Hasty Briefsbeta

All tags

#game-development

110 stories total

Bilingual

Export Web Games for Desktop in One Click
6 months ago
- GemShell is a new tool that allows exporting web games for desktop platforms in one click.
- Available in Lite (free) and Pro (paid) versions on itch.io.
- Lite version features include selecting game build folder, configuring metadata, and building executables for chosen platforms.
- Pro version adds features like custom icons, splash screen toggle, performance mode, asset compression, code minification, and preload critical assets.
- GemShell uses the system's webview, leading to potential rendering and performance differences across operating systems.
- Data saving is handled via localStorage or IndexedDB, with a hidden ID file ensuring data persistence across updates.
- Compared to NW.js, GemShell is more convenient but lacks consistency in performance across platforms and Steam SDK integration.
- NW.js is recommended for consistent performance across platforms and Steam SDK integration, despite larger build sizes.
- A Patreon course is available for learning NW.js with Vite, NW-Builder, and game development using KAPLAY.
Poor leadership slows down game development
6 months ago
- Poor leadership in game development can significantly slow down production, despite technological advancements.
- Seven key traits of poor leadership include failing to understand game development realities, not trusting employees, treating developers as interchangeable, slow decision-making, providing unclear feedback, demanding sudden changes, and vague crunch policies.
- Leaders often lack understanding of game development processes, leading to wasted resources on unnecessary polished demos or concept art that gets discarded.
- A lack of trust in employees can result in excessive approval processes, delaying work and creating bottlenecks.
- Treating developers as interchangeable ignores their specialized skills and experience, leading to inefficiencies when shifting to new genres or styles.
- Slow decision-making and unclear feedback frustrate teams and prolong development cycles without clear direction.
- Sudden changes inspired by other games or media can derail projects, especially if implemented late in development.
- Vague crunch policies create tension, with some employees working unpaid overtime due to unrealistic deadlines.
- Structural reform is needed to improve leadership, but some individuals will always misuse their power regardless of systemic changes.
- AI cannot solve leadership issues; effective game development requires listening to and empowering the actual developers.
A File Format Uncracked for 20 Years
6 months ago
- Splinter Cell (2002) is a favorite game of the author, developed by Ubisoft using Unreal Engine 2.
- The author explored cut content from Splinter Cell but found limited datamined information available.
- The game's file structure includes .lin files, which are a unique format the author sought to reverse engineer.
- The .lin files contain compressed data and a file table, but offsets and sizes are misleading, complicating static analysis.
- The author discovered that the game reads files in a specific order, ignoring seeks, which affects how data is accessed.
- A runtime dumping approach was developed to extract files by patching the game executable, allowing data to be saved after loading.
- Dumped files can be viewed in UE Explorer, but some textures and levels have issues when loaded on PC.
- The author acknowledges the challenges of dumping unused or unreferenced content and suggests future work for static recompilation.
I'm Making a Small RPG and I Need Feeback Regarding Performance
6 months ago
- Developer is working on a small RPG game using JavaScript and KAPLAY library.
- Experiencing performance issues, especially during battles, but unsure if it's machine-specific.
- Game is intended for Steam, so desktop performance is crucial.
- Requesting feedback from the audience with builds available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- Encourages gameplay recording and sharing performance results.
- Gameplay involves moving with arrow keys and entering battles by overlapping with stars.
- One user with a lower-end system (ROG Ally Z1) offers to test and provide feedback.
Make yourself a Voxel Engine THIS weekend
6 months ago
- Introduction to creating a voxel engine from scratch.
- Requirements: Own programming language and rendering API.
- Starting with rendering a single cube and expanding to a voxel world.
- Optimizing performance by using meshes and chunks.
- Implementing world generation with flat terrain.
- Adding voxel types (Dirt, Stone) for variety.
- Optimizing mesh generation by only drawing visible faces.
- Adding interactivity with raycasting for block placement and removal.
- Implementing AABB collision for player movement.
- Replacing HashMap with a 3D array for voxel storage for better performance.
- Challenges for further development: gravity, procedural terrain, save/loading, etc.
100 Hours to Shanghai
6 months ago
- Esther Ward received an invitation to join the Juice challenge, which involved creating a 30+ minute languageless game in 100 hours for a chance to present it in Shanghai.
- She formed a team with friends: Esther (coder, artist), Layla Salloum (graphic designer, animator), Luca Salloum (coder, composer), and Peter McNish (graphic designer).
