Hello Everyone! I'm creating a PS1 era style game where you control a tank against the AI apocalypse where machines turned on humanity.

For those who grew up with these type of games and are nostalgic, you can play the Demo on steam! (and everyone else ofc)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5152000/MAGNUM_Protocol

The most recent visual effect in my game!
I really like how it turned out, there's still room for improvements, but that's a good basis to work with. Can't wait to add some water in game (though the debug checkerboard ground is pretty satisfying to me)!

Any feedback to improve the effect is welcome!

I’ve been working on a small pixel-art game with ships and islands. Graphics are still very much in progress and will probably change as I keep developing it Planning to put up a Steam page once I manage to save a bit for it, currently a broke student, so it’ll take a little while.

My twitter for interested in that game: https://x.com/BartekK349090

Thanks for any encouragement! That will be my first game i'll share and release :D

Hey all. I just finished a sci-fi shield pack for Godot 4. It works in Forward+, Mobile and Compatibility and in web exports too. Every class starts with Cyberflux, and I've had it in one project with five of my other packs (fire, lightning, ice, weather, melee) without a clash.

You give the shield a mesh and I build a thin shell 4 cm off its surface. It takes that mesh's skin and skeleton too. On a rigged character the shell just walks along with the bones! When a shot lands you call hit() with the spot and the hexes around it light up.

My first version was just the hex lines.

It looked like a cage lol. Now there's a thin film with a brighter rim, and the lines mostly come up at the rim and around a hit. I went back and forth on the film a lot, a bit too thick and it reads as jelly.

The pack is at https://gennai.itch.io/sci-fi-shield-hologram-vfx-godot-4 The laser beam is free, the zip is under Download demo on that same page.

still far from the end goal, but it's starting to do what it should do.

Happy with how these turned out 😋 For a presently unannounced project. Probably will be a while before I do...

So about 3 years ago, after participating in a 2 week game jam, I was somewhat disapointed with my game development speed, and decided to try a challenge you've probably heard of before.

12 games in 12 months. I was gonna bust out 12 quick, easy games to try to supercharge my gamedev chops. Arcade game clones. No time wasted on designing new and complex mechanics or pushing the boundaries of the craft, just focusing on pure execution. Like an artist drawing a thousand pages of circles.

Well I seem to be a special kind of idiot. First on the list was a breakout clone. Ball, paddle, bricks. Easy peasy.

"But!" I thought to myself, "what if when you hit the bricks, they burst into smoke." When I visualised that, I didn't picture baked smoke animations, or the usual noise textured shader effects, that overlap eachother and don't interact.

No, of course I thought of a real fluid; smoke explosions that would drift and diffuse realistically, different colours mixing, balls carving wakes through the fog.

How hard could that be, right? I've seen fluid simulations before, it's a solved problem.

Now I'm a SAHD with no education beyond highschool, just a lifelong, self-lead student of game design. Granted I did very, very well in highschool, but I never did anything with it.

So I started researching. I started by looking for something that produced the closest to the effect I envisioned. I found a shader on shadertoy that looked pretty, and met my naive requirements. Reading through the code, the math within might as well have been magic incantations to me.

Kindly, the author of the shader linked an academic paper in the comments of his code, and so I started reading. Didn't get too much understanding, but was able to follow a trail through more and more acedemic papers and graphics programming articles, combined with just googling "good fluid sim quick". It took time, but eventually things started to make more sense. Along with some shakey understanding of the equations and processes behind fluid dynamics and simulations I was also picking up more knowledge on shaders. I'd had some experience with them, just the basics, but with all the reading I started to get a decent handle on them as well.

After maybe 3 months of reading, thinking, designing, planning, I finally started to lay down some code. Remember 12 games in 12 months? Me neither. It was slow, trying to directly port the shadertoy shader into Godot. Quite demoralising, I just couldn't get anything to work. The code diverged from the shadertoy shader significantly as I tried and tried, for over a month probably. I started to get something... not realistic fluid, but at least a blob that was bleeding and blending somewhat.

But I ran into a lot of grief with how godot handled feeding the output of a shader back into itself back then. I tried all the tricks I could find to get around this limitation of the engine, looking into godot projects on itch.io and github, but none of the adequately solved these problems. Sims were clunky, slow, unrealistic. More often like thick paint in a vacuum. Any smart dev at this point would have probably switched platforms to something more suited to what I wanted to do. I am not a smart dev. The whole point was to really upskill my understanding of the godot engine, and I'm so very good at sticking to the point, obviously. Especially when I'm 5 months into a 1 month project.

I tried just running the code on the cpu, using godots image editing methods to set individual pixels, and it looked promising. It showed me that my math was at least on the right track, but it was far to slow, far too low resolution.

I don't remmeber when I heard about compute shaders, but I discovered that the Godot engine was set to introduce them with an upcoming version. So I took a substantial break while I waited for someone else to solve all my problems.

