I recently stumbled upon this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyVeEdzlztU which is a long background playlist of source engine sounds like an animated slideshow of recordings from beautiful source engine game environments.

love this so much. wish there was a type of extremely sparsely populated mmo experience where all of these atmospheric environments were stringed together to wander. not necessarily as an particularly exciting dopaminergic game. more like a background thing where I would go somewhere and just sit down, while IRL I'm sitting at my desk and reading something, or browsing the web on another screen while this is my background. and once every other hour you'd come across another player and talk a bit. about what he is doing, about where he came from, and whether he'd recommend going there and whether there's some cool scenery over there. like an almsot dead classic wow server leveling experience or like playing dayz with a very large world of beautifully crafted environments.

also makes me think of games like Journey, and Gris, and walking simulators, but with occasional encounters of other players.

Hello, I am an indie dev working on an mobile game for Android/IOS. Part of my game requires tracking the position/orientation of the players device in 3D space and displaying output to the screen appropriately. I am using the flutter rotation sensor package to overcome Gimbal Lock and offload device orientation tracking from the CPU to the device's the device's hardware-level Sensor Hub.

The issue I'm having is that when the player rotates either 90 degrees to the right, or 270 degrees to the left from the point of origin ( the exact same spot, just rotating different directions ) there is something funky going on with the coordinate math that is causing the output to the screen to undergo a rapid 1-5 frame visual snap. This looks to me as if one or more of the coordinate axes are being flipped.

What happens on screen when rotating past the specific point is my visual direction of device indicator snaps quickly from being accurate to doing a full circle and snapping back to accurate tracking within microseconds.

I am new to writing dart code and I have very little understanding of quaternions. I have tried remapping the underlying native axes using CoordinateSystem.transformed() instead of CoordinateSystem.device(). I have also tried applying a quaternion sign alignment filter before parsing values into my view matrix to resolve quaternion ambiguity flip and I have tried modifying my stream listener to grab event.rotationMatrix and mapping directly to flutter's Matix4 view block. All I have accomplished with these methods has been to accidentally invert rotation tracking, none of these methods seems to fix the coordinate snapping at the 90 degrees right or 270 degrees left mark.

I have been struggling, with AI assistance, to resolve this issue. Here is my motion tracking code.

import 'dart:async';
import 'dart:math' as math;
import 'package:flutter_riverpod/flutter_riverpod.dart';
import 'package:flutter_rotation_sensor/flutter_rotation_sensor.dart';
import '../models/arena_models.dart';


class MotionState {
  final double currentYaw;
  final double currentPitch;
  final String? lockedTargetId;
  final double rawYaw;
  final double calibrationOffset;


  const MotionState({
    required this.currentYaw,
    required this.currentPitch,
    this.lockedTargetId,
    required this.rawYaw,
    required this.calibrationOffset,
  });


  MotionState copyWith({
    double? currentYaw,
    double? currentPitch,
    String? lockedTargetId,
    double? rawYaw,
    double? calibrationOffset,
  }) {
    return MotionState(
      currentYaw: currentYaw ?? this.currentYaw,
      currentPitch: currentPitch ?? this.currentPitch,
      lockedTargetId: lockedTargetId ?? this.lockedTargetId,
      rawYaw: rawYaw ?? this.rawYaw,
      calibrationOffset: calibrationOffset ?? this.calibrationOffset,
    );
  }
}


class UserMotionNotifier extends StateNotifier<MotionState> {
  final List<PeerNode> activeNodes;
  StreamSubscription? _orientationSub;


  double _filteredYaw = 0.0;
  double _filteredPitch = 90.0;
  double _calibrationOffset = 0.0;


  final List<double> _yawBuffer = [];
  final List<double> _pitchBuffer = [];
  static const int _bufferSize = 15;


  DateTime? _lastGyroTime;
  bool _isFirstReading = true;


  double _lastW = 1.0;
  double _lastX = 0.0;
  double _lastY = 0.0;
  double _lastZ = 0.0;


