Olex (Solo gamedev Diablo-like) 🇺🇸🇺🇦

I've been dreaming of this C++ profiler for my game for over a year. It's now here. It shows me the slowest code logic that runs over my game components in real time. Each one is a lambda that I can find at the file name and line number. An hour after I made this, I already optimized my game significantly by actually seeing what was slow and then optimizing it. For example, I optimized a C++ lambda from 750us down to 50us (cost per frame). This level of introspection into my game is god-like vision. Not seeing any perf impact of having this on either, so it's on by default.

@coboman Yes, I love adding all kinds of minor interactions that add up and create a livelier world and character.

@OlexGameDev That does look pretty cool! and it really shows some personality, or expresses character

When you are fighting robots, you would expect to see some machines working in the area, wouldn't you? I have started to work on such assets. Rigging and animating is in progress.

@coboman It is done!

@OlexGameDev Jesus, I would flinch, then wet my pants after some robot arm swung like that yards (ah, maybe I shoulda said "meters") over my head That's pretty cool

@coboman Oh, that's a great idea! I'll add an animation to the heroine if she is too slow to that swing.

I love Americans and their sense of freedom so much! youtube.com/watch?v=u4Aiuq…

@miketuritzin Yep, using a combined mesh uber buffer simplifies and optimizes things a lot.

I'm now rendering triangle meshes (for some objects) on top of the world (SDF) in my engine using this dead-simple approach: - All meshes share the same vertex and index buffers for easy batching - Using a standard set of vertex attributes, each in its own buffer (so ... 1/

@jogamedev @TheBuzzSaw Yes that is a huge value. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us!

It's not the best games in the whole world that I'm referring to. There's dozens (maybe 100s) of indie developers who could make a full time living with their games if they magnified their sales with proper marketing. I was one of them. I want to help those indies learn what I did. I can't count on making the next Hollow Knight. But I can make a 6/10 game that earns enough for me to follow my passion full time. This is available to more people than most realize.

I wish someone had told me this years ago. Your game's marketing is like the multiplier in Balatro. A high quality game (the blue) is not enough on it's own. You need high quality marketing / content (the red) too. Together - great quality game X great content - is what makes a game go viral.

@badlogicgames @molecularmusing AI is amazing at patiently teaching me basic concepts as I work on my game solo. There are too many areas to cover to be a decent dev in. AI fills that hole and let’s me work faster by being a better knowledge aggregator and presenter.

i'm clearly not as deeply technical as you, but i like to think of myself as some who cares about their craft. what i'm seeing is an industry wide change (and hype) that i want to understand as deeply as i understand other areas of my craft. only then can i know what actually works, craft-wise and what doesn't. a lot that's paddled to "work" by grifters and corps that need to sell you that vision does not. but there are things that do actually work and are helpful wrt my craft. a big part of developing my craft over the decades was to learn new tools and see if they help me in anyway at creating good code, be it directly, or indirectly by saving me time with non-coding or coding related tasks. this is another such tool. but it's a tool that hasn't found it's final form yet. and i'd like to figure out what it's final form may look like, just as i liked to figure out how to write a debugger or a compiler and all the nitty gritty details that entailed downstream. for me, this is about learning new things for my craft, not replacing me andy coding skills. that's a very thin line tho, which is super easy to cross without discipline.

I find this extremely worrying, with many of people I respect saying things like "I no longer write code" or "let LLMs do it". Why did you start programming? Was it never the journey for you, but only the goal? I genuinely want to understand this, I seem to be the odd one out.

Making games is hard but it’s even harder if you have a bad philosophy guiding you. Luckily Ayn Rand was born in the previous century and there are philosophers today that are worth their weight in gold. Here is my signed copy of How We Know by Harry Binswanger.

@jogamedev 30% is nothing compared to what the government will tax you at in many countries especially in Europe. And ye nobody has the balls to speak against that but very happy to attack Valve.

There's no question that Valve earns their 30% cut; however, I think they'd make even more money in the long term if they took a smaller cut from indie devs. Here's why: Many super talented devs are struggling to create their games in their free time - on nights and weekends. An extra 20% could make a huge difference. If you turn a part-time indie into a full-time indie, the chances that they'll make significantly more money and finish their games faster is obviously much higher. So this is my message to @Steam: for your own benefit, consider giving smaller devs a bigger cut. More full-time indies means more money for you in the long run. Be in the business of making part-timers full-timers and it'll play out in everyone's favor.

@SandyofCthulhu Immoral is the impractical.

The bishop of my former congregation worked in for the City of Berkeley. I was his clerk. He told us that when rent control got voted in, the landlords fell into two groups. One group jacked up their rents as high as possible before the law took effect. The others left their rents as was, trying to be nice guys. The "nice guys" then took it in the shorts. Some went bankrupt. Some just abandoned their buildings and let the city grab them for non-payment of taxes. Most followed the policy of never ever letting anyone new back into an apartment when someone moved out. The landlord end-game was if EVERYONE moved out of your complex, you could remodel the thing and then even Berkeley would let you calculate new rents. He said he knew of several apartment buildings in which only one tenant was left, hanging on for dear life. The owner just waiting for the guy to leave. Of course no landlord had any motivation to ever repair, repaint, or refurbish anything in a rent-controlled complex. When I moved to the East Bay I was pretty much pro-rent control. When I left, I thought it was the stupidest idea ever.

For my Diablo-like, I've added a market console station that is available in battle zones when all is peaceful. Way more fun to play now. :)

@MeFlorrie_Alive @joellecabbage @ChimpSquared They charge less than 30% if you make a ton of money. Down to 20% at the top.

@joellecabbage @OlexGameDev @ChimpSquared It's cookers ay. So much unnecessary stuff in steam, means they waste money, means they charge too much. I wouldn't have so much of a problem won't 20% even. 1/5 vs almost 1/3, crayze

Alright I'll play: Valve should not be taking 30% - they should drop to 12% like Epic. Gamers post like Valve are great for games but lets be clear, it's a ridiculous cut.

@molecularmusing Prior to AI, I have observed some engineers leaving the field to go work on a farm. And I wondered the same thing back then. I think a lot of people become engineers just because it pays well and it has become a practical safe career, so a lot of kids are pushed into it.

I don't believe in numerology but...

@valigo Include an STL header file and bring in a mountain of other headers and kill my build times? Hell no. If I really have to I'll implement on myself. So far I rarely see a need.

@OlexGameDev Nice! std::variant is for pussies

Let's compare tagged unions in Rust and in C, and then steal some of that type safety from Rust with a bit of a compiler and macro magic so that C can have nice things too!

In-game monitor idle animation, SDF-like, no textures involved. Next tasks are animations for sitting down and getting up from the chair.

@AnalogDreamDev Welcome to the club!

Im at that stage where I spend a day working on my game engine and the successful outcome is everything looks the same 😅 Cleaned up messy dual pipelines I had for sprites vs meshes and got it unified. Sprites still work! 🥳

@molecularmusing @miketuritzin Seconded it! x.com/OlexGameDev/st…

@miketuritzin I find it too limiting in terms of what it can do, especially because it can't handle optimized code (among many other things). I'd like to recommend liveplusplus.tech, which I developed and use daily.

Started using Visual Studio's builtin C++ hot reload on my engine, and it's working ... pretty well so far? Can live update code changes in a couple seconds. I'm open to other options, but am going to use this for a while to see how it goes.