this mentality made me doubt and question and delay for too long so i try to push back on it when i see it. You don’t actually need to have always “known” or “shown signs”. If you feel like experimenting you can just try it.
Do it dude - if you’re passionate about building a rich simulation game then there’s a good chance you’ll create something awesome. We’ve seen huge successes with Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld - those sort of complex simulations can be both fun and dazzlingly interesting in terms of their emergent game play.
It’s relatively simple to get started, just simulate one thing or render one simple 10x10 grid, and work your way up. Remember that video games take a lot of effort and set reasonable goals and milestones to recognize your progress… DF originally played on an, essentially, fixed map with no z-plane - wildlife was non-existent and sieges were just pre-planned events.
Same boat… But I had some success with low poly 3D models which I found are pretty easy to make. Learning a bit about color theory, how to match colors, as well as learning a bit about level design goes a long way. You can make a great looking game this way.
But my dream game is 2D pixel art, and I really suck at it.
You mean like an MMO where different maps are arranged in an infinite hexagonal pattern that’s randomly/procedurally generated based on different biomes, that also keeps track of how many players have entered/completed each hex and begins scaling down the difficulty in said hex and evolving it into a more peaceful zone, that way the higher traffic areas eventually form safe zones/towns for low level characters while low traffic areas encourage high level characters to visit and explore, with the highest level characters able to survive unexplored areas and expand the map for all players, all while having developer tools to specifically add unique dungeons/events/items directly to tiles so that the game doesnt feel a mile wide and an inch deep but instead as if the whole world map is alive and constantly changing?
Definitely some cool ideas there but how do you deal with the long term effect of the map becoming too big?
The bigger the map the more the defs would need to stretch their resources to adding cool stuff.
Also, at some point, the inner hexes will be essential all complete cleared and new players will have to wander for a while as soon as they level up a bit.
Unlocking a new hex would be fun at the beginning but how fun will it be after 100+ have been unlocked and any more just will inevitably just feel same-y because even the best defs will eventually run out of ideas
Welcome to Wayne’s World: The Game You find yourself in Aurora, Illinois, the hometown of Wayne and Garth. You’re on a mission to help them prepare for their biggest public access TV show yet. Scene 1: The Basement You’re in Wayne’s basement, surrounded by music gear, posters, and a comfy couch. Wayne and Garth are brainstorming ideas for their show, but they’re stuck. They need your help to come up with a killer opening segment. Do you: A) Suggest a musical number with Wayne and Garth performing a duet of “Bohemian Rhapsody” B) Recommend a comedy sketch parodying a popular movie or TV show C) Propose a special guest appearance by a local celebrity D) Suggest a “Top 10 List” segment, à la David Letterman Choose your response:
…
You have found the Encino Man Dungeon.
Encino Man: The Adventure Begins You are Brendan Fraser’s character, Link, a caveman who has been thawed out and is trying to navigate modern life in Encino, California. Your goal is to make it through each scene without getting into too much trouble. Scene 1: The Thaw You wake up in a block of ice in a backyard. You’re confused, hungry, and thirsty. You see a garden hose nearby. Do you: A) Drink from the hose B) Try to break out of the ice C) Look around for food D) Take a nap Choose your response:
LLM to generate ideas, history to check uniqueness
I had a cool idea that I completely gave up on because I tried to learn how to do it and realized what I was asking was so insanely complicated and time consuming that I couldn’t do it. I play a lot of games, I know what would make a good one, there’s just a gaping chasm between knowing and creating.
The problem is that this complexity isn’t just a one-off thing you need to get through. There’s a ton of details which matter, which you will not have thought through as part of your idea.
Many of these details, you will encounter as you write code. As in, you’ve just worked for three weeks on a feature and then realize a glaring problem in one of the details. Then you spend another week trying to find a solution. And worst-case that solution is to rip out that month of work and start fresh.
This has been my biggest learning from dabbling in gamedev for a while: Make a stupid paper model first.
Even if you spend a week glueing sheets of paper, and you don’t really even get that close to your actual idea, the more of these details you think of upfront, the higher your chance of getting anywhere (or scrapping your idea without wasting months trying to put it into code).
Well, and the other big learning was: Holy crap, gamedev is hard.
I know how to “code”. I’m a senior developer and have worked on multiple large-scale software projects.
The scope of the game I was trying to create, was laughable in comparison. As in shitty 2D, tile-based, turn-based.
I encountered performance problems like I’ve never had to deal with in my career, because it turns out the whole games industry is fueled by smokes and mirrors.