- Their game, Dust and Dawn, was inspired by Hollow Knight and featured a soot sprite cleaning a polluted world, though they had to simplify the concept due to time constraints.
- Developing the game was challenging, especially coding features like movement, inventory, and quests, with some elements taking up to 10 hours to implement.
- Despite the challenges, they completed the game and traveled to Shanghai, where they joined 90 other participants from around the world.
- In Shanghai, they showcased their game at Bottle Dream, interacted with locals, and received positive feedback, including from a young girl who loved Dust and Dawn.
- The trip included cultural experiences, such as visiting an electronics market, exploring the city, and attending workshops, culminating in a game showcase and awards ceremony.
- Esther reflected on the experience as transformative, proving her ability to tackle difficult projects and connecting with like-minded individuals globally.
Hiring a developer as a small indie studio (in 2025)
6 months ago
- Hiring in 2025 is challenging due to lack of funds and high applicant volume.
- Small indie studios like Ballard Games handle hiring manually without fancy tracking software.
- Initial triage involves two passes: first to filter irrelevant applications, second for a fair review.
- Key initial questions for candidates: expected salary, availability, and full-time/part-time preference.
- Indie studios compete on freedom and control, not salary, compared to big companies like EA or Microsoft.
- Take-home assignments are practical and relevant, avoiding sterile LeetCode-style puzzles.
- Final step involves video chats with the team to review the take-home assignment.
- Use Gmail labels to manage the screening workflow efficiently.
- Design take-home assignments to reflect real job tasks and respect candidates' time.
- The entire hiring process took about 4 weeks to complete.
Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 (2022)
6 months ago
- The author expresses nostalgia for SimEarth and a desire for a modern version, leading them to start their own planet simulation project.
- Initial attempts used polygon-based approaches with Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellation, but faced performance issues in Unity & C#.
- Switching to C++ and Vulkan proved too complex, prompting a return to Unity and exploration of GPU-based solutions.
- Compute shaders were explored to leverage GPU parallelism for simulating tectonic plates, though deformation remained a challenge.
- Inspiration from physical simulations led to considering Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) for realistic crust deformation.
- Implementing SPH with compute shaders was challenging but educational, highlighting the importance of memory optimization.
- Future goals include adding features like current visualization, air currents, precipitation, volcanic activity, and hardware optimization.
- The project is ongoing, with plans for a follow-up blog post and a downloadable version available.
Easel's State-of-the-Art Rollback Netcode Implementation
6 months ago
- Rollback netcode helps games feel responsive despite latency by predicting inputs and correcting mispredictions later.
- Easel simplifies multiplayer game development by handling rollback netcode automatically, allowing developers to code as if in a singleplayer environment.
- Rollback netcode requires determinism and the ability to snapshot and restore game states, which Easel guarantees.
- Easel's rollback netcode features include incremental snapshotting, true peer-to-peer networking, and fair latency distribution.
- Easel uses Cloudflare for secure, efficient peer connections and employs server-authoritative models to prevent cheating.
- The platform ensures determinism across all operations, avoiding desynchronization bugs common in other engines.
- Easel's design specifically supports multiplayer games, with features like snapshotting executing code and continuous time synchronization.
- Developers don't need to understand the underlying technology to create multiplayer games with Easel.
The Cities Skylines Paradox: how the sequel stumbled
6 months ago
- Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order announced a split after 15 years, with Cities: Skylines II moving to Iceflake Studios.
- Cities: Skylines II launched in October 2023 with technical issues, poor performance, and lack of mod support, leading to player dissatisfaction.
- Colossal Order struggled with technical overreach, management constraints, and human factors, leading to an unfinished game.
- Iceflake Studios, known for Surviving the Aftermath, is taking over development with a focus on optimization and incremental improvements.
- Paradox Interactive aims to regain trust by prioritizing quality and transparency, but modding freedom will remain limited to Paradox Mods.
Making a Small RPG
5 months ago
- The author wanted to create a small RPG within 1-2 months and drew inspiration from classic games like Dragon Quest, Undertale, Breath of the Wild, and Elden Ring.
- Dragon Quest's overworld map and simple mechanics inspired the game's design, including a non-random encounter system where players choose when to battle.
- Undertale's bullet-hell combat influenced the battle system, shifting from turn-based to real-time action.
- Breath of the Wild's open-ended progression inspired the idea of an optional final boss and player-driven exploration.
