Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬

Solo indie game dev, iPhone and Apple Watch. Now trying something for Steam. Here: the design decisions behind my games, and what broke along the way.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

One finger on the screen is a gravity well.

It pulls your ship and the debris around it into orbit. There are no guns: you swing a rock around and let go at the right moment.

Gravitide, my iPhone game. Made solo, no ads.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

A few times a week I post how the game works inside: why the ship orbits instead of falling in, what my playtest bot broke, and what changed after.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

One finger on the screen is a gravity well.

It pulls your ship and the debris around it into orbit. There are no guns: you swing a rock around and let go at the right moment.

Gravitide, my iPhone game. Made solo, no ads.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

Free to start: the first three expeditions are free, one $1.99 purchase unlocks the rest. iPhone, iOS 18.6+, works offline.
https://t.co/U1JxVZkUWz

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

Every metric said my rig was healthy. The render showed no arms.

They were inside the armour: torso half-width 0.309, hand at 0.304. Stretched-edge checks can't see that: nothing tears when a limb hides inside a body.

Measure the thing people complain about.

#b3d #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

I stopped trying to automate joint placement.

An auto-rigger finds a knee by looking for the narrowest point of the leg. On armour, a kneepad is a bulge, not a waist. Knees landed 79-85% off-centre. By hand: 25-37%.

20 minutes per character, and it stays 20.

#b3d #gamedev #indiedev #devlog

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@Bingeljell This is actually really cool :)

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@GameDevVentures What sells a kill is contrast with a normal hit: its own sound and a 2-3 frame freeze only on the killing blow. Quick check: close your eyes, and if a kill sounds like a regular hit, that's the next fix.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@El_Micha101 Real terrain, custom everything else: one region's elevation from free SRTM or Copernicus 30 m data, airports and towns placed by hand. Recognizable mountains and coastlines, without licensed imagery or streaming a whole planet.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

Bones drawn as real geometry inside a semi-transparent body. The only way to see where a rig landed when Blender runs headless.

#screenshotsaturday #b3d #gamedev

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@MeekerKame81032 Honestly, no. Without a free tier the store sends almost nothing, and the puzzle angle doesn't change that. I'm rethinking the model rather than doubling down on it.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

AgatVault is $1.99. No ads, no IAP, no subscription.

Paid-only means the App Store sends me almost no traffic: a 15-level puzzle game doesn't chart. Every install has to come from somewhere else. That's why I'm here.

#indiedev #gamedev #iosdev

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@Bingeljell Request: someone in a long coat or robe, walking. Cloth hanging between the legs is the classic place for auto-weighting to tear, since every vertex there has to pick a leg, so it shows how far the rig step really goes.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@tinylittlestudi Depends on what already glows. Glow reads as 'look here first', so if the player glows too, glowing enemies compete with it. Blur a screenshot and check which one your eye finds first.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@sllbailuo How are you planning to slow the stone beast's turn: a lower yaw rate or a slower turn clip? For an enemy that heavy, a short wind-up before the turn often sells the weight better than a slower rotation, and the feet stay in sync with the animation.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@ChiveArcade Not the boot itself, but the flip exposed one: after turning the donor 180°, its LeftArm landed where our RightArm was, 171° apart, and the arms shot straight up. The boot now also places the foot bones: ankle and ball of the foot at the donor's heel-to-toe proportions.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

My character walked drunk for three days.

The rig wasn't misaligned. It was on backwards: the Mixamo donor faces +Y, meshes out of Hunyuan3D face -Y, and my auto-rigger never checked.

Found it by measuring a boot: 18cm heel at the back, 10cm at the front.

#gamedev #indiedev #b3d #devlog

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

Yes. The boot check now runs on every mesh and on the Mixamo donor too, and if they face opposite ways the donor armature object gets turned 180° without applying the transform, since applying it wipes the animations. My first check, how far the foot swings forward vs back, was useless: 0.378 vs 0.320.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@sllbailuo Don't snap: on a long body it reads like a turret. Cap the yaw rate so they arc into turns (Rotation Rate in Character Movement), play a turn-in-place anim only past ~90 degrees, and let a Look At on the head track the player.

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

Fastest way to judge an image-to-3D model: a human in T-pose has armspan = height.

TripoSR gave me armspan 0.55, height 0.96. It never built the arms at all.
Hunyuan3D-2.0 turbo: 1.99 / 1.86. That's the one I kept.

Same input, four models.

#gamedev #indiedev #devlog

[Konstantin B - indie games dev 🇧🇬 @kostyabl]

@Bingeljell Thanks, really useful. Merge by distance is exactly what fixed it for me: welding took the mesh from 133k to 88k verts and the auto weights finally worked. And good call on ~50k faces, for sprites that's plenty.