itch.io

Hi all,

Well, last night I learned why my laptop is so bad with rendering graphics...  it literally only has 128MB of dedicated VRAM.  It's basically 6 year old integrated graphics on a small laptop not built for graphics.  The tough part is that it's got double the RAM of my other, even older laptop.  What's worse is that I have an even older Alienware box that had dual Nvidia 1GB graphics cards in it, but I can't use that because one of the cards is broken and the machine no longer has hard drives in it... not to mention it's 16 years old.  The 1,200W power supply soaked up a lot of electricity and it was often loud when the fans were blowing.  

So I can't use any machine I have to do graphics stuff for DamNation very well.  This laptop is already challenged just compiling what I have now and I'm just getting started and have a long way to go.  A cloud solution is too expensive for a sole part-time indie pretend dev like me.  So do I buy a new computer?  Not any time soon I don't think.

So more graphics may not come for some time.  I'll just be working on all the other stuff for now.  I have a lot to do... an almost overwhelming amount of things.  I guess I've got nothing but time, so there's that.  I learned one person had been working on their game off and on for 6 years now.  I'm at less than 6 months I think, if I include when I tried this the first time Summer of 2025. I'm just gonna keep working on making DamNation better and better.

thanks for reading!

Ortisha

Hello! 

Thank you very very much!  This is the best feedback and advice I've ever received!  I love it!  Nobody has ever provided anything like this for me until now.  I agree with all of your observations, points, and suggestions.  It's exactly what I was hoping for by doing random evals for people.  Sorry that I don't know enough to be able to do the same for you and thank you for taking the time to write up very useful information for me!

I appreciate what you did here very much.  It's beyond anything I could have asked for from anyone.

thank you again,

Ortisha

Hello!  Cool game, but it's not for me.  I'm not good at escape rooms in general.

Here is a short eval for you:

1. Game title: Alyryla

2. Dev: garmpeeld

3. Platform: browser

4. Minutes played: 2

5. Biggest takeaway: the instructions are simple and easy to learn.

6. Biggest issue: seemed heavy on resources.  I have an older laptop.  It took a while to load and fan came on during the short time trying the first room.

7. What is the game trying to do?  Escape room!

8. What works: the instructions are simple and the game does load and is playable.

9. Would I play this more?  I personally would not.  I don't generally do well at escape room games is the only reason.

Hello!

Your game looks really neat!  I don't have a platform to evaluate the game on, or I would!  I don't evaluate on production devices.  How long have you been working on this game?  Any advice for a noob indie dev?

thank you,

Ortisha

HI Seanthemii!

I got it to work!  what a fun game!  

How'd I do?  :>

Platform used: browser

Time played: 5 minutes

Biggest takeaway: it was fun!  once I figured out how to get through the beginning menu with the keys

Clarity: middle of the road.  It's just been kind of a challenge for me, as a noob, figuring how how to get this game going and play it

Core mechanic: 5 out of 5!  using the keys to race is easy and a lot of fun!

Technical stability: 5 out of 5

Cohesion: middle of the road.  It was just challenging for a new person to know how to play, but once you do it the first time, it's a piece of cake!

Can I feel the game loop: yes!  and I got a good score in my first race, I think.

thank you,

Ortisha

Thank you!  I'll give it another look soon, in the next couple days for sure, just not sure if this evening.

Ortisha

Hi all!

v_05 has been posted!  I am loving the traffic to my page and the six downloads and the four followers!  You all are great!

v_05 has the following new things: 20 more beaver facts, swimming, a pause button, fog, eyes that show up in the distance at night, owls that only hoot at night when you get close to them, and a "how-to-play" button under the in game menu button.

I ran into a few issues this time.  Water engine stuff and adding external game objects.  I saw that one thing was reaching out to the internet every time I loaded the game!  no thanks!  I don't know if the artist who posted the thing online knew it did that or not, so I'm not placing blame.  I'm just not using that item anymore.

Thank you for downloading my game!  Thank you to those who left a $$ tip!

If I generate enough $$, I will be formalizing my effort.  If I make enough $$, I will be buying real game objects to make the game much more immersive and factually correct for plants and animals, including Agnes herself.

Anything above lvl 5 are "in development" levels.  Lvl 9 is not completable.  I'm aware of the current bugs and issues, I think.  Feel free to read the readme.txt to see my journey.  If you have questions about pre-v_03, just ask.  It's been a wonderful learning experience so far!

I've also started doing game evals for people.  Got a game you want me to check out?  Let me know!

Be well,

Ortisha

hello!  I tried via the browser.  It was just the opening page for me - no way to get into the game.  Did I do it wrong?

