Game development devlog from Scarlet Engineering
In an early build of Brews & Kings, demolishing a house while its worker was out on a delivery deleted the worker. The game didn't crash. It kept running with one less worker, and nothing reported the loss. Resource bugs in a builder sim are hard to find because nothing crashes. A playtester tells you the brewery feels slow. There is no stack trace for that. Every resource mutation, such as:…
What the engine sees. What the player sees. In part 1 I said everything is agents moving resources between buildings. This post is what happens when you take that literally: the engine that runs my game does not know what beer is . It routes agents and balances books. Every noun lives somewhere else. The Layers The game consists of three layers: View, Engine, and Content. The player only interacts…
Brews & Kings - the simulation game I'm building. Before I knew much about game development, I already knew I wanted to make simulation/strategy games. But. There's just not much information on the internet about making a simulation game. This is what I learned. You can't make a simulation game without studying SimCity. The first reference is the GlassBox engine behind SimCity. Here's a…
This is one shader on a flat mesh. No hand-painted terrain, no tile maps. Just math. Here's how it works. Polygon Regions (water, meadow) │ ▼ ┌─────────────────┐ │ GPU SDF Baking │ Each polygon → SubViewport → signed distance field └────────┬────────┘ ▼ ┌─────────────────┐ │ Pack into RGBA │ R,G,B = water regions │ A = meadow └────────┬────────┘ ▼ ┌─────────────────┐ │ Zone Blending │ SDF distance…
I'm a big fan of short incremental games with cool narratives. Games like Digseum and 1,000,000 Shrimps are delightful and memorable. I made a game that's heavily inspried by them. Try it here: Murderhorn by Poga Last week I did my first hiking with my wife. During the trip I keep thinking about an old saying: "You cannot speak of ice to a summer insect"(夏蟲不可語冰). How would a mountain feel when…
Notes of Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers. Charts are made with Python and Matplotlib. Games need goals. and the journey of achieving the goals needs to be fun. The Goal The goal, e.g. dps required, xp required to level up, etc... is usually an exponential function of the level. They make early levels seem attainable and players go through them fast, while later ones…