cloverfruit

19 yo

[devsgames]

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.

[randomalienencounter]

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

[mxrderscenes]

writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months

[galadrieljones]

Serious advice tho if this happens, it's likely because you already wrote past the end of the scene and wandered too far from the more logical transition point, and you should go back to the last time the writing felt "unforced" and cut everything after.

You can also just skip the transition. Really good writing can span years in a single sentence, like you can just authoritatively state fact and your reader will go with it.

[xalphafox]

This is GOLD! You just saved me like thousands of therapy costs lmao

[headspace-hotel]

When I was writing my fic last few months the strategy I used was "just skip all the scenes I don't want to write" and it worked great in my opinion

[dr-wily-enjoyer]

i hate them

[cloveraex]

I don't get it

[pyrobchilling]

Oh shit I just realized I can post the "Gaussian Blur Wizard That Gaussian Blurs You" here

[transgendercyborg-deactivated20]

[zzoupz]

his friend "Motion Blur Mage That Motion Blurs You"

[blastovkatamarinecromancy]

Their long suffering associate, the "Sharpen Cleric that Sharpens you (badly)"

[artastic-foe]

Nooo!!! What have you all unleashed upon us!?!

[l4byr1nthz1]

dont forget the chromatic abberation warlock that chromatically abberates you

[vinnybox]

may I add Mystic Mosiac who turns your quality waaaaaaay down

[theo-window]

What did he do to deserve this

[rain-droplet]

punished by the council

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

FOOLS!!!! YOU ARE ALL NOTHING BENEATH THE MIGHTY POWER OF MY JPEG ARTIFACT

[animentality]

[alamuts-lair-of-madness]

Prison School explained it best:

[cpericardium]

Bzzt!! Wrongo

you try. what do you all get. don't give it good/bad feedback i don't want it to get better

[theslowesthnery]

🥹🥹🥹

[midnightnautilus]

I haven’t even seen this movie but I need you to see this Letterboxd review of The Housemaid - the discord server I’m in and I have been losing our minds over it

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Well now I really want to watch this movie.

[fahbee]

(source)

Bonus:

[toast-the-unknowing]

the bad news: I now hate my current wip and strongly believe there isn't a single joke in it that lands

the good news: I know my process enough to recognize this as the slump that I hit in everything I write when it's like three-quarters-ish done

the bad news: the only way out is through

the good news: I do know the way out!

the bad news: yeah but it's through

[toast-the-unknowing]

making a cross stitch that says "I am funny and he would fucking say that" to hang directly above my monitor

[toast-the-unknowing]

"hey toast you stayed up past midnight because you were working on the fic and not because you were procrastinating by making a hideous pattern for a joke cross stitch" have you never met a writer before

[toast-the-unknowing]

gonna tell my kids this was live laugh love

[biglawbear]

I'm instituting a new policy of "if I can't easily read your crusty scanned PDF then I'm sending it back to you, telling you to get your shit together and save your .docx as .pdf, and causing snakes to manifest inside your house"

[christaaah]

this but also if you are in accounting and you have an Excel file please do not save it as a PDF or take a screenshot of it and then paste it into another Excel file

[biglawbear]

I take it back whatever you have going on is way worse than what I was dealing with holy shit

[firstbornsons-deactivated202605]

@thesummoningdark hello?????

[thesummoningdark]

yeah no this is a real thing an actual human being said to me

[biglawbear]

Good afternoon to everyone in the notes having a horrible time! Y'all are fighting demons I never knew existed!! I think every person that makes you do stupid time wasting shit like this because they refuse to learn basic computer literacy should be fired!!

[pirateprincessjess]

Google Chrome has been installing an AI model on users devices without their consent.

[pirateprincessjess]

Since that file path is only on the screen for a second, the ai is located in

C:\Users\<YourUsername>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\OptGuideOnDeviceModel\weights.bin

[squarebracket-trickster]

"Readers have SHORT attention spans! The average reader takes just TWO sentences to decide whether to put a book down! You have to HOOK them in the FIRST sentence! GRAB them by throat and don't let them BREATHE—"

... have... have we considered that perhaps the average reader just, like, knows what they like in a book? I mean... first sentences are famous for establishing things like *checks notes*... genre, tone, POV, pacing, character, voice, uhhh... writing style...

The average reader is putting your book down because they discovered it's in first person (or not in first person). The average reader put your book down because they wanted a cozy read, or they're sick of cozy reads, or romance, or grimdark, or assassin princesses, or vampires, or or or. The average reader put your book down because they just didn't like your writing style—no, not because it was boring... they just, get this, didn't like it.

The average critical reader put your book down because it had six grammatical mistakes in the first two sentences.

The average reader will read quite a ways if the premise intrigues them, they like the genre, the writing style doesn't get on their nerves, and the characters pop off the page. In fact, they'll probably read the whole book, so long as it delivers on its plot promises and doesn't drag in the middle section.

