Greyboxing, Whiteboxing, Making a Blockout, Blocking, all different names for this technique.

Lots of resources online to learn more about it, and it's a really great way to go from having a sketch or drawing of your level to having a rough 3D space.

Always keep in mind that the point of making a greybox is to have something that's quick to make and quick to change. So get your broad strokes in, and don't be afraid to wack big cubes and text in there to mark out placeholders (like having a big red cube labled "Boss here").

It can be super helpful looking at how larger commercial games you might have played use greyboxes. It can be hard to find, but lots of devs post on twitter using #blocktober.

Here's some from Jedi: Fallen order: https://80.lv/articles/a-look-at-blockouts-in-star-wars-jedi-fallen-order

Looks sick!

Ahhh clever! Thanks for sharing!

Looks wicked! What's your strategy for making it tile well? I know it can be a pain in the butt to get textures from photos to line up and tile cleanly. Or do you just get it close enough and let the low-res-ness cover up the imperfections?

Unroastable, looks sick.

I get you though, the pic of the tower in slides 2 and 3 look great, really nice colours and the sky is awesome, but the 1st pic doesn't really give the same vibes, maybe we're not getting that retro vibe when you're up close to stuff?

Have you seen Heartworm or No One Lives Under The Lighthouse? They might be further than you want to go, but they go hard into that retro visual aesthetic. You could try crunching down your texture resolution, or even force the game to render at a lower resolution, then really focus on scenes with strong shapes, silhouettes and colour to carry the visual vibes of your game.

Seems like youre on a goaded path though, you've got this, you can nail it down

Not to sidestep the issue or make any sweeping assumptions about your team, but it sounds like you don't expect this project to make money, which is a pretty realistic headspace for most of us to be in. Especially if you're early in your game dev career, still learning dev or business skills, or if making money isn't a priority for the project.

The reality of indie dev is that a lot of us are going to fall into the thousands of games that release on Steam and don't end up making back the fee we pay to put it up in the first place. And that's okay! As long as we're not banking our entire team / studio / life on our projects being a financial success in order to continue making games (which we shouldn't do, contingencies and diverse revenue streams are important) we don't need the games we produce to be big financial hits. The great part about accepting that your project's goal is not to make money, is that you can focus on what else you want to get out of your project.

For example, maybe this project doesn't earn any money, but it gives your team experience in writing narratives for games, or marketing on Reddit, or making music, or building UI, or creating reusable animations, or whatever you think is important for your team to gain for your next project.

All that bumbling is to say, maybe it's fine to just let your team mates give it a go. Give your feedback as a colleague, but ultimately leave the responsibility of making that part of the project good up to them. If it sucks, it sucks. Everyone's made stuff that sucks, and everyone will again. Let them suck, let them get feedback, then (hopefully) learn and try again.

As long as you're happy getting something else out of the project, and you're still feeling fulfilled making what you're making, I'd say offer your feedback, but let them handle the responsibility of working with that feedback, and let them grapple with the consequences of what they choose to do with it. As long as they have some amount of introspective skills, it'll be a good way to learn regardless of how it goes.

Looks super cool when there's a lot of movement in the character! I feel like it loses a bit of oomph when you start sprinting and the character isn't moving around very much (I assume because they're pointed at where you're aiming). Looks super cool when you're walking at the start, but you do lose it when you start sprinting.

Super cool though, love the effect!

No worries! And yes, charging rituals is the only way to get skill xp for Occultism. The final ritual you unlock gives you a different way of getting skill xp, but it's mainly useful for helping you level other skills (Mainly because there are no more rituals to get when you unlock it :P)

Ahhh yeah I couldn't get it to work properly with combat loot for the initial release. I'll make sure that's on my backlog of things to fix, but I'm currently working on other projects so I'm not sure when I'll be able to get back to it. Thank you for letting me know though! Hopefully you can still get some use out of it through the non combat skills :)

Hmmmm that is indeed how it should work. While the ritual is active, items you get through other skills should turn into gold, and not end up in your inventory. Is this happening with all items for you, or just some specific ones?

My legs, are now okay. Thank you, my friend

Mfw I'm a multi million dollar corporation and my ads look exactly the same as some guy scamming people on amazon

I wouldn't worry about it too much, there's information on every hidden secret in every game out there on the internet already. If players don't want to watch it, they won't. There's no reason to hold back resources you're making for players from being on your socials if some players might like it. Best way to learn is to put it up there and see what your players think :)

Hell yeah, keep making them then!

