I am amazed. I witnessed (mostly heard) a 14 year old girl calm down a young adult female suffering an anxiety attack before I managed to push through people on the tram. She told her to close her eyes, breath, tell her what she smells, then open her eyes, name first thing that she sees, then look left, name first thing, etc.

This is called sensory grounding and it works. And yeah, what she did was pretty awesome but this isn't what amazed me the most. I asked where she learned that and she said "from a game about apes". And I knew exactly which game she meant. There's a title called Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey and among many interesting mechanics there's one that puts the player in a state of anxiety when they venture into an unknown territory. The way to win that part is by analyzing surroundings by vision, hearing and the sense of smell before a panic countdown goes to zero. It's called "conquering your fear". Holly fuck, I played that and I didn't connect the dots. Are games nowadays teaching kids how to handle real life crisis? Where were those games when I was a kid??

When I self-published my first indie game on steam and people actually started buying it.

Remember sitting on the floor with a bottle of vodka trying to tell my girlfriend like that lunatic dotconnecting on a whiteboard meme guy, this is really bad because too much people bought it.
They should spend their money on something useful instead of me, I felt like a fraud.

It turned out good in the end tho, made some updates for it that made it better so i felt better about it, plus got a job from a publisher because they liked my game 😃

So I'm making a music game, and I've been struggling to fend off this large sound latency issue. There is like a ~80ms of latency, which is a total deal-breaker for music games.
So I've been polling everything using a profiler, but nothing came up... Until just now, I realized:
IS IT MY F*<KING KEYBOARD THAT IS LAGGING?

I pulled my iPhone out, opened the Notes app, and recorded the screen as I smacked the keyboard.

Whaddaya know, exactly after 5 frames (in 60fps) of the sound of me punching the keyboard, the letter shows up.

Now I need to take *this* lag into account :facepalm:

Psst. I managed to smuggle this screenshot off my computer, and I'm bored so I'm sharing it with you.

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.

I've been putting off my gamedev project for a while... while the golden age of free open source game development has long ended, I believe that a renaissance is long overdue!

In a real-time multiplayer competitive game where you control a vehicle, is it feasible to simulate the whole thing on server side, such that the client only sends controls and receives sensor results? I mean like the client doesn't even know its own precise rotation, just the readings of a gyroscope and an accelerometer which are both susceptible to errors, and deduces the "down" direction from those two and approximate control forces. This would both solve hacking (writing a good robot is just as challenging) and lead to fun results like an attitude indicator going crazy from a gust of wind.

How bad an idea is it to avoid having to write VoIP for my game by writing a discord bot instead that moves people between rooms that represent the literal rooms in game?

All my resolutions:
- Finish my fully FOSS gamedev workflow and start working on my game by March, have a concept demo by May when my matura exams come round.
- Do good on said exams and get into a good university.
- Do some political or social activism
- Learn the guitar to a campfire level
- Drink til I pass out if trump wins again.
- Make close friends with at least 10 new people
- Go on at least 6 dates

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 :)