Me if i was a game dev

After years of game dev!

Being paid to rewrite someone else's bad code is no joke.

I'll give the dev this, the use of gen 1,2,3 Pokemon for variable names and class names in beyond fantastic in terms of memory and childhood nostalgia. It would be even more fantastic if he spelt the names correctly, or used it to make a Pokemon game and NOT A FUCKING ACCOUNTANCY PROGRAM.

There's no correspondence in name according to type, or even number. Dev has just gone batshit, left zero comments, and now somehow Ryhorn is shitting out error codes because of errors existing in Charmeleon's asshole.

The things I do for money...

Client: I want a mobile game with Leaderboards, Social media sign-ins, In-game store, Ads, IAP etc in 2 months

Me: Cool, what’s your budget?

Client: $50

Going for a Unity game dev course that might have some VR stuff in it and I'm exited as hell about it.

There's always a but. I wasted nearly a year on a college that taught me very little.

Don't know what else to say.

I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF BUSINESS MOTHERFUCKERS USING TECHNICAL FUCKING BUZZWORDS LIKE THEY KNOW SHIT ABOUT TECH! THEY TRY TO BE FUCKING SMARTASSES AND ARGUE WITH DEVELOPERS LIKE GOD KNOWS WHY THIS FUCKING DOUCHE IS NOT THROWN IN /dev/null YET!

Ugh. He try to sound smart and argued with a unity game developer why the dev is not using "react" and "redux" in his game, purely because "since its the hype in 2016"... I was like really nigga?? FOR FUCKS SAKE Do some research before you say! Then he argued with a senior full-stack web developer on why they're using ES6 and not ES7, purely because he heard that ES7 is newer. When we try to explain we're not using decorator syntaxes since we use pure functions in our codebase, or how we haven't installed any ES7 babel plugins to transpile our code, he kept saying ES7 is newer and cooler and we must use it somehow... More to rant but i am fucking tired right now...

Talking with a dev friend:

- I want to create a program. Want to help me?
- Sure, any ideas?
- Yeah, I'd like to create a paint software using Java
- Cool

After 3 mins:
- Nah I just realized it'd take too long and no one would use it. Wanna play Rainbow Six tho?
- Okay

After playing for 15 mins:
- Holy shit! This game is so buggy. I could make it better

After 3 mins:
- Nah I just realized it'd take too long and no one would use it. Wanna create a paint software using Java?

Me: I'm building for 32 bit.
Me: But I feel like I should be building for 64 bit.
Me: But not everyone has a 64 bit OS.
Me: But who the fuck doesn't?
Jerry: The people who can't run our game.

So I'm learning 2D game dev in java.
(I know)

Being stubborn I'm coding everything myself because, you know who needs libraries.😅

And

Holy toenails ,I have mad respect for the guys who build game engines. Especially 3d engines.

Y'all are beasts.

This annoying fuck is the single most hated guy on youtube PERIOD.

Every time I try to watch a tutorial or some gameplay demo this fucking cunt comes up with his piece of shit game dev course.

Making those Unity cubes more attractive

While working on some improvements to camera system I accidentally made pretty cool transition to the rooms.

Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

!dev

Did you ever think a game would take up over 100 gigs on your hard drive? Neither did I, yet here we are.. WTF

Me as interviewer: So how often do you post on dev rant and how far are you into game of thrones?

Interviewee: Not a fan and what's dev-

Me as interviewer: Ok I think I have all the info I need

When I was 12 I started programming by makimg games. Then when I was 18 I stopped with a game dev study (because of personal reasons). I went to a web dev study and found work 4 years later. Today my company hired a new sales person who has worked at a few game dev companies and she said she will try to put me on game dev projects.

Im so happy now :D

My brother made a PC game for his game dev class.

You are a hamster with a hammer
- acorns drop and u crack them for points
- you have to avoid rolling logs and eagles that swoop down
- the game gets faster

Dad: I just played the game, I think it has potential like Angry Birds, can you convert it to Android?

Me: no and no
Dad: why and why?
Me: **facepalm and takes a deep breath**

Explains why very simply and that I'm not a game dev... And if he thinks it's that good, go pay for a freelancer...

My son loves...loves Star Wars, so when Star Wars Battlefront (on the PC) went on sale, he jumped on it.

To my shock (I'm not a big gamer), the game is filled with hackers/cheaters that are able to give themselves 'god' mode, so they can kill in one shot and take no damage.
My son (and others in the game) keeps 'reporting' them, but it looks like an issue EA is ignoring.
My son keeps asking me "You're a programmer, can't you fix the game so they can't do that?"

Good lord...I could care less about russians "hacking" our election (moronic press, doesn't even know what that means), but hacking my son's favorite game!...hmm..wonder how long it would take me to drive to EA headquarters and find that SOB dev manager in charge?
I get it, cheaters are gonna cheat, but fix your friggin' code! Aren't you embarrassed!?

Don't give me any of that "we don't know how they are doing it..." nonsense. This is devrant, not <insert media outlet you hate>.

I'm thinking of livestreaming my friend and I doing game development on Twitch tonight. How many of my fellow ranters would watch?

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Gaming anytime!

The reason I become intrested in computers was gaming.
Given I started out as a game dev, playing games helps me think more about it and imporve my skills.

Also sometimes it reduces my productivity :P

I think I may start my very own indie game dev studio... For now as a one man army... That’ll be fun.

I guess wish me luck guys!

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Making graphics is probably the most painful part of indie game development... :(

I need to take a break..
I've been wotking on my game non-stop for the past 8 days from 7-10am to 11pm-2am..

But there are alot of problems in my current repo, and i have ALOT of code to re-rwite..

