HardwoodLogic

Game dev working on Conclave Hockey, a physics-driven first-person hockey sim

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

Conclave Hockey has a new fight engine! 🏒👊

Fights are now entirely first person and physics-based with procedural animations, mouse-based head movement, and dynamic grappling.

Jabs, straights, hooks, overhands and uppercuts are thrown dynamically from orthodox or southpaw based on distance and positioning.

Stamina and health meters are gone. For maximum immersion, visual cues and dynamic facial damage indicate who's being dragged into deep waters.

And the dragging might be literal. You can now grab your opponent with the left or right hand (or both!), and attempt to pull them off-balance with a sweep of your mouse. Be careful, as your opponent can do the same to you.

Facial damage is procedural and location-based. Noses can be broken, eyes swollen shut, lacerations and bruising formed. Blood drips and splashes dynamically. Now it's possible for you to be covered in blood that isn't yours. Fun!

As in real hockey fights, defense is less about keeping your guard up and more about keeping your head off the center line. Slips and rolls are now possible with precise mouse control.

And as a quick reminder, you can trigger a fight at any time during active gameplay by rapidly tapping right click. Left mouse button controls left hand, right controls right hand. Click to punch, hold to grab.

Have fun, boppers.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

Can confirm: Fight Night died because there is no one company or association for EA to negotiate with for licensing fighters. They had to negotiate with every boxer's estate individually for every game in the series. Living boxers like Mayweather were negotiating for massive fees that made each subsequent Fight Night game more difficult and costly to develop. With the UFC, one license gets all fighters. Too bad it doesn't necessarily lead to a better game. 😅

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

@ForwardEditor I love the quote "fearful when others are greedy, greedy when others are fearful". Having some patience, buying the drop and holding for life is key.

But it's not nearly as fun as the other thing. :)

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

"It also argues that today’s models already have capabilities the wider economy has barely begun to use."

Most people I know have never even heard of Anthropic, and maybe a couple use free ChatGPT to write birthday cards and emails. There is no precedent for a technological revolution most people have no clue about.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

@claudeai Welp I guess I should just set Anthropic up with direct deposit straight from my bank account! They're on a mission to take all my money.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

One of gaming's most storied studios has closed, and it doesn't even make the news.

We're all so occupied with fighting each other over whether AI and the democratization of game dev are evil, when the reality is that billion-dollar publishers have spent years buying up your favorite studios, wringing them dry for every cent of shareholder value, and discarding the remains.

I don't love AI. I support AI in that it allows me and anyone else to make ideas real. If any other technology did the same, I'd laud that too.

Multiple things can be true. The gaming industry is on fire. The biggest publishers in the industry add 0 value for gamers or studios. And there's never been a better time to make games.

[🚨 AI News | TestingCatalog @testingcatalog]

ANTHROPIC 🔥: According to The Information, Anthropic will release a new model this month, along with Gemini 4 Carbon and a new Terra model from OpenAI.

> "The unreleased model is especially good at discerning a person’s underlying intentions and goals even if they don’t give the model much information."

> "The Anthropic model is also better at thinking outside of the box rather than regurgitating common sense advice or solutions."

> "It’s not clear which model family Anthropic will fall into, such as Fable or Opus."

Thinking outside of the box is a huge limitation these days. If we get a model that can do it reliably, we'll be properly transitioning into the "Innovators" stage.

The line about "discerning underlying intentions" is a bit scary, though, given all the guardrails.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

Opus 5.5 is amazing, and often feels to me like the first model to deliver on the true promise of AI.

However, my biggest sticking point with it and every previous model, both from Anthropic and OpenAI, are the mind-numbing little subtitles they add to every output.

"Walk the line. Shoot through traffic."
"Bottom-six grinders live at the crease."
"A quarterback up top."

I see this flavor text on every game demo, app and site on X. It's the last glaring IYKYK indication that something was made with AI.

If this gets fixed, I'm calling it AGI. 😂

[Synthetic Beef @SyntheticBeef]

Most games fail. I made ~$2 million in my solo indie gave dev career which puts me in the top 0.1% of solo indie game devs. You know how many of my games I consider a financial success?

One. 80% of that revenue was one game. Paid for the rest. If you're in software for the money, game dev is not the way to go. Divide my revenue up over the hours I worked, subtract expenses, and I made about what the average junior software engineer makes working for a big company. A third of what I make now.

Make games because you love to make games. Make them with a.i. if you love a.i. Make them without a.i. if you enjoy that. But know that you've picked a market where your odds of financial success are about as low as they possibly can be for a software engineer whether you use a.i. or not.

So many anti-ai haters are throwing stones in a glass house. The amount of "indie game dev" labels I see on people's profiles who have never shipped a game in their life is absurd. Ship a game first, then talk shit. But know that you're talking shit, not speaking the truth. I don't know what motivates people who have never shipped a game in their life to tell other people that their game will fail, but if you're on the other end of this, just know that they have no idea what they are talking about. Nobody does.

Gamedev is even less understood than filmmaking and 80% of the 600 films that hit theatres every year are financial flops. 99% of advice in gamedev is complete bullshit. Millions of games get made, some of them succeed, then the successful devs give talks at GDC like they knew what they were doing. Then a bunch of people copy that formula and fail. There is no formula. Do your own thing. Explore. Discover something nobody else has discovered. Create a new mechanic. Go crazy. And enjoy the process.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

Why is it always breaking news that a frontier AI lab is testing a future model in addition to the upcoming one? 😂

If any frontier lab is like "We did it, boys. This is the last one," that is real news haha.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

@gsimone And every vibe coding game harness like Tesana and Rosebud 😅 RIP

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

I lose more fights in Conclave Hockey than I'd like to admit, but I managed to put Coldstone away after a spirited bout!

