Tim McGrath’s Post

Get ready to survive the wasteland on the go! Let's explore into the challenges and triumphs of optimizing #MaximumApocalypse: The Video Game for the Steam Deck!

In our game, we are seeing a behavior that truly baffles me. I'm curious if any of you have any type of explanation. Our game demo is live on Steam (https://lnkd.in/giAk9qY5). We are seeing an oddly large percentage of our players who open the game, "play" for 1 minute and then close the game. Like, this is not even enough time to hit the Play button. Can anyone suggest an explanation for why a Steam user would install a game demo, open the game, and then almost immediately close it?

introducing party game Blank Slate: Hilarious Minds Think Alike in Blank Slate Are you ready to put your mind-reading skills to the ultimate test? Introducing Blank Slate, the addictively fun party game where predicting what others are thinking is the key to victory! In this fast-paced, easy-to-learn game, players race to complete phrases by writing down the word they think their opponents will choose. The catch? No hints allowed! It's a battle of wits and intuition as you try to get inside each other's heads and match your answers. The gameplay is simple: pick a Word Cue card, write down your word, and see if you can match it with another player's response. But don't be fooled by its simplicity – Blank Slate is a delightfully challenging exercise in understanding how others think, making it a riot for players of all ages. With 250 double-sided Word Cue cards, the possibilities for hilarious wordplay are endless. Will you and your friends be on the same wavelength for phrases like "The early bird catches the _____" or "A stitch in time saves _____"? Or will your responses be wildly different, leading to fits of laughter? Blank Slate is the perfect game for family game nights, parties, or any gathering where you're looking to inject some light-hearted fun and friendly competition. The included scoreboard keeps the competition fierce, while the dry-erase slates ensure easy cleanup and endless replayability. Whether you're playing with a small group or a larger crowd, Blank Slate promises to bring out the mind-reader in everyone. So, gather your friends, grab your slates, and get ready to put your predictive powers to the test in this uproariously entertaining game! Buy here if interested! https://amzn.to/4brkeLm

Bomb Bash: Explosive Fun Awaits! 💖 https://lnkd.in/gj9TPjiU 💣🎉Get ready for the ultimate bomb-throwing showdown in Bomb Bash! Use your skills to run, throw bombs, and be the last one standing in this action-packed, hyper-casual game. The goal is simple: run, dodge, and throw bombs to be the last one standing! Why You’ll Love Bomb Bash: ⚡ Fast-Paced Action: Quick rounds and constant action keep you engaged. 🧠 Strategic Gameplay: Plan your moves, dodge bombs, and use the environment to your advantage. 🎮 Hyper-Casual Fun: Perfect for quick gaming sessions anytime, anywhere. Dive into Bomb Bash and experience the thrill of explosive competition. Can you outsmart and outlast your opponents to become the last one standing? Download now and find out!

Anyone started a Slack channel sharing these, ala wordle back in the day? I don't actually recommend that (ha!) By far my quickest one. This is probably my favorite game out of the three here and the NYT games. I kinda wish it was an app! Queens #73 1:10 👑 lnkd.in/queens. Sharing these in a group evvvvery day breeds comparison and competition - which is NOT the point of games (hot take!) The benefit of games like these ... well, that's a long list! Problem-solving, focus, attention, innovation, vulnerability, resilience... it could go on and on and on. All of those benefits directly result from the neurochemicals your brain releases when you participate in these low-stakes (no one actually cares how you did, AT ALL) activities. And all those skills (problem-solving, creativity, etc) DIRECTLY translate to high-stakes situations. Want to learn more? I'd love to bring a workshop about this very topic to your team! Let's chat! #LetsPlay #PlayfulWorkDesign #PlayIsntJustFunAndGames

📚 In the second installment of our series on Building A Multiplayer Backend, our CTO Hunter Fortuin dives into the crucial topic of managing player accounts. Whether you're in the planning stage or facing the challenge of changing course mid-development, our newest blog post is here to help you navigate common pitfalls, avoid complications, and ensure a smoother experience overall. Plus, our blog page got a touch-up! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/erYzTP3Z #GameDevelopment #BackendDevelopment #CatenaTools

Really enjoying the "retro" Half-Life vibes of ABIOTIC FACTOR. I've only played it solo so far, but it's a brilliant concept: take the gameplay foundations of HL1 and update it with more modern gameplay elements like crafting, a bit of survival, and co-op. Created by a NZ developer, Deep Field Games, with all the charm (and accents) to suit. Great work, Geoff (Zag) Keene and team. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you are a fan of the original Half-Life (and I mean, who isn't?): https://lnkd.in/gFA8-8KD

