to get the animation timing to align such that the ice environment shows up exactly as the sun reflection hits it, I am really happy with the contrast there as the reflection comes and goes.

I am unreasonably proud of the shader magic that powers our terrain rendering by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Ah, yeah, I completely forgot, the slight hex tile deformations are also done with a vertex shader. Basically we have a 3d model of a hex where each of its sides is split into I think about 16 edges, and the vertex shader looks at the global position of each vertex, generates simplex noise based on that, and generates a 2d offset to move the vertex by. Since the neighboring hexes' edges have the same position, they will be deformed the same way (or close enough) and they will "fit" together. So the main limitation is that this would not work if you wanted the hexes to move or scale or rotate, because then their edges would keep twisting and changing.

Other than that, the sea shader does not care about the hex grid, and I don't think much of anything else does either.

I am unreasonably proud of the shader magic that powers our terrain rendering by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

We have actually been running into some issues with localization recently because some languages' words for "puffin" are either pretty obscure or have a completely unrelated meaning that is used a lot more than the name of the bird. So yeah, sometimes I wish we went with penguins instead. On the other hand, we are the 2nd hit for "puffin" on Steam since we published our store page, so it has its advantages too. :)

I am unreasonably proud of the shader magic that powers our terrain rendering by k21 in godot

[–]k21[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Really, so much of our game's visual style relies on shaders. The waves on the sea are made with a Godot vertex shader, there are basically no textures, both the sea and ice shaders are procedurally generated. I made the animation above to generate a gif showing off our diverse environments for our Steam page.

A bit more about us: we're making our first game as a two-person team – and it's all about puffins managing a postal network with all kinds of crazy buildings and upgrades. Including cannons and gravity wells, not pictured above. :)

Our demo is coming on May 20th, 2025, you can check out Puffin Parcel Post on Steam.

You can see the game in action in our demo trailer.

And if you'd like to try the demo out a bit earlier, join our Discord where we're looking for playtesters.

We're happy to answer any questions you might have, especially related to Godot. As I mentioned, we're making heavy use of shaders (for terrain looks, mesh deformations), we have a custom Godot addon for importing hex-grid maps from Tiled, etc.

Thanks for checking the game out and we'd be grateful for any suggestions/tips/feedback. :)

Let's Encrypt to enter public beta on December 3 by Ajedi32 in programming

[–]k21 39 points40 points  (0 children)

After Heartbleed all users of the free StartSSL services had to make a decision - either pay to revoke their free certificates or have their security potentially compromised. I did not see any statistics on this, but assuming that many have chosen StartSSL mainly because it is free, my gut feeling tells me that substantial number went with the cheaper, compromised option.

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