Every year Chris Zukowski puts on an online conference called Staying Inside about marketing indie games. Here are my takeaways.| Games by Mason
Lerp, or linear interpolation, is a convenient way to animate stuff in games without having to store much state: constposition=lerp(start,end,time); This will move position linearly from start to end as time moves from 0 to 1. Unfortunately, linear motion often appears robotic and unnatural. In fact–even a cartoony robot should overshoot and rattle a bit, right? Thankfully there’s an easy fix. You don’t have to give up lerp, you can just play with the t value that you pass in: This isn...| Games by Mason Blog
Since shipping Way of Rhea last year I’ve been hard at work on game two, but I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like. Every time I sit down to write a blog post in Jekyll, my Ruby dependencies are somehow broken again. Any time spent trying to sort this out feels like time that could be better spent elsewhere. As of today, I’m saying goodbye to Ruby! This site is now powered by Zine, a static site generator written in Zig by Loris Cro. Working with Zine has been a blast. It’s alp...| Games by Mason Blog
I recently released Way of Rhea, a puzzle game that I’ve been working on in Rust since 2018. If you like games like Braid, Talos Principle, or Portal you’d probably enjoy it: After launch I posted an AMA on r/rust_gamedev, and people asked a lot of great questions! This write up contains curated highlights from the AMA, with some additional editing for clarity. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Hey everyone–thanks so much for a great launch day. After having worked on this game for so long, it’s an amazing feeling seeing so many folks enjoy it. :) We hit 10 reviews on day 1, and at the time of writing are at 24 positive reviews: My new goal is to get to 50 reviews so we can be labeled “Very Positive.” I’m not going to share Steam stats today, but I can tell you that getting 10 reviews increased our visibility by an order of magnitude. Thank you again. Cerebral Puzzle Showc...| Games by Mason Blog
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s helped make this happen in any way, this is the culmination of years of hard work–I don’t even wanna say how many years it’s been here, if you know you know. As of now, Way of Rhea is out on Steam! I hope you all enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it. If you want to support me, the best thing you can do is purchase a copy of the game, and then leave a review. My goal is to hit 10 reviews today–Steam will show my game to more people w...| Games by Mason Blog
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam TOMORROW! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The End Game. For many players, the biomes up until this point will be sufficiently challenging, and some players may be happy to solve most of those puzzles and stop. However for avid puzzle gamers, everything we’ve seen so far is just set up for the real challenge: the end game. The end game combines everything we’ve learned...| Games by Mason Blog
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 2 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The Professor’s Biome. The professor is kind of a jerk. This area introduces The Professor, and a new way to change colors using staves. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 3 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers Rhea’s Biome. This area introduces Rhea, and color circuits. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 4 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers The Overworld. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Way of Rhea is coming to Steam in 5 days! This blog series walks through some of the mechanics featured in the game. Be warned: mild spoilers ahead! This post covers the second area in the game, Snow Crab’s Biome. Hermie got lost in the Ice Caves trying to help his dad, you need to save him! This area introduces Snow Crab, and how you can use his behavior patterns to solve puzzles. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
In celebration of Way of Rhea releasing on Steam in 6 days, I’m making a post a day about a different aspect of the game. Let’s look at the first area of the game: Shrew’s Biome. Be warned–this blog series features mild spoilers! Shrew is your excitable friend who’s very invested in you solving the forest puzzles tonight for some reason. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Way of Rhea releases on Steam in 7 days! In celebration, starting tomorrow I’m making a post a day, each about a new aspect of the game. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Today I’m excited to announce: Way of Rhea is coming to Steam on May 20th, 2024! I want to thank everyone who’ve been patiently waiting for the game to come out–your support means a lot. If you’re excited for the game, the best way to help is: Wishlist Way of Rhea on Steam Share the release date trailer with people, communities, or influencers that enjoy puzzle games I can’t wait for everyone to get their hands on the game. :) Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Exciting news–we’re starting the closed beta of Way of Rhea! I’m going to be running it through our Discord. I’m only adding a couple people at a time so that I have time to address feedback between participants–if you want me to add you to the list, ping me there! v0.1.0 Release Notes All levels now have unique music Marked areas navigable by crabs with crystals Improved speed controls, speed controls (optionally) affect music Improved biome progress visuals Shows controls on scree...| Games by Mason Blog
An IMGUI. Sometimes, you just want some unique bits to use as an ID. Maybe you’re working with an immediate mode GUI, or need to generate IDs for cancellable sounds. In many cases you could technically get away with manually enumerating the various unique IDs in a header somewhere, but this is very inconvenient–especially in the case of IMGUIs: if you do this, every time you add or remove a UI element, you need to make a secondary change elsewhere in the codebase. You won’t be able to f...| Games by Mason Blog
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from 29 years of internet, it’s not to reply to YouTube comments. Let’s do it anyway! --- I gave a talk at Software You Can Love (SYCL) titled It’s Not About The Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools. The YouTube recording premiered on Monday, and there was a lot of high quality discussion in the comments. Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
A game I do some programming for, LUCID, just went live with its Kickstarter! I’m sure Eric would appreciate your support. Don’t worry—I’m still hard at work on Way of Rhea—I typically have a few projects in the oven at a time. :) Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
