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

@oleksandr Turns out Slavic languages are indeed mutually intelligible where it truly matters.

I try to keep this profile less political and more focused on my work, but I do appreciate the fact that it looks like I'm going to keep my German remote job for now.

@jalefkowit It's funny how this argument is usually coupled with a completely arbitrary choice of the historical reference point. Go look at Poland's borders in 1600 and tell me whose boundaries are more "historic".

(to be clear: I strongly oppose the thankfully very few people who say Poland should claim its former eastern territories)

@quaithe Looks like it's going to be SPD *and* Greens. Merz faced some backlash from his own party when he tried to cozy up to AfD, so hopefully that's out of question.

@OchmennoPodcast The actual fiction in the book was the idea that there's some kind of secret organization that has our best interest in their hearts, answers to the government, and is able to stop said industrialist by dispatching a single highly-qualified field agent, augmented by cutting-edge technology funded from the state's budget.

@yora Art is driven by both horniness *and* spite, and one of things that drive my spite is when the internet (as in "the algorithm") won't just leave me alone. I'm demisexual. What I want is emotional connection and cuddles.

I don't feel comfortable with eroticism in games and wouldn't want to make a game where there's a lot of it, but I am occasionally tempted to make a mirror image of what the internet keeps assaulting me with, and create a game where every male character has an extremely prominent bulge in his pants, in the general area of where his genitals should be.

@siwa Nieustająco 2, ale w poniedziałek idę na badanie wzroku, więc mam nadzieję, że już niedługo nowe okulary.

@yurnidiot The Nazis have been well known for their poor winter performance, so I'm not surprised.

I'm looking through someone else's Unreal code from an unrelated project right now, and one thing that stands out is they made a number of changes to the engine that in most cases could have been just child classes.

I'd recommend the latter, because sooner or later you're going to want to move on to a newer version and you don't want to have to redo all the engine customizations.

@cstross I imagine people generally have no idea about the goings on in other countries and the UK and US are an exception because of their cultural hegemony.

It doesn't become international news until it reaches Euromaidan-level intensity (Euromaidan was in 2014 in Ukraine, the police there killed about a hundred protesters).

@cstross I was born in 1980. In 1981 there was martial law, in 1986 there was the Chernobyl scare, in 1987 I got carbon monoxide poisoning, in 1988 the economic crisis got so bad my parents couldn't afford anything for next 5 years, in 1989 there was a revolution, in 1992 there was the "night of the briefcases" (basically a failed coup attempt), and I'm going to run out of characters before I get to the one good part (2004, EU accession).

@mindfuck_inc I think the low rolls were a choice to enforce some risk-taking, since the game is balanced to allow dice waste (it has to be because dice get broken rather unpredictably). But I agree some more low-risk rolls in cities would be nice. There are like three "safe" rolls in the whole game.

Also, more focus on the crew would be nice. Shame that they only have two dice and never grow their skills.

Citizen Sleeper 2 doesn't disappoint. It's mostly more of the same, but in a way that doesn't feel like a money grab. The new mechanics are fine. Going to buy all DLC they throw at me.

Rule of thumb: you need one tester for every ten team members in other roles, rounded up.

Things I can handle just fine: riot police, violent counter-protesters, distress calls from stranded teenagers, covert meetings, walking up to plainclothes police officers and taking pictures of the parliament building as they're watching me.

Things I can't handle: milestone delivery days.

@keul It's an old PC video game. Here's the Mobygames entry for it: https://www.mobygames.com/game/3785/gothic/

Well, no.

It turns out "Gothic" fandom still exists and there's even a Discord server. Someone learned about the book somehow, told their friends, and now some of them want it as a collector item.

I mean, it is nice to find someone with a shared appreciation of something, but also just imagine, you made a game 25 years ago, and some people still like it enough that they want a book about it in a foreign language.

So I have this tiny store on the web where I sell my books. The books are in Polish, and so is the store, because we're too small to have them translated and published abroad.

So imagine my surprise when one day I got not one, but four orders for a copy of the book about "Gothic", all from abroad, made on the same day, and even at the exact same hour in some cases.

My first thought was this was either a package redirection scam or someone hacked into other people's bank accounts.

I had a wonderful wholesome little adventure yesterday.

So, it so happens that I wrote a game design book. It sold well, so I wrote another. That other book has a companion in the form of a monographs of an old open world adventure/RPG game called "Gothic".

"Gothic" is a classic, it plays well even today, and also has a notoriously obsolete UI (designed before it was obvious that mouse is for camera controls). So overall a very interesting case study.