Yehehe, I'm glad)
The mechs were, in fact, 3D models, just in MagicaVoxel. Exported as slices.
Idk, maybe it's not hard but unnatural to something like Unity. There you're used to work with materials and meshes and objects etc. Here, in the wild you just render images on top of each other and they look pretty)
It's not really. I have a folder with all my sprites, dev server packs them into an atlas and also creates name-rect JSON dictionary I access in code as "assets.textures['texture-name']" and its just a region in the atlas. I just checked and it's 870x1130. I was cautious of the atlas size because I wanted the game to be playable on phones where WebGL has a limit on maximum texture side length of 4096 or so, at least on my phone, and I only have 1 texture (and as a result everything renders in a single draw call). I know that cause I reached it once and couldn't tell why the game was crashing.
I think it's not as complicated as it sounds. I'm doing (and know tbh) only the basic things in the area or the way of writing a game that I'm choosing (in short - not using any engines or libraries) and when I hear that it's "too technical" (what my ego hears is "cool") I get impostor syndrome and feel like a fraud, but that's just a character issue. It limits my tools and forces me to spend most of the time typing. Maybe it's like making notes on paper instead of a laptop - it's less practical or efficient but makes sense if you like it that way. And for now I think i prefer that more - learning what menus to click or what esoteric (compared to general programming) APIs to use just doesn't give me satisfaction. I also may be in that "wanna rewrite it from scratch" phase and some day will outgrow it (as in grow into something else, not necessarily from something worse to something better). But again, on my laptop Unreal crashes and Unity is barely usable. Godot does work but I havent' given it much attention.
FFmpeg is easy when you you don't have to read its docs and can just ask google search thing what arguments to give it. For me it really is just a thing that converts anything into anything else. I'm using it to resample WAVs into mono 22kHz to save space, then concat everything into a single MP3.
Like hell I'd animate its legs xD
About Landsword... I did count the sprites. I was that one excited idiot who posted game's source code into project comments suggesting the dev to render buildings as single prerendered sprites without realizing that each of the layers tilts relative to the camera mimicking 1-point perspective... yeaa. Still amazed by it. Though I'm afraid it will be forever a prototype because the author was spending time on weapons and maps and not core gameplay or like, the plot or the thing I can't name that brings the levels and weapons and enemies together into a cohesive experience or makes it appear like one. But maybe it's good for it to be abandoned at some point. It would look great in CV I'm sure.
It's not like thousands of sprites is an issue, I think the problem is the legacy version of GameMaker the dev is using or even the fact that they're using GM at all (my personal feeling).
Yeah, I believe this form has potential. However I'm not seeing anything like it so maybe there's a reason it wouldn't work. I don't know enough about networking either) I only read a few articles and what google search AI thing spits out. Gotta work on that.
Well, luckily programming doesn't require judging by the gut that much) Or training the eye.
I think there's more to find in the idea of aiming for doing 80% with the 20 that you personally are capable of and it doesn't require a lot of hard skills, just using them accurately. At least that's what my idea of "how to make games when I can't do sht" currently is. I think a good example of that would be Curse of The Arrow or really anything made with PICO-8. It's a constraint the point of which, I guess, is to free the energy you would spend on art or programming and make you spend it on things you wouldn't normally give enough time to so that the game overall is more complete and round and therefore enjoyable.
Nah, It's probably because people think it's too complicated for them. We can do really cool stuff, just gotta know where to put the effort.
Well, I couldn't tell you aren't one)
Absolutly not, it isn't. I had an issue with performance but it's Godot and my browser, nothing to do with the game. I did leave some notes on potential (from my POV) imporovement though, but it might be totally irrelevant if you did decide not to focus on things I was talking about. I did find it fun, especially the bossfight).