Impossible

Hopefully the SDK is available before hardware ships, or at least day one. I'm tempted to beg for early access to it. Although I'm excited about the launch games, I really bought it for development. I don't want to wait 6 months or a year to deploy to it

This book was in development while I was working on the core interpreter for the Facebook Horizon visual scripting language. While many things in it are not directly applicable to a VPL, it helped with more robust implementation in at least one area (branching) and overall was a joy to read. I prefer to read print so I'll pick this up

Pico CAD is a full low poly modeling tool in Pico 8. It's very different from an implementation standpoint than SpriteStack, which is voxel editor, rather than a polygon modeler. They are only similar in both being low resolution, resulting in a similar aesthetic.

The Noita team explored some game ideas along those lines and had challenges. If you haven't seen the GDC 2019 talk about tech and design of Noita I recommend checking it out. They show some early prototypes focused on building https://youtu.be/prXuyMCgbTc

Yes, the falling sand roots of Noita make it a little tricky, because it's a really good Roguelike platformer/shooter, that has a lot of interesting systems and mechanics, but the sand mechanics and physics are kind of a "value add" rather than core gameplay. I haven't played much Noita, but from what I know the wand system is more important for success than taking advantage of the environment. It somewhat misleading because the game was introduced with "ever pixel is simulated", but that doesn't actually matter as much as advertised in most runs.

For years (I even pitched it to Dennis Gustafson, the creator of Teardown) I've wanted to do a 3D falling sand game that could naively be described as Noita x Teardown, but outside of the technical challenges I haven't thought of a concept that truly takes advantage of falling sand automata and isn't just a sandbox.

I've worked for Oculus and Unity and know a lot of people at Epic and Roblox so I've tried to understand what people mean by Metaverse (outside of directly referencing Snow Crash or Ready Player One). My simplified version is a 3D online game, that has the same number of users and retention as a social network. Almost by definition it has to have user generated content.

Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite are close in various ways, and many apps have the feature set but are missing the user base.

VR Chat is made with Unity but not owned by Unity FYI. So are almost all other social VR apps (RecRoom, Facebook Horizon, etc)

There are few Lego games that actually embrace free building or engineering. I've heard it is because Lego doesn't want a digital app to cannibalize their physical sales, which always seemed silly to me.

Someone has already made a working Gameboy emulator for it. There is also a Doom port.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/07/08/gamekid-a-game-boy-emul...

It seems like there's a modern definition of scam, especially with gamers, which is hyping or marketing a game too well and not completely delivering on promises (often imagined) due to budget constraints, design or technical challenges and often just inflated expectations. This happens with products that a perfectly fine but aren't what people expect, and products that "work" but are buggy or don't deliver all features immediately.

See all of Peter Molyneux's games post Bullfrog, No Man's Sky at launch, Cyberpunk 2077, Magic Leap. I agree that putting Playdate even in that category because the SDK won't be ready at launch is kind of ridiculous.

I've done this multiple times ~4-6 months between jobs. I'd like to be able to do it for years, maybe next round...

This was my experience at FAANG as well. I had some terrible game industry jobs, but I've been at a few studios where I had a much better experience than FAANG even if pay was lower

It's also possible to work on games or game like software at FAANG, not crunch (although FAANG companies have plenty of other toxic qualities that can make them worse than a game job in subtle ways) and get paid a FAANG salary.

Ultimately it's working on game tech and companies like Roblox also hire for other roles that don't have exact equivalent in web or mobile development (art and game design roles mostly). Limiting your definition of "game development" to content heavy games with low pay and longer hours, especially when the industry is moving away from that type of game with a few exceptions, doesn't make sense.

There is way more gamedev in the Bay Area than Roblox...

I was paid similar rates at a midwest non-gamedev company in early and mid-2000s. Left to get in gamedev and got a 2x salary bump instantly...

Although you're right, if you phrase OP's question as "how do you manage complexity with Ink", you could talk about specific named constructs in Ink (knots, stitches, weaves, tunnels, etc.) These are specific ways to organize a story graph and transitions, and might look like or be direct equivalents to concepts in other programming languages, but have specific names and usages in Ink. As always it's probably best to RTFM if you want to know more about how these concepts work rather than a random HN comment :) https://github.com/inkle/ink/blob/master/Documentation/Writi...