The average reader will, however, stop reading after just two sentences if it's clear by the second sentence that the only thing they'll like about this book is the opening line.

[squarebracket-trickster]

Idk, I just think like, painting a demographic of people who, you know, pick up full length books to read for fun, as having short attention spans doesn't make too much sense. At least not as much sense as the alternative: words tell people things; namely, the contents of this book.

In general, though, I think we jump to blame short attention spans too often when there is a far more logical explanation. "It takes 0.06 seconds for viewers to scroll past a post." Yes, that is typically how long it takes me to discern whether this post is about something I'm interested in. There's a trillion posts out there, probably a billion books, of course we've gotten fast at sorting through content. That's not an attention span issue. That's just efficiency.

[sw-or-gtfo-deactivated20211219]

my bf has many interesting stories and observations from his new job as a 911 operator

my favorite is how meandering people are, even in the midst of a terrible emergency

they respond to “what is the emergency” with “well, the thing is, four weeks ago–”

and then he’s like “WHAT IS THE EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW”

and they’re like “so what happened this morning was, i said to my wife, i said–”

“WHAT IS CURRENTLY HAPPENING AT THIS MOMENT”

“oh i’m having a heart attack”

my second favorite is how specific he has to get sometimes

like, “what is your emergency?”

“i’m sitting in a pool of blood.”

“… is it… your blood?”

“yes i think so”

“do you know where it’s coming from?”

“probably the stab wound”

“have you been stabbed?”

“oh yah definitely”

[lizawithazed]

In all fairness shock is a hell of a drug

[slatestarscratchpad]

#MedicalHistoryTaking

[lasrina]

Slightly related true story from my family:

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“My house is on fire, but it’s just one wall and I have a fire extinguisher, so I think I can put it out.”

“Sir, please get out of the house. The fire engines are on their way.”

“I will in a minute, but I really think I can–”

“SIR. PLEASE. LEAVE THE HOUSE.”

“Fine.” [beat] “Okay, from out here I can see that the whole roof is on fire.”

[the-haiku-bot]

“Fine.” [beat] “Okay, from

out here I can see that the

whole roof is on fire.”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[findingfeather]

I spent a bunch of time watching nearly every “follow-thru-a-shift/day/whatever” First Responder show that I could find because they turned out to be such a great way to watch how humans actually behave under intense stress/distress and what contributes to each kind of reaction.

One of the things was that anything with a cognitive effect - cold, head trauma, hypoglycemia, stroke, alcohol, drugs - can make you not just really “stupid” but really weird-stupid, really fast.

And cold will do it faster than you think! My favourite example was a British one where the person who needed rescuing was actually an off-duty police-constable who had gotten into danger on the water, and he actually had done everything right, except that he hit a point of being Too Cold from the cold water and became absolutely obsessed with getting the car-keys out of the little single-person boat that was actually Stuck. And like, obsessed, unreasonable, blankly-not-comprehending-arguments, “I got to get my KEYS”.

You could see the first responders pausing and being like how do we deal with this, as he wades back into the cold water to try to haul the boat out. Eventually they decided it was worth giving freeing the boat a shot as clearly their next step was physically dragging him away.

tl;dr they did eventually get the boat out and he got his keys and stomped off to his car - they stayed on-scene to monitor him, since he also started otherwise-rationally changing into the dry clothes that he had in his car, because like I said he had prepared properly etc, and then we cut to the interview afterwards.

And the guy is like: no actually I have no idea what the hell came over me. That was 100% the stupidest, most dangerous thing (the going back for the keys) I have ever done in my life, and I realized it as soon as I’d got the dry clothes on and sat in the warm car for about ten minutes - I stopped shivering and then went what the hell was I doing?

The interviewer was like, was it at least a nice car?

And the guy was like NO IT WAS NOT. IT WAS NOT A NICE CAR. IT’S A COMPLETELY MEDIOCRE CAR AND I’VE GOT ANOTHER SET OF KEYS AT HOME. But at the time I absolutely and without even a hint of doubt knew that I had to get my keys and I was willing to fight everyone there if they tried to stop me. I remember that clearly, I remember that it was the absolute most important thing that ever existed, and then as soon as I got warm again I realized that was absolutely absurd.

He noted it had completely changed how he understood and approached interactions with others in altered states of consciousness, because he now fully understood that they could not be rational and they simply were seeing the world through a completely different window and it wasn’t their fault.

And like that was one of my favourites but there were lots like that, and as the poster up a few notes, even just emotional shock can have a cognitive-state changing effect - and additionally, both exsanguination (heavy bleeding) and cardiac emergencies (like heart-attacks) have very real potential effects on how for instance if your brain is getting enough oxygen to make you a sensible human vs “that person sure is in an altered state of consciousness, they are”.

