🥳🥳🥳

Yep I personally use Bitbucket, a holdover from the days when you couldn’t have private repos for free on GitHub, and I just never bothered moving. There’s tons of options, but I wanted to keep it simple for people starting off 🙂

Add stuff, commit stuff, push stuff. Like 99% of the time that’s all you need to know how to do, especially if you’re working alone.

But I think maybe part of the problem is people think it’s going to be a lot more complicated than that, and who wants to learn something big and complicated when you’re already trying to learn game dev, you know? At least that’s my theory.

Ok I’ve seen the “but I use Google Drive for backups so it’s fine” argument a few times from solo devs, but in a team? When you’re in a hurry? Argh, nightmare fuel.

This is a new one on me, looks very cool though! Thanks for sharing 😄

I didn’t want to mention that in the op because I didn’t want to confuse anyone coming into this for the first time, but you’re right it can be a problem.

I’d expect (and correct me if I’m wrong here) that by the time someone is running into this issue they’re generally going to be experienced enough to know about the basics of version control. But there are options, Git LFS is one, Perforce is another, and some folks self host their own instance of Gitlab to get around repo size limits of sites like Github.

Haha, I won’t say this was entirely uninspired by you, but I will say it’s come up a lot in conversations I’ve been a part of lately so you’re far from the only one 😅

Git is by far the most popular but I know large studios sometimes go with Perforce because it’s apparently better for dealing with extremely large projects. I say “apparently” because as a lowly hobbyist I’ve managed just fine with Git thus far.

Down with the shark menace!

Hah, yes I should maybe have added “soothes irrational fears” to the list somewhere too.

You’re right about the sense of closure though! Nothing like finally making a working commit to round off work on a feature, oof, feelsgodman.

Hey no worries, we all need a good rant on occasion. Welcome to the community and also to Lemmy! Lurking is totally acceptable btw, albeit kind of a foreign concept to me 😄

We were just talking about scoping in another thread recently and I’m gonna straight-up quote @[email protected] because honestly their advice in that thread was great. Basically it was to break down your scope into bronze/silver/gold like so:

• Bronze is something you are sure you can complete in the time frame.
• Silver is where you think you can get to if you really push yourself and nothing bad happens
• Gold is where you can go if everything goes right all the time.

That’s in the context of a game jam and the time constraints that come with it, but I think it’s great advice in general. Whatever your personal limitation might be, whether it is in fact time or maybe it’s budget or even your own skill level, there will be a “bronze” level game you can make without too much trouble. Focus on that first, and have your silver and gold stretch goals waiting in the wings for if you complete your original plan. Maybe add a diamond tier for the real pipedream stuff, or whatever works for you!

A lot of solo projects I follow tend to sort of splutter out and die after a few months and it’s almost always because the dev finally stepped back, took a lot at how long their ideal scope would take, and understandably noped out. A bit of planning ahead and being realistic with yourself works wonders.

Thanks. I feel like this screenshot maybe makes it look further along than it actually is but never mind 😅

Luckily gamedev Mastodon took pity on me and pointed me in the right direction for the nav stuff lol, I would definitely have been lost otherwise. Still, another thing checked off the “to learn before I’ll feel like a real game dev” list! 🙈

Interestingly, that effect has a lot in common with some anti-motion-sickness settings like reducing field of view (in a lot of first person VR games they will literally shutter off your peripheral vision). So that makes a lot of sense!

Thanks! Yep, I’ve been learning how to do AI navigation for the first time so currently they wander randomly around town. Including over bridges between hexes that are currently invisible and only exist in the code 😅

Progress was made! 😄

To kick things off then. Progress on my little solarpunk city builder has basically ground to a halt the last couple of weeks among illness and other priorities. So it feels good to be back on the horse this weekend.

I’ve done some planning, picked out focus tasks for the weekend, and first up is to tweak this model a bit. It’s the central “hub” building in my city and it’s a little too six-way symmetrical for my tastes.

Here’s how it currently looks in-game, I’m still in the prototyping stage so there’s not much visual variety (all the house tiles are the same etc), but tackling that is a nice low-hanging task to ease me back in.

rolls up sleeves

Let’s get to it!

Nice one, cheers!

I’m aware these things take time. I’m also aware that each app developer has been prioritising features in a totally different order to all the others. The possibility that one of them decided some basic mod tools were important to get in there early is not entirely unlikely.

Anyway just thought I’d check with the people who’ve tried more apps than me. Thanks for the reply!

(Backup mod account comment - please ignore!)