I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

Remember the Ububtu mobile OS ?

I remember working on the community UI drive for this project. To know that something as awesome as ubuntu would come down into the form factor of a phone , was just ecstatic.

The first build was out , people liked it. People nagged a bit about the performance issues , but it was going fine. Then the second build .. then the third no one heard about and the 4th that never came.

The interface for this system was unique because after Wondows , this is the only other OS developer that embraced the one ecosystem mantra of design.

Using Ubuntu phone was natural , it was a small desktop OS.

I remember logging on to launchpad one day and seeing the Ubuntu mobile channel with it's last post " Thank you and goodbye "

It was heartbreaking , but i could understand. Like windows phone ( which if you guys weren't aware of , had APK support by the end of its lifecycle ) felt crushed under the weight of android and iOS.

Waiting for a day when there will be a third champion in game. I miss having to see Ubuntu being on my phone , but they seem to be doing great in everything else , so good on that. 😄

Ok done .. thanks

So, I got a paid internship and was tasked to create a game from scratch. They told me to start by creating an idea and so I started creating a Game Design Document with 40+ pages. Fuckin epic idea. The idea is presented to the boss. "Very good. But I want it to have multilayer" *Sigh* Substantial changes are made and I'm eager to start working on my masterpiece. Everybody wanted to see how it would turn out. 2 months into the internship I have to make a presentation to the boss. He tells me that I won't be able to accomplish anything in the limited time of the internship. They change my work completely and I am now part of the main team. Two weeks later I have another presentation. "You have been here for 2 months and this is what you have? This is you progress? You need to do better". A couple of days later I get an email stating that my performance was unsatisfactory and I won't get paid for those 2 months. Like, ARE YOU FUCKIN KIDDING ME! YOU TELL ME TO CHANGE EVERYTHING! 2 MONTHS OF MY LIFE OF HARD WORK WADTED FOR NOTHING! FUCK YOU! SO FUCKIN PISSED!

I have cool coworkers tho

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Friend: Do you think you could make an app that does X?

Me: Yes but I'm not an app developer so haven't had much experience with app design so might take a while

Also friend: What sort of programmer are you? It's basic shit

My friends don't seem to understand that the programming loop for game development (Mostly background asset management) and app development is like trying to ask why a bull and a bull frog won't breed...Yes they both have bull in the name but they are 2 fucking different cunting things...

Arrived at a game jam in an animation school. I hope they're better at game design than they are at cable management :)

Sometimes.....

When I want to escape how dull/repetitive/boring the world of web development is. I crack open a nice lil terminal, dust off my gcc/g++ compilers and fuck around in C or C++ till my eyes start to bleed.

I have been fucking around with systems development. Mainly with Linux programming. I have also started to get deeper on game engine design and compiler design....because low level development is where its at.

A man can only fuck around rest apis, css and html and the endless sea of Javascript and other dynamic languages for so long before going crazy.

Eventually.....I would want to code something impressive enough to give me a spot somewhere as a C or C++ developer. I just can't work with web development any longer man. It really is not what I want to do, the fact that I do it(and that I am good at it) is circumstantial more than because I really enjoy it. I really don't

Hi everyone! Progress is slow for the game development.
I'm finally (and hopefully) done character design though I have a fuckton to do for 10+ characters.
Tbh it was my first time but got the help from the art community to give me a lot of feedback!

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

Game Development,
Because it merges together so many interesting fields so well. It has a ton of physics, a lot of art and design, psychology, philosophy, storytelling, music ...
And it really gives you the possibility to make anything work to your rules. The only limit there is is the limits of logic and your hardware.

Hi Dev Ranter,

My name is John Smith and I came accross to your resume on Linked In and I was very impressed. Would you be interested in a 5 min call?

Job Details:
Required skills (all expert levels): C#, JAVA, Clojure, C, PHP, Frontend, Backend, Agile, MVP, Baking, Redis, Apache, IIS, RoR, Angular, React, Vue, MySQL, MSSIS, MSSQL, ORACLE, PostgreSQL, Access, Python, Machine Learning, HTML, CSS, Fortran, C++, Game design, Book writing, PCI - Compliance
Salary: $15/Hours no benefits
Duration: 2 Months (possible extension, plus we can fire you at will)
Place: Remote (with work tracking software)
Hours: 5am - 1pm, 6pm - 11pm
Expect to work on weekends

You will be managing people as well as building applications that had to be running as of yesterday. Team culture is very toxic and no one cares about you.

We care about you though (as long as you deliver)

Looking forward to talk to you.

John Smith
Founder, CEO, Director of Staffing, Entrepeneur
Tech Staffers LLC ( link to a PNG posted on facebook)
Est. 2020

For fucks sake, just because you don't know anything besides JS, you don't have to constantly complain how it's "so fucked up"!

Yeah there's a lot of frameworks. So what? Python has 50+ wsgi frameworks just for server-side apps, Linux has literary hundreds of desktop environments, C++ has over 30 actively-developed UI frameworks, and let's not even get started on CMSs or game engines. And each language comes with its own dependency management or two, NPM discourages static linking & bundling dependencies until the very end, while some others only recommend dynamically linking widely-available dependencies & always bundling the remaining ones.

Software development is constantly evolving, and for most time there's no right or wrong approach. And when one approach is chosen over another, there's a reason for that. Imagine you just found a perfect library for your use case, but some idiot decided to only offer minified code with bundled jQuery? Or a different idiot made it impossible to have multiple versions of a dependency on your system without resorting to one of various third-party hacks?

Every language has a ton of various frameworks & libraries that ultimately do the same thing, every language has a bunch of design choices you probably don't understand at first, and every language was made with a purpose and the fact that you're using it proves it achieved that.

Last but not least, all devs had to learn about quirks in various languages, and they're fucking tired when someone who barely knows a language tries to act smart going "ahaha how the fuck 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3".

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

Never heard of a so terribly designed online game.

For starters: the client-server model is process everything on the client, then save it on the server, and due to the nature of the site design, simply changing a tag will give you another of money.

The PayPal processing system doesn't read any headers or anything of that sort. So if you cancel your payment, this game thinks you've paid anyways.

Also, the trading system is based off of what buttons you can see so if you can see the cancel button it must be yours. So if you copy the cancel button to someones trade offering (FYI this is all done locally), and you click it you have gotten said item(s).

It gets worse, but I don't remember much more than that. The one thing they actually do is make session IDs expire.

Today on forgotten games – Ballance.

The game is absolutely outstanding. Graphics is absolutely amazing even though the game was developed in 2004. The sound effects are perfect, I can literally feel the wooden ball rolling on steel rails. The background music is also amazing, we're talking Alexander Brandon level here.

The game is about rolling the ball through the levels trying not to fall off. There are three balls: the stone one, the wooden one and the paper one, different in weight, velocity and momentum.

I admire the clever level design. It uses in-game map features in multi-purpose way, for example some levels use ball transformers (the things that transform the ball from one kind to another) as a trap for your ball to lose momentum. It even seems like that levels were designed by some crazy modders for advanced players, but they weren't, and traveling through them feels like you're a pro gamer playing custom levels.

Even though levels seem simple at first glance, they allow non-linear gameplay and different gaming styles.

The gameplay itself is pure meditation. But even though the concept seem straightforward – just follow the level and don't fall – it's not. You have to use all three ball types: there are air vents to fly above upon, which only paper ball can do, there are obstacles to push, which only stone ball can do, and so on.

For additional sonic satisfaction the levels even feature some metal domes that serve no purpose but to be bumped into just for making amazing gong sound.