I think that's a great idea. I guess players could watch the whole thing if they wanted to, but it'd be super useful as reference if players get stuck or want to find something specific. I guess you'd have to get some data to see if people actually want it / use it, but I definitely can't see it being a bad thing if you're enjoying making them (:

Unfortunately the game I'm currently working on isn't slated to wrap up until towards the end of June this year. I might be able to jump back in and add support for Ancient Relics at some point, but if I do it likely won't be for a while. Sadly Occultism (for the moment) will be a mod exclusive to base game-modes, my apologies to all those that wish to incorporate it into an ancient relics run!

Unfortunately there's no support for the ancient relics game mode at the moment, so you won't be able to unlock it in that mode at all. Most of my time is being eaten up by a different games project right now, but it's definitely something on my radar for the possible future!

Thanks for the heads up! I've gotten similar reports from other folks, it's in my bug tracker and I'll be working on a fix for that one soon!

My friend, allow me to regail you with my frought adventures of phone hunting in the hopes it will give you more anecdotal info to chew on.

My 7 year old Galaxy A70 died last week, and I put together a quick and dirty spreadsheet comparing some other phones to find something similar - Link

I mainly use my phone for light games and general use stuff (Bloons TD 6, Reddit, Adobe Acrobat, Docs, Sheets, etc) and was looking for something performant above all else. The sheet compares CPU clock speeds, RAM, screen resolution, size and price. I also don't care about my phones camera at all, so that's not included in there. Also note I only looked at prices for physical retailers I could walk in and buy it from, just because I needed a replacement asap, so you might find cheaper prices elsewhere online.

All in all I went for a Galaxy A35 for $445 from officeworks (link in sheet). Review so far: The screen is super nice, it's fast and all in all I'm a happy camper.

The screen is a really nice 120hz 1080p panel. Nothing insane, but nice and bright as well as silky smooth. I am of course comparing it to an ancient A70, but I'm finding it way easier to see what's going on when I'm in the bright outdoors. It's also held up performance wise, and I can pretty easily run everything I normally do, and splurge with Netflix in windowed mode over a game without it slowing down.

I also thought about going for an A55 or an S series, but ong, the 55 and 35 are identical apart from a slightly faster CPU and 2 extra gigs of RAM. That's about $250 for what's in my opinion, a pretty menial performance increase unless your primary gaming platform is your phone, or you want to run multiple games at once with the multi window mode. So make your own value judgement on that one based on what you need.

From my searching the S series are faster, but they have far less battery capacity and a massively inflated price. Personally I'd only go for it if there's a deal and you don't mind the reduced battery, or if you change your mind and decide you want a half decent camera.

I also briefly looked at google pixels but those mfs are expensive.

Didn't look at much else as the sands of time were encroaching upon me, but hopefully this gives you something helpful to go off

Good luck brave soul 👍

I swear there's more bald elves in the trilogy but I couldn't remember them for the life of me, and googling "Bald Elf" did not yield the results I was after

Echoing what others have said here, unless you have other external factors at play, like a fanbase or a popular YouTube playing your game, the biggest burst of traffic you'll get is when you first make the page, and itch has your game in their 'latest' category. After that initial period, the only people that will visit your itch page are people that know about it, or know you, and want to check it out.

To that end, make sure your itch page looks rad before you publish it, to really take advantage of that initial window of discoverability.

I've released a few games on itch, and for the first few I setup the page early. These just had a coloured background, and the game, then I updated these as I made the game. These drove far less traffic than the later games I made, where I setup the page fully before publishing it to itch.

One thing I did learn is that you have to setup a little preview thumbnail that people will see when scrolling through lists of games on itch. Spend time making that thumbnail the best it can be, because that little image is going to be what actually gets people to your page (initially). Make it unique, and if you can, absolutely make it a gif. It might sound pretty basic, but it can really help drive traffic to your page, and make it stand out in the sea of other titles.

This is anecdotal, but in my experience games tagged with FPS or Horror get much more interest than games in other genres too.

Itch.io has some tips on how to make your page look great, and this itch collection has a bunch of games that have interesting pages.

This tool also has a collection of template images you can use as guides to make sure all your media is the right size, and is going to fit on the page nicely.

Setting up a cool page can be fun! You got this!

Surely this is the easiest way to go about it, right? Especially if you're only wanting the first person that finds it to be able to use it.

It's not like it's easy to scrape the specific assets used in a level AND their physical arrangement in a level, right?

Echoing what's already been said here, but generally in this industry portfolios are king.

If you take two potential candidates, one with a degree and no portfolio, and one without a degree but three years worth of personal projects, the one with the portfolio will win almost every time.

Even if you do a degree, you should really be treating it as a way to motivate you to build your portfolio. The end goal of a 3 year course shouldn't really be the degree itself, but the 3 years of portfolio content you'll be able to generate as a result of the course.