You do it to understand the problem you're working on before you start writing production code. If you understand the problem you're working on, there's no need for prototyping, which is probably true for most code an average programmer writes. I tend to write prototype code to learn how something new works before writing production code, or when I have multiple ideas how a system should work and need to iterate on them and pick what I should actually ship. If you know you need to build a specific feature and how it should work you don't have to prototype it.

Machine Zone is relatively successful. They also funded Mino Games https://minogames.com/en/, which might not be "successful" on your terms, but they've stayed in business for 10+ years which is better than many game studios

Zenith is a VR MMO that went through YC https://zenithmmo.com/. Multiverse isn't exactly an MMO, it's more of a tabletop RPG platform (think Roll20), but is also YC funded https://www.playmultiverse.com/. There might be more.

I'm a man and when I used dating apps they were entertainment. Used to say crazy shit for fun, copy and paste prewritten messages, etc.

Epic doesn't pay below market rate. They can't offer stock because they aren't public but offer cash bonuses 2x-4x salary.

I do agree with OP that (some) game developers undervalue IT. Oculus had a similar and pay rate was equal to FAANG (because it is FAANG!), so it came from culture, not pay.

This was common in console games and console SDKs had special APIs to support this. It's a decent solution to memory leak and fragmentation issues

When I first saw the headline I imagined flocks for T-Rexes devouring everything. 2.5B for all of history is more reasonable

Tiltbrush is opensource, but not actively being maintained by Google and hasn't been for a long time. Some of the original team is involved in maintaining an opensource fork, however, but this is not a Google product. Daydream was sunset a while ago and cardboard support has stopped also. VR is an interesting category for Google because there are often no services to maintain in VR apps. So, like an indie developer with a failed game, they can leave their VR apps on the Steam store with zero maintainence as long as SteamVR works. There are zero employees working on Google's VR apps except for Owlchemy, which I suspect is still around because they cost very little or they're profitable. Google Poly, which is a service related to VR, is getting shutdown.

As for VR not picking up, it didn't pick up on startup folks timeline but there has been steady growth in the market and it's close to sustainable for many developers. Facebook, Valve, Sony, Microsoft and Apple have been more persistent and came in with realistic expectations. I think this is a case where Google was premature entering the market and also premature exiting. If they re-enter they'll probably look like Microsoft trying to re-enter the mobile or tablet market in the 2010s after not succeeding in the 90s and 2000s. That's not to say that VR will "take over the world" like smartphones, but its on its way to evolving into a sustainable category with a variety of compelling use cases.

Google has bailed on VR apps (for the most part, Owlchemy is still there), so I imagine not. It'd be cool if Google Earth VR was opensource like Tiltbrush. Like Tiltbrush it was one of the foundational early VR apps that people demoed, it's fun to imagine a world where Google continued to put money into VR, but I'm actually not sure how that fits into their business outside of just another platform for Android.

It sounds like OP was talking about the same process, although they skipped mentioning bootcamp and only mentioned team selection. They also accounted for specialist pre-allocated roles. My FB experience was different than many because I was hired to a specific team. I was also the first member of that team to go through bootcamp. It was a weird exception because many of the team members came from the Oculus acquisition, and at the time Oculus had somewhat separate culture. Afaik AR/VR still hires for specific teams and roles externally, although roles in that org are also regularly filled by bootcamp grads with the right experience and/or interests

Huh, number of sprites per frame has little to do with the speed of C# in Unity. If anything it shows that Unity's default sprite renderer is inefficient.

Dear IMGUI is like the React of game dev/graphics demo UI. Shows up everywhere now

$1400 is the cost to put kids in alternative private programs (daycare/preschool). Keeping kids in (public) kindergarten is "free". I put that in quotes because pandemic kindergarten requires significantly more parent involvement. $1400 a month could look like a bargain compared to losing a full-time salary or could look like too high a cost to justify having both parents work. In dual parent hetero relationships, it's usually the mom that drops out of the workplace