I love that CPU opponents push and pull, and use head movement to slip and roll, just like I do. This results in every fight looking and feeling way more realistic than the voxel graphics would imply.

Notice the refs circling as well, ready to jump in as soon as there's a lull or a finish. All the tiny details add up.

Made with Opus 5.5 @threejs @ClaudeDevs

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

@lastraum Thanks very much, my friend! Looking forward to more of your Spawn creations!

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

Conclave Hockey has a new fight engine! 🏒👊

Fights are now entirely first person and physics-based with procedural animations, mouse-based head movement, and dynamic grappling.

Jabs, straights, hooks, overhands and uppercuts are thrown dynamically from orthodox or southpaw based on distance and positioning.

Stamina and health meters are gone. For maximum immersion, visual cues and dynamic facial damage indicate who's being dragged into deep waters.

And the dragging might be literal. You can now grab your opponent with the left or right hand (or both!), and attempt to pull them off-balance with a sweep of your mouse. Be careful, as your opponent can do the same to you.

Facial damage is procedural and location-based. Noses can be broken, eyes swollen shut, lacerations and bruising formed. Blood drips and splashes dynamically. Now it's possible for you to be covered in blood that isn't yours. Fun!

As in real hockey fights, defense is less about keeping your guard up and more about keeping your head off the center line. Slips and rolls are now possible with precise mouse control.

And as a quick reminder, you can trigger a fight at any time during active gameplay by rapidly tapping right click. Left mouse button controls left hand, right controls right hand. Click to punch, hold to grab.

Have fun, boppers.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

@Satior420 @threejs Thank you, my friend! :) The CPU gives as good as it gets. I am regularly walloped in my own game 😆

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

I am consistently surprised and in awe of the things that are made possible with @threejs. The way that kinetics work in Conclave, with very few canned animations, allows Conclave to punch way above its weight in the hockey space.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

Conclave Hockey has a new fight engine! 🏒👊

Fights are now entirely first person and physics-based with procedural animations, mouse-based head movement, and dynamic grappling.

Jabs, straights, hooks, overhands and uppercuts are thrown dynamically from orthodox or southpaw based on distance and positioning.

Stamina and health meters are gone. For maximum immersion, visual cues and dynamic facial damage indicate who's being dragged into deep waters.

And the dragging might be literal. You can now grab your opponent with the left or right hand (or both!), and attempt to pull them off-balance with a sweep of your mouse. Be careful, as your opponent can do the same to you.

Facial damage is procedural and location-based. Noses can be broken, eyes swollen shut, lacerations and bruising formed. Blood drips and splashes dynamically. Now it's possible for you to be covered in blood that isn't yours. Fun!

As in real hockey fights, defense is less about keeping your guard up and more about keeping your head off the center line. Slips and rolls are now possible with precise mouse control.

And as a quick reminder, you can trigger a fight at any time during active gameplay by rapidly tapping right click. Left mouse button controls left hand, right controls right hand. Click to punch, hold to grab.

Have fun, boppers.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

In light of recent features and save functions added to Conclave Hockey, I've decided to make it Download Only on Itch.

The in-browser build was way older and simply no longer representative of how far the game has come along. I'll probably lose some early players with this decision, but I want people to experience the true vision and direction of the game if they choose to visit.

I'm mulling a Steam release, but I'd like to iron out some rough edges first and make sure the quality and amount of content meet my standards. It's well on its way, but it isn't quite there yet.

Conclave will continue to be 100% free until a Steam launch, and there is no ETA on that yet.

Some folks will call my game slop no matter what I do, and they'll probably come up with some creative names for me too! But for anyone who just enjoys a passion project, I want those people to feel like they got their money's worth in addition to my eternal gratitude.

Time to get back to work!

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

This was the furthest thing from a one-shot. My first prompt was a novel, compiled from 20ish notes I had jotted on my phone over the past month. The initial output was okay, but plenty of back-and-forth and human testing was needed for honing the game feel and finding the fun.

For all 3 of you who might be curious, here are a few facts and figures for implementing this feature.

Model: Opus 5.5 (Medium) - No plan mode (I find that planning often leads to overengineering)

My first prompt: 1020 words

Total prompts: 15

Total time: 15 hours

Commits: 8

New lines of code added: 5,600

Claude Code output: 1M tokens

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

The seed for this idea was simply that I missed first person fighting in NHL games. Remember when Zack Stortini consulted on NHL 10? What a time to be alive!

But I also wanted to make sure that if I implemented something like that, it would have to improved upon in every way, and feel distinctively Me. Ego Prime, right?

My objectives were twofold:
-Fights in Conclave should feel as chaotic as they look IRL
-Winning and losing should feel equally fun and hilarious to me

Mission accomplished, I'd say.

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

@TokenGremlin Haha I've downgraded from the 200$ GPT to 20$ and I'm mainlining 100$ Claude. I alternate from month to month. I'm right in the middle of the lunacy 😆

[HardwoodLogic @HardwoodLogic]

@bijanbowen You're going to have it build Slappis into a real watch company, aren't you? 😆