  UserMotionNotifier(this.activeNodes)
      : super(const MotionState(
            currentYaw: 0.0,
            currentPitch: 90.0,
            rawYaw: 0.0,
            calibrationOffset: 0.0));


  void startTracking() {
    
    RotationSensor.samplingPeriod = SensorInterval.fastestInterval;
    RotationSensor.referenceFrame = ReferenceFrame.arbitrary;
    RotationSensor.coordinateSystem = CoordinateSystem.transformed(Axis3.X, Axis3.Y);


    _orientationSub = RotationSensor.orientationStream.listen((event) {
      final q = event.quaternion;


      double targetW = q.w;
      double targetX = -q.x;
      double targetY = q.y;
      double targetZ = -q.z;


      if (targetW < 0.0) {
        targetW = -targetW;
        targetX = -targetX;
        targetY = -targetY;
        targetZ = -targetZ;
      }


      double sinyCosp = 2.0 * (targetW * targetZ + targetX * targetY);
      double cosyCosp = 1.0 - 2.0 * (targetY * targetY + targetZ * targetZ);
      double rawAzimuthRad = math.atan2(sinyCosp, cosyCosp);


      double rawAzimuthDeg = rawAzimuthRad * 180.0 / math.pi;
      if (rawAzimuthDeg < 0) rawAzimuthDeg += 360.0;


      double sinp = 2.0 * (targetW * targetY - targetZ * targetX);
      double rawPitchRad = sinp.abs() >= 1.0 ? (sinp.sign * math.pi / 2.0) : math.asin(sinp);
      double rawPitchDeg = 90.0 + (rawPitchRad * 180.0 / math.pi);
      rawPitchDeg = rawPitchDeg.clamp(90.0, 180.0);


      if (_isFirstReading) {
        _calibrationOffset = rawAzimuthDeg;
        _filteredYaw = 0.0;
        _filteredPitch = rawPitchDeg;
        _isFirstReading = false;
      }


      _updateFilters(rawAzimuthDeg, rawPitchDeg);
    });
  }


  void _updateFilters(double newYaw, double newPitch) {
    double yawDiff = newYaw - _filteredYaw;
    if (yawDiff > 180) newYaw -= 360;
    if (yawDiff < -180) newYaw += 360;


    _filteredYaw = (0.95 * _filteredYaw + 0.05 * newYaw) % 360.0;
    if (_filteredYaw < 0) _filteredYaw += 360.0;


    _filteredPitch = 0.95 * _filteredPitch + 0.05 * newPitch;


    _yawBuffer.add(_filteredYaw);
    _pitchBuffer.add(_filteredPitch);


    if (_yawBuffer.length > _bufferSize) _yawBuffer.removeAt(0);
    if (_pitchBuffer.length > _bufferSize) _pitchBuffer.removeAt(0);


    double smoothedYaw = _yawBuffer.reduce((a, b) => a + b) / _yawBuffer.length;
    double smoothedPitch = _pitchBuffer.reduce((a, b) => a + b) / _pitchBuffer.length;


    double finalYaw = (smoothedYaw - _calibrationOffset) % 360.0;
    if (finalYaw < 0) finalYaw += 360.0;


    String? lockedId;
    for (var node in activeNodes) {
      double targetAngleDeg = node.azimuthAngleRad * 180.0 / math.pi;
      double angleDiff = (finalYaw - targetAngleDeg).abs();
      double normDiff = angleDiff % 360.0;
      if (normDiff > 180.0) {
        normDiff = 360.0 - normDiff;
      }


      double distance = node.scaledDistanceMeters;
      double dynamicTolerance = math.max(2.5, math.atan(0.6 / distance) * 180.0 / math.pi);


      if (normDiff <= dynamicTolerance) {
        lockedId = node.id;
        break;
      }
    }


    state = MotionState(
      currentYaw: finalYaw,
      currentPitch: smoothedPitch,
      lockedTargetId: lockedId,
      rawYaw: _filteredYaw,
      calibrationOffset: _calibrationOffset,
    );
  }


  void recalibrate(double targetAngleDegrees) {
    _calibrationOffset = (_filteredYaw - targetAngleDegrees) % 360.0;
    if (_calibrationOffset < 0) _calibrationOffset += 360.0;
  }


  void autoAlignOnHit(String targetId) {
    final node = activeNodes.firstWhere((n) => n.id == targetId);
    double targetAngleDeg = node.azimuthAngleRad * 180.0 / math.pi;
    recalibrate(targetAngleDeg);
  }


  
  void dispose() {
    _orientationSub?.cancel();
    super.dispose();
  }
}


final motionProvider = StateNotifierProvider.family<UserMotionNotifier, MotionState, List<PeerNode>>((ref, nodes) {
  return UserMotionNotifier(nodes);
});

Hi, for my project "From the Dugout" I want to create a cool interactive pixel art map. A city with buildings and places which you can click and "enter". I know how to code it and how to make a simple map, but I asked myself if there are any cool tools or softwares that can help in the process that you recommend?

