YesBox

Thank you! I'm fueled by passion more than dedication.

A few weeks ago I was curious about this too:

   - - Total days - 1631
   Engine:          610
   Pathing / Roads: 287
   Features:        477
   Marketing:       45
   Burnout:         130
   Other:           82

The game engine is cross-platform ready, but as a solo dev I'm just targeting Windows for now.

You're welcome!

I've been working on Metropolis 1998[1] for +4 years now. Custom C++ engine built with a modified version of SFML 2.5 and SQLite.

Creating my own engine was both a personal and strategic decision for me. I was really worried about running into performance issues with generalist engines, and I did not want the friction of working with someone else's mental model. Pretty sure that friction would have caused so much burnout for me. There's also the long payoff of operating in an environment that you understand top to bottom.

I ignored all the advice about making smaller games first, creating an engine first, etc. Metropolis 1998 is my first game and so far it's working out just fine. But your mileage will vary.. I started development with 10+ years of software experience and fond memories of Rollercoaster Tycoon and SimCity 2000/4.

I only add what I need. There's no level/scene editors (outside of the game being one itself :P ). No scene graphs. Shaders are coded by hand. Right now the entire game is about 45MB.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

There's another great comment by daxfohl that I saved. The "complacency" at scale worries me [1]

Copied to save you a click:

> I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency". Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and go back to its original approach, or mix the two, or whatever. Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted.

> What I've seen is that after the initial dopamine rush of being able to do things that would have taken much longer manually, a few iterations of this kind of interaction has slowly led to a disillusionment of the whole project, as AI keeps pushing it in a direction I didn't want.

> I think this is especially true if you're trying to experiment with new approaches to things. LLMs are, by definition, biased by what was in their training data. You can shock them out of it momentarily, whish is awesome for a few rounds, but over time the gravitational pull of what's already in their latent space becomes inescapable. (I picture it as working like a giant Sierpinski triangle).

> I want to say the end result is very akin to doom scrolling. Doom tabbing? It's like, yeah I could be more creative with just a tad more effort, but the AI is already running and the bar to seeing what the AI will do next is so low, so....

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784594

I just retried this with my reddit account (game dev stuff)

Last block of text from copilot :/

-----------

If you want, I can also break down:

Their posting style (tone, frequency, community engagement)

How their work compares to other indie city builders

What seems to resonate most with Reddit users

Just tell me what angle you want to explore next.

Additionally, you can open up copilot.microsoft.com or w/e and ask it to summarize any reddit users (and presumably HN) posts. Not just the content, but their emotional state (without prompting).

[0] Note: last I tried this was months ago, things may have changed.

By the time I was in high school, we had laptop carts that were rolled out for a few classes (as in a handful of times per year). This was 2004+. We also had computer labs since elementary school. Iirc laptops were used when labs were booked up.

I recall the experience being distracting. Computers are more fun than classes. No matter how much you lock down the machine, a kid will figure a way to make it more interesting than class. Computers can do so much. Children are curious.

I remember sneaking in flash games, ms paint/kidpix, browsing the web and whatever.

Anecdotal.. but i certainly wasn’t the only kid fooling around.

I don’t know what the “right amount” is, but I turned out ok. Though the iPhone was introduced after I graduated high school

Unlike baking bread, It can take decades for an artist to become experienced enough to create something of value.

Some art, like classical music composition, is and has been propped up by grants and wealthy donors since forever.

Whether that’s a good allocation of resources is of course entirely subjective :)

Reading the comments made me want to check the Steam Hardware Survey [0].

Some quick facts (Dec 2025 -> Jan 2026):

- Windows 10 gained more users than Windows 11 :D

- Linux lost users :(

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Neat. I cant comment on your work (unfamiliar territory).

But, I looked at all the images and there is a consistent loss of red/yellow and gain of blue/green in the 0.5bpp versions. It's subtle, but noticeable on my mid-grade monitor.

Hehe, you created quite the dog pile. Here's my woof:

IMO you only need to look at the 30+ year history of Linux to see how wrong this prediction is. There will be a small group of people who do as you say, but the other 95% will happily pay for someone else to take care of their problem. Convenience is the supreme king of the American market.

Agreed. Microsoft tried this with Mixer (twitch competitor) and shut it down a year later. They paid top streamers handsomely to be exclusive

They’re targeting game developers too. Source: me, a game dev

Started two weeks ago. Someone claimed people were pretending to trade coins related to my game. (Huh?)

Week later I was told I could make thousands of dollars. Today it was life changing money. Wanted me to promote it too.

Agreed! LLMs are a force multiplier for real products too. They're going to augment people who are willing to do the real work.

But, Im also wondering if LLMs are going to create a new generation of software dev "brain rot" (to use the colloquial term), similar to short form videos.

I should mention in the gamedev world, it's quite common share because sharing is marketing, hence my perspective.

