A video game that simulates #ADHD. The mission objective changes at random every few minutes and whenever you walk into a new room, your inventory shuffles one item and sometimes it becomes invisible for a few minutes.

You auto steer into table corners. Whenever you get more than one sidequest there is a chance you go into overwhelm and your controller will pretend it is unplugged.

The corners of the level starts filling up with laundry.

You put down an item and it vanishes when you look away.

A 3d character walks into a bar.

The bartender doesn't say anything.

You realise you haven't put collision or a trigger volume on the bar asset. A 3d character walks into a bar.

The bar jitters and flies off into the distance.

You need to turn off "use phsyics" on the bar asset.

In Life Is Strange Before The Storm, one truth Rachel Amber tells Chloe during "two truths and a lie" that she is a Leo.
The brilliant thing is later if you pay attention, her birthday is the day after Leo ends. But her starchart has her on a cusp.

This is brilliant. The series has a few moments of absolutely brilliant subtle clues in it that add layers of meaning, but you have to be sharp to spot them.

A technique I highly recommend to #gamedev artists is to look at actual shipped game assets.

There are various ways to get hold of them, such as programs like Ninja Ripper, Utiny ripper or via archives.

And I must stress this is for learning purposes ONLY. NEVER use them. Being able to look at models from a wide range of titles, see how they are rigged, how their Uvs are layed out, the triangle count and modularity... it all helps you understand the ACTUAL end result you are aiming for.

There is no ethical use of AI art.

There is no future for humanity in a world where all human endeavour is stolen and boiled down to something that replaces humans.

What do humans do in a world where humans are not employed to create?

Is that a world you want to live in? If you take away the creative process of human artists into pool, the zeitgeist becomes entirely manufactured from an ever decreasing pool of looping cannibalism.

Pop literally eating itself.

Draw calls are responsible for a good 50 percent of the chugging issues I have helped games with.

A draw call is "okay now draw me an apple, and come back when you are done for the next instruction."
Then you ask for another apple. Then when they return you ask for another...

https://twitter.com/Nostrodamus911/status/1711212187988136050

So the GPU is running back and forth to the CPU when it could just do that once and "draw me a pile of apples".

Lowering polycounts on models to speed up rendering isn't so much about the total count of the model but the density of triangles on screen.

The aim is to give each core of the GPU as little work as possible... ...and that means one triangle and one material, if possible.

Having a dense model means that you get smaller triangles that can at some angles really load up each core with a shit tonne more work.

You notice this at glancing angles, and when dense models are far away.

One thing I noticed about Starfield is the character smiles have an issue with the orbicularis oculi muscle not contracting to give a "Duchenne smile".

When you smile and this muscle doesn't contract, you get a "fake smile" or a "liars smile".

Played Mass Effect 3 legendary edition last night for the first time, and it reminded me that I think this series can teach you a lot about space.

No, not outer space, the use of physical space in games. The Mass Effect Series contains a lot of space between functional, intractable gameplay. Empty space. Big space. Huge areas of absolutely nothing but jogging.

A reminder that one symptom of #adhd is task paralysis. You are unable to start a task, regardless of motivation or importance of the task.
You WANT to do it, you HAVE to do it and you are telling yourself to do it... but the body simply doesn't respond. It's not a case of being lazy or unmotivated, or not caring. You usually care a LOT and it can feel extremely frustrating and often terrifying that you are not in control.

A common #ADHD symptom is starting hobbies with great enthusiam and then suddenly dropping them.
The dopamine deficiency causes us to chase dopamine, and the initial rush of a hobby, including the research, shopping for supplies and imagining the results in dopamine. However, that wears off, and the amount of reward given by the hobby itself isn't enough to sustain that craving. And so a new hobby calls.

There can be a lot of financial strain as well as guilt associated with this behaviour.

TTRPG mechanics discussion?

Okay then.

Let's talk about dice as attribute type systems. One of the great shames of DND is it doesn't use all the pretty dice fully. And we all love collecting dice sets. Holy fuck do I own a lot of dice.

Enter statistic as dice based systems.

Let's talk about a problem I see on #Warhammer miniature videos of late: The Need for Speed. When you are new to miniature painting and gaming, you are faced with a number of mental health related challenges that you may not have encountered before.

Miniature painting can both help and highlight issues you have.

#gamedev
Okay so lemme just drop a serious lesson about game design for this whole trending thing.
Why is this the ideal design and can we boil it down further.

Yes, we can. This design is simply a difficulty slider.

That's it.

You have a choice at every single stage to make your life harder or easier by picking a direction.

Absolute truth here. One thing I can tell you is never work for or with your heroes.
Never 'for' because it makes you exploitable.
Never 'with' as the real human will spoil any love you had for their work.
#gamedev

https://twitter.com/osamadorias/status/1670102964944486400

The games industry takes the "dream" energy of young employees and milks it. You work long hours, accept unpaid overtime or low wages because you hunger to be part of that dream.

You are easily exploited and discarded once you wake up or are burnt out.

The comments fall into three main categories.
A) people naming games that do this.
B) people saying they enjoy the fuck all bits because holding down a stick is fun.
C) people who do not understand what a joke is and are very angry about the lack of detail in my diagram.

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1669986188302880768

This is, brace yourself, not a complete game design document.

But if you want a complete one I offer reasonable rates for design :)

My hand sculpted oldschool chaos dwarfs are returning to production!

@FenrisGames in the UK will be releasing the entire range, including the unreleased variants.
Shipping from the UK in the top quality resin you expect from Fenris. I am currently working on adjusting the masters taking advantage of the new material- (so the flag poles will be sturdy and modular).

#gamedev DM question re this post: basically asking about dynamic cloth.

This quick paint over demonstrates cloth for a static mesh. The original artist simulated the cloth and had to sub divide to get a passable bend...

However

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1669500539753857025

...once the cloth had settled and baked into the static mesh, thr extra topo does nothing. And of course the edge is jagged.

So this example shows how the orientation of the grain of the mesh helps make nice bends.

The same is true of dynamic mesh!

Once again for the people at the back, being depressed and being very sad are not the same thing at a biochemical level.

The activities that alleviate sadness have little or no effect on depression. Anyone who says "hey just play with your cat" or "go for a walk in nature" have clearly not faced actual depression.

#gamedev
Okay so joints are best thought of as the central pivot of a ball.
Like you get on action figures.

The joint should go in the centre of the mass, NOT where out bones actually are.

https://twitter.com/holographicpink/status/1666630990175916032

To give you an example- poke your finger into your hip joint at the side and move your leg around, find where the joint in a human is.

Okay so what you have no doubt discovered it it is near the outside of our leg, not the middle.

But this is because of how our bones work...

#gamedev DM question. So lighting comes in two main forms- static lighting and dynamic lighting.

Static lighting is where you precalculate information because it is "static"- i,e, it doesn't move so it doesn't change.

Dynamic lighting is updated on the move.