People are sometimes more meandering in that state of emergency than they are at any other time … . because bleeding to death can feel a lot like being drunk, and having a cardiac emergency can come with bodily effects that make your brain genuinely stupid.

Plus also we like to believe that adrenaline gives us the power to think really clearly for a moment, and sometimes that’s true, but it’s really more accurate to say that adrenaline gives you the power to think really fast. Which means unfortunately if your brain is firing off along the wrong route, metaphorically speaking, it’s a long way down that route before you even have a moment of “hang on wait - ”

(This would apply to the above anecdote about the fire, for example!)

For me this was amazingly useful for writing because it’s really quite difficult, otherwise, to get portraits of how people react to things that are this intense - and how different and disjointed they can be from how people act when not in those situations. You really can have the calmest, most reasonable, most carefully pacifistic person in the world who then hits their head and becomes a violently combative patient; you can have the most sensible person in the world who does something amazingly stupid because their core temperature dropped too low; you can have someone go from sullen uncooperative non-verbal and hostile to the absolute opposite from the application of a tube of glucose paste.

There are ways to up your likelihood of behaving sensibly under this kind of pressure that mostly come down to “practicing over and over and over in calm and controlled simulations of the thing” as it starts training your automatic reactions - this is why fire-drills work.* It’s why real in-depth first-aid training (rather than the one-day certification) involves endlessly Doing Scenarios - I did a year of Junior Lifeguard when I was a kid and I still can feel those habits coming on when a relevant situation comes up.

But yeah. This is ALSO ALSO why well-trained emergency services dispatch have a rote list of information they ask and just keep asking and asking and pushing at until they get a precise answer to that question - because most of the people calling them are absolutely in altered states of consciousness!

This has the result of creating a quite amusing momentary brain-pile-up if you happen to be someone who was drilled by rote as a child on How To Call Emergency Services back in the days when things like “where am I” etc were not easily found out - I was drilled by first responder family members as a wee thing that the moment they picked up and said hello, you recite your location, THEN what service you need (assuming you’re calling centralized dispatch - otherwise they will assume that since you’re calling fire-emergency you need a firetruck :P), THEN describe the problem, THEN say who you are … .

… so that if the line dropped or got cut off or something bad happened to your ability to communicate by telephone (a real hazard in a small northern town in the late 80s and early 90s) the dispatch had the MOST important information immediately (where to find you), before moving onto the others that were somewhat less important in descending order.

Of course now if you’re calling from a landline they know exactly where you are, and even with an internet-phone or a cell they have somewhere to start (no, it’s not an instant location; no, it’s not totally “we have no idea” either); and the dispatchers are trained to walk people who have not had that same training thru giving them the right info. So if you just respond to their “hello please state your emergency” (or whatever) with the descending order of “I’m at [location] and need [whatever service], [specific details of what’s going on to the best of my knowledge], this is my cell number in case we get disconnected and my name is Meredith” their train of thought skids sideways a bit and they have to realign.

Still saves time! But it’s funny.

*[it’s also why the current form of active shooter drills in eg schools actually doesn’t; the drills themselves are basically designed to mimic the actual event too closely and thus mostly result in traumatic experiences for the children in question, and not necessarily in retained safety habits under stress. Conversely, at least when I was in schools, fire-drills were honestly actively boring: the bell rang and then we had to all line up and our teacher was really anal about Exactly Following Rules and then we all filed out of the classroom and went and sat on the hill and it was all very unrealistic in terms of how a real fire FELT … .which. was the point. Anyway I digress.]

[libraryspectre]

I’ve had an experience like this! A couple years ago I was flipping a tortilla and dropped the skillet, and the bottom of it hit my thigh and gave me a sizeable second-degree burn.

My wife had to drag me to urgent care, and that was her compromise down from the ER. And I was really insistent that I be allowed to eat my taco before we left. In hindsight, I don’t know why I was so stubborn about this - I think I was in shock a little bit, and the pain I was in just wasn’t processing. Nothing could make me understand that this was a serious problem.

[cwicseolfor]

We are our fallible meatsuits.

[takereveng3]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[pukicho]

I need you to know that my favorite coworker owns a pink tax evasion hoodie and it looks incredibly comfortable and it was only slightly awkward when I asked her if she was wearing pukicho merch

You mean to tell me people who work wear my shirts?

[cloveraex]

Did you think only criminals that earn their money exclusively through stealing it from others bought your merch?

[crabussy]

I asked my five year old cousin what he would do if there was a scary skeleton and he said "I would pour water on it and then kick it" and I've been losing my shit laughing crying about a wet skeleton for about fifteen minutes straight

[crabussy]

he was so delighted by my fits of giggles that he drew eight wet skeletons for me

[cloveraex]

Why do its legs have ribs?...