As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.

1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.

Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.

2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.

I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?

3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.

Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.

4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER

Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.

5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.

Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.

6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.

I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.

7) CLICK BAIT.

Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine

Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists

No... No... No!

The game engine is not in charge of code optimisation, if your program runs like ass; it is 99% going to be your fault...

Sick of seeing people judge engines because of the poorly optimised things made in them by half assed developers... Why do the good things never get any attention where the shit gets all of it... Why?!

(Just had someone crack the shits at me because I'm not using a 'real' engine and am not a a 'real' developer because I'm not using unreal... So I'm in a fan-fucking-tastic mood after that :-D)

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

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 have been creating mods for Skyrim and Fallout for a few years now. One day another modder wanted to make his own game using Unreal Engine 4. I wanted to learn UE4 anyway and the other members have made many mods before, so I joined in.

Well, it turned out I was the only one with a professional programming background (this is where I should have run). The others were all modders who somehow got their shit working. "It works, so it's good enough right?" On top of that UE4 has a visual scripting system called Blueprint. Instead of writing code you connect function blocks with execution lines. Needles to say that spaghetti code gets a whole new meening.

There was no issue board, no concept, no plan what the game should look like. Everyone was just doing whatever he wants and adding tons of gameplay mechanics. Gameplay mechanics that I had to redo because they where not reusable, not maintainable or/and poorly performing.

Coming from a modding background, they wanted to make the game moddable. This was the #1 priority. The game can only load "cooked" assets when it got packaged. So to make modding possible, we needed to include the unpacked project files in the download. This made the download size grow to 20+ GB. 20 GB for a fucking sidescroller. Now, 1 year after release we have one mod online: Our own test mod.

Well we "finished" the game eventually and it got released on Steam. A 20 GB sidescroller for $6.99. It's more like a $2.99 game in my opinion. But instead of lowering the price they increased it to $9.99, because we have spent so much time creating the game. Since that we selled less than 5 more copies. And now they want to make it work on mobile. Guess who will definetly NOT help them.

I have spent ~6 month of my freetime for this project, my rev share is < 100€ and they got me a lot of headaches with all their dumb decisions. Lesson learned. But hey, I am pretty good with UE4 now.

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

I've discovered that working with artists on a videogame is the equivalent of the chapter when Homer asks for a wish to a monkey arm on the Simpsons.

- I want a png image of the player on idle position. And I dont want a 30000 x 30000 image, neither an image which half of it are transparent pixels, neither the image not to be centered or any strange thing ok?

*They send the image*

- Normal resolution, well drawn, no visual artifacts centered on the image...

*Tries to import it on the game engine*

+ Can't import .jpg format images

- FFFFFFFF#@€&£$$}•{^÷|CK!

This happened after a year working on the same project on the same engine with the same image format specifications.

Finally getting off my proverbial ass and doing something about the lack of games I like. Going to focus on making an engine for the kind of games I want to play.

No, I am not starting from scratch. Going to base my engine on Godot and use it for my own titles. I am not insane. Making it from scratch is too much work these days. But the indies are shifting from Unity to other engines right now. So a lot of wanted attention will be placed on better alternatives. This means more content and plugin choices will be available to Godot devs.

I kept making excuses as to how hard it will be or it will take forever. It only ended up taking me further away from what I wanted. I have my wishlist of features and I will focus on modularizing them so they can be used as needed. If it makes sense I will make these modules available to the community at Godot. This will help get feedback on what can be improved and generalized further. It will also reduce development costs in the long run. I want to take the approach that No Man's Sky has taken for content and generate as much as I can. I am fascinated by generating objects using algorithms. This seems to be a trend in games.

The struggle I have with games: I want to build things like structures in game (aka Minecraft), I want to build characters in game (aka RPGs), I also want to deform terrain (aka organic voxels), and I want a mixed genre (guns and dragons). Nothing like this exists in a form I want to pay for. I also want to be able to mod the game and for other people to be able to mod the game. That really narrows the list of games down to nothing. Sure there are few games that hit these bullet points, but not all in the same game.