I like it that when you get cocky and think like that's easy, I got this, the game quickly puts you into place. It basically says nigga you ain't shit, you got nothing on me.

Overall it's basically a mesmerizing travel through cleverly designed levels surrounded by relaxing music and outstanding graphics.

Definitely a must-have for mechanical keyboard gamers, it's a pure satisfaction playing this game with a great level of precision and control mechanical keyboard allows.

Search for "ballance widescreen fix" for modern displays support.

Installed Miami Street earlier today.. some random free Shaftgame.
Late at night now, I figured "let's try this out".

> Logging in...
*crashes*

*goes to the settings for this crap game*
> *crashes*

Fucking worthless piece of Microshit.. yet another data collection hook that REQUIRES your shit to log in just to fucking work? Fucking Shaftfuckers, 5GB of internet traffic I spent on this?! Just to see it be a worthless data-hungry paperweight?!! Luckily my residential connection is unmetered and has some decent speeds.. but still, FUCK YOU MICROSHAFT!!!

Coincidentally, keyboard input completely broke when I wanted to do a minor edit to the drafted rant. Microshit can't even design a decent keyboard driver anymore, huh.. I DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO REWRITE THIS SHIT FOR A SECOND TIME, FUCKING REDMOND MICROCUNTSUCKERS!!!!

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

Dear non-webdevs,

We don't talk bad about you. Why somayou mad at us? :D

I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.

Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.

Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.

Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.

It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.

The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.

Me: yo pass me the photoshop
Friend: You better not make weeb idol game design
Me:

Game is underway in unreal engine!

Been doing the art for a ridiculously long time, got help from many people! All sorts of suggestions, and great ones too! I've used paint dot net because it is reliable, Im not a great digital artist but can do a decent job!
So what's happening now is that I'm working on the maps and going to start on the character design tonight.
I have less than a month to get a huge portion done but I hope I execute it at an international standard! :D
Here's a preview of the basic part

Ok so we went to a graphic class seeking graphic designers for our game.

We pitchted our 3d fast paced speed running game. With highscores and shit. (We only have a week to create this game)

This fucking moron in the back of the class starts to rise his hand asking:

Is this a MMORPG?

Me: No this is no fucking MMORPG?!

Him: But i only want to design to a MMORPG

Me: Well we are not doing a fucking MMORPG..

Him: Can you change it to an MMORPG please?

Me: WTF NOOO!

Him: Okey you sure?

Me: YES... smh

Like why the fuck shall we change an idea to something litrally impossible to make in a week and that will fucking crash and burn like every Michael Bay movie ever...

Currently I'm working on 3D game engine and making a 3D minesweeper game with it.
I have started creating a compiler not long ago using my own implementation (no Lex no tools nothing just raw algorithms application) to hopefully some day I will be able to make a language that works on top of glsl inside my game engine. I have compilers design class this semester which haven't even started yet and made a lexical analyser generator. I also have another class about geographical information systems which I will be using my engine to create some demos for some 3D rendering techniques like level of details or maybe create something similar to arcgis which we will be using.
Oh man I have many stuff I want to do.
Here is a gif showing the state of my minesweeper game. I clearly lack artistic skills lol. One thing I will be making is to model the sphere as squares not triangles.
Finally I want to mention that I months ago saw someone here at devrant making a voronoi diagrams variant of this which inspired me to make this.
I made long post so
TLDR : having fun reinventing the weel and learning 😀

I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.

Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.

I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)

And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.

But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.

You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.

Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.

The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.

This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.

If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.

No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.

But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.

Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.

As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.

When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.

I fucking hate esoteric code.

Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.

This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.

As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.

Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.

Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.

That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".

I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.

It's just the community.

Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.

You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.

Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.

You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!

On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.

And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.

Hello World! First post here. I'm literally done with frontend stuff. I want to design code, not to code design. Unless it's Processing. I find it cute. So.. I have a somewhat handy grasp on C++ because of a class in electronics course, Python seems quite easy to catch. I'm totally new to programming. I'd like to get into software, game development and android development (but I would like to do things cross-platform).
Which paths, resources, languages, useful books, videos, or just anything would you recommend?

To be fair, I have no coding friends so mentorship or simply finding code buddies would be great. 💜

That's how my girlfriend is addicted to game design....
Sometimes I ask me who is more addicted, she or me 🙂

When you design a system UI but cannot stop thinking about the game last night.

I don't like marketing people (nothing personal).
Most of those I had to communicate with, do lack anything that would remotely come close to brain activity.
A handful of days before the start of a huge event, for which we made a VR game over 2 months, they have the ovaries to tell us that the spectator TV doesn't fit the event's design and thus the VR game will not be shown at the event.
Wow.
Thankfully, half a day later, their CEO directly wrote us and told us to ignore them and to proceed with the preparations for the game.

This will be 4chan-r/greentext-ish in format. Also "me" is not me, PTH, it's referring to a game studio.

>Be me
>Be game studio
>Create event for weapon design
>Player base submit in a craptonna designs
>Holyfuck.jpg
>Create an internal service for voting
>Service doesn't check for vote except for a login
>MFW one submission has 6-digit votes
>MFW a lotta submission also start gain a lot of votes
>WTF.gif
>The vote count spiked
>Votebotting is here
>Ohshit.gif
>MFW I don't how to filter votes
>MFW I can't block rerouted traffics (VPNs, proxies, etc.)
>MFW the Discord server of the game gets vocal then Reddit.
>OhshitIfuckedup.mp4

My first PC was a USSR clone of the IBM XT 5160-086 PC, but with a different design, and beefier RAM. I was shown a game in it (barbarian), and the next evening I really wanted to play again, so I inserted the floppy disk, booted up into DOS and Norton Commander, and was stuck. It's my first ever interaction with a computer. So i typed "computer, please give me barbarian".
I was way ahead of the time you could say :)

What you are expected to learn in 3 years:

power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,

and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices

This is a major called "computer engineering"

If you're making a game, dont start by thinking about your inventory system. Start by thinking about what you want your player to be able to DO, the cost of those things, and the constraints.

For example, ages of empires didnt have you worrying about unit equipment at all. every villager could do almost any job. while survival games, especially survival horror, like the recent RE remake, severly restrict inventory and stack sizes to make resource managenent more important.

Games like Fallout had list based inventories because lists are cheap, and it allowed a tighter interaction loop. players would loot. go into inventory. close container, onto the next container, keeping the player in the exploration loop longer. neoscav did the opposite *for effect* harkening back to diablo, but taken to the nth degree: *everything*, actions, combat, exploration, character design, all based on an inventory-style grid.
while games like rimworld and dwarf fortress have your inventory represented by zones where items are physically *stored* in stacks on the ground, extending the concept of base management to resource management through physical layout and build optimization.

its important to think about what kind of actions you want players to be able to do, and the kinds of challenges and constraints you want on them at each point of the game and each mechanic they engage in.

other examples, though terrible, include fortnite, where the limitations of competitive play had inventory limited to a resource system and a hotbar. while earlier battle royale and sandboxs games like rust and battleground induced tension by combining loot mechanics and grid inventories with the constant danger of competing players, allowing them to have richer inventory systems at the risk of frusterating players who frequently died while managing their inventory. meanwhile in overwatch, notice how the HUD changes to best represent the abilities of each character.

all in all it is better to stop thinking of inventory systems as a means to an end, and instead as the end representation of desired mechanics, or artificially selected representations for particular effects.

this applies likewise to ui and ux in general. because the design of interface is fundementally about the design of *interactions*, and what you want to enable a user or customer to *do* will ultimately drive those interactions.

