youen

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place wonder what the curve of "abandoned apps that kind of work but are not maintained and are left to die on next OS breaking change" is going to look like 👀

Some clues: the crime scene 🫣

@cmconseils@mastodon.social we do know that many had feathers though, so this should be added to these drawings.

@eniko so far I'm working around this by not even trying to think about considering to estimate how much time I'll need. (though I didn't start with a game jam) But I suppose this is only possible when your revenue is not dependent on finishing and selling the game.

@runevision@mastodon.gamedev.place @benthroop@mastodon.gamedev.place multiplayer is a tough subject. It adds a lot of complexities, bugs, testing hassle... But starting with a solo game thinking "maybe I'll add multiplayer later" is not a good way to do it either. There is no good solution, for all the kind of games where multiplayer is "nice to have" but is not mandatory for that kind of game. I mean, even if it wasn't a puzzle game, with those specific additional difficulties, it would still be a tough decision.

@oblomov if anyone has job offers for this, I'd like to apply (some day). Whatever the metrics you'd use to measure my performance you'll find I'm pretty good (we can work out the details later)

I've spent some time improving on the same idea of an island with mountains. The most difficult part is to get coherent river beds (always going downhill, even though the terrain is made up of random noise). It's not finished, but I think it looks cool for a starting point, to define scales and place the main elements.

Here is how it looks in the game, and also with the #FluidSimulation to have actual rivers infinitely flowing from the sources I've placed, until it gets to the sea. It's still very empty, but there should be some potential for interesting perspectives.

To give an idea of scales, the map is 16x16km, which means the cliffs on the coast are about 300m high, and I don't know exactly but the highest mount probably 2km high. In-game we are really much closer than this preview. So the heightmap needs to be exported at high resolution (my target is 8192x8192), which means one point every 2m of terrain. I couldn't achieve such details with real elevation maps, and of course I can't draw that kind of data by hand.

It's not finished yet, notably I need to configure the erosion simulations to make mountains look more realistic, place big rivers strategically for gameplay reasons (this is of course where the #FluidSimulation https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@youen/115860872576805368 will come in action). And there are tons of things that could be improved. It can look cool in the preview, but not that much in-game with the different perspective. And then, that's only elevation data, I also need to work on texturing, vegetation, etc 😅

I think I can now officially announce that I love this tool! How could I know I liked combining mathematical functions that much? Beside, I created in a few hours this first version of my game map, which is way beyond anything I could cobble together in the last days (I was trying to combine real Earth elevation maps, but with disappointing results). #gamedev