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

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.

@blotosmetek These days you never know. I've already been told to try the new AI feature in my IDE at work.

I know everyone knows using metrics in programming for performance tracking can be very silly, but I was reminded of that just today, because today I committed 5 (five) lines of code to the repository, and in doing so I fixed 3 (three) bugs.

@mattblaze @cstross Poisoned by JD Vance while exactly 88 years old. There are no coincidences, there are only messages from the God.

@cstross I know an interesting case where a game development studio developed their next game under a new name, and I think it had to do with the fact that the new game, unlike the previous two, was not porn.

Not really related, but slightly relevant: my cartoon giraffe avatar has stuck to me to the point where people who already know my work and meet me in person for the first time tend to call me "the giraffe guy" before they remember what my actual name was. Awkward.

"Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" has an absolutely clear opinion about fascists, and the upside of it is we seem do agree, but the downside is it's not trivial to make a compelling villain this way. Voss is jut not an interesting character. I find myself just waiting for him to leave scene.

@Lana He's going to stop all transmissions. As an added bonus, this will free up a lot of superheterodynes to help regular heterodynes fight homodynes.

@Lana Obligatory Betrans comment.
(it's an actual company, and fairly large at that)