So building a game engine/framework/thing/thang and was working on a scripting language designed for the Dev terminals commands/applications...

Then I also have to design a language for the asset scripts, instances (probably going to do JSON) and it only took me about 4 months of planning to realise I could just use the same language for everything and just double down on the one.

Well aren't I a fucking dickhead .-.

Have an idea for a fun little side project coding a game. Install Unity and read up some samples.
Remember I'm awful at any kind of creative design work.
Get sad and go back to Overwatch.

Here we go....

At our school we had different industry people come in and talk about whatever they want to.

My last presenation for the day is on 3D modelling in Game Design, and of course we have middle school kids being generally loud and obnoxious.

Some fuckers are being exceptionally obnoxious, and the teachers decided, in their infinite FUCKING wisdom, to stick them in front of a table where Juniors and Seniors are sitting, minding our own buisness.

Of course, the fuckers decided to continue being obnoxious and despite my request to keep it down, and another Senior's direct approach to tell them to shut up, they continue being disruptive.

At one point, a teacher, again using INFINITE FUCKING WISDOM, decided that instead of removing the fuckers from the room, put a Senior in between them, hoping that that would somehow keep them quiet. Yes, the fucking preschool level attempt didn't work.

Eventually a teacher concluded that the fuckers were pissing us off and removed them from the room. Thank fuck.

That feels much better, excuse me as I need to reinstall an OS on my desktop since the Universe seems to fucking hate me today.

Ahh boy, uni sure is fun...
I missed my comp-sci class last week when we got a project assigned. No big deal, right? We have an online student portal where teachers can post assignments for everyone to see. I'm sure it's in there.

It's not.

Okay. How about the syllabus? Professors are supposed to create a weekly schedule for students to follow, it's probably in there, right?

Nope. Nothing.

Alright... I guess I'll email him. At this point about two classes have passed and I haven't heard anything in class, so I fire off a quick email to the professor asking for the details to be posted to the web portal so I at least have some idea of what I'm doing.
Surprise surprise, I get a response in about an hour.

"I'm not posting anything online. You should have been in class. Talk to a classmate."

*sigh*

So, from what I can gather from my classmates, we have to design a game using python. It might be a quiz, maybe. We have a week.

Are you fucking kidding me? Is it really that hard to take 20 minutes to type up a few requirements so your students at least know what you're grading for? I barely have any idea of what you even want, and from the three people I talked to it wasn't very clear even when he explained it in class. Post your assignments online, asshole!

Stories from Gary #000

Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.

So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.

Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.

Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.

I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.

-.-

So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.

"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.

To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.

tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.

This dude from the advertising agency I'm currently having a little job wants to convince me to go study media informatics/cs instead of going into the game scene.

I'm scared of my future, is that fine?

Fire your whole fucking web team Bethesda

* Your design is a classic ipecac. Whatever the fuck you are doing doesn't in frontend doesn't justify the 4Mb of bandwidth I wasted on a single js file. Why the fuck can I see the whole fucking node_modules directory when looking at the sources?
I know this is supposed to be a webpage for a game development studio, but I'm seriously wondering if your budget would even get me a prostitute.
I'm a greedy fuck and want a free game. apparently your servers are only good enough to register me, but login is apparently too much to ask for. Yeah sure. Oh and also thank you for choosing an "incorrect username and password" error message by default, even though your fucking gateway timed out. Please be kind enough and punch me directly into my face next time. Not like I'll ever access that shit ever again

(sing this in the "If I were a boy" melody from Beyoncé)

If I had a job,
I think I'd want to support,
this awesome platform we call devRant,
but right now sadly just can't...
[oooh]

If I had a job (again),
I think I would buy CodePeeen (amen),
by buy I mean I would buy plan pro,
but I ain't got no fixed income, no
[I ain't]

If I had no school,
I'd be game dev or web noob,
I would design like in the 90ies,
pink website showing panties, oh yes...
[that'd be cool!]

If I were adult,
I wouldn't laugh at these jokes,
I would know the hard and real life,
and maybe even have a loved wife...
[maybeeee]

"Pokemon Let's Go" review:

I knew it would be a very easy game, made to transition Pokemon Go players to the core series of games, but this game is just poorly thought out. The multiplayer was obviously an afterthought; there is no split-screen. When the other player goes off-screen, they are lost off camera. Player 2 cannot interact with anything: they cannot talk to people, collect items, or initiate battles (They walk right through Pokemon)

The game is too easy by design. You cannot fight wild Pokemon, so you end up having 6 Pokemon by the beginning of the game all at full health (And everything gets XP when you catch something, so most of your Pokemon will be up to level 6-10 by your first battles) and the opposition will only have one level 3-4 Pokemon.

This trend continues throughout the game.

The map is tiny. You could walk the whole thing in an hour. Even Gameboy Pokemon maps were larger.

I knew this going into it, but it only has gen 1, which means pretty much no Pokemon, and they're the ones that I'm bored of. Every shitty game starts with generation 1 pokemon then ever introduces anything else. I'm sick of pidgeys!

Plus the hefty price tag of $60 just makes this game not worth much, despite the hype they tried to give it. That's probably why they were to secretive about the gameplay before launch: they knew it was bad,

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

Applications written with game engines - Unity to be specific -, that mimick usual user interfaces with an appalling design that screams "grefic desein is ma peaetion"

Your cancerous application is ruining my health and the ads only make it worse. Go learn to program natively on a platform or caese.

Nobody wants to see that logo of yours while waiting for your app to load what? Your very "unique" listview? Those very extremely beautiful buttons with images? You incompetent being learning how to crop images properly without destroying the proportion of it?

Please learn how to kick yourself in the head

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

ME: ok its time to create a game let's see... i will do a 2d pixel art game and... it will be medieval type of game... ok lets start by creating a character design.

*30 minutes later*

Me: I quite!!!

Why !?! Why would you design your web page in such a way that as images load, I have to play a scrolling game to try and read the shit !?!

I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.

Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.

1. asset management

2. asset change management

3. behavior change management

4. data management

5. combinatorial design management.

6. Combinatorial Behavior management

7. Feature completion

ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.

ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.

This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.

DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.

COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.

COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.

FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.

I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.

It's a toss up between a basic software portal for my old school as a volunteer thing or an old game designed around user content creation.

The portal is more of a personal success but the game was a success in the respect it ended up rolling past a Bethesda employee and he gave me a one on one Skype chat about there design methods.

I began exploring code and graphic design early on at about 6-7 years old. My Dad had a commodore 64 with a few games and a little handbook that had some awesome examples to go by. My Dad had at one time been a subscriber to a serial magazine for Commodore enthusiasts that featured a snippet of code in each issue. After getting into my Dad's old stash of magazines I was able to combine all the magazines and write the code from each issue to create a hangman game. This got me into computers and programming. Then we did some Logo/Turtle work as got into qbasic on our IBM machine.

My boss drives me crazy. He hired me for working on his SDK which is game related. So I am responsible for basically everything, including an ingame UI (menu etc.) and to predict the future path of a game object (unit, minion, ..) when a certain spell is casted on it. For that task I divided the prediction into firstly getting the predicted path of the unit without a spell being casted and then a class that would cast the spell on that path and estimate the units reaction to that cast. Simplified, but that way you get a pretty okayish result. Now he thinks that is too complicated. "Can we not put everything into one class, if someone wants to replace the prediction he needs to read documentation for hours". WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT, THAT IT'S GONNA BE SOME ONE CLASS 3K LINES MAGIC??

