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Comment by nadam | Hacker News Reader

Joy with creating something other people enjoy or find useful. For example creating a videogame. But formerly I enjoyed creating the underlying technology (engine programming, which is a nerd sniping too), nowadays I am more interested in the game as a whole (more game-design focus and less game-tech focus.)

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In my experience, you can do both. I recently made a tool where I had great fun making the internals as “elegant” as possible. What other people perceive though is only the usefulness of the tool.

I would have had significantly less fun with a more pragmatic approach, and maybe the tool would not be as polished as a result.

In German, we say “the journey is the goal”.

> In German, we say “the journey is the goal”.

Which btw, for the non-German speakers, we do because we have one single word ("Ziel") that means both "destination" and "goal". =)

But someone had to create the underlying technology for you to be able to focus on more high-level tasks. Seems it's easier for you to share these new tasks than your old tasks, but not that one is intrinsically more valuable than the other.

As long as it's working for you.

I have somewhat similar feelings on my side. I really enjoy mathematics, but at university, I realized how vast the field is and how it can be fairly easy to dedicate your life to learning something that no one around you cares about. As such, if I ever get back into these disciplines again, I'll probably focus primarily on the math necessary to solve physics problems. Not because I think that's inherently more useful or valuable, but merely as a heuristic to limit the scope, so I don't go insane with the vastness of mathematics.

Can I ask if other people care about the game you’re making? As someone with a fair amount of indie experience it seems easier to create a proof people care about than a (even reasonably) popular video game.

It is too early to tell for my current project. I know that it is very hard to create a successful game. Certain genres are more crowded than others though. Creating a successful 2D platformer is almost impossible nowadays for example. I am creating a grand strategy game. It is a niche where the supply and demand dynamics is reasonable, but it is still hard to create something successful.

How theoretical is the math in a game engine? (I’m asking because I have no idea but I assumed it’d all be really applied linear algebra stuff, that sort of thing).

Not very theoretical. But with 'nerd sniping' focus I tended to create my own tech unnecessarily, and wasting too much effort to optimize things that do not necessarily need to be that much optimized. Nowadays I try to reuse other people's code as what I really enjoy is to create the end-product.

If you use an existing game engine all you need really is some decent Google-fu... I've been commissioned to create some non-public VR experiences for a couple of people and all I needed during development was some basic high-school vector math (like literally addition, multiplication, very occasionally a cross prodcut or a dot product which I googled by their purpose [e.g. "how to find a tangent to two vectors" or "how to check if a vector is aligned with other vector"]).

You do use that math constantly especially in shader tricks which do some visual magic based on angles between stuff but the difficulty is not in the math itself at all.

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