(also i'm the only dev x.x)

!dev

That moment that your favourite YouTube channel (I only use YouTube from google and mostly through hooktube.com) announces closing soon.

I’m genuinely very sad. This channel was awesome because it allowed for beginning raw producers to get feedback from raw fans and even get in touch with the top raw labels!

Some top producers which are around now got into the game because of this channel and I was hoping that that’d be me one day as well.

I’ll miss you, RawstyleNation 😥❤️

5 years ago i was working on a 2D game using C and we needed to use the sleep function (I forgot why ) .but however one of my team member did something new , for each second he did an empty for loop from 0 to 1000000 .You never know maybe that's how it's implemented (sarcasm)

How it's like to work in game Dev companies

Welp my game dev career is over.

I started early in my childhood days, nobody had cellphone or internet here, my phone number was 3 digits long and my home country started to recover from 44 years of communism.

My first dev project was probably to copy game from newspaper to Atari 1300XE

Article listing was around 10 pages long and if you made mistake program didn’t run.
It took me a while I can’t remember how long but probably whole day and I was finally able to play it.

I don’t remember what was game about but later on I learned some BASIC from book and was able to color the screen and stuff like that.

I was about 6 years old.

I also remember that Atari computer had tape recorder where you put cassette to load game.
Some more complicated games were loading more then hour and you need to walk very carefully around or your walk can cause error and operation would fail.

Besides that there were national radio auditions about Atari where at the end they played code sound wave so you can record it on your cassette and then play software from radio on your Atari.

I never managed to do it cause I was living near military airport and pilots were practicing landing and starting above my home causing radio signal noise and breaking my software recoding.

I can probably say that highly accelerating plane could cause game loading problem and it’s not a joke.

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

Oh god this is not going to plan!
This is the first piece of art I've ever done haha

Apartment owner tells me to get out for a few hours while he repairs some stuff around the house . Get laptop , get wallet , go to kfc , go to order , only have money to get a large coke and a coffee , set up laptop , start working on my 2D game project , one hour later hobo comes in and begs around for 2 mins , before the guard catches him , he goes to order instead and gets a large duo bucket with coffee ...fml being a poor dev before paycheck...

Been looking for a part time game dev job to pass the time during summer break, got a reply from a guy.

This part came up some time in the middle of our conversation:

Me: So, do you have a version control system in place?

Him: Excuse me, a what?

Me: A Version control system, like Git.

Him: Ow, what's that?

Me: It is a way to host projects in a more productive way for two or more people. It allows us to share our work more easily and work on the same file without overwriting and losing data.

Him: Ow, like Dropbox?

He was developing the game solo thus far and no idea such thing existed.
:/

Woke up this morning with a fuck this shit mood. I need to write test specs for a system I don't know shit about, and it seems no one who work with this system wants to talk to me, so I gave up and started devranting and reading a game dev book. Fuck this shitty job.

How I feel when my family says "Sure you can fix the TV! if you can make a video game, this shouldn't be a problem."

So recently completed my first overworked and underpaid freelance job, I'm like totally a developer now right

Ok so I'm trying to focus on reading docs on a game engine to do some game dev

And wife busy disturbing
wife: come do this for me
wife: come sit with me
wife: come talk to me
wife: come massage me
wife: come do this to me

Its like a stream of endless error messages

I was limited to how much time a day I could play video games, but I was told that if I made my own games I could play them as much as I wanted.

I took an HTML course on Codeacademy unaware that it had nothing to do with game dev and that's where it all started.

<ruby>when you let an apprentice web dev have a go at game development 🤭</ruby>

Landing Page takes a minute to load...

Web Dev: Maybe I should another npm package to show a loading animation while the site loads... maybe even a small game...

Dear non-webdevs,

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

When all your friends are gamers/developers! Just a typical Sunday 🤓🤓🤓

devCraft {
Closing the minecraft server for a little while!
I'll be adding mods, writing up a perms file, and hosting the pack on git! I'll post a rant with the repo link.
One of our lovely ranters offered a VM to host the server on, so the ip is probably gonna change as well! (i also gotta make an arch bootable USB, and running the server would slow that down lol)
i'll notify you all once it's donevia a rant, like i said. until then, formulate plans, and suggest some developer-related mods for me to add in! (must be 1.7.10)
Currently planned mods are:
- ComputerCraft
- Applied Energistics
- Buildcraft
- Project Red
and a few from whatever you guys suggest. see you then!
}

Game dev update: I'm procrastinating the project cuz I need help with stupid background and it doesnt mix well so Im just contemplating existence
But I did this for fun

I wonder if flappy bird dev is in this community. Anyway, I want to ask you guys - What would have you done if you were in his situation?

I hear he removed the game after he saw people are wasting too much time on it.

People waste too much time on porn, Facebook, YouTube and what not. I don't understand his reasoning behind removing the game.

Anyway, what would have you done?

When I play "Super Mario" in computer and I wanted to do this game by myself. That's first moment that I want to become dev.

Unity3D Game Dev Interview

Interviewer: What is reflection and why would you use it?

Me: Gives overview of system and how I've used it in games before.

Interviewer: Sorry that was a trick question, Reflection is really dangerous and slow. You need to go back and learn the basics.

Me: ???...

A huge portion of Unity is built upon Reflection based systems, the entire Monobehaviour base relies on it. Their events system uses it, animation and timeline. I guess their team needs to go back to the drawing board.

How is this person a senior dev?

This is a somewhat old story. I joined a project in making a 2.5d platformer in Unity. A couple months in, the project manager had decided that this game would have two sequels, an MMORPG, a live-action movie and a web series. He informed the whole team of this decision. One week later, every member of the dev team had left. This scope crept forth from the depths of hell and ruined a simple project. Lesson learned: Keep the scope small and don't bite over more than you can chew.

