• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I don’t think this can really be answered until after the fact. Anything that I (and I suspect most) people could say about an artstyle are going to be particular to an instance of that artsyle. If I’d give advice as someone who is neither an artist nor a game designer, what attracts me more than anything is a unique artstyle, which, if I’m gonna give a brutal opinion, starting from a vague category like ‘pixel’, ‘hand drawn’ or ‘3D’ probably won’t get you there.

    I feel like I even struggle to answer your question at face value because it doesn’t align well at all with how I conceptualize game art. For example, Cruelty Squad is a game that I don’t think I’d have gotten if not for it’s artsyle. Like, sure, it’s 3D, but it’s a lot more like a PilotRedSun animation than it is a game like TF2. Or take a game like Factorio: most of the assets of that game are pre-rendered 3D sprites, so despite being artisticly unique in a way that interests me it doesn’t fit into the categories you’ve asked about. The best I can say is “I dunno”, and I don’t think anyone else can answer it further than that.


  • There is the Anno series of games, which are technically RTS games but if I’m honest I find them the most fun when I go out of my way to avoid combat/micromanagement. I’ve only played 1404, 2070, and 2205, 2070 being the best in my opinion, but it has a bad history with DRM so I’d suggest 1404 (known as “Dawn of Discovery” in the US because us americans are afraid of numbers apparently).

    Edit: looking at the steam page it looks like they decided to take 1404 down and made a new page where the game is (mostly) unchanged besides requiring you to jump through all the BS hoops that 2070 did, so I’d say if you’re gonna spend money get 1404 on GOG, or if you are willing to do unspeakable things go with 2070.









  • There is this excellent video which shows how a simple C program looks in assembly (don’t worry about it being C, the program is simple enough to be understood without C knowledge). There’s also this which does what the video shows automatically for you. Neither of these are fully sufficient to understand assembly but they are still incredibly useful resources.

    Also: watch out for AT&T syntax vs Intel syntax if you’re doing x86. It took me way to long to figure this out. And as another commenter mentioned look at TIS-100, but also some other similar games (sorted from easiest to hardest, TIS being harder than all of these): Human resource machine, EXAPUNKS, Shezhen I/O, and Box-256





  • One of the reasons I really disliked Reddit and stopped using it years ago was this way of using the voting system. If I make a post, and it gets voted something like +4-10, and a reply that is some rewording of “that’s a dumb statement”, what am I to think? I’m certainly not going to change my mind, no one gave me a good reason to.

    If one is voting because they feel they can’t stand behind their opinion if they expanded it in text… I don’t know what to tell ya.

    I’m inclined to believe a lot of people do this. This is not to say they are terrible for doing this, it’s that it’s human nature. Replying to someone with a well thought out post takes effort and, from my experience, makes the me realize i don’t know shit about the subject. Point is, this way of using the voting system breeds half-thought opinions which is a host of a lot of other problems.



  • I started working on a similar project about a year ago, except I was doing it fully by hand in the vanilla game (journey mode in a blank world), custom 8-bit instruction set, all that. I took an extended break from the project and kept thinking “this idea is so obvious, someone else is gonna do it first and I’m gonna look like a copycat” but not getting around to finishing work on it anyways. I’ll post pictures if anyone is interested, maybe a world download if I can find somewhere to host it.