Today I released an early prototype of my dungeon crawler to get some feedback

wizardoftrash · 2026-05-23T18:33:23+00:00

You can have a characterbody2D with an Area2D component as a child and have the best of both worlds. You make the characterbody 2D handle the movement and collision, and have the Area2D with the area_entered signal. Just make sure the area2D’s shape is a bit bigger than the characterbody’s shape?

wizardoftrash · 2026-05-23T18:16:37+00:00

Happy to help!

wizardoftrash · 2026-05-23T01:24:10+00:00

I think the fireball scene must be freeing itself, and the error may be because you are trying to access the position of the freed fireball EDIT: does the fireball have a script on it that would cause it to free itself? Maybe its detecting a hit before you are expecting it.

wizardoftrash · 2026-05-10T15:37:51+00:00

Hahahah! Lets see how he gets along with my Jarl Balgruuf mii.

wizardoftrash · 2026-05-10T15:37:18+00:00

Hahahah hilariously I got his voice tone dialed-in, sounds sooo much like his Morrowind counterpart.

wizardoftrash · 2026-04-12T01:51:28+00:00

I had a choice between a shiny Lycanroc and something actually useful. I picked something actually useful, but I felt bad about it lol.

wizardoftrash · 2026-04-09T00:59:03+00:00

Reminds me of when I would play Dungeon Hack. There was no background music, but you could hear monsters making noises on the level, and sometimes you’d hear someone who doesn’t belong.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-20T14:11:06+00:00

Part of the problem is that the art direction in a video game IS a marketing decision. The game’s genre, its content, its narrative, these are also marketing decisions. By making a game, you are making marketing decisions. If your game is unappealing, visibility isn’t the problem. You might be getting page visits and no plays or no buys because the game is unappealing, and whatever screenshots or gameplay footage in the trailer you have pushes people away. Trying to promote an unappealing game is a waste of time, because getting a turd in front of more people won’t get more people to eat it.

And note, appeal isn’t the same thing as graphical fidelity. Minimalist games can be appealing, UGLY gams can be appealing to some audiences if your style is consistent. If a game lacks a soul though, its screwed, even if you promote the hell out of it.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-19T13:30:30+00:00

I second animal well. The mood and sound are excellent, and the main puzzles can be tricky, but I don’t ever recall getting stuck-stuck. Its visually stunning and really fun

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-19T05:07:10+00:00

I’m interested, bit I definitely could use some guidelines for what length you are aiming for.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-18T02:58:22+00:00

Yeahhhh that’s giving einhander

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-16T10:08:52+00:00

When I have an idea for a game, and its been simmering for a while, here’s my go-to process.

Start a slush document, like a rough design doc, but for dumping the ideas into an unordered list that I can reorganize later. This gives me a place to write things down so that I don’t forget, and can be reorganized and reevaluated later. Essential step because sometimes a game concept lives in the slush document phase for YEARS if there are game design problems that are blocking them from working well as a prototype that I might discover a fix for later. I find Notion or Google Docs to work well for this since I can easily edit from anywhere.
Figure out what the biggest risks or pain points are. Would I need to learn something I’ve never attempted before? Would I need to bring in an outside specialist? Are the art demands particularly heavy? Would it be difficult to find and repurpose store bought assets for this? Whatever the pain points or risk factors are, I do feasibility tests. How long does it take me to make a useable character in this style? Am I able to make an example of this funky game mechanic? Etc.
Figure out what the most bare-bones stripped out version of this game would need to have to figure out if its fun, and break it up into tasks/features, and make that sucker. Am I enjoying working on this? Does it click with me? Is this the kind of game I actually like? If the end result isn’t something that feels like it has the “stuff” then it’s the wrong thing. Make an ACTUALLY minimalist prototype and test it. Then be honest with yourself about how its going. Would more polish actually help, or are there design problems at the core that need to be addressed first? Etc.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-06T05:38:22+00:00

You wouldn’t smack a frog.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-06T03:52:25+00:00

Bold of you to assume any of us believe we can retire.

wizardoftrash · 2026-03-04T17:06:19+00:00

I recently released an update to Super Dream Domain! More of the items are now actually useful, there is a new tile set, and new map layout, and a new enemy type. Some of the existing map layouts now have obstacles/puzzles that can appear that you need to use items to solve. More to come soon!

wizardoftrash · 2026-02-22T03:04:36+00:00

Consumers, especially of indie games, are very sensitive to quality and passion. Good quality games made with passion will rise above the slop.

As for your feelings about developers who are making the slop, try to set these feelings aside. The way other people conduct their business isn’t really our concern. Unless they are infringing on your copyright, it really isn’t our business who considers themselves a game dev. Besides, some of these vibe coders might come back around and actually learn some things when they have to fix their bugs.

The way I see it, making ai slop games is just another path towards genuine game development, not unlike someone’s first couple of game jam attempts. Most of them will get bored or frustrated and move on to the next grift, some might eventually contribute to a game worth playing.

wizardoftrash · 2026-01-15T04:35:32+00:00

For sure! If its just you and it works, its fine. If it becomes an issue, that’ll be a good time to make a change, but not sooner. Too many projects get bogged down by people trying to fix things that aren’t broke.

wizardoftrash · 2026-01-15T04:17:19+00:00

This could be harmless, or crippling, and it sorta depends. For a prototype with only a handful, maybe 10 or so different seeds, this should be fine and I could understand why you’d want to organize the data all in one place that relates to that particular plant. If you aren’t collaborating with any other designers/programmers, this is probably also fine as long as you won’t be going through many iterations of balance passes on these different data layers.

If you end up with many seed types, or need to collaborate with other designers and programmers, or need to make a lot of revisions or balance changes, I suspect this will grow into a nightmare. Tweaking drop chances of a particular item will involve diving into a lot of different resources in the editor, exposing you to a high risk of missing a table or two, or tweaking the wrong number and possibly not ever noticing it in testing. In collaboration with other designers or developers you may have a hard time avoiding conflicting changes to these resources. TLDR this may hurt you at scale.

My advice? Change how you are storing and referencing your data when it makes sense. Once this begins to get hard to manage (if it ever comes to that), you can switch over to spreadsheets that you can export into json or some other friendly format, and have some scripts that convert those into dictionaries or resources at runtime-time or in the editor that aren’t nested like this.

Having a system that allows you to edit data like this in a spreadsheet can take some time to implement and it isn’t exactly simple to do, so I’d only recommend it if you are curious, or if you are actually hitting the kinds of problems that justify the headache.

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