Dinosaursssssss

Doors are useful for a few reasons...privacy (which Ratamero mentioned), temperature regulation, and security. If you have an indoor storage area, I don't think you need to bother heating/cooling it and putting a door on it will prevent wasting energy heating it. And if you have a lot of doors, and a colonist goes berserk and starts murdering everyone, or enemies get into your base, you can lock doors to keep them contained. Also as far as the Rich Explorer starting thing, I like the challenge of it. Starting with only one person means you really have to spend your time wisely if you want to survive winter. My only real problem with that starting scenario is if you get even a minor injury, there's no one to heal you since you can't heal yourself, so you're kinda boned.

Yeah, the combat balance is one of my biggest issues with the game right now...the developer (Tynan Sylvester) is currently doing an AMA on reddit and I asked about if he has any other plans for late-game than just ramping up combat. Right now, I think the combat controls awkwardly and is just extremely unforgiving, so I tend to turn the difficulty on it down a bit. If you don't want to see it at all, you can play with the chillax storyteller on the easiest difficulty and it becomes a non-issue; I tend to play with the normal AI storyteller with difficulty turned down a bit, which means that early raids will just have 1 or 2 enemies, so things can go sideways, but you don't necessarily need to build a fortress immediately. There are some other ways to challenge yourself than increasing the combat difficulty though! Mainly, the arctic biomes are pretty challenging to deal with at first, since you can't grow food and there's little or no wood on the map. There are also two new starting scenarios that are a bit more of a challenge (one where your tech is limited, and one where you start with only one colonist).

Chris Remo streamed some Rimworld yesterday and it was good https://www.twitch.tv/idlethumbs/v/78597270

I picked up SoundStage after watching that VRodeo and it was really neat, but I couldn't figure out how to...do anything useful with it? I could set up some loops and make music, but I couldn't figure out how to actually record anything out of it to an mp3 or whatever. The UI is really intuitive to a point, but some of the controls, like adjusting sequencers, was really fiddly.

I've been poking at VR stuff more this week and started playing Selfie Tennis, which I'm in love with. The core gameplay of hitting tennis balls to yourself feels pretty good, but the surrounding weirdness and reactivity of the world makes it feel a lot bigger than it is. The selfie stick is a weird feature, since realistically you can't even use it during normal gameplay (it'd be nearly impossible to hold the selfie stick at a good angle while actually playing tennis), but it adds to the absurdity of the whole thing, and...kind of grounds the weirdness, I think. Like, it's sort of psycopathic to miss a shot, then turn around and start whipping tennis rackets at spectators, but being able to (and I think encouraged?) to capture it on video makes it an absurd performance rather than a violent rampage somehow. I donno. I also goofed around with Modbox (VR Garrys Mod?) and ViveSpray (a Vive clone of KingSpray, a spraypainting app which was recently announced to be an Oculus exclusive). Modbox seems like it has a TON of potential...after playing some Fantastic Contraption, I wanted a more freeform sandbox for building, and Modbox seems to be that. It's kind of fiddly though, so I'm not sure how much time I'll spend with it. ViveSpray seemed neat and does what it says, you can spraypaint onto a wall, but in terms of features it's really light right now. Also @Clyde...assuming it's the same guy, the author of that weird America room, MikeAlger, is also a Google VR guy who gave this talk I linked in the gamedev VR thread

My intro was spending an afternoon goofing around with the Unity VR demo stuff and sort of remixing them into other games, that's a fun/super easy way to jump into making some stuff.

I sorta fell into VR development accidentally, so I spent the morning digging into some videos I figured I'd share. I found this site that has a listing of UI/UX resources that was interesting and watched a couple things: http://www.uxofvr.com/ This'n is a kinda high level discussion of possible interaction designs, mostly based around a combination of an HMD and hand/finger tracking with a Leap Motion that was...interesting, and presented some cool ideas, but felt a little aspirational(?) given the current state of hardware and VR operating systems. The presentation is really slick though and gives you a good sense of the possibilities for the ideas he discusses. I guess this guy now works at Google on VR stuff. This was more grounded, and kinda specifically tackles Gear VR development (it's from a dev at Samsung) and the limitations of that hardware. Probably more relevant for cardboard/gear/daydream than room scale/positional stuff, but it covers a bunch of very specific, super useful info like what viewing angles are comfortable for people wearing an HMD and how to build UI around that. That presenter also recommended a Valve talk, 'Lessons Learned from porting TF2 to VR' which I haven't checked out yet, but probably will tomorrow. Something I'm wondering about is how much the thinking about this UI design has changed since these videos came out (late 2015 and 2014 respectively). They aren't even that old, but since they were made all the hardware has actually come out so I imagine the best practices have become a little more clear since then. I'll probably try and dig into VRDC talks from this year next to get more up to date presentations, and it looks like all the Oculus Connect talks are publicly available as well: So...yeah, anyone else doing VR stuff and have videos or anything they like? I'm trying to ramp up on this stuff as fast as I can, so I'd love to hear what people have found useful.

I had a Business Guys On Planes today while flying to Seattle I had the proportions slightly off, I only fit about 1/3 of the can in that tiny cup.

A HAM

Alright and here's my perspective on that sextuple kill. The announcer actually says 'sextuple kill' it's pretty cool.

