Gamedev Knitting #2

Welcome to Gamedev Knitting! This is a newsletter in which I talk about crafting games.

This week we have Game Jams, adding videos and rotoscoping dancing people on a Godot game, non-edible cookie textures, a new Action Game Maker engine, and more!

GameJam Culture is still going strong

If you don't know what a GameJam is, the quick explanation is: it's an event in which you have a deadline to create a game.

That's it. Most of the times is not a competition with anyone else but yourself, because crafting a game is hard enough and finishing one is always a reason to celebrate (in the age of AI, I like to use the word crafting whenever I mean you making the game yourself, not prompting it to ChatGPT).

Screenshot of the submission page for Godot Wild Jam #97.

I've been participating in quite many Game Jams now, enjoying my time making small and weird experiences, sometimes getting #1 place in the Music category with a soundtrack I made myself, yes that's me bragging and I'm making sure to make a very long link to highlight this achievement. For me, GameJams are one of the best motivators to finish a game, because one common thing in all GameJams is that, at the end, everybody presents their games to everyone else. Here is where digital and presential GameJams differ the most, though:

• In GameJams with a physical site to participate, people present their games at the end - you'll have some time to show your game off, and at the end of all presentations, people can play each others games.
• In online-only GameJams, you'd usually have a "rating period" for the games made during the GameJam, where people can play and rate each other's game. Rating is hardly competitive (most GameJams don't have any awards at the end); it's mostly something people can use to gauge what they liked about games and give/receive feedback.

Nowadays, itch.io is the place to find online GameJams to join, as there is one happening all the time. If you are interested in participating in Game Jams, it's worth taking a look at what I wrote about Itch.io unspoken community guidelines.

Rotoscoping and Videos

Speaking of GameJams...

Godot Wild Jam is a somewhat traditional GameJam in which you have to use Godot to make your game, and use the theme of the Jam somehow in your game.

This time I wanted to try crafting a different game with my wife, Brena. I'm an ape-coder by trade, and Brena is an amazing UI/UX artist, so we decided upon ourselves to experiment a couple of things:

• I'd create the game soundtrack and the game mechanics would reflect the different sections of the music.
• My wife would create the rotoscoping effect of the characters.
• We'd add a real video at the end of the gameplay.

The end result is quite unique and did I mentioned we got #1 place in Music? Out of 160 games? Crazy stuff (I did the music by the way).

Specially for a web build, there are a couple of things you have to be careful about when adding too many assets, so we were careful in how we made the rotoscoping effect and adding a video to a web build.

Drawing the boogie shade on Krita

No big tricks involved besides knowing which tools to use. For the Rotoscoping, it was a manual process of recording ourselves and drawing on top of it frame-by-frame using Krita. The video was a bit harder; Godot natively uses OGV format for videos, which is kind of legacy and a bit of a pain-in-the-ass to work with.

If you are interested in knowing more, I wrote about it here!

AI Jams and itch.io future

One thing I noticed, having participated in a couple of jams in a row and looking forward to participate in more, is that there are currently two types of GameJam in itch.io: Those that forbid the use of AI (the vast majority), and those in which AI usage is not only recommended, but the whole purpose of the GameJam is to use AI tools to create your game (not linking to any of them here but it's quite easy to find).

That's a bit understandable, seeing there is a crowd quite hyped about AI, and a much bigger crowd quite tired of AI insidiously occupying the space of the their beloved craft. But if anything, this rift indicates that there is definitely something incompatible in what GameJams are and what using AI means.

I would love to write more about that in a different article, zeitgeist and such. But one of the clearer reasons for this is: if GameJam is a Knitting event, using AI is like bringing a sewing machine. When everybody knits together, it's easy to gauge what everyone did based on how they knit, and to share knowledge with each other. If someone uses a sewing machine in such an event, they will pretty much look like assholes, because they are bringing something that defeats the purpose of the whole damn thing.

There are arguments and counter-arguments for that, but the "social" solution for this is to separate AI usage in their own niche Jams, which is almost okay.

Almost okay.

