Manuel Jiménez

Aspiring game dev. me:

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

Own a @playdate ? I Just published a demo of my game about sport climbing 🧗*Climbing Life*
https://t.co/EQvDwjwGjj

#playdate #gamedev #IndieGameDev #indiegame #rockclimbing

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

@lepetitbernat El nestea de antes ahora es el fuze tea, por lo visto

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

hi, i'm a sole proprietor/founder in Austria and i earn many many multiples of what i'd earn as an employee, despite "predatory income tax". in fact, i opt out of the many tax optimizations i could use because i like having good schools and as high a standard of living as possible for everyone.

the great thing about the EU is that you can just live under any tax regime you like in any of the 27 member states. it's all about trade offs. if poland works for you, fantastic! go build there.

and if i may add one more thing: if the CEO of a startup, especially pre-revenue, lives "barely any better than a regular employee" then the system works as intended. fact of the matter is most startups are bad. you are not special because you are trying out a shit idea and fail. but i'll happily pay taxes so you can try your shit idea, fail, and can still live.

[Erik Sombroek @ErikSombroek]

That moment when you boot into the main menu of your childhood..

Cross-compiled Warsmash (a LibGDX-based Warcraft III engine reimplementation in Java) to JavaScript using TeaVM so the whole game runs directly in the browser, with map files served from OPFS. Still some quirks left but great progress.

Credits to Retera for his hard work.

#Warcraft3 #RetroGaming #Gamedev #TeaVM #LibGDX #WebGL #Java #OpenSource #BrowserGaming #IndieDev #RTS

[Destination Playdate @HelloPlaydate]

SEASON 3 🥳🥳🥳 #playdate

[Charlie Cleveland @Flayra]

It's been a tough eight months for @UnknownWorlds and the @Subnautica community. But today, we've been vindicated!

https://t.co/QNDq8tq5Pz

Time to dive back in. 🌊

[IndieDevDay @IndieDevDay]

Sorteo de pack de juegos para steam de navidad hasta el 5 de enero entre X e Instagram

-Call of the Sea
-Friends vs Friends
-Blasphemous 2
-Aragami 2
-Temtem
-UnMetal
-Moonlighter

Para participar:
1️⃣ Síguenos
2⃣ RT

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

Split Wars has just received an update to address issues identified by beta testers.

Things like noticing idle units, and providing feedback when you reach max. capacity. Thanks for playing, and please keep sending feedback!

#IndieGame #GodotEngine #itchio #GameDev #IndieDev

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

This is the in-game level editor of Climbing Life.

A big part of the game is about solving boulder problems (puzzles in climbing jargon), so I needed an easy way to see how far holds are from each other.

#gamedev #indiedev #playdate #IndieGames

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

The name actually comes from a real route!

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

These are the two fonts I created for Climbing Life: Climb (1) and Parabol (2)

Climb is inspired by inscriptions on walls made with a stone.
Parabol looks like the names you sometimes see painted at the bottom of the route.

#gamedev #indiedev #playdate #IndieGames

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

Hey climbers! Do you recognize any of the four crags featured in Climbing Life?

All of them are located in Catalonia, one of Spain’s climbing meccas!

@playdate #gamedev #indiedev #playdate #IndieGames

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

👻 Ghost update for Split Wars was just released!

Get it on Android: https://t.co/FhBZQN38pY

#IndieGame #GodotEngine #itchio #GameDev #IndieDev #GameDesign #IndieGameDev #GamingCommunity

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

@playdate This is what you see when you are belaying someone

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

🧗 Climbing Life isn’t just about climbing... sometimes you'll have to belay your partner.

Grab your grigri and crank it, but not too hard or your buddy will fall!

@playdate #gamedev #indiedev #playdate #IndieGames

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

New blog post: Progress update #2 of 🧗Climbing Life for @playdate

https://t.co/Jsvhjr76fU

#gamedev #indiedev #playdate #IndieGames

[Charlie Cleveland @Flayra]

What is a Wave but a Thousand Drops?

I started my journey into video game development more than 25 years ago, back before there were any books or courses, back before there were engines to license, back before it even felt like a viable career.

