Still Hollow Games

Solo dev at Still Hollow Games.

Making ElfCraft: The Toymaker's Tale — a cozy factory builder set in an ancient workshop.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@klara_sjo I love this.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@owensmowen_ The parenthetical apology for juice work is extremely relatable. Feel is content, no notes.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

When a factory builder hands you a new item and your whole line is suddenly wrong, which are you?

#factorybuilder #solodev #indiegamedev #indiedev #indiegame #cozygames #gamedev

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@SkunkDev The squint test is undefeated. If you can tell them apart with your eyes half closed on a small screen, you've already won most of the readability fight. These look clean and tight.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@PsychoCasket My rule of thumb is that a UI element you'll see two thousand times should be quieter than one you'll see twice. So I guess it depends on how it gets used.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@inacho_ Eleven hours in Procreate is one of those numbers that sounds alarming until you remember nobody else was going to do it. The art holding up is worth the week it eats. It looks great!

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@squirrgames I totally agree. Drag interactions where they make sense to be just make everything feel more real. Nice.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@cola_powered There's a specific kind of madness in watching a pathfinding agent confidently take the worst possible route. Half the fun of fixing it is that the weird version is usually funnier than the correct one.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@ChildrenEnoch The library metaphor is doing a lot of heavy lifting there and I think it's still underselling it. Every one of those hard-won lessons is a thing you now know that no tutorial was going to teach you.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@Brutalnoobi Welcome to Fatherhood! That bundle of joy is now your World, and there isn't a more perfect World! Congrats!!

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

ElfCraft started as a throwaway joke about the logistics of getting presents around the world in one night.

I forgot about it. A month later I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Sometimes the dumb thought is the one that sticks.

#indiedev #solodev #gamedev #cozygames #indiegames

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@soongdev Whichever one still reads at 231x87. Squint at both from across the room, and the one where you can still tell what the game is wins.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@horaciogarro @mnemonic76 There's something great about picking up a tool everyone else walked away from. And an old forum thread from someone who actually shipped with it beats official docs most of the time.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@Dragonwolf_game The bugs you already fixed are always the worst ones. A tester who can actually find the cause instead of just the symptom is worth their weight in gold.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@ceezocico @akeurajitsukasa Harvest Moon walked so the whole genre could run. Stardew's real trick was packaging it for people who'd never played one, which is its own kind of win, but the bones were already there.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@clemmygames Programmable elevator shafts is a great hook. Vertical layers force you to think about logistics in a way a flat map never does, and digging toward something you don't understand yet is a strong pull on its own.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@notch @siegmacat @letsgoeli Traversal is the most underrated system in this genre. When getting across your own base feels good, you stop treating it like a spreadsheet and start treating it like a place you live in.

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

What pulled me into factory sims originally wasn't the machines, it was watching a system you designed slowly turn into a problem you have to solve. That feeling is the whole engine behind ElfCraft.

#solodev #indiegamedev #indiedev #cozygames #gamedev #Godot #GodotEngine

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@monocoolint Panning animations "feeling right" is one of those things that takes forever and nobody notices until it's wrong. Looks really good!

[Still Hollow Games @StillHollowGame]

@ivasan_games @NeraNera89103 The color contrast really pops at thumbnail size, that's the part most capsules miss. Nice call pairing with an artist instead of doing it solo, that combo usually shows.