Because if I'm right, I suspect sooner or later Itch.io will also have to make a decision. Unlike Steam, itch.io is a boutique store for indie developers, with many games but very niche ones, and most of them quite small or web based. It is quite easy to publish something on Itch.io, unlike Steam where you have to pay $100 to publish something (and maybe get your money back once you sell your game enough).

And in Steam, we're already seeing the effects of mass-producing games with AI. Curatorship in Steam will certainly take a hit, because discoverability is becoming worse than ever, and it already sucked quite a lot. With Itch.io being much easier to publish games and allowing GameJams where the whole thing is mass producing more games, I'd think it's only a matter of time until Itch.io can't scale faster than people creating cheap clones of other games using AI.

For my part, I'll keep participating on Jams AI-free, thank you very much. I'd rather knit my own games and leave The Hustle out of this for as long as I can.

Engine Updates

Crown Cookies

Crown Engine versions look a bit misleading to me because they seem like minor versions, but they always pack quite a bit of content. Crown is a Lua powered Game Engine with REPL support, and version 0.65 expands rendering and scene import, adds glTF 2.0 support for 3D models, adds MP3 support for Audio, triplanar mapping, improved shadows, projection textures for all light sources, collision visualization, parallel compilation for resources, along with many other editor QoL improvements.

"Cookie Texture", or Texture Decals in Crown Engine.

You can check more about this update on the Crown v0.65 highlights post.

S&Box Neck Update

S&Box is one of the weirder engines-slash-robloxlike ecosystem (successor to Garry's Mod and all), and this is an interesting engine update because it added necks to the original bean-like mascot characters of the Engine.

The new revamped model, courtesy of S&Box update.

Of-course this is not the only update, there are plenty of other things, the more interesting ones like Model deform using physics colliders, better GPU profiling tools, and revamps on Friends and Parties list, where you can join your friends in the Metaverse-esque games list.

Defold Fonts and 3D Physics

Defold launched a new minor update but packing two very important bits: it adds rich text to labels and GUI nodes, so you can now create more expressive interfaces with colorful texts and images without extensions. It also gives 3D projects a much broader Bullet 3D physics API in Lua.

A Defold Ragdoll example running with the new Bullet3D API

It's also a prelude for Defold v1.14.0 (still in beta!), which will add better support for Apple Duo.

I'm participating on the 2026 Defold jam to learn more about Defold, so expect an article next week (if I manage to finish the game in the first place 🙃)!

Also from Engines Database Aggregator

• Optimizing CPU-side Rendering Code. A Godot blog article on optimizing a game to run on CPU code. Really good article about some tradeoffs of GPU vs. CPU code, and how to profile your game to know when to optimize.
• Update objects using DOTS without ECS. What Unity ECS has in performance, it lacks in developer experience, specially if you have to deal a lot with the non-ECS world (MonoBehaviors in general). DOTS without ECS means using Unity Job System and Burst compiler, which is a huge performance upgrade, without paying the full price by staying in the ECS world.
• Writing Efficient C++ Code. An old-school article (from the distant year of 2013) about efficient C++ coding. It made the roundabouts in my feeds, and it's an amazing article that is quite applicable to game development.
• Action Game Maker Massive 2.0 Beta. Action Game Maker is a Game Engine built on top of Godot Engine, and launched with many usability problems that made it hard to justify spending money on an Engine, when you can just use Godot. Now they're on Beta for a new, revamped 2.0 launch.

Remember to comment and vote on new entries for the next Newsletter! And if you want to submit a link so I can talk about it here, consider becoming a supporter!

Human in the Loop

I was supposed to write this post two days ago! I'm still figuring out the best way to write the newsletter. Even if I love writing, good lord how difficult is to ape-write when you're still learning the ropes.

This have been quite fun couple of weeks still, doing Game Jams and all. It's also a great excuse to test weird stuff, so I'm trying to pick my Jams to learn new bits of game development to post here. If you have any weird Game Jam to recommend, I'd love to know more about it.

As it goes, stay safe, and I hope you have an amazing weekend ahead of you. See you next week :)

Missed something?

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