#just google unity games

[the-fandom-crossroads]

Folks talking about Game Devs dropping Unity or how it won't hurt small indie devs with under 200,000. Are missing the point.

Some of these Unity games can't change to another engine because they have years of code piled on top of each other at this point. aka POKEMON GO. They'd basically have to rebuild the game from scratch.

Not to mention Unity is mostly used by phone app games or Indie's that are lucky enough to get picked up by console. Indie games on Mobile easily pass 200,000 downloads. Temple Run 1 and 2 are in Unity, Crossy Road, Angry birds 1 and 2, and Hearthstone. All of these past 200,000 downloads years ago but aren't bringing in money now except hearthstone.

The Developers will do what happened to the first Angry birds app. They'll take it down, build it in a new engine for "HD", and add a shit ton of micro transactions. We are about to lose countless original versions of the OG pre lootbox mobile games.

We are also about to lose some of the biggest Indie games of the last decade. Among Us, Plague Inc., 7 Days to die, the original Slenderman game and it's sequel, I am Bread, Ori and the Blind Forest, Dream Daddy, Overcooked 1 & 2, Pathfinder online, Cup Head, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Oxygen Not Included, Bloons Tower Defense 6, Beat Saber, Subnautica, The Stanley Parable, Untitled Goose Game, Power Washing Simulator, Fall Guys, Inscryption, Phasmophobia

And the big one FUCKING HOLLOW KNIGHT. Silk song has already been pushed back out of this year specifically because it's being made by a team of like 3 people. It is so close to being finished and now they are being told they have to start over from scratch basically. Hollow Knight got over 200,000 downloads from being on playstation and was eventually put on Playstations subscription service. Every cent they made from hollow knight has gone back into making silk song. Which might now be delayed by multiple years and oh they are going to have to use some of that funds to pay unity now. Or find a way to get out of a contract with playstation. Because folks will keep downloading Hollow Knight for free and Unity will send the Hollow Knight team the bill.

oh and there's one more teeny tiny game made in Unity that you guys might not want to suddenly disappear. One with almost 3 years of monthly code updates, one with 139 million downloads to date, and 4.8 million monthly users.

Genshin. Guys Genshin Impact is made completely in Unity and that's not a game that can have it's code just copy and pasted to another engine.

#unity #genshin impact #genshin #indie games #pokemon go #hollow knight #bendy and the ink machine #bloons td 6 #the stanley parable #untitled goose game #angry birds #hearthstone #pathfinder #dream daddy #among us #phasmophobia #i don't even know what to tag #just google unity games #and understand it is literally thousands of games #from the last decade #douglitheories

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #enshittification #semantic matching #google #antitrust #trustbusting #transparency #fatfingers #serp #the algorithm #telling on yourself

[the-timewatcher]

fuckin hate 3d development, i miss godot

#godot engine #anti unity engine #game development #sonic the hedgehog #i just wanted a kart controller why is it so floaty #and why whenever i google how to animate characters everyone just has a tutorial on downloading anims from mixamo

[shakespeare-official-account]

CONTINUING MY PARTY ORGANIZATION SHIT

You heard me, bitches. I’m organising/participating in another party; and it’s my wedding. (No clue why someone would be so suicidal, but hey, not gonna complain <3)

KNOWN ROLES

Bride: me, by some extremely confusing and completely welcomed turn of events

Spouse: @thesmallestclown :3

The disowned parent who says “im proud of you”: @eharmony-official

Co-organiser: @unity-real

Bridesmaids: @india-official @swearification-and-cursing @gimmickswag

Guests of Honour:

The +1 who everyone loves:

Best Bitch: Belt from the Croods Movie

Ring-kids: @nanochittle @real-hottopic @femboy-hooters-official @gibberish-anon-from-hell @zoe-can-see-the-stars-again @actually-kroger @/darthpastry

stealing and eating cake; throwing purple glitter: @/nanochittle, me and @/thesmallestclown: @official-denmark