I am finding I struggle to be engaged intellectually at work. I do what I have to for a paycheck. I think having a side project will help with this. One that is radically different than what I do at work is going to be helpful. I need to be realistic about expectations. I probably shouldn't expect any real progress for at least 2 to 3 years and probably more likely 5 years. I have some experience with the tool chains from other engines I have worked with. I also want something that I own and is mine. Even if it sucks.

In school we got asked 4 our future jobs. I saif: im gonna get informatician, because im already really good at it... Look, i can evem build compilers... In the break, my friend: could u program a game, dude? Me: no, im not using a graphical environnement. If i wanted to i would have to learn unity or flash or some sort of game engine He: then, ur not an informatician, and u shouldnt get one either...

(hes a windows user)

Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??

It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.

Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.

All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.

Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.

Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.

If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.

Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.

Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!

Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

I am an Indie game developer. I've been working solo for two or three years now and teaching myself. I can work in 3D modeling applications as well as program in c++ and do blueprint in unreal engine. I know most of the pipeline and the suite.

I'd like to transition to doing game Dev full time or at the very least do programming as my job. I have no degree.

I'm looking for contracts or whatever I can get and I'd like to get suggestions on how I should go about quitting my shity night shift job at a factory and finally work in tech.

I've got a couple contracts going on right now that I am not sure if they are going to last. I would like to know how I should go about finding more and or what things I should do in order to get residual income so I can focus on my own projects.

I have several of my own games in the works and I'm developing some tools for the marketplace. Advice?

!rant
How to earn a lot of money as a programmer?

So this question might sound a little naive and too simple, but earning a lot of money is what we all want after all right? Collecting experiences from people in the business should be a good idea.

So this is the position I am in:
I am a German student in my 13th year of school (which means I will graduate this summer) and I am very interested in information technology. I know C++ pretty well by now and I have built a rendering engine for a game I want to make using openGL already, which I am very proud of.
I would love to turn this passion into my profession and thats why I plan to attend a dual course of computer science next year (dual means that I will be employed at a company (or similar) in parallel to the studying course).

But what direction should I be going in if I want to make big money later on? I am ready to spend a lot of time and work on this life project but I don't know which directions are the most promising. I hate being a tiny gear in a huge machine that just has to keep spinning to keep the machine alive, I want to be part of a real project (like most people probably) and possibly sell a product (because I think that is how you really make money).

Now I know there is no magic answer to this, but I bet many people here have made experiences they can share and this could help a lot of people directing their path in a more success oriented way.

I personally am especially interested in fields which are relatively low-level and close to memory (C++), go hand in hand with physics and 3D simulation and are somewhat creative and allow new solutions. (These are no hard lines, I just thought I should give a little direction to what I know already and what I am interested in)

But really, I am interested in any work you are likely to earn a lot of money with.

~ The Feelings ~

The feeling when someone thinks you can fix his laptop/phone/other electronic device because you know how to program.

The feeling when someone tells you that you can't program because you are bad at math, but you realize majority of the time that breaking down mathematical formulas into code requires no mathematical skills, in fact you learn it better that way.

The feeling when someone calls programming 'legos for autists' and you can't legally lock him up in your basement for few months.

The feeling when one of programming languages finally gets an update with a feature that existed in all other languages you didn't learn for few years now and they call it a big 'breakthrough'.

The feeling when someone learned basic programming and says he'll make a game, with his own engine and starts listing features he can't have any clue about.

..I'm done, for now :)

Today on forgotten games – Vangers.

Even though the game is extremely hard and very, very frustrating, it somehow has an ability to make you obsessed with it. A very complex pieces of information, either carefully crafted or accidentally emerged from the void, delivered straight to your brain, making you an addict. If you play it and not delete it after five minutes, there is no way back – you better get used to new, different you.