Same for the GUI. We only have DirectX and don't want to use a framework. Guess what, it's more than one class if you want to seperate view, model, controller or whatever fucking "design pattern" thing you use.

And then Git... he seriously said let's not use branches till release, I feel like they slow down things.. before I was there they did every operation on master.

And if it was just that..

/rant

I put much work into this, time to leave?

Embedded app design resources?

We have a device that is currently controlled through buttons and knobs. We are rethinking this design. We want to have a mix of buttons and knobs and in addition have a touchscreen. The controls must be redundant. So if we turn off the touch screen it must be able to control everything.

Does anyone know of any design resources for non-touchscreen embedded control?

I have been looking into how gaming console controls work. I like how they have the idea of controlling the game vs breaking the 4th wall. We have a similar constraint as we want the operator focused on what they are controlling and not the controls or even sometimes the screen. So immersion is definitely a concept for us. I have been toying with the idea of adding a d-pad for some controls. We have not solidified the hardware controls yet. That is still up to me to come up with some ideas to make it more intuitive.

When I was 12 I created my own LEGO manuals and monopoly boardgame variants.
When I was 14 and into gaming I had fun playing with a Q3 level editor for Wolfenstein (GtkRadiant), and drew boardgame maps.
When I was 16 I translated the game battledawn.com to French for in-game currency in return.
When I was 18 I fiddled with texture packs for Minecraft and got interested in Total War mods.
When I was 20 I met a student who studied webdev & design. I was so excited about basic HTML, CSS and later JS and PHP, that I read and learnt some every evening (and even failed an exam because I was learning PHP until 5AM)

I always wanted to use my skills to create something of use to others. Open-source is the perfect avenue for that and is also what enabled me to get here in the first place. And though I m've been professionally employed as dev since 2015, only the last 2 yrs I finally consider myself skilled enough to give back something of quality :)

!rant
Just realised my game development and design teacher is the senior game designer of sacred 2. Well next lesson gonna be a constant flame of this shitty random drop generator which literally mostly drops you stuff for all the other classes.

Any senior types out there find that you’re losing your coding “chops”? I’m involved in so many OS/Middleware upgrades, infrastructure upgrades, status meetings that I can’t code to save my life anymore. I can review and guide design, but I struggle to generate new code. I can get a new dev going really quickly though - is this just a natural progression or is it game over for me? I feel like if I had to get another job, I’d be very unsuccessful. They call me a leader, but I think I’m just a slave.

Im a software developer, and make games as hobby and sometimes as actual job. Recently I started looking into game design, through my work I can can do a study for free.

The main thing I would like to learn is Character development and using GDD's

Would you recommend doing such a course or is the quality of these things way to low to actually be of use?

Is there reading material I should read?

I do own a digital copy of "A theory of fun" already which Im gonna read the coming days.

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

When I was in University, there's a group project on web development. We decided to make a simple game.

Out of 5 students (including me), one was missing for the entire semester.

Another one don't know anything about any kind of programming. We asked him to write us a json file of characters' attributes. Taught him how and gave examples. Turns out that most data is missing.

Luckily the other two was great. Altogether, we covered frontend, backend and design. Finally we got the highest mark :P

Best (and worst) team ever

This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.

So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.

Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.

Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.

While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.

He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.

So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

Title: "Wizard of Alzheimer's: Memories of Magic"

Setting:
You play as an elderly wizard who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. As your memories fade, so does your grasp on the magical world you once knew. You must navigate the fragmented and ever-changing landscapes of your own mind, casting spells and piecing together the remnants of your magical knowledge to delay the progression of the disease and preserve your most precious memories.

Gameplay:
1. Procedurally generated memories: Each playthrough generates a unique labyrinth of memories, representing different aspects and moments of your life as a wizard.

2. Memory loss mechanic: As you progress through the game, your memories will gradually fade, affecting your abilities, available spells, and the layout of the world around you.

3. Spell crafting: Collect fragments of your magical knowledge and combine them to craft powerful spells. However, as your memory deteriorates, you'll need to adapt your spellcasting to your changing abilities.

4. Mnemonic puzzles: Solve puzzles and challenges that require you to recall specific memories or piece together fragments of your past to progress.

5. Emotional companions: Encounter manifestations of your emotions, such as Joy, Fear, or Regret. Interact with them to gain insight into your past and unlock new abilities or paths forward.

6. Boss battles against Alzheimer's: Face off against physical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease, representing the different stages of cognitive decline. Use your spells and wits to overcome these challenges and momentarily push back the progression of the disease.

7. Memory anchors: Discover and collect significant objects or mementos from your past that serve as memory anchors. These anchors help you maintain a grasp on reality and slow down the rate of memory loss.

8. Branching skill trees: Develop your wizard's abilities across multiple skill trees, focusing on different schools of magic or mental faculties, such as Concentration, Reasoning, or Creativity.

9. Lucid moments: Experience brief periods of clarity where your memories and abilities are temporarily restored. Make the most of these moments to progress further or uncover crucial secrets.

10. Bittersweet ending: As you delve deeper into your own mind, you'll confront the inevitability of your condition while celebrating the rich magical life you've lived. The game's ending will be a poignant reflection on the power of memories and the legacy you leave behind.

In "Wizard of Alzheimer's: Memories of Magic," you'll embark on a deeply personal journey through the fragmented landscapes of a once-powerful mind. As you navigate the challenges posed by Alzheimer's disease, you'll rediscover the magic you once wielded, cherish the memories you hold dear, and leave a lasting impact on the magical world you've called home.

LMAO

I've seen a lot of people design great websites here on DR. Since I'm being dragged into quite a bit of front end, I've decided to quit complaining and up my design game. Suggestions and advice on good design considerations?

Our creative lead sent me a few reference websites that had a lot of "wow factor". It had stuff like trailing text animations, slow motion menus and what not. For some reason, I found all of it to be annoying and pointlessly bloated. I'm more into minimalist design and simple transitions but idk if this is just my taste or lack of competence in making such fancy ass design that makes me not appreciate such sites. I need advice and I'm not sure on what. You'd probably know what if you've been in a similar situation before.

!rant - Also sorry this got rather long.

This is actually a psoitive story. I always used to be someone working on his things alone. It was great, I got shit done, I learned something. No one stressing you. But I was also lonely. The thing is that this behavior not only applied to developing. I was also able to observer that behavior in other parts of my life.

So it was time for a change. And I made a change.

It all began by switching my field of studies. Well, not really the field but some details. I switched from plain old computer science to computer science combined with media design. Here in Germany we have a nice word for it. Mediendesigninformatik.

I wish I had made that change earlier. Nonetheless it's never too late to make a change. So I began going to creative courses, like animation or graphic design. Directly from the start I made sure to talk to people. Make them remember me, offered my help because I already had experience with some things etc.

Next up was to get a job. So I got one. Now I'm working as a Game Master for a branding of escape rooms. Fun job. Also something different from developing all day, which is quite nice to do sometimes.
This job is where my change begun. The people there are amazing. I felt instantly like I've found new friends. Actually I also developed a crush on someone there and we are possibly dating soon. Not quite sure about that yet though. That also isn't the point here.

So a month later I moved out of my parents house. Living together with friends now and it's great. I'm so much more creative, so much more shit happens. I feel like a different human.

