Wait, you also created the music? The music is amazing!

Wow, really nice! The music reminded me of donkey kong. Super great game!

Really nice idea! The SFX and VFX are also excellent! Is there a lose condition?

The flying thing jump scared me. Pretty cool game!

I like the visuals. I think with some relaxing music and more polish it could become something really special.

My bad, I should have been more thorough. The function I use to calculate delta time (window.performance.now) returns milliseconds but I assumed it would return seconds. It’s too late to fix now. I’ll add it to the list of known issues.

Do you have a >60 FPS monitor by any chance? It’s intentionally fast to make it difficult to hit your opponent. The logic should be capped to 60 updates per second regardless of monitor refresh rate. Originally it was tied to the frame rate of the monitor but I already addressed that issue before the submission period ended. Thanks for checking out my game! :)

Update: The game still doesn’t work properly on monitors with a refresh rate higher than 60Hz. Sorry about that! It’s too late to fix it now.

Yes scaling everything down would probably help. Thanks for trying the game!

Yes you need other players to play the game properly. Don’t worry about the rating! I appreciate honest feedback and obviously this game isn’t visually impressive :) The idea was to make it a fast and chaotic struggle to hit your opponents. Thanks for giving it a try!

The issue should be fixed now!

Oh boy, I thought browsers were limited to 60 FPS 😅

Nice job, it works really well for such a relatively simple system! The jitter threw me off into thinking that it’s a neural network ^^

The AI is quite impressive. I’ve always lost so far ^^ Is it a neural network by any chance?

I would love to try this game but why does it require admin permissions?

Hey! I’m actually a professional programmer but I could also do the sound design instead. I enjoy doing sound design stuff! I sent you a message on Instagram.

Yew Zyr vibes

Really cool music and sounds!

I enjoyed the game but pressing T in the water didn’t teleport the raft for me.

Making a tower defense where the player controls the path was a great idea!

Cool idea, this has potential!

Very well made. Really enjoyed the vibes! The only issue I encountered is that most of my screen was black where I would expect green grass instead (in both the release and debug versions).

Very cool!

I like the idea and the music is very fitting! Could make for an interesting ‘backrooms’ game.

I really like your track ‘Retro Rush Hour’ but the other tracks fall a bit short imo. It would be more transparent if you included a short snippet of the other music tracks in your preview video.

Thanks, I got really addicted Inscryption before making this game. I’m glad you like the cards ^^

Very cool game! It had some sound issues for me. There was a very loud high pitched sound sometimes.

Its a nice concept and could be really fun, but it feels unresponsive. When pressing a key, the white ball should go in the corresponding direction immediately. I also really like the visuals and sound.

Thanks!

Glad you liked it!

Thanks for playing and for your feedback!

Very difficult but nice vibes :)

Excellent game. The slowdown and particle effects when destroying the beamers feels awesome!

I didn’t find spamming the left mouse button very enjoyable but maybe I’m missing something.

Very enjoyable. I really like the art style despite it being so simple. The music is super fitting.

I didn’t find the ship controls very enjoyable but it has a nice vibe!

Very well made!

Hey everyone, it’s been a while since I posted anything here. (You can find my main devlogs on IndieDB)

I thought I’d share my newest devlog on here since it’s of a more personal nature than usual.

Limiting Social Media

As an indie game developer I had been incorporating more and more social media in my free time.

My thought process was that by being active on social media I could find some good marketing opportunities for my game, Assembly RTS along the way. This has been been true to a limited extent.

However, I recently noticed that, even though I didn’t expose myself to the dark side of social media (drama, politics etc.) and preferred checking out what other game developers and artists are working on, it had an overall harmful effect on me.

Being exposed to so much superficial communications had a negative impact. Once I noticed this, I made some pretty big changes on how I spend my free time.

I made the decision to log out of all social media platforms including Discord and YouTube and to not give them a single look for a whole week. Additionally, I forced myself to not play any video games in my free time, except for real-time strategy games.

So how did it go? I feel great, and there have been so many positive benefits!

Good Sleep

During the past few months I have been struggling to fall asleep at night. While I was no longer using social media the problem lessened significantly. Getting a good amount of sleep is a big game changer. Concentration levels and overall well-being are way up!

Writing Music Again

I caught myself by surprise as I started writing music again in my free time. A most welcome change!

I have been trying to write music after work without success because of a lack of energy and motivation. Now that I have reduced all the elements from my life that satisfy a low-key addiction to instant gratification it felt very natural to start writing music again. Now wouldn’t that be awesome? If I could write the soundtrack for Assembly RTS myself, in my free time!?

RTS Games

I also found a brand new liking for real-time strategy games. Believe it or not, even though I’m working on a real-time strategy game myself I barely played any games in this genre during 2023. The main reason for this was a severe lack of energy after a hard day of work.

