Excited to announce that we've begun exploring Clone Drone VR! I didn't think we'd be going in this direction, but after playing a bunch of VR games, I can't stop thinking about the awesome opportunities unlocked by the format.

🚨VR CREATOR CALL🚨 We're looking for VR Content Creators for some slicing, dicing roguelike actioning in @CloneDroneZone 🤺 Get in touch with us at community@thunderful.games if you're interested in covering! RT's appreciated 🙏

I don't hang out on twitter much anymore, but if I did I would say that: CLONE DRONE IN THE HYPERDOME launches on December 12th!!! 🔥⚔️🔥⚔️🔥 https://t.co/0lOp1CRWKL

🤖Ever wanted to get a close look at our robots or use them to make an animation? Download the 3D models from Clone Drone in the Danger Zone here! https://t.co/WuN678RAWi

And it's interesting to think that others probably played those games and were inspired by some completely different aspect of them. Anyway, I really like the practice of dissecting things you love to understand why you love them, and allowing that to influence your work.

It reminds me of the early days of exploring Clone Drone. I drew heavy influence from the old Jedi Knight games, but what I tried to create was not so much a copy of the gameplay as the same *feeling* I remembered from them. Powerful slow strikes, emphasis on distance and timing.

Really loved this episode of @WritingExcuses : Dissecting Influence https://t.co/JcY1cx4CSz Identifying what it is you love about something and applying that to your own work vs copying the surface level thing is powerful. Great nuanced discussion about that!

lol, gamedev is spending 2 days trying to make your thing interact realistically with rigidbody physics before trying a stupid 5 line approximation that looks much more realistic.

It's a minor feature but one of the things I'm most excited about for our new mocap system are these little preview animations. Look at those cute little robots stabbing eachother!

I asked a few scammers how they find and target game developers to request free game keys. I came up with a couple very simple tricks to 100% catch all of them and auto-flag them as scam. (thread)

I really love this TikTok lol. (sound on!)

Easy. The expert will tell you they're an imposter.

We're currently working on a mocap editor that works directly inside VR. The ease of capturing new animations and iterating on them instantly is going to be so much fun!

I feel like people often think of #gamedev tools purely in terms of speed and productivity, assuming the same result could be achieved over a longer period of time. But great tools make you want to do things you would never attempt without them. Dance robot, dance! :D

Like imagine if the voxels got temporarily offset in the impact direction of the cut, the edges around it glowing like molten metal, cooling down to a burnt color, all in a compute shader not bothering the CPU much. I think there might be gold in these mountains!

Also looking forward to messing more with compute shaders! The one we ended up using just calculates the position of each cube relative to its parent volume. But easy to imagine color effects, position offsets etc!!! 🔥🔥🔥

One of those weird things where it doesn't scale up infinitely, probably don't want to make the whole game rendered like that, but for moments where a voxel model is being rapidly updated every frame? Very promising!

GPU instanced cubes turned out to be a pretty viable way to optimize voxel rendering for us! Still requires a whole bunch of work and experimentation, but for Clone Drone VR I think this might be how we will optimize sword cuts!

One of the most interesting things about VR is that when you give the player a weapon you can't just play a bunch of cool attack animations for using it right. Does anyone know how to fight with a double bladed scythe?? 😅

Makes me think about when people complain about enemy balancing in Clone Drone. There are definitely instances where there's been a mismatch between how badass someone looks and how hard they are to kill. It's an important factor to evaluate outside of mechanical balancing.

Giant knight on horse pierces your heart with a single mighty thrust = Yes this makes sense. I should have dodged that. Contrast with $5 games I sometimes try with my son on the Switch: You bump your knee on a kitten and die with no visual feedback = This game is bullshit.