So I continued working on myself. I wanted to get really good at it. I wanted my groups to succeed whole having a challenge. They were supposed to leave happily, even when they didn't make it. Of course not everyone can be satisfied, but I noticed a positive change. Which motivated me to redesign and rethink the tool we use to give the players hints, manage their time and other stuff.
I was scared at first, but eventually I showed them what I did. Their feedback was surprisingly positive and while it will perhaps never replace our actual tools because our chef is a cheapskate, I was happy to achieve something. This continued. I made more stuff and formed connections.

Now I'm not working on things alone anymore. Recently I started working together with someone and this also was the first time I've made actual money of it. It's not a lot, but I was able to live half a month of it.

This is the beginning and I hope there will be much more. The moment I started showing other people my work and feeling confident about it made me change. I also learned to appreciate other people's compliments and kind of get an high of them, but I'm not sad when they don't like it. I feel like I've grown as a human and are more mature.

Have you experienced something similar? Can't wait to read your stories.

So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

Disclaimer - Day in the life of a whitehat student.

Whitehat Whitehat Whitehat

What is this????
When I attended my first white hat jr online free trial class, I got to know that the teachers does not know the difference between java and javascript. Infact they were saying blockly as javascript. I was knowing the difference between the same. There were 3 types of courses -

***Note : - This information is taken from the whitehat official website***

1.) Introduction to Coding :-

Sequence, Fundamentals Coding Blocks, Loops
(Teach us to drag and drop blocks of code.org(blockly))

2.) App Developer Certificate:-

Events / UI,Conditionals, Complex Loop, Logic Structures, Turtle Coding
(Advanced drag and drop(blockly))

3.) Advance Coding with Space Tech -

Extended UI/UX, Rich GUI app, Space Tech simulation in Space Lab / Game Lab, Professional Game Design.
(GUI - with tkinter(python), Game Design - Blockly(code.org))

These things are rubbish ......making GUI's is simplest with tkinter and the students who make games (with code.org) submit their codes to the whitehat community (because the teacher says "they will compile it to an android app, then you can publish it to playstore" --- this is for 1% students who are able to design their own games).

The thing whitehat do with code given by 1% best students:-

Export to HTML from code.org
Download HTML to APK Convertor
Setup SDK
Successfully converted to APK!
Publish it to Whitehat Jr console account
Credits of the students
Income of the exporters

Rest all students will only think to be the CEO of google one day.

My Opinion - StackOverflow, Unity for Game Development, Android Studio, Dart, Flutter and Kivy (using google colab for compiling the python code to an apk) for app development and Flask, HTML, CSS for web development.

Building games for people to whom the expression "game design" evaluates to "game UI design", which a fancier way to say "a bunch of static slides with arbitrary screenshots"

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

Ok, so, serious question.
How the frick do you time a music game properly?
IN C#?

...Ok, maybe in C# it's just impossible, isn't it? Because I've done a metronome, it kinda works, but it's... wobbly... Because the thread stops every time the music effect is being played.
And also how do you make the notes...? ...I should design an entire editor for charts/maps, I guess, but how do I make that in C#?

So maybe I should try in Unity?
What do you think? I want to make a music game so bad ;–;

Learn enough about 2D animation and game design to be able to make an RPG/interactive visualization of my favorite album.

(I currently know nothing about this lol.... so yeah ambitious)

I'm in a senior level game design course, where me and two others have to create an actual game. I picked my teammates out bc I thought they've already taken classes in the subject(as they are both seniors and I'm a sophomore taking this as a final class for my minor). Turns out, they haven't taken any courses in game design and know nothing about the basics of making a game... FML, good thing they can code I guess lol.😅😓

any gamedevs here with tips for gamedev students

Hello DevRant,
I need your help
I'm currently studying Game design and development first year in The Netherlands and I love programming but I hate designing. I was thinking about changing the course to something like Ethical Hacking or Computer science. The reason why I want to do this is that they teach us openfl until second year and I feel like I learn nothing until now.
Do you think would be better to change the course or to stay but start programming in something else? And what programming language would you recommend?
P.s. I also want to apply for a part time job/summer school to gain experience but I had no luck at all.
P.s.s. You are the best community for me!
Return 0;

Been thinking about game design for a while now. I have been thinking about how the game can affect the player emotionally. I pay attention to off comments people make in game forums. I didn't fully realize the impact of some NPCs until someone pointed it out.

For instance, in Skryim a character would say something like "Your parents should be very proud of you. I am too." People have expressed how profoundly this impacted them. So I put this in my notes of "things to include" in any given game. I also saw a meme where there are people where their only positive interaction with the world could be a video game. I don't know what kind of dark existence that would be so it makes it hard for me to relate. Which is probably why I didn't understand the impact of such a statement. I realized that regardless of the medium, you will have an impact on someone.

I have also been thinking about how people get older they become more of a casual player. But as a casual myself I want to a more detailed system of interaction with the game. Despite the shitty graphics (all text map), the "Mines of Moria" is one of my all time favorite games. It is based upon the Rogue I think. I remember being able to do almost anything that made logical sense with anything. For instance, you could dip arrows in any potion. The affect was not always significant, but you could to that. I want to recreate that in my games. I am going to start with shitty graphics and build a system of interaction that is more detailed than any RPG I have played. Maybe a lot of players will gloss over this, but for those that want that it will be there. I think the biggest issue is often the types of exploits this would allow. So I guess I will have to get good at simulating the player interactions to test things out. I am always a bit frustrated with games that have mages, but all their spells are wrote. I feel like skill trees for all types of play should be expansive and exclusionary. That way a new play through doesn't end up with the same god character every time.

I have been watching One Piece. I now want piracy and ships in my game. Including ship battles with a working crew. It seems like this could make an RPG a lot of fun. Who doesn't want mages casting fireballs at opposing ships?

Attended a game workshop session by Mark Skaggs, creator of Farmville. At one point he asked all the programmers to raise their hands. I love to code even though i aint an expert in backend db related code. I raised my hand. Then he asked all the designers to raise their hand. I love to graphic design as a hobby even though i aint an artist. I raised my hand again.
He noticed and said "Interesting..."

It made me question which trade i should focus more on. I still have years ahead to master them but should i give up one for the other?

Would be cool to hear your thoughts on this!

Today I found out that my favorite indie game, CrossCode was built using ImpactJS, a javascript/html5 canvas based game engine/library/framework/tumamaencuerada and I was fascinated by it.

The game is absolutely beautiful, plays and works great, badass story mode and combat design. all powered by web tech. I am honestly amazed, I was always under the impression that something like Unity was used to build it.

Gives a bit of hope

I learned to program with Game Maker, downloading examples and changing variables to see what they did. After that I wanted to make websites so I followed tutorials and just see what happened if I changed variables and functions. Then came High School where we had exercises with Java and just experimented with the possibilities.

Then in Uni I learned about OOP and Functional which opened even more worlds. After a class on design patterns and designing the architecture of a system, programming was never the same.

And even until this day, I haven't stopped learning better ways to code. Oh how I long for those days where everything is new and how I can build a hello world application and be truly excited about it! That is how I learned to program and why I won't stop anytime soon. 😁

I had the Fox Sports Go app on my Roku TV.

A few weeks ago, I noticed it was changed to the Fox Sports with a whole new design.

"Cool deal I like this."

Fast forward to today, I'm looking for a game that I know I have access to and I should be able to see. (I also check the Fox Sports Go website to see it there.)

Turns out, some dumbass fucker thought it'd be a fan-fucking-tastic idea to take a few of the TV channels and put them on their own app, while leaving the others in a separate app.

What the fuck was the point of this? I genuinely want to know what the end goal was, because it's fucking retarded to have two apps to do what one can and DID do.