Grandkid who’s supplying glitter: @darthpastry/walmart

Aunt: @i-bless-your-heart

Caterers: @shakesberes-ghost @the-actual-reliance totally-france

Decorations: @totally-ikea

Professional arsonist and criminal: @confusedhomicidalrage

Hovering awkwardly in a corner: @cleric-posting (also getting rug burn)

The one stealing a bunch of random shit: @nanochittle @totally-france

Telling battle stories to kids in a corner: @its-target-official

Asleep/reading/listening to music/ignoring everyone: @jollibee-real

“Who the hell is this guy”: @nila-sings

creepy staring goth guy: @the-one-and-only-duckduckgo

Eating corpses (and wings) from dumpsters: @bananamantallyhall

Selling shady stuff from their trenchcoat: @somekindofgimmickblog

The one who’s playing a video game: @just-another-fan-of

@the-real-google: the great-great-great grandparent who everyone finds really cool

Officiator: @is-this-shakesperean-accurate

Actually being a normal audience: @mcgeese @nickelodeonfake

Spending time with the cat: @the-real-gmail and I

INVITEES ( POTENTIAL ROLES INCLUDED):

@france-unofficial @totally-france @the-official-italy @/the-official-potatoo: caterers

@gimmick-thief: the one stealing a bunch of random shit

Other invitees: @artemis-lynn @bingle-official @i-identify-as-an-ominous-threat @its-sanrio-official @unity-real @the-official-publix @brains4ne

ANYONE CAN JOIN!! PARTICIPATION IS OBVIOUSLY NOT NECESSARY, PLEASE IGNORE/TELL ME NOT TO TAG YOU IN SHIT IF YOU WANT!! If you’ve asked for a role on a rb, I’ll either reply to the post and tag you; or just add you straight away.

#shakespeare #shakespeare approves #william shakespeare #small clowns are cool :)

[foone]

As the person I follow who does reverse engineering, do you have any suggestions for finding resources on reverse engineering Android apps?

Specifically, there's an app I'm playing with, where after seeing the structure of the "export as Markdown" output I want to know what the internal structure and representation of the data is. The end goal of understanding it is to be able to add certain kinds of data dynamically, rather than up front. That's certainly doable typing in raw markdown, but being able to do it "app style" would be more convenient.

The google Play Store entry does not mention any open source licenses, or looking for the source code and hopefully a git repo or something would have been my first step.

(I'll probably need to bang together a crappy app to do what I really want regardless, but maybe this app's data structure would be more convenient than doing so with markdown.)

So, android stuff:

First you need the APK. You can do some trickery with your phone to pull it over the ADB connection if you install the android SDK, but generally I just google "app name APK" and you'll find some greymarket site that'll give you a copy.

Secondly, APKs are just ZIP files (JAR files, technically, but JAR files are also just ZIP files!). Unzip them and you can find lots of interesting stuff, often.

For disassembling/decompiling them, my go-to program is jadx. It's a java decompiler that's been around a while and can natively open APK files and decompile them. There's some weirder new APKs that it can't handle (something to do with a newer bytecode revision, I think?) but I can't recall the details on how you handle those. Those are rare, in my experience. jadx is pretty good, but you'll occasionally find methods or entire classes that it just can't figure out, and it'll give you a bytecode dump. I don't yet have a good solution for those, other than "get good at reading JVM bytecode".

If you're dealing with games, another useful thing can be UABE and dotPeek. These are unity/C# tools, but you would be surprised how many android games (and non-games!) are actually unity under the hood.

Bluestacks can also be useful, because it'll let you run the app on your desktop and that can be handy for things like running WireShark to log all network traffic.

Speaking of logging, the other handy thing I've done is enabling android developer mode on my phone to get to one specific option: Bluetooth HCI snoop log.