There are many hard but addictive games based on simple mechanics, but Vangers is a different story. Compared to Vangers, Dark Souls seems nice, simple and easy casual game.

One can easily imagine "the hardest game possible", but all of them simply makes you delete the game and not to play it at all. Vangers precisely balance over this, achieving a very fragile equilibrium, being hard enough to frustrate you like no other game does, but not hard enough to simply make you quit instantly. While doing so, the game makes you a junkie, addicted to its eerie psychedelic nature.

This game spits in your face. This game makes you a slave, a desperate addict. All of your previous gaming skill, and speedrun experience doesn't matter.

The plot roughly goes like this: humans fucked up while experimenting with portals and accidentally discovered an advanced hivemind race. Trying to escape they fuck up spacetime and the two incompatible civilizations annihilate each other, creating a primal soup of creatures, from which the whole new world emerges. So there are many different strange creatures trying to survive in fucked spacetime where incompatible worlds are forcefully fused together, and you are the Vanger, one of many other Vangers trying to figure out what they are and how they was created.

The game features a voxel, fully-destructible world mapped on a torus. The game lore and terminology are extremely complex, and no one will explain it to you, you have to figure everything out yourself. Skip the dialog and no one will repeat it, you're on your own now.

Every playthrough is different. There are very many game mechanics and play styles available.

Everything in the game including complex rendering engine was written in C and Assembler back in 1998.

There are two types of Vangers players: the ones who was able to escape early and the ones who think that Vangers is the best game of all time. This says it all.

Last warning – DON'T PLAY THIS GAME. You better watch some playthrough on youtube.

Once upon a time i had a great idea.
Because i couldnt be bothered to do anything productive i created a simple app in the C# that would look into every .js file (from a game that uses it for the gui/main menu) and search for "//todo" lines.

I did it mostly for kicks. I got that idea when i encountered one //todo in a file when i was trying to mod that game.

Yes i know grep exists: fuck you.
It would have taken me more time to learn that than to write that 20 line program...

The result? Over 30 lines of //todo with some briliant pearls in the type of:
>Temp workaround because X
>Workaround for race condition
>Clean that up
>Obsolete

When i return home i will post real quotes. They might be amusing to read...

The game is based on a custom C++ engine. HTML, CSS and JS is used for main menu and some graphical interface in game.

The most amusing thing is that this inefficient sack of chicken shit is powering one of the biggest (no playerbase but unit, world, gameplay vise) rts that i have ever played.

But still in spite of a dead community, buggy gui as shit and other problems i love this game and a lot of other people love it too. It is a great game when it works correctly.

To the interested: JS portion uses jquerry and knockout lib.

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.

Not a rant... But I have a question guys...
I am currently a student in 2nd year of college.
I have been using and learning C++ since like 4 years now and it is my truely favorite language. It just is a joy to work with. Tried others but couldn't handle them (no offense. Just a personal preference) so here is the question:

What should I do in future? Like which field would be most enjoyable?

Currently, I feel game programming is it... I do enjoy whatever puny game like thing I make way more than anything...

I also specifically enjoy creating backend stuff...
(I always end up creating mechanics for working of game engine but never creating the actual game... Like creating an asset manager or something but not using it).

By backend stuff, I mean something which requires me to think a lot as to how can I implement something and then implement it (again, in C++). And then another developer could make use of it.

I heard game development has a very low scope for growth and is very very tedious... Is it true? What route should I go to?

Edit 1:
Btw, I enjoy building stuff from ground up, although ofc that doesn't happen haha...

You know apple has its dick deep inside your ass when you buy a Macbook pro with no discrete gpu for game development(unreal engine) and then shell out $1500 for a fried cpu.