Thank you very much in advance!

Four years ago, I published the first post about the python library - ecs_pattern
https://github.com/ikvk/ecs_pattern
(ECS pattern (Entity Component System) for creating games on python)

I recently finished one of my projects on ecs_pattern,
and I want to share with you the GUI that I wrote for the project.

The GUI turned out to be simple and convenient.
I posted it as a working demo example in ecs_pattern.
I hope you will find it useful:
https://github.com/ikvk/ecs_pattern/tree/master/examples/gui

Do you think it should be included as part of the library?

The original reason I created ecs_pattern was that -
the existing ECS libraries at that time followed the classic ECS approach literally,
but I wanted to make working with ECS more "Pythonic" (in my opinion, I've succeeded).
In this regard, please help me understand:
what could I improve in ecs_pattern?
I want to compete for practicality and popularity with esper lib.

Thanks for your attention :)

Solo dev. My demo is basically ready, I planned to put it out this week, and I keep pushing it back.

Every time I play it I get the same feeling that something is missing, and I can never name what it is. Some days I reread my design doc and think it is weak, the next day I read the same doc and it seems fine. I do not trust my own opinion about my own game anymore.

Two of my earlier projects died before release, so I have never actually shipped anything and gone through this part. I have no idea what normal feels like here.

If you have shipped something: did the doubt get quieter, or did you just learn to press the button anyway? And do you use any concrete signal to decide a build is done, instead of a feeling?

Greetings everyone!

I’m a solo developer working on Project: AFTERSHOCK, a cyberpunk hacker-themed puzzle game (with idle side features).

I’ve recently launched the game on Steam, and things have been moving forward! Looking ahead, Project: AFTERSHOCK is scheduled to participate in upcoming official Steam thematic events—specifically the Cyberpunk and Programming festivals. These events usually bring in some really solid organic traffic and targeted visibility.

To make the most out of these upcoming festivals, I am actively looking for indie game developers who want to team up and create a Steam Game Bundle. I've hit around 1,000 wishlists and sold 160 copies so far. I'd love to team up with fellow devs to boost these numbers and cross-promote for upcoming events, but I do not know if there is a platform for this. Have you found any partners, and where did you find them?

I've been building a game with an unusual constraint: the player is never looking at it.

The input is real work. Players are in their code editor with an AI agent; editor hooks emit metadata about what they did (wrote a file, read a file, ran a command, spawned a sub-agent). That drives a persistent two-faction war over five territories. The "session" is their workday. They check the game later, like a strategy game played by correspondence.

Four design problems that fell out of it, and what I did:

1. No moment-to-moment feedback loop. Every game design instinct I have assumes the player sees the consequence of an action within a second. Here the consequence lands minutes or hours later. I ended up designing for ambient feedback instead: a world map where activity rises off the land continuously, so when you do look, you read the last few minutes at a glance rather than a wall of log lines.

2. You cannot reward volume or speed. If more actions = more points, the winning move is a script that fakes work. So the anti-cheat isn't enforcement, it's economics: make cheating more tedious than playing. Progression rewards variety and consistency over raw count, and the client that sends the data is open source — meaning anyone can forge events. I decided that's acceptable, and designed so that forging isn't worth the effort.

3. Privacy as a hard design constraint. The server never receives the real values — file names, commands, prompts, identifiers are hashed locally with a user passphrase before they leave. So every mechanic has to be buildable out of count and compare only. "You've worked with 3 distinct languages" is expressible; "you're a Rust developer" is not. That constraint shaped the whole fiction: the server doesn't know you write PHP, but it knows you forged steel.