Edit: I know that you should dream big, but don't make 4 games, a web series and a movie simultaneously.

I bet there's a lot of stories here in DevRant

Breakup really kills the mood to work for a long time eh?

I have a multiplayer minesweeper project in the works. It's great, everything is super slick. Using SASS, Node.JS, MVC design, WebGL... It's a super great, modern project and I am very proud of it.

But I just can't continue it. I open my editor and I just ignore it. I play video games, go outside... Anything except code. It hurts to see myself do this.

I have some great designs for it. You're allowed to play anonymously or logged in. VS mode and everything.

I was going to share the discord link when I launched the alpha... But I think maybe I need to start building a community now so that I can gain my motivation back.

Before the breakup I worked on it daily. I was learning new technologies left and right (SASS being the largest, and WebGL is the next frontier)

It hurts to see. Today after I get off work maybe I will try harder.

Well it looks like I just might buy a barbie doll for my baby girl))

After concepting my game for years and having no real success bringing it to a playable medium, I've decided, fuck it, lets write a book.

I came up with too much lore and backstory for all the character's to go to waste!

One year ago I did the Week 242 Group Rant:
Dev goals for 2021?
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
⬜️Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

Now its 2022 lets se how far we got.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
✅Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

What I did instead:
✅Worked on my indie Game
✅Went on vacation
✅Make my wife pregnant.
✅Construct, Paint, Decorate house.
✅Hold presentation about profilers

Future Goals:
⬜️Take care of my new born daughter soon.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Learn to play Piano
⬜️Socialize a bit more

The awkward moment when AVG flags your newly created executable as a Trojan 😓

So, my plans:

Life
* to have my firstborn child and do my best as a father
* to pay off ~half of my 5yr lease (my brand new car arrived at the dealer yesterday, I will be picking it up within 2 weeks, yay!)
* not to die from starvation while paying it off

Work:
* to become more comfortable and fluent in my current position to reduce stress and save time for personal goals (learning another language / technology so that I'm not a prisoner of the field I'm good at)

Hobby:
* to publish my first Android game (or at least be close)
* to make indie game development my hobby, a way to vent off after work and hopefully a source of additional income
* learn to draw just a little (for my game dev)

!rant
How many of you guys have played Uplink? IMO it's a game every dev should try. While it's not exactly realistic, especially today, it shows actually how powerful a hacker can be. And YOU are that hacker.

!dev

Fuck my broken brain. I’ve been taking various meds for depression/ptsd for 11 years, and just when you think you’re making progress it comes back and takes a nice big shit in your slippers.

I Referee grass roots football (soccer) on the weekends, and I’ve been out with an injury. I should have been reffing a women’s game this afternoon but my damaged brain has other ideas.

Sometimes I just want to scream fuck it all and move to the woods to become a full time spoon whittler

Just got accepted for a game developer. Ive been making games since I was 12 as hobby. Did a few months of university level of Game Development. Then started as web devloper professionally. The company I work for found a project as game dev for me.

I love my work and the sales team for finding me that job, even though its out of scope of their regular projects.

Not dev related but:

Main game: 7gb
Updates: 52gb
Wtf....

Installed Linux on a crappy laptop got many many errors. in the process of googling then fixing them I fell in love with the os itself and it turned me towards programming now we sit here me a game Dev major

Lots of game dev office in my country, only one uses LibGDX.

So my friend is learning the Java. And he says to me "Why would you even need dividing in game developing?!".

Reviewed some Unity game code yesterday

[HideInInspector] public NavMeshAgent agent;

Me:”why is this hidden if it’s public”
Dev: “so designers don’t fuck it up”
Me: “then why have it public”
Dev: “I need it to be set by another class”
Me: “then make it a private bar and create a get:set function”
Dev: “Why?”
Me: “Because hiding a public variables from designers is a bad model and by standards things now to be shown to the inspector should be private”

This shit is why I have no confidence in devs my age

!Dev

Okay so this is a very embarrassing story but I guess it's kinda funny so I thought I'd share it anyway.

I was playing a tabletennis game in VR and my opponent was a pretty chill guy who started blasting metal music. We were just casually vibing and then we started headbanging. Not a good idea with a VR headset on your head. There are two deep scratches right on my forehead now. Two perfect parallel lines.

I lost the game, and the smoothness of my forehead.

Okay kids, never headbang with a VR headset on, remember that.

Really hate being a developer sometimes, as soon as people find out what sort of Dev you are; they begin associating you with known successes and their personality...

I'm a game developer that works in 2D so I get thrown in the basket as being obsessed with Japan, have outlandish hair and am just an all round wanker.

Stereotypes can really bring you down sometimes...

I just had another shitty idea, yall know cards against humanity. I wanna make a hearthstone-yugioh-CAH -esque game where the cards are all dev-related. Like say [c++] {onSummon: 'shuffle 2 pointer cards into your deck'}. Ill probs start a collab here, dunno, if ya steal my idea then dont be a bitch about it and say so in the comments.

What kind of developer are you and what is your opinion on other development areas?

Me: Junior dev, oriented towards full stack and Android(with a sysadmin background):

-Low-level(kernel development, embedded, drivers, operating systems, reverse engineers)- Badass, I wish I could do that.

-Mobile apps- awesome but too high level sometimes.

-Full stack/Backend- awesome.

-Web Frontend- fuck HTML+CSS. JS is cool I guess.

-Enterprise applications(e.g SAP) Pajeet, my son.

-Malware development- Holy shit that is awesome.

-Video Game development- was my dream since childhood.