Spent 2 hours wondering why Unity Engine sees my 2 joysticks as Joystick 1 and Joystick 5 (or 6 depending on a UBS port).
Turns out, for some reason, Unity remembers ALL the ports that were ever used (even with the usb extender). That's documented...exactly nowhere. Ok, at least I figured that out, but what am I gonna do about it? Nothing, there's no way to change the order.
So after a quick nervous breakdown, and a cigarette break, I decided to build and run the game, just to see how it looks, and...what's this?
Everything's working! Unity removes all the joysticks from it's array and puts only active ones in the right order and that too is documented...NOWHERE!
Ugh... Unity I still love you, but god damn, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER!!!
Needless to say, this day is an emotional roller coaster.

Alright got an idea I have for my game engine that I'd love some input on...

So the engine has emphasis on user made content and openness to that content (EG. open source dev tools and no licencing of art) but I also want to try and build a basic ecosystem with the engine and one way I'm doing it is with cross game mods (Take a mod from one game and drop it in another and it just works... Famous last words) but something I want to try is a companion app for the engine itself...

So it'll have a custom written save system baked in engine to make progress saving and the like simpler for the end user, thinking about building an app for smart watches and phones that would connect to the engine and actually back up and sync local saves to the app and vice versa as long as they have a connection (Hotspot your phone, bluetooth or wifi) but allow you to manage some data within the app by building a basic API to let devs show the user information about the save and the game by adding description, thumbnails to distinguish games and the like...

Just want opinions if it may be a good idea to invest some time into and if anyone has idea's that could make it better.

First post here...Here's a funny thing that happened to me yesterday. I'm with my friend, we're both taking a break from school, and he comes up to me and mentions how he wants to make 3d games. Conversation goes a bit like this:

Friend: "Hey, I found this 3d model website. I'm thinking of using it for my 3d game."

He was already making a 2d game at this point, so I assumed he just gave up on it.

Me: "Well...do you have Unity?"

Friend: "Yes."

Me: "Well if you're going to make a game on there [stuff about c#]"

Friend insists he can easily make this. I tell him it would take years on end to learn C# and make a good game with it. And then he says something I never wanted to hear.

Friend: "Actually, no. You ever heard of Dani? D-A-N-I? He made a game in 2 weeks. He's actually making a new game and you should wishlist it on steam blah blah yatta yatta."

This guy believed someone else who was previously a game developer (if i recall) learned an entire programming language and engine in two weeks. He could've, but to me that seems seriously outrageous to someone who doesn't even know a smidge of programming.

He then advertised his YouTube channel and his games and brought down my arguments like "he probably had previous knowledge" completely. This guy doesn't even know where to start with C#. Really, all I could do after that was mention three.js (oh wow another JavaScript library, exciting), show him a game Google made with said library, and then said good luck...

Worst thing is, he uses Scratch to make games. And he genuinely thinks that is a real programming language.

That's it for my first post, thank you very much for reading :)

I've said this once before and I'll say it again, if you create a game engine, development kit or the like that is single threaded with no easy ability to allow multi threaded work loads, grab a cactus and firmly shove it down your urethra :-3

(It's mostly a rant with GameMaker but fuck sake, we have CPU's with more than 1 core... Let us use them!)

Working on a project to create a space Invaders clone using Android studio/java. Point is to prove teamwork and our ability to optimise for a phone.

Leader makes the engine
Passes code to me who is doing gameplay.
Creating classes, testing them with a temporary activity class to get them on screen.
Okay, time to get it going properly.
Starts creating the game by placing aliens to the screen via the new alien manager, created in the true starting place.
Nothing appears on screen, sounds still play.
Odd. Repeatedly try to fix, but objects will not appear on the screen if created outside of temporary activity.
Show problem to leader as I haven't been able to figure out.
Gets lectured to no end about how I can't just ask him for help (first fucking time) if I get stuck!!!
Turns out, the value for frame time is way off for the first frame, and their positions get going way off the screens range when being placed. Temp activity works as it skips first frame.
Why did this happen? Genius leader didn't properly initialise it, so first frame time was equal to the First Date Object time ever locked - current time 🤔🤔🤔
We figured it out together.

