Hey everyone!

I know there are some people on Tildes who like making games as a hobby. I’ve had a long-standing passion for game development, but I never managed to finish a project. About a month ago, I decided to push myself to finish a small game and publish it somewhere, and finally that day has come! Orb Sweeper, a 3D minesweeper puzzle on a sphere, is now live on the Google Play Store. Just as a disclaimer: it’s free, has no ads, and works offline by default, so I’m not earning anything from it. I just genuinely wanted to share my first finished project, along with the joy and relief I feel now.

Honestly, I’ve always been more ambitious when it comes to game mechanics. I’m a big fan of strategy games, especially TBS games over the years, so of course I always dreamed of creating a grand 4X strategy game of my own. Over time, I implemented many different systems and mechanics that are complex on their own: generation of realistic and interesting maps, pathfinding, economic models, different variations of game AI, and so on. But since these kinds of projects are huge, I was never able to finish one as a solo developer, or even bring it to a properly playable state. I burned out relatively quickly.

Over time, I realized what motivates me to continue: when somebody else is also working on the project, and when you can quickly see the results of your work. Both things are difficult to achieve. First, it’s hard to find people who are ready to spend a lot of their free time developing a big strategy game while following the same vision. Since it’s a hobby and I cannot pay for development, I also have to spend a lot of energy motivating others, not just myself. The longest I managed to keep a small team of two enthusiasts together was one month.

Second, with complex games like strategies, there are only a few big and impactful mechanics that bring the game to the state of a playable prototype, but getting there demands a ton of polishing. Graphics, sounds, small animations, 3D models… a lot of work that is almost invisible on its own, but contributes enormously to the overall look and feel of the game. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in these small fixes, and that also leads to burnout.

So I decided to make my projects progressively smaller until I could realistically complete one from start to finish. It’s a bit sad to see that only a Minesweeper-like game survived this approach, but I feel like it’s an important starting point. Seeing my game actually published gives me a bit more motivation to finish other projects.

But then… it’s Google. All interactions with its platform make me feel a bit frustrated. It’s surprisingly difficult to publish such a simple game. I even had to hire paid testers just to satisfy their entry requirements for closed-test user engagement. There are so many policies regulating data handling that even if your game does nothing in terms of transferring data, handling accounts, or showing in-game ads, you still have to go through all these bureaucratic procedures anyway. I guess it’s probably the same with Apple, but their famous support still hasn’t helped me with account verification after a month, so I’ve yet to experience that side of things fully.

Anyway, I’m glad that the game is available somewhere at least. And I actually play it myself sometimes on my phone. I know some people here are going through similar obstacles, so I have a question for you: what motivates you to continue working on big, complex games? And more generally, how do you avoid burning out on long-term projects?

The last couple of weeks I've been fooling around with different ideas for how to build a chess bot that's fun for beginners to play against. I don't have much real experience with chess, so I've mostly just been testing it against myself.

After looking into the different techniques that are used to force engines to play at a certain level, I put together my own (somewhat silly) approach and have had some fun playing against it. The problem is, as I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to the actual game, I can't be a particularly good judge of how others will feel playing with it.

Regardless of your own skill level, I'd be super appreciative if anyone would give it a try and let me know what they think.

I'm working on a full write up of how it works, but here's the short version:

His Christmas present is going to be a custom-built arcade cabinet. The internals are simply a Nintendo Switch, an 8bitdo arcade controller, a computer monitor, and some speakers. Pretty simple stuff!

He has next to zero experience playing video games and I haven't really exposed him to my games either (screen time and all). So, he's probably got about zero coordination when it comes to using controllers or playing platformers, etc. Also, he tends to get very frustrated with himself if he can't do something, causing him to want to give up.

What are some recommendations for Nintendo Switch (1, not 2) games that will ease him into gaming?

Thanks!

