Don’t you have difficult levels?
I consider difficulty levels a failure in game design.
Cas 
Why is that, if I may ask?
Because you ask the player to make a choice, up front, about how good they think they are, at a game they’ve never played before, using criteria they don’t yet know. And they cannot choose the right answer! They’ll feel like they’re missing out if they choose “pweez don’t hurt me”; they’ll moan vociferously but refuse to back down if they choose “kill me now!!”
Far better to just design a game at which everyone has fun and sort of creates the difficulty level of their own making, so to speak.
Cas
It occurred to me the other day that the good old pinball machine might be a nice model, when it comes to difficulty issues. There’s enough variety and randomness that a novice can have fun, but room for skillful play such that an aficiondo will not be bored.
My WIDT: again, a task that I thought was going to take three hours took the better part of several days. I made an endless torch/fire, derived from a 5-second sample, and added it to the peacefulbrook “sound demo” jar.
In the process of working on it, discovered that several other things were broken and had to fix them, mostly pertaining to the synths and the event system.
I discovered an article describing how to output a stream of PCM data via OpenAL. LWJGL streaming sound with OpenAL. Am looking forward to digesting it. But there are several other things on the queue as well.
If you’re interested in reverse engineering check this out. It’s a ton of fun 
https://microcorruption.com
You are right, but it shouldnt be a definitive choice.
For example I have always liked setting the hardest level and then, if it is too much during gameplay, lowering it.
Yeah I guess a good choice can be to make an increasing difficulty slope (what I like to do is make it so the player can always have access to levels of various difficulty so that if they feel up to it they can try to beat a tough quest or monster or whatever, or train somewhere easier. But in the end, whatever path you picked, you end up having to defeat stronger and stronger mobs and so on.
J0
like adding 5 difficulty levels up front or letting the player feel cheated on ?
I’ve added variable water depth to my isometric terrain. Each tile has its own separate water depth, although they are currently all set to ‘seaLevel’. This is in preparation for implementing dynamic flowing water. But it might be a good idea to leave flowing for a while so that I can actually get some gameplay type things happening.
@LiquidNitrogen I reckon you could use real shading to make the terrain easier to understand Other than that, I’d love seeing flowing water!
Happy Father’s day to any dads here!
I’m working on a bit of a puzzle. My family is gone and I have no clue where they went, but I’m pretty sure it’s for Father’s Day. The weird thing is that they didn’t leave a note, text, or wake me up to come with them. The water pooled up in the washing sink is room temp and my mother always makes it screaming hot so they’ve been gone for a good while. But! The plot thickens… There’s an unused pan filled up with soapy water in the middle of the dining room table. Wtf? In the kitchen there’s 3 PAPER plates with 3 (metal) forks that are stained like they were used to eat a fruit. However the plates are 100% clean. There is also a plastic (we have no plastic plates or anything) bowl under the 3 plates and forks. This bowl is totally clean too. So they obviously didn’t use these forks to eat on these plates. If they had there would be fruit juice stains. My father doesn’t have any interests other than the occasional mountain bike and camping. So I have no clue what they’d go out to do (neither my brother nor my mother would mountain bike, and they aren’t going camping since they obviously would’ve let me know somehow). The plot thickens more!: there’s a piece of toasted cold bread in the toaster!!! There is something fishy going on…
Finished my games port to Slick2D and made smooth lighting work.
Each block light value is rendered to a 1:1 buffer which is upscaled with bilinear scaling.
Awesome article posted by Dragonene_ on IRC, discussing how market share works (or rather, doesn’t exist) in the games industry:
https://medium.com/steam-spy/your-target-audience-doesn-t-exist-999b78aa77ae#.xofz0xw4x
Huge thing to note, is that there are only 1.3 million (1% of total) steam users who can be considered “core” gamers.
“Core” gamers being the people who you can expect to purchase several games per year.
Great article. I only played MMOs because of World of Warcraft and now that World of Warcraft isn’t that fun anymore (because Blizzard didn’t manage to even maintain the quality of the game after WotLK, let alone improve it) I’ve moved on to other kinds of games. I was only an MMO gamer because of WoW, I was in the WoW market but not in the MMO market. I’m in the League of Legends market but not in the MOBA market, and so on.
Many people including myself tend to specialize in one single or a few games and play mostly them for long periods of time. They rarely go out of their comfort zone trying new games. As a game developer I either have to fill a niche that is requested but not filled (rare) or create my own market (hard) - if I want to make money off my hobby, that is.
Implemented dynamic bitwise autotiling in TritonForge.
Took 8 hours of needless problems because I made the alpha Tileset opaque (facepalm)
but I learned a lot today, and are pretty happy with the end result.
I can switch out the mask file and all fades will change too, so look variation and
texture packs for players will be interesting.
So I need help making a decision:
Should my software renderer have imperfect transparency or no transparency?
It’s a tough decision for me because I don’t like to have imperfect features 
Make it as an option
Well I mean, transparency is something that I expect to be used primarily for windows, so if I make it an option, opaque windows would exist, which would make the window useless haha
Imperfect transparency is perfectly fine, as long as you use it only for simple objects. Anyway you only really use transparency for windows, glasses, perhaps bottles, but usually not for cars, so I think it’s alright to keep it