Notices by Parrot (Jeff) (psychicparrot42@mastodon.gamedev.place)

If you are at all thinking about AI coding please read this. It is an amazing journey into the realities of it all.. honestly, it’s fucking brilliant.

https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/

“And I got lazy. Of course I did. When the system forces you to code with a hallucinating clown, eventually you stop resisting. You let him type. You let him be "productive." You check out. You surrender your brain to the noise and just float.”

Amazingly, I just plugged this beastie into the 4 year old tv aerial plug, tuned it in and it works! 😲 picture isn’t perfect obviously, but it’s pretty awesome to say that I didn’t need to do anything other than plug it in! I’m in my element playing this little Intellivision thingy. Looking forward to playing Star Strike next, and doing a bit more Burger Time on it later 🤓

This Intellivision came with a box full of cartridges, all in really good condition, including instructions booklets and the little overlay thingies for the controllers. 😍

I know I need to make more videos of what I'm working on and post them all over the place.. even if I think this game is going to take at least another 6-12 months, I know I need to start getting attention for it as early as possible.. but .. urgh. Y'know?

@midnightspire Yeahhh the paywall is super disappointing tbh- finally my game gets a bit of press attention… annnnd most people won’t even be able to see it 😔 sigh. Such is the indie life I guess!

I’m super proud of my game Die for the Economy! I think it came out better than I’d imagined it, but at the same time it was exactly the game I wanted to play when I started making it if that makes any sense?! It’s lovely to see it getting a little bit of love from the press and I can only hope that it helps the game to find a few more of its people 💕 .. sadly the review is behind a paywall, but all the same here’s the link incase you have an RPS subscription.. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/die-for-the-economy-is-a-less-frantic-space-dungeon-ish-treat

@sinbad Yes! Amazing! 🤩 And here we are now.. it's bonkers how far it's come and my kids just think I'm being a mad old git talking about it lol

I'm not really that up on fancy graphics - I've been playing games since before we even had graphics (you're a letter A and you jump over letter O's, right?) - but I've been playing them Tomb Raider reboot games on me Xbox recently and the lighting in Rise of the Tomb Raider is melting my brain. It has no business looking as good as it does. Some of the environments are stunning, mostly because of the lighting.

My kids, who were born into a time of fancy graphics, don't even bat an eyelid when I'm calling them over to look at the lighting.
"Just look at it! Look at how good that is! It's unbelievable!" I say, as they roll their eyes for the 100th time, shrug and mutter something along the lines of:
"They're just lights Dad, I dunno!".

@sinbad Yeah me too, sadly. I really wanted to be a surfer and I tried, but I don't have the best balance and I tended to accidentally swallow more water than I was able to surf over. Given the state of pollution, I don't imagine that'd work out so well. Especially now.

@sinbad Reminds me of driving my VW Beetle in the 90s (custom purple paint, dropped to the floor, obvs!) giving this gesture to all the other bug drivers as a sign of Volkswagonny solidarity! Back when the thought of driving l something old that was literally falling apart and could break down at any second wouldn’t have bothered me one bit. Today, not so much..!

@sinbad No worries!!

@sinbad When I made RC Rush, I thought I needed multiplayer for it to sell (*slaps head*). It's one of those things that people complain about when it's not there in indie games, then when it *is* there complain that the multiplayer's dead because barely sell enough copies to pay bills let alone enough to keep concurrents at a good enough rate. And that's exactly what happened. Added it, nobody used it. I doubt I'd do multiplayer again after that other than split screen, like.

@sinbad Good stuff to know, thanks Steve!

@sinbad Yeah it's getting harder all the time to avoid them but I can't keep going along with it any more. It's making life harder not going with these big corp assholes, which is probably why I haven't got rid sooner, but I dunno we have to try and fight it as much as possible I suppose. Especially now. 🤷♂️

Due to Bezos, I'm getting rid of anything Amazon. Although the thing is, when I'm quitting these asshole services, I just feel like I'm just going from one evil corp to the next, making my own life harder when everyone else is just carrying on as normal. Trying to live an ethical life shouldn't be this bloody difficult! Bollocks to capitalism.

@sinbad @JeremiahFieldhaven @crussel I'm hoping I can stick to 'when it makes sense' on both sides, really. Like I doubt I'll be moving any input code over to C++ any time soon, just because it's loads more complicated to set up in C++ than it is in Blueprints so I don't really see much point at this stage. Everything can be passed into the components I'm using, so may as well keep it simple. On the other hand, there are times my graph has 10 nodes to do something I can do in 1 line of code etc.

Did a bit of work on the AI last night for my stunt racer … hmm .. prototype? I don’t want to call it a game because I haven’t fully committed to making it yet 🤪 Anyway, I realized that the ‘quick hacks to get things going’ were utterly rubbish and my Blueprints were fast becoming spaghetti so it’s time to rebuild it all in C++.

@crussel Yeah for a minute I thought “hey this is working well, maybe I should just leave it” but I don’t fancy its chances of remaining anything like readable after 6 or 12 months of chucking more stuff into it! It’s already becoming a mess, so best to just sort it, eh? 🤓

@crussel Not saying you can't do just Blueprints, like, but it's just that I know my brain will struggle a *lot* once the Blueprints get over a certain size. I was chatting to the person who made the snowboarding game 'Slopecrashers' a little bit ago, and he told me the whole game is Blueprints! No C++. So I know it's possible, but I know in my own brain the code is more manageable in the long term.