Hi All,
It's been coincidentally EXACTLY 1 year since my previous post about Gametje. I've been busy creating some new games and re-designing all the main pages with the help of a UI/UX designer. I have posted a few updates in the weekly What programming/technical projects have you been working on? threads but I thought this milestone deserved its own post. I published the new site earlier this week and also migrated to a new backend server. Here's a refresher of what it is for those that may have missed my previous post a year ago. I also recently started working on it full-time last month after not really working on it much from January-June this year. You can read more in my recent blog post.

What is it?

It's a set of online games that can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat. It's also available directly in Discord as an embedded activity. It is playable in 9 languages and doesn’t require any downloads. Most games revolve around creativity in some form. None of the games require fast reflexes and can be played by just about anyone.

Where can I try it?

https://gametje.com and directly on Discord

You can use the "quick play" option to launch directly into the game as a guest.

What's different from last year?

There are 2 new games (Sync Think and Hide & Peek) and the main pages have been redesigned. I also implemented a game room concept which allows you to bounce between games without having to recreate it each time. I also integrated with Discord, which means you can play directly in their interface and also use Discord as an Identity Provider when logging in. The games themselves need a bit more polish (especially the two new ones) but overall they should work.

What am I looking for?

I'm trying to gather some feedback about the games and the overall concept. Are the games fun? Is this something you'd try with your family? What could be improved? Is the site clear about what you can/should do? Should I add some gameplay videos to give you a quicker feel for the games?

I'm also open to game ideas, I have a few in the backlog already but need to focus more on the business side at the moment. Any advice on the games/marketing etc would be highly appreciated.

Side note: I'm probably going to rename the whole site soon since the name Gametje doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and has caused some debate with Dutch speakers. The branding for the new name isn't quite ready. I am considering calling it GameBuffet as my avatars are all food related and its more of a "all you can play" offering for any games added to the platform.

Thanks for reading.

My party recently finished Descent into Avernus, which we played over Discord and FoundryVTT given how scattered across the country we all are. A regular party of the campaign was the DM poking and prodding players for "someone write up a recap of last session", helping keep us all in the loop, players who were absent in particular.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that this could be automated, and Scribble was born.

Scribble is just a bash script wrapper that will:

1. Take a .zip of FLAC files from the Craig discord bot, recordings of each player present for the session
2. Use the tool whisperx to transcribe those audio files to text
3. Compile a transcript of the session and send it off to Gemini to come up with the recap
4. Parse the recap and send it along to Discord via webhook

After some trial and errors and tweaking, I've got it in a pretty good place, it's working very well for our campaign. So I docker-ized it and published it to share with the world anyone else who might get use from it. I'm not sure where else I could put the word out about this for anyone who might want to use it, so here it is. If you might find this useful, please, enjoy!

https://github.com/goose-ws/scribble

I've had some ideas for a game simmering for a while now and I've finally committed to learning Godot to see what I can put together. I'm still in need of some inspiration, though, and I know there's a few folks around here who have made games. Complete, polished, sketchy, half-baked - doesn't matter! - I'd love to see what people here have come up with!

"Dominion of Darkness” is a strategy text game in which the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness with the goal of conquering the world. He will carry out his plans by making various decisions. He will build his army and send it into battles, weave intrigues and deceptions, create secret spy networks and sectarian cults, recruit agents and commanders, corrupt representatives of Free Peoples and sow discord among them, collect magical artifacts and perform sinister plots. Note – one game takes about 1 hour, but the premise is that the game can be approached several times, each time making different decisions, getting different results and discovering something new.

Game is avalaible for free, online: https://adeptus7.itch.io/dominion

If you are hesitant to play the game, I invite you to watch/listen to the reviews:

• Indie Sampler (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM6f4UCEgWU

• [BOKC] BlancoKix (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgNpSKToOSg

Hello Tildes, I wanted to share with you a project that I have been working on for quite some time and have finally released.

63 is a modern version of the classic public domain party game known by many names, but listed on wikipedia as Celebrity. (Some people might know it as Hat Game, Fishbowl or by some of its commercial versions such as Time's Up or Monikers)

The game works exactly like all these other games except you only need your phone to play it, no pen and paper or decks of cards required. The game is pass-and-play so only one phone is needed for a any size group.