Now, actually getting that log is tricky and varies from phone to phone, because for some reason manufacturers like to move it around, but it's one of the best ways to reverse engineer bluetooth communication stuff. You basically turn on the log and everything your phone does to communicate with your Smart Toothbrush or whatever will be logged to a file, then you can yank that file over and stuff it into Wireshark.

So... hopefully some of that is a helpful start? I've not done a huge amount of Android reversing so I'm not super familiar with the tools used, but these are the ones I've got on hand for when I do.

also sorry for all the horny robotgirl posters who saw "android reverse engineering" in the tags and thought this was gonna be about taking them apart with screwdrivers and rooting around in their insides. Not today!

#reverse engineering #android reverse engineering

[detectivehole]

announcing my new indi horror game Sinbble Snorf's Sleepy Time where titular Snibble Snorf, a contender for this years champion of "Worlds Dumbest Character Design," chases the player around a house i bought on unity while playing free use audio clips backwards. when Snibble catches the player they "go to sleep" and a jpg of jeff the killer i found in google images pops up for a second along with just a god awful stock scream noise. my target audience is 9year olds and 39yo lets-players. i expect a billion dollars in inexplicable toy sales

#mine

[yeehaww-sims]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!

I'm only a little late, but better late than never!! Today I have for you: 16 recolours and an overlay, totaling to 17 pieces of cc!

I know some of these have been recoloured for pride before, but I've never been happy with some of them, so I did it myself!

This started out as a personal recolour series for myself and my partner, but I wanted to share it with everyone! Because of that, please note that certain flags/terms were chosen with my personal wants/preferences in mind first, and then others I thought others might want/are never included in any recolour. If a flag is included that isn't the most popular version of it, or feels as though it might not fit, this would be why.

BGC, some meshes included, some not.

150 swatches per item, not including the overlays.

Overlays are located in the Toenail category.

The hoodies are an update to This Piece of CC that I made last year, and will replace the originals.

I realize this is a LOT of flags. It’s a lot for me to even remember. Feel free to remove swatches you’re not going to use, the original will always remain up if you want any back!

I won't be doing flag requests for these, but if you have a flag you'd like to see in game, may I interest you in This?

Every single item uses the same flags; if you feel something doesn't fit a particular piece of CC that's not my problem.

Don’t claim it as your own, and please feel free to tag me if you use it!

Most textures were sourced from Pride-Flags Deviant art, LGBTA Wiki, Tumblr, Twitter, or google search.

T[SW]ERFS/Bigots/Exclus die! You are not welcome to this CC :)

DOWNLOAD: [SFS] | [MF]

Meshes: [Answer] [Illusion] [Paper Plane] [Circle Earring]* [Bottlecap Earring]* [Adult Hoodies] [Bandana]* [Necklaces] [Child Hoodie] [Binder] * = REQUIRED

Below is a list of every flag included. Some flags include uncensored reclaimed slurs. If you don’t care for/disagree with a flag/term, just delete it from the file. I do not care, I will not be involved in any discourse, and if you message me about it, I will just ignore you. Please respect my boundaries. Thank you. Happy pride!

See also: [Pronoun Hoodies] [More Pride Flags v2] [Pride Thigh Highs] <- Made by my partner, using the same flags as below!

Usually I would link every single flag, but Tumblr refused to let me save the post while I was in the process of doing so. So, instead, you can find all the flag's sources and meanings [HERE]

[Rainbow Flag] [Gilbert Baker 8 Stripe] [Gilbert Baker Diversity] [Philadelphia Pride] [Progress] [Progress + Intersex] [QPOC] [Gay Anarchy] [Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism] [Abrosexual]

[Achillean] [Agender] [AlloAce] [AlloAro] [Alterhuman] [Amatopunk] [Androgynous] [Angled AroAce] [Aromantic] [Aroflux]

[Aroflux] [Aromantic Spectrum] [AroAce] [AroAce Spectrum] [Asexual] [Aceflux] [Aceflux 2] [Asexual Spectrum] [Autigender] [Bear]