To use Unity with VS you have to get Unity Build Tools as a plugin.

Alright, I'll download that.

Oh but now there's an error with connecting to unity, I need to get a newer VS and switch to the 2018 version of the engine.

Ok fine that's annoying but I guess I might as well upgrade.

Oh now there's no Intellisense? I guess I need to reload my project.

Oh what's this? Some major build error due to a missing component from Vs 2015?

This is getting stupid, fine let me install it.

Oh but to install the component you need to rerun the installer for VS, fine I'll redownload that.

Oh but apparently the installer _I JUST DOWNLOADED A FEW SECONDS AGO_ is outdated and needs to be upgraded. I can't _not_ update the installer and still install the components because that would be stupid, why would we let the developer decide what versions to use obviously they don't know what they're doing I mean it's not like they know how to use computers?

To get simple code completion, let's force developers to download an installer that then needs to be updated to install a component for this giant IDE that also requires the 2015 version of the IDE to be installed alongside a special plugin and patch designed for a specific game engine.

All this. For fucking code completion. I can't even get Intellisense to work in VSCode without fixing the issue since the C# extension in VSCode just binds to Visual Studio tools and runs the same shit with a different GUI.

So I had to write a program for university... It got graded.. I got 1.7 (1 being best).
Now you might say that's good. But I wrote a whole fucking final fantasy like game with engine and the program I helped with of a friend of mine is just a little roulette game without animation.. and he got a 1.3.

TIL: Don't give your best. Just give no fuck and push something out quickly.

So started building a game engine in Vala using SDL2, I have never built anything from scratch and decided to do it with no tutorials and just looking at the documentation on valadoc... So of course all of the pages for SDL2 and it's sub components show up fucking blank... Well isn't this dandy .-.

YouTube... for video creation.

Now I know I was a really amateurist video maker trying to make tutorials and videos about his coding creations in Mugen (you know, CNS state controllers and stuff,...), but this is the kind that's hard to get views from if you don't have a reach long enough to appear in search pages. I've had fun tagging my videos with plenties of tags just so they appear someday as a relevant result. EVEN in search pages for videos in the week, they barely appear and are sunk under videos of your Nth Mugen KOF clone with broken chars, Mugen ryona, Mugen hentai,... Speaking of which, did you know someone got to one of my videos from one of these?! How does YouTube's recommendation system work at this point?!
In the meantime (more like recently), I've been more interested in Ikemen, still kinda Mugen, still a DSL for a game engine, but still fascinating and there's material for tutorial making. But if I ever went back on video making, that won't be on YouTube. I'll just stick on Twitter and Discord if I were to share my content. At least, I got people following me there and a base visibility over there to start with. I could consider forums as well, why not, but YouTube is a no-go for me now.

Rant!
Beginner tutorials are great.

Personal project UE4 (Unreal Engine Game Dev)
I'm having this bug where I dynamically draw every tick into a Uncanvas. (C++) First I call .ClearChildern and after I create UserWidgets by calling blueprint to fill text.

Text is Invisible when drawn in native tick
I works. If I don't do it in the NativeTick

Search Online: "UE4 UMG text dissappears"
Result: How to create a Button in UMG
Me: No I'm creating a complex UI system

Search Online: UE4 Issue with UMG Text disappears when drawn in native tick
Result: How to create textfield UMG with blueprints
Me: No I have a weird bug and trying to figure out why that is!

50 Searches later
have seen 50 tutorials on how to do the basics.

My problem with certain applications that there are so many tutorials out there that Sirius shit is hidden behind a cloud of beginners content.