For this initial release, the english version of the game only has 2 packs of cards available to choose from (General and Celebrities) but my goal is to add more packs and create a platform where anyone can create and share their own packs of cards.

You can download the game now on Android or on iOS.

For those not familiar with the rules I'll leave a brief explanation below but inside the game there's a more comprehensive rule section and tutorial.

GAME RULES:

A random deck of cards is generated for each game based on the packs chosen. Each card represents a concept and the objective of the game is for teams to guess as many cards as possible.

Two teams take it in turns to guess cards. Each turn is 63 seconds long and the player from the active team holds the phone and gives clues to their teammates.

There are three rounds, each with different rules for giving clues:

ROUND 1 - Forbidden words
You can’t use words from the card’s title

ROUND 2 - Only one word!
You can't make sounds or gestures nor use any word in the card title

ROUND 3 - Charades!
Words are forbidden, only gestures and sounds are allowed

At the end of the three rounds the team with the most points wins!

This is one of the first places I've shared the project in, especially for a global audience (since the game is also fully in portuguese), so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Hope you enjoy 63!

Well, a few minutes ago I finally pushed the button, the game is released. So I wanted to write a short write up of some things that I had to do to release the game. I won't really talk about making the game itself too much, more about the part of actually releasing the game, if you are interested in more of that you can see my posts from Timasomo (1, 2, 3, 4, showcase).

Steam

I have already created many games in the past, I've been making games for more than 5 years, but always as a hobbyist. So I never experienced releasing a game on a platform like Steam. I have to say working with Steam and Steamworks is very pleasant and streamlined, but it is still much more complex than for example releasing a game on itch.io, which is what I did before for all my other games. I'll try to summarize how the process looks like.

First, before you can even get on Steam, you have to register, fill out a ton of paperwork, wait some time for it to be manually approved. Afterwards, you have to pay the 100 dollars for Steam Direct. At this point you finally get a Steam app id, which you can use to start integrating Steam features into your game. For example, having achievements, Steam cloud integration (so the saves get synced between devices), leaderboards and potentially more, especially if you are making a multiplayer game. To make my game I am using Godot, and I found a C# library called Facepunch.Steamworks which made this all quite easy, I'd definitely recommend it if you are using Unity or Godot with C# and want to release your game on Steam.

Before releasing a game on Steam you also have to finish everything on a gigantic checklist, including things like: uploading 10 various header, capsule and other images which are used on the store page and Steam library. An icon for the game. What are the minimum requirements required to run the game, whether the game has adult content, whether it supports controllers, how much the game will cost, screenshots, a trailer, there are just so many things to do! And when you complete parts of this checklist you have to have your game go through manual reviews. Each review could take about 3 days to get done. I failed one review first so I had to resubmit it too and wait again. Let me tell you, if you plan to release a game on Steam, reserve at least a month to do it, and start going through the reviews as soon as possible -- actually I think there even is a minimum of a month before you can release the game from the day you get an app id.

Trailer

Creating a good trailer is super hard. I am not a video creator/editor at all, but luckily I at least own a solid program for creating videos -- Vegas 14 pro, that I got for super cheap in some Humble bundle about 8 or something years ago, so I at least had a good start there. I ended up with not that complex of a project and Vegas still kept crashing when rendering, so I am not sure if I'd recommend it though.

The hardest thing for a trailer is deciding what to put in it for me. I know that a trailer should be super short, should showcase how the gameplay looks, what are the features and so on, but when I got to actually making it, it was still super hard to decide what to put there. How do I even start? I watched a ton of other indie game trailers to get some inspiration and that also didn't help that much. There are some trailers which are really just gameplay, some trailers which are actually just incredible with editing I could never do as a pleb... So I started with something that I know a bit more. I created a very short music track, and decided that I will just edit the trailer to fit the music.