In June, I gave a talk at Software You Can Love titled It’s Not About The Technology - Game Engines are Art Tools. The intended audience was systems programmers, but there are lessons here for people evaluating off the shelf systems as well. This is a part two to my talk from Handmade Seattle last year, It’s Not Survivorship Bias - On Successful Software Endeavors. Please note that I’m playing a little joke at the beginning that may not work as well without a captive audience considerin...| Games by Mason Blog
Recent events have a lot of studios thinking about their choice of game engine, and at first glance, options appear to be limited. But things don’t have to be this way. For most studios, the optimal short term strategy is to wait and see if Unity is forced to back down. Retroactively altering the engine license for shipped games certainly doesn’t sound legal. While waiting it out may be pragmatic for existing projects, it doesn’t save you from the nightmare of having your entire busines...| Games by Mason Blog
My puzzle game Way of Rhea now runs natively on Linux, and Steam Deck! This is in addition to the existing Windows support. The new demo also has some quality of life improvements–namely the ability to pause and fast-forward time. You can give the free demo a try here, if you run into any issues please let me know. :) Please note that if you’ve ever run the game through Proton, Steam will default to Proton despite the presence of a native build. The UI does not always reflect this correct...| Games by Mason Blog
Posting this a little late, but I had a great time at GDC this year! I got to catch up with a lot of people I don’t get to see very often, and meet a lot of new folks. On top of that, a member of GUMBO won the IGF Grand Prize, and the Nuovo award, with his game Betrayal At Club Low. You should play it–Cosmo makes great games, and you don’t have to take my word for it this time what with the whole winning the IGF thing. I’ve written up my personal takeaways from some of the talks I att...| Games by Mason Blog
Hey everyone! I recently gave a talk at Handmade Seattle titled It’s Not Survivorship Bias - On Successful Software Endeavours on why some software projects find an audience and others don’t, with a focus on independent games. I’m working on converting this talk into a blog post, in the meantime here are the recordings & slides! Talk Annotations @ The Handmade Guide Q&A Annotations @ The Handmade Guide --- If you enjoyed this post and want to be notified about future posts, you can sign...| Games by Mason Blog
original: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=197252&picture=speed-limit-45 Normally, to make your software go faster, it has to do less work. This usually involves improving your algorithms, skipping work the user won’t see, factoring your target hardware into the design process, or modifying your game’s content. We’re not talking about any of that today. This post is a list of ways to make your game run faster on Windows–without making any major changes to y...| Games by Mason Blog
Alright, why not. :) Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
Hey Mason could you explain to me a safe way to use github with multiple users for a Unity project? I know a little about github, and I’ve set up the project with the Brackeys’ tutorial. That all went great. I even have the other people pulling the project onto their machines successfully. And I can successfully do a push from mine. My concern is what if they make changes, and want to push. Do I need to do a push first before they do or do they need to do a pull before they do a push? I...| Games by Mason Blog
So. Up until last week, Way of Rhea did not have a crash reporter. This is kind of a problem! We’re a small, self-funded team. Our initial reviews could have a big impact on sales. The last thing we need is for an easily fixable crash to mess up our day one reviews! I’ve tested the various aspects of the game on a large variety of setups, but there’s always a configuration you’ve yet to test. I’ve participatedinlotsofevents with test builds, but I doubt most players will bother to r...| Games by Mason Blog
Fullscreen exclusive is a real thing your computer can decide to grant a window, but, as of yet I haven’t been able to find a single game where the fullscreen exclusive vs borderless window settings consistently do what you’d expect them to. If you’re an expert in this topic and believe this post is incorrect in any way, definitely email me or DM me on Twitter and I’ll issue a correction! If you’re interested in jumping to the conclusion, see Testing Fullscreen Exclusivity in Other ...| Games by Mason Blog
This morning, I decided it was long overdue that Way of Rhea get its own icon. I believe that if you’re building a project in Visual Studio there’s a UI through which you can change your exe’s icon–but I’m not a Visual Studio user. It took me quite a while to figure out how to set an exe’s icon from the command line, so I figured I’d document what I learned here in the hopes of saving someone else some time. It’s possible to dynamically load and set a window icon via code, but...| Games by Mason Blog
I recently attended the Steam Q&A hosted by GamePlay Space, and I took a bunch of notes for myself. A few friends asked about the event, so I figured I’d just upload my notes somewhere I can share. If you’d prefer to read a summary over the raw notes, Chris Zukowski put together some takeaways in his article “What does Valve say you should do to sell your game on Steam?”, and Simon Carless wrote some of his thoughts up in “The ‘mysterious’ Steam algorithm - not that scary?”. R...| Games by Mason Blog
With Santa Cruz officially in lockdown due to COVID-19, I’ve been at home a lot working on Way of Rhea. Since I’m left without any excuse for not posting, here’s a neat proof I happened across while working on some new puzzles. :) Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
I posted this poll on Twitter few weeks ago: Entity systems won by a long shot, so that’s what I’m going to be writing about today. In particular, I'm going to outline the process that lead me to Way of Rhea's current entity system. Way of Rhea is being built in a custom engine and scripting language written in Rust, but the ideas described should still be applicable elsewhere. Hopefully this writeup will be found helpful, or at least interesting. :) Read more...| Games by Mason Blog
These past two weeks I have been drawing inspiration from other side scroller games in order to develop a style unique to [Way of Rhea]! I have found Braid to be a particularly good source of guidance because it is a successful game with an inspiring art style. The art for Braid is both as encapsulating as it is functional. Additionally, this is the first serious game I’ve worked on, so it helps that Braid’s artist, David Hellman has a SUPER amazing process blog of his own out. I’ve bee...| Games by Mason Blog
The first API I came across for talking to a scripting language from engine code was Lua's stack based C API...| Games by Mason
Artists Alley is a segment which provides a behind the scenes glance into the artistic process for Way of Rhea.| Games by Mason