Know how ray-traced lighting is the craziest new technology? Yeah, that’s literally just a matter of hardware being strong enough that we can simulate lighting in the way it actually works. It’s conceptually simpler than the ever more sophisticated bullshitting we did beforehand.
have you ever smoked weed? ideas are cheap - even ones that seem good. ACTUAL good ideas are only proven good when they are implemented AND become successful.
That’s like saying a lot of banger songs could exist but the person doesn’t know how to write music.
Absolute delusional bullshit.
Verifying the idea is good is also part of the process. Play testing, making hard decisions, smoothing out jank, juicing up the experience… The whole implementation can make or break a game.
Not “great novels” but great “great world building”. I’ve seen some absolute bangers out there where the concepts, characters and even the overall plot blew my mind away. However, the authors couldn’t write decent dialogues or a coherent chapter of their life depended on it. So, most people wouldn’t be exposed to their ideas.
I had to learn that the hard way, but with a comic/manga idea I used to have.
Long story short: I worked way too long on an idea (almost 10 years), all while my taste etc. changed. It would have been way too hard to get it working after a while without a complete revamp of the whole idea, so I ditched it completely, maybe reuse elements and character concepts in other things, including video games (yes, they’re easier to make, unless your comic’s artstyle is stickmen figures).
The inability to detail the idea all the way down to the level were something concrete can be made from it kills it well before the lack of coding skills.
It’s like what separates having an idea for a book and writting an actual book that is enjoyable to read: there is no “knowing how to code” barrier in there and yet most people can’t actually pull it off when they try or it ends up shallow and uninteresting.
This is actually one thing I’ve been thinking AI and deepfake tech can potentially do good. Let’s say you have an idea and can code… You have an idea for music but no instrumental talent, so the best you can do is hum it. You can’t afford voice actors or other professionals.
Or maybe you’re artist with an idea who can storyboard but not code. Maybe you can make 2d designs but not 3D models, or aren’t great at animate.
But… there is software that can take what you say and change it to a different voice. It can animate a model to match the words. Similarly, software that could generate instrumental sounds from humming is possible. An AI can generate interactive dialog. It could also provide assistance in the generation of music, debugging of code, and eventually more advanced 3D modeling.
A lot of game design software is much more a GUI to an environment/model and triggers etc than stuff like writing hardcore backend C++ code etc. AI could take that even further.
Then add VR. Drop somebody into a blank-slate where they can create a whole world with a word, a gesture, and a great idea.
flexbox made things so much easier, but still hard. There are just too many rules to keep in your head about display and position and how they affect other attributes. And the box model… wow. margin, border, padding, content, but he attribute is box-sizing and it has border-box and content-box, but not the others.
IINM it was written by people who came from print media (just like HTML) and that stuck.
Every time I want to do something, I have a look around the baffling ecosystem of frameworks and end up writing it from scratch because it's easier than wading through the bullshit.
After so many years in this company, lots of the unmaintainable code I have to deal with is either my own fault, or the fault of someone I used to work with but and now they left and I’m the one who has to apologize for their code.
If I move to a different company, 100% of the unmaintainable code I’ll have to deal with there will be someone else’s fault.
And managers don’t like it when you explain that the code is a unmanageable mess because they put a deadline on every goddamn thing and never pay off technical debt.
At a new place you can honestly say “the code is kinda a mess, it needs a bunch of work” and the manager can just assume it was because the last guy didn’t know what he was doing and not because of their own shitty management.
Management could implement a code review process to avoid this.
Software development isn’t a brand new field anymore. Most problems are well known and therefore have well known solutions. So it pretty much always comes down to management not wanting to implement the known solutions to the problems because its easier to blame the devs.
They did, that’s why I said “team” in my response, however I will elaborate for you.
two Devs must review and one dev lead has admin rights to push to protected branches. Problem is when the whole team is not meeting expectations and they all jerk off eachothers bad code.
My team reviews internally just like they did, the issue isn’t the review process. At a professional level you should trust your peers therefore the issue was the hiring and/or training process
At one of my first jobs, I was tasked to rewrite a bunch of legacy Perl scripts in Python and the unless lines always made me trip up. I don’t know why but it really messed with my mental flow when reading Perl code
It's nice. "if", "then", and "else". I spent a year programming a shitty roulette game on an Apple 2e back in high school. I still remember the joy of using if/then/else paired with goto to make a horrible mess of spaghetti logic.
