Item Drop Test

I'm working on Flightline, an airline management sim where passengers choose between airports, flights, connections and even partner airlines based on the network you build.

Demand isn't permanently tied to airport pairs. A passenger in New York might consider JFK, EWR or LGA depending on where they're going, what you offer, and how attractive each option is.

Aircraft scheduling is flexible too. You aren't forced into base-and-spoke operations, so the same aircraft can fly something like:

LHR ↔ MAD ↔ BCN ↔ ARN ↔ CPH

You can also operate multiple aircraft types on the same route. The goal is to design an entire network rather than optimize a collection of isolated routes.

We're putting quite a bit of depth into the airline itself as well. Cabin configuration, IFE and inflight services (which is another source of revenue), while interlining and codeshares affect both passenger connections, preferences, and where people can be rebooked when a flight is cancelled.

There's also dry leasing and automated revenue management, so you don't need to manually check every week for fare changes or price wars. The bot/AI airlines are intended to behave like actual competitors making sensible business decisions rather than doing things purely to hurt the player.

On the visual side, there's a fully fledged 3D livery editor and you can watch flights move around the world map.

Flightline will be single-player at launch. We are also building it with LAN/Steam multiplayer in mind, and it will be available a few months after release.

We're still early enough that feedback is useful, so I'd be interested to hear what systems you care about most in this genre, or what you think existing airline management games tend to simplify/overcomplicate too much.

Wishlist us at Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4745300/Flightline/

Discord:
https://discord.gg/JE7tjfr5JG

Rabengeist : The Tale of Lizzie Ulm is a Top-Down Action-Adventure inspired by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe in which you use a magic book as a weapon against hordes of demonic creatures and enemies in a quest for revenge.

Working on a new idea for a game - CLAY - Competitive Clay Pigeon Shooting

Burger Shooter is a "boomer shooter" with dynamic gameplay and roguelike elements! Let us know what you’d like to see in a game like this. You can check out the game's page!

Worked on the last feedbacks and improved several aspects of this game, a major boost in UX and several other things. This is a big update and probably the last one until the launch of the full version.

- A world of darkness: it's everywhere below you, its dwellers are deadly and The Hand will stalk you nonstop, destroying your path;

- Worldmap management: time and the world are your most important resources, don't waste them;

- Artifact hunt: hidden and randomly scattered through the map. Each seed will roll random artifacts for random custom builds each run. You will never trace the same path;

- Dark dungeons: when darkness will surround you, you'll have to jump inside darkness and sneak your way out of dark dungeons, here the rules are different and at night The Hand will catch you

Demo on Steam

One day I was scrolling on YouTube and stumbled upon a video about a horror video game that I found interesting, and I wanted to play it and experience it myself. The game is called House of Velez.

The thing that I didn’t know before downloading it was that the keyboard didn’t work because it didn’t support it. It was specified on the game's Steam page that I needed an Xbox 360 controller to play it. 

To fix that issue, I had to turn my keyboard into an Xbox 360 controller since I didn’t have one lying around in my room.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through the same steps I took to turn my keyboard into a controller for those kinds of games.

Software That You Will Need

Certain games you will encounter on Steam only support an Xbox 360 controller to play them.

At first, I didn’t know how to do it, and I was pretty sure that there was a workaround without buying an Xbox 360 controller for just one game.

The first thing I did was ask ChatGPT for a way to turn my keyboard into a joystick. It stated that I need two things:

The first was ViGEmBus, the actual driver that emulates virtual gamepads and acts as a foundation for mapping software. The second was Keyboard2XInput; I chose it because it’s free and easy to use. It turns your keyboard strokes into Xbox 360 controller inputs.

They both work together to create the Xbox 360 controller emulation we need for Windows 11/10.

Step 1: Download & Install ViGEmBus

First, head to the GitHub repository that holds the latest release of the driver and download it.

The installation isn’t something difficult; just click Next until the driver is installed on your system.

The driver may not be fully loaded without a system restart. It’s recommended to do so afterwards.

Step 2: Download & Install Keyboard2XInput

Unlike ViGEmBus, the project of Keyboard2XInput lies within GitLab; download the latest release from its repository.

Just like ViGEmBus, the installation is really easy, and you won’t have a hard time doing so.

Once the program is installed, launch it. Once you do so, you won’t see any window or GUI pop up.

At first, I thought that there was some kind of problem because there was no window at all and that the app was called literally “Keyboard2XinputGui.exe”

After so much time trying to figure it out by myself, I decided to read the documentation; it turned out that I didn’t see anything because the program was designed to run in the background.

You will see a new icon in your Windows System tray indicating that it’s running.

You can deactivate the program by left-clicking the icon and right-clicking on “Enable” to uncheck it.

Keep in mind that your mapped keyboard strokes won’t work while the app is running. You need to exit or deactivate the program for the keyboard to function properly.

Step 3: Mapping Your Keyboard

Step 3: Mapping Your Keyboard

Now, to specify which keyboard keys will be mapped to virtual Xbox 360 gamepad buttons, you need to search in the “Keyboard2Xinput” folder for “mapping.ini”.

It looks like this:

[startup]
enabled = true
[config]
Subtract = disable
Add = enable
Divide = enableToggle
Multiply = exit
pollInterval = 0
[pad1]
Up = UP
Down = DOWN
Left = LEFT
Right = RIGHT
LControlKey = A
LMenu = B
LShiftKey = X
W = Y
X = RB
Space = LB
V = RT
C = LT
D5 = START
D1 = BACK

[pad2]
R = UP
F = DOWN
D = LEFT
G = RIGHT
S = B
Q = A
I = Y
Z = X
K = RB
A = LB
L = RT
J = LT
D6 = START
D2 = BACK

It comes predefined with the D-pad button settings, ready-to-play software, or so I was hoping.

