Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place)

@nekomimi "Okay honey, I get it, but you really need to learn to use arrays, stacks, and heaps, or one day you're going to run into allocation issues. Trust me, you don't want to end up with 5 minutes to go and nothing to put on".

@cstross @skjeggtroll

I tend to agree this is what games and gaming platforms are, with the caveat this isn't always how they're treated. In fact, it's one of my big professional frustrations that they aren't.

But it does seem that the companies that take the steady approach (Valve, Nintendo, Sony) are long term winners, while the ones that take the startup approach (Microsoft, EA, Embracer, Facebook, btw does anyone even remember Zynga?) tend to get themselves in trouble.

@skjeggtroll @cstross This is true, but on the other hand:

- Valve absolutely does take interest in "Next Big Things", e.g. they did their own experiments with AR back in the day, and there was even some minor drama when they gave up on those

- I haven't seen industry people be this excited about something Valve did since they launched Steam, which is a sign of its own

Against my better judgement, I bought Europa Universalis 5 without waiting for a month, and now I'm stuck with a bugged saved state after I restarted from an earlier attempt where I had to put up with at least two other annoying bugs.("at least" because with Paradox it's sometimes hard to tell a bug from a feature). Now I have to wait a week for the first major patch.

Mini Metro is a power fantasy of being able to move the tunnels under the river around at will and at no cost.

Testing the feature I'm currently working on requires me to have as many bad random rolls as possible, which is perhaps why I keep getting a higher than expected number of good ones.

@rayckeith This article seems to be from almost six years ago. Is there a follow-up?

If you're curious to know how "the AI" loses its core audience, an executive in the publishing chain of the game I'm currently employed with tried to use "the AI" to learn what the players are thinking about our recently published demo.

"The AI" first insisted the game doesn't exist at all. then it produced a fake review describing players' problems with features the game doesn't even have.

The exec literally said this has cured their FOMO wrt "the AI".

@graydon @jered @henryk @futurebird @afeinman @cstross

I would argue it's still and overcomplicated solution, given how alienating it is to live in an old-school high-rise block of flats surrounded by a bit of useless non-descript space with other blocks just far enough to make you feel isolated but close enough to make you feel constanly watched. Assign flats to tenants at random, give them five years, and they're all going to hate each other.

@NanoRaptor Unfortunately, I am, in fact, 5'6", so switching to 6'5" has no immediate side effects, except for a few ladies who used to say I was too short for their tastes, and now they're going to to say they just don't like me that much.

Doing this in metric (I'm 168cm) would be funnier.

@feorag But those people put sugar in their tea instead of milk, so do they really count?

@glassbottommeg A quick case study to support this point. I wrote two game design textbooks in Polish, so it's a niche within a niche within a niche (for the record, I knew that up front). And yet, 9 years after the first book was published, they still cover my monthly food expenses. I'd rather they covered my rent, but still, it's one thing less to worry about.

How do I know my cat was in my room while I was away? The PC has restarted itself.

Against my better judgement, I let someone else pick my new PC case three years ago. That person chose a case that looked nice instead of a functional one. Now I'm stuck with the case that has the on/off switch at the top, and not in the front panel. Never again.

@cstross I remember reading Harry Potter long after its first release (I was catching up because one of my friends was a fan), and wondering why the world in those books was so dystopian. The school was at the core of the problem: the supposed good guys were the oppressors. The actual schools I went to weren't great in terms of their values, but they weren't anywhere near that.

@cstross I saw your post and read the quote before realizing it was a genAI sample, and for a moment I thought that either my reading comprehension or my English fluency was gone.

@Gustodon It really depends on the specs, but any of these points on its own can be anywhere from 3 to 300 man-months of work, depending on details. Best if you talk to potential team mates about it. You probably only need a fraction of the effort to get a proof of concept done.

But yes, games cost millions to make for a reason, and no, vibe coding doesn't solve that.

@Gustodon The best thing a solo dev can do is scale down, and then scale down some more. Less is more and so on.

@makdaam Well, technically I recruited them... But we could do an origin story of the eldest cat, who essentially became my cat by breaking into my flat and insisting on staying.

My cats are literally doing heists while I attempt to come up with more and more elaborate ways to hide my food from them.

Wikipedia: cats are good observational learners but don't have a good grasp of cause-and-effect.

My cats: all right, so he's closed the wet room and the water is pouring, that means he can't hear us, and we can break into the food storage. As soon as the cover falls on the floor, we have this long until he comes into the food room, so we need to grab what we can and start running.

[I wish I was making this up, but they've done it on two consecutive evenings]