This game is turning out to be an absolute mayhem!
(A bit too late to #ScreenshotSaturday)
Remote
Jakub Neruda
@jakub_neruda@techhub.social
mastodon 4.7.2Software engineer and hobby game programmer. I am mainly talking about C++, Clean Code and my gaming projects.
Check out my Itch.io profile for cool PC/Android games!
343 Followers
194 Following
30 Posts
Joined November 11, 2022
Home Page:
LinkedIn:
Medium:
Itch.io:
This is so cool, I just found out one of my games on Itch got a review😍 First review ever.
It's little things like this that make this hobby worth it.
Wow, this is a very good #gamedev advice!
Game Dev Secrets: Sound Effect Magic! #indiegamedev #gamedev
When I was young, there was this Tamagochi-esque game console which you used to scan barcodes and each barcode had a chance of spawning some random monster.
I don't remember if it allowed fighting like in Pokemon, but it sounds like something that could be cool on a smartphone 😎
(And I totally did not look up a C++20 library for parsing barcodes and totally did not hook it up with SFML to load in images)
Replaying #Doom3 these days. It is a really flawed game.
Enemy design and placement is downright unfair, weapons either lack punch or damage output, level design can't decide between horror atmosphere and action-packed gameplay.
But it has bright moments. Like the Enpro Plant level (the one with damaged reactor) is legit cool - action ride from start to finish.
I wonder why update manager on my Linux Mint wants to update thunderbird packages when I don't have thunderbird installed 🤔
Today gamedev session - I zoomed in the game by 50% and reduced speed of everything by 30%. The game instantly felt better. Hopefully it is not just a novelty factor.
I also plugged in my library for making finite state machines and while I don't want to brag, it is a piece of code I genuinely enjoy working with. Haven't touched it for a year, zero troubles getting oriented or getting it to work.
I know summer is almost halfway through but here's a fun challenge. Download PPSSPP emulator and all available demos for PSP games. Play a single demo each day - you might discover genuine gems among these!
Love it when the community joins forces to make something amazing.
Two weeks back, I once again felt the urge to scratch the WoW itch. I was looking for some MMO running on Android and remembered Order & Chaos. Both O&C 1 and 2 (developed by Gameloft) have been shut down a long time ago, but wouldn't you know it - the community decided to bring the game back.
And the official launch was slated for 15.7.! And it really launched. There were hiccups and server overloads as you might expect, but the devs fixed that within a few hours.
The game is fun and full of people (including the obligatory boss queues. And I am surprised how much it fulfills "WoW on phone" tagline.
Go play it, it's on https://oac-head.com
Summer is almost over and I'm releasing my summer-long project - MagRider! A simple-to-learn, hard-to-master 2D platformer where you move by magnetizing your avatar - a cutsy round ball.
Build by hand in C++, SFML and TGUI, this one also runs on Android and let me tell you a secret - it is a great toilet-break game! Just don't get too angry with the uncompromising difficulty so your phone doesn't end up in the toilet as well. 😁
Play the game for free: https://nerudaj.itch.io/magrider
All right, another game is out! Mansion Malevolence is available for free for PC and Android on my Itch.io: https://nerudaj.itch.io/mansion-malevolence
The game is a demake of classic survival horror Resident Evil, reimagined as a solitaire card game that you can play in short bursts while commuting.
The game was made in C++, using SFML for rendering and sounds and TGUI for UI. Source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/nerudaj/MansionMalevolence
#gamedev #indiedev #MansionMalevolence #ScreenshotSaturday #SFML #TGUI #cpp
TGUI is a great library for building GUIs, but it seems it isn't tailored for pixel-art stuff.
That or I am dumb and can't make it use the same scaling across the board 🤔
Wow. Normal videos on my Youtube have at max dozens of views months after being published. A single crappy Youtube Short has 2.2k after 2 days, with a bunch of comments and likes.
You can apparently make a bigger impact on you game marketing with a 15s video you spend 10 minutes making, as opposed to carefully tailored 2-minute trailer you've spend hours on.
I don't view myself as an anarchist (yet), but general development around age verification and state-level oversight in major developed countries makes me sad, cautious, and thinking.
If OSes are supposed to implement age verification and Android is really trying to turn devs into verified ones, how long will it take before every dev for every platform would be required to register and obtain signing keys to run their app even on their own machine?
If that happens, we might want to have an escape strategy prepared. Meshtastic comes to mind. Right now, it is an off-grid decentralized communication network. If it can send packets, it can become an inderground internet.
We can leverage chips like ESP32/RPi with 3D printed parts for DIY computers that we plug into the Meshtastic network.
If this happens, I'll be making games for such platform, because it sounds like fun 😀
Recently, I made a stupid mistake that made me think about the way C++ APIs handle dependencies and what we can do to prevent dangling references and lifetime issues. 🤔
It was a surprisingly fun topic to explore that led me to the discovery of a very cool static analysis tool. Can you guess which one? 😎
You can find out in the article I wrote about the topic here:
➤ https://medium.com/@nerudaj/type-safe-dependency-management-in-c-a293703f00ff
This whole pandemic of age-verification laws is making me really sad.
I am glad I could access porn since I was eleven and that I could drink beer in pubs when I was fifteen. I still managed to become a valuable member of the society, while enjoying so much fun.
