HOT GAMEDEVS DON'T GATEKEEP

Inspired by this post by @midwinterhunt, here's a compilation of all the game dev resources I have come across, most of which I use fairly frequently. Most of these are free, some are paid but fairly cheap. Feel free to add your own resources. ✌️

Important reminder: When using basically any works or programs someone else created in your games, make sure you thoroughly understand the licenses and terms it has been shared with. If you don't know what the terms are, reach out to the resource and ask. Don't be lazy about this; it's not only dishonest but it can come back to bite you.

Engines

Unity - Best suited for mobile and multi-platform.

Unreal - Tailored for shooters and high-fidelity experiences.

PICO-8 - Virtual console for simple games

Godot - Open source and free!

GameMaker - Good for 2D games

Bitsy - Great little engine for making simple games and experiences

Construct - Never used but have heard nice things

Scratch - If you've never coded before, this is the best place to start. Great for young devs and those who want to get their feet wet.

Adventure Game Studio - Best suited for adventure games

RPG Maker - Best suited for top-down classic JRPG style games

Twine - Text-centric games like Interactive Fiction

Assets

OpenGameArt - Many assets, various licenses, and plenty of CC0 content.

Unity Store - For Unity only. Some free.

Unreal Store - For Unreal only. Some free.

Godot Asset Library

Jean Moreno's Toon Effects - Some of the best effects available on the Unity store. Unity only but I've used them in basically every project.

Steamworks.net C# Wrapper For Unity - Unity only C# wrapper for integrating Steam compatibility to your game

Itch.io - Plenty of free art assets and game dev resources

Kenney - Kenney makes tons of open-source assets for devs to use.

Art

Mixamo - Generates rigs for your humanoid models and lets you apply a library of free humanoid animations to them. Super helpful for prototyping. Adobe.

Blender - Free, open source and fully featured 3D program.

XNormal - Free offline normal map generator

Normal Map Online - Free online normal map generator

Crocotile - Cheap tool for building 3D models from sprite sheets

MagicaVoxel - Free voxel modelling tool

Piskel - Free online sprite drawing tool

Aesprite - Paid sprite drawing tool

TurboSquid - Not always great quality, but can be good source of free placeholders.

Textures.com - Limited texture downloads per day but free for personal use.

Pexels - Free stock photo resource. Most are free for commercial use. Check licenses.

Clipstudio - Good for illustration or graphic design. One time payment.

GIMP - Image editing program a-la Photoshop. Free.

Audio

Audacity - Free and fully-featured DAW/audio editor.

sfx.me - Free 8-bit synth-style sound effect generator for games.

CastingCallClub - Easy forum to find amateur voice talent for your project (p.s.: you should pay them).

FreeSound.org - Free sounds, searchable by license. A go-to for my audio needs.

Incompetech - Royalty-free music by Kevin McLeod.

Scott Buckley Music - Royalty free with conditions. Generally more on the cinematic side of things but very good stuff!

SoundCloud - 'Search -> By Track -> Filter: Use Commercially' leads to songs posted with allowance of commercial use. Always reach out to the artist to understand their terms and confirm that it's okay to use with your project.

Project Planning

Keymailer - Handy for mailing keys to influencers (don't expect a lot of traction unless you're paying for some of the features though).

Trello - Kanban board. Great for organizing tasks, managing bugs, etc. Free.

Notion - Private text and wiki page editor. Good for project organization, note taking, and fleshing out ideas. Free.

Obsidian - Alternative to Notion, with similar features.

Miro - Free whiteboard for organizing thoughts, images, brainstorming, etc.

Wave - Free Bookkeeping site. Great for keeping finances organized.

||⚍ᒲᒲ|| ||⚍ᒲᒲ|| ⊣ᔑᒲᒷ ↸ᒷ⍊ ꖌ╎ℸ ̣……. ↸ᒷꖎ╎ᓵ𝙹⚍ᓭᒷ

Pope Innocent XIV ♥️

Im sorry wolfy😔

It had to happen

No copypasta has ever ruined my life as comprehensively as Hell Fuck Castle. I write tabletop RPGs, and now every time I read a lore blurb about an ancient ruined kingdom where everything was cool until the last ruler fucked it up, my brain whispers "King Big Sad Guy, who did the Flame Thing".

This one?

Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.

I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.

And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷

for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.

In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).

To use it:

now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type "py -2 .\tumblr_backup.py [your options] [your blog name]" and hit enter. Example:

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down

Now consider: a man in a dress. Not in drag or all dressed up or anything. No accessories, no makeup or styling, just wearing the dress, some ratty boxers and muddy sneakers. No socks or stockings, hairy legs in the open air, just raw dogging those nasty shoes. Hair mildly damp. Visibly sleep-deprived. Bruises on shoulders, elbows and knees, left palm bleeding. Sitting on a curb on the street, shivering, looking wretched, and absolutely miserable.

