Diego

My building/street has some machines running and they're combining into one ominous low note. It really sounds like I'm inside a thief mission.

I made a small prototype level

Just finished watching it and came here to comment. Excellent documentary indeed! Really cool hearing all those people who worked on it. The deadly shadows part made me feel bad for him. It's a flawed game, for sure, not just because of constraints and technical difficulties, I think the wrong choices were made and only later they understood them. However, it's clear from the interview that it was obviously made with a lot of love and effort, and sometimes bad choices are not obvious at the time. And flawed as it may be, I still hold the opinion that the plot is at the same great level on all three games. The way they worked at Looking Glass goes against all my instincts of any creative project. It was very much a chaotic group effort, there is no one person who you could say made Thief. To me that is a terrible way of making art, but I guess that it has its merits if it can produce Thief, system shock and deus ex.

Streaming is weird. I don't watch any streams of any kind! I do not understand the appeal. But I decided to do it for my own selfish purposes. You see, it's way harder to procrastinate when there are witnesses. Sometimes there are 2 or 3 people watching me for whatever reason and it makes me feel bad for scrolling twitter instead of working.

BTW, I started streaming my game deving. If anyone's interested in watching hours of mostly black screen with some characters on.

Yes! they do bother me! Coincidentally just a few minutes ago I was thinking "I could really use an extension that makes these go away"

There's a guy working on a raytracer for the mega drive. He pops up on the SGDK discord server every now and then. His seems more advanced than wolfenstein, with slopes and levels, but I think it's not going to have texturing.

I hate this kind of stuff. I get it that there must be limits to what people can do in their own property to ensure the neighbor's rights are preserved, but every government will seize the opportunity to go well beyond that goal while extorting as much as possible.

Me too. That's how much potential it has! We stopped playing when we really didn't want to. From what I have been reading of the older reviews and comparing with my experience, most of the bugs were dealt with. But as I said, with their no-save design choice 'most of the bugs' is not nearly good enough. If you're 25 minutes into a play session and the guard spots you through a wall, no matter how rare the bug happens, that just murders the flow of the game.

Oh here it is! The topic I was going to make I played this a couple of days ago and at first I was extremely impressed, but then the cracks started showing. I am not going into the details of all the criticism I have but, if I had to put my finger on exactly the biggest problem of the game, it would be the saving system, or lack thereof. It's actually a really cool idea in theory! saving scum ruins tension in stealth games. However, it comes with tremendous risks (from a design perspective). For this to work the game needs to work flawlessly, because when you have to play in one hour sessions without saving the stakes are too high. Every small imperfection will pop out and pulse red! Thief wasn't perfect. We grew to love the game and now most people don't even remember the terrible mantling detection problem, because we just saved before tricky jumps. I am playing the third mission but I can't get myself to open the game again. It's a time investment that I don't feel encouraged to make. Last time I was doing fine but the guard changed his route and just started orbiting my position. I don't know if this is realistic AI or weird game design but it sucks. I was cornered. Then he just completely parked in front of the desk I was hiding under and stayed there forever. Even though the penalty for getting caught is just a pep talk from Steve it's still an extremely unsatisfying experience. When you are about to get caught it starts playing this tense throbbing music! feels like you're hiding from a xenomorph! but all that tension goes down the drain because it's just "Steve" whom upon catching you goes "uh, hey Mr. you're not supposed to be here. Let's go back to the lobby". But enough of that. I said I wasn't going into details. So anyway, it's a game with mind boggling potential! but probably too ambitious to work. I particularly like their ideas on how to handle detection, it's a new take. It's neither like an instant death nor makes the game into action filled combat simulator.

I might be! That tutorial looks complex but I would have to compare with the equivalent in OpenGL. Even then there's a risk they will both look like complex gibberish to me! There's got to be an advantage though, right? maybe it scales better when you start to get an engine up and running with modern features.

Yes! I really do miss the status thing. Why isn't this pinned yet? @STiFU Have you considered skipping ahead to Vulkan? From what I heard it drops a lot of inconveniences we have been dragging with opengl and dx and is easier to work with. Here's my game project I mentioned in that other topic:

Hah! It already exists! I'm going to move my little game project there. When I sit on my PC.

Thanks! Yeah, the pandemic is making things harder for us It's just the two of us taking care of a newborn and maintaining the apartment, all the time every day, no external help whatsoever. My wife is also a very social person so the isolation hits her particularly hard. I look forward to become a grandpa!

Sometimes I just want to come here and say stuff like "hah, how about those biscotti biscuits, eh? Tried for the first time and my mind was blown into a million tiny biscobits. They're pretty good! also, I'm a dad now. anyway, bye" But I feel a new topic would be too strong, and I'm not yet sold on the Discord. I was an avid IRC user in the past (where I met my current wife, btw) but even so discord still doesn't work for me, I don't know. So yeah, I am a dad now! that is actually a thing. He looks like me and is very tiny and I love him. Also, the easiest personality to raise a child I've ever seen! this is baby easy mode, for sure. He barely screams and cries and just generally makes my life happier. The day before he was born I was super insecure and afraid. Would I love him? would I raise him well? as soon as I held him I knew that if anything happened to him I would murder an entire football team with my bare hands and then kill myself. As grim as that sounds this is actually a good thing. Also, a good use for this topic is for all of us to dump our TDM-unrelated game dev projects! I decided to make a game for the SEGA Mega Drive (Genesis for the Americans). It's a grid platformer akin to Flashback, prince of persia, blackthorne and others. I reject the term "cinematic platformer"; I think it's silly. But, brushing aside nostalgia, the only things I like about those games is the animation, obviously, and the grid snapping. There is potential for strategic gameplay in grid-based games and I think those games I mentioned should have focused less on precision platforming and more on semi puzzle gameplay. So I'm making it a stealth game! I don't think Mega Drive has any of those yet. Having some fun with debug logs: I have currently 4 game dev projects, which I cycle through periodically, but this is my main obsession right now.