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

so when someone in the office finds a funny design or absurd code on our sites we play a game we named roulette: we check the versioning system and find who did it... there is no price in this game, that shame is enough :)

I am going to rant about this being the exam week, it being hot as hell, and us having had a messed up semester study-wise... And I still managed to do good-ish in subjects somehow... Good as in, relatively good. I am no 4.0 GPA person by any means and could never be one if I studied only (if that's even realistic at all). Recently I applied to a job at Andersen Lab for a Trainee position. Got turned down because I lack experience. A TRAINEE POSITION. I could retake the interview but I feel weird with how I got rated a whole level lower than my IELTS score and two levels lower than my score at Epam (which is the more recent one!) and the questions were mostly so easy I could answer while half asleep. Just yeah. Also, while I understand the whole knowledge required thing... I don't get the need for THREE whole interviews only to then proceed to turn me down. I am continuously applying and still seeing no results. If I'm "lucky", I guess, I will get training from a bank. And then get employed there... Mentally doing very bad right now, just barely wanting to MOVE. Which is basically me being this close to giving up. Today's exam is in Linux Security and I swear, this was such a waste of a good sounding subject... Imagine, I could have learnt how to set up a server at home and all that but instead we did... The more basic stuff in Linux. And for the whole semester outside of two or three cases I was the only one in attendance. Anyways, I have been feeling like I just can't program anymore and stuff... Even though we did a Python subject this semester. And in that subject I just felt like we were going way too quickly considering a lot of the students there come from non-IT or close to that background...

I may need to put effort into learning 3D Environmental art, I have this feeling I would like doing that as a job in game dev. Oh, and I also wanna design this house that I have in mind for me. It's shaped like an Amanita Muscaria and instead of the white dots it has windows that are round, as well as a spiral staircase connecting the lower and upper floors. Need to figure out how to model that in something like AutoCAD (I have a bit of experience with it and that's why I'd like to try there... But I may have to learn other programs to do it for free), but it will take me a long time to execute since I am not the most organised in how I learn...

Anyways, I will only sporadically be there, so I may not see things here. I am somewhat busy with exams and then this NGO I recently became a founding member of (and I have to say, I kinda don't wanna be there, but there are things that have to be done). Also filling the documents for a Canadian visitor's visa to go finally see the family over there and all that. But the latter will probably not happen until next year...

Finally, I am wishing you all a sound mental health and happiness. I hope you do well in whatever you are doing at the moment or are planning to. Until next time!

I was trying to build a simple 2D (drag the fish to eat other fish) game in JavaScript, cause why not there are already many libraries i will certainly find one for my use.

I'm already familiar with p5.js thanks to Daniel Shiffman and his coding train sessions.

I thought to build the game with p5.js with the play and 2Dcollide libraries, but it turns out they don't have a custom irregular sprite collision detection neither the other thousands libraries which are rotting on github.

Guess, I need to build somethig own my own.

And I also hate it, cause I have to design those fishes, the main game logic, this collision detection function and levels

I need a coffee with a coding partner

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

I bought a $1 Steam game called Square Brawl some 5 years ago. It's a minimalistic arena battle with forgiving physics, diverse and satisfying weapons and a geometric design based on squares.

It's among my favourite couch multiplayer games, but the programming is shit. The resolution is weird, the launcher is some default config screen that came with the game engine, with a controller it's tricky to avoid picking a second color by accident which spawns a ghost player that is jointly controlled by the AI and the player. Sometimes the game spawns 10 copies of everyone, all of which you control at the same time. Getting stuck inside walls is commonplace.

On an unrelated note, I'm making a minimalistic arena battle with forgiving physics, diverse and satisfying weapons and a geometric design based on squares. It's gonna be FOSS and web-based. I haven't settled on a name yet but I think Tetragon Tussle might be good.

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

Data wrangling is messy

I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.

And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."

yeah, no.

(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)

Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.

So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.

Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.

But for now, flora.

For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:

* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.

For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)

Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.

The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).

Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.

As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.

Data wrangling is fun.

My game design & dev teacher. He was a level designer for an old german game company so he wasn't actually a proper programmer.
What made him a good teacher was he knew what he could teach and what was beyond his skills, and encouraged self study in those areas.
Not that many did, but those who did are all decent devs now.

Is it just here in my school that students think if you are studying game design in college you are fat fk anime lover sh*t weaboo who play games all day :/

Do you think it's possible to get enough of a following on YouTube and twitch to fund your living expenses and use the rest of your free time to work on your own studio projects?

For example I'm a VR and AR game developer. I do the whole shebang for game development and design on my own. I could stream play throughs of the current game I'm working on as a weekly thing and create tutorial videos for other developers and students for more content on my channel, but to also stimulate growth in the VR and AR industry. I'd in a way be creating my own market. I could also stream the development of the art assets and whatnot.

Could possibly make some money from the ads at first. Maybe even within the game?

Idk I'm trying to avoid having to get a job anywhere else if I can float my own success as an indie start up. So thoughts on this rant please?

Currently delving into the realm of tabletop game design and I'm noticing the transferable skills between that and programming. Has anyone here got similar experiences?

I want a game that teaches you engineering by presenting challenges you have to design something to overcome.

... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.

so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.

BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.

and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.

and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.

autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.

in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.

upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.

at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.

remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.

it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...

it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.

and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.

it was a transcendental experience.

and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.

and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.

... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...

Just finished high-school and we had a lot of coding classes. I have a good foundation of programming concepts and i'm a quick learner. What should i try to do during college in order to make some money on the side? I need something flexible and part-time programming jobs aren't really a thing here.
Game design, web development, maybe something else?What would you all recomend?

happy rant 😄
just finished our group software project in uni (5 students, a way too complicated game) and just got the highest possible mark of all!!🤩🤩🤩
the project was focused on having a working, bug-free game, so yeah our game was UGLY AS FUCK😅 ... but 99% no bugs😎
best group in years😇
next chapter:
human-computer-interaction(is that the translation for Mensch-Computer-Interaktion?), we'll take our games and bitch about their usability and design😅
by the way i was responsible for the design/ux and did a kinda crap job because of too little time😐😅

Question for game developers 🙄
I wanted to try game development a few years back, started watching unity3D tuts, but I realized quickly that I can't actually do anything, because I don't have the skills to design animation and draw ui, and it was stupid to buy components online before I knew what I'm doing.. so I left it. Was I wrong? How did you start? Is it possible to make a game on your own, or do you need a team with members who each specialize in its own area (code, design, animation, music, etc.) And if team is needed, then how do you even start learning? Thanx

when you've been struggling for years to learn how to program to make games but find out everything you've learned is a drag and drop feature

Jesus fucking Christ windows firewall is a tumor on this Earth. Serious who the hell thought of the design for that shit? The way rules are implemented are fucking terrible and you really can't tell one choice from the other. All I needed was for a game to be allowed through my firewall so I could host games and it took hours to fix this problem.

Alright, it's been a while since I expressed my thoughts/feelings but here is what I'm dealing with.

Ever since I was a kid I've played games and even ended up enjoying the testing of new beta games more than actually playing games. The first games I played were atomic bomberman and worms. I was 4 at the time and lived in Denmark. By the age of 6 I moved to The Netherlands and have dealt with 8 years of being bullied for a reason I do not know. So as you can imagine I've dealt with a serious depression for a while and have always felt out of place.

Later after a few failed attempts of following an education I got into development. This was after I wasn't accepted into an education of game design. The course I follow now describes itself as application development but all we're doing there is building websites and not learning a proper way to keep code clean.

