A bit of a delayed post, partially due to less progress on games recently.

Gravity Flux is still available on Steam and two patches have been sent out already.

November

Not much work was done in November, I have been taking a break as I have lots of other hobbies!

However last weekend, on the 4th of December, I did some work getting the SteamAPI integrated into Godot Engine using GodotSteam. Previously, I was using an plugin that give me a sub-set of Steam features. It however does not support Steam Input, which is required for me to be able to support 8 controllers of any kind on Windows. So I built Godot from scratch as required. It wasn’t too difficult on the Mac and Windows, thanks to the scons build system which is much easier to use than CMake.. Just to test it out, I added the feature of getting the user’s Steam username.

Next time I get time to work on it, I will be testing the Steam Input system. There is not a lot of documentation on Steam Input with Godot Engine. I’m not sure how it works. It’s possible it just works alongside Godot, and no new code is required? I will be testing it for sure. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

Steam username provided by SteamAPI, built-in to Godot Engine.

I don’t have huge plans for December, being that time of the year where everything is super busy. I may get some time to test Steam Input.

Screen Australia

I did however go to a meeting with a representative from Screen Australia! (Lee Naimo, Head of Online). Screen Australia recently announced they have funding for indie games, as well as TV/movies in the past. This was an extremely awesome opportunity to at least get a feel for what kinds of games get funding from Screen Aus, and what the people from Screen Aus are like themselves.

The main take-aways were,

• No guns. Apparently it’s a hard sell to the big-wig politicians and ministers who approve funding requests. So my next game, “Sentience” involves some guns, and that may not be suitable for Screen Aus funding. But I’m still going to work on it, and it’s not intended to be that violent despite having guns in it.
• Know your audience. Lee said that if you think you know you have an audience, even if niche, they’ll be more inclined to support you. So if you’re just experimenting with no clues about audience, they may not be as supportive. For example, making a game similar to or another game which already has a known audience. Maybe a Minecraft clone for example, but different enough of course. I think I will need to do some more research into what’s successful in the indie games space for games similar to the next game I’m working on.
• They don’t have a favourite genre or art style or gameplay type. Any game that as above, knows it’s audience has a chance.
• The Tas game developer scene is much newer than Melbourne and other bigger states. So it’s been a slow start, building an industry down here, with not many great examples of successful studios. You of course would want a successful studio as an example, and there have been some notable ones, but nothing too huge yet.
• They all seem to be very nice, approachable people. They also had a meetup the day before where the CEO himself came up to us Tas game makers ourselves and had a bit of a chat.
• As above, they’re very approachable. You can contact them with any questions and I’m very certain they’ll do their best to help.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

This will be my last planned post for 2022. It’s been a pretty big year for me in my game development journey. Releasing Gravity Flux, working with Tas Game Makers more, meeting Screen Australia, going to several game maker meetups now that covid restrictions are easing. Feels like hopefully a good start to something more.. The ball has started rolling and it will hopefully keep rolling!

Please have a nice, safe, pleasant Christmas and New Years break.