Shaders are still magic to me even though I understand them and use basic ones now. Maybe I'm magic.

Would it be worth updating the game dev resources page in the wiki to include alternative tools that could be used for creating HTML5 games? Perhaps include genres for engines that are limited to a specific type of game?

I'm pretty sure Ren'py is widely used nowadays for making HTML5-based visual novel games. AGS has an unofficial method to port games to HTML5. As does Scratch with HTMLifier. Edit: RPG Maker as well! Can't believe that isn't listed.

Also, how comprehensive is the "software" list supposed/allowed to be? I can think of a couple of tools that don't appear in that list when I tried adding them, although I can't attest to their popularity.

Looks like it was updated not too long ago, with Godot in the list. Although that still could have been a few years ago I guess...

LDtk is a really nice tool for making tile-based levels. I want to say the integrations aren't haxe-specific, but I haven't actually used it for anything yet. If so, I would swap this and OGMO for where the wiki says "could be the new favorite."

I feel like the list should be broken up visually a bit more, but not sure if categories of tools is too limiting or not. I would want the opinion of someone who actually might use the list, and that's not me.

I've updated the Wiki page to note these updates.

One of the awkward / redundant things here is that for years now we've been building a database and cataloging what tools people use at the project level. The plan has always been to create a browsable front-end of that database, at which point the Wiki pages could probably send people there.

For example, RPG Maker and Ren'Py were already in the database.

I forgot this was the last topic, but I feel like some kind of "Wanna get started making games?" thread or link should be stickied here. Not sure if linking directly to the wiki is possible, but pointing people there or whatever would help instead of answering that same question 1-3 times per week.

Like this one or sumpin' else?

I actually hadn't thought of linking to the Wiki at the time since I forgot it was there, but since it links to a newsfeed post I can edit the newsfeed it links to and include the Wiki. Or someone else can.

Yeah something like that in a more visible place. I think that was the post I had in mind and couldn’t find for a recent question.

Still love you guys.

Barcelona meetup yesterday! I’m on vacation and @Sam is in the area.

Quote of the day: “I’m so glad you’re normal”

hello nerds

Hello fellow kid.

Luv glaiel

Wassup

I met up with @OmarShehata this week but I forgot to take a pic!

this thread has been around longer than twitter and will outlive it at this rate

If everyone stopped leaving for temporary things, NG would have been successful by now!

we need a 😔 reaction emoji for posts

Dude im not making more shit

😔

sike hopefully i have something comin out on pixel day!

Flash Forward Jam 3 is just around the corner...

Hopefully I'll be more available to submit something for that this time around. Already missed the last 2 due uni and I'm not looking to have history repeat itself again...

I found this foto from 2010 flash reg forum. I was looking for art from portal defenders cause tom deleted the instruction booklet 😤

Going through old posts and oh how wrong I was, lol. I don't even know what I was thinking when I wrote this post - maybe I was unaware of the Unity Web Player being discontinued, and/or I had no idea about WASM or WebGL/WebGPU at the time, because here we are and not only is Unity going strong but it's among one of the most popular engines these days.

check again in 10 years lol, unity's been on a downward spiral ever since they went public and seemingly only care about mobile games now. plus the alternatives are getting good

Unity has lot's of problems as a company. But they've got a strong product that continues to see wide adoption.

Unreal engine dropped mobile initiatives internally, and focused on AAA as a market. In large part due to Unity's success. I think both products have found very successful markets.

In 10 years time, Unity games will be selling everyone NFT's real estate in the Metaverse. And Unreal will be responsible for the destabilization of western democracy via real time deep fake technology.

I'll be back here in 10 years to see how it all went.

outside of the mobile space, sentiment on unity's been dropping a lot, games just take a long time to make and people end up locked into the tools they use if that's what their team gets used to, plus Godot is becoming a real alternative now

my big issue with unity is just that it kind of lacks canonical, production-quality ways to do a lot of necessary features like input, rendering, networking, ui, etc. Canonical meaning, there's one right way to do it and everything can rely on that being part of unity, and production-ready meaning you can ship a commercial game with all the features users expect right out of the box. Instead you get like, 3 different rendering pipelines that are somewhat incompatible with each other, 2 different Input systems (the new one is definitely better but also a separate package and quite complicated), networking support that is still in limbo, UI missing some pretty basic widgets (and having like, 5 different UI things), etc. Means you have to rely on the asset store to fill in the blanks here, and with so many different ways to do stuff plenty of assets are just broken if you aren't using the one they were made on. it's a mess

plus all the performance issues and "reimporting assets (5 hours remaining)" stuff

anyway they fired the team that was making a game internally so they could understand the needs of devs better, because "they learned all they could and actually finishing the game would take too long", so hope for real improvements here is nil

You've pretty much nailed Unity's issues as a product. I'm personally tired of them launching all kinds of new engine products like networking and lobby, and dropping them when they don't reach certain profit margins. It's no way to build a platform, in my eyes.

But, when considering a 10 year timeline, I don't see major changes. Mobile markets are massive. Game's like Genshin Impact keep Unity relevant into the near future.

I do want to give Gadot a shot though. Release some small ideas that I can build quickly. It'll be Unity in this weekend's Global Game Jam though.

This is a really fun thought experiment! Now I'm thinking about what I was predicting at the time. I remember believing that it sucked that Flash was going away because I spent so much time learning it, but that you'll still be able to make a living with web games just with other tools.

I've been learning Godot 3 to make a mobile native version of this jam game (https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/853766) and I've been really enjoying it. It feels like a slightly awkward time to start now because Godot 4 is out and nice and shiny but not fully documented yet. I haven't figured out yet how to setup C++ or something else with it, but I think that'd improve the experience a lot. Attaching scripts to lots of nodes feels kinda very AS2/hard to keep track of.

In unrelated news, I was reading about this "tiktok for articles" and it reminded me of how I've always wanted to see that for short games. Like imagine this medium where you can make these little games, don't worry about title screen and all that, just launch the player into a fun/interesting mechanic, and players can kinda cycle through lots of different games like that. Feels like it'd be fun to design something for, almost like a game jam theme. I guess they'd all be somewhere between little warioware like tiny games and just general arcade games that are easy to jump into. Could even do something fun like, I remember this game jam where an optional theme was use this standard save file format so players can take save files from different games and see what happens.

Anyway, has this been done before? Closest thing I can think of was like Facebook trying to do a "instant games" platform in Messenger, but that was kind of very different.

we have outlived the General and Politics forums