In the second year of the three year course we had to follow our first internship. This was the first positive thing I've had with school in my entire life. I ended up working for a company that had a game which tested your skill, the game was used by recruiters for bigger companies to pre select the right people for interviews. I had a look at the code of the game and it was a mess, after a couple of meetings further I managed to get them far enough that I could start working on a complete rewrite of their game.

So far it's been a rough road to becoming a game dev but I most certainly hope to own a studio one day. Now I only need to manage until I've got there

I'm a web developer that would like to do some game development. I focus on front end, and have done backend work (not a lot of databasing, though). I mainly use JavaScript and Python, with enough knowledge of Java, C#, and PHP to get by when I need to. I've also got a background in graphic design.

What aspects of game development might be a good fit for my skillset?

Where and how do I get started? I've looked at Phaser in the past, since it was inspired by Flixel, a Flash game library I used for a some simple projects in college.

Hello tech community ,

Quick question. I have been learning web development casually over a couple of years. Now,I'm stepping up my game. Playing with big boy libraries like Vue and React. Diving into JavaScript and functional react.

I can make static websites. Even dynamic ones. I know how to deploy websites from my terminal and I have done an ftp once before ,which was weird. But it was a long time ago. OMG my question is how do you transfer over a project to a client? I made a cool site. Added some JavaScript. Maybe it's pulling in some data. Maybe it's static. What is the best course of action? I really want to start a web design/developer side hustle.

Thanks homies.

Hey guys, my boyfriend is a software developer and he wants to start developing video games, he would like to design games but is not good at drawing, I have been advised that a wacom would be a good gift for someone that wants to become a game developer, what do you guys think? Is it a good gift even if he is not good a drawing?

Decided to start learning Swift as I became a Mac user back when I was in college (and I'm a Linux fan so win win?).

I went to college for Web design and development but think I should definitely be putting a big focus into app and game development/programming.

I also have a backlog of programming languages I'd like to at least familiarize myself with...

So back to Swift...anyone use it regularly here for app and/or game development?

Formed teams with a few people from university I wasn't really compatible with. I wasn't prepared well either and it was my first hackathon. We bounced about a few ideas and decided to build a simple Javascript game, a Python backend and Postgres dB, techs I was barely familiar with at the time. Wasn't involved/couldn't contribute in the design or help much with coding. It was a humiliating experience overall.
Changed teams and formed a team with like minded people 4 months later and was better prepared this time. Built an app for social innovation and came runners up at the hackathon!

Any Game Design students here?

When creating a new indie game with no budget start really really small. Because it will grow faster than you can say 'input mapping'.

Limitation as a way to force creativity. What do you think about this?

Platforms such as Vine or Twitter limits you somehow, but people still found a way to build their creativity around and grow a following. At the same rate, most Game Jams give you a theme and sometimes some kind of limitations and the result is in almost every jam at least a few interesting games.

Now, looking specifically at dev work, some frameworks or languages limit you somehow. Lets think about Rust safety or Node single threadness.

Do you think those work as limitation to enhance creativity as well? Not necessary by design.

Do u think game design is really a field one can study?
No offence, it just seems to me like a pseudo science.
I know there are some kinds of study programmes and stuff.
I just think it is way better for people to be experienced in coding, do graphics as a hobby and study psychology (or something related) instead.

its frustrating when i want to be a game developer but have n0 design skill.

i mean, there are apps out there that help designers make games without programming skills.

but i have not seen one that help devs make games without design skills.

A space game (obviously) where ships are built and broken in convex pieces. With in-game computers and ship design/construction software, of course. Because what would a game engine be without the ability to play a game within the game, with exactly the same visual quality as in the outer one?

Edit: Game-within-game premise based on the idea that it will be easier to write the ship-CAD software in a game engine than from scratch

Edit 2: may as well also be able to play the actual game within itself, since it would be like holodeck simulations

Good morning all,

New to this app and figured I could use it to learn a few things and to meet some people in the field. Currently studying game design and learning C# in Unity. Any other game devs in here?

I feel compelled to figure out how to use software in a gaming setting to teach skills like CS and Math. But do it in a way that is fun and not feeling like a "math game".

I want to spend more time learning about algorithms, architectures, design approaches, etc. Writing such a game would force me to understand what I present in a very intimate way.

I can see a way to create algos in game using very visual ways. Then allowing someone to make superstructures combining those algos to solve tasks.

I was inspired by how some algos require data to be sorted a certain way before starting. As the algo as a side effect resorts the data to know when it has completed. I realized if an algo is generic enough it can be combined just like functions or objects.

I also want to learn math better, especially in conjunction with code. So making a platform for learning these would be a lot of fun. I would definitely want both visual and textual interfaces to the code. I have to imagine a real programmer being frustrated with a visual interface unless it was really compelling.

I find it interesting that a lot of algos are represented visually when trying to show how it works. I realize some probably cannot be visualized so easy though.

I also want to use software like this to teach someone to think more deliberately and help people be more disciplined in their thinking. I know I could use this.

I have a secret goal of being able to use such software to help someone become a math/programming wizard. I don't know if this is achievable, but having exercises that help solidify root concepts in a fun way would be really useful IMO.

So Im still a college student but my worst burnout happened a week before finals this year as a sophomore at DigiPen

On the same week, I had to conduct and submit 10 playtests for my competitive Unity game by Friday, submit said game polished and completed on Sunday, finish and submit my team game project that I've been working on the whole year with 10 other people also on Sunday (which we would discover so many TCR submission issues we ended up finally resubmitting on Thursday the following week).

On top of this I had to write a memory manager for my operating systems class due Thursday, a water retainment assignment involving recursive queues for my Data Structures class due Saturday, and to top it all off that class also had a final Thursday when that memory manager was due :'). I don't know how I managed to get OK sleep.

All stuff was due that week so all game teams could have next week before finals to work on submitting, so some CS teachers also move their finals to before that to theoretically distribute the load (which sucks for people in my major because we're almost a double major for CS and Game Design) However my team wanted to submit early to snatch some bonus points but we ended up having to resubmit late anyways :(. Due to the week of hell we were already burned out when trying fix our resubmission.

I love the school and the people in it but there's a reason why our most heard phrase is "I want to die" and no its not just a millenial thing I swear.

I just started playing terraria and holy shit, it puts minecraft to shame in so many aspects.

It actually makes you feel like the mc devs are some fucking lazy ass morons sitting on piles of cash.

Minecraft is 11 years old and it has 4 bosses and they are all underwhelming pieces of shit, jesus christ.

They can't even make mining fun for fucks sake. Work an half an hour or more to get a full set of diamond only to accidentally lose it to lava in the nether.

They added netherite? Holy shit I can't wait to see the new gear I can craft with it.

Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword, helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots. Wow, netherite shovel, that's what the minecraft community needed.

How about an actual battle axe, knives? a baseball bat? Spells? Fucking something minecraft, come on, you can't just have 10 weapons man!

The lack of creative content and variety in minecraft is staggering. Adding a block of a different color and texture is not new content!!!

Also, fuck villagers and the sound they make and their faces. Worse character design ever. Not a single redeeming aspect. And fuck their trading system.

The trade system is horrible!!! One item at a time per character. No text from villagers. They don't have names!!!! They don't feel like villagers!!! They feel like robots!!!! Not a single one of them fights back!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???? JUST ADD ONE THAT FIGHTS BACK YOU MORONS!!! NOT THAT WEIRD ASS GOLEM!!!

