Rcently I worked on water filtering in my game so I figured I'll share what the entire process looks like. These are all resources and actions that are needed to get clean water that is 100% safe to drink. What do you think?
This time I wanted to showcase a creature I worked on recently and various attempts to hunt it. Dusklings are skittish neutral creatures that look like a blend between kiwi and a rabbit. Genetically they are closest to a platypus though :)
As you can see they become alert quite easily when a player approaches. The only safe moment to get near it is when it pecks the ground. Of course it can also be sniped from a distance with a well timed throw. Both melee and ranged tactics are feasible but some patience is recommended!
Edit: Oh, submission guidelines ask to post a link to the game. It's from Dusklander - A game I develop by myself.
Hey Guys!
I just got notified that Frozen Ship has been released in Early Access. I'm really conflicted about this one. On hand hand the concept of a huge mobile base making its way through frozen wilderness sounds great... On other hand the game looks like a literal copy of Long Dark in terms of visuals and mechanics. Hell, take a look at shooting the bear, its death animation and skinning animation afterwards. It looks like a direct clone of the way it looks in Long Dark.
I'm a huge Long Dark fan so this is alarming to me. But also as a Long Dark fan I'd really like to play more similar games if they're good.
Let me know what you think and if anyone already had a chance to play it. There are no user reviews on Steam yet so I have no idea if it's actually any good or just a knockoff.
Edit: Ok, I played the demo and I don't think I'll be trying the full version anytime soon. Disclaimer: I might be a little biased because I didn't like the fact that they copied the visual style from Long Dark. But I don't think I'm biased a lot. See... the visual style resembles Long Dark to the degree of plagiarism but that's where the similarities end. It doesn't play like Long Dark. Hell, it doesn't even play like a survival game actually. It plays like a fairly simple colony management game. A colony management that you control from FPP by interacting with a handful of consoles on your ship. You can assign your colonists to gathering tasks and you can also do it yourself. After each day your colony gains resources based on your assignments. You don't see your colonists working, you just see the numbers go up. You can cut trees and scavange houses yourself as I mentioned but you don't do it very fast so it seems almost insignificant. Your only survival meter is the cold which effectively limits how much time you can spend outside of the ship/vehicle each time.
I don't see a survival-driven purpose in this game. It creates some obstacles for the colony each day or every couple of days but it feels a little forced. It's like a scripted series of crises you need to overcome for the journey to continue smoothly. You're a captain but also a guy responsible for handling all problems hands on by yourself. Also there's this rather weird design choice - whenever you exit the ship it keeps rolling. Slowly but steadily. So when you do anything that takes in-game time, you need to keep track of where the ship is or you might lose it.
I'm a bit disappointed honestly... I think after the visuals I wished for the gameplay to at least be closer to how Long Dark plays but instead it feels like a Frostpunk without moral choices played in FPP.
What a crazy ride it's been... 144 hand drawn frames of animations and at least 10 points of sanity lost. But it's done at last and I can move one to other animations. Some of these angles turned out to be really challenging as you can probably see.
PSA: If you ever find yourself developing something on your own and you think it's a good idea to have 8-directional pixelart animations, please do some math on how long it's going to take :D
Hey Guys!
I'm currently working on the hunting system in my isometric survival and I'm looking for some solid inspirations. What is the game that feels the best for you in terms of hunting? What aspects of it do you like most?
I'm not trying to overcomplicate the system but I'd like it to have some depth and feel that it's essential to your survival.
My personal favorite is definitely Long Dark in this aspect. Hunting predators is hella dangerous but even hunting deers and rabbits always feels thrilling to me. The chance of failure during a hunt is pretty high and the stakes are high too because you risk losing your condition during the hunt but you sure need meat, leather and guts to survive. Also, following a wounded animal on its blood trail feels like being an actual hunter (no first hand experience here but I watched a lot of hunting videos)
Another example that I like is early Valheim. Deer and boar hides and meat are super important in the early game and deers especially are quite elusive. Sadly the thrill of the hunt vanishes entirely once you're done with meadows. Maybe hunting rabbits in Mistlands brings it back a bit.
