Tom White
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tomwhite.bsky.social
Tom White
@tomwhite.bsky.social
210 followers 130 following 180 posts
Software Engineer, Dad and Playdate developer when I get time (not often).

https://play.date/games/flinger/
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tomwhite.bsky.social
Added a log-overdue feature to Hyper Vector: an explorable map.

#gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev
October 19, 2025 at 3:31 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
I've made a few improvements to trade in Hyper Vector, completely overhauling the Market to provide much more information, which should make profitable trading much easier. There's also more information in the Manifest on good routes!

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
October 15, 2025 at 8:23 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Hyper Vector is nearing public playtesting! I'm working my way through the game end-to-end personally first, and finding/fixing a lot of bugs and performance issues.

Device Info is my new friend!

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
September 21, 2025 at 10:02 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Fewer updates on Hyper Vector recently, but that's because it's getting close to something play-testable and I've been head-down!

I'm down to a handful of blockers, I've invested a bit of time sorting out perf issues and it now runs smoothly on-device too!

#playdate #indiedev #solodev #gamedev
September 7, 2025 at 9:33 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Refactoring how the starmap is rendered. Previously it was one sprite with everything drawn onto it - which was eating fps as any kind of update involved a lot of work to run the draw method of the whole thing.

#playdate #gamedate #indiedev #solodev
September 2, 2025 at 10:00 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Hyper Vector is gradually filling out with more sound effects, the latest is for when you jump between systems. I added a new animation for it too, it feels a bit more like an event now!

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
August 31, 2025 at 7:50 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Working on better hitboxes for long thin ships in combat, a proper bounding box is now computed which should make for more satisfying combat.

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
August 20, 2025 at 7:39 AM
tomwhite.bsky.social
When you've completed combat training with either faction, you get to visit the simulator as many times as you like to practice combat scenarios.

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
August 17, 2025 at 9:40 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
The bad: This has introduced perf. issues on-device. Lots of careful profiling and tweaking to make sure it doesn't stutter. Nothing insurmountable so far. The main culprit is the trade screen - drawing text is surprisingly slow! But I can drop the framerate here.
August 16, 2025 at 10:04 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Playing around with some portraits. I think I've got a style that I like that works with the feel of the game. There's a lot to do but this feels like a good direction.

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
August 1, 2025 at 9:06 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
July 30, 2025 at 1:33 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Added stats to the game over screen, a nice thing to have - although it turns out adding it was 99% tedious text formatting!

#playdate #indiedev #solodev #gamedev
July 26, 2025 at 9:15 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
First stab at a main menu for the game, and a logotype. Couldn't resisit throwing in a 'high res' spinning planet for good measure.

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
July 25, 2025 at 9:26 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
A big moment, the game has an ending, a credits screen and... a name!

#gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev
A gameover screen saying "Thank you for playing Hyper Vector".
July 23, 2025 at 8:20 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
I've added a significant amount of pew pew to combat. Lasers in particular look a lot better. They're still just line segments to avoid collision testing, but I'm only drawing 1/5th of it per frame. All running smoothly on-device!

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
July 19, 2025 at 12:41 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
More work on the combat engine. A couple of new things driven by the story: battles can now have allies, and there can be conditions that cause the enemy to flee!

#playdate #gamedev #solodev #indiedev
July 18, 2025 at 10:01 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
The pirate ships are more of a mixed bag. Can you spot the Escape Velocity Nova tribute?

#gamedev #playdate #indiedev #solodev
July 13, 2025 at 9:06 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
More ships, this time for the Archonate faction! Ships have reputation requirements to purchase. To unlock the more capable ships, you need to get your faction reputation high enough (which may lock you out from purchasing ships from other factions!)

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
July 12, 2025 at 10:11 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
A batch of ships modelled. I'm sticking to the same basic chassis for each faction, these are for the Alliance. You lose a bit of detail on the really big ships, but I think the animation still helps see some of it.

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
July 11, 2025 at 9:33 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
More work on the ship models, I'm happy with these! Fixing the animation frame while toggling makes it much smoother too.

#playdate #indiedev #solodev #gamedev
July 8, 2025 at 8:39 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
It needs a bit more work to unify how they look here with the combat view too
July 7, 2025 at 9:50 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Today I fell down a rabbit hole and into Blender... I've been unhappy with the shop/shipyard graphics, and I think I might be happy with this approach finally.

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
July 7, 2025 at 9:50 PM
tomwhite.bsky.social
Here's the log of the AI making decisions!
July 4, 2025 at 10:33 AM
tomwhite.bsky.social
It turns out my angular difference check was missing a math.abs... With it in, enemy ships now behave much more sensibly! There's also now the start of a basic HUD for combat too.

#playdate #gamedev #indiedev #solodev
July 4, 2025 at 10:21 AM
tomwhite.bsky.social
The AI can now decide to attack. I'm sticking to simple lasers for now, as I'm worried about the performance impact of projectiles, although so far it's holding up in on-device testing!

#playdate #gamedev
July 3, 2025 at 9:30 PM