- Elden Ring's experience-as-currency system was adapted for stat upgrades and risk-reward mechanics.
- The game was developed using JavaScript and the KAPLAY library, focusing on 2D pixel art and a square aspect ratio for simplicity.
- Core gameplay includes an overworld for exploration and a battle scene with bullet-hell mechanics, upgradable stats, and variable rewards based on performance.
- Art assets, including pixel art backgrounds and enemies, were created to enhance immersion.
- Dialogue encounters and lore were added to enrich the world, with optional rewards for engaging with them.
- Performance optimizations and UI improvements, like health bars and a new font, were implemented during development.
Pixel Art Tips for Programmers
5 months ago
- Programmers can improve their pixel art by nurturing good taste, which acts like an internal compiler to guide their art process.
- Pixel art at low resolutions is about negotiating with the canvas, treating it like a puzzle game rather than drawing freely.
- Using references from existing game sprites can help in understanding how to represent objects or characters effectively.
- Sticking to a limited color palette is crucial, but expanding it carefully can enhance the sprite's appeal without overwhelming the artist.
- Constraints in pixel art can breed creativity and help hide flaws by keeping the artist within their skill comfort zone.
One year as full-time solo game dev
5 months ago
- Initial effort estimations for game completion were significantly off, highlighting the complexity of solo game development.
- Time tracking proved essential for maintaining motivation and productivity, with a simple text file method preferred for flexibility.
- Persistence is key in game development, with the importance of not giving up emphasized through personal highs and lows.
- The concept of 10,000 hours to mastery is referenced, with the developer noting substantial improvement but not yet reaching mastery.
- Taking breaks and avoiding burnout is crucial, with a shift from daily commits to a more balanced work schedule.
- Facing societal underestimation of game development as a profession, the developer stresses the importance of self-respect and following one's passion.
- A surprising lack of personal enjoyment in playing one's own games is noted, attributed to over-familiarity and a critical eye towards improvements.
- The dangers of comparison on social media are highlighted, advocating for focus on one's own project over external noise.
- Marketing strategies are explored, with a preference for enjoyable methods like blogging over budget-intensive campaigns.
- The principle 'done is better than perfect' is advocated to avoid perfectionism traps and ensure progress.
- Organizational methods evolved towards simplicity, using a single todo.md file and notebook for ideas and tasks.
- The challenge of naming is discussed, with the chosen name '99Managers' meeting criteria like uniqueness and domain availability.
- Trademark registration for the game name in the EU is detailed, emphasizing protection in an open-source context.
- Financial strategies include living on savings, minimal spending, and considering future crowdfunding or cultural funds.
- The core advice is to focus on making a great game above all else, as it is the foundation for success.
- Multiple backup plans (A to Z) are outlined, ranging from freelance work to full-time employment, ensuring financial sustainability.
Playtiles: The Pocket-Sized Gaming Platform
5 months ago
- Playtiles Season offers weekly indie games for mobile gamers who prefer real buttons.
- Season 1 features retro-inspired indie games with modern design, playable in short sessions.
- Games span genres like Action, Adventure, Horror, Platformer, Puzzle, and Racing.
- Playtiles OS allows sideloading over 1,300 games from itch.io for physical button gameplay.
- Playtile layout is compatible with the Delta simulator for retro gaming.
- Playtiles are pocket-sized, electronic-free gamepads, currently in development.
- Playtiles Game Dev Kit enables game development, including a custom Playtile and a game design course.
Show HN: Fixing Google Nano Banana Pixel Art with Rust
5 months ago
- Pixel Snapper is a tool designed to snap pixels to a perfect grid, fixing messy and inconsistent pixel art generated by AI.
- AI-generated pixel art often has inconsistent pixel sizes and positions, drifting grid resolution, and colors not tied to a strict palette.
- Pixel Snapper ensures pixels are snapped to a perfect grid, maintains consistent grid resolution, and ties colors to a strict, quantized palette.
- It is useful for AI-generated pixel art, procedural 2D art, and 2D game assets or 3D textures that need to be perfectly scalable.
- Pixel Snapper preserves details like dithering and requires Rust to be installed on the machine.
- Installation involves cloning the GitHub repository and running the tool with input and output PNG files, with an optional k-colors argument.
- A WASM module can be built for use in web projects.
- Pixel Snapper is part of Sprite Fusion, a free, web-based tilemap editor for game developers, and is licensed under MIT.
Around The World, Part 27: Planting trees
5 months ago
- The author discusses the process of planting trees in a procedurally generated world for a game.
- Low-poly tree models were created in Blender to optimize performance, with the tallest tree having only 44 triangles.