My high school friends and I spent our summers in Burlington, Vermont not working for others, but working to try to create a video game. Every summer we tried and every summer we failed. Failed to have anything even remotely playable before the leaves developed their autumn colors and threatened to fall. But we kept trying, until the final summer after my college graduation in 1996, when just two of us worked through the fall and got our first game playable: an underwater (!) Star Control II clone called Aquarium Fighter. When I played it against my friend for the first time, and I evaluated the fun, controls and balance, I instantly became hooked. Hooked on making games. Hooked on making not-fun-things (but with potential), fun. That game helped me land my first professional game programming job which I used to pay off my credit cards, and I started iterating through the now-familiar cycle of making money to make games.

Now we’re halfway to 2026 and the world is a very different place. Anyone can learn how to make a game on YouTube using free engines. But making money off of making a game has become truly brutal. Like the world’s wealth distribution, it’s feast or famine. Game development is a career now, and it can be a very profitable one. And the artistic heights that games have reached is jaw-dropping: Starcraft. Braid. Limbo. Minecraft. League of Legends. Hades. Inscryption. I dreamed, but never thought, that the design, technology, art and business models of these games would one day be possible. Nor would I ever have believed that games could overtake Hollywood, even if they “weren’t art”.

Without realizing it, I started Unknown Worlds in 2001 by making the Half-Life mod Natural Selection. I worked with a distributed team back before a health crisis mandated it and we released not half-baked games, but documents describing level design and textures for making those levels, with the hope that the community would make maps. Lo and behold, they did. And we eventually hired some of those people, giving them careers at Unknown Worlds, however shaky the long-term prospects might be. I asked the community to send me $20 bills in the mail so I could keep working on the game, and you did. $18k was a tough salary to live off of, but I made it work and loved every moment of it. Like a design hook, but I was hooked on design. So hooked that I spent 10 years making the sequel.

There’s no way that could’ve happened without Max McGuire and his belief that the game was something special. With that, we made just enough money to get Subnautica into a stripped-down early access, which allowed us to find the fun. It didn’t have submarines, base-building, story or survival. But through the early access process, the community helped guide us forward until we found something we all loved. Something we loved to make and something that millions loved to play. There's no way it would've been as successful if we had waited until v1.0 before releasing it to the public.

I tell you all this because I want to tell you that game development is in my blood. So is iteration and early access. Our games have thrived because of it, and one of our games failed because we thought we knew better. I was most passionate about that game, and it fell flat. We worked on it 5 years before our early access, thinking that this time we were experts and we knew better. But fewer people played that game than even that humble Half-Life mod. Even though our studio had financial success in that period, and even though many fans fell in love with the game, it really wounded me and I needed time to heal. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never get over that one.

So with all this as background, I hope you can see why we were so excited to release Subnautica 2 into early access. Many of the folks that started the journey with us nearly 20 years ago have worked hard on Subnautica 2, and they're joined by some incredible new talent who were drawn to the studio by their love of the games and their passion for the way we've made them. We know (and love) that the expectations for this sequel are high. But the team has poured their hearts into the game and their dedication really shows. We helped pioneer early access and our community seems to love it just as much as we do. It’s the best way to develop a game like this.

So you can see why for Max, Ted, myself, the Unknown Worlds team, and for our community, the events of this week have been quite a shock. We know that the game is ready for early access release and we know you’re ready to play it. And while we thought this was going to be our decision to make, at least for now, that decision is in Krafton’s hands. And after all these years, to find that I’m no longer able to work at the company I started stings.

I want you to know that whatever happens to the founders, to the team and to the game, our priority is, and has always been, to make the best damned game we can for the best community in the world. With your Gorge plushies and your hand-drawn fish fan-art, and yes, your hard-earned dollars, you’ve supported us in every way, in every season, cold and warm, since Half-Life modding was even a thing.

And I also want you to know that this is not where the story ends.

-Charlie (“Flayra”)

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

@igp UWE had a special place in our hearts. @Flayra Wishing you all the best.

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

Just shared a progress update of Climbing Life for @playdate! Check it out here:

https://t.co/VlE3ZOCc27

#gamedev #indiedev #playdate #IndieGames

[Manuel Jiménez @tortill4]

Hey! This is Split Wars 👇

What if local real-time PvP happened on the same phone?
You’re on one side. Your opponent’s on the other. Last army standing wins.

Available on Android: https://t.co/FhBZQN3Gfw #GodotEngine #indiegames #itchio #indiedev #gamedev #gaming