DizzyDoo

I do love that you can use this to listen to 'Tatooine' radio: http://radio.garden/visit/tataouine/QhlNhiHM (Tataouine in Tunisia is where Lucas filmed the opening of Star Wars, it was originally named 'Utapau' in the script until the location scout.)

A common tactic for Poker players who want to make some of their actions in a common scenario random (call in one instance, or perhaps re-raise instead) is to look at their wrist watch, and depending on where the second hand is they can simulate a coin flip or a dice roll.

I was genuinely interested, and, wow. It's been 15 years since I've tried Second Life but I'm not terribly surprised the scripting/modding looks like this, and all your comments about the exposed API make sense now.

That sounds like an issue (and a big issue at that) with the API your engine is providing to you, rather than an issue inherent in A*! Building/rebuilding a navmesh is the expensive bit, cell look-ups ought to be essentially 'free', performance-wise. In an engine like Unity a physics raycast is a super expensive call to make, so if that's also the case for your situation then that's a real shame, I hope you can work around that.

If I'm doing regular "were are other objects relative to an object" I much prefer an ordered-spatially data structure like a quadtree, but doing a quick hash of the position and sticking it in a key based store works fine too. Again, that's one of those data structures that is expensive to build and cheap to query, so only building it once every x frames is probably a good idea. But again, not sure what your API is giving to you and how low level you get to work.

It's worth mentioning that there's now a third way C# is utilised in Unity which is via their new 'Burst' compiler, part of their wider move to an Entity Component System they've called DOTS[1]. It supports a subset of C# that gets compiled into memory safe jobs that can run safely on and spread across different threads. I'm using the Burst compiler + jobs in my full-time game project and the performance is seriously good for whenever you just need to process a lot of data. You can use Burst with both Mono and IL2CPP script modes.

The go-to deep dive on how DOTS/Burst works is pretty much everything Jackson Dunstan has ever written on the matter [2] but specifically the article that digs into how IL2CPP calls Burst is interesting.[3]

[1] - https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@0.17/ma...

[2] - https://www.jacksondunstan.com/?s=burst

[3] - https://www.jacksondunstan.com/articles/5251

I'm a bit confused by your comment, when you say that "testing if a cell is blocked has a sensing cost", do you mean the obstacle/wall is not in your graph at the point of search? A properly calculated navmesh by definition has the obstacle/wall 'cut out' of the mesh (or otherwise represented in a modifier area). Perhaps I've misunderstood you but it sounds like you're trying to build, at least partially, the navmesh as you search?

If you're rather talking about temporary obstacles like other nav agents that need to be avoided, there are a number of approaches to agent avoidance that work nicely on a subset of a navgraph.

I've been working at detangling myself from the Adobe lineup of products. I really like (or liked) Adobe AfterEffects, it's been very helpful for me in compositing trailers for my computer game business, but it's totally been replaced by the free version of Davinci Resolve. Which I've also found is an excellent replacement for Adobe Audition, which I was using for editing the Voice Over and raw Sound Effects for, again, my video games.

But I can't see myself escaping from Photoshop anytime in the next couple of years. I have a lot of special export scripts in 'Adobescript' (yuck) that carve up my high res art assets, slice them this way and that, crop, hide/display different groups and export in particular ways. Nothing unusual, it's just a lot of grunt work, but I have it set up so that clicking a button in Photoshop will just Do It All and have it work. It'll take some time to set that all up again in a Photoshop alternative.

The nasty payments stuff detailed in the twitter thread is just the usual Adobe nastiness, some product manager somewhere is trying to juice the numbers.

My own billing experience with Adobe recently was needing to change my account's country from UK to Canada, as I've moved, and the VAT number and sales tax stuff is of course all different. The poor support person I spoke to couldn't fix it for me, they had to have a backend engineer manually change alter a field in a database somewhere - it all sounds like a terrible mess.

Other one would be Double Fine, while it is relatively early days since they were acquired in 2019, they seem to have been just working on their projects since then. Psychonauts 2 was very well received last year - from what I've read it seems like the Microsoft acquisition allowed them to add a bunch of content back into the game that they had previously cut for time/budget, like boss battles - looks like it helped with the overall game quality.

I'm in the same boat - I have a free GSuite account and need to either pay Google for it or move elsewhere. What's not clear is that I have a YouTube channel attached to this Google identity and I don't know if when my custom .com GMail address enters the 'suspended' state whether I will lose access to my YouTube channel.

Both the email and the YouTube channel are for my video games business, so I'm okay paying for the privilege of my domain with my email, but I'm unsure that I want to trust Google with that. The whole way they have announced cancelling this GSuite deal, which they originally promised they would never do (it was "for life"), makes me think that all the more. But my YouTube account is pretty important to my business and I don't want to lose that.

Woah, 42u, that's quite something! How many of those slots are you using? What kind of cooling do you have to have for that closet, and how is the volume for the rest of the house?

