Primordio tower defense

I'm working on a sequel to my game... Instead of another roguelite survivors-like, it'll be an incremental RTS tower defense with some roguelite mechanics. The UI is all placeholder, just copy/pasted from example... it'll be completely redone.

One tester has hit 2 million enemies on the map at a cool 200FPS... My testing has an arbitrary limit of 8mil and I can hold 60fps.

The units are not fluid sim, though I use flow fields as a pathfinding helper (not governor)

Towers are magical wisps that you can move at will, not static placements.

Gameplay is endless, always-on. Waves are organic, not set.

Engine is proprietary, written in Odin and webgpu.

Is this something you might enjoy? I'm early in development... So, if you have any wishlists, let me know. Also accepting more pre-alpha testers, DM if interested, especially interested if you've got a rare GPU.

u/Additional_Name_706 — 10 days ago

Why did I make this game?

Hello all, I started making this game like...3 years ago?

It's an idle incremental multiplayer mining online role playing game.

I had a core gameloop and I thought it was neat. mine rocks for money, buy more miners that fall into the mines, give them jobs as blacksmiths and stuff, you pull a caravan through the mines... The idea that it would be a growing caravan city. Your miners can become jewelers, caravan crew, blacksmiths, or your forgemaster. All miners have unique stats and equipment. The forgemaster and the rest of your guilds give you their stats, and then the miners inherit stats from you... The forgemaster is your main guy who levels up faster than the rest, his level directly affects your yield multiplier...

https://preview.redd.it/slauhm8k30oh1.png?width=1874&format=png&auto=webp&s=3286cb765d361d38e85c5004098ff75a4cf6189b

Essentially, I used this game as a test bed to learn how to program all sorts of game systems. I've learned a lot. Backend is a series of typescript, javascript, and go modules that talk to postgres. Server software is around 20k lines in total. I've ran the game on a $6/mo vps for a good long while now. Intentionally underpowered server to force me to really optimize. It was actually a really good time figuring out how to budget so much... The most players I've had online at once was 23, and the server handled it pretty well!

As a developer, I've always been data-first. This game started as spreadsheets and has grown so much.

It is far from complete... the art is...really bad... I drew the miners... I did some technical art that I think is really good looking and the game is pretty light and performant. The budgets are tight.

I so seldomly post anything about this game... I don't know if it's a deadend or not. I know that I can't sell it because it's an online game and I can't provide the care and support a paid live-service would require.

I highly recommend developing your own mmorpg as a learning experience because it will force you to touch just about every aspect of game design.

If anyone wants to talk about systems architecture or optimizations or if you see anything in Yearn that you have questions about, I'd be happy to answer anything.

https://yearn.work/

u/Additional_Name_706 — 1 month ago
▲ 379 r/odinlang

not a fluid sim, not ecs

Hello all,

Just posting a little progress update on my auto-battler/tower defense/idle incremental/online dueling deckbuilder in progress.

pure odin.

This is a stress test, 2 armies of 1 million soldiers clashing with wisps casting a few hacky spells.

The tech feels pretty good. I need to tighten up some of the sim values but I split the struct into 3 parts, hot, warm, and cold which has really reduced the GPU memory bandwidth. We were in budget but now we're roughly using half of what we were using.

Does anyone know how to turn this into a game? I didn't have much of a plan beyond tech demo.

There's a good chance I can make an online duel work.. I always thought a round-less Legion TD 2 would be cool...with battles scaled to the millions?

u/Additional_Name_706 — 2 months ago

Money's nice but have you tried attaboys?

I felt like a goofball copying these so I stopped...

Devs, post your 'atta boys, I wanna see em!

What's your favorite review?

u/Additional_Name_706 — 2 months ago

Primordio is a game about chain lightning

My dear friends and distinguished guests,

We first opened our doors almost three months ago.

Tomorrow, the Primordio opens anew. Life advances, the spark of creation must adapt.

  • A dozen or so new Words of Power.
  • Leaderboards with weight classes for fair competition.
  • Mastery breaks the limits of the meta board.
  • New prestige system allows you to distill your essence into Qualia to break even further.
  • Nearly 800 Compendium pages giving verbose explanations of the game.

We're a real incremental game now with limitless vertical progression.

Season One launches August 17th, along with a fresh sale, and a free demo.

Thank you to all of those who've been with me throughout. Looking forward to many more seasons with you.

edit: how silly of me to forget: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4385580/Primordio/

u/Additional_Name_706 — 2 months ago
▲ 2 r/gametrailers+1 crossposts

Primordio Season One Launch reel cut 6

Are these clips coherent? If I write some music and/or add some captions, would it be a good trailer for my big content patch releasing August 17?

My better question, if you have no idea what this game is, can you look at these clips and kinda tell what's going on?

youtube.com
u/Additional_Name_706 — 2 months ago

Is this getting away from us?

Or is this what you like to see in late game incremental extraction roguelite bullet hecks?

(quarter speed)

u/Additional_Name_706 — 3 months ago

I hate marketing

Hi friends,

You can look at my account to see how much marketing I've done for my game. It's actually selling better than I thought it would. It's a genuinely good game with 20/20 positive reviews.

I've got a big patch coming... I really enjoy working on the game and building things my players continue to enjoy.

But I hate marketing.

Should I start responding to those marketing bots? Are they all scams? Are there any services or publishers that I should be reaching out to?

What's the play for someone who is just likes programming?

reddit.com
u/Additional_Name_706 — 3 months ago

I had a successful launch weekend

My game launched on Friday. It's now monday.

I bucked most of the conventional marketing advice. I did very little marketing, had my steam page live for only 21 days. Still somehow amassed 400 wishlists before launch.

I feel like these are really good numbers, way better than I expected.

u/Additional_Name_706 — 5 months ago

early playtest of primordio

This footage is old but it does showcase the basic game loop. I think this was me playing, and I'm bad.

If you want to play primordio, it launches on steam in like 20 hours.

AMA

u/Additional_Name_706 — 5 months ago

Memory lane

booted into windows to build tauri stuff, opened notepad, and got a spam of all sorts of old documents (yeah windows fucking sucks). This was from that time that I wrote primordio in C# for unity.

I did a couple-two-or-three prototypes of this same game in unity (I could write many more blog posts about my various iterations of primordio.) I used fat visual studio for this particular piece.

It reveals a technique I use for writing code...

those declarative comments for simple things. I would write those out first. Pseudocode, and then write the code, or spend time with the LSP, docs, copilot, and/or whatever to work out each piece.

This might have been 2-5 years ago... I still use this same strategy a lot of the time, where I scaffold out the logic with comments.

I think it's a beginner's technique but I've been doing it for decades... So, I thought I'd just share it here.

What are some beginner's techniques that you still use?

And, if you are a beginner, what do you think of the idea to scaffold with comments first. I've been doing it so long that I don't have any idea where I learned to do it and I have no idea if it's a common tactic.

u/Additional_Name_706 — 5 months ago