[Bigender] [Bigender 2] [Bisexual] [Bi Gay] [Bi Lesbian] [Boyflux] [Bungender] [Catgender] [Ceterosexual]

[Cinthean] [Demiboy] [Demigirl] [Demigender] [Demiromantic] [Demisexual] [Diamoric] [Dollboy] [Dyke] [Enbian]

[Enbian] [Faggot] [Femme] [Futch] [Gay Man/Vincian] [Gay Man/Vincian 2] [Gay Man Double Mars] [GENDERANARCHY] [Genderfae] [Genderfaun]

[Genderfluid] [Genderflux] [Genderless] [Genderpunk] [Genderqueer] [Gendervoid] [Gendervoid 2] [Girlflux] [Greyromantic] [Greysexual]

[Heartless Aromantic] [Homoflexible] [Inclusionist] [Intergender] [Intersex] [Intersex 2] [Leather] [Lesbian] [Lesbian 2] [Lesbian Labrys]

[Lesbian Trans Labrys] [Lesbian Trans Labrys 2] [Lesbian Sappho] [Lesbian apersnickitylemon] [Lesbian Double Venus] [Lesboy] [Loveless Aromantic] [Loveless Aromantic 2] [Loveloose] [Lovequeer]

[Maverique] [Multigender] [Multisexual] [Multisexual Spectrum] [M-spec Gay] [M-spec Lesbian] [Nebularomantic] [Nebulasexual] [Neurogender] [Neutrois]

[Nonbinary] [Nonhuman Unity] [Non-SAM Aromantic] [Objectum Sexual] [Omnisexual] [Omni Gay] [Omni Lesbian] [Oriented AroAce] [Otherkin & Kingender] [Pangender]

[Pansexual] [Pan Gay] [Pan Lesbian] [Polyamorous] [Polyamorous 2] [Polyamorous 3] [Polygender] [Polysexual] [Ply Gay] [Ply Lesbian]

[Pupgender] [Queer Anarchy] [Queer Chevron] [Queer] [Queerplatonic] [Sapphic] [Stargender] [Systemfluid] [Therian] [Tomboy]

[Transgender] [Transandrogynous] [Transaporine] [Transfeminine] [Transfeminine 2] [Transmasculine] [Transmasculine 2] [TransNeuFem] [TransNeuMasc] [Transneutral]

[Transneutral] [Transoutherine] [Transxenine] [Trigender] [Twink] [Two-spirit] [Unlabeled] [Unlabeled Gender] [Voidpunk] [Xenogender]

🏳‍🌈🏳‍🌈🏳‍🌈🏳‍🌈🏳‍🌈

@maxismatchccworld @mmfinds @ts4pride @emilyccfinds @sssvitlanz

#ts4 #the sims 4 #sims 4 #ts4 pride #sims 4 pride #my cc #ts4cc #ts4 cc #pride flag #custom content #pride #gay #trans #lesbian #nonbinary #bisexual #pansexual #asexual #aromantic #xenogender #mogai #lgbt #lgbtq #omnisexual #polysexual #polyamorous #otherkin #alterhuman #therian #reclaimed slurs

[krisp-xyz]

Found your work. You inspired me to take another shot at technical art and graphics programming. Do you recommend any specific resources for getting started and beyond?

Thanks so much! Really glad I could inspire you to do that bc graphics and tech art things are so much fun :D

(Also sorry for the late response. I've been a bit busy and was also thinking about how I wanted to format this)

I'm mostly self taught with a lot of stuff and have done lots of research on a per-project basis, but Acerola and Freya Holmer are two of my favorite channels for learning graphics or technical art things. Shadertoy is also an amazing resource to not only create and view other's shaders, but learn about algorithms and see how people do things!