However, now that I have much more energy, I have come to enjoy the singleplayer campaigns of Empire Earth and C&C3: Tiberium Wars very much.

I actually never played the single player campaigns of strategy games very far. It must have been due to a lack of patience that I generally preferred the multiplayer aspect of strategy games.

Life Without Instant Gratification

Now that I feel much less like a dopamine addict I’m looking forward to an even more interesting and fulfilling future.

Who would have thought that cutting out all forms of instant entertainment would have such a positive effect in such a short amount of time. I honestly expected that I would feel absolutely miserable without my ‘fix’, but after a few days often feeling a sense of withdrawal and boredom I now feel better than ever before.

I highly encourage all of you to try this experiment yourself and to cut out all forms of social media and other forms of instant gratification out of your life. You might be surprised.

Social Media Going Forward

From now on my plan is to utilize social media on Fridays only. This is the day on which I usually post my devlog on IndieDB and occasionally do other marketing-related stuff.

I’m not sure how severely I should keep limiting my Discord use in the future because I utilized that platform to quickly gather advice on various topics whenever I needed it. I’ll have to give that some more thought. Perhaps I should use old school forums for that purpose instead, to limit the risk of being distracted.

Please let me know your thoughts on this topic!

Hey Strategy Game Enthusiasts!

This week I continued working on enhancing the visuals of Assembly RTS and added a fog of war effect.

Reducing Visual Clutter and Improving Immersion

Two important goals for Assembly RTS are to keep visual clutter to a minimum and to make the game as immersive as possible.

To achieve this, I originally envisioned most of the important information about units, such as their health to be part of the ‘physical’ world instead of the user interface. This is why I initially added two distinctively colored surface areas to each vehicle. One area for the team color and the other for the current health status.

However, I later noticed that this introduces too much visual noise, especially when the camera is zoomed further out. So I decided to only highlight the team color on the surface of each vehicle.

This looks more elegant and should be more easy on the eyes, even when a lot of units are visible on screen at the same time.

In the future, vehicles are going to emit different levels of smoke depending on how damaged they are.

Health is also going to be displayed by a health bar above each unit (toggleable).

Here is what I’ve got so far:

Additional VFX

I had the idea to let the hovercraft not only distort the surrounding air due to their futuristic propulsion system, but to also kick up the surrounding snow. So I went to work in Unity’s VFX graph and came up with this effect. I think this turned out looking quite impressive! (As you can see I also integrated snow fall)

You’ll just have to imagine the hovercraft actually moving around for now. In this example the hover logic is disabled.

Fog of War

Next, I added fog of war and some animated cloud shadows. It’s all starting to come together!

Starting off Work on the In-Game UI

Before I make the Steam page for Assembly RTS public, I would also like being able to showcase close-to-production ready UI elements for the in-game scene. Unfortunately, the browser-based user interface solution I’m using for my main menu suffered from frame rate issues in this more graphically intensive scenario.

So after a little bit of research I set up OneJS for my in-game user interface. OneJS as a tool may be a bit overkill as the in-game user interface isn’t going to be very complicated, but it offers a workflow I’m already familiar with.

In Figma, a UI concepting tool, I had difficulty coming up with an attractive design that can keep up with the competition. What I came up with looked so mediocre that I’m not even going to show it here 😅

I’m better at 3D modeling than 2D visual design, so I tried using 3D models for the UI instead. But unfortunately post-processing caused me a lot of trouble. The rendering pipeline I’m using doesn’t support displaying objects with distinct post-processing settings. With that, this option is out of the window.

So instead, I started supplementing the OneJS-based user interface with a shader-graph-based solution. It’s very tedious to create UI with the help of Unity’s shader graph tool but it has the added benefit of supporting the bloom effect when you crank up the albedo intensity. And bloom, as you may be aware of, can make anything mundane look more interesting.

This is the energy bar showing the current power level your base is at. I think I’ll change it to go from left to right instead of originating from the center and I’ll further improve the visual clarity.

The rest of the in-game UI is still very rough around the edges. I’ll show it off in the next devlog, once it’s in a better state.

That’s it for this article. I’m looking forward to your thoughts! Please leave a comment if there is anything you want to add or have any questions or feedback.

If you would like to follow the development Assembly RTS consider following me on Twitter and YouTube!

Hi there!

This week I continued improving the 3D assets for Assembly RTS.
This is also the first time I’ve used Unity’s VFX Graph for an extended period of time.
It worked great for creating this heat distortion effect!

The updated vehicle textures and building designs:

This is also the first time I’ve used shader graph animation.
It helped me quickly create this light emission effect:

That’s it for this devlog. As always, I’m looking forward to your comments and feedback.
If you would like to follow the development Assembly RTS consider following me on Twitter and YouTube!