Hey everyone! I figured it'd be a good idea to do a blog post about any exciting or interesting developments whenever it made sense to do so. There have been a few cool things going on that I'd like to talk about, so let's get right to it!

Luck be a Landlord's Mobile Port

The mobile port of Luck be a Landlord is really coming along!

A common misconception is that porting a game to mobile is as easy as pressing the "export" button in your game engine of choice. While using a game engine like Unity or Godot certainly makes the porting process easier, it's nowhere near as simple as pressing a single button.

To illustrate this, let me show you a screenshot of what happens when I take the current build of Luck be a Landlord, export it to Android in Godot, and launch the APK (Android Application Package):

...At least that's what I would show, but this process doesn't even result in an APK being created. After a lot of troubleshooting, I eventually realized that the custom build of Godot that I use that allows me to link to Steamworks (necessary for the game's Steam Achievements and Steam Workshop integration) was causing issues when trying to export to Android.

Unfortunately this also meant I had to strip out about a hundred lines of code that were specific to getting the Steam features working, since a regular build of Godot crashes when trying to figure out what any of these Steam-specific lines of code do.

I'm glossing over this process over the course of a few paragraphs, but figuring out all these issues took several weeks of searching for answers. Production of the mobile version didn't really start until early March of this year since I needed a break after finally shipping the dang game back in January.

Fast forward to late April of this year, I finally got the mobile version of the game running on my phone. I was so excited that I grabbed my partner's phone so I could take a picture of my own phone and tweet about it:

I eventually realized that I should've fixed the rotation issue before tweeting and made a follow-up:

Of note, Luck be a Landlord is running in portrait mode here. This was a decision I made to make the game easier to play on mobile devices and more accessible to players.

Back when I lived in New York City, I remember frequently seeing loads of people crowded onto trains (pre-COVID, of course), playing games on their phones. If they didn't have a seat, they had to hang on to something so they didn't lose their balance on the train, forcing them to only interact with their phone using one hand.

This effectively made their thumb their only input for the games they were playing. This was one of the key reasons why I wanted Luck be a Landlord to have a portrait mode.

I made a TikTok

I finally made a TikTok. The site's got a bit of a learning curve, but coming up with ideas for videos is exciting. It reminds me of when I was really in to making YouTube videos as a teenager. I probably would've loved TikTok if it was around back then.

Now that Luck be a Landlord's mobile port is in a semi-showable state, I'll be posting videos of it there in all its vertical glory.

Anyway, if you want to see TikToks (do we call them that?) of my games, as well as some bite-sized gamedev videos I've got ideas for, feel free to follow me: https://tiktok.com/@TrampolineTales

LBaLdle is rad

MonstyrSlayr over in the game's Discord created a Wordle-like for Luck be a Landlord called LBaLdle!

I've had a lot of fun with it and it has a daily challenge like most Wordle-likes. If you take part in the daily, feel free to post your result in the #lbaldle channel of the aforementioned discord.

Ludum Dare 53 - I'm in!

I'll be taking part in Ludum Dare 53!

For those of you who aren't familiar with Ludum Dare, it's a game jam where a few thousand game developers make a game all around the same theme. I personally prefer doing the 48-hour solo competition instead of the 72-hour team jam.

I've made two games during Ludum Dares before:

For Ludum Dare 37, the theme was "One Room" and I made an HTML game called "The Evidence Room"

For Ludum Dare 46, the theme was "Keep it Alive" and I made a PICO-8 game called "Ninja and Mouse"

I'm excited to (hopefully) finish a game for Ludum Dare 53 and share it with all of you!

That's all for now, see you next DevLog!

-Dan