While I don't have many general resources. I'll steal these resources for graphics programming that Acerola shared in his discord server:

For getting started with graphics engine development: DX11: https://www.rastertek.com/tutdx11s3.html OpenGL: https://learnopengl.com/ DX12: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d12/directx-12-programming-guide Vulkan: https://vulkan-tutorial.com/

For getting started with shaders: catlikecoding: https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/rendering/ the book of shaders: https://thebookofshaders.com/ daniel ilett's image effects series: https://danielilett.com/2019-04-24-tut1-intro-smo/

For getting started with compute shaders: Kyle Halladay: http://kylehalladay.com/blog/tutorial/2014/06/27/Compute-Shaders-Are-Nifty.html Ronja: https://www.ronja-tutorials.com/post/050-compute-shader/ Three Eyed Games (this one teaches ray tracing AND compute shaders, what a bargain!): http://three-eyed-games.com/2018/05/03/gpu-ray-tracing-in-unity-part-1/

I also wanted to talk a little bit about I do research for projects!

A lot of my proficiency in shaders just comes from practice and slowly building a better understanding of how to best utilize the tools at my disposal, almost like each project is solving a puzzle and I want to find the most optimal solution I can come up with.

This is definitely easier said than done and while a lot of my proficiency comes from just doodling around with projects and practicing, I understand that "just practice more lol" is a boring and kinda unhelpful answer. When it comes to projects like my lighting engine, I came up with a lot of the algorithm stuff myself, but there were certainly lots of details that I learned about from past projects and research like ray marching (calculating the ray intersection of a distance function) and I learned about the jump flood algorithm from a tech artist friend (calculating distance functions from textures)

Each new algorithm you learn in various projects ends up being another tool in your toolbox, and each project becomes a combination of researching new tools and applying the tools you've learned in the past.

One last example. I made a Chladni plate simulation in blender (that thing where you put sand on a metal plate and play noises and it makes patterns) and it started with me researching and looking up chladni plates, I watched youtube videos related to why the sand forms the patterns it does, which ended up being due to how the sound waves displaced the plane. I googled some more and found the actual equation that represents it, and used it to simulate particle motion.

Figure out some projects you want to do and just do some googling or ask for help in game dev discord servers or whatever. Lot's of research on a per-project basis is honestly how you'll learn the most imo :3

#game dev #guide

[wauzmons]

New Biome + Free Demo Update + Another Art Contest Soon

World Generation

I've been working a lot on improving the world generation and also made it a lot faster, meaning no more annoying waiting when entering an area in Aquatic Stage!

Cell Stage: 4 seconds -> 3 seconds

Aquatic Stage: 26 seconds -> 6 seconds 🔥

I'll soon be able to reveal the second aquatic biome and since it's Halloween soon, it will be extra spooky! Just like with the Vine Reef, it will be just terrain for now. So no other creatures yet.

Free Demo

A lot of people have asked what will happen with the free demo now, since I "leaked" the Patreon version during the Unity incident. Both Cell and Aquatic Stage will stay completely free from now on and will also receive regular updates! The google drive link will be removed soon and it will be downloadable directly from the website instead.

Everything from creature stage onwards, including the big 0.4.0 update, planned for the end of the year, will be Patreon exclusive.

Art Contest

Once we reach 20,000 wishlists on Steam (18,935 currently), I want to hold another art contest, giving you the ability to directly influence future updates of the game! This will also be the first time that you can submit your concept art through Tumblr!

You can wishlist Elysian Eclipse here.

#elysian eclipse

[nancythedrew]

A lot of these preview environments look really nice but remember how those original views for MID looked great but when actually viewed from various angles with the game mechanics they definitely didn’t measure up? 

and then even just from the corner animation we get of the character it still has that distinctly “NPC” movement that the character animations in MID had. Hard to explain but the character doesn’t seem heavy enough and its movements seem like they’re there just show ~look this character is alive and moving~

ALSO the coffee “puzzle”? It’s just another cooking minigame! HeR already had a cooking minigame template programmed and ready to go from MID, not to mention the dozens of others who have already made coffee making minigames on Unity if you do a google.