I've noticed a huge drop in negative comments on HN when discussing LLMs in the last 1-2 months.

All the LLM coded projects I've seen shared so far[1] have been tech toys though. I've watched things pop up on my twitter feed (usually games related), then quietly go off air before reaching a gold release (I manually keep up to date with what I've found, so it's not the algorithm).

I find this all very interesting: LLMs dont change the fundamental drives needed to build successful products. I feel like I'm observing the TikTokification of software development. I dont know why people aren't finishing. Maybe they stop when the "real work" kicks in. Or maybe they hit the limits of what LLMs can do (so far). Maybe they jump to the next idea to keep chasing the rush.

Acquiring context requires real work, and I dont see a way forward to automating that away. And to be clear, context is human needs; i.e. the reasons why someone will use your product. In the game development world, it's very difficult to overstate how much work needs to be done to create a smooth, enjoyable experience for the player.

While anyone may be able to create a suite of apps in a weekend, I think very few of them will have the patience and time to maintain them (just like software development before LLMs! i.e. Linux, open source software, etc.).

[1] yes, selection bias. There are A LOT of AI devs just marketing their LLMs. Also it's DEFINITELY too early to be certain. Take everything Im saying with a one pound grain of salt.

Not mine, but the reason I find this interesting is how long it took to reach that point.

4 months! Each LLM improvement pushes this further and further out. Depending on the complexity of the project, there'll be a point where 4 months turns into 6, 8, 12, etc months until the code generated by the LLM is too large for it to manage. Lots of interesting implications.

Thanks, haven’t heard of this one!

This year I've been diving into Game dev books and Harry Potter fan fiction. There's a lot of great reads out there. I assume having an entire world built for you removes a lot of the heavy lifting (as a writer).

GameDev:

- The Masters of Doom

- The Doom Guy

- Play Nice

- Press Reset

- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

- Console Wars

- Ask Iwata

- Embed with Games

HP Fanfic:

- All The Young Dudes (by MsKingBean89) [student life of the Marauders]

- Grey Space (by noaacat) [Pre Hogwarts. Focuses on parental abuse. One scene I'll never forget (paraphrasing) is when another student at school notices Harry's bruises, slides up her sleeve, and implies she slipped too]

- Just started the Glasslight series (noaacat).

I also reread the entire Harry Potter series, and revisited a handful of Redwall books. I find it interesting how I loved RW as a kid/teen, was bored out of my mind with it in my 20s, and now I love it again.

Every time I think about EVs, I become filled with dread thinking about what will happen if an area loses power for an extended period of time. I used to live in an area that had transformers blow from rain showers.

At least you could hook up a generator to pump gas at a gas station.

:/ Life's about trade offs.

Edit: Whoops.. Im not against EVs to be clear. But from a safety POV, having two different energy sources is safer than having one. Im not sure if you'll understand this if you haven't lived in a very snowy state.

Over time, do you think this process could lock you into an inflexible state?

I'm reminded of the trade off between automation and manual work. Automation crystalizes process, and thus the system as a whole loses it's ability to adapt in a dynamic environment.

Beautifully done! What more can I say?

Those disc drive sounds are so cool

heh, Im using this font in my game. Picking fonts is hard, and I feel like I've just dipped my toe in the water so far. Im not 100% satisfied with the non-monospace font I use (Adobe Source Sans), but I have more important things to focus on right now

Everything you see fits into a 64kb executable.

So happy I bought this game on GOG before they replaced it with the revamped version (modern looking art, etc).

I played through the orc campaign last year and had fun. It's definitely aged, but it makes me wonder if something like that could exist today. Story games are popular, and I think always will be (people like stories).

Instead of a solo protagonist, can we bring back the hero (a la WarCraft III) and their army? Or even the invisible god like WC2?

Thanks for putting this together. Shaders are something I wish I had the time to dive deep into, but since I'm making a game, my time is very limited for the time being. i.e. I only learn what I need to.

Only critique is.. if you're sharing to teach, your compact/one line [460] char GLSL code is a poor delivery mechanism.

C++ keeps getting bigger and bigger :D

Thanks for sharing

Same. I go one step further and create a macro _STOP which is defined as w/e your language's DebugBreak() is. And if it's really important, _CRASH (this coerces me to fix the issue immediately)

Im a encryption noob. Less than a noob. But something I've been wondering about is how can homomorphic computing be opaque/unencryptable?

If you are able to monitor what happens to encrypted data being processed by an LLM, could you not match that with the same patterns created by unencrypted data?

Real simple example, let's say I have a program that sums numbers. One sends the data to an LLM or w/e unencrypted, the other encrypted.

Wouldn't the same part of the LLM/compute machine "light up" so to speak?

Thanks for the WL :)

I was also inspired by RCT and played it a ton growing up. So 4 years ago I started working on a City Builder in that style w/ a custom engine[1]

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/