-Desktop apps- No opinion.

Just finished 2nd year of uni and got a summer placement doing game Dev. I walked in to be the most experienced person there because I am the only one doing it.

I'm playing The Outer Worlds right now and came across this on one of the in-game terminals. I think this game dev needs devrant... 😂

story time

I'm a C++ programmer and they have given me CSS, Javascript, Java, PHP and C# vacancies.. because I'm a programmer and they think I can do the rest.. YES I can.. NO i don't want to

One day I was invited at the recruitment office. had a talk for like 30 minutes.. where after they said yeah we have a game dev company for you.. then they said which one... Yes that Is indeed in this city... their SALES division not their DEV devision!

One day I came to a recruitment office 30min travel time.. and in the conversation it was me who talked about 30 minutes that recruiters don't understand the difference between javascript and C++. .. they asked me If I knew MySql.. for a backend job..

How can recruiters be THIS stupid.

I spent two days in a row fixing chairs at work because our whole dev team was waiting for issues (which means helping QA team and playtesters testing the whole game).

Just when everyone left and Im standing up to go as well a playtester comes up with a release breaking bug in the handwriting recognition code...
Since this game is build for a charity which will release it in a country at war we cant push the release date.

Guess who is making overtime trying to fix this bug?

Someone (QCat) on devRant offered me to be his contact, it ended up with him teaching me a HUGE lot of stuff, enabling me to now code an operating system alongside him (o and I learned maths, formalism, biology, chemistry, game dev, REAL C++, drawing [I still suck at all of them though] )

So yea, thats it from my side

One of the coolest projects I've worked on recently was this little adventure game I made for a game jam a while back, It was made from scratch with Golang and C over two days. It also features procedural level generation (that technically should allow the user to walk in one direction for at least 7 decades).

Unity or Unreal Engine... I am a noob to game dev. Please help

!rant

I am so excited, I just got a response from Voodoo.io on publishing my mobile game. Hopefully it makes a decent amount of money!

Watch youtube all days and play video games because I am a game dev.

Making my own game console.

I work with FPGAs and have access to a bunch of pretty nice dev boards, so building a workable CPU and GPU is definitely possible. I even have architectures for both in mind, and have planned ways to get compiler support (i.e. just use RISC-V as the ISA as much as possible so that I can reuse an existing RISC-V compiler with minimal changes) so that I don't need to write assembly.

But, lack of time. Sigh.

Game devs/other content creation people, how do you version control large asset files? So far I've been using git, but is there a better way?

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.

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 .-.

"let's use git for this game jam"

Wait! Don't go! I love git and use it on every project I work on! You'll have to hear me out here.

This was 4 years ago, at my first Global Game Jam. Every jam and game I'd worked on up to that point, I was the only Dev; no need for git, as backups were more than enough. I joined a group with high hopes for the game jam, with three coders and a proper art team.

The entire jam was "1 step forward 2 steps back", as git somehow constantly overwrote code as fast as we could write it.

By the end of the jam we barely had anything to show for our hard work. The takeaway isn't even about git. It's simply to never work with other people. Git is a great protocol but it can't stop people from accidentally fucking other people over. Every jam since, I've worked on my own and had a far better time of it.

Lets play a game of spot the bug...

Too easy you say?
What if I told you that this code was written by a well paid dev over an exceptionally large period of time?

Crazy huh, but that's still nothing. The most ludicrous thing about it - is that you (like me) probably suffer from a mild case of impostor syndrome.

I just ended that suffering. The only thing worse than impostor syndrome is believing you actually know what the fuck your doing. Keep it in check but learn to love it... it's probably the reason you could spot the bug after all.

Meanwhile at my place (Translation L-R):

"Wow! Are you good at hacking?"
"Please hack my neighbor's Wi-Fi"
"Download me some movies!"
"Are you good at math?"
"Please fix my phone!"
"Can you remove the virus on my computer?"
"How many hours do you sleep in one day?"
"Put some cheats on this game!"
"Please hack my boyfriend's Facebook account!"

Yep, my family and even the entire neighborhood are ignorant of what I do as a dev!

FFS I'M NOT A PC REPAIR MAN!!! 😤😤😤😠😡

Comment a 1 if you’re a web dev.
Comment a 2 if you’re a game dev.
Comment a 3 if you’re a data scientist.
Comment a 4 if you’re in cyber security.
Comment a 5 if you’re in IT.
Comment a 6 if you don’t fit any of the above categories and you code only in PHP and refuse to learn any other language because you think PHP is the future.

Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.

App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.

Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.

Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.

I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).

He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.

Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.

Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.

After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.

Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.

I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.

Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.

Why do you want to work for this company?
I'm broke and i need a placement for Uni next year

Many devs like GoT so it would have been rude not to post this.

Finally got my stickers! Thanks so much guys 👌👌

It's fascinating to see C# mentioned as a "lower level language" now days. Times change.

C# was my first language when I started out learning about programming as a kid (I still think it's a great language) and I remember searching the forums for information about any commercial games written with it hoping it was possible to build something "cool" and "3D". Back then that was pretty much just a dream, or so it seemed. C# was, I understood, way too high level for anything like that.

Today it wouldn't be totally baseless to call C# the game dev industry standard.

I knew I wanted to be a dev when I saw the Game Developer Barbie come out...

Just kidding.

The moment I knew was when I started creating my own Myspace templates. It was so awesome to have one that I built myself. I wasn't forced to choose from those pre-made templates, none of which truly expressed my adolescent personality. :D

!dev
EA can suck my inches. Fucking deprecated and greedy business practices. Now I'm fucking told me to play the game later, because "too many computers have accessed this accounts version of a shitty game that crashed my pc 3 times. Please try again later."

