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Tinker Tuesday for January 7, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I'm working on a VR game. For me, VR game development has recaptured some of the magic of indie games ca. 2005, before the whole scene got professionalised and commercialised to (un)death: the space of existing games is tiny (and so is the potential audience), so whatever vaguely new idea you have, chances are good that nobody has ever done it. You don't need to be a talented artist and animator, because the medium itself still has a certain "wow" factor like the first 3D console games did in the mid-'90s and has not been ground down by the hedonic treadmill. There are hardly any established "best practices" for interaction design either - instead of spending weeks to reproduce some deep local optimum of camera and input behaviour that has been iteratively refined by the industry over decades, you can try out any crazy idea you have and it probably won't be much worse than the typical existing game (and has a good chance of being better if you put some thought into it). Oh, and support in the major engines is a steaming pile of bitrot and performance regressions, so you can actually write bare metal code and not drown in FOMO over the SIGGRAPH-certified gimmicks and asset libraries you are missing out on (last I checked UE's Lumen-Nanite combo was still unusable in VR?).

There is a slight problem in that OpenXR (the only reasonably portable API) is somewhat overengineered and underdocumented, which is probably why there isn't really much of a user community for it, but so far I haven't encountered obstacles that couldn't be overcome with some gentle trial and error. It's slightly more unfortunate that its way of talking to the drivers is sufficiently weird that tooling like RenderDoc (indispensable program to record/profile/replay graphics API calls) can't work with it, so debugging also kind of has to be done like you are a primitive (ca. 2005) technology Youtuber.

Since the performance envelope is so tight, optimisation (for performance and appearance) also feels quite fun and rewarding, though your mileage might vary if you don't share a former ROM hacker's masochism. Over the course of the past 48 hours, I tried to improve a volumetric fog effect by reading (absence of data races not guaranteed) the depth buffer to clip each volume at solids already rendered, realised that I made an algebra error integrating the fog (nontrivial because I loathe wrangling FBOs and so am trying to do almost all objects as raytraced primitives) before, found that the wrong integral serendipitously happens to be in a family of integrals approximately equal to those of other fog functions that look decent, found that this all tanked rendering performance, and then more than recovered the loss by tweaking the drawing order and using the newly available depth buffer data to discard some fragments early.

Does anyone here have experience with hobby game development? How do you release your games? VR development is a wilderness, but not so wild that you can just throw up an FC2 homesite and hope that people will find your project. Are there still forums of the type where people would happily try out a half-baked game and give constructive feedback out there?

I'd be excited to see whatever alpha versions you come up with, and I know there's a couple game developers here.

I wish someone would make a good VR port of a drone flight simulator like Liftoff. Doesn't seem like it would even be all that hard to do, but it wouldn't be profitable in any way. It might make a good first project for someone.

On a related note, the very best drone flight simulator on PC right now is a free mod for GTA 5. Nobody made a dime off of it.

I too am making a game. I don't know a damn thing about product release or marketing. All I have is this tweet for a marketing strategy, it seems pretty sound to me: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819790369166430275