Hmm, I would never price a game at $5, that sounds insanely low. I've sold a decent % of my copies in Oceania so I'm confident my pricing isn't off, it's been working for the last six/seven years in any case. From the looks of it the Australian Dollar price is just one or two US dollars more than the US price. There's always a bit of fluctuation over time though.

Mostly Unity and C#, I still use Python for bits and pieces (see my other comment). I made and make all the art myself, just painting in Photoshop, animating in the wonderful Spine by Esoteric Software (great tool that's worth every penny), and do all my video and audio editing in DaVinci Resolve (I used to use Adobe AfterEffects but the monthly fee was just too high for me). I also use Blender for any 3D work (I used to use Modo, but again, the monthly fee was too high).

Marketing for The Cat Machine wasn't too bad, I had an okay ground game with getting coverage from gaming websites and someone posts it on Reddit and for 2015 that was good-enough marketing for the time, more than enough to Greenlight the game. The voice actor is Scott Gilmour (@scottgilmour7 on Twitter) and I found him after listening to about 100 voice samples on all the different VO websites. He's fantastic! I don't share my sales numbers publicly, but Steam is about 70% of The Cat Machine sales, and about 25% is from the Apple Mac Store - where the game actually hasn't been published for about a year now, I need to get on that and reupload it. And games is right now my full time job, so no IP clauses needed negotiating, and my old employer back in 2015 was very chill about letting me work on my own stuff.

Hope that helps!

I still use a lot of Python, often for little tools or scripts, especially anything where data needs to be transformed (like file formats for art assets), or something needs to be automated (run build scripts for all the different platforms). I built a little graphical puzzle/level editor for The Cat Machine with Python and SDL bindings too.

But I'm mostly using C# and Unity these days. There's too much useful stuff build into Unity to ignore it, and C# is very pleasant so I didn't find it particularly hard to make the jump - there's just a very definite 'Way' Unity wants you to do everything and so most of the time it's just a case of working out what that Way is.

I got up early every day and got in an hour or two before my proper full-time backend Python programming job begun. That and working on The Cat Machine on Saturdays got it finished within a year, and then after it came out I could go full-time. It's hard to just make the switch from 'real' (normal?) job to small business game programming without already having a game that's done okay released, so that's what worked for me.

I make video games like this one [0] or this one [1]. It's pretty simple, you can buy the game and then download and play it. Are games 'desktop apps'? It's not the language I would normally use but I think it applies.

Having been out of the web app development bubble for about seven years now, there's whole industries that work entirely in the pay-for-it-and-then-download model, and while games-as-a-service is more popular now than ever before there's still plenty of the old-school way of doing things going on.

I really like the simplicity. You can buy the thing, maybe from Steam or maybe from a DRM-free store like Humble, download it, play it. You can get a refund if you don't like it, or buy another copy and gift it to a friend if you do.

[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...

I'm pretty sure I could easily bot this though - I'm not an expect web scraper/automator by any means, my experience with PhantomJS is probably quite out of date, but what's stopping me from running x,000's of little scripts on a x,000 different VPS's (or a botnet, if I'm a bit evil), setup a unique looking User Agent and client environment in case of any finger-printing, and adding my competitor to a blacklist x,000 times? I'm pretty sure I could make it all look human enough. The manual check doesn't stop me from flooding the moderation queue at the very least, and perhaps the mod gets genuinely fooled, or convinced that my competitor must be up to no good.

"Build usage profiles" is pretty much on the opposite pole to DuckDuckGo's whole 'privacy, simplified' deal.

How would this not be gamed by bots? I see how what you're suggesting would work if there were humans going through and moderating, but I can imagine they would be deluged with millions of reports. Doing it algorithmically is just giving the bad actors a mechanism to sink their competitor's results.

I've had those Staedtler 'pigment liner' pens that are in the parent comment's link, deeply disappointing. They dried out very quickly, and I do really try to take care of my pens.

My go-to fine-liners, as someone who sketches/inks, are the Sakura Pigma Micron pens. They used to be much harder to find but nowadays I see them all over, in most art supply shops, they're pretty popular.

I know most of the comments here are already and will continue to be along the lines of "they're two different things requiring two different skill sets", which I agree with.

But my first breakout indie game[0] was directly inspired by my Introduction To Computation course I took in my first year of CompSci at the University of Sussex. The lecturer (who was fantastic, though I forget his name 10 years on) walked us through Finite State Automata, and part of the course homework was, with pen and paper, designing finite state automata that would 'consume' strings of tokens. All pretty abstract, but drawing these circles for the state nodes and directional lines to consume the tokens, all terminating at the right end state... was really fun! They were good, solid, old-fashioned puzzles, just as much as Sodoku or something like that.

I made a mental note that it might make a good video game, and four/five years later I published The Cat Machine on Steam. All it is is those same finite-state automata puzzles, wrapped in a very cat-heavy abstraction. Different coloured cats are the different tokens, the 'islands' are the states, and as the player you draw train tracks between them all to consume x number of cat-train sequences. At the end the cats all sing a congratulatory meow song.

I'm pretty sure everyone just thinks its a whimsical, coloruful puzzle game but I've tricked thousands of people into doing a large chunk of 'Intro To Computer Science' homework without ever realising it!