Stupid cunts, have you ever heard of a vpn? Or maybe listened to the people complaining about this issue since 2017. On top of that you apparently rendered geforce now useless with this error.

Good fucking lord, I haven't even mentioned origin, the big pile of shit, yet. The download functionality you praise like God's cum doesn't even hold out half an hour before it freezes, together while the whole UI. You cannot like your games with a steam account, so you'd have to pay for a game you already own.

...And a whole lot of other issues I probably haven't encountered yet.

It's more lucrative to sell this shitty account and then buy the fucking game I want to play on steam. I have a feeling that would be about the best option I have.

I'm tired of this shit, I just wanna play some games with friends. I did not play to be spit on my face by some corporate wankers

Finally, after 42 days of in development, I can proudly say my game reached Alpha stage. All core mechanics are in place. I hope I'll be able to say the same thing for Beta in next 6 weeks too!

To be honest, I could do it better, but I didn't had much time.

So, I'm heading back down the rabbit hole. I did some web dev (backend) on the side years ago, but I've been out of the game since. I want to change up careers at this late date and I had forgotten how cathartic manipulating raw code could be. So now I'm relearning and learning all kinds of good stuff via the internets and was excited to find this community. Not much of a ranter but this should be fun.

Found out today that someone who started game dev with a game jam I started in university has a top 10 game on steam!

Every Game Dev right now:

*using the patrick meme*

“We should stop updating our games in PC, and move to mobile!”

File hosting like GitHub?

Basically.. I want to let my Patreons download major updates to my game before I upload them to Github. Now, I will get a GitHub Developer upgrade once I get $7+ per month from Patreon, and host the updates on a private repository for a few days before uploading it to my main dev repository, but I something until then. Some place I can host the loose files, or a .zip at a static link for free. (that can only be accessed by that link) ^~^

yay or nay?
for who are wondering what is on the screen :
i am working on a fish tank simulator gamr, which every fish have different unique combination and/or permutation. i combined this with cryptocurrency, the idea is similar to CryptoKitties and Insaniquarium combined. the implementation is not yet done, but currently i am working on the in-game market front-end functionality.

sorry no in-game preview/screenshot yet :P

curently thinking about considering to open source it and a collab.

First real dev project was a calculator for a browser game, that calculates the optimal number/combination of buildings to build. I got bored constantly doing it manually, so I made this program as a fun and useful challenge. It involved basic math, and I did it in VB.

Second one was a stats tracking page for my team in another browser game, that let us easily share and keep track of stuff. It allowed us to minmax our actions and reduced the downtime between actions of different players. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL.

Third one was a userscript for the same game that added QoL features and made the game easier to play. JS

Fourth was for the first game, also a QoL feature userscript, that added colors/names, number limit validation to inputs, and optimization calculators built in the interface. It also fixed and improved various UI things. Also had a cheating feature where I could see the line of sight of enemies in the fog of war (lol the dev kept the data on the page even if you couldnt see the enemies on the map), but I didnt use it, it was just fun to code it. JS

From there on, I just continued learning and doing more and more complex shit, and learning new languages.

Being able to make THE game I've wanted to make for 4 years. I have a team of people who wants to participate (dev, artist, etc) and I even started building my engine from scratch.

But most importantly, my dream for this game is to have it published on the Nintendo Switch (also PC, OSX and Linux of course)

But right now I must focus on finishing my degree and doing contracts to make enough money to hopefully work full time on my game.

I'll see you in 2 years Albi

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

Why the fuck everyone in indian game dev industry is obsessed with unity fuckkkkkk !
Don't you know you only need some lite runtime like OGL or SDL for those shitty "hyper casual" games
Also why the fuck is an experience in building hyper casual games is a requirement isn't this side scroller hack and slash knockoff good enough for you to know I'm competent enough
Fuck you dumb shit for brains people who are heating up phones by using unity just for a shoot the hoops game.

Seem to always have ideas but no way to do art for said ideas :-(

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.

I'm asking a few questions to all the game developers here.
1. How'd you learn to make games (books, YouTube series, udemy, sold your soul to Satan, etc) ?
2. When and how did you realize that Game Dev is what you want to do?
Thanks.

Created a simple bot for an online game using puppeteer.

After an evening (and night) of dev and debugging (quite some rejected promise errors), it worked fine and was ready for a 10-minutely cron job.

Fixed a couple bugs in the first three hours. Then started playing minecraft, which lagged like hell.

Opened task manager and saw a list of about 25 headless chrome processes. They had not been closed because of unhandled errors before the close method call 😵

Now added some basic error handling ☺

I Started in 2012 at 12 years old with Minecraft as an introduction to computer programming. I created a few of my own mods and released them to the forums. I think my name was "lilwillis2" if you want to look them up. Once I created mods, I got into game development. I used The Cherno's game programming tutorials and a few others on youtube. After having my fun with game Dev and the debt of College soon to come, I got into developing my own apps, which got me into using react-native. React native made me realize that I should probably try to stay up to date with the latest frameworks and languages, so that I can create a surpieror product in much less time. It also made me realize how quickly programming changes. Last year, before getting into react-native, I got a summer job using Django and mezzanine at a local company as a web developer and they want me to work there again this year, maybe even on a salary with a pay raise. I recently turned 18 and I already look at code I wrote a few months ago as crap 😂, but hey it means I'm improving quickly!

BTW, if anyone knows any tips on paying/saving for college, please do let me know!