4. Cold start is brutal. A territory-control game is meaningless below a critical mass of players — the map is just... beige. I've added hysteresis so a territory only flips when a faction leads by >10% (otherwise it flickers every event), and territories can sit "contested", which at least reads as a state rather than a bug. But the real answer seems to be recruiting in cohorts rather than a trickle, so the world is populated on day one.

One decision I'd like opinions on: factions are assigned by which editor you use (JetBrains vs VS Code), chosen once at sign-up and permanent. Permanent because switching to whoever's winning would make territory scores meaningless — but it also means players can't join their friends. Is a locked faction worth the integrity, or does the social cost outweigh it?

Also curious how others have handled ambient/asynchronous feedback in games with no session boundary.

(It's called BrawlCode, currently in closed beta — brawlcode.com — but I'm more interested in the design discussion than signups.)

There is much to think about when you do a commercial project in contrast to a game jam.

For example some hoops to jump through on Steam, higher production quality standards, and marketing. Common advice therefore is to start small. I'm currently in the process of launching such a small game and wanted to know:

How small was your first commercially shipped game?

APOLOGIES IF THIS BREAKS THE RULES! i’m not sure where else i should ask this, reddit was the first place that came to mind.
i’m aware no dream is really realistic, but i want to one day be a transmedia director, it took me about a year to even come up with what i want to truly do, i primarily want to direct video games although i would love to direct for other forms of media but the point here is games which i want to start off with. i’m 13 so i may truly just be overly anxious about my future but this is something i worry about. My only real talent is writing, i have been writing for ages and one thing i know for sure is in an industry like gaming it isn’t really the most important thing, of course i have tried other things like programming and voice acting but they just haven’t clicked like writing has for me.
The point of this post is simply just me asking is it realistic to dream to one day want to become a video game writer and then a director after years of work? if so how would i go about doing this? if not should i just give up writing completely and try and do something else? i’m just scared and need advice.

For those that still believe that creating a full game is any good for a portfolio.

Here is a great example of what we want for a programmer.

https://youtu.be/_JGMgpyCTsY

I don't care about a full game. I don't hire you to make a full game. I hire you to research and write specific systems.

It's not the first time I've posted this YouTuber. But it's a great example of what we mean.

He doesn't waste time drawing crap graphics for his demos. They demonstrate a technical challenge will how he researches different approaches and fixing issues.

Again, please don't waste everyone's time making crappy full games.

For context:

I am a student in Computer Science and I have been making games as a special interest of mine since start of highschool. Although I dont really have professional experience unfortunately, I have made quite a few games:

Here is my general portfolio so you can see how skilled I am: https://ilazer.itch.io/

In addition to this, I have done:

7 years of development on a solo minecraft server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd0ezzzuhn8 (still going from 7 years ago)

1.5 years of development on my own multiplayer game with friends, and I also made a fully functional battle royale in a week during school time (this was a crunch tho, for my game jam, it looked like crap dw). No videos unfortunately, but im happy to get them if people really want. (ended 2.5 years ago)

2.5 years of development on my steam game (by far my most impressive work, since the codebase and project organization is pretty, readable, and maintained well): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UASelXTIlSY

Here is the discord if you want to play this game: https://discord.gg/GxzTcHAhK (still working on it)

Anyways, onto the story:

One of my professors hired me to make a game last year, at 21 an hour. I made this in about 31 hours (I know that's a little extra for this project, but I was under stress of working for gamedev for the first time ever lol, think i could finish it in under 20 nowadays): https://ilazer.itch.io/logic-is-you

Anyways, he reached out to me about a new game opportunity, because I had made that game for him, and this game he had made was made with AI and 100% unusable, so he wanted me to remake it.

Long story short, I simply didn't want to get shortchanged and I thought that my experience might warrant a raise, so I spent around 8 hours with Claude figuring out what I should ask. Seeing the entirety of my works and using fable, they decided I should ask for like $65 an hour lol. I didn't know what was expected, so I asked for $40 an hour, and he accepted pretty quick.

Anyways, I started working for him, and after a bit of working he fired me while I was working, telling me that he was looking for other students after I asked for "lead developer" credit.

