Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 2

Steam had the right idea letting people attach tags to games, because that tweet-sized summary next to the trailer really doesn't seem like a good spot for you to tell me your game is a "card-based tower defence idle clicker". What I'm looking for is some info on how this game is different, and not how it's more of the same.

A person I follow on Bluesky made me aware of a good point: before "AI art" became what it is now (i.e. poor copies of the internet's common denominator), the procedurally generated images were very surreal, dream-like and unsettling in their own particular way. They evoked emotions that were not that easy to replicate elsewhere. Which means they had a value of their own. Also, their origin was obvious and it felt, you know, honest.

When my father started using the internet back in 1997, his modem could do 56 kbps in theory, and 14,4 kbps in practice.

9 years later, the download speed in the first flat I rented on my own was 8 Mbps, which already felt like a lot at the time.

I'm currently downloading something from Steam, and the download speed fluctuates a lot. Right now it's on the lower end, about 320 Mbps. When it improves, it gets as fast as 450 Mbps.

Four orders of magnitude of difference in less than 30 years.

@sashag Mathematicians had discovered spaghetti code long before programmers did.

Which is why, to this day, the traditional meal of statisticians is the bolognese sauce.

static const boo* Be()
{
for (int Day : Life)
continue;
return nullptr;
}

@Leszek_Karlik @cstross President Vance appoints deceased Trump's advisor.

If I ever get to the point this pet project evolves into an actual project, I want it to have no romance options (it's a party-based dungeon crawler, so one would expect some of those). We're going to warn everyone up front that we're saving romance quests for the "Fan Service DLC".

Then we're going to have people vote on which pairings they want to see in the DLC. And if people decide to pick some weird pairing as a joke, we'll roll with it.

...and the romance will go horribly wrong.

I really liked "Pacific Drive". I even kept playing after the main story concluded. But I get the impression that either the things I liked about it are different from other players, or the authors don't necessarily have the same idea of what's making their game fun.

They keep releasing new decals for the car, and I really couldn't possibly care even less about those. I didn't even paint my car a consistent colour, because it kept breaking too often and I stopped caring at some point.

By the way, Katarzyna is a freelance 2D artist and is currently open to new commissions. As her coworker on two very different projects, I have only good things to say about her work ethic and teamwork skills.

Maintaining a slow but steady pace of work on what started as a pet project, but may yet become something bigger. Thanks to my great colleague Katarzyna Odrobińska (see her other work here: https://www.artstation.com/katodrobinska) for lending her talents, as we're looking for a comic book-style look for a not-quite-serious post-apocalyptic dungeon crawler.
In this concept for outdoor environments you can see we're trying to follow the genre's traditional limitations, except one: the sight range.
#indiedev

One of negative side effects of the early access trend is that it's now common to call the game "unfinished" rather than "poor", implying that the developers were lazy or scammers for not working on it some more, as if throwing more people at the problem would solve it (it usually doesn't).

Ironically, one game that everyone insists is bad, but was actually forced into release before a major patch was ready (and it ultimately never got released after negative initial feedback) is "Gollum".

@RogDolos Big Grift sounds like a great umbrella term, too, because the AI hype will eventually burn out, but then they'll just come up with something new sill (and I just hope it won't be cyperpunk-style implants, because that would be gross)

Just for the record, it's 18th October 2024, and bots on Twitter are still trying to sell you crypto, while Microsoft has apparently just given up on trying to sell you augmented reality. Everyone's seemingly already past their lootbox stage, and no one remembers Farmville anymore.

@labria @cstross As a friend of mine once said, "the never-sleeping eternal creature living in the abyss is now growing new tentacles so it can give you a better hug"

So, the AI hype has evolved from promising us things it couldn't do, to promising us things it could do, but other things could do it better, to promising us things no one wants them to do except some very greedy people, to promising us things no one wants them to do, period.

As someone who has studied "decision support" at the university, I'm torn between despair from seeing promising tech abused like this, and amusement from seeing some tech bros hang themselves on a very, very thick rope.

My huge arsenal of typos has been recently expanded by mixing up z and c.

If that seems like a riddle, the solution is in Polish the c represents the same sound as the z in German, and I've been working with Germans for some time now.

Stereotypes can be very silly, which is why I find it useful to take note when they don't match reality.

The other day I noticed my coworkers have fairly stereotypical German last names, but female colleagues in particular have first names that don't match the stereotype. I've met Sarah, Luna, Naja, Linda and two Claras, but no Helgas. Just sayin'

Ok, there is ONE legitimate use of Algorithmic Image Blenders, and that is Kevin MacLeod making thumbnails for his tunes, which he then puts in the public domain, and has been doing so for years.

(it's likely you don't know who Kevin MacLeod is, but it's also very likely you've heard his tunes many times)

Working with a German company has slightly improved my fluency in the German language. For instance, I am know familiar with the German word for "tax".

@VeroniqueB99 It's embarassing to me that this particular idiom in Polish is not particularly nice or innovative. One version is "I care a shit" (i.e. not at all) and the other is "I have this outfucked" (literally "wyjebane", nb. it's an example of the glorious Polish prefix-suffix syntax, which is more interesting, but not on topic).