TeaHands

Got this through our letterbox yesterday. What sort of supernatural powers do we think they're talking?

I did always quite fancy the power of invisibility when I was younger although nowadays I'd probably pick teleportation. Not sure where "supernatural power" ends and "superhero power" begins, though 🤔

Maybe this is more like the ability to be slightly see-through and float 6 inches off the ground. Which I guess is still cool in its own way.

I feel like most Saturday TV from my childhood wouldn't hold up, but in my mind at least Gladiators was the exception! Really hope they don't ruin it.

(17:50, BBC1 for the unaware)

Now that 0.19 is in testing on a couple of servers we're faced with the reality that Liftoff is probably not going to be functional for much longer. So I'm curious what everyone's got planned.

Personally I've got my eye on !raccoonforlemmy@lemmy.world which is currently under development but looks like it might be the closest to my ideal. Developer describes it thusly:

I liked the feature richness of Liftoff (e.g. the possibility to explore all the communities of an external instance), the multi-community feature of Summit and the polished UI of Thunder and I wished I could have them all in the same app.

It's currently very promising, but also very buggy so I'm hopeful it might be in a more usable state by the time 0.19 starts majorly rolling out. We shall see. The dev put out a call for testers a couple days ago but I'm sure more wouldn't hurt if anyone wants to give it a whirl.

I've tried most of the main Android options by this point, Summit gets the most use just because of multi-communities (great for sports and other happening-right-now events) but I'm really not a fan of its interface.

Boost looks nice and simple, but I find a lot of the features to be just straight-up broken.

Sync and Eternity both put me off with their looks even though they look totally different to each other!

Connect would probably be my second choice so far, but I'd still need to keep Summit around for the multi-communities which is a bit annoying.

That's about the extent of my investigations at this point. Would love to hear which you've tried and what you like / dislike from the point of view of a Liftoff user. Let's get some recommendations ironed out before everything breaks and this group is overrun with people asking why 😅

Could be outstanding, could be something you've already completed.

I like to break my goals down into a sort of ladder with the eventual goal at the top, but smaller achievements on the way. So to that end my bucket list includes such gems as:

• Go out for a meal alone
• Buy a fancy ice lolly without feeling guilty about it
• Climb up the nearby hill without stopping for a break
• Reach out to various old friends for a catchup
• Finish reading the whole Discworld book series (I never did read the last one, iykyk)

Haven't been feeling well this week so I took the opportunity to log into the game for the first time in years. Maybe Past Me knew when she logged out that it was going to be for a while, because she made sure I was in a lovely spot for the sunrise when I came back!

Happy to see Laurelin server is still going strong, I've been pottering around it on and off for 12 years now and still never even made it to Moria due to spending all my time farming, smoking pipe-weed on the roof of my hobbit house, and back in the day playing quite a lot of creep and RP-selling dyes in Bree when I should've been levelling instead 😅

That's my Christmas break game sorted, anyway. Do they still do the Yule festival?

Went down with a mysterious cough on Tuesday night. Seemed like just a bad cold Wednesday, got worse and added dizziness to the mix Thursday, now today the dizziness is gone (hooray) but whatever I've got has changed tack and is trying out severe nausea on me instead (booo).

Was supposed to be out tomorrow with a friend I've not seen since August. Not impressed.

So while I spend the next few days swooning around the house complaining about it like an actual child, I'd love to hear some happy things to focus on instead!

Weekend plans, amusing anecdotes, promises to avenge me should I not make it through, jokes at my expense, all equally welcome. For the love of god just distract me 😭

First pub, two drinks, £10.70. Ouch, we thought. But that must just be what it costs round there nowadays.

Second pub, literally round the corner. Same two drinks came to £6 something.

I'm trying to be normal today and do my actual job instead of falling into a hyperfixated rabbithole of how pubs work and how they can possibly be so different despite being in essentially the same location and about the same size. But I can't get it out of my mind!

Both of them had dogs in, so it can't be that. The more expensive one was much more brightly lit, so maybe pub-grade lightbulbs are very expensive? 🤔

Any subject-matter experts hanging about who can put me out of my misery?

You may or may not have heard of the gross Android 14 bug currently affecting people with multiple user accounts on their phone. I'm in this picture, hi, this is me.

When I heard about the bug, I stopped using the second profile and everything seemed to be fine. A narrow escape, right?!

Alas, no.

This morning I saw something vaguely amusing, and thought "my friends at UKCasual will chortle quietly at this". Tried to take a photo...camera crashed. And again. And that's apparently it! I now have no access to storage on my phone and am left hoping Google come up with a fix asap.

