xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

So the recent-(ish) Minecraft movie announcement trailer along with an old chart of freeware indie games got me nostalgic for early Minecraft, and as much as I hate the cultural phenomenon it spawned, it got me thinking: Minecraft was basically an end of an era for indie gaming.

For one, it is the last major indie game to be written in Java. In fact, it's probably what got people to stop writing games in that language because it clearly showed how unoptimized its GC is for video games, especially 3D games. It also represents an era where indie developers still made their games "from scratch" instead of using an engine, and even though there are still developers who write games without engines, I feel like that practice became less prevalent when Unity became really popular.

But what truly makes it feel like an end of an era is that Minecraft was never on Steam, Origin, Desura, GOG, or Itch. It was always officially hosted on their own website which you almost never see anymore, outside of FOSS games. And their old website is a great example on how you can still have a simple, yet professional looking website.

I could go on and talk about how it was pre-culture war and that you can just make games without getting into any id-pol related drama, but I feel like that's pretty obvious. I really wish we could go back to this era.

EU citizens: Please sign this petition to make the EU give us UBI, put heavy regulations on X, fund open-source projects, ban Y.....
EU citizens after the EU rolls out a digital ID:

Key now only appears after killing all of the enemies in the room.

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegames #indie #SFML #cplusplus

Increased the size of the explosions.

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegames #indie #SFML #cplusplus

Explosions now kill enemies.

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegames #indie #SFML #cplusplus

Speaking of the DS turning 20 this year, check out this screenshot of 4chan/v/ during that time. It's a completely different place than what it is now!

Decided to bite the bullet and add bombs because I feel like I need at least one more boss fight in the game. If I can't make bombable walls, then I can just have enemies that can only be killed by bombs instead. The game is too boring with just a sword.

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegames #indie #SFML #cplusplus

Just to let you know that the Nintendo DS turns 20 years old in two months. Now does that make you feel old?

Is this guy a real person? He never posts anything or replies to anyone, but he seems to favorite and repost everything I post or repost.

Just looking at his timeline, it's all reposts and most of it is either stuff I've posted or boosted. Though given that "lurker" is in his handle, maybe he just prefers to lurk and view other people's post.

If this guy is real, hopefully he doesn't get offended by me talking about him. I just don't like the feeling of being stalked by some bot.

X/Twitter is now considered an "alt-right website", according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Alt-right_footer

If you type "Forest on the Moon" into an AI, text-to-image generator, it will generate a picture of a forest on the moon...with the moon in the sky.

There is a very simple way to have "walkable-cities" without any central planning or any of that 15-minute, smart-city crap. Just allow residential and commercial zones to mix. Allow people with big enough houses to run shops in them.

I know a lot of local stores and restaurants that were renovated from former houses. Just remove the walls between the kitchen and living room, and have the bedrooms be employee offices then you will have enough space to run a store.

You can take that one step further. Why not have a house with a store attached? A garage can be converted into a small shop or you can have the other side of a duplex be a store. Japan has tons of houses with stores attached. There are even apartment building with something like a 7/11 at the bottom.

See? A simple solution that doesn't involve demolishing entire towns and rebuilding them or building expensive railways that would require evicting a bunch of people and destroying their homes just to make room. Car-dependent cities are a result of central planning, not the other way around.

Placed the end-game item on a pedestal.

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegames #indie #SFML #cplusplus

Music now stops after defeating the final boss.

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegames #indie #SFML #cplusplus

Boss now drops the key which leads to the room with the MacGuffin item. I think it's slightly more climatic that way instead of it just ending abruptly.

#gamedev #gamedevelopment #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegames #indie #SFML #cplusplus

So apparently YouTube is going ballistic on Invidious instances (again). Just a reminder that Google Video not only allowed you to download their videos but also had their own desktop video player for watching videos offline, granted it was their own proprietary video format, but still.

So apparently, my definition of "techbro" was all wrong. I thought it was referring to right-libertarian-leaning, sometimes rich, tech-nerds who offer "solutions" to the world's problems when they are (at-best) perceived as band-aid solutions. But apparently, it's actually about "toxic masculinity in the industry".

Attempt #2 at creating a restaurant quality pizza at home:

I made another New York style. This when turned moderately better then attempt one, but when transferring from the peel to the stone, it got stuck to the peel and I had to manually transfer it, which is why it resulted in this heart shape.

This time I used actual pizza flour, so it tasted a lot less soggy. But the dough still raised more than I expected. In fact it was rising BEFORE I stuck in it the oven because I was preheating the oven so high and for so long, the surrounding area was hot enough to cause the dough to rise. I also used a much better balance of mozzarella, parmesan, and romano, and it tasted much better than the previous attempt as a result.

It still wasn't exactly the way I wanted it. It seems like you really need that high-gluten bread flour which you need to order directly from a farm or ask a local pizza shop to sell a spear bag for you. I don't feel like doing either of those, but it seems like it's the only option. Maybe I can order a bag online somewhere.

Either way, it was a major improvement, but I plan to do better.