- The game uses a biome system to determine where different plant species can grow, with each biome having specific plant functional types.
- Domain warping is used to add detail to biome boundaries and ensure plants follow these boundaries naturally.
- Each plant species has a base occurrence rate to control how often it appears within its biome.
- Plant placement is managed using a grid system to prevent overlaps, though challenges arise with chunk boundaries and ordering dependencies.
- Rejection sampling and iterative methods were considered but deemed too complex or performance-heavy for the current implementation.
- The author decided to allow some plant overlaps to simplify the process and ensure even coverage.
- Additional features include preventing plants from growing on steep slopes and clearing areas around human settlements like ports.
- Performance issues were noted, with dense forests significantly reducing framerate, suggesting the need for impostors in future optimizations.
Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor
5 months ago
- Kaiju is a 2D/3D game engine written in Go (Golang) backed by Vulkan.
- Supports Windows, Linux, Android (new), and Mac (WIP).
- Features local AI (LLM) interoperability.
- Under heavy development with faster builds and better performance than other engines (9x faster than Unity).
- Uses less memory compared to other engines.
- Current version renders extremely fast, outperforming Unity in FPS tests.
- Go was chosen for its simplicity, modern system-level capabilities, and ease of learning for other developers.
- Includes a garbage collector (GC) for stability, playing well with the engine's design.
- Engine is production-ready, but the editor is still in development; contributions are welcome.
- For updates, join Discord or check Twitter/X; documentation is available for getting started.
When Would You Ever Want Bubblesort?
5 months ago
- Bubblesort is theoretically faster than quicksort or mergesort for small arrays, making it useful in hybrid sorting strategies.
- Bubblesort is beneficial in game development for rendering objects due to its fast individual steps and incremental ordering improvement.
- Bubblesort can be used for animating particles sorting into a rainbow spectrum, though better methods may exist for smoother animations.
- The article also mentions a Quanta article on metacomplexity theory and Petri net reachability, highlighting problems harder than NP-complete.
Easel Now Has Stencils
5 months ago
- Stencils are a new feature in Easel that allow limiting camera rendering to specific shapes, enabling effects like scene transitions, fog of war, stylized borders, and search and reveal.
- TextSprites now have new parameters for styling (bold, italic), sizing (fontSize in em units), and alignment (align, vAlign), improving text display and performance.
- The physics engine has been upgraded to a newer version of Rapier, improving performance by 25% and automatically including new colliders in spatial queries.
- Easel's rollback netcode for multiplayer games now has a dedicated page explaining its implementation, allowing immediate response to player inputs before reaching others.
Things I learned making a game engine
5 months ago
- Dave’s Word Game, developed using the Growl engine, is set to launch on iOS and Android.
- The author shares their journey of creating Growl, a custom game engine, starting from learning C++ to implementing features like graphics rendering, text handling, and audio.
- Key motivations for building Growl included overcoming limitations with Java and libGDX used in a previous game, Feud, and the desire for better portability across platforms.
- Development highlights include implementing Metal and OpenGL for graphics, creating a command-line tool for texture atlases, and tackling text rendering with support for multiple languages and emojis.
- The engine was ported to multiple platforms including iOS, Android, and experimentally to 3DS and web via Emscripten.
- Scripting support was added with Lua as a reference implementation, allowing for game logic adjustments without recompilation.
- The project was driven by the development of Dave’s Word Game, which helped focus engine features on practical needs.
- The author reflects on the extensive learning and personal growth achieved through the project, despite acknowledging that building a custom engine is not the most efficient path to shipping a game.

first prev3next

About|Login

#game-development

Export Web Games for Desktop in One Click

Poor leadership slows down game development

A File Format Uncracked for 20 Years

I'm Making a Small RPG and I Need Feeback Regarding Performance

Make yourself a Voxel Engine THIS weekend

100 Hours to Shanghai

Hiring a developer as a small indie studio (in 2025)

Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 (2022)

Easel's State-of-the-Art Rollback Netcode Implementation

The Cities Skylines Paradox: how the sequel stumbled

Making a Small RPG

Pixel Art Tips for Programmers

One year as full-time solo game dev

Playtiles: The Pocket-Sized Gaming Platform

Show HN: Fixing Google Nano Banana Pixel Art with Rust

Around The World, Part 27: Planting trees

Kaiju – General purpose 3D/2D game engine in Go and Vulkan with built in editor

When Would You Ever Want Bubblesort?

Easel Now Has Stencils

Things I learned making a game engine