Using a standalone ‘else’ would tickle my brain in the same nice way that being able to declare a variable inside an ‘if’ statement as if it were a ‘for’ loop (which you can do in modern C++) does.
I haven’t written any Ruby for years, but I still praise it in every conversation I have regarding programming languages. It’s basically a much simpler Python, with some design ideas that are both beautiful and deeply strange.
Ruby was designed to evoke joy and they absolutely succeeded. Usually, programming is mostly a means to an end to me. But using Ruby just feels so amazing, it’s almost impossible to even describe to somebody who has never used it before.
I wonder if they’ll ever do Bootcamps for any other engineering positions. I mean a Bootcamp Electrical Engineer would be absolutely comical, but I could honestly see there being something like Bootcamp for specific focuses. For degrees like electrical, where the items you learn about in school are often outdated, offering some sort of “What’s New” per field (microelectronics, processor designs, fiber optics, quantum computing, etc) might actually be pretty useful.
I’m going to give what I’ve realized newer folks to Vim think is a scorching hot take: VimL is nice. Theyre the same editor commands you use in your day to day life, even if you’re using NeoVim + Lua, just all written out in a file.
That said, using NeoVim + Lua makes it far easier to organize your config, which also makes it easier to write more complex configs. It’s like the difference between building a shed around back for your home office vs building a cathedral. Its fine to work in a shed, but once you know you can build a cathedral, you’re kinda tempted to just up and do it
At first maybe. But when you get your vim config well honed over time you’re good. Plus there’s things like pathogen or other frameworks to add plugins and stuff.
I had it happen once after a windows update. What it has done is put a shortcut on my desktop enough times that I wrote a script to check for and delete them whenever it does.
What is does do way too often is make itself my default PDF viewer. I’ve got Adobe Acrobat Pro and Bluebeam. I have zero reason to ever want to see a PDF in Edge.
I think this has a lot to do with what license you bought. My old Win8 Pro key install has never had ads and shit pop back up or re-enable candy crush or whatever. One of our shitty laptops at work with a win10 home license I absolutely dread updating because there is some new bullshit nearly every time.
I’m still on 10, but half the shit I see people complain about with Windows I’ve never experienced personally. Maybe I’m just lucky? Maybe I just read? I don’t know, but I’m not having the same experience as a lot of people on here.
In general any bad thing about windows that it manages to fixes still gets commented about online for several years after the fact. For example: BSODs stopped being a regular thing in windows user’s life very long ago, but it took another 10 years after that for people to stop making BSOD jokes online.
Ironically enough, I actually did have my first blue screen in likely 5+ years yesterday. I was so shocked by it I wasn’t even mad, just impressed it’s been so long.
There was a while there where it would default to Edge for PDFs and as a web browser after a update. Quite annoying for a factory full of PCs that I wanted to use Chrome and Adobe Reader instead.
I tried Edge for a bit but stuck with chrome. Recently I’ve gone back to Firefox but I’ve not had one of those major updates yet that even tries to get me to log into Microsoft as a log in so it will be interesting when that happens again if Edge shows up as the default.
From time to time when you update windows it’ll show you a welcoming setup again similar to the first time you logged in. In that process it will try to convince you to setup some Microsoft stuff on your pc, including changing default apps, but it shouldn’t do it on its own.
But sometimes it does. It happened once for me this year.
I have obsidian installed, but I haven’t really looked into how to use it. It has been on my list of things I should probably learn for a long time now
I was using MarkText and a fairly structured set of directories. I switched to Bookstack which allows me to do essentially the same thing but with a web interface and the ability to share with even using RBAC. It doesn’t do the cool linking stuff though.
I think the use cases are different, as Zettlr seems like a pure publication tool but Obsidian (at least originally) was more of a personal note organizer that grew due to having community plugins.
I do agree though that Zettlr is a better publication tool, though I wouldn't change Obsidian for it as a personal organizer/kb.
How's the Book of Hours? I played a good deal of Cultist Simulator, but it tends to suck me in and I recover few hours later without an understanding what just happened.
I finished my playthrough a couple days ago, after 80 hours. It’s much more forgiving than CS – there’s no lose condition, as far as I can tell. There’s also a shitload more to keep track of, hence me using Obsidian. I personally found the experience of tracking [what books give what resource] and [what resources make what crafting recipes] to be extremely satisfying, but your mileage may vary.
Definitely, I said latex but I wanted to mean Pandoc.
The only thing is that applying a docx theme format to Pandoc was very challenging, although I would blame docx, not pandoc.
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