Give me a character animation with mouth movements synced up to dialogue that doesn’t sound like it was recorded on a calculator. Give me a puzzle that’s more difficult than an experiment testing the object permanence of a parrot that hasn’t already been done by a dozen other people just fucking around with Unity. Give me a plot that you’ll actually be willing to discuss and defend afterward if we send in follow up questions and aren’t just gonna get shoved under the rug because you’re too focused on “other projects.”

#nancy drew #nd34

[pb-s-corner]

LOLRUST’S (.Flow’s creator) FUN FACTS

While searching for more canon facts for .flow, I couldn’t really find much about the game, but man did I find silly things about him, so here are the most important ones

THIS POST RECOLLECTS Lol’s ANSWERS IN TWITTER FROM September 20, 2023 (actually, November 14, 2023) TO March 23, 2024, BUT WILL UPDATE ITSELF DEPENDING ON HOW INTERESTING HIS NEW POSTS ARE.

EVERYTHING WAS TRANSLATED USING GOOGLE. LONG POST STARTS NOW

-He is a Vtuber (In case you somehow didn't know), Here is his Youtube channel

-He is self-taught in music Marsh-QnA

-This is his Amazon Whislist Click here if you want to buy him something I guess

-His advice for crating RPG games is find a balance between what you want to do and what you are capable of doing. Marsh-QnA

-He uses Studio One for his music, but used to use Piston Collage. Marsh-QnA

-The audio of a girl crying that is usually put on his games is not a recording he made, it’s an audio from the internet, he just processed it. Marsh-QnA

-This is the prototype drawing he made of Mimimi-chan many, MANY years ago Consider he posted this on 2021

SOFT GORE WARNING

Twitter

-He used to make games with RPG Maker, but now uses Unity Marsh-QnA

I don’t know how to add this one, but I found it very cute so…

#.flow #dotflow #lolrust #mimimi-chan #text post #yume nikki fangame #ynfg

[mahvaladara]

Have I become sensitive?

When I was a teen and young adult I could watch gore shows without batting an eyelid. Be it horror movies, mangas, animes or games. I would sit through SAW and point out the flaws in the traps and ways to survive them if the heroes were smart. I laughed at Texas Chainsaw ending tantrum. But... something clicked to me a few years ago. All because I decided to google, after the infamous 'decapitation' scene of the AC - Unity trailer, can one remain conscious after decap and for how long? All because I was trying to understand for an imortal what could be worse than loosing the people you love. The moment I started realizing and understanding the amount of physical pain your body can process... Suddenly... I no longer can watch gore without my nerves physically cringing at it. Like, somehow, my brain, now that it theoretically knows how it feels, can process the horror of it.

Is this normal or am I just too sensitive?

#mahv rants

[celleryeller]

Game design thoughts- Superliminal

I’ve decided, for shits and giggles and bettering my analysis skills, that I’ll write and post some thought about the game design of games I’m playing for the first time. Not a rating or anything, just a sort of what I learned from it

I just finished Superliminal on the Xbox. Only took around 2 hours for a solid first playthrough. Made in Unity, released 2019.

The main mechanics were around perspective. Unfortunately, this playthrough wasn’t completely blind, because there was a gif set or promo trailer floating around Tumblr a couple years ago, and it showed the mechanics before I got a chance to figure them out myself. But, the premise is picking up objects, and their size depends on the actual perspective when you drop it.

I think those mechanics are pretty fucking cool. I would love to see how the idea was originally prototyped. Or how they came up with the idea. Honestly tomorrow morning I might look into if the creators have done any interviews or anything.

The tutorial was pretty sick though. Instead of ui elements floating and telling you what to do, everything was written on objects in the game. My favorite was “press a to jump” being on a wet floor sign.

Narratively, it did make me ponder about brute forcing puzzles, and trying the same thing over and over. There was one puzzle I was stuck on near the end that I only decided to change perspectives on after I noticed the classic game trick of teleporting the player to create a feeling of infinite looping. While I didn’t walk away fundamentally changed, I did gain a new perspective on how I do puzzles.