Really hate pen drives, lost all my 2D game on Unity 😭😭

I'm more of an artist than a developer, myself. One time I went to a camp when I was younger to learn how to create flash games. Even as a kid I wanted to make the game look good, so I animated all my characters from scratch and began teaching the others how to make cover art for the games and how to work Flash. Still making art nowadays. :P

They think I play too many games as a dev, in reality I play games when I don’t dev and am bored. However, even programming is a game somehow. Oh well, I still love every one of my projects.

QA vs Devs

QA PERSON 1: "They are sending the same thing again!? Did they actually make some change or do they think we're stupid and won't notice that it's the same as the last one?"
QA PERSON 2: "Is this a game of chicken? - Who caves in to the pressure first, loses."
QA PERSON 3: "Nah, it's not a big deal, just let it pass... it's going to be easier for everyone. It's not a critical thing."

On the dev side:
"They accepted it this time, with no changes. LOL They're stupid and useless."

Hi, I and my dev are finishing our First Game, it's an application because u know, everyone have a smartphone... but this's not the point. I'm an IT student but I didn't graduate yet (maybe next year 🙊) but my dev did a year ago, (yup is older than me), but the fun fact is that I didn't write a single line of code (for this game) because my dev chose me only for my drawing skills 😎 (OK as a future dev I feel a little noob and scared, but no problem I love drawing, even more than programming, less frustrating😉.. sometimes) BTW, this project took 1 year of cooperation and before this an other year (to my dev to learn C# and unity), now we are so close and proud of our creation. As soon as possible I will show you everything 😁 a concept art of our zombie's face just to prove something
p.s. this app an this community it's so funny and, well, kind :)

So after a pretty packed day of family time, DIY, play dates and parenting, I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours of game dev... now to get up in 6 hours to go to work.

Started a new game dev job. Fortunately, they already have a Rubber Ducky chilling at the desk. Only thing, it's less of a duck and more of an evil imperial guard with a lust for bloodshed. I hope he likes C++.

I want to get into game dev, but don't know which engine to choose, Unreal or Unity. Both would be free, because Unreal is free for students. I already know C++, but I think it depends more on the API than the language itself. Maybe I would like to create games for Android too.
Which one would you recommend? Any experience?

I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).

I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.

Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.

[reminder] At the end of the month I will participate with the GGJ for the first time. Who of you has participated in the past and/or will participate this month?

Ive been planning this for 5 years now but every year I forgot... That's why I placed this reminder. Have fun everyone who will participate.

Let's play a game.
Dev-ops roulette, loose it all or walk away a lucky boi.

Run this command
sudo [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "You lucky boi";

How do I convince a dev department to take source control, peer code review and unit tests seriously?

I'm a recent software grad with internships that recently started at a smallish company (less than 20 employees but has been around for 10 years, with most senior non-mgmt employee around 6 years). I've been working here for less than a year (approx 5 months) and I love the company - lots of talented and passionate people.

We are a creative industry with a handful of devs and one of the issues I'm seeing is that often devs are working in silos. I'm trying to make suggestions to upper management like encourage more usage of source control, documentation, etc and most of the senior devs are pushing back - saying that they don't feel that it is necessary and due to the fast moving nature of our projects that all this would be a total waste (they were so fast on the idea of not having PR's because it would be "too much of a blocker").

I understand that a large part of this has more to do with shifting the culture in the department and that can be very hard to do, especially since i'm fresh out of school, but I see these devs have so much potential but it seems that they think having these implementations in place would mean more rigid rules and bureaucracy.

I've been speaking to some of my engineering friends and they're pretty much all just telling me that I am shooting myself in the foot if I continue to stay at this company because I'll be behind skill wise, but part of me isn't ready to just give up yet.

looking for some advice

Managers told my fellow droid dev, to use push notifications to have a multiplayer game possible. And he was proud of his solution.

I really really want to change jobs and pursue being a game dev.

I am so tired of our company kissing our clients' asses, out of fear they might leave, making the developer work an extra mile without the appropriate salary for the extra work, which now I realize why we have alot of sh*ty projects.

I think there is a clear line between customer service and being suckups.

:(

Well these are the EA devs..

(Its Command and Conquer: Rivals..)

It's decided. Going to learn libgdx so that I can use scala (my favourite language) for game Dev (my favourite type of personal coding project)!

I'm clearly a little obsessed with Destiny, but it's what helps me unwind at the end of the day. Between working full time, 16 credit hours at school, and a baby girl coming in just a couple of weeks, I have to have something to escape reality for just a little bit sometimes.

Destiny isn't all I play, but it takes up most of the time and the game that - for that last several years at least - brings me the greatest amount of joy. It's the game that has finally made me buckle down and get serious about finishing school work on game dev.

Other activities include podcasts - which I am devouring nearly constantly - and movies. I have about 20 podcasts I'm currently actively subscribed to with another 20 that I have on reserve in case I get through my list too fast. As for movies, I watch them when I have time. Recent watches that I've enjoyed were Destroyed, On The Basis Of Sex, and Aquaman.

Just thought I'd mention that there are some assets and training material for cryengine available on humble bundle right now for those of you who are into game dev

'I remember, oh six months ago... when I was all like ... "I'll be that dev that happily takes PMs!" ... yeah... I hate six-month-ago-me'

Being a dev is like playing the best video game there is for money.

i wrote a website, a server in go, a small os in c, a game in js, a game and server and web scraper and other desktop apps in java, mobile apps with flutter, a website with php also, implemented aes in go, wrote a parser in java. done sysadmin stuff on my vps and pihole/openvpn/nextcloud on my rpi. learn about c vulnerabilities and used metasploit. attempted to write an interpreted language. did some led displays with arduino. currently learning tensorflow.

i have never...
- written a driver
- made a game with a game engine
- created a file encoding
- implemented an oauth2 server
- made an api
- worked with vr

what am i missing? i want to be a very well rounded dev.

