Steve Streeting @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

I didn't know about the #introductions tag, sorry! Properly this time:

Hi I'm Steve, and I...
...wrote #ogre3d a long time ago
...wrote Sourcetree more recently (now Atlassian)
...am now using Unity to (finally) write my own games, with my wife who does the art

Good to meet you!

Managed to sneak in a new game mode (Time Attack) before beta. Lesson: time limits are a lot harder to balance than score chasing

On my i7/RX480 Washed Up! potters along at around 3% CPU and 6% GPU at full screen 1080p.
Could be a "play it in a window while waiting for something else, or while the boss isn't looking" game 😀

Here's how I automate my Unity batch builds and release process to Itch/Steam using Powershell:
https://github.com/sinbad/UnityBuildReleasePS
It's pretty configurable so might be useful to others. PRs welcome if you have more complex needs
#unity3d #Steam #itchio

Being disproportionately dicked over or favoured by the RNG on occasions can be a fun mechanic for some games, but given ours is about high scores it really needs to be "globally fair" while also being "locally random"

Chalk this up to another one of those really obvious things to game design veterans that I'm learning late :)

I realised (should have earlier) that although our random source is both deterministic (for replays) and well distributed in itself, because it's used in lots of places you can get unlucky with the distribution in a given single context.

Technically the underlying random number system is the same, I just realised it was a bit too random so it's now driving a second layer which filters it through shuffle bags and dampening systems so it can't get too out of whack with intuitive randomness/fairness

Just swapping out all the random number systems in our game shortly before beta, I'm sure this is totally normal in all gamedev

My earliest gaming memory is standing on a milk crate to play Blue Shark (1978) because I was only 5 and couldn't see or reach the controls otherwise

One of my favourite useless gaming facts is that the progenitor of Super Sprint was Sprint 2, which was the first one in the series. Sprint 1 released a couple of years after Sprint 2. The 70s were weird.

See you at Rezzed this weekend! We don’t have a stand but if you see us wandering around, please say hi! Happy to show you our game if you like 😊
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/media/x7zX69aAQ_TArQF2RJE

I don't know if other games bother with this, but you can play our game offline and it'll still save any high scores it can't send until next time you're online, because you just *know* that's when you'll have your best run. Encrypted obvs so at least not trivially exploitable

My hobby: assuming that other people *must* have solved a glaring problem and therefore I must find a way too, without actually checking

- Wow this is a pain, how do other games handle it?
- Read threads bitching about popular indie games having empty or non-existent leaderboards when bought on GoG
- Oh

Beginning to realise I'm trying to solve a problem most games don't bother to (unified leaderboards whether you're on Steam, GoG, Itch etc), and why they don't bother to 🤔

Having spent ages this week sorting out edge cases with player profile management just for leaderboards I can see the attraction of just leaving it all up to Steam et al

It still feels like quite early days for Nakama, there are gaps (like you can't page backwards in leaderboards, only forwards), but I'm submitting PRs to help fill them and the team is responsive. And it's #golang so any I wrote would be very similar anyway, might as well share

I've posted the second part of my blog series on setting up a game server using Nakama on Google Compute Engine: http://www.stevestreeting.com/2018/03/21/setting-up-a-game-server-using-nakama-on-google-compute-engine-part-2/

Our T-shirts have arrived in time for us to be walking billboards at Rezzed next month 😂 Marie's first time designing silk screen shirts with limited plate colours, think she did well 👍