I'll do a more in depth review if you can tell me what I did!

Ortisha

Hello!  Your game looked cool so I had to try it out.  I'm new to evaluating games so it's easy for me to be a complete noob with no lofty expectations.  Below is my evaluation:

1. Game title: Tiramisu Super Duper Star Racing

2. Developer: Seanthemii

3. Platform: Game Boy emulator.  I thought it was an HTLM5 game at first.

4. Minutes played: 2

5. Biggest takeaway: I wasn't sure, as a noob, if I needed to download it or not.  The splash page could include a note saying it's for a gameboy emulator?  I'm sure the game is fantastic but I can't evaluate it yet, I can only do windows and html5 games currently.

6. Biggest issue:  I didn't know how to run it.

7. What is the game trying to do: racing!

8. what works: great instruction page.  Lots of details there.  I should have read them all.  Also, the splash page has cool music.

9. would I play this again?  I don't think I would.  I don't have an emulator and this is literally the first game I've seen that requires a gameboy emulator.  Again, I'm a noob!

Thank you for posting your game! It was neat to learn about and that's why I do these evaluations: to learn stuff for my own game.

regards,

Ortisha

Hello!  It is not possible to reach me via Instagram.  And we are talking in the threads here now!  Thank you for the follow!  I haven't found anyone to follow yet but I started following a few discussion threads like the one you posted your game on.

I'm not looking for anything in return, so no worries there.  Evaluating your game was fun as it gave me more perspective on things.

regards,

Ortisha

Hi Michael!

I decided to try my hand at evaluating your game.  I'm doing the evals because people like them and because they help me learn and come up with ideas for my own project.  Here we go:

1. Game Title: Flappy Devil

2. Developer: Noob's Games

3. Platform: Browser

4. Minutes played: 2

5. Biggest takeaway: It's the best info page I've seen since I started doing this.  Brilliant!

6. Biggest issue: nothing blaring to me.

7. what does it do?  the player flies around obstacles using mouse clicks for flight

8. what works?  it's simple yet satisfying

9. would I play this again?  yes!

Thank you for posting your game!

Ortisha

Hello!  Neat game!

Minutes played: 10

Biggest takeaway: great loop!  simple and fun.  Loved the opening music and the UI was easy to follow and works.

Biggest issue: Defender smartscreen hates your executable.  The credits ODT file looks like gibberish in windows notepad.  Maybe use a txt file?

would I play this more: yes!

cheers,

Ortisha

Hi all!

I'm strongly considering building a game reviewing sandbox on a separate throw-away system.  I've built a google form so I can give consistent feedback at three different tiers of depth/analysis.  I want to assume that not everyone that wants feedback on their game is just looking for malware victims.

While you can play my game safely, I won't be pulling anyone's game on my production system.  I do want to review other games though.  I just need to pull out my old crappy laptop and set things up first.

In other news, I'll be posting v05 this weekend.  I've added some neat stuff on the existing 9 dev levels: swimming, fog, eyes in the night, and...

Agnes now starts each level on a tower where she has increased initial camera zoom so you can check out the terrain before you begin.  You can see who created the tower in the credits in the v05 readme (not posted yet).

There's also a new "how to play" button in the menu.  It's not great, but it's a start.

cheers for now!

Ortisha

Hi Curlyy, you wrote a really good post about 40 days ago that I wanted to reply to, but there was no way to reply!  I can relate and I think we have things in common.  Maybe we could commiserate for laughs and then share insights and what each of us are doing next to try to get more visibility of our games?

thoughts?

Ortisha

I made a game!  https://ortisha.itch.io/damnation

If I can ever get a budget started for it, I'll bring in real game assets.  Collect sticks and stones and eat berries.  Explore the maps/levels.  Finish the level objectives to move on to the next map!  Each map has better stuff.  Birds, fog, rain, night/day transition, water.  Read the facts that stream.  Dream of a better DamNation game and send feedback!  Free to play.  Windows only (so far).  Read the readme and win!  The download has the fun security warning but it's clean the last I checked.  Thank you!

Whoa!  I finally took a step to put my game link out there more, in itch.io and elsewhere.  I now have 42 views, 5 downloads, and $12 in yucky revenue!

I know people aren't downloading my game because itch is posting a security warning still.  It is what it is.

I've been slowly visiting the community blogs and trying to expand my presence.  I have lots of ideas but not a lot of time.  Baby steps!

Ortisha

https://ortisha.itch.io/damnation

Hi folks!