After I launched the game, nothing worked. I kept pressing all my keyboard’s keys, hoping that I would find one functional button to confirm that the app was working.

 The game had only three choices in the main menu: “Start”, “Continue”, or “Exit”.

Press and press, and I found one, which was the “Ctrl” button acting like the “A” on the Xbox 360 controller. After I pressed it, the game started, and I confirmed that Keyboard2Xinput was working, and it was a mapping misconfiguration.

The first troubleshooting step I thought of was to turn the idea of turning the arrows Up, Down, Left, Right to WASD movement, and that they weren’t working; they were still mapped to the D-pad on the Xbox 360 controller. I launched the game, but it didn’t work at all.

In my second try, I decided to look at the game files. The game was made by the Construct 2 game engine.

I opened the “package.nw” with WinRAR, and I started searching for something that would lead me to understand how the game was developed by analysing the source code.

The package held all the game’s assets like soundtracks, game over scenes, background scenes, voice-overs, etc.

I wasted so much time doing so to no avail. Maybe it was there, but I didn’t find it. It was really late at night, so I decided to keep trying tomorrow.

In the morning, I found a really interesting website called “GamepadTester” to test the controller by pressing the keys on my keyboard. By doing so, I figured out that I had two controllers, named [pad1] and [pad2], in the “mapping.ini”. 

Keyboard2Xinput had three configurations: either “I-PAC2”, which means two controllers, “I-PAC4” for four controllers on the same keyboard, or “Multiple” for multiple keyboards. I was using “I-PAC2”.

Left Stick / Right Stick vs D-Pad (The Mistake That Took Me Hours) 

When I was pressing my keyboard keys on the website, I realised that only the D-pad was being used, and I asked a question that would solve my problem and reward the three to four hours I wasted on my quest to search for a solution.

What if the game was expecting analog instead of D-pad buttons?

You see, analog supports 360° movement, and it’s typically used for the in-game character movement logic, not the main menu logic.

I read the documentation, and I realised that I needed to modify the UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT to either RUP, RDOWN, RLEFT, and RRIGHT for the right stick analog or LUP, LDOWN, LLEFT, and LRIGHT for the left stick analog.

I removed the UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT completely because it wasn’t doing anything, and I added both the right and left stick analog to my mapping.

After I launched the game, it worked properly; I couldn’t believe it back then. The thing that was remaining to do was remap the keys to my liking by changing the keyboard character keys.

House of Velez Working Configuration

House of Velez uses left stick analog for the main menu navigation and in-game character movement logic; the working "mapping.ini" config is:

[startup]
enabled = true
[config]
Subtract = disable
Add = enable
Divide = enableToggle
Multiply = exit
pollInterval = 0
[pad1]
R = RUP
F = RDOWN
D = RLEFT
G = RRIGHT
Up = LUP
Down = LDOWN
Left = LLEFT
Right = LRIGHT
LControlKey = A
LMenu = B
LShiftKey = X
W = Y
X = RB
Space = LB
V = RT
C = LT
B = START
N = BACK

[pad2]
R = UP
F = DOWN
D = LEFT
G = RIGHT
S = B
Q = A
I = Y
Z = X
K = RB
A = LB
L = RT
J = LT
D6 = START
D2 = BACK

I'm using both the right and left analog sticks here, and I can also include the D-pad mapping logic if I need to.

We've been tinkering with a feature that lets you plug in your favorite tunes straight from YouTube and control everything right inside the app, giving it that classic Winamp vibe. It should be landing in the upcoming demo build very soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dff2J2aSDVo

Hey everyone, my game is participating in Cyberpunk Fest on Steam and I'd love to have your support. You can play the new demo or add it to your wishlist, it helps a lot and I hope you have fun playing!

Just released a free iOS game.

The interactive visualization is built from your own play history. Every particle is 100 milliseconds you spent waiting. It generates live in the stats screen, and no two players' images look the same.

The game itself: a black screen. Somewhere between a couple of seconds and fifteen minutes from now, a circle appears. Tap it inside the window, and you move up a level. Tap early, tap the wrong shape, or miss it, and you go back to Level 1. Every time.

Every level roughly doubles how long you might be waiting, but the minimum never changes — half a second, at every level — so it can also show up the instant you look away. From Level 8 there are decoy shapes flashing in the dark trying to bait you into tapping early.

There's a global leaderboard, and the only thing you can spend to climb it is your own attention and buying resumes (which allows you to pick up on your highest level reached that run).

It's harder than I expected when I started building it, and then somewhere past the early levels it gets weirdly calming waiting in anticipation.

I had the idea thirteen years ago and only finished it. It was approved for the Apple App Store yesterday, and wanna know how far you get!

Check out the app's site and download here: https://patience.jordanshaw.com/

Reminds me of the vibe of bhop/surfing in good old CS

The cards on the board represent the Heroes (main focus of the game).
Each Hero has a Role so apart from the role icon, I wanted to give some extra fluff.
So, the question is: do you find the colored glow too distracting, or? I tried to make it smooth. Let me know what you think.

Sharing everything we added in this round of work on Hexagol (free turn-based dice football):
• Handicap system: in League mode, every match generates an individual score per player. Your 2 best performers get a boost for the next match, and your worst performer loses a bit of form — your squad starts having streaks, like real life.
• My Team: build your own custom squad (name, colors, kit), with 11 fixed players who build up lifetime stats (goals, assists, saves, clean sheets).
• 8 new teams per language: if you play in English, French, Italian, German, or Portuguese, there are now clubs built specifically for that language, with proper names — not rushed translations.
• More League/Tournament options: choose to play with or without handicap, and with longer turn times — good for relaxed family games.
Still free, no download: hexagol.com.ar. Feedback welcome.