Well here's a story for you. I can't work on my game till the developer of a package I use updates his package. I can't research how to add the newer features I want to add till I know what the base code is gunna look like. I can't work on my second game idea because unreal engine has a major bug since version 4.15 that is crippling the performance of what I want to do. I can't work any assets for that game till I know what performance is gunna be like after the fix is implemented. It's now version 4.17 almost 4.18 and it might get pushed till version 4.19. I need to work on something like right now because my game studio is otherwise just sitting. It is a VR / AR only studio and there is no real direction to move in at the moment till somebody other than me gets their collective shit together.

I need something fairly "quick" but still fun to play to work on so I can sell sell sell. No idea wtf it's gunna be though. The steam market place is so full of garbage that I really don't want to contribute to that with more garbage. I also don't know anyone I can collaborate with to make something interesting.

WHAT DO I DO?

One day I decided I wanted to build robots.
And not kidding the reason I wanted to build them was because I wanted someone interesting to talk to and stil not kidding I even fantasized about a robot girlfriend... Lame I know I think I was a lonely little guy back then, though even after 7 years or so it doesn't feel as though it's that long ago. Maybe because things didn't change that much. Which is worrying but it's not the topic so I will pass on that future-past worries bullcrapper. After learning how robots worked and what made them function so things gradually led up to me being more interested in machine learning applications and software. I learned Arduino at first, I think I still have some messy circuits and old arduinos around. I only finished one robot though and it couldn't even support it's own weight. The servo motors were taking too many amps that heated up the little arduino even with a fan attached. Provably I should have made use of mechanics for robots books and calculated things first. But even though it couldn't walk properly I still felt success and I loved it like my own kid (me taking it apart was questionable but believe me). After that I focused more on writing code than using my hands to make things which was a pain in the ass if I might add.
After learning arduino and making that failed project of mine. I then picked up C++ wrote hello world program usual things a starter would do. It was the language I wrote my first game which I finished and this time it worked. But I never released it which was partly because I didn't want to spend a hundred bucks on a license for the engine and I also knew that it was a shit game. If I were to describe; lines in different colors come from the top you need to hit the lines with the same colored columns to break them. The columns changed their height and location on random. The lines sped up and gap between them decreased. Now that I think about it it wasn't half bad. But the code was written in game maker studio's version of C so I have no way to salvage it.
But I learned a lot of things from that project and that was the goal, so I would call it a win. I don't remember but after sometime I switched to python. And I'm glad I did, it's fun to code in which was the main reason I coded in the first place. Fun.
Life happens and time passes,

Now I'm waiting to enter college exams in a few months after hopefully passing them. My goal is to get into computer engineering which will be extremely challenging because it's the highest point department in the university I'm aiming at. But hey if the challenge is great the reward is greater right ? To be honest I'm still not sure about my career path. Too many choices. So I will just let my own road called <millions of similarly random events that are actually caused by deterministic reactions, to affect you and your surroundings leading up to a future which only the Laplace's demon can forsee> guide me. Wish me luck.

My experience was very recent. I was working on my game engine, Pillar3D, and realized that the setup allowed it to be automatically multithreaded with little to no concern about deadlock or race conditions. All based on the assumption that individual levels don't talk to each other, and that moving entities between levels could be done between frames. I can even track about how much work each thread has to do and use that to distribute levels among the threads. Now I can do things like force UI trees to exist in their own level and get fantastic multithreading.

So, i want to dive a bit into game development. But firstly without a game engine. Just some small projects, like a short 2d game, to get knowledge.
Any suggestions, to do so?
Which language, ide, framework etc.?
Thanks

Question for those who are into mobile game dev: unity is still a shitshow or they just quit the idea of charging for each install ? Trying to choose a game engine and I have no f clue what to choose for a 2.5d platformer

Hey everyone! I need your help!

So I am working on a game engine thingy called Polita. Now I want to import Polita's core module (`polita/polita.py`) into the `test/simple.py`, which contains a simple test (See the image). But when I tried to run `test/simple.py`, it saids `No module called 'polita'` (See the image) although I have added `__init__.py` to indicate that `polita` is a module.

Any ideas?