plinth

Solo dev experimenting with agentic LLM tech in games

[Hidedono @HTProject073]

絵面は変わってないけど自機のミサイルがトップアタック方式になったり動く敵が実装されたりしてます！
#スーパーゲ制デー

[plinth @plinth_games]

"SpaceNav" #DevLog #7: I took a little break from game dev for a while. I got into a monsterous iteration completely re-engineering the lighting/auto-exposure system and it was a slog. I had accepted the lighting as "good enough" for a while, then I wanted to revisit it and get smoother blacks on night sides of planets when the scene is lit and the exposure is low. I kept tacking on new rules to the existing lighting/auto-exposure system, but the spaghetti was just making things worse. FInally, I got some help from Fable 5 to re-design from the ground up. The initial results were promising, but there were a lot of kinks to work out. It kept feeling "off", for example, I had weird exposure curves on ingress or egress from a planet. The night sides of planets refused to pop in consistently when the exposure was high which took multiple passes of normalizing luminance/albedo of the planets and finally a pass to desaturate the earthshine to better match human eye nightvision. Then there were further weird bugs about how sun occlusion was being calculated, so fixed that finally to get good eclipses. Overall, much happier with the lighting. Even the terrible placehold planetary shaders don't look too bad with good lighting. Here is a full flight to see how it looks.
#gamedev #indiedev #AIinGames #AIGaming #AIForDevs #spacesim #orbitalmechanics #space #solarsystem #madewithgodot

[ToughSF @ToughSf]

Arcing tracers, sparkling lasers and tumbling reactors: space combat in Spacezero Interactive's "Spacefleet: HEAT DEATH".
Dev blog 4:
https://t.co/vQjRhRqgWx

[Sofa (Comms Paused) @SofaMods]

[Space Game Prototype] Clean de-orbit "shove" maneuver with just a pusher-plate. Lucky I got right on the money with the target's center-mass, escaped in the nick of time before following it to the ground, and don't have a system for stuff breaking off wrecks or your ship yet.

[Hamster of Orion @hamsteroforion]

I've always wanted to make a turn-based game that feels great with mouse controls as well as with keyboard. Jagged Alliance 2, X-COM, even Diablo 1 (which was turn-based in early dev stage) all shaped how I approach this.

The core idea: you 'decide' how much risk to take by the size of your move, and a big move just means picking a far-away target. Every time you move, the enemy moves too.

SUPERHOT is onto something, you never waste time crossing empty stretches of a level, because time only flows when you act. Some of that same feeling is starting to come through in this build, and it feels pretty good.

#ScreenshotSaturday

[Sengkala Dev @Pedalahusa]

Mollucas

#indiegame #Gamedev

[MicroProse @micro_prose]

GROUND BRANCH 1.0 launches July 16, 2026.

Our biggest milestone yet, and only the beginning of what comes next. Version 1.0 doesn't close the book. It opens the next chapter.

Deploy into the campaign Prologue, face smarter enemies, push into new environments, and experience the most complete version of GROUND BRANCH to date.

🎯 Watch the Release Date Teaser and wishlist now on Steam.
https://t.co/C3B36V3EMP

#GroundBranch #TacticalShooter #MilSim #IndieGame #MicroProse

[plinth @plinth_games]

Added a new camera mode: "lock-on" which allows locking on to targets by clicking them or pressing next/previous (currently bound to c/v). This makes zooming up to 25x much easier. Here is a little demo plus another look at the pop-in of Mars' placeholder surface.
#gamedev #indiedev #AIinGames #AIGaming #AIForDevs #spacesim #orbitalmechanics #space #solarsystem #madewithgodot

[Control, I'm Not Coming Back | Out Now! @DesbordeGames]

Finally releasing our indie game!!

Get "Control, I'm Not Coming Back" for free on Steam right now!!!!

A hopecore walking sim about a lost astronaut meeting Voyager 1
#indiegame #gamedev

[plinth @plinth_games]

@panoskarabelas Looks awesome!

[plinth @plinth_games]

@ondydev Love it!

[plinth @plinth_games]

"SpaceNav" #DevLog #6: finally decided it was time to emerge from the auto-camera rabbit hole. I'm still not quite satisfied with it. But, decided it is good enough for now. Eventually I'll expose different settings to the player to tune the auto-camera. I decided there were more important things to work on. New features implemented: 1) bloom glow on the stars. 2) fix for the Sun's halo adding to the bloom of objects in its halo (now the Sun's halo properly washes out things caught in it). 3) planetary bodies resolve to looking like bright colored stars at a distance. I referenced the Voyager and Cassini "Pale Blue Dot" photos as inspiration and it took several passes to tune. There is actually two smooth transition phases that happen since there is also an intermediary "half-phase"/crescent shape for when viewing the profile of a planet at the side of the day/night. At a far enough distance it resolves to a single point of light which halos/blooms similar to the starfield. As you approach or zoom on the body the surface smoothly resolves. 4) made some adjustments to HUD markers, allowing toggle between all, minimal, and none, and removed the green circle now that planets aren't simply distant dots. 5) upped the zoom max to 25x. This seemed to be the sweet spot since I did this by lowering the FOV floor to 2 degrees. At 1 degree FOV the scene jitters while moving. And at 0.5 degrees there is no meaningful increase in size or detail of distant objects. So, that is the best FOV zoom can do at the moment. I also fixed it so that the starfield inversely scales with the zoom meaning that the stars don't increase in size but do grow farther apart. From my research, this seems to be fairly realistic. Modern spacecraft like Cassini have 50x zoom cameras from what I've read, but 25x will just have to be the max for now.

