Pere

Solo game dev. Making secret game!

[Casey Muratori @cmuratori]

Tangentially: the only reason OP is able to "stop looking at assembly" is because a bunch of other people still do. There are compiler codegen bugs constantly, but OP never knows about them because other people who do read ASM find, report and/or fix them before they cause too many downstream problems.

Another way to say this is that the "compiler" does not "get it right". A ton of people, constantly reading the ASM that the compiler outputs, work together to "get it right".... eventually :)

So the proper way to look at this is, if you've stopped reading ASM, that's not because codegen was solved, but rather that you have implicitly decided to outsource to other people the problem of keeping codegen working reliably.

[Pere @peredolcet]

@ZenoRogue @CJ_SpaceSword "Roguelike" is a vast category (under my definition), so best practices will depend a lot on the subgenre.

[Pere @peredolcet]

@ZenoRogue @CJ_SpaceSword I guess you are talking about Rogue style games. CJ's game is more fixed length and shorter. I feel we might be talking past each other, as your game is quite different than ours (I'm also making an action roguelike), and we have different perspectives.

[Pere @peredolcet]

@ZenoRogue @CJ_SpaceSword Good points. I agree you want breaks from the action, but in these shooter roguelikes you get small breaks every 2-3 minutes between levels, which are longer when there's a shop or upgrade choice. Is this what you meant?

[Pere @peredolcet]

@CJ_SpaceSword @ZenoRogue Cool, looking forward to it!

[Pere @peredolcet]

@CJ_SpaceSword @ZenoRogue What I find harder to justify are permanent "number goes up" upgrades, which would essentially make the game easier over time, as @ZenoRogue pointed out. But many games do that, e.g. Rogue Legacy, so who knows. Just be aware of how it'll change the experience at every stage.

[Pere @peredolcet]

@CJ_SpaceSword @ZenoRogue It can make sense to hide some of the more complex upgrades to understand in unlockables, so that the first runs don't confuse players too much with the upgrade description texts.

[Pere @peredolcet]

@ZenoRogue @CJ_SpaceSword And most developers employ it because it's an easy, standard way to add gameplay hours.

[Pere @peredolcet]

@ZenoRogue @CJ_SpaceSword The only valid argument I see for meta progression in roguelikes is that it gradually introduces gameplay complexity, which facilitates the learning process. However, I think most players are attracted to it intinctively because artificial progress hooks them.

[Pere @peredolcet]

@Jonathan_Blow @SinkingStarGame Please fix the hair. It looks sticky.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.

Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.

I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.

On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.

One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.

We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.

Sorry, Sandy.

[Casey Muratori @cmuratori]

I don't think people realize just what a joke modern software is.

[Alps @alpaysh]

i still think about this

[Xor @XorDev]

When learning shaders most tend to overcomplicate common practices like noise or color corrections.
Here are 5 common noob mistakes:

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

I interview dozens/hundreds of new grads, nearly every day of the year. These are people with a well-formatted resume and a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering from well-regarded US universities and a GPA above 3.6. The majority cannot engineer, cannot function independently, cannot answer basic technical questions. We have watered down standards and inflated grades to the point that a bright, enthusiastic student spending four years in school sends almost no signal at all.

What does? Hard evidence of actually building stuff. There is no substitute for actually doing the thing.

[Pere @peredolcet]

https://t.co/tTYEimYyOZ

[Brian Eskow @brianeskow]

If a director wants to cast a Black person in a White role, that is fine by me. Who am I to tell an artist what to do? My problem is when the system, in this case the Oscars, incentivizes such behavior. Imagine you wanted to start a comedy group and instead of having the freedom to pick the five funniest people you know, you were forced to pick a woman, a Jew, a Chinese person, a Black person, and a Native American. That isn’t art. That’s social engineering, and it infuriates me.

[Yun-Ta Tsai @yunta_tsai]

There was no award when Newton discovered three laws of forces, nor when da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.

There was no Grammy for Beethoven or Chopin, nor a Nobel Prize in Literature for Homer.

Masterpieces do not seek transient trophies but aim to be timeless.