Excellent! Let me know what you think or if you have any ideas - it’s easy to add more types, I’ve only been minimal so far. Vector3s come to mind…

Not a game, but a tiny godot addon I’m working on, a dev-focused pretty printer for making your logs more readable.

I’m liking this as a logo so far!

• Repo: https://github.com/russmatney/log
• Devlog covering it: https://youtu.be/5yuEuA6S-Ws

Hopefully coming to the godot asset store this month!

Screenshot is via Pixaki on an ipad: https://pixaki.com/

Thanks much!!

Another much shorter answer is, once you pay the steam fee, you can easily play your game on the Steam Deck, so it helps a ton for playtesting (both myself and putting the games in people’s hands).

And otherwise, the Dino page is up now in the hopes of starting to collect wishlists sooner than later.

[edit: sorry, this whole answer I thought the question was asking about Dot Hop, not Dino! Re: Dino, I’d started the project much earlier, but paused development on it at the beginning of this year to pursue Dot Hop first (much smaller scope). I’m moving back to Dino now that Dot Hop is released, targeting a launch before June!]

Yeah, Steam charges $100 per title - if you earn enough (some high number, maybe 1000?), they give that 100 back, but I’m not necessarily counting on that (not soon, anyway). My goal is make enough money to keep doing game dev full time - i’m hopeful to make it work across steam/itch/patreon/other stores. (Hopefully Dot Hop mobile/Switch releases later this year!). To me the dream is to make enough money to make the rent and make the next game.

But! There are definitely other less-directly-monetary reasons for the release:

• getting exposure and feedback from more people will help me improve as a game dev/designer (this might be the biggest reason, really - I don’t expect commercial success from my first game, so instead it’s about all the intrinsic value I can get out of it - experience, motivation, validation, learning all the annoying marketing/steam/etc overhead)
• having a deadline and ‘proper’ release definitely motivated me to raise the quality bar of my work (before this I was submitting scrappy games to game jams)
• regardless of the project’s monetary success, it’s now a useful portfolio piece for future game dev teams/interviews, which I might need if/when the solodev thing isn’t enough

In general I’m intending to get multiple quality games into “stores” as soon as possible (hopefully this year), and then decide what to do next - I think the experience along the way is the best thing for my growth and will inform the next move (some larger game, find/build a team to work with, start applying for studios, etc)

This template might also be useful: https://github.com/bitbrain/godot-gamejam - e.g. i read through the savegame stuff before implementing it in my own game.

I saw another template the other day… and my last/next project “dino” is available as well, though it’s pretty crazy in there right now: https://github.com/russmatney/dino - i hope to whip this one into shape by june 1st!

Excellent! Let me know if you have any questions!

I’m working on some devlogs that will share parts of the implementation - I’m happy to dig into whatever directions are useful

Thanks! I’m hopeful it helps folks as an example godot game. Not that my way is the best, but it’s working for me, so feel free to borrow some patterns!

A steam link would be nice!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2779710/Dot_Hop/

Got dropped b/c i also included the image, i think [update: realized can edit the original post, so the link is in there now]

Thank you, I’m glad you like it! I like pixel art b/c it’s so constrained, so it helps me relax and just fit whatever i can in the space. Hope you like the game!

I added a more celebratory new-puzzle-set-unlocked screen to Dot Hop yesterday:

Dot Hop is launching March 1st (next Friday)! Originally prototyped as Flower Eater in the Fediverse Summer Jam - now re-implemented in Godot, with ~50 more puzzles (and many more to come!)

Check it out on steam and on github, or watch a short devlog about it on youtube

In fact i did not know that! Thanks for the vid, will check it out!

https://godotwildjam.com runs every month for the last …60+ months?! Feels like a long time!

Anyway, It’s a great community of godot game devs!

This was a cool talk on teaching programming gradually (with a lang called hedy) at last year’s strangeloop: https://youtu.be/fmF7HpU_-9k - might be some useful takeaways for you in there

It was pointed out to me i should add OOP. Burn it all down!

Indeed, the problem with gui apps is when you can’t script them!

I always loved alfred on osx, then loved scripting rofi on linux, only to come back to osx years later and find alfred can’t be invoked with stdin options. It’s damn shame….

We used to call this ‘Code is Cheap’ at my last job - you’re spot on about the value of it

I think you’re right re:oop - let’s throw that in there too.

One problem is naming things - bad names/naming conventions can start things off in a bad direction, so you spend forever figuring one out… but do you really need this thing you’re naming after all?

Maybe the hot-take is more like: All code is bad, so less code is better…. what should we drop first?

Sorry, I liked this hot-take setup and I’m shooting from the hip a bit. Maybe i actually mean objects/classes, not types? Can’t everything just be a bag of key-values, like in clojure?

I have been building mostly prototypes (games and wm-tools) for a year, so most of my context is getting things working to see if they are useful rather than locking them down.

I thought about my argument a bunch, and while i have alot of complaints, it all sounds like non-specific whining to me, so i’ve decided to give up.

types and unit-tests have their place. Fine! I admit it! i was pushing a hot-take I’ve had on a few occasions, and I’m glad to see this programming community is alive and well! If you need me I’ll be in my clojure repl.

Fair! Naming is hard, but maybe that’s no excuse for not defining a thing