The juice was pretty good, too. It got me giddy to pull every fire alarm and use up every fire extinguisher just because the option was there. There might also be achievements for doing that each level? Idk. Superliminal also had some good (although a little too loud) controller shake when an object was made huge and dropped on the ground. There was text I couldn’t read on papers that I wanted to read. The loading screens were great too, and while the bar animations weren’t accurate, the variation and weirdness for each one made up for it.

The limitations, unfortunately, were a touch obvious. The edges of light could shine through objects in a way that initiated something was up. Too many objects bumping around (which didn’t happen often) made a god awful sound. Screen hiccups happened a lot. Honestly, all of it was bearable, but the first one in particular just made me think about how light does that and it pisses me off as a developer that I can’t control it.

Other thoughts:

The walking around and setting felt very reminiscent of The Stanley Parable, especially in the repeated opening segments.

Music cutoffs were well placed and heavily affected the tone.

Late game played heavily with dream with dream sensation, and so perfectly emulated the dream feeling of looking at everything right side up while it feels like you’re laying down.

Played with the medium. I mentioned earlier that it used teleportation for infinite hallway tricks, but at some point it just started teleporting you for the purpose of being jarring.

On a similar note, it loved to play with the first person camera. It knew that you couldn’t look behind you, so it had complete free range to silently change whatever you weren’t looking at. Then when everything was breaking down, it started fucking with you and changing things as you looked at them, so you only saw the change once you moved

There was one level intended to be eerie, and it did that so well it made me google “is Superliminal scary.” The answer is no. I’m just a bit of a paranoid fraidy cat. It ended with a joke so good I instantly forgave it for making me scared.

The humor was also pretty good. It’s a good reminder that games can bet serious AND a little bit silly with it.

The piano music was superb

The options menu was simple and bland. It didn’t need to be anything else. Everything it had could simple fall under “gameplay” or “audio” settings.

Conformed to the wonderful idea that text to speech voices are evil. Fuck tik tok.

Overall, it was a sick game! I might do a couple more replays tomorrow. Or I’ll move to something else.

#yelling #game design thoughts #I’m not sold on calling these ‘game design thoughts’ but eh. it’s true at least #superliminal

[devsgames]

Do you know what's up with the Windows Defender warnings that sometimes pop up on game maker projects and/or exe's? I have had this thing happen where I wanted to show friends my wip-stuff, and their Windows would go through the whole routine of "we have blocked functions, do you want to run this anyway?" The idea that I would upload something to itch.io only for random people worrying that I might be trying to infect their devices with malware puts a damper on wanting to make stuff to share in the first place

This was something that actually came up a few weeks ago in my Discord (I believe @vissadev had to deal with it on one of their projects). I honestly have little experience with it myself - Windows is either cool with my Unity executables or executing them mostly via Steam like most of my users do must certify it better. I imagine embedded web builds would probably not trigger this behaviour, if that's an option.

To get around this apparently you can also submit your applications to Microsoft for scan/review, wherein they look at it and go "oh it's just a game" and then update their registry to stop that from happening. Other antiviruses usually have an option to do that as well. It's probably best saving this process for shipping and just dealing with the warnings while you're still in development or adding exceptions to your antivirus, it might be annoying but submitting builds as you go could be even more annoying. It's not a great system but it's probably better than nothing!

I will say though that you shouldn't let that deter you from sharing your work! Like, it's going to be pretty inevitable that antivirus will false-positive your builds at some point or another, and I think most users when downloading a game are pretty good at recognizing the difference between secret virus or just a dang video game. It's just part of the process and doesn't really reflect poorly on you - it's not like you're actually sending people malware! If it's done through itch it's at least a little more legitimate as opposed to those Discord attacks where people DM randos with a 1kb file saying "please play my game".

Heck, I think especially on itchio where people download hasty little game jam titles labelled "My First Game_v12__FINAL_2.0_026" on a regular basis I think you're probably fine if it's not a shipped game. :)

(Also I just Googled it, apparently this is frequently reported in GameMaker and they have some recommendations to address it as well!)