I made a game dev friend from a forum. Later we went in business together and now we have a really strong friendship. And our business is doing great.

Posted previously about our codebase being a monolithic, poorly-written, pain-to-maintain gigantic cluster-fuck. And the efforts made to rewrite it.
Well, we made huge success the previous year in this regard. I rewrote the entire API while my other team mates worked on two different UI apps one of which is now in production and the other soon to be released in alpha.
Processes have being put in place for our team and are being improved.
We still have some technical debts though.
Dev goal for 2020,
- Pay most of the technical debt.
- Dive deeper into Flutter and finish the app I wanted.
- Play with ML, AI and Game dev.

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

- Linux (OS)
- VSCodium (General Coding)
- Godot (Game Dev)
- Krita (Digital art and edits)
- Blender (3D Art)
- LibreOffice (Docs)
- LMMS (Music/Audio)

I'm trying to find OpenSource alternatives to anything creative I do.

oh fun the copyright part of my game dev course

Man, you start doing computer graphics you really get an appreciation for nature

Like "got dayum, god got some good ass graphics, no way I can compete with that"

Does anyone here listen to game dev related podcasts? If so, which ones?
From me, I can definitely recommend The Debug Log. They've got a lot of energy, knowledge and experience. Also the way they talk makes me feel a lot more motivated.

Went to an "Hour of code" event with my dev friends and learned how to do the snake game in javascript.

!dev

Nothing like a quick game of Among Us to reassure your disappointment in the human race.

Is it OK to punch a game dev who codes stupid numeric bugs?

So my wife got into Stardew Valley, that admittedly awesome comfort game farming simulator.
She went pretty far in the game, and found some item that was supposed to highly increase the damage she could inflict onto cute little monster thingies.
It didn't work as intended.
Since equipping the piece of shit all her hits did 0 damage. She tossed the item away but the problem persisted. And on and on...
She took to the googles to try and find some explanation, and apparently that is a fairly common bug for mobile devs.
Then she called in the big guns (that is how I'm calling myself in this case, you will see why).

Apparently there is some buggy piece of shitcode somewhere in the game with a numerical insecure routine that overflows the attack modifier. I.e. if it was supposed to increase from 1.990 to 2.010, it actually went all the way down to -0.4.
She was lucky her attacks weren't increasing the monsters' HP.

We found a forum post where some dude said that he managed to edit the game save file and reset the negative-value attack increase modifier variable. Seems easy enough at first, but my wife uses iOS. Nothing is ever so straightforward with apple stuff.

We did get to the save file, she emailed it to me (the file has no extension and no line breaks in it, so we facepalm'd on a couple attempts at editing it directly).
I finally manage to get it into my personal 11-yo laptop... that won't open a single line file that big.

Cue the python terminal. Easy enough to read the file into a string var and search for the buggy XML tag. Edit the value and overwrite into a new file. Send it back to her by email. Figure out how to overwrite the file in iOS.

Some tense moments while the game reloads... and it works!!!! Got some serious hubby goodwill points here.
Srsly, this troubleshoot process is not for technophobes. It is out of reach to pretty much every non-techy user.

And now back to the original question: If I ever manage to find the kid who coded a game-breaking numerically unsafe routine and shipped it as if every test in the planet had waved it bye-bye, can I punch them? Or maybe buy them a beer, let's see how I get to cash that hubby goodwill tonight :)

!dev
fuck call of duty and activision. I finally had time to play with my friends when suddenly I had to download a 56 GB update. Why the fuck does every update have to be big? Then after that monstrous update, if you want to play multiplayer, you still need an additional 22 GB for a multiplayer pack which you already have. This has to be the most clueless company out there. I should have uninstalled this game a long time ago.

The license for assets on epics new asset store is insane:

For any Content licensed to you under a Standard License, you may not:
i. attempt to reverse engineer, decompile, translate, disassemble, or derive source code or data from the Content;

HOW IN GODS NAME AM I SUPPOSED TO USE ASSETS I BOUGHT WHEN I CAN'T EVEN DERIVE FUCKING DATA FROM THEM???? Like how in hell am I supposed to load textures and meshes when the only thing I'm allowed to do is to maybe look at them

They DO know graphics cards can do sweet fuck all with a JPG texture, right? Like I /genuinely/ have to translate that thing into a proper format for it to have any use

The double-edged sword of teamwork. I'm an indie Game dev, so I have no choice but to work with others of completely different fields. I enjoy it and I get a lot of motivation seeing things done and learning many new disciplines, but team projects have so many downsides when you have to handle everything from programming to cinematography that someone else was meant to do.

My final team uni project I even had to do our music composing cause our sound effects guy did almost nothing in 6 months (he wrote 6 midi notes in 2 weeks at one point).

Tearing my hair out over a skybox in DirectX 12 please save me

Front End Web Dev 💻 I've dabbled in game development and wish I had more time for it. 🎮

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.

Trying to explain a game developer in a community, why its a bad idea to only make client side patches for equiptment to appear correctly..

me: because the server needs to be aware of the changes made to avoid faulty calculations, for instance if the client calculates a fatal but the server disagree..

dev: but it works...
me: yes, but not optimally.
dev: Working as intended (TM)
me: ... teh fuq?

not sure if he's a bad troll or wut..

Yesterday a met a self learned dev. He started electronics at 11 years old. He was homeschooled with no obligations at home. So he ended up doing about 10 hours of electronics a day. Until he got bored of it and realized he could integrate his own programes.

So he started coding 10 hours a day. He is really smart. I figured someone like that surely plays video games. So i mentionned path of exile. I love rpgs the new league is starting on friday， im trying to make exiled friends you know...

