u/Braym3n

Something I see in games, is fake gambling. And I'm not talking about loot crates or real gambling. Nothing with MTX. I'm talking about having gambling mini-games in the game with currencies you get normally.

How do you view mechanics like this? Does it add value or just distract players from the real goals of the game?

I've leaned more towards, it ruins the balance a bit, but also it just distracts players. It's almost a low-effort way to add "content", but at the same time it's something some amount of players enjoy. I should state, some games are built around gambling to a degree, but this is more geared towards games that are not, but just added it in for fun on the side. Also, even though it's fake and not tied to any real money, there's a moral issue of is this a gateway to something worse?

Just curious about other devs thoughts. I tried adding it to my own game awhile ago, but I honestly took it out because of the things above and now don't consider it for my games.

Last week, I wanted to discuss the different ways we design games (That thread for reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental\_gamedev/comments/1whqh86/what\_does\_your\_design\_process\_look\_like\_when/).

This week, I wanted to see how everyone goes about organizing and tackling the programming side of things.

For me, I am much more of a free baller. I don't tend to have a list of any kind. I have in the past used Trello and Github issues to track what needs to be done and what is in progress. But as a solo, I found it more of a time killer managing that (And I know this is me not thinking about the indirect benefits). I also personally tend to change up a lot of the design as I playtest and work through the different mechanics. The game I am working is already pretty different than when I was in just the design stage because I found things that just weren't as fun or cool as they actually played out. This would mean shuffling the board up a lot. My second game I did use a todo list. It was dead simple and I would just label the mechanics and honestly it was less for me to remember what to do and more a "you're almost done" progress bar. This didn't feel too bad honestly, but not as satisfying as moving cards between columns.

I don't think my strategy is a great one honestly. I would like to find something like Trello (or just use Trello) and be better about organizing myself. I can be a stubborn programmer always trying to optimize my time, but it is one of those things that I think would be helpful if I utilize it correctly. I have noticed too when I am in the programming stage, the design stage kind of turns off a lot. I'm thinking breaking up tasks like this would help keep that side on more, so I am not wasting time coding things that just end up not being fun, even if technically it was fun to create.

So, what is your way of tackling programming tasks? What is your system of actually creating and shipping a game? Getting to the finish line can be tricky without a clear goal or set list of things you need done.

I'm open-sourcing all my assets that I commissioned or made myself amongst all my games, and part of that is all the creatures from Koltera 1 and 2. You can find those here: https://github.com/braymen/braymens-free-assets/tree/main/Commisioned%20Art/koltera-2/creatures

I love creature collecting games and as a developer, the biggest struggle I had was finding a lot of creature art. I couldn't find what I was looking for, so I invested a lot of money into commissioning it all. I want to make it a little bit easier on others interested creature games, so I am open-sourcing it under MIT so you can utilize them in your games any way you like. I'd love to see the creature collecting incrementals expand!

Additionally, I have made all my games (including my steam releases) public repos. You can find all of those here: https://github.com/braymen?tab=repositories

Still unsure how exactly I want to license those (if I do). I want others to learn from it or get some ideas of how another dev went about doing something, especially on the games I've released on Steam.

AI Disclaimer about my Public Repo Games

Koltera 1 had no AI used (except a year ago, I was trying to clean the game up after having used just javascript and noodly code) and Koltera 2 had a bit of AI usage throughout development. My goal is use AI pretty sparingly. I don't vibe code, but especially with google's AI summary, I find myself trying that first when I am searching for things. All my games for now will be public as well.

No art/music/sounds had any AI usage, to my knowledge. I used asset packs or commissioned it. Any of the public games I removed asset pack stuff since I am not the owner and don't have permission to do that.

Hey everyone,

Thought I'd share my very short incremental game "Blood God" which I've spent the last almost weekish making for the incremental game jam. I've gotten very very little sleep, but I'm happy with where it is at! This is my first time really finishing a game in Godot. It's a little scuffed UI wise which is why you can't resize/fullscreen it... otherwise it just... breaks. I also haven't figured out saves yet, but it's a very small little incremental game!

I've also been learning pixel art, so that is all made by me as well. I call it scuffed art, but I wanted to try and do the art myself too.

Blood is your currency and as a Blood God you must collect it all! The theme was parallel universes and the concept I ran with was you have 3 universes overlapping at the same time and you can traverse between them to collect blooooood.

Still doing some minor balancing and flavor with the rest of the 8 days I have, but it's pretty much where it'll end up! Let me know if you find any bugs. Sorry there isn't descriptions on the upgrades. Still trying to figure out the UI and I am going to look at doing tooltips if it's not terrible.

Hope yall enjoy and happy feeding 🧛

Link: https://braymen.itch.io/blood-god

AI Disclosure

No AI was used