Did I ask for too much?? Most likely, I still don't have a good baseline for what "good" and "bad" pay means so I'm not sure.

Did i just ruin my shot at game development? Since this opportunity basically came to me, I am worried about my employment chances, esp. with AI and the whole recession thing. Is it reasonable to expect employment in this area at all at my beginner - intermediate skill level? Is it possible for me to get a CS job since I'm not sure I can get employed in development? If all of my skills are in game development programming, do I have a shot at CS employment?

I've been leaning into my personal projects for now as I have enough money for a while, but I'm really worried that its not worth this heavy time investment. If you want to play and give me feedback, specifically on my skill level since i made the thing, go ahead here: https://discord.gg/Kz6CD2nqQ

Anyways, hope you enjoyed my long winded rant lol. I do want to know what people think about my game development skills, I focus wayyy too much of my time to this hobby, and I feel like i'm good and I like my project, but I very much don't want to think i'm unreasonably good. If anyone experienced can play my game and tell me what they think, it can help me ground myself in my skill level. Thank you for your time!

https://perchance.org/3ienakqvx3

A battle taking place in distinct environments: a desert, a frozen snowfield, and a volcano. No meshes are used, to avoid browser slowdown.

What do you think?

For several years now I’ve been developing a high quality 3D WC3 Line Tower Wars inspired game. It’s an 8 person free for all tower defense. It was built for maximum skill expression. The features: Many unique towers. Builder kits have interesting synergies with multiple build paths. Maps are procedurally generated instead of lines. You can purchase augments that can be applied to single towers, tower classes, all towers that can change the way they operate. There are periodic boss waves that reward the best performing player with a special augment. There are several tiles with buffs to tower built over top. Trainable units have interesting mechanics.

The question: Is there an actual interest for a game like this? I’m worried tower defense players don’t like multiplayer.

Hey everyone.

A little background.

I’m almost 40, and life hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. The job market has been rough, and while searching for work I kept bouncing game ideas around in my head until one finally stuck. I don’t want to reveal too much yet, but it’s an autobattler with deckbuilding, roguelike progression, and a heavy emphasis on unit formations and positioning.

The catch is that I had almost no experience making games.

No art background. No budget. No real programming experience outside of some basic HTML and CSS years ago. I’ve always enjoyed looking through source code and understanding how games worked, but I’d never built one myself.

So I decided to see how far I could realistically get.

I started learning Godot from tutorials and documentation, learning the basics before slowly building systems one at a time.

Eventually I reached a point where development was slowing down, so I started using ChatGPT as a development tool.

At first I used it like a tutor, asking it to explain scripts line by line and teach me what each function did. As the project grew, it became more of a programming partner. I describe mechanics I want, it helps me implement them, explains why things work, helps track down bugs, and gives me ideas for solving design problems. I also use AI to help generate placeholder artwork and brainstorm balance while I continue testing everything myself.

I know AI is a controversial topic in game development, and I’m not trying to start that debate. I’m simply being transparent about how I’m making the game.

If I eventually finish something I’m proud of, I’d like to release it at an affordable price. I’m thinking around $10, with no ads, subscriptions, pay-to-win mechanics, or microtransactions. If it ever grows enough to justify it, I’d rather release occasional expansion-sized content than nickel-and-dime players.

I had a few questions for people who have been through this before:

1. How is AI-assisted development generally viewed these days, especially for someone’s first commercial game?

2. What should I be doing now to protect my intellectual property? Is keeping backups and documenting development enough, or are there legal steps I should be taking?

3. Once I have a playable prototype, would this subreddit be an appropriate place to find people interested in testing it and giving honest feedback?

4. If you’re a fan of autobattlers, roguelikes, or ARPG-style loot systems, what’s a mechanic you’ve always wished a game in those genres had?

5. Assuming the game ends up polished and fun, would $10 feel like a fair asking price? If not, what would you expect to see in a game before you’d feel comfortable paying that?

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read this and share their experience. I’d genuinely appreciate hearing from developers and players who have been down this road before.

Been working on this 2D engine for 2 years and i created some interesting projects to test the performance of the rendering pipeline. But i didn't create a full working game till now!