This'll be an idle-ish game, building on an idea I experimented with during Extra Life last year when I did a 24 straight hour solo jam. Basically I want to make an idle game with an active gameplay component, where the resources obtained from idling and playing interact and are both necessary to progress, so you get the satisfaction of numbers going up alongside some minigames to mix things up and generate extra resources while waiting for your other currency to generate. Anyway this probably means that most of my gifs will be super boring, since idle games are inherently not terribly sexy. Though the runner-y bits and the other planned minigame will probably be a little more interesting. Roughly the idea is that you're operating a cybernetics manufacturing factory, and need to both upgrade your manufacturing capabilities and maintain a stable of racers (aka, runners, get it, cause netrunner) to generate revenue. So far what's done...the minigames aren't built, but clicking the buttons generates the appropriate resource. You can buy upgrades, and they appear on your runner. That's...basically it! Was a little busy the first weekend (mostly playing Overwatch), this weekend should be more productive. My next task is fleshing out the upgrade system, and also figuring out a better way of controlling bloom from uGUI elements.

I also found the controls a little weird; for whatever reason what helped me get over it was always holding down the direction I was going. This was surreal and funny, I absolutely love that gobbler.

That was a delight, thank you.

That mummy game looks really cool, the panel animations (rumble and sliding in) are great. And I don't think anyone is gonna object to you posting whatever you're up to

Oh also in case people are curious or end up doing their own Greenlight in the future, here're some numbers. As of being greenlit, Gravity Wolf has: 450 yes votes 49 days on Greenlight 1283 unique visitors 50/50 Yes/No votes I think people were finding it naturally through Steam for about 3-4 days, after that it seems like it was entirely driven by my own marketing. I think my numbers were kinda weak based on the charts and stuff I see on there but it's all such a weird black box, who knows really.

Yeah sorry looking at it purely economically is sorta shallow and boring. BUT it also points to how few people are playing the stuff I made, which I think is a more meaningful metric. People do seem to mostly think the games are alright though so I guess that's something.

lol this company so far has spent....probably $3000 on software, events, contractors, etc and I've made...I think $100? Not to mention the probably thousands at this point of unpaid hours for myself.

Sorry, I was kind of disappointed with how this came out so I didn't hype it too much! Anyway don't take this as an example of the genre; the thing that actually makes clickers interesting is how their tech trees unfold and the economy scales, which in this game is just a mess. Upgrade costs are static, cash growth is linear, and there're only a handful of upgrades. It's a really boring setup that was really just to try out the idea of having some minigames (though the construction thing is barely a game, really) instead of straight clicking. But to me it ends up being dramatically less engaging than more standard clickers because of my lame economy and the lack of positive feedback around earning income. I was also disappointed with how the mobile version came out...I kinda rushed it and didn't test the camera effects on device, and as a result the bloom, distortion, and static effects that give it that cyberpunk grime don't come through. I do still think there's something to this idea of combining smaller games that are fun on their own into a clicker; sort of the inverse of how AAA games these days are building little idle games in. The process of discovering new games is what makes stuff like Candy Box and A Dark Room so much more interesting than the other stuff in the genre; because there's some mystery and unexpected content, the idle component feels purposeful and there's motivation to dig into it beyond seeing numbers go up. Interestingly I haven't seen a lot of games doing it recently...idle games now are generally just layering complexity onto the idle component with stuff like reincarnation systems, deep tech trees, unlockable cosmetics, etc. I assume this is because it's so much more time consuming to build (and balance) well integrated minigames than it is to build a little more UI, but it feels worth it to me. ADR and CandyBox probably get away with it because ascii games are relatively cheap to build(?) if I had to guess, but it's part of why something like Factory Idle works so well I think. Factory Idle doesn't have explicit minigames, but there's a constant semi-optional optimization tetris that requires learning slightly-new build patterns as you progress, giving the familiar puzzle subtle twists as you unlock new tech. Uh anyway getting off onto an idle game tangent that won't ever stop, but thanks for the comments all!

Oh yeah sorry been a bit since I posted. Here's my update: Thanks ZeroFiftyOne!

Wanna get those pesky headset wires out of the way? Spend a couple grand on a backpack PC! http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/27/vr-backpacks-are-now-a-real-thing/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter This seems absolutely insane to me, prooobably a little cheaper to just put a hook on the ceiling.

Here's that Robert Yang post: http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/04/the-joys-of-sub-projecting-in-unity.html It's a clever solution, though like he says really not great for bigger projects. I've been thinking about this a lot recently in the wake of wiz jam '16, where I reused a bunch of UI components from other projects. I think my solution will probably be to figure out how git submodules work and set one up with my extensions and whatnot. As far as a comic strip creator...idk, I hear that BigJKO fella is working on something like that. On a related note to that, Matt Derby (a designer at Harmonix) gave a GDC talk a couple years back about using comics as design documentation that was useful to me http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020456/-Nuff-Said-Comics-as

Business Guys On Planes 1 nip (~50ml) Jack Daniels Half can of diet coke Serve on the rocks in a disposable plastic cup. This joke courtesy of a ramen place I like called Little Big Diner.

I would argue that this is actually a good thing, as getting more dupes means more currency, which means you'll be able to buy specific cosmetics you want faster.

Reminder to everyone to come hang out in Slack and Discord and play Overwatch with us, last night we played some 5v5s with all thumbs and it was great! https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10426-idle-thumbs-readers-slack-discord/

This is comin' along, though honestly I'm not amazed by how its going, It needs a lot of art to make it feel substantial, and the running running minigame still needs to be built. The upgrade system and more idle-y mechanics work alright, though the economy is still really boring and needs a lot of design work.