But that's just my personal opinion and I'd really like to hear what you like about hunting and what are your favorites. Thank you!
One month ago I announced my second solo game: Dusklander
Today I managed to break the 1k wishlist barrier and I'd like to share what worked for me through that period. Before the announcement I emailed all media outlets I manged to find and also YT channels that post game trailers. I sent a press release and this trailer. One fairly big channel that replied and posted my video was "Indie Games Hub". The video gained over 4k views. Nothing crazy but it gave me some initial visibility. 80 Level was the only outlet that promised to cover my game but it seems to be still scheduled. As expected the big outlets like IGN didn't reply or cover it. I managed to get my Press Release to be posted on GamePress but it was picked only by some very small creators. I thought I was being smart with a semi-click baitey e-mail title "Survival game by Dying Light developer where the Light is actually dying" but turns out it wasn't as effective as I hoped for. Well.... I don't know how many of them clicked the mail so maybe it was a little effective after all.
I posted the announcement on every social media I'm active at. X/Twitter surprised me most. My post got 32k views and it resulted in almost half of initial wishlists. Reddit was a little disappointing because I manged to get many posts that got better traction before than the announcement did. But I had great success at r/dontstarve community. They received the game very warmly and wishlisted heavily. Bluesky didn't get that much attention. I used to have bigger successes there in the past.
After the initial spike I tried to post about the game regularily but I noticed that I used most of my videos and resources for the trailer and didn't have anything new to show. It's something I'd probably do better next time. What worked really well were Reddit ads. I kept a simple ad with comments enabled during all of this time and it gave me 200 wishlists which costed me $150. I believe that it's a very affordable ratio and I think I'll actually keep the ad with minimum budget enabled as long as it keeps generating wishlists.
There's nothing groundbreaking about my strategy I think. I try to post regularily and be active in X and Reddit. The ads are a nice boost to the baseline Steam offers.
Oh, and by the way the 1000k WL in a month was kinda my internal goal of what I'd be really happy to achieve with this game if it doesn't miraculously blow up so I'm glad it worked:)
I'm happy to answer all of your questions!
Edit: Of course I meant 1k not 1000k in the paragraph above ;)
One month ago I announced my second solo game: Dusklander
Today I managed to break the 1k wishlist barrier and I'd like to share what worked for me through that period. Before the announcement I emailed all media outlets I manged to find and also YT channels that post game trailers. I sent a press release and this trailer. One fairly big channel that replied and posted my video was "Indie Games Hub". The video gained over 4k views. Nothing crazy but it gave me some initial visibility. 80 Level was the only outlet that promised to cover my game but it seems to be still scheduled. As expected the big outlets like IGN didn't reply or cover it. I managed to get my Press Release to be posted on GamePress but it was picked only by some very small creators.
I posted the announcement on every social media I'm active at. X/Twitter surprised me most. My post got 32k views and it resulted in almost half of initial wishlists. Reddit was a little disappointing because I manged to get many posts that got better traction before than the announcement did. But I had great success at r/dontstarve community. They received the game very warmly and wishlisted heavily. Bluesky didn't get that much attention. I used to have bigger successes there in the past.
After the initial spike I tried to post about the game regularily but I noticed that I used most of my videos and resources for the trailer and didn't have anything new to show. It's something I'd probably do better next time. What worked really well were Reddit ads. I kept a simple ad with comments enabled during all of this time and it gave me 200 wishlists which costed me $150. I believe that it's a very affordable ratio and I think I'll actually keep the ad with minimum budget enabled as long as it keeps generating wishlists.
There's nothing groundbreaking about my strategy I think. I try to post regularily and be active in X and Reddit. The ads are a nice boost to the baseline Steam offers.
I'm happy to answer all of your questions!
You'll be able to throw many weapon types in Dusklander: spears, axes, knives and darts. I got this idea that weapons which aren't that easy to throw (axes and knives) could bounce off the target if the throw wasn't aimed properly or by a small random chance.