The guy tellls me he has no clue about the game so i ask him what games he play and thats when i heard: “factorysialimsntnaio” something. I was like “whaaat?”.

Its the type of game where you create your factory. You smelt， combine， make parts like screws and so on and build your factory.

Thats when i realized how some people will always be smarter than me ;)

Best part being a dev; you are able to make your own game :D

I was in a meeting yesterday where a junior dev was pitching an idea for a mobile game. He starts explaining the rules of the game. Here's what he said "Each Players starts off with 5 BALLS 🏀 and when 1 players ball is hit said player loses 1 BALL…" His presentation was excessively laced with mentions of BALLS.

PS: Never pitch a BALLS idea unless you've got BALLS.

For the game devs out there … Is following a game developer career a good idea ? We always hear about crunch and no work life balance. Im thinking about changing my job( currently a dev at a fintech company) for a while and need some insights from you guys :)

Anyone got C++ code for Minecraft?

Not just dev goals.

-Stable relationship with [Redacted]
-Finish my projects
-Get new SSD
-Finally get paid for the DLR project
-Not fucking up my exams
-Finish my blacksmithing idea/project
-Play a good game that's not Destiny2
-Learn python.
-Drivers license
-Think positively for once

Can someone help me?
I want to program games, (2d & 3d) I have made games in clickteam and RPG Maker, but I want to program them. My biggest issue is my hardware. I have a not so powerful notebook, and I don't have Wifi. So online installers are off the table. (Nono, visual studio.) Syntax, I like clean, easy to read syntax, and I would like an active community. Any suggestions?

Unemployed Game Dev & Co.

My Dev goals for 2018:
- build a raycaster in OpenGL and Vulken
- finish my game
- actually write a Dev blog

So my friend had an idea for a game and asked me if I could help him develop it. Now, he understands how the code works and can even write quite a bit himself. On several occasions (including today) this happened:

*writes code*
*tests code*
Me: Hmm... this isn't working like it's supposed to
Friend: It looks pretty good, maybe check to see if everything is in the right order
*checks code*
*tries alternative solution*
*checks again*
Me and friend: Well this is even worse than before
*presses ctrl+z a lot to go back to the original*
*opens new project*
*writes new code for same purpose*
*checks code*
Both of us: IT WORKS!!!
*checks again just to be sure*
Both of us: IT STILL WORKS!!!
*compares new code to original code*
Me: It's the exact same code with different variable names!!! Why did this not work before?
Friend: No idea
*puts new code into main program*
*it still doesn't work*

Reasons Java makes me cry sometimes

Okay, this is quite hard to explain properly, but I'm actually scared of my personal future.

In about a year, I finish school and I don't have a straight plan of what to do next. I want to work independently, preferably as a game dev, but I imagine that to be a hard task. I have thought of doing a bachelor's degree in game development, but the university I prefer to go to costs 20k€, which is a huge sum and I don't even know whether it would be actually worth it. The university states that 20% of all their graduated students work independently afterwards and they even offer you a flexible "loan" (not sure if it's the right term) you can pay off while you start working, but I fear I won't be able to pay it back, I cannot imagine making this much money any time soon after I start working independently as game dev. Additionally I fear I won't be able to keep my motivation up, since I struggle doing so already, on the other hand my lack of motivation could be caused by this toxic environment I live in.

I've also considered doing freelancing, but when I'm scrolling through the requests made, I never find something I am experienced in, I don't know what request is best to get started with freelancing.

I just don't know what to do in the future and I'm scared and considering to go to this university is probably pretty stupid already and I consider it as me ranting myself, because of my nonexisting self-esteem. So I don't know what to expect from this post, I just needed to share.

I don't think anyone said it yet so I'll have to choose osu!. It's a rhythm game and now it is being remade as open source. It also uses a open source game engine dedicated to rythm games. The osu staff is great and the main dev (peppy) streams on twitch while making the game sometimes.

It's a great project and I hope I can contribute some day.

I'd love to meet the sadist that lead the Apple certificate and provisioning portal/process. Apple really needs to up their game, their dev tools have gone way downhill.

How would I go about finding a game dev project that I can follow where I can view progress on a designers level? I want to see a game built from the ground up, detailed error reports included?

!rant: I am pretty fresh to this game so I couldn't say what my biggest hurdle has been because there hasn't really been one yet. So, in an attempt to beat the curve and perhaps learn something...

What is the most important thing you have learnt from the biggest hurdle in your dev career?

So for game dev we need to do a lot of writing. For an assignment we had to write 3 documents.

First has 8192 words, a power of 2.
Second has 3600 words, a nice square number.
Third is 2002, my birth year.

Just found it nice that they were all randomly a nice number.

!dev !rant

A couple weeks ago, my friend bought Risk of Rain 2 and got a free copy to gift to a friend, so he gave it to me. That game is so fucking addicting. I don't know the term for it, but it's one of those games where every round, you start with basically nothing, and you get items that buff you up, and so on. If you die, you have to start a new round. Then it just keeps going and going.

..That's it. I just wanted to recommend a really fun game to anyone who hasn't heard of it. For our Linux users, it runs in Proton and the first game has a native Linux port, so I believe the second one will have a port at some point (it's early access, so stuff is still being added).

Any developers here working in a creative agency using Unity/Game dev skillsets? Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

!dev !rant

Helicopter! :3 🚁🚁🚁

If pixels were triangles, instead of squares, would this be considered pixel art? 🤔 actually no, dumb question xD sorry.

(Btw, the game where I created this is called Monogolf. It's a mobile game, it's cool, so check it out if you want! [not sponsored]) 💙