Small update from me.  Level 8 is coming along nicely.  It's a water level and I've been working on water and swimming physics (some new things are introduced in level 7).  I've also figured out how to wire my stone spawn points to detect water when they spawn and put the stones on the ground surface under water instead of showing the stones as floating on the water. It sure beats manually placing the spawn points on each level!

If you are reading this and you know a good resource for free 3D stuff like grasses and bushes and trees, please let me know.  My budget for this game is currently $0.  At some point I may buy a full 3D beaver with skeleton, but I can't/won't right now.  I'm also very new at importing stuff and making it work, just as I'm a complete noob at Blender.  I'm not an "artsy" person so that stuff will come slower than new game functionality.

I'm learning a lot and successes like the ones I had this evening in making the game better and adding features have made the whole thing continually worth the time and effort.

I also learned that my laptop is too small, for storage and processing power and RAM.  So things may come around slower than I could do them, and that's ok too.  

Please try out the game!  It's free but you have the ability to donate if you want.  It's just me doing the whole thing and I really welcome your feedback.

Be well,

Ortisha

Hi all!

OK... I've learned something new and very important.  If I want to greatly reduce the size of my zip w/ EXE posted here on itch.io, I need to not include the editor content in the "package".  I already knew that part, but here's the kicker:

If I try to package DamNation as it is right now, I have to include the Unreal Engine editor content (this makes my current build big like you see it now).  If I try to not package the editor content, the packaging sequence fails with errors showing that I still have editor tools in use.  This is true, because I'm still developing the game!  In order to remove the errors, I need to not try to package the editor tooling... and even with migrating the items to my game folder, they still wont package.

The way I fix it: I bake each level first.  But baking, in my experience, removes the ability to edit the levels with the tooling... which I don't want to do yet... cuz I'm not done building the initial levels!  So the dev downloads will stay big until I can package without the editor content, which I won't do until I'm done developing the initial levels.  So the download stays big, for now.

Learning has occurred (for me).  Thanks for reading.

Ortisha

Hi folks!  Just a small update from me.  Last night, to my own delight, I got "swimming" to work.  Agnes actually swims, or appears to swim!  The joy of this is because when I first tried to create DamNation last summer, I broke nearly everything related to collision zones in my attempt to get Agnes to appear as if she's swimming in water.  I used that failure as hindsight this time around, and got it working within just a couple hours.

I'll need to make it so it's scalable across playable maps/levels, but it works in the single place where I'm developing it (in Level 7).  Level 7 is also where my new foliage system is first deployed, and is only the second level where I'm doing some cool water physics stuff.

What's the plan for today, when I have time?  Fog!  More wildlife stuff!  And maybe the next wave of UI widget enhancements.

While I am absolutely approaching all of this as vibe, I do keep an organized OneNote.  You can get a glimpse and catch a feel for what that might look like just be viewing the posted ReadMe.

Please keep the feedback coming, early beta testers, and thank you for reading.

Ortisha

DamNation v04 has been posted.  It has my first rain system, a 2nd water system, a 2nd foliage system, and real bird sounds, as promised!

In v04, I made the minimaps better, I changed some collision zones, I added indicators for dam trigger zones, I tweaked Agnes's movement and camera, and more.

I have a lot of notes of things to work on now from the first beta testers.  Thank you for the feedback!  

I was also able to add another level or two while decreasing the overall package size of the game zip!  It's under 500MB now.  

Anyway, lots more to come.  Please consider downloading DamNation and giving it a go.  I will appreciate it.

Ortisha

I love your concepts here.  Harvesting, Energy, and progress meters are brilliant.  I have a "happiness" meter and stick/stone counter only, so far.  I'm up in Vermont.  Indie RPG - I need to call mine that too.  I'm such a noob.

DamNation v04 is in the works!  I spent about 30 hours on it over the last several days (outside of work, I know, it's crazy).  V04 will have my first attempt at rain, a new water system (flowing river/stream) in addition to just a pond, my first attempt at using one of Unreal Engine's foliage generators, and real native bird sounds, straight from audubon.org!

I'm hope you like it!  Let me know what you'd like to see done better.  This is still in beta and will be for a while while I'm vibe dev'ing.  It has the potential to be big, though, as I'm just getting started.

DamNation is free to play but feel free to leave a tip!  If I can self-fund the game, I will be buying content from others and offering small payments to people to help me with stuff in the future.

Cheers!

Ortisha

Hi all.  I'm Ortisha.  I have started creating a game I named DamNation about beavers in the wild.  I am not a game developer and I'm just doing it for a hobby because I love learning.  I love the topic and everything my game is about and I find joy when I get stuff to work.

Nice to meet you all.