PlayMedusa

We are physically attracted to games, like moths to light or cats to red laser dots. Check our games at

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

The wait is over! Well, if you were waiting, that is. We were, for sure, because after all these years publishing our own games on multiple platforms, including this same game on Nintendo Switch... we finally published on Steam!

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

I'm leaving this social network, can't bear its owner nor everything he represents. I'll be available here

https://t.co/KbC3dPTcdq

And here

https://t.co/HXhBBcdJgL

Hope to find you there!

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

Kindly reminder that I am way more active in BlueSky and Mastodon. Sorry, but I just don't like it here.

https://t.co/FbmdaCqa89

https://t.co/YF6TMrAQWj

[Paweł Jarosz 🔜 DevGAMM, Gdańsk @pawel_developer]

Defold 1.9.4 is released now! 🥳

Devs find the new GPU instancing for models on of the best features, but there's more!

Which one do you find most useful?

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@miriamne_ Thanks! Few things are as beautiful as trigonometry! ;)

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

Oh, I entered Ludum Dare this weekend with a shameless Puyo Puyo clone for a single player - so instead of fighting someone else you must push a huge salamander back so it doesn't eat your Tiny Creatures!

https://t.co/Nx2I6LTqlg

#ldjam #ld56 #ludumdare

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

I'm slowly forgetting to use this social network - after all, I get a fraction of the human interactions I get on BlueSky and Mastodon... I don't want to close it, tho, because who knows, someday someone else may buy it from its current owner and return it its former glory?

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

This is a bug, but I had to add music before fixing.

#gamedev #bug

[islaOliva Games 👁 Developing QUO 👁 @islaOlivaGames]

Booo!

Just a reminder that if you're looking for a horror story set on #Halloween night, you can stop looking now!

Check out Horror Globes on Steam!
🎃 https://t.co/k4ECB23jDR 🎃

#indiegame #indiedev #indiegamedev #horrorgame

[Blue Oak Bridge @blueoakbridge]

⭐️Looking for content creators and streamers!⭐️ If you are interested in creating content / streaming in exchange for a Steam Key please comment below! 💙🥕🍁 #cozygame #indiegame

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@slashie_ The backlog does not control you. You control the backlog.

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@MartiansGame I love Bubble Bobble and I've been following your project since you announced it, would love to try it! :D

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@Griff_ Same here. And now my 11 and 8yo kids are reading them! They are already on the third and second book.

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

Here's his first video. Would be nice if you shared! Might be useful for someone. Certainly for my colleague, at least :D

https://t.co/Bu6XuLLFeh

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

Are you #learning #spanish? A friend of mine is starting a new project where he plays #videogames while narrating them, slowly, in Spanish, explaining vocabulary and idioms. It's certainly a fun way of practicing #listening!

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@DennisBaensch So cinematic, indeed! :D

[Martin Griffiths @Griff_]

I’m going to hijack Ray’s awesome post here and use it to talk about a particularly challenging engineering problem that we solve in No Man’s Sky, which arises as a direct consequence of our game universe being so astronomically large:

You all probably know about shaders, which are the primary basis for rendering rasterised graphics in games and also might know that large titles can have thousands of shaders, so that they can render a rich set of materials/meshes, particles, shadows, post fx .. and everything you see, in game.

We face a hard and complex task in #NoMansSky when it comes to these sort of shader combinatorics - not only as biome diversity and richness has grown over the years, but also because the exact set of shaders needed to render a planet or anything else that is procedurally generated is not known until it is calculated - nothing in NMS exists until the seeded generation produces the system, planet, ship, station (etc) or anything else that you then see on your screen! This aspect makes “shader loading” in our game more challenging than a lot of titles, where a traditionally designed/static world might allow you to have information about which shaders are going to needed, ahead of time.

One up front thing that we do know is the whole set of shaders that could possibly be needed to render anything in the game .. and right now that number is around 60 thousand. The 60 there is not a typo, but at least we can initially reduce this starting count by 2.5x with some hash reduction - it still leaves us with tens of thousands of shaders, though!

For console versions of NMS this huge shader set can be completely precompiled offline and then streamed in as needed - but on PC shaders have to be compiled and cached by the driver. To deal with such a large set requires quite a lot of extra work, in order to minimise hitching that would happen if a driver has to compile shaders (pipeline states) that it has not encountered before - Nobody on PC likes hitching, and pretty much every gamer has encountered FPS drops that are caused by this problem, across a large number of titles over the last decade, as game rendering complexity has grown.

When running from Steam, there is an embedded shader caching system, (introduced some years back) and this is very helpful for reducing initial load times or long compiles/loads when you update a driver.. but even with this system in place, every time we do a large update (or patch) that has changed a lot of our shaders, we gather data from QA - dozens of hours of real play or smoke-test shader usage, visiting hundreds of planets, dozens of stations, freighters and bases, so that we accurately know and can precompile 99.5% of the most common shaders in use, to minimise this kind of hitching - quite a mad amount of effort to solve something that is never mentioned in patch notes and all just happens behind the scenes!

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@nightblade99 Does it work on mobile?

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

I miss a lot of accounts, but I've been trying to stay away from this social network lately. My timeline is quite healthy, fortunately, but the amount of ads, the way the algorithm works, the amount of bots and mainly the weird behavior of its owner are making it too unpleasant.

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@VenalithStudio Thanks! That's one out of 6 stages and just three out of 14 enemies :)

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

All enemies implemented, backgrounds integrated, FX and music there... And we even had time to change some enemy design and add new items! Less than one month to release! Plenty of time to polish, play test and catch bugs.

#gamedev

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

@pawel_developer Will look for you if I'm not following you already ;)

[PlayMedusa @PlayMedusa]

Well, music is not there yet, only placeholders. We are still looking for something that feels good :)