#If anyone knows if there's some kind of GameMaker-specific setting to get around this plz feel free to reply! #asks #ask

[rabbivole]

my graphics professor is telling us to find groups for the self-directed final project, which is fairly open-ended; he suggests either some kind of informational video about a topic or a small interactive unity thing

i know what i want to do, which is a small proof-of-concept for a photography game ala interior worlds, umurangi generation, etc. this feels relatively attainable and would also demonstrate some unity/3d graphics concepts; a zoom on a camera is just a fragment shader, and you can do other fun photo filters/effects with convolutions and shit. i originally wanted to do this in VR when it was an idea i had for the VR class. having to hold your controllers in front of your face like you're taking a picture would be cute and i think i know how to implement that. however i'd have to borrow a quest from the department and uuuuggghh who has the energy (plus i'd have to look the hardware guy in the eye again after he saw me at my lowest point in the VR class)

however this has to be a group project. i know absolutely nobody; i haven't even been going to the QA sessions. he made a google doc where we can either pitch our idea for other people to potentially sign up for, or put our name down for an existing team and idea. and i am completely paralyzed by this. i talked to one girl in office hours who was cool and she's in a group that has an empty slot but i feel like a weirdo just. putting my name down. even though that's what i'm ostensibly supposed to do

i guess i could just slam my dick on the table and put my name down alone with 'i want to make a weird unity photography game' and be That Guy. the professor's going to auto-combine underfull groups anyway. somebody already put down that they want to make a groundhog day-esque game with horror/surrealism/nostalgia elements so i guess i'm at least not the only That Guy. i'm fine with anything as long as i don't have to make a fucking explainer video about nfts

#making me do group work with people i don't know already fills me with despair #making me do group work that is self-directed and creative with people i don't know makes me chew my own arms off #this is my saw trap

[shadowxamyweek]

I FOUND A MOBILE CHAO GARDEN

I have never met a community so long lasting and so dedicated as Sonic's. 'Oh Sega won't do this? Well fuck that' and people just MAKING the games and stuff they want. Amazing. Stellar. Love the energy.

Behold, the one (and only) Chao Garden mobile game currently on the Google Play Store.

WELCOME TO POCKET CHAO GARDEN!

I will say before I continue that yes, it's a bit buggy, and no, it doesn't have all the features I wish it did, but it's only about a year old and it is very clearly run by a one-person team. It is, basically, a Chao-themed Tamagatchi virtual pet made via the Unity engine. For what it is, I think it's super cute and I look forward to seeing what upgrades are done to it.

The garden itself is styled after the Tiny Chao Garden of the Advance games. Your energy and hunger bars are along the top. The menue, being opened by clicking the tab, has a shop, a game list, a chao stats meter, and a daily reward component.

You've got a bunch of different easy to play minigames. All minigames give you coins to buy things in the shop. Games also boost different stats. If you want to join the chap races, you will want to balance your stats out to get maximum effectiveness. However, if you don't care to do so, just play your favorites.

(Last three pictures take from the game listing to provide visual examples)

I don't believe any of these games have a real 'end' so it's just that you loose/finish whenever you do. As such, at least for me, it provides a low-stress experience.

Again, it's a little buggy, but it's nothing that makes the game unplayable. It's also only about a year old and has a team of 1 person making sure it works, so I've got no real complaints.

And best part is that it's free.

And I mean completely free. No free-to-play but pay-to-win, no gatcha gimmicks, no anything with real cash. 100% free.

I love free stuff. It's my favorite type of stuff.

So yeah! If you've been waiting for a game like this, this very well may be a good fit for you. And hey, the more attention and love this gets, the more likely the person who made it will upgrade and add onto it!

So go try it out!

#sonic #sega #sth #chao #chao garden #free game #mobile game #chao game #sonic chao #chao fountain