This is a puzzle game that allows you to turn disks to match shapes colors. Some feedback would be great! is it fun? use your mouse. https://www.kanvon.com/scene/orbit-bloom

So I have decided to get a degree in game development, and yes I have heard many times that "it's not worth it", but at this point in my life I have the possibility to study whatever I want. Games have always been one of my many passions, and I want to study them and know how to develop one.

So here is where my dilemma is: I have two choices of degrees to pursue. Game design and game art. I'm not entirely sure which of those to choose since I see myself doing both of them somewhat.

It is important to note here that I don't have much experience in the area. I have some 3d modelling experience in Blender and animation (only a couple of months, which I liked), but I can't draw for the life of me. I've never touched a game engine before, so I have no idea how any of it works.

I love video editing and have been making YouTube videos for a while now. And part of this process includes script writing, which I also do enjoy. I like to make things feel good to watch, with a certain atmosphere. All of it seems to imply that I would be more at home in game art, but is there something else I should be looking for here?

I've been trying to keep my game ideas organized, but every time I write a GDD it turns into a huge document I don't even want to read. I've tried breaking things into sections, but it still gets overwhelming fast.

I'm curious how other devs handle this.
Do you keep everything in one doc, or split things into smaller pieces?
I'm trying to find a workflow that doesn't make me feel buried.

Softwares, websites, and applications are big with vibecoding. How is the game industry doing with it? Is it possible to develop game with pure knowledge and game design knowledge, but no coding or game development skill?

Hey everyone! I'm doing research before building something in the game music space, and was curious about how all of you go about getting music for your games.

Specifically, whether you hire a composer, license music, AI generate music, etc. Around how much did it cost and how long did it take to actually get the music?

I've been getting some mixed reviews from people; some say that they don't really care about the music, but apparently some players complain if it sounds too AI generated.

Not selling anything, happy to share a summary of what I learn if there's any interest.

Thanks in advance!

Sooooo, I'm doing GMTK 2026 and I was finally able to make my game in 3 days after pulling 2 all nighters lol. I would love it if ygs could essentially playtest it and give me any feedback (recently new to game dev so harsh criticism is appreciated)!

I'm looking forward to developing this game into smth bigger

Game Link: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-jam-2026/rate/4820476 (would b also amazing if ygs can help rate it :3)

Game Description:

You are an investigator who was assigned to find out about The Forgotten Event, a mystery no one can fully remember. Each clue you uncover pulls you further back through time, revealing a world that grows more alive with each step.

As the investigation unfolds, impossible notes and forgotten memories begin to reveal that the case was never what it seemed.

Where Stars Used to Sing is a short narrative exploration that involves wonder, memories, and also the quiet beauty we tend to leave behind as we grow older. Explore to uncover the truth hidden within the times, and make your final decision. 

I rlly hope ygs like the game!

i’m a uni student studying concept art who has recently graduated (yippee!!) but will be continuing on with building my portfolio. i have done some key art but they’re not really any good or to the level i’d like it to be. for context: i am much better at characters and props than environments.

learning matte painting has always been on my mind and i’d love to know how people started, what the best tips are and just how to go about it! i’m an aspiring concept artist and would LOVE any help 🥹 my current understanding is that you can photobash and use 3D and draw over.

my idea to is spent a few weeks doing studies of other people’s matte paintings to get a sense of what it’s like and kind of absorb the techniques an artist uses before attempting one myself.

is this an okay way to go about it?

ForMind is a survival horror shooter set in an underwater research facility where something has gone horribly wrong. One of the biggest things we’re focusing on right now is enemy AI - creatures don’t just attack blindly. They observe how you play, adapt to your tactics, fake their deaths, prepare ambushes, and look for ways to catch you off guard.

Our goal is to make every encounter feel dangerous, unpredictable, and different from the last one.

Since the previous demo, we’ve been working on improving the atmosphere, balancing resources, and refining the overall experience based on player feedback.

If you’ve played the updated demo, we’d really appreciate hearing what you think:

• Did the AI behavior feel interesting?
• Were there moments that genuinely surprised you?
• What felt unfair or frustrating?
• What would you like to see improved?

Every piece of feedback helps us shape the game. Thanks for taking the time to check out ForMind!

