Elliott Ayling | The Fire Must Grow 🔥

New game! The Fire Must Grow. A hex-based horror city builder. 🏘️Grow your village. 🔥Tend the flame. 💀Sacrifice your villagers. 👹Meet strange people and creatures. Coming soon! Wishlist on #Steam ! #gaming #horrorgame #indiegame

Game: Devil's Derby Release: 4/2/2025 Developer: @elliottayling.co.uk Rail Location: ???

Playing around with #Unity new graph toolkit stuff to build out a tool for defining my 'expeditions' (choose your own adventure type system). Seems pretty good, but missing a fair bit at the moment. Hopefully 6.4 sorts a lot of it out.

Happy to say that The Fire Must Grow🔥 is taking place in the #MidwinterSpirits steam event! ❄️ A great celebration of current and upcoming games that celebrate the cosy start of winter! Check out the sale page! store.steampowered.com/curator/4412... Thanks @IvyJuiceGames

Keep your villagers safe from the terrors that lie beyond the light. #screenshotsaturday

Devil's Derby is currently just £4.12 in the Steam Autumn sale! store.steampowered.com/app/3121580 #indiegame

Damn, everybody trying to buy Devil's Derby today have crashed Steam. Crazy stuff. Guess I'll play #Silksong instead.

This game is over 10 years old. Still looks amazing. Arkham Knight.

Added a table UI class. Supports dynamic column/row changes and sorting. Editor and runtime support. Here it is tracking total existing resources. Will help me add various stats windows. Quite neat. #gamedev #madeinunity

Ghent #photography #streetphotography

Basic farming system done (sped up). Villager plants/maintains/harvests crops. Crop can fail, be affected by weather, temperature etc, which can effect final yield. Needs some UI, but quite happy at the moment #gamedev #madewithunity

In Bruges #photography #streetphotography

Went to Brussels. #photography #streetphotography

#photography #japan #streetphotography #japanphotography

Just updated this and my resource system to use "IResourceAttribute". Effectively means I now raise request for any attributes (IsEdible, IsBurnable etc) rather than specific resources. Resource itself is a IResourceAttribute though, so you can still do that. Much more flexible. #gamedev

Quite like this subtle scanline effect #gamedev #madeinunity #shaders

I wrote up how I designed my logistics system in my next game. It's not a complete in depth post, but just a general overview of how it works at the moment, and the classes/objects that it uses. Hope it is helpful to some people. #gamedev #madeinunity

Reworking my logistical system right now- easily the most complex part of the code so far. It gets complicated fast. Have to be strict with your abstractions, and don't design yourself in a corner with no room to expand. Lots of edge cases! Might do a little write up when I'm happy with it #gamedev

#photography #japan #streetphotography #japanphotography

Devil's Derby is 20% off in the Steam Summer Sale! Give it a go if you like fast paced shooters. #indiegames #steam #fpsgames

Osaka, Akihabara. #photography #japan #japanphotography #streetphotography

#photography #streetphotography #japan #tokyo

#photography #streetphotography #japan

Some early WIP of UI/gameplay. #gamedev #madewithunity #indiegame

Swear 50% of #gamedev time is just save/load edge case bugs and UI fiddling. Losing my mind.

Devil's Derby is Steam Deck Verified! And it's also 15% off for the week! Go try it out! #indiegame #madewithunity #gaming #indiedev #steamdeck

Moved back to Unity for this project. Not because I didn't like #godot, but, as this was a Unity port, realised I spending too much time rewriting core systems instead of finishing the game. Also having to implement systems I use asset store assets for. Already missing certain parts of Godot though!

Anybody got any experience with hex grids in #pixelart? I've settled on a size of 18x20 pointy top hexes, so that a 16x16 sprite can sit on it comfortably. Any considerations I need to take into account?

Starting to look like an actual game now. #gamedev #godot

Works pretty well, with minimal code to support it. #godot #gamedev

Wrote some stuff to simplify serializing custom structs and classes to #godot editor to make for easier debug. Read only at the moment, but works on C# collections too (even collections of custom objects). Might clean it up and put it on github- could be useful.

Godot is really fantastic. Having a great time using it. Very fast and iterative. Have a few nitpicks, but considering it's completely free and open source who cares really. Amazing bit of software. #gamedev #godot

Decided to just use #godot as a kind of frontend/renderer for this project as it's fairly simulation heavy. Considering it's just me, I don't need to be super designer aware. Have written ~7k lines of code before I've even put a graphic on screen so far 😅

Actually quite a lot of good stuff in this old project. But really wish I had documented it, even a little 😭

Porting an older project to #godot C#. Liking it so far, it's quick and easy. But I am missing the serialisation options from Unity. The biggest offender being you can't export struts! Haven't found a way around that- kind of makes the editor useless for debug with how I want to structure the code.

Remember buying this on Xbox 360 from GameStation around release, I must have been 15 or so, and reading the manual on the way home from the shop, getting so excited. Remember stepping out of that sewer gate for the first time. Never played a game like it. Can't wait to do that again.

Has anybody got any experience with the UK Games Fund? It seems like it's designed to exclude companies with no/little funding already considering its PAYE requirement? I can't apply for funding unless I already have enough funding to pay myself? #gamedev #indiedev