The music track basically splits the trailer into 4/5 very short sections:

• Basic gameplay, how the game looks when you start playing it
• Explaining the roguelite part of the game, selecting spells and items
• More complex gameplay, how some combinations of spells and items can look later in a run
• List of features
• Special bonus ending section showing a "Legendary" spell, which should show how insane spells can get, followed by the logo of the game

I think the trailer ended up being not too bad, but I still had some feedback that it isn't flashy enough. And it's true, but I am not really sure how to improve it easily. When watching the Vampire Survivors trailer for example I can see that they did a much better job: it's so much more dynamic, the music really pumps you up, it's overall better edited, it has cool transitions, camera movement and so on.

End

Releasing a game on Steam was a great experience. I learned so much! I basically made this game over weekends and evenings, since I also have a job. To try maintain my productivity I tried to do at least some work on the game every single day. I have to say that towards the end I started losing some steam (haha), some days scrambling to do at least something late in the evening before I went to sleep. But, if at least someone plays the game I think I want to keep updating it more, I still do really like the game!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to ask me anything about the game, or the game dev process, or about anything basically haha.

Here's the Steam store page, the game costs 5 dollars, I'd love it if you checked it out. If you want to play the game but can't afford it PM me and I'll send you a key for the game (at least once I get the keys I requested -- did you know that Steam has to approve the creation of keys manually? Edit: the keys are now ready)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2682910/The_Spellswapper/

Thanks to all who posted to or read last month's trial run of this topic. Let's try another month!

This thread is for when you're done with a game and you want to give your finalized overview of it. Did you enjoy it? What did it do well? What were some of its frustrations? Would you recommend it to others? That sort of thing.

For ease of readability, please bold the title for the game you're reviewing.

Also, please mark all spoilers as well using the following formatting:

<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>

Spoiler text goes here.
</details>

I really enjoy reading through the weekly gaming threads where people talk about what they're currently playing. Those often give really interesting in-the-moment commentary, and I was thinking it might be nice to have a spot for more formalized "I'm finished with a game" thoughts and reflections.

This thread is for when you're done with a game and you want to give your finalized overview of it. Did you enjoy it? What did it do well? What were some of its frustrations? Would you recommend it to others? That sort of thing.

For ease of readability, please bold the title for the game you're reviewing.

If this is something the community likes, I'm thinking it could be a recurring monthly thing. Consider this month's post a trial run to see whether this is a concept worth continuing.

Hey all, I'm a board game designer named Adam Wyse and I just wanted to share my latest project that went live on Kickstarter this morning!

A little bit about me; I'm a former software engineer who now works in the board game industry full time. I have a few published games (Head of Mousehold, Masque of the Red Death), and many more that have been signed and will be coming out over the next year or two. I work for Roxley Games doing logistics and development. If you're a fan of modern tabletop games you've probably heard of Santorini or Brass.

Anyways, Mayday Games is publishing Poetry Slam; a word/party game for 3 to 8 players (10 if we reach the stretch goal). It's all about writing a word based on a prompt, then coming up with a short poem that allows other players to guess your word. Each player loses a letter each round that they can no longer use in later rounds. Coming up with your word faster will earn you more points, but you will lose more valuable letters! It's a strategic and hilarious word game that you can play with a big group - it makes for a pretty fun and unique experience.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maydaygames/poetry-slam-a-beatnik-3-8-player-party-game

I did up a full how to play video here a couple weeks ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Y-0FBCjyM

One of the cool things that Mayday is doing is a referral system. If you back the game you get a referral link. If you get someone else to back the game using your link, you get a free playmat. Whoever refers the most people will get a cool prize pack!

If you have any questions about Poetry Slam, board game design in general, the tabletop industry, or Roxley Games, I'm happy to answer! I hope you'll give the project a look!

Edit: The project was cancelled because it kind of stalled in the middle, but the game is still going to be produced! It will be available at Origins board game convention in June, and then in retail shortly afterwards. If you are interested in checking out a gameplay video, we recorded on at my local game store last night: https://www.facebook.com/sentrybox/videos/10156328694703428/