I think there's plenty of room in CompSci for a dozen more puzzle games that quite directly lift the outline of puzzles out of a textbook and into a more accessible computer game space. I know I've for sure got a few more ideas - one day I'll sit down and make The Cat Machine 2 and incorporate them into a consumer friendly product.

[0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/

I think the more people creating game engines and open-source game frameworks the better, since every now and then something like Godot will emerge and continue to prevent a Unity-or-Unreal mono-culture. Which, to be clear, I don't think we're close to; to pick just one example Monogame, for instance, has been doing its thing for ages now and is going strong. As someone who's full-time job is working in Unity I think this sort of thing ends up being healthy for the whole developer ecosystem.

When hankchinaski says 'managed' I think they really mean that there's some capital-A App dashboard somewhere, on Digital Ocean or wherever, and they log in and click 'new database' and that's it. No ssh-ing to a VPS, and choosing the file location where the sqlite file will sit, figuring out backups and so on. But as you say, while you can wrap postgres or redis in that sort of 'just take care of it for me' approach, given the simplicity of sqlite it doesn't fit that paradigm, so perhaps hankchinaski is just misunderstanding what sqlite fundamentally is and how it works.

I guess Factorio is an idle game as much as Age of Empires, Sim City or Roller Coaster Tycoon is? That is to say, not really very much at all. Sure, when I go and make a cup of tea the simulation keeps on churning, and some numbers continue to go up. But I'm not playing for those numbers, I'm playing to make my city/civ/themepark/automated factory.

I'd never describe that as me 'playing' those games, I'd describe that is 'downtime'.

I get what you're saying, but it's worth also mentioning that your full 3d SNES game example is pretty much exactly what games like Star Fox[0] did, back in the early 90's. The Super FX chip is inside the SNES cartridge. From the wikipedia page:

> The Super FX was so much more powerful than the SNES's standard processor that the development team joked that the SNES was just a box to hold the chip.

Really interesting to read about, but there was a whole selection of other chips that various SNES games took advantage of: [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_(1993_video_game)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...

Really interesting, thanks for posting. What do you practically do with the psychopath dogs/pups? Presumably the 'insane effort' required to keep them in line doesn't square well with all the other hard work your farm requires. Are you essentially forced to give the mentally unstable ones to a shelter?

Yeah, I have to agree. I've been a full-time indie game developer for six years now and I'm fortunate that my peer network consists of about 90% people in the same boat, they have a few shipped titles under their belts.

If I want to seriously talk about Steam's discovery algorithm or get some feedback, that can't really just be anyone. And if I want to talk about the game publicly its to get customers, not to show to other game developers.

Not everyone would think the same, and that's okay!

If a video gets lots of views because of some other signal that isn't "this looks like a fun game", it's not too difficult to see that? The comments on YouTube or Reddit will be: 'look at this bug', or 'this game is ripping off X', or some culture war thing. I can think of a examples in the last couple of years of each those.

But, it's harder to imagine how Steam wishlist counts lead to totally distorted accounts. Unless someone is botting your Steam store page and the wishlisters don't exist, they're all still potential customers, and 5,000 wishlisters means something and 50,000 wishlisters means something.

There's lots of conversation about 'quality' of Steam wishlisters between developers. For example, Steam Fest is an event that Steam runs every now and then with game demos and there's very prominent 'wishlist this game' buttons. It's generally accepted that these wishlisters are 'worth less' than if they come from YouTube or PCGamer or even other sources upon Steam. So if 90% of your wishlist count comes through Steam Fests, yeah, you probably do have a distorted metric to work with. But no, I haven't experienced this myself.

I mostly use it to say "oh good, there will probably (with a certain % likelihood) be x,000 people who will buy the game within the first week.

I know publishers like Playway do exactly what you describe with all of their <insert niche job here> Simulator series of games, but it's not my thing. I use my wishlist counts to check I'm on the right track, to keep encouraged when development feels like a grind, to help justify putting a certain amount of $$ towards its development. If I was really struggling to get wishlists I would seriously consider changing the game's presentation substantially, or changing to work to something else, but I've not yet been in that situation. But in that case it would be a pretty decent signal that something about how the game looks isn't chiming with potential customers.

There are other useful metrics too, how many YouTube views did the announcement trailer get? Did it get posted to reddit and do okay there? How many people have joined the Discord? And so on and on, so it's not all one thing.

Given the not-perfect-but-pretty-good correlation between number-of-wishlists to number-of-first-year-sales it's a helpful number to help budget/forecast my business.

I'm an indie game developer on Steam and one of the most important business metrics for me is Wishlist Count. When I have a game coming up to release I can see what the level of interest is for it, and roughly how that will convert to sales. When a game is released that you have on your wishlist, Steam emails you about it, so it's a pretty valuable thing to have as a developer.

It's not a metric with 100% certainty, but if you tell me you have 1000 wishlisters, or 10,000, or 100,000 I can tell you roughly the range of sales that gets you.

It is very silly.