Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 3

Usually, in exploration-oriented games you're going to find resources and tangibly useful items. "Jedi Survivor" leans hard in the opposite direction and sends you in search of cosmetics. There's an entire system for customizing your lightsaber that doesn't seem to alter its functionality in any way.

I'm not much of a minmaxer and don't need everything to have a point value, but I'd much rather do all that sightseeing for the lore and not this.

I'm still enjoying "Jedi Survivor", and it's definitely one of the prettier games I've seen lately, but I must admit I don't understand its combat. It feels like I'm using 3 moves al the time because I don't remember all the others, and I don't even know when to use them. Combat against some enemies feels random: sometimes it goes terribly, sometimes it's a breeze, and I can't tell why.

Perhaps I'm just getting old and slow and default difficulty settings aren't for me anymore.

Man, Star Wars stories are so predictable sometimes. A character has sickly pale skin and emotional maturity of a 15-yesr-old = they're about to flip to the dark side.

TBH the whole trope of "bad skin = evil" has been making me uncomfortable since the first KOTOR.

I bought Jedi Survivor via Steam, because people keep saying it's good and there was a deep discount, and I am indeed having fun - no, seriously, the game is really all right so far - but the bugs, and the fact they're still there months after the release, are a bit hilarious.

I hate it when people claim a game was "abandoned", because usually it's complete BS, but this one feels a bit like that.

@cstross One thing that I find quirky about the US is that they love to put a bigger number on something than everybody else did, and at the same time they're a large, mostly empty country where trains have the room to go really fast, and yet they've completely ignored the unofficial worldwide race to have the fastest train in commercial service.

@foxhkron To be fair, Polish train network was gutted in the 1990s. Kazimierz Dolny got lucky, because it's a tourism destination.

Just finished "Skin Deep". Don't get fooled by its looks. It's a very well designed thing that plays to its strengths and steps back where it cannot win. Small, focused levels were the best choice. Mechanics are wonky but consistent, I can't even get mad at the glitches. 13/10, 14 if you have a twin

"Skin Deep" is pretty good! Has a very sensible ratio of unpredictable systemic mayhem and deliberate puzzle-like level design choices. The levels are small, typically 4 or 5 rooms, but on the other hand most levels have some kind of special mechanic or side mini-plot. The pacing is good, the challenges are comprehensible, and while you have to figure out stuff on your own, the process of figuring them out is fun. Overall feels more like a dessert than a main course, but I find it tasty.

I do game development professionally, so it feels weird to get excited because a placeholder asset is showing up on screen, but there's such a joy in just working on whatever the hell you want, even if its target audience is maybe 10 people.

Pet project now lets you float around the test level, but the level only has floors in the ground plane for now. I'm recreating a project I originally started in Unity, so I'm only going to start declaring progress when the current implementation does something the first one didn't. Unreal encourages a different workflow, which is why the game already has a main menu and level streaming.

@cstross I'm not so sure, because nuclear weapons are expensive. Part of the non-proliferation system is no one's sharing their tech, you need to build your own full stack. Poland has just had one shopping spree with conventional equipment, and now it needs to catch up with soldiers' training, personal equipment, morale and last but not least headcount.

YouTube's been recently pushing to me clips from a programmer who keeps ranting about her various frustrations with the big tech programming culture, and I'm just amazed by just how different it is from gamedev programming. Different tools, different procedures, different recommended practices, not to mention different programming languages. I thought there would be more overlap.

Important pet project milestone: a fully functioning main menu.

Tired: a windowless empty office space, covered in yellow wallpaper, is a liminal space

Wired: a staircase corridor in a communist era high-rise block of flats, painted in rotten green, is a liminal space

(I actually briefly worked on a game that pulled this off)

A game I'm not naming that is currently being often referred to as particularly good, happens to have a demo, and it turns out I can't stand it on any level (the story, the writing, the mechanics, the interface, the pacing, the balance). In other words, demos are a good thing and having one for your game is a good pro-consumer policy, even if it's going to cost you some sales in the short term (in the long term people who do buy your game will be more satisfied on average).

I don't need an IDE that writes my C++ code for me.

I need an IDE that says "you forgot to forward declare this class, click here to auto-complete" instead of throwing 30 errors, none of which even mentions this class or forward declarations.

My friends' love language is small giraffe-themed gifts. Now I just need to make sure my cats don't hunt the giraffe or the monkey down.

For the record, I never meant for giraffes to be a theme for me, I just occasionally mentioned them on various occasions because I thought they were such uncanny animals (in a good way). I consider it a happy accident.

There's something extremely depressing about video game development studios using the word "franchise" in their own announcements about their own work. "Franchise" is a business term. A creative person would perhaps say "setting" or "series", they might even say "sequel" or "spin-off", but franchise makes it sound like you don't even like your own creation anymore.

@Nickiquote I could swear Elon Musk was a Vogon sometimes. The main difference seems to be that rather enjoying being bad at poetry he enjoys being bad at video games.