121 karma · joined February 26, 2013
4.5min review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w54iBRN8oQQ
There was also an uncomfortable amount of "thirteenth stepping" going on in my groups, where the single males running them ended up in relationships with women in the groups.
My personal opinion is that the web had a "sweet spot" somewhere between the advent of pop-up blockers, and the death of flash (aka, the widespread adoption of javascript).
When flash was around, all the focus-grabbing/context-switching/interactive media was locked behind a click-to-play flash container that could easily be ignored.
Now that flash has been replaced with javascript (along with an expectation that everyone should allow it to run because "flash bad, javascript good"), we get unblockable pop-ups, cookie banners, unresponsive pages with content that refuses to load with the rest of the page, and countless other "features" that seem to be, at best, lateral moves.
You know, I think I actually agree with you on that point, despite the rest of your post. I won't address the rest of what you said, because it'd just get nasty.
The problem, in my opinion, can be described by Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In the US (probably elsewhere too, just speaking for myself), the layer below physiological needs, like clean air, shelter, clothing, etc, is: "Get a job." Without that, you're dead.
Common Sense Skeptic has series covering all the same topics without all the repetition, and also has a series covering the current Musk/SolarCity bailout trial: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgKWj1pn3_7hRSFIypunYog/vid...
I think this is referred to as "Evergreen Content", and is encouraged by marketing/SEO companies.
Edit: Just realized I'm mentioning a small island, like you said, hehe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_Island#Ecological_ba...
Edit: Also, I can understand your sentiment for not wanting to have an indoor cat. It seems 'unnatural' to me too. I want to them to have as much freedom and joy as possible, but... I've also had outdoor cats that just get run over, so. I don't know what the right way is.
In addition to what hesdeadjim said, I'd also like to add don't blindly accept the common gamedev maxims. For example, "Make the game YOU want to play" is repeated as good advice, but I haven't found it to be very useful.
First off, if I'm working as the sole developer and have total control over design decisions, it's easier to follow that advice than if I'm working with multiple people who all play different genres of games. A lot of the time people will only use gamedev-jargon to back up their design decisions (immersion, positive feedback, vertical slices, etc), which are hard to argue about because they're so subjective and ill-defined.
Also, keep in mind how many times Level 1 gets tested. At a certain point, no matter how excited I am about the game, I'm going to get sick of playing it. From that point on, I'm no longer developing a game I want to play. I'm developing a game I should want to play but don't (I think this adds a lot to burnout). Maybe start the project as a game you want to play, but make peace with the fact that it's ultimately not for you to enjoy playing. It's for the players. You're very likely going to be sick of the game by the time it ships.
"Make it juicy" and "avoid premature optimizations" are more maxims with limited use, and are even contradictory in a lot of instances. For juice/polish: Focus on the core gameplay mechanics. Once those are set in stone, make them juicy if you want/have the time. A juicy boring game is still a boring game. For performance/optimization: If a core part of your game is having 10,000 enemies on the screen at once, you're going to have to make design decisions based on performance at the very beginning of development. Kinda related: I've shipped a game where at the beginning of development, I suggested using Multiple Render Targets (we were doing deferred rendering with the XNA Framework) to speed up the rendering (instead of rendering everything, switching render targets, rendering everything again, switching render targets, repeat...) but the lead dev took the "avoid premature optimizations" maxim to heart, and we ended up with a significantly hobbled final product on PS4s and lower-end PCs. I guess I could have gone into "crunch mode" and rewrote the entire rendering pipeline to make up for poor decisions at the start of the project, but I wasn't willing to do that.
It was my dream to make games from the age of probably 13 to ~28. I'm 35 now, and am not all that interested in games any more. I enjoy doing "gamedev" as a hobby, because I've realized my preferred method of "playing" is to program little toys I can tinker with for a few hours and then abandon. I also have MDD, so YMMV. Best of luck, though.
If that is too specific of a question, we live in different worlds. Which is fine. But OP'll probably live in a similar one soonish.
Another question I would ask, is who all is involved in this decision to move to an underprovided city? Is it just you, as the sole provider? As in, no family? How long are you willing to live there? People can, and do, live in these neighborhoods for decades at a time...
But: How willing/capable are the people you love of withstanding an attack? I don't mean an attack against you ideologically, I mean physically. Can you live the rest of your life in a normal way, after you've been told to lie down next to the vehicle being stolen, with the full knowledge that you are a point on that vehicle's path of escape? Knowing they could run you over in an instant, if they felt like it. Knowing that wasn't you that experienced that, but your daughter or son?
Are you still then okay with sacrificing your own interests, and your families, for the benefit of the city?
Edit: Agh, this just turned into more anecdotal stuff. Oh well, I guess don't have much else to add. Either way, good luck OP.
I lived in a bad neighborhood for about 20 years, and have had family living in the "same" bad neighborhood (about 10 blocks away), and the difference in crime is night and day. The main difference from what I can tell, is that nobody on my street called the cops, ever. If I didn't call, the cops/fire department wouldn't show up.
For example, we had a mentally ill meth addict wandering the streets, breaking into vacant houses, vandalizing property, etc... One day, I find him starting a fire in some brush outside our house. My neighbor's way of dealing with this? Get out the hose and put the fire out. That's it.
I called the fire department, who alerted the authorities, who detained him.
Later that day while driving around, I saw half a dozen piles of ashes where he (I assume) had set fires before wandering off to start a new one. All within a 1-2 block radius.
I honestly think I was the only one who finally called the authorities on him, because everyone else in that neighborhood is so apathetic (or maybe so suspicious of the police) that they refuse to call 911.
He could have set a house on fire and killed a family. I'm speculating, but I imagine he wouldn't have even got the first fire started in a neighborhood that is vigilant and willing to call the cops.