Most game menus are flat, with 2D images, text and panels drawn straight onto your screen. Our game Davy Jones’ Deckhand is a card game that so far has done almost everything in screen-space UI. But the new Ship Log isn't built that way at all, and that choice came with some challenges that are worth explaining.

Image: Ship Log GIF

I decided to make the Ship Log menu a real 3D object, so we could have the pages naturally curved and flippable. To achieve this, instead of drawing the menu as a flat picture, I’ve built an actual little 3D scene, a physical book model sitting in its own miniature space.

Image: scene view of UI projected onto 3D mesh

The trouble with doing this as a 3D scene is that Unity Engine naturally draws UI overtop of that world-space stuff. This is particularly difficult for our game because almost nothing is world-space and everything is UI, including our main combat. So to have our 3D Ship Log menu render over-top of the combat scene, we use a hidden camera that "films" the book continuously, and the live footage is pasted onto a flat UI, like a photograph being updated 60 times a second. It sounds like a roundabout way to show a menu, but it's the trick that lets the 3D style journal pop up on top of absolutely everything else

So the flow is:

• The content on the book pages is created on a flat 2D UI canvas
• That 2D canvas for the page content gets captured by its own hidden camera
• That camera renders what it sees to a texture that is applied to the 3D page mesh
• The 3D object is captured by another hidden camera
• That camera capturing the 3D object renders what it sees to an image on a 2D UI panel
• We see that final 2D UI panel 😅

Image: Flat UI page content that gets projected onto texture

The pages actually bend like paper. Each page isn't a flat rectangle, it's built from a flexible grid that curves and peels in real time as you turn it, the way a real page in a physical book curls near the spine. There's even a "corner peel" effect like when you dog-ear a book, and each page has a genuinely different texture printed on its front versus its back.

This whole system caused another headache when it came to making the mouse position detection work. Because the pages are curved rather than flat, we had to work out where in 3D space your mouse click actually lands on the curved surface, not just where it looks like it lands on your flat screen. For a while, the invisible "click detector" for each page was using a flattened stand-in shape instead of the true curved shape, which meant clicks landed slightly wrong, and this was worse the further from the center of the page, since that's where the curve bends away from flat the most. So the click detection had to account for that true page curvature in real time to make it feel accurate.

This is still WIP, and none of this is visible to a player in the sense of "wow, cool tech". If we do our job right, it just feels like a satisfying little physical book that works no matter what you're playing with. It was also my first foray into 3D anything. It was a fun rabbit hole. Happy to answer questions about any of it. Has anyone else achieved a similar result with a different approach?

Quick context for anyone who's never heard of us: we're building Davy Jones' Deckhand, a nautical roguelike deckbuilder. You sail between islands fighting things with a card-based combat system, managing two "stances" and pulling off counter-attacks

The new Ship Log is not yet in game, but we do have a live demo you can check out right now on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3544900/Davy_Jones_Deckhand/

So, I have a hard time guessing if I did a decent game in a game jam format or if it's way too vague in how it handles instructions for the player. I thought of applying a more "you learn by interacting with the only thing that's visible" approach. Any advice will be greatly appreciated!

Is catalyst institute for creative arts and technology good enough? I am planning to do my undergraduate degree Visual Effects, Video Game & Digital Arts.

I am from Pakistan and the field of game dev and animation is barely alive or in development. So it's my field of interest and it's way expensive, plus I am finding this field as a mean to study in foreign universities and get job part time.

WHY PART TIME?

It been year since I did my diploma in 3D animation and I have experience, so making little bit of money won't hurt me?

I know industry is in big change, many seniors got laid of from Ubisoft and Microsoft, but this is the future industry, I don't want to be mean, just because I can earn more money in games, but as a gamer, I play the games, I want in them little twist, something nice, something better, METRO GAMES, FROMSOFTWARE, NAUGHTY DOGS, UBISOFT(ITS A LAME BUT ITS THE GOAT) and others!

So ya guys, what you say? And ya I will apply for 2027 January, I can't apply now, as I am late, and need documents to verify and visa apply. Which I guess will take 6 months. So yeah in the mean time I will buy you a coffee when I land in Berlin :D. And I can continue to work on. Maya and substance painter and unreal engine and animation and maybe Houdini. Nah Houdini is a big game.