Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 7

@dusoft We experimented with real world maps in a project I worked on back in 2019. It actually worked pretty well, but needed some work, and our whimsical project manager turned his attention to something else.

@ArmouredWizard In programming, "good" is relative to your priorities. This is a perfectly serviceable first iteration. For a future one, consider updating the total when you're adding or removing an item from inventory. This will reduce workload from "all items every time someone asks for the total" to "one item every time an item is added or removed".

@rewolwerow @SceNtriC Na razie nie można. Musimy przydusić drukarnię, żeby nam przysłała prawidłowo wydrukowane egzemplarze.

@SceNtriC Wykresy, które powinny mieć napisy, nie mają napisów, równie dobrze mogłoby ich nie być w ogóle. Tekst książki jako taki jest czytelny, ale tam, gdzie są odwołania do ilustracji, może być niewygodnie.

@SceNtriC W międzyczasie dźgamy drukarnię, żeby nam się wytłumaczyła z błędów w druku. Wiemy na sto procent, że to problem po ich stronie. Wiodąca hipoteza mówi, że robili jakiś update oprogramowania i nie sprawdzili, czy coś się nie rypło z tej okazji.

@Mazurek64 Yeah, you know you've messed up when something's too much even for Adrian.

Congratulations to the sauna creative director guy, my foreign coworkes say you're all over their local social media. You're making Poland famous for all the wrong reasons.

In a perfect parallel with the subject matter, my game design textbook was released with a whole bunch of last-minute bugs that occurred between final evaluation of the sample copy and the actual print. The closest gamedev counterpart to that would be an error in the Steam backend that deletes UI assets from your uploaded build.

Unfortunately, in the world of printed books there's no such thing as a day one patch (the last time you can try to fix bugs is after print but before release).

I'd like to make a space opera RTS game that features Reasonably Sized Military Spaceships.

I want the characters to board a mighty beast of a ship, like one hundred metres long, which is a lot (frigate-sized, more or less), and then go visit some very minor celestial body and feel small again (e.g. Phobos, a tiny moon around Mars, is some 20km across, basically space's equivalent of an island)

"...so today we're going to talk in-depth about this new nuclear fusion plant project that actually makes a lot of sense, and you know what else makes sense? It's SENSMAKR, our today's sponsor, the new crowd-sourced hypertext knowledge base that's better than any old-fashioned..."

SIGH. Could youtubers please stop doing this?

(I guess not)

@LeoSandbox One, adequately-sized milestones, as in "here's the one thing I'll achieve in this project next month".

Two, avoiding long pauses (say, longer than three months).

Remember kids, if you spend a lot of time at a desk, you need to stretch regularly.

(or so says my cat)

@Alrecenk That's basically every game ever, they just don't realize that.

@Leszek_Karlik @cstross @BadExampleMan @monkeyben To this day my favourite protest slogan is "Polska dla dziwaków" (Poland for weirdos), which mimics the nationalist slogan "Polska dla Polaków" (Poland for the Poles).

So far the greatest thing about publishing this book is that tomorrow is a deadline in my other project (a.k.a. "my job"), and I had to disappear for a few hours to take care of the delivery, and no one as much as blinked, because it's Germany, and in Germany people understand the concept of other people having urgent important things to do outside of "the job".

This is what 300 copies of a 1000-pages book looks like (volume 1 on the right, volume 2 on the left, and the appendix / bonus chapter in the middle).

Some 600kg in total. Fourth floor, no lift. I need to catch a breath.

@konstantinosd As an aside, and I don't mean it as a criticism (I liked the game and gave it a thumbs up on Steam), my Steam review from a few days ago literally says, as part of a comparison: "Stray portrays an actual cat. Little Kitty, Big City represents the popular fantasy / stereotype of a cat". To me as someone who's been around cats for 30+ years it's obvious this isn't a "real" cat (and there's nothing wrong with that).

@Mazurek64 This true, because features (and especially gameplay) don't exist independently. Interactions between features are crucial to the experience, and they grow geometrically with the number of features.

@kwramm The real metaverse was the strangers we got into pointless arguments with along the way.

@yora @Igigog 3D printing is useful whenever you need a small custom-made piece of plastic. This includes spare parts (for drones, for example, which these days is a military application), but also props (for e.g. LARPs and board games).