u/Pycho_Games

Yesterday I made a post showing off some 'art' I commissioned recently. The immediate majority response was that these images were AI created. I did not believe you. I had source files and thought they could not have been faked. But, as it turns out, I was wrong. What's worse, I have been aggressively defending the scammer in the original post. So to everyone I snapped at in the original post: I am sorry.

That's all. I just wanted to apologize really.

I am making a deckbuilder where you play three decks at once, each with its own class. It's nature based so classes are mammals, plants, arthropods, ...

The feature in question is the evolution feature. You can evolve a card (say a honey badger card) by sacrificing a card from another deck. Currently the system is set up so that the badger can receive a plant evolution or arthropod evolution etc. depending on which class of card was sacrificed.

But I am thinking of changing it so that it actually matters which specific card was sacrificed. So right now the badger could add poison to its attack by evolving via arthropod sacrifice. But what if that's only available if you sacrifice a poisonous beetle. And if instead you sacrificed a bullet ant, the badger would add pain to its attack instead.

It would massively increase experimentation, but it also adds a lot of work coding specific evolutions and balancing them will be even harder.

It would neatly fit with the theme though. I could call it cross breeding.

Another negative would be that players might be overwhelmed with too many options.

Okay, just writing this down helped me think. But if anyone has any opinions on this, I'd be grateful.

I use Spine animations in my projects. And most of them look smooth and run without problems. But some animations look bad, because the sprites have clipping artifacts (kinda like with old VHS tapes). I export all animations as version 4.0 atlas files and can't see what the difference is really. But no matter what I do, it's consistently the same images causing problems.

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Has anyone maybe encountered this problem before?

Slay the Spire and Monster Hunter and many other deckbuilders give you a starter set of cards and power ups at the beginning and you unlock more of them through playing the game.

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I assume it's to both give players a sense of progression / discovery and to not overwhelm them at first.

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But I think I might just prefer having everything from the beginning.

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What are your thoughts?

I am proud of my game and feel it's really fun to play, but making a post about it still feels like walking up to a stranger and demanding their attention for my hobby art project. It's cringy. And I think that probably comes through in my posts.

I think I'll try leaning a bit more into short form videos for a while. At least there I can say to myself "Hey, I didn't invade your subreddit. The algorithm chose this for you."

I'm a dad. I don't have more than 20 minutes or so to play at any given time.

I keep hearing my game looks off (saturation, color pallette, contrast, etc), but I don't quite see it and I certainly can't figure out what to change. I just don't have an artistic eye. Does anyone know a good youtube source for learning the basics for people who suck at art?

My game is 2D illustration style, if that's relevant.

Game Title: Life Altered

Playable Link: 

Playable in browser: https://gx.games/de/games/80txcq/life-altered/

Download as ZIP: https://pychogames.itch.io/life-altered

Platform: PC (Web/Windows)

Description: Life Altered is a dicebuilder. It is basically Slay the Spire but with dice instead of cards and there are three characters (each with a unique deck) that you control at the same time. Collect animals/plants and use them to defeat enemies. Maul your foes with the honey badger, deliver huge amounts of pain with the bullet ant, heal yourself with some Arnica. Evolve your animals/plants multiple times with different effects by sacrificing other species from your dice.

I have made significant improvements to the game in the last year and would love some feedback on where to improve further.

Free to Play Status:

• [X] Demo/Key available

Involvement: I am the sole developer and owner of Life Altered.

I was reading a.post by the Dreadmoor devs describing how important it was to distill messaging to a very simple way to describe the game, in their case: 'fishing, but the water is not safe', which I think is perfect. And now I'm trying to formulate something like this for my game and I'm stuck.

Story-wise it's 'All life is infected. Fight the mutations and find the cure.'

Gameplay-wise it's 'Slay the Spire but with dice and three characters played simultaneously'

None of those grab me however. Is my game just too convoluted or do I suck at marketing?

How do you go about this for your own games?

Edit: Here's the Dreadmoor post, if you're interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/2rjDjM8vNw

I need lots of animal icons for my game and I am trying out which look works best for the game. Can you give me your opinion which looks better for the first three dice on the left?

https://preview.redd.it/wvldbjpfkh1h1.jpg?width=2594&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d0c79a2a69d002c760981d943a2b86ac5cd55344

I like new Spencer, the drumming is solid, but it sort of fades into the background for me. Old Spencer's drumming always had something in each track that was unique and made the drumming very noticeable.

This may of course be due to the fact that new Spencer joined the band at a point where maybe a lot of the music was already written and there wasn't much room to put himself in it. I will be curious how it turns out in the coming years and the next album.

I have two kids and I am a little unsure when to introduce them to video games. On the one hand I myself started at 6 years old and have been loving games ever since. I played A LOT. And I kinda want to impart this love to my kids.

On the other hand, I want them to have a happy life and I think being social outside of digital experiences and generally being outside is a huge part of that. And I know how addicting games can be for young kids.

So I am curious: how did you deal with this?