After a few months of just living my life, I remembered the project, grabbed the shiny new version of Godot, and had a crack. Turns out I don't know squat about compute shaders. I hit the books again, but the documentation for this somewhat new feature just wouldn't click. Couldn't even get the bastards to dispatch, probably because I had no idea what that meant. I ended up neck deep in Vulkan documentation. It did help somewhat, but I ended up in the weeds, going far lower level than was necessary. Don't ask me to render a triangle, but I know of it! The wall I was hitting though was the Godot boilerplate. I just couldn't wrap my head around defining buffer sizes and workgroups, or just the general engineering of what information I needed to hand over to the GPU, so I couldn't even get to the point of knowing what to do with that info once it got there. Forget about reading it back to display it.

I took another break (read: I gave up again) and just tried to forget about it for awhile. I still researched a bit here and there, and somewhat developed a sense of the engineering of it all.

At the start of this year, I decided to have another go. A few more versions of Godot had been released and compute shaders went through some quite substantial changes, and frankly, it was easier.

I finally got a compute shader going. Thus began 3 months of deep work; kinda remembered I need another layer, the first was just the velocity field, but I needed colourful smoke for it drive. Didn't look quite right, so I tweaked and tuned, added more layers to solve pressure, started playing with viewport and visibility layer bullshittery to inject forces and obstacles. I'd take a month off, then come back to it and fiddled with it for hours. Every day saw better and better results.

Truly an amazing, self satisfying feeling. As the fluid dynamics got more realistic, more regular shaders came along to pretty the smoke up, more and more.

Real world physics analogues started to emerge purely out of the dynamics and the math. I started to see Kármán vortex streets, and capillary action.

Recently I took another 2 month break, because life just fucking sucks sometimes, and all you can do is hide in a ball and hope your mind comes out the other end intact, if not somewhat tattered. Vague, I know, but I'm not here to sulk.

I've come back to it this last week with more direction now for what the actual game itself could look like, because traditional breakout is kinda dull, and suffers from some built in design flaws with pacing and difficulty.

But really, I just wanted to show off my smoke. It's so, so good and I'm very, very proud.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading, I appreciate you.

TL;DR: I made pretty smoke and it took me far too long. Please look.

If you can spot any other errors let me know so I can continue to refine this!

Hi everyone,
I was rather silent the last couple of weeks after the release of my game The Merchant’s Eden. It was a rather hectic time with all the bugs and feedback coming. Finally having some time to relax again was also quite nice after some quite intense months before the release.

Currently working on the new update 1.3 of the game. This update will all be focused around the attack and defense mechanics. On thing a lot of players asked for, was to give the enemies a chance to destroy building or defensive structures like walls and towers.

I wanted to make something interesting and not the usual catapult that still fits to the game. I decided to go with a unit that places an explosive charge to bomb walls, creating new pathways into the city. Finding the right spot for placing those was an interesting part to implement. But also the visuals for the explosive and destruction was something new for me. The destruction was a bit tricky to optimize and find the sweet spot as it is happening dynamically and isn’t pre-rendered or animated but physics based.

Grateful for any kind of feedback!

Very early dev footage, but happy with how my sheep tech is coming along! Sheep go through a number of states like grazing, moving, panicked and they have a fear level which increases based on the dog's distance, speed and barking. Sheep also try to stay in a herd and react to each other's fear and movement - if a sheep is scared enough it will run away from the group and become a straggler.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5230230/Board_Dynasty/

Making games has always been a little dream of mine.

Thanks to Godot, I’m finally bringing that dream to life, one small step at a time.

It may be a small project, but it means a lot to me ❤️

I updated the movement of my spiders to bring even more fear into the game. Do you like it?

The game is still in development, so there is plenty to improve and experiment with. I'm sharing the progress along the way to get feedback and document my journey as I learn and develop with Godot.

It hasn't happened to me, in fact I'm a novice, but with the current problems there's a high probability that it will happen.

¿And what do you do when something like that happens to you?

it is great to see that some devs here are grounded to reality and it is motivating.
I also fear that an AI dev will copy and release a game I am working on, but I just needed a reality check that consumers will choose the better product and there is a market for authentic games.

Just be better! and improve! If they steal, you can also steal from them (or learn from their mistakes).

I faked the side black bars (they are actually just color rects) to do this effect, plus some shader and canvas layer layering shanenigans :D

It's for my horror game where you play as a game-tester called Little Knight's Last Night. There's a demo on Steam right now as part of Scream Fest V!

My favourite recent character, making an asset pack for unity and Godot 🔥

(Not an ad)

You can find it here on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4824730/KAGERO/

Hey everyone!
It’s been a while since my last update, but I’ve been slowly working on the project.
This time I finally got the first prototype of the first-person hands working, including the first animations. Please don’t judge them too harshly. They are what they are for now 🥲
There are now animations for picking up and holding items, so items no longer just disappear from the world and instantly appear in the player’s hand.
The held item is also properly visible in the hand now. For the moment I’m scaling it down a little so it fits, but I’ll be reworking and improving that later.
Right now, the most important thing for me is getting the foundation right.