AND NO ONE GIVES TOO FUCKING SHITS ABOUT THE GOSSIP SYSTEM MC DEVS. NO OONEEEEE!!!

Terraria is not a perfect game, but it doesn't just try to be a good rpg, it actually is.

Meanwhile every 3d sandbox after minecraft will either be a filthy clone or not exist at all by fear of being labeled as such. Because of that I will keep on trashing on minecraft, even though I still play it a lot.

My parents showed me how to play "Spy Hunter" on their Pentium III Windows 98 machine when I was 2, and I started installing games. Fast-forward to elementary school there was a game design afterschool class where we learned to use "Scratch" to drag-n-drop pieces of code used for animating and creating games. I wanted to do "real coding" so I got an internship at a local company, learned HTML, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Now, I'm developing games in Unity engine, and making mods on SourcePawn. The consumer is becoming a creator.

Been thinking about game design. Making things testable and modular. I think I have a lot to learn in this area. One idea popped up in my head. How can I design the game so that it can be networked later? One idea was an interface in the logic that gives authority to another set of code (module?). Basically include the abstraction as if networking was there. So if/when I decide the next version of the game or existing version should have online play. I think learning to create client/server would be instructional. Maybe networking could be a dlc or something.

A question to game devs : which design/architecture patterns do you use ?

Everytime I try to take a look at game development, I feel like there is a lack of guidelines, mostly about architecture.

It's something strange to me as a web dev, as we use much of these patterns on a daily basis. Of course I think about the near omnipresence of MVC and its variants, but not just that. Most of frameworks we do use are essentially focused on architecture, and we litterally have access to unlimited tutorials and resources about how to structure code depending on projects types ans needs.

Let's say I want to code a 2D RPG. This has been done millions of time across the world now. So I assume there should be guidelines and patterns about how to structure your code basis and how to achieve practical use-cases (like the best way to manage hero experience for example, or how to code a turn-based battle system). However I feel these are much harder to find and identify than the equivalent guidelines in the web dev world.

And the old-school RPG case is just an example. I feel the same about puzzle games or 3D games... Sure there are some frameworks and tools but they seems to focus more on physics engine and graphic features than code architecture. There are many tutorials too, but they are actually reinforcing my feeling : like if every game developer (at least every game company) has his on guidelines and methods and doesn't share much.

So... Am I wrong ? Hope to.

What are the tools and patterns you can reuse on many projects ? Where can I find proper game architectures guidelines that reached consensus ?

There needs to be a new (MOOC) class for people like me.

Hi, I'm William. I can't get my head around designing systems. I've read GoF and a few breakdowns of it as well. I find some patterns obvious for my field of interest (game dev, woot!) while I'm reading through the stuff, but have a pretty hard time retaining much of it. I'm aware of the danger of over using patterns, so I don't worry that much about it. I'll look something up when I'm sure I need it.

Still, I'm tired of the tutorial blues. I can watch a few different people write entire games, usually not in the language of choice, but that only helps me so much.

How do I fight scope creep? In the meantime, how can I make things extensible? Scope does need to creep some, after all.

People joke about starting with (visual) BASIC ruining you forever. I don't believe in that crap, but is this just denial? Am I too dumb for this? Not that I'd ever seriously blame a language for that.

I've been a hobbyist for well over 10 years, please don't make me count exactly how long I've been unsuccessful.

I'm baffled by Löve. I think it's the coolest shit I've seen, maybe ever (unless we're counting IPFS).

I think what really prompted this rant, apart from the obvious degradation of my mental health, was my search for an entity component system for Löve/Lua. Hold your replies. I know there's a few of them, and I'm positive that they're fantastic. I'd roll my own, but that requires actual Lua specific knowledge that I just haven't dug all that deep into yet. I can't wrap my head around the ones that exist, even though I can tell their complexity is next to none really.

I have severe tool anxiety, I'm shocked that I've stuck with ZeroBrane Studio as long as I have. It feels good though.

Sorry to use this as "Devs Anonymous", but I think that's how this community helps (me) best.

I feel like I should stop now and just say: Advice? before this gets much deeper/less readable.

I want to make a fancy 3D game for an assignment. Would it make sense to separate the game content completely from the engine? The way I imagined it, there would be a game folder with all the content in it (textures, shaders, scenes, scripts etc...) and the engine would "load" this folder, construct the scene and run the game. I was even thinking of using a lightweight scripting language for the game logic, like javascript, so I don't have to make an api and compile DLLs, and the engine (written in c++) would communicate with these scripts.

Is this a good design, or should I just put everything in one project so both the engine and the game logic compile to a single exe?

I wanted to design an operating system when I was younger after giving up on the idea of being a video game designer. While researching that I learned I need to know how to program. I tried too learn solo with websites like Codecademy. I completed several tracks on the site. After getting the basics down, I took two Java programming classes. After that opportunities to write code for free kept popping up and I kept saying "yes". Fast forward a few years and I'm working as a programmer. I'm by no means good at this but I'm learning and I love my job.

I also kept trying to solve coding challenges on websites like codewars over the years.

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

How often should I worry about keeping an engine, non-enterprise, at arms with the existing frameworks if all I need is an event scheduler and animation possibility?

I have the need for task, animation and secure through the use of executables. Why should my engine be larger than 3mb in code?

Charli XCX to music is like Mirrors Edge for game design

Think about it

Got a Game Design sign-off due last friday. Last Thursday the GD mentiones that basic stuff isn't implemented, which she didn't take notice of for the past half year i'm developing and i should do it asap. While having another game with one trillion bugs due the same friday which is in endtest.

fml

I thought you had to be great in the computer fields before your friends started asking to make their idea games. Just happened to me this morning.
Friend: Hey let's make an MMORPG!
Me: Bro that would take years...
F: Hmmm... fine then just an RPG.
M: *in my head* cuz that really changes things, it's still an RPG...
M: Lemme hear your idea
F: *proceeds to describe Fallout /but better/
F: And I'm willing to learn game design an hour or two a day

Idk how to make him realize that it takes money, time and more than two people!!

I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.

In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.

Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.

I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.

I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.

I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.

I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.

Sophomore year starting soon so I'm looking for new project (s) to complete in parallel with the studies.
Some are more design-y and some more backend-y but I recently started getting better at designing so :)

1) Learn some fragment shader stuff. I've always been messing around with graphics and have a game on steam, so I think that's a good idea to be paired with signal processing.

2) Reactive web services. Preferably with spring-boot or vert.x but

3) I would also like to dive into golang (and make some reactive thing with it)

4) WebAssembly seems nice... But I got some concerns

5) exercise making wireframes -> CSS (with some js)

6) I've never really done any real backed work with nodejs, except serving and aot compiling js, or doing gulp tasks

7) Implementing a whole project, or a fraction of it as serverless on aws

* I'm definitely going to use a couple very simple services to make a docker swarm with load balancing, etc, just because I know how everything works but got no practical knowledge

8) Design an esports jersey for the university department I'm in (shouldn't take long)

So what do you guys think? Recommendations are welcome :)

P.S. last year in review:
> A webapp running on a raspberry pi powering a reflex testing game on gpio (java/spring-boot , codename: buttonmasher)
> small Elastic search cluster to monitor some random university servers through kibana dashboards
> laser tracking on wall of *any* colour and variable light conditions via a webcam (opencv) , controlling the mouse pointer, whether you run it against a projector or any wall
> jstrain.herokuapp.com => a small JavaScript powered tool with a DSL to help you train more efficiently without a coach
> Various random Photoshop stuff