u/HalcyonDaysXX

Hello people, hopefully you guys are doing awesome. I don’t know exactly what I wanna tell, so I guess I’ll go with the flow.

I’ve been a gamer almost all my life and of course, like most of you, wanted to make a game, but life takes its own turns, so that dream loses to other stuff. Well, in my case it was never fully lost, because I ended up doing engineering, became a software engineer, and ended up working in Silicon Valley.

Anyway, I never left gaming, but a few months ago I built my first ever PC, because I’ve always gamed on console, even in Pakistan, and I didn’t really enjoy gaming on PC since I’m so used to playing on console. So, to make use of my PC, I tried Unreal Engine, and to say the least, I’ve been enjoying it like anything. I’m an engineer, so this stuff isn’t alien to me, but I guess only new and to help me climb this mountain, Claude has been a gem, since I can ask it a question and it would answer like anything and save me hundreds or thousands of documentation reads.

So, long story short, I’ve been working on a farming game inspired by the Punjab/Sindh atmosphere. The loop is very simple: you grow, harvest, sell, buy more land, and repeat. I don’t work on the game full time, but rather a couple of hours a day after my job. I enjoy doing it, but making a game is a long, long process, probably like 5 years, especially for someone like me.

So I wouldn’t even consider this to be a game, but prolly a pre alpha, with no clue if it will ever reach the finish line. But I have the basic farming loop working, and I wanna share 2 snippets of before and after of my 3 months of development. I believe this kind of fidelity won’t be sustainable, but I think it’s worth sharing what one can achieve with a little consistency and a realistic goal.

Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with game development. K bye

Working on a streaming tool where viewers on TikTok Live can gift to queue a sound that plays the next time a specific in-game event happens. Kill, goal, knockout, whatever. Basically “I paid for an airhorn on your next death” and it sits waiting until it triggers.

The queue display lives as an OBS browser source overlay and I’m stuck on how to design it. It needs to show the sound, who queued it, what event triggers it, and how many are waiting. All while not eating the streamer’s gameplay.

Right now I’ve got a carousel for the gift-to-sound mappings, kinda like Instagram stories. That part works. It’s the queue itself I can’t figure out, especially when TikTok gifting spikes and you suddenly have 10-15 sounds waiting.