Not even going to tell you what the amusing photo was, so ner.

How's your day going? 😩

Not that I'm admitting this is a degenerate meal, but it seems to be looked down on by everyone I know and haven't convinced to try it yet.

• Basic plain pasta shells, cooked normally
• Drain water
• Add like half a block at least of chopped-up basic cheddar and stir it while it melts
• Stuff into six (this is the appropriate amount, trust me) Yorkshires
• Throw the pan away due to burnt cheese

Easy peasy, lemon....cheezy? I await your judgement.

*whoever replies with a penis joke first, loses

I'm off on holiday tomorrow and will have basically no internet for over a week. So naturally I'm downloading all the media I can think of, just in case of downtime.

Thought it might be fun to solicit some musical suggestions from you lot to help expand my mind. So here we are. What's your ultimate all-time #1 album?

My tastes are pretty eclectic* so feel free to suggest basically anything, and maybe I'll update after holiday and judge what I thought of them all. Or maybe not, you know, that sounds like potentially quite a lot of effort.

Cheers in advance!

* mostly on the alternative / rock side of things but also love various kinds of dance sub-genre on occasion and of course the genre-that-isn't-a-genre-at-all, Eurovision

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1915905

OP posted their unpopular opinion that game devs shouldn't be using their development time on making games accessible for people with disabilities.

But check out the top comments, which have turned into basically a handy checklist of all the simple accessibility features we can easily add to our games!

Thanks, OP 😄

Sorry in advance

Since Lemmy is a terrible influence, I’ve been convinced to give RSS another go as a means to get at the ~~news that interests me~~ interesting stuff that I’d otherwise miss. It’s actually working surprisingly well, so I thought I’d share some gamedev-specific resources that I’ve subscribed to so far.

My current approach for the feed is to subscribe to basically anything that looks interesting, then prune it later if it turns out to be no good or be too spammy. So I’d very much appreciate suggestions of blogs, magazines, video channels, podcasts, whatever is RSS-able!

READING MATERIAL

Magazines

• MCV / Develop Magazine - News, interviews etc from around the UK gaming industry
• Game Developer (née Gamasutra) - Lots of interesting news and articles among the nonsense here but I can’t find a way to sub to only certain categories, so may be too spammy. We’ll see.

Blogs

• LOSTGARDEN - Self-described as “a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design” and it’s not wrong
• Keith Burgun Games - Basically a personal blog that includes devlog updates, general musings on gamedev, and a podcast
• Blobs in Games - Technical articles that mostly go over my head but are interesting to read through anyway to see what sort of thing actual smart people get up to
• Brandon Cole - Game reviews and other articles from the perspective of a blind gamer who works as an accessibility consultant. Really interesting read, and audio versions of posts are included.

WATCHING & LISTENING

Podcasts

I don’t really do podcasts but would like to get into them more, so any recommendations for this section very welcome!

• The Clockwork Game Design Podcast / Strategy Can Be Fun - By Keith Burgun who I mentioned above already, a combo of discussions and interviews around game design
• Building The Game - “the ins and outs and ups and downs of being game designers in a documentary style”
• Deep Listens - Subbed to this because it described itself as taking deeper dives into what makes games great, but haven’t listened yet so we’ll see
• The Game Dev Advice Podcast - Basically what it says on the tin

Videos

Did you know you can still subscribe to YouTube channels via RSS? This should help with the problem of YT trying to decide what we actually want to see, versus what we’ve literally told it we want to see. So far I’ve RSS-followed:

• GDC - An excellent resource that you all no doubt already know about
• Going Indie - Video essay type content on the business side of games, from a guy who started his own indie studio
• Ask Gamedev - Despite the name this is more of a showcase channel for indie / solo games, but it’s fun for a bit of occasional inspiration
• Grant Abbitt - Actually a 3d modelling channel focusing on Blender but the way he explains things has been invaluable for me and my game

Plus a couple of devlog channels by members of this community that I’d like to make sure I don’t miss:

• QueenOfSquiggles - Making a magical farming sim inspired by Slime Rancher (shoutout @QueenOfSquiggles@lemmy.one )
• JulianH - Making a story-based game about the very far future, with some definite Outer Wilds vibes (shoutout @julianh@lemm.ee )

If any of you reading this have your own devlog channel, please share, I’d love to check it out too!

—

For anyone thinking of joining the RSS revolution, I’m trying out Inoreader which I’d seen recommended a fair bit around Lemmy. Not too sold on it yet, but the free plan is a decent enough start.

interesting stuff that I’d otherwise miss