📝 Let’s learn from League’s new Swarm mode. Released on July 17th, Swarm is a new bullet hell game mode that stands apart from anything they’ve done before (yes, even more than Invasion, for the OG’s). After spending a few hours with this game mode, we can confidently say it’s not just any ordinary mode. Here, we’re not playing the League of Legends as we know it—no skill shots, no shop, nothing of that sort. Instead, you must survive, level up, upgrade your equipment and stats, and then do it all over again. It even has some roguelike elements, as after each run, you can enhance your starting stats with the money you earned while fending off waves of enemies trying to end your run premateraly. Let’s see what learnings we can extrapolate from this ambitious and quite original take on the genre: 🧑🤝🧑 Creative and non-intrusive User Research We all know that recently, Riot has been keen on exploring and releasing different types of games, such as TFT, Legends of Runeterra, Valorant, 2XKO, or Project T (you know, the MMO FPS that’s taking forever to come out…). Wether this game mode is a massive test or not, it’s definitely a good use case on how to use your already estabilshed IP as a tool to validate the market and safely explore new ways to expend your license. Speaking of it… 🧵 Build a multi platform license They kinda already kicked things off with TFT, LOR and even Arcane, but making a completely separate game using the League’s iconic license is another challenge. Even though they don’t go the bullet hell way, the MMO and 2XKO also benefits from understanding how their target audience behave outside of the Moba’s confort zone. 🕹️ A place for each audience to thrive With the release of Arena, it’s clear they’re trying to cater to players who no longer want to grind ranked games but still want to enjoy their favorite MOBA in new ways. This could be an attempt to make their game more accessible and casual-friendly. Ultimately, both the casual and the competitive audience will benefit from such actions, each of them having their own playground and their own place to enjoy the game. Less toxicity in casual play, less soft-inters in ranked. Either way, we in Naga Agency give a good 👍 to the game mode and you definitely should give it a try with your friends! What do you think? What else have you learned from the Swarm mode? Let us know in the comments 😁

OF RULES, CHOICES AND LEVELING UP Life is a game. With many mini-games within. There are a few universal rules in the main game, e.g. all players have a limited lifespan, all players need to eat, drink and sleep to survive; but in mini-games most rules are flexible and set by participants in the games. Some play to win the game, others play to enjoy it, but all players need to find and keep resources - wealth - in order to survive, and enjoy the game. What rules we play by depend on what mini-games we are playing in, and which participants get to make the rules in those games. The most conscious of us choose the mini-games we want to play in, and level up to become a dominant participant who gain enough resources to play an enjoyable game. As we continually level up, some of us rise in game ranking to play in bigger games. We 'zoom out' and see a bigger game-map than before, and see how the mini-games exist within the bigger game. As we play in bigger games, we encounter higher categories of other players, better quality of resources, and start to have more influence over the rules of the mini-games within our game-map. Some people play the same game for their entire lifespan, while most level up and rise in game ranking and 'zoom out' a few times. Then there are those, who level up and rise up at higher speeds to play on bigger gamemaps quicker than others. This speed is driven by what's known as Ambition. We can start early or we can start late, but we can control the speed at which we rise in our game ranking. Ambition determines the size of the gamemap we are playing on. Do you know the size of the game you're playing in? Ring the bell 🔔 on my profile. I am Kenny Lim, Ambition Amplifier and an #LBFAlumni member at #SkyHighTower.

Dev Log #10   The past few weeks, the work on the online multiplayer mod for Rain World has progressed well. I resolved a months-old bug, added character select with Steam integration, and squashed a few new bugs from engine changes.   The most challenging bug to fix was progressing from the first PvP arena level to the next. The engine is designed around how the game operates: you play inside "rooms" that exist within "regions". In Arena, the room and region are tightly coupled whereas the story mode could consist of hundreds of individual rooms linked together in one region.   For a long time, I had been working against our engine to make Arena work with the next level. It had moderate success locally, but when applied to the real world of networking latency, things quickly fell apart.   In fact, things fell apart in one of three ways, which I arbitrarily called the following: 1. "Blue 42" -- clients are rushing the host to the next level 2. "Why isn't this working" -- nobody's moving on 3. "Time-traveler's paradox" -- Host loads next level (which could be same level if people wanted to replay the match) and sees player 2. Player 2 does not see Player 1. I initially tried overriding our transaction control system to just stop throwing Exceptions in hopes that the network packets would go to where they needed to go if I kept things up. This strategy was awful and consumed countless hours.   I realized yesterday when giving it more thought that I needed to do something I hadn't done yet: I needed to implement a slinky.   Yes, that kind of slinky. The ones where the coils expand and contract yet are still connected. Rather than holding the host in the match or trying to make them move faster than the clients, I decided to move them to a staging area (read: The netcode equivalent of The Twilight Zone) where they would recursively check if all clients had left the current level and joined them in the Twilight Zone. Clients, for their part, would also recursively check to see if the host had moved on and established the next region for them. The host would slinky up and wait, the clients would slinky up and give the host slack to slinky again This immediately made an impact in the gameplay. The host was able to clean up resources from the previous match (and re-use them without having time-traveling problems) or could load up a new level without issue, because players were being treated the same way as if they had joined the first level. The recursion gave me the one thing I needed in my new control flow the most: time.   The video you'll see below just show me playing the game with some bots (creatures) turned on since I didn't have anyone available at the time to playtest (though I did later to great success), and creatures created the same kind of problems that clients did (clients are animals was my takeaway). I play through Level 1, then throw myself off the edge to die and trigger the next level logic. It's two videos spliced together.