Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 11

@barubary @Loukas The relationship between Polish and German languages is... complicated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D28dqca4xg

@Argonel @Loukas Here the relationship is inverted. Long German words are genuinely long. Long Polish words are actually short words with a lot of digraphs and a serious inflection.

(if you remove inflection from "bezwzględnie", you get "wzgląd")

Something I can disclose: at one point during the protests, the government publicly encouraged the far right to form militias. They weren't that well organized, but some of them did feel like they got a licence to beat people up. So one day I got an urgent request to organize an escape route for a group of LGBT teenagers who accidentally wandered into the far right's territory and couldn't get out safely. I didn't have enough staff on hand to actually do that. Stressful, to say the least.

One of my pet ideas for a video game is called "The Protest", and is based on real events. A key plot twist in that game is when an authoritarian government introduces martial law, and the player's character, who is a member of a political party, is helping that party establish its underground structure. This part of the game isn't real (we didn't have martial law), but... well, let's just say it was a crazy time and I'm itching to turn it into a story.

@Loukas Polish, on the other hand, is the real deal. Those parts that look like they could hurt you can and will do just that. Bezwzględnie!

@nyrath @johncarlosbaez Star Trek: Voyager ending does something a bit like that (not sure if the Borg count as zombies, but they sure are scary; in fact, they're about half as scary as these wasps).

With this character, we're confident about her looks, but we're going to work a bit more on the generator she's repairing. It looks too modern and mass-produced for the intended setting, which has a post-apocalyptic theme (although it's built mainly on the opposition to the usual stuff - no endless desert, no crazy cults, no doomsday devices etc.).

The character was originally blonde, but the red hair complements her colour palette better, and helps draw the viewer's attention toward her face.

@Nifflas @taylorhadden I didn't have any major issues with VS when I worked in Unity. Never tried it with Unreal, though.

@taylorhadden @Nifflas I didn't know about Rider until I joined my current project, which was just starting at the time, and basically all the programmers said let's work with Rider from day one because it's that much better.

@Nifflas I work in Unreal now, using Rider as the IDE. Unreal has its own set of conventions. Rider has a preset just for Unreal and throws warnings every time I don't follow the convention. I guess that's the next best thing, since I imagine one could supply their own preset.

@Nifflas I'd probably say "village or small town, as long as it's located on a railway line with a decent connection to a city". Low costs of living + decent service availability + fewer cars sounds like a good deal.

There are two schools of concept art. In one approach, the art is mainly a marketing tool and is there to sell your game to the publisher (not the audience).

In the other approach, the one I prefer, the art is mainly a discovery tool. In this case, the artist and I aren't looking for a cooler-looking "pistol" (it doesn't actually shoot), but one that's closer to the game's lore (the item is a few hundred years old, hence wear and tear).

(artist: Katarzyna Odrobińska https://www.artstation.com/katodrobinska)

@rst @cstross The way it works in Poland is Palestinians are foreigners, so it's someone else's problem, but one of those aid workers was Polish, so it's our problem now, and there's an uproar.

It could actually cause people to care about Palestinian civilians more, but we're going to have to wait and see.

(the fact that it's the last week of the local elections campaign isn't helping)

Today fediverse is casually reminding me the Internet infrastructure in Poland is better than in Germany.

There's a sort of early adopter's paradox: if your country is quick to adopt new inventions, you get stuck with an early iteration until it makes financial sense to replace it, which could take decades. Meanwhile, second adopters are already on a later iteration.

For this concept art, I asked the artist Katarzyna Odrobińska (https://www.artstation.com/katodrobinska) to look for a low-detail style, primarily to help the game stay in a low budget. Since this is the very first iteration, there are a lot things we didn't want to polish, because we know they're going to evolve.

I'm happy with this piece, because in addition to looking nice it shows the character's personality and makes his role in the party apparent.

(this is for a dungeon crawler, i.e. losts of fighting)

@angelastella @rupert @jgordon @cstross If some youtubers I watch (such as RMtransit) are to be believed, the mass transit in the US is behind pretty much everyone everywhere. There are some pockets of decent public transport on the east coast, though.

@angelastella @jgordon @cstross Perhaps living there would raise too many suspicions, but for occasional stay this could work. Now, as for why middle-aged men and their friends might want a spare sleepover place that is not their home, I'd rather not dive into stereotypes.

@glassbottommeg The world's population has been oscillating between rural and urban since the ancient times. The reasons were complicated, e.g. Graeber mentions in "Debt" that in the ancient times people would run into the rural areas to escape from usury. The standard of living needed to only be relatively higher in a chosen aspect, such as "you're les likely to die" or "your creditor won't rape your daughter".

After some experimentation I've decided to stick to my earlier approach where I used real perspective. The biggest reason is that I don't really want to just make a copy of some old forgotten genre from the early 90s. There are a few things I'd like to do differently, and one of them is have larger and more interesting outdoors. I'm going to need the wider field of view for that.

The fake perspective trick used in old dungeon crawlers worked for them in part because they were using VGA resolution on a 4:3 display, and the "3D" view would only take up like half of the screen, and sometimes less. This meant you could only see about 3 tiles ahead.

For a modern 16:9 display it won't do. The distortion is simply too large for further tiles.

But! I think I've found a compromise. Needs some testing first, though.