Replying to
@llogiq@hachyderm.io @Mara@hachyderm.io I want to delve deeper into clang-tidy for static analysis, but until recently, my codebase was not compatible with clang tools (MSVC toolchain allows many incompatible things). Tried MSVC static analysis, it was not good enough. Tried ASAN at work, but it didn't work well with some more windows-specific linkage options.
I do not store iterators, only use tree dependency hierarchy (no loops) and use functional approaches (like std::ranges) to avoid most common issues.
Still, I sometimes accidentally capture a local reference to item of array and then resize that array (which relocates and invalidates the reference). But since it is local, it is usually super quick to debug and fix. Other issue is when I need to delete objects from array while resolving queue of events/commands where subsequent events might reference the same element. Has to be solved by deferred deletion. I've only encountered a handful of memory errors in past four years.
Replying to
@llogiq@hachyderm.io @Mara@hachyderm.io C++23 dev here. Its not solved, but it is rarely an issue in high-level development.
Replying to
@llogiq@hachyderm.io @Mara@hachyderm.io
I see very little difference between memory bug that crashes the program and assertion macro that crashes the program. But my view might be skewed due to working a great deal with Windows ecosystem and MSVC - if Microsoft has perfected anything about their system, its crash dumps. They contain all parallel stacks, all unoptimized variables, shows the actual source code (when symbols are appropriately provided). Therefore, I likely have comparable amount of information as you do, even if the crash happened on the customer environment.
I agree with your point about tools being able to detect presence of bugs, not their absence, I was mainly questioning the economy. If maintaining the tool costs way more than dealing with occasional bug, then I am not going to use the tool, even if it sounds really stupid said out loud like this.
Replying to
@llogiq@hachyderm.io @Mara@hachyderm.io Could be.
The hard bit is that you can't definitively prove there aren't any. And the tools to prove anything are hit and miss.
Any time I tried plugging in a static analysis tool into an existing code (both mine and at work), it produced a lot of false positives and nothing useful.
When we tried ASAN at work, it found 9 legit issues, all of them in unit tests, none in actual production code.
Statistically, I worry much more about logical bugs than memory ones. So far, they "cost" me infinitely more than the memory ones.
So I managed to get a working version of gamepad support on Android in #SFML running, with some trade-offs.
If you want to test it out yourself, here's a working branch: https://github.com/nerudaj/SFML/tree/feature-android-joystick-support
PR discussion: https://github.com/SFML/SFML/pull/3497
@darkcisum@swiss.social I dread every time you rebase my PR for joystick support on Android in SFML, as every single time it breaks CI on all my projects 😂
If you like early From Soft games like King's Field or Echo Night, check out the demo for Queen's Domain on Steam, it's awesome!
Tip 95 of #TuesdayCodingTips - Copy & swap idiom
Rule of 5 says that if you need to implement one of the copy/move constructors/assignment operators or a destructor, you shall implement all of them to avoid resource management issues. However, this often leads to duplicated code and subtle issues, such as a class being move-assigned onto itself.
Copy & swap idiom helps deduplicate the code by implementing assignment operators in terms of creating a temporary copy of the source object and swapping its contents with the target object.
On top of base copy & swap, one can even merge the two assignment operator methods into a single one, further reducing the amount of code needed. Unfortunately, this òften comes at the cost of the move-assignment operation no longer being `noexcept`, thus preventing many standard containers from using the most effective relocation strategies.
Brainrot is a bigger problem than low fertility rates. It doesn't matter how many workers you have if they'll suffer from dementia by the age of 30.
It seems that Google caved in under user backlash and presented us with the "advanced flow" for installing apps on #Android from unverified developers (=developers who value their privacy and rather pay 100$ for something meaningful).
The flow is still a major pain in the ass, since it requires a 24-hour waiting period, but at the very least, you should be able to do it once and then never again. I understand Google's "reasoning" behind this wait window, but something reasonable, such as 1 hour would suffice.
Here is the link to the blogpost announcing this flow: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html and I am also attaching a screenshot of the description of the flow itself.
It took about 9 days for GameLoft to issue a Cease & Desist to the fan revival of the Order & Chaos MMO.
I am coming to grips with the fact that I will probably not see my level 22 elf mage ever again.
It was fun while it lasted, so sad that corporates can't let fans be when they killed the game a long time ago.
My bi-yearly summer urge to start playing some WoW-like MMO on my phone emerged again.
First I was saddened that Order & Chaos servers have been shut down a long time ago. Then I found out that the community revival project is gonna start on 15 of July.
And then I decided to kill the time with a new kid on the block, #Eterspire . It is nowhere near the experience I wanted, but is fun nonetheless and is pretty friendly to solo questers. The writing is fun for an MMO, gear upgrade and rule crafting systems are interesting, and combat is good enough to keep me engaged.
And luckily, the game supports controllers!
Two-step guide for making killer sound effects for your game:
1. Download a bunch of free VST plugins for your DAW
2. Have no idea what to do with them
---
Jokes aside, both music and sound crafting are way harder skills to acquire than 2D/3D art, simply because you can always use some sort of reference graphics, learn by tracing, and apply concepts (like shading, squash-and-stretch, ...) gradually.
Whereas with sound crafting you either need to know what you're doing or delve into endless combinatorics of trial and error.
Plus the tools are way more complex. All you need for 2d graphics is a pen, eraser, and layers. For audio, you need DAW, audio plugins that are usually not free, and you need to understand not only the lingo, but also a decent amount of signal processing.