Prototyping the melee combat system for my next game, Today I Will Destroy You. It's mostly inspired by Sekiro, Tunic, the Zelda games, and Death's Door.
I just started running sword combat playtests this weekend for my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, which is about a girl who goes looking for her sister.
This week I'll start playtests for the combat system of my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, an action adventure with combat inspired by Sekiro.
In this first round I want to see how players respond to the composure-driven knockdown system, and if they find the sample boss fight difficult enough to be interesting, but genuinely fair. In the background, I'm thinking about how to improve the training mode (it only kind of worked on my daughter), so the game can teach you how to play without telling you how to play.
I've been using and tuning a tool I built myself to help me lower my LDL and ApoB: https://www.heartroutine.com/. I still don't like how the daily check-in system works (it's still too dumb) but it's keeping me consistent for now.
In a few days I'll start running playtests of my combat prototype for my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, some kind of SNES Zelda and Sekiro inspired combat adventure.
Periodically thinking about what the future of helping small teams build software will look like and keeping my personal site up to date: https://piinecone.com/.
I built HeartRoutine to help me lower my LDL and ApoB. I recently started beta testing it on some friends, too, to see if anyone other than myself would find it helpful: https://www.heartroutine.com/.
I've started building the combat prototype for my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, inspired by my love of going-on-an-adventure-with-a-sword games and Sekiro-style combat.
When I have time between freelance work I make games and tools for myself.
Put One In for Johnny Minn (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3802120/Put_One_In_for_Jo...) - A small soccer game all about scoring nice goals. While I don’t expect it to do well, I’m very happy with how it came out, and it’s the first game I’ve made that I’ll release on Steam! Comes out on Thursday (March 12th).
HeartRoutine (https://www.heartroutine.com/) - I built this a few months ago to help me stay on top of my heart health. I enter my numbers on the (offline) app, and then configure my goals (like “lower Apo B through diet and exercise”), and then the server emails me every morning asking me what I ate yesterday, how I exercised, etc. The goal is to stay on track, and to be able to bring a cardiologist a very detailed report.
> Someone needs to figure out a way where we can turn this around and empower ( I hate this word, but I dont have anything better in my vocab ) employees
My friend and I are trying to do this with a matching tool we've been working on lately. You describe what you're looking for (pay, schedule, etc.) and then you only hear about jobs that match your criteria:
If you like the job, you can accept the match, and then you and the employer are introduced.
It's early days still and we have plenty to iron out, but we've started making matches, so please check it out and let Ryan or I know what you think (at team at polyfill dot work).
I’ve been living in Europe for 7 years and working remotely for US companies. Here is what I do (please tell me about better ideas!):
1. Apply to US remote jobs on the east coast and mention working from Europe. I’ve had a lot of luck overlapping for half a day. Not so great in a leadership position though.
2. Contact colleagues you like working with at US companies and see if they’re open to working with you. Someone vouching for you on the inside helps a lot.
3. Specialize in something valuable, pitch contract work, and try to convert that to full-time (or part-time or whatever).
Plug: my friend and I made a thing to address this problem because we have it too:
You say how much you want to make, where you work from, etc., and it emails you when a company wants to hire someone like you. If you try it please let me know what you think.
Also good to say; many singles or child free couples can change their timezone to match their client. I changed from US to SG and back a few times over the past 10 years while living in the EU. It was actually quite nice; asia was better because finishing your day when the rest of your friends wake up is nicer than saying you cannot really do anything after 4 pm but you get used to it anyway.
Just some input for you:
Confirmation mail went straight to the spam folder in Google Mail.
After confirmation send a mail with link to profile and some welcome message, how am I suppose to find my profile again?
Let me edit my profile afterwards.
I love reading these kinds of posts. Whenever I’m reminded that I’m not alone, I get a little bit more self-compassion and that makes me more excited to release my game and helps me appreciate all the progress and hard work to date.
I’ve been working on King of Kalimpong [0] on and off since playtesting a one-week prototype of it in 2014. I had no idea how much work a networked physics vehicle/movement shooter game would be. (I should have, I was 8 years into a programming career).
Working part-time was critical (for many reasons), but so was learning that progress is a product of discipline, not motivation, and that I needed to learn “infinite endurance” (I think that’s what Chris Hecker called it).
Once I adopted the perspective that I was some finite number of 3-4 hour blocks of concentration away from turning a goofy idea into a game that anyone could play, finishing became something that felt inevitable — as long as I kept going.
I’ll take the time to write about my experience after I release (which is now months instead of years away) in case any other game developers get anything out of it. Until then, thanks for another reminder that I’m not alone!
I'm using a fork of Unreal Engine 4.20, and I'm using the substepped physics that UE ships with. I have a fixed timestep PR simmering for if and when it's time to implement a proper rewind/replay system for all vehicle movement.
I attempted the standard prediction/correction implementation used for deterministic movement systems and got it working for the deterministic aspects of the vehicle's movement system, but naturally couldn't make it work for the core, non-deterministic physics, as that will require fixing the timestep and probably doing other things I haven't thought about / don't understand yet.
For now, the system works like this:
- basic client vehicle movement is non-deterministic physx + deterministic overrides
- special moves are deterministic but client-predicted
- weapons systems are deterministic but client-predicted
- server-side anticheat model is derived from me moving around and generating believable movement curves so the server can check that any given client move it receives is appropriate given its history / state of the world
- server also (supposedly!) handles noclip and flying cheats (this was a fun month)
- clients predict hits, server authorizes them
- simulated proxies (other clients in your world) mostly move according to projective velocity blending[0], though there are special cases for some of the special moves (spins)
- collisions are blended between the replicated state of the world and the client's local simulation [1]
- probably most importantly, the server creates replay files during matches which the game coordinator/serving system scoops up and saves, so I can (at some point) generate useful statistics and review matches to detect and improve cheat handling
I would have loved to do the networked physics really right, like Rocket League did, but I couldn't quite pull it off (I'm one guy with kids and a job and just not enough brainpower!), so I opted for what I hope is "good enough" for a small project like this: give the client a great experience, put all vehicles and projectiles in mostly the same position at the same time in all worlds (since they're momentum-based entities latency-based predictions are usually quite accurate), run an anticheat model on the server, and save replays to find and review anomalies.
If the game does okay and people are enjoying it I will get that fixed timestep/rewind replay PR done.
I hope that was a good answer! Let me know if I can tell you anything else. Something I didn't mention here is the networked projectile movement, which was the most fun to work on. I plan to write about that, too, at some point.
Playable build: https://piinecone.itch.io/today-i-will-destroy-you
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