I forgot where I was going with this.

done. next challenge

A dog wearing a motorcycle helmet, sitting on a skateboard and knitting.

I made him an Italian greyhound, hope that's OK

Now, everyone picture the dog offering the man a little knitted greyhound.

imagine dragons

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

Share the knowledge

Okay, here we go! I'm gonna try and put this in order from least to most technical knowledge required. I'm not responsible if you accidentally create SkyNet etc.

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

And that, friends, is a comprehensive approach to banishing the demons of capitalism from your home!

Facts about your body after you turn 25, AKA things I wish someone had told me:

With stroke going on and everyone catching up on shows/movies they couldn’t watch

I highly recommend watching old OLD films

Btw there’s YouTuber that posts film noirs with backgrounds on actors, sets, and directors AND there are zero ads

so. my wife came downstairs just as i took a bite out of the remaining half red onion on the counter. literally within seconds of just getting away with it. i looked at her, and she looked at me, and we both sat there a moment, all frozen, beforeshe said babs, what the fuck. i tried to say i can explain but it came out as or corn explorn because such was the onion in my mouth that there was no room for words. its honestly a miracle that she understood me at all. at least, i'm assuming that she understood me because she did let me get my bearings for a few moments. a smarter man would've used that time to think up a good lie, but instead i just chewed as fast as i could because i knew i was gonna have to tell a whopper and i really wanted to be able to use big words again.

big words are instrumental to telling a whopper.

anyway, i totally ran out of time. i barely got my first swallow of onion in before she said well?, and i did at least have an empty mouth to match my empty head. but also i had no lies. so i looked her dead in the face, opened my mouth and waited, every bit as curious as her, to hear what excuse my mouth was gonna come up with.

im pregnant, said my mouth.

great job, mouth, said my brain.

mmmmm onion, said my mouth.

better you than me, said my wife. then she went upstairs. it has been two hours she still refuses to kiss me. im devastated. im shook. im crying a little, i think.

(but that might just be the onion.)

Okay but now I have to know

What was the truth??

Because it simply cannot be as obvious as “what, I like onions”

It can’t

Because that would not need a lie

I know people who eat onions like apples simply for pleasure

I don’t understand them, but they say “what, I like onions”, and we both shrug, and they carry on

Also. Was. Was the plan to eat the whole thing? Just no more half red onion? Because the alternative form of “getting away with it” was you were planning to put it back with a bite taken out of it before she came in and that is if anything more unhinged

okay so i do this thing that i call tummy tacos where i put all the ingredients to a taco in front of me, but like, separate. and then i take big bites of all of them. but just one at a time. like one big mouthful of taco chicken and then swallow and then a separate big mouthful of chopped cabbage and then swallow and then a corn tortilla and you get the idea.

(my wife considers it Barbaric. she does not approve of tummy tacos.)

but yesterday i had this idea for stomach pico de gallo there i was gonna eat an onion and then a tomato and then a jalapeno and then some cilantro. thud achieving salsa internally. but i underestimated the call of the onion. i really could give a damn about everything else after the onion. i felt the love of jesus in that onion.

and thus i fell into folly.

Babs, were you going to just rawdog a jalapeno?

no i was planning on just eating it

im sure someone already made a post about it but i came across a ublock origin add-on that blacklists around 950 AI websites and disables AI overview ☝️ so u can be free from seeing AI in your search

Your irregular reminder that you should have ublock origin installed for a significantly better internet experience. advertisers have tried to make it as shitty as possible; fight back! Give yourself an online experience worth enjoying!

Most websites check for adblock now.

They do NOT check for UBlock Origin. :)

I once heard a quote by a dude named Alan Watts that went “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions” and now when I get trapped in an anxiety spiral that likes to pop in too

I think the internet might be like this as well actually

This quote may in fact be the philosophical highbrow equivalent of Bitch Go Touch Grass

Everybody, this is Grym! He’s Hopper’s father and a traditionally evil dragon but with some extra razzle-dazzle added 🪩✨

Patreon

the weed just hit and Intuin I wanna learn toncode.n

I als9nwanna get nasty wailth it.

marry an igyanwna ??

Wh is music so wet?

this is my favorite version of loo

Good morning what the fuck did I mean by "why is music so wet"???

hmm... travels on sound waves. waves like water. sound is moist

Thanks! You're right, and I hate it :D

no worries! many have sought me out for my endless wisdom

Did they also hated receiving it?

Deltarune mafia arc is crazy

What the fuck

Beard is a slang term, American in origin, describing a person who is used, knowingly or unknowingly, as a date, romantic partner (boyfriend or girlfriend), or spouse either to conceal infidelity or to conceal one's sexual orientation.[

Wtf these prices are insane

WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER I POST LINKS? WHO HAS THIS KIND OF MONEY

Says someone clearly without organ cartel money

reblog to teleport your mutuals to a massive party when jkr dies

when jkr dies i will tag every single person who reblogged this in a post btw