Notices by Jacek Wesołowski (jzillw@mastodon.gamedev.place), page 8

I bought Divinity: Original Sin because it was on sale and because I was curious about that game I never played that everyone seemed to like.

It's basically Baldur's Gate 3 version 0.1.

I can see how they made this one on a much smaller budget, made a bunch of mistakes but learned from them, verified some ideas, and then reused that experience in a higher profile title.

I was worried this was going to be a real-time hack&slash slog but no, it's actually decent, if a bit rough here and there.

I've been playing immersive sims since the original Thief, and I love the genre, but I have this dream I'm probably never going to be able to fulfill: to make an immesrive sim with wholesome characters in it. I don't want another story about criminals. I want stories about regular people trying to deal with the mess around them.

Reinstalled CP2077, but bounced off an abusive scripted sequence fairly early in the Act 1 main quest. This made me think about the difference between CD Projekt games and the games I actually enjoyed, like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Dishonored.

And I think it boils down to the fact these games know how to do a complicated character who's navigating a pathological system and making (flawed) moral choices, as opposed to just being the most disgusting asshole the writers could think of.

@robryk Czerwony, derived from czerw. The color of an earthworm, basically.

Sometimes I'm reminded how in Polish there's the worm colour and the herb colour, there are the months: the cold one, the flowery one, the month of sickles etc. and the currency name can be plausibly translated as "gold pieces", and I get the impression that all you need to create a fancy-sounding fantasy setting is to speak a foreign language.

LinkedIn has this running theme where someone starts a post with the claim that "XYZ is a gamechanger" and then follows up with a really bad example of XYZ. The most recent in my experience is some guy who claimed 3D animation is a gamechanger, but the 3D animation clip he attached was so nauseating it almost made me throw up.

@goshki I advocate for KISS a lot and iterative approach has been my catchphrase for years, but also I've seen how commercial development can stand in the way of both. Simply put, iterative approach needs to be communicated in advance: we are going to revisit this feature, even though it looks good enough, and we are going to spend money on it again. But most investors would prefer to jump straight into pipelined production.

@kurtseifried @cstross Just looking at this picture is giving me phantom pain from all the times I'd bump my head against the ceiling getting up. And then there's the washing machine.

@rubenbolling Huh, I clicked this link thinking "sounds like the thing we have in Warsaw, I wonder if it has something in common". xD

It has some limitations Townscaper didn't have (crucially, it doesn't allow subtractive operations), and the asset pool is somewhat limited (e.g. I didn't manage to build a bridge over a body of water), but I imagine the tool may still grow over time.

Obviously this is nowhere near as pretty as the fancy pieces that people with actual art skills make, but still, it looks nice, and more importantly, it's pretty much what I wanted it to be. Took about two hours to make.

A sufficiently responsive concepting tool still beats prompt-driven generation. This is great for level sketching, and I bet someone's going to make great use of it in education as well.

@goshki I won't say "yes" or "no", but I'll give an example. In one project I worked in everything was fine until we introduced a tech tree. A tech tree is basically a bunch of things that say "this specific thing right here used to be a number but now it's a function". It turned out many of our features weren't ready for that. Would be nice to take the tech tree into account from day one, except no one could tell in advance what techs were going to be there, because it depends on playtests.

@europesays Bonus points if they're a cis male politician, and the sudden incidence of menstrual cramps makes their colleagues question their gender identity in the most transphobic way imaginable.

@yora I imagine in reality there are both kinds and the former is much more numerous, but it seems like every year the latter are getting more and more aggressively stupid.

The more comments about the new Witcher I see, the more eager I am to spend more time on my pet project, which is very much intended to piss off as many rightwingers as possible without being obnoxious

And I'm not even much of a fan of the Witcher. The first one was all right but I never finished the second (it was boring) nor the third (I lost track of what was going on)..

@glassbottommeg Have been working with Unreal on-and-off since 2.5 and their approach to documentation has always been "let the licencees figure things out on their own and share it on a mailing group / forum / YouTube, also let's see if we can appropriate their hotfixes to our bugs".

Unreal would still be using apples for navigation if not for my then (2009) teammate who just couldn't stand them and implemented a navmesh.

If you're going to moral panic about someone playing "Among Us", you might want to first check the contents of "Dishonored".

For those who haven't, "Dishonored" is literally a series of missions to "neutralize" a bunch of oligarchs. You get to choose whether to kill them outright, or serve them some pretty cruel poetic justice that makes you think they might be better off dead.

@darkling @cstross More importantly, if you try to summon a magical entity that's no longer there, the entire universe suffers a catastrophic collapse (but it will give you a scroll listing all magic that was present at the time in the order of casting, so you can retrace your mistake).

@graydon @vanderZwan @Freyja The abstract just says they have a consensus, and further down the document there are the specifics. There are same caveats, but I think you could say they're saying yes to hormone therapy, and list a number of precautions to be taken.

In a weird case of the kind of irony you normally only see in fictional stories, Facebook is now pushing to me anti-corporate memes[1] instead of chess problems, architecture trivia and endless instances of Calvin & Hobbes.

Seriously, it's now a noticeable trend, I do wonder how the owners feel about it.

[1] Like, literally, "CEOs are our greatest enemy", "just shoot him already" and similarly unambiguous messages.