Gametje

Hi all been working on this project for a while in my spare time. I wanted to share it with this community to see what you all thought.

What is it?

It is a set of online games (currently only 2) which can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat with screen sharing. Essentially there is a host screen and then each player has their own player screen (laptop or phone etc). It is playable in 8 languages at the moment (feel free to request any others!) It also has an integrated ChatGPT player which can be turned on/off in game settings if you prefer to play without it. There are some game mechanics to identify a ChatGPT answer which can yield some funny reactions if you choose a human's answer! It has Chromecast support and works well on Amazon Fire sticks. Visually, it is still a little rough around the edges as frontend design isn't my forte but the core concept is there. I have been play testing it with friends but have not shared it publicly yet.

Why is it called Gametje?

I have been living in the Netherlands for some years and my original motivation for starting this project was to create a game that supported languages other than English. I wanted to incorporate something Dutch into the name. tje is one of the diminutive endings in Dutch. It is usually meant to soften a word or make it "smaller". So Gametje -> a little game.

Where can I try it?

https://gametje.com/

You can either create an account (user/pass with email confirm) or try it out as a guest (navigate to either game, then choose continue as guest). Currently it is free to host a game. Happy to hear any feedback (both good and bad). Hopefully the host provider I am using to run the game will hold up.

Thanks!

So, by now everyone knows about the big outcry over Unity's big runtime fee. Even if they backtrack, I foresee MANY developers leaving Unity because the trust has been damaged. So there are two options to look at now: Unreal and Godot. I have no experience with Godot personally, but I know there are people on here who do.

So, to those with experience with it, here's the chance to share your expertise and knowledge! What do you want new users to know about it? What do you consider its strengths and weaknesses? What resources would you recommend for new users? Any particular tips and tricks? And also, what are some games you know made with it you'd recommend, either to give people ideas of its capabilities or just because they're good games?

I thought it'd be fun to have our own recommendation list before the final results are announced.

Here's the link to the theme announcement video (the theme is "Role Reversed") and link to the itch.io page where you can find all the entries. The default sort is 'random' but you can also change to other Sort if you just want to quickly check out some more notable examples. Also select 'Play in browser' in 'Platform' if you're worried about having to download files.

If you participated in the jam, let us know too!

Edit: since the mountain of entries is enormous, I'm thinking a way to narrow the scope and reduce choice paralysis is this: try out 3 entries that caught your interest for whatever reason, and tell us which one among them you like most (you can recommend all of them, or try out more if you're up for it). Feel free to be as loose or selective in your recommendation as you want.

My friend and I embarked upon a journey over the past few months to create a tabletop board game. The interesting part is that we were motivated by the emergence of generative AI and the capabilities it had in rapid prototyping concepts. On a whim we said, let's see how far we can push making a board game. We pushed Midjourney, ChatGPT, and a variety of creative tools to help build the foundation for our game. We both have design chops and are into diy, creative design, and 3d printing, and technology to help get this thing past the finish line.

We are now at the point were after many iterative sessions, we have a functional and fun to play game! Our intention is to give it away as a free downloadable that folks can 3d print and paper print all the parts so they can play too! Huzzah! We are balancing the rules and creating the instructions which is not something we are relying on AI aside sticking to the theme. We are in search of inspirato on what makes gameplay fun for folks today.

Question What are the most fun, exciting, or challenging aspects of any tabletop or board games you play? What keeps you engaged?

EDIT
I didn't give many specifics on the game itself, and figured it might help. Remember we used AI to come up with this storyline. The prompt was to write a story for a "Sci-fi Christmas Horror" board game...

The basic premise is that you are attending a party at the North pole celebrating the research of Dr. Frost on ancient Christmas magic. Predictably things go bad, and you have to find your way out before it's too late and you are killed by a troop of Christmas themed monsters.

The games objective is to work together to escape the facility by collecting sleigh parts, fighting monsters, navigating a maze in dark hallways, and visiting special rooms to solve puzzles. It's all kinds of ridiculous but fun it its own way.

Bevy just released their version 0.11, so I figured it would be a nice opportunity to ask the Tildes gamedevs if they were using it :)

Bevy is a rust game engine - more like a set of libraries actually - that's been gaining popularity the last few years. It has become the de facto toolset if you want to make a game in rust. It is very opinionated towards Entity-Component-System (ECS), and uses the pattern to facilitate parallelism and multi-threading.

Personally, I'm using the bevy-ecs lib (not the whole engine) to write a roguelike and hone my skills in rust. I enjoy it but it's not really beginner-friendly. The official docs are lacking, and you'll have to dig in the auto-generated api docs to make the most out of it. However, I appreciate that each release not only brings new features, but also refines existing ones. The engine is getting better - not only bigger - release after release.