All right, I'm slowly getting back to Midnight Draw! It's a 4P party game deathmatch, a futuristic western shootout chaos in the darkness! Here's a mockup:
#PitchYaGame#gamedev#pixelart
I'm giving away 5 keys for BlastFX 2.0!
Retweet this post to enter and this time on Friday I'll pick the winners
https://t.co/FaMBQhl9ou
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To be a little less vague, I suspect that we're likely (not certain, but likely) to be entering into a period of unprecedented software degradation, and we're going to be seeing an increasing frequency of outages like this across many high profile products.
But IMO the cause is actually not just the-one-thing-that-everyone-is-always-talking-about, it's a number of things that have all been bubbling away at just below critical levels for a long time. Some of the things off the top of my head:
- Poorly designed / optimised software has been getting a free ride on hardware improvements pretty much since the invention of the computer. That chapter is now coming to an end, and will only be worsened by the enormous industry-wide pivot to producing & innovating on AI specific hardware, rather than general purpose CPUs etc.
- The ZIRP era created a temporary suspension of reality in our industry, and now that it's ended we need to deal with the hangover. Companies that spent years making no profit, paying extravagant compensation to employees / shareholders and giving away server time for free are now pivoting into extraction mode, which is putting further pressure on their low quality software. QA is being laid off, hardware budgets are being reduced, timelines for shipping features are becoming more aggressive, etc.
- The enormous amount of free money incentivised too many new people to join the industry too quickly. This has led to an abundance of poor quality education programs (bootcamps, uncertified colleges etc) and an influx of people into the industry who frankly aren't interested in programming. If you compared the average person in the industry now to 20 years ago, I suspect the difference in motivations would be stark. I'm not saying it's these people's fault necessarily, it's simply an inevitable result of the absurd compensation / performance expectations ratio that our industry has enjoyed for the last 15+ years. Working for a tech company has also become socially prestigious, which further adds to the problem.
- Because computer programming was once an incredibly niche area of interest, many of our fundamental systems are built on trust. We're now starting to see that if systems like open source, public supply chain, discussion spaces, education etc become flooded with bad actors, we have no real mechanisms to deal with them.
- Our hiring / recruitment pipeline has totally misaligned incentives. Even before the AI resume / AI HR-filtering arms race disaster that we're experiencing now, the widespread adoption of the leetcode style interviews IMO selected for a very narrow personality type, and filtered candidates that would have made great contributions to the industry long term.
- The pivot from purchasing long term stable releases of software, to paying a subscription for constantly updating software has done huge damage to software quality as a whole. Companies have lost their incentive to get their software "right" because they can just "fix it later", and for the consumer - you can't just go back to the version of github that still works because the new one has problems.
This was all happening well before AI entered the picture. I won't belabor the point because there has been endless discussion about it. But to me personally, there are two additional and deeply worrying problems with AI code generation.
- It's undeniable at this point that it negatively affects the people who use it. It stops juniors from getting better, and it burns seniors out and makes them hate their jobs. Like it or not, humans are still the core of this industry, and I don't see this ending well.
- It's completely unfit for purpose in the most important, high-stakes situations. One of the reasons that we excuse all the small errors it makes, is because it's low effort to type "do it again and fix this bug". That kind of thing doesn't fly when you only get one attempt because a mistake results in data loss or an outage. The damage is done.
All the above has led to a silent exodus of many of our most experienced and impactful people. There are so many amazing programmers who made enough through stock options / compensation that they didn't need to work anymore, and were only doing it because they enjoyed it. Many of these people have just quit the industry and switched to doing hobby projects in the last 5 years. These are the types of people who have the experience and foresight to prevent the types of outages that we're seeing at github today.
It's very easy to assume that the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is entirely to blame here. But I think it's a reckoning that has been on the horizon for a very long time.
4 years of development.
12,000 merged pull requests.
7,000 fixed issues.
1,500 individual contributors across engine and docs.
Godot 4.0 sets sail NOW! ⛵️
A complete overhaul. A solid foundation to build upon. #GodotEngine
https://t.co/XgE9iq29Jp
🚨 EX-ZODIAC HAS LAUNCHED 🚨
A low-poly tribute to the 3D on-rails shooter, barrel rolls and all!
10% off on Steam for the next week: https://t.co/rJZ4MY5Oc0
Code, design & art by @BenHickling
Music by @plrusek
Published by Pixeljam
Creating a vector flow field and applying it as a steering behaviour.
Here I'm using it to create interesting swarming movement around a leader entity, but it has many uses. This is for shoot-em-up I'm working on in #GodotEngine
Steering behaviours are fun! #gamedev#indiedev
We just released a new update for Learn GDScript From Zero.
It's a Free and open-source app to learn @godotengine's GDScript language, from zero, right in your browser.
It now works 100% offline and standalone!
https://t.co/wDAURFo2hq
We’ve been keeping this a secret for too long and now it’s time to announce to the whole world: Rogue Snail and @GearboxOfficial are working together on Relic Hunters Legend! 🎉🤩
Game Developers: I'm gonna make this machine render beautiful vibrant landscapes 60 times per second.
Web Developers: This newspaper article needs at least 7 seconds to show up and will boil your computer alive if you try to scroll too fast.
We're giving away 25 copies of @KenneyNL's wonderful KenShape pixel-to-3D art app.
Paint pixels, paint their depth, and boom! You get a 3D model.
It runs on Windows and Linux.
Like and retweet for a chance to get a free copy!
Follow @KenneyNL to support his amazing work. 😄