Roadmap to MVP: 1) add a lock-on camera mode. 2) idempotency for continual journeys. 3) graphical polish passes on planets and Milky Way (you can see in the video the placeholder graphics for Venus and Saturn leave a lot to be desired). 4) title and menu screens. 5) MVP release (includes only sun and 8 planetary bodies).

Post MVP Roadmap: New solar system and extra-solar bodies. New ship designs. Burn animations. Flight control. First person mode (inside ship).

Key decisions to make: 1) lighting/exposure: after the bloom passes on the planets and stars I've strayed into a more astrophotography look. While that is fine, my original goal was to have the solar system look like it would with the naked eye. I have to decide if I want to keep this look for the external camera (when I add first person movement within the ship, I could focus on a more "human eye" look). 2) tackle "closer-in" orbits now or later. I think I'm going to try to do lower orbits to increase sense of scale during the graphical polish passes on the planets. The solar system simulation already has the needed scale (it is 1-to-1 with the solar system), so it is a matter of ensuring I can give the planets enough detail to not look sucky at lower orbits. 3) attempt again a fix on the sun flickering at higher time compressions. 4) scaling time compression.

Today's flight shows a full time compressed journey from Venus to Saturn showing off the new features (particularly the higher zoom and star/planet bloom).
#gamedev #indiedev #AIinGames #AIGaming #AIForDevs #spacesim #orbitalmechanics #space #solarsystem #madewithgodot

[plinth @plinth_games]

@LoomingColumn Looks amazing! This is the vibe I'm going for in my game with sense of scale in space (it is just a "toy" for exploring a scale version of the solar system, much smaller scope than your work). Looking forward to your game, keep up the great work!

[plinth @plinth_games]

@levelsio This is incredibly cool, though performance is kind of poor for me for Quake at least. I've tried on a few of my PCs (which are pretty beefy gaming PCs) with Opera, Chrome, and Firefox but it runs a little sluggish. But, everything else works great. Thanks for putting this up!

[doekuramori_citadeldev @citadeldev]

It's Summer sale! Go grab some!!
https://t.co/WJNCZrOtFQ

[plinth @plinth_games]

Sometimes I worry about getting into game dev. I often feel like I do not belong here, that I am unworthy primarily because I lean on AI tooling, LLMs, vibe coding, and AI assisted development. I know these tools are controversial within the indie dev and artistic community, and for good reason.
I have been a gamer since I was 6 years old and had endless dreams of designing and developing my own games. I tried many times to chase those dreams over the years, but always had to put them on hold to prioritize practical needs: dealing with the curveballs life throws at you, taking care of myself, taking care of my family, taking care of my child, taking care of my spouse, working my day job to pay the bills. All of that left little time for learning game development and left a slew of half-begun prototypes and proofs of concept.
I fired up Claude Code not knowing what to expect, but I soon discovered that agentic AI does not take away the human element of game development. It enables it. It lets me focus on my dreams and design, on realizing my visions, without having to learn every skill required to have a robust game development team. It still requires knowledge of how games work, of how to design things, of how to solve problems. AI cannot fully replace a human. At the end of the day it is a tool, but a powerful one.
I know the concerns about these tools are serious. They are trained on the collective output of human creativity, largely benefiting powerful corporations. There are real environmental and economic costs, hype cycles, fears about jobs, and bigger questions about where this technology leads. I am wary of those things too.
Moving from assembly to C didn't make programmers obsolete, it enabled them. Photoshop didn't make artists obsolete, it enabled them. But, those analogies fall short. This technology feels different. More powerful. More alien. And thus more scary.
That difference forces a real choice. We can try to pretend it does not exist, shame its use, and stay pure. But that also means opting out of shaping how it is used. And it is unrealistic: the genie can't be put back in the bottle. Or we can engage with it critically, cautiously, transparently, and with eyes open, while pushing for ethical guardrails and keeping human creativity and agency at the center.
I am choosing to engage. These tools are powerful, but they are still tools. The human direction and judgment behind the work still matter most. That is the approach I am taking at @plinth_games.
What do you think?
#gamedev #indiedev #AIinGames #AIGaming #AIForDevs #anthropic #claude #claudecode #artificialintelligence #ai

[Selaco (NOW AVAILABLE!) @SelacoGame]

New meaty Chapter 2 Development Blog is live! talks about Jetpacks, Abilities, Squad Mates and more.

Link below ⬇️

[sunset visitor | Prove You're Human - Wishlist Now @sunset_visitor]

We made a game in which god is a teenage girl with generational trauma.

- Relive her memories
- Uncover a 1,000 year-old lie
- Atone for the sin that will change the society of her clones forever

1000xRESIST is 40% off for the Steam Summer Sale!

https://t.co/SgufKnKmqT

[SpaceEngine @SpaceEngineSim]

It’s time for sun, sandals and SpaceEngine! The Steam Summer Sale is live, and we’re 40% off until July 9th!

Steam Store page: https://t.co/1xuLdwp51y

#steamsummersale #steamsale #spaceengine #space #spacesim #astronomy

[Necrofane @necrofane]

Adding a kick to my dark fantasy game