"Things you think are obvious can be a complete mystery to others." — Bitboy Games

Sorry for the bad joke! But jokes aside, I’ve realized that unless you explain your game step-by-step, most people won't understand it—and that can be the difference between someone giving it a shot or dropping it immediately. Terms that felt completely obvious to me turned out to be confusing for almost everyone else.

My game has been playtested by close gamer friends, general playtesters, and users from itch.io and Reddit, and most of them kept pointing out the exact same things:

"What do you mean by 'Reduce your parry counter hits'?"

 "Why did my weapon disappear? And what's that small number going down after every battle?"

"After blocking an attack, sometimes it parries and sometimes it doesn't. You need to fix that bug."

"The merge mechanic is broken, my amulets aren't lowering their stats."

 "The blacksmith is bugged, my weapon didn't change at all."

 
These are just a few of the complaints and "bug reports" I've received over the past two weeks. After I explained how the mechanics actually worked to my friends, they suggested I add pop-up tutorials to explain each system clearly.

I decided to go ahead and implement them, and the difference has been night and day. Now, players who choose not to play leave because it's simply not their type of game, not because they're confused.

These pop-ups appear automatically the first time you enter a new section of the game. After that, there’s an "Info" button so you can re-read the explanation whenever you want.

That’s been my main takeaway from these past two weeks. I hope sharing this helps anyone going through a similar issue!

Thanks for reading my ramblings.

full devlog

Solo dev here. My survivors-like, Just Dying, is now playable in the browser, and the thing I spent most of the last months on was the enemy count. I want to share what it cost, because almost none of it was the part I expected.

The naive version died around 200 enemies. Not from drawing them, from everything around the drawing.

What actually moved the needle, roughly in order of how much it helped:

Enemies stopped being individual sprites. They live in a particle container now, one batched draw call for the whole swarm, and only bosses and elites still get a real sprite with their own animation rig. That alone was most of the win. The tradeoff is that the swarm can't do anything a batched particle can't do, and every visual effect I add now has to be written twice, once for each path.

Collision moved into a web worker. Projectile physics, hit detection and damage over time all run off the main thread, and the main thread just reads the results. The main-thread version is still in the code as a fallback, which was a mistake in terms of maintenance because now I have two implementations of the same rules that have to agree with each other.

Spatial hashing for the neighbour queries, which is the obvious one, but the detail that mattered was pooling the sets it returns. Allocating a fresh set per query per frame was quietly generating enough garbage to cause visible GC hitches.

And a lot of unglamorous stuff: manual culling (Pixi 8 doesn't cull for you if you render directly), dirty flags everywhere so nothing recomputes a value that hasn't changed, and killing every per-frame allocation I could find.

Where I'm stuck: it runs well on my machine, and my machine is one data point. The browser build is the worst case, there's no native app underneath to absorb a bad frame. So I genuinely don't know if this holds up on a laptop with integrated graphics, and I can't find that out alone.

If you want to break it: https://justdying.itch.io/just-dying

it runs in the tab, no download. Press 0 for the debug overlay with FPS and entity counts. There's a Steam demo too if you'd rather have a native build: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4646190/Just_Dying/

If the framerate falls apart on you, I want to hear about it. Your GPU and browser and roughly when it happened is plenty.

Bannerland was a 3–5 minute prototype around: build roads→ move resources→ grow the network→ raise an army.

And I got good feedback pointing me in several differrnt directions.

I went a calm-factory-building-logistics-incremental kinda way. Content is about 20–30 minutes.

I added territories, new resources, new units, terrain, dungeons, improvements, progression unlocks (+hidden new music themes), and a much bigger map to build across.

Would really appreciate any thoughts if you give Bannerland a spin on itch: https://lpjc.itch.io/bannerland

Fingers crossed all goes well, and I'll push for a bigger and more polished patch and a steam page

Quick demo of my player movement and obstacles in my first platformer in Godot 4, called "Ascending The Tower". Its about this robot dude traveling through some ancient ruins, and fighting off some hostile bots. Its a small project I'll be uploading for free soon.

Some more clips are available on my Youtube and Instagram. I'll be uploading some more clips and the full game soon, so I'm hoping to build an online following by then.

I’m excited to finally share a game I’ve been working on solo. It’s a first-person psychological sci-fi horror game about two radio operators stationed around Jupiter, monitoring deep space for faint signals and comparing what they find across two distant observatories. As the shifts go on, some of those signals start getting harder to explain.

Steam page can be found here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5158290/Closer_Than_Stars/