My best intuition is that it should depend on the aim distance. Say... if you hit the target within last 10% of the flight trajectory it always digs into it. Maybe similar rule for mid point of the trajectory. Otherwise there's a chance it won't work.
Do you think it would add some depth to this mechanic or would it be just frustrating?
Yet another animation for Dusklander. This time I tried right axe throw. This throw animation is meant to be used with other weapon types too: javelins, darts and knives.
All feedback is welcome. I tried to implement most of what you pointed out for the Back-Right spear throw I posted last. I hope that some progress is noticeable :)
You find yourself trapped in a nightmare world that tries to break you. The light on your hand slowly fades and the shadows are getting closer as you search for food and resources. Each death brings you back to you started and forces you to try again. Will you let the nightmare and the one who jails you break your resolve? Or will you find a way to wake up... knowing that your body in the real world slowly withers in coma as your seemingly endless fight for survival continues.
I know that a lot of you were interested in my survival game :) It now has a name: Dusklander and I'm here to answer all of your questions!
Most important probably is Valheim 1.0 release date announcement on September 9: Link
But my personal favorite is Abiotic Factor: Entropic Break DLC coming in Autumn this year: Link
Grounded 2 announced a content update "Into The Abyss" coming on August 11. Trailer
Palworld 1.0 got announced to be released on July 10. Trailer
Did I miss anything? Did anything else catch your attention?
A little showcase of melee action this week :) The combat system in Dusklander features 8-directional animations and a 3 hit combo that allows you to change attack direction mid-combo. The first upward hit is meant to look a bit weak because each consecutive attack in the sequence does more damage than the previous one.
Hey guys!
I stumbled upon this game today: Link
Honestly I'm super surprised that I've never heard about it before. The developers must be struggling with marketing a bit since I actually try to follow every interesting upcoming survival. It looks like it was very much inspired by Sons of the Forest. The crafting, even the forest itself reminds me of SotF. Now I'm not saying it as a bad thing. The setting is different and quality-wise it looks really solid.
Too bad they don't have a gameplay trailer on they Steam page but there's a stream going live. I wonder if any of you have an opinion about it or tried the demo maybe? I think it looks interesting enough to give it a try. I'll check it out on the weekend and report back.
Hey guys!
I've just anounced the isometric survival game I've been working on for a while. I'd love to hear what you think about it and answer all of your questions :)
Hello!
I have a quick question about localization. I wonder how you guys handled it for your games. I got my Steam page localized to a couple languages including Spanish. Now when uploading localization files I notices that the Latin American (latam) is a separate language code.
What's your approach to this... Do you recommend to copy the Spanish version of the localization into the Latin American so that they are identical? Or is it preferable to NOT do it and leave it in enlish since it's technically not the same language?
My resoning is that it should be easier for folks in Latin America to understand a page in European Spanish than in English but maybe it's considered a serious faux pas.
Hello fellow Solo Devs!
I'm preparing for the announcement of my game and I figured I'd try to compile a list of YouTub channels that might be interested in covering it. And honestly I found only a handful mostly local ones from my country.
Did you have any luck getting game news YouTubers to mention your game? Is there anyone you could recommend or maybe you even have your own list you could share?
Actually any mention of a YT channel that could cover an announcement would be great help for me. Thanks!
Hello!
I'm preparing for the announcement of my game and I figured I'd try to compile a list of YouTub channels that might be interested in covering it. And honestly I found only a handful mostly local ones from my country.
Did you have any luck getting game news YouTubers to mention your game? Is there anyone you could recommend or maybe you even have your own list you could share?
Actually any mention of a YT channel that could cover an announcement would be great help for me. Thanks!
I'm starting to work on run animations for my protagonist. It's a little tricky because I'd like to use the same animation when she's holding a weapon/tool and when she's bare handed. Still I think that it's better to have her main hand acting as if she's holding something heavy rather than making the axe swing widely when she performs a bare-handed run. What do you think?
I'm working on the mining mechanic for my survival game. Since it's a brand new animation I figured I'd also try on a new armor design. The Chitin armor is gonna be craftable from shells of insect enemies.