shinymark

Device support is a nightmare from a game development perspective if you're coding in C++ and using the GPU directly. Figuring out why the black box shader compiler is crashing on a particular device is not fun.

I'm a 35 year founder of a small company in San Francisco. I had never heard of Venmo until recently. The dividing line among my team is around 30 years old. Below 30 -> use Venmo all the time. Above 30 -> never heard of it.

That may be true but tech-wise no casual game I'm aware of needs Metal so the logic doesn't follow. (Specifically casual games that I've played are not pushing performance so a more performant low level API doesn't help.)

PAL vs NTSC perhaps?

This description made me chuckle. It reads to me like someone was intentionally concocting the most complex and least efficient method of programming a computer.

I come from a game development background and my view on things is admittedly affected by having to deal with issues related to real time efficiency.

Agreed. This is why single player game AI can be made fun with simple FSMs and logic models.

Isn't the hosting the commodity part of the equation and the creation of the game where the valuable IP is?

You'd need to contact Disney. They own the IP now.

The price is under NDA but I can say that there is separate, special devkit hardware for PS4 and it costs more than a consumer unit.

Are you confusing the Unity and Unreal engines perhaps?

One counter argument I've considered is industry excitement (I'm a game developer). No one in my network was excited about 3D TVs. No one in my network was excited about the Kinect. Both seem to have failed.

Almost everyone in my network is excited about VR. Having the content creators on board is huge.

I was the producer and an engineer on Grim Fandango Remastered, a remaster of one of the first games to use Lua (2.5, later 3.0 alpha). And the lead engine programmer on the original game in 1998, Bret Mogilefsky, added coroutines to the Lua language in the game engine before they were officially added as an official language feature. They are very important for scripting adventure gameplay in an intuitive way for non-engineers and helped the original team ship Grim Fandango in 1998. It was similar to what LucasArts had done with SCUMM, their adventure game domain specific language, previously.

To reference SomeCallMeTim's comment - the way the save game system worked in Grim Fandango was to serialize the entire Lua environment! Stack, all code, etc! And too jamesu - when you patch the game you patch the code that was serialized into the save game! The story behind all of this in Grim is pretty interesting.

If anyone is interested in more details please come to the Game Developers Conference this year as I'm giving a talk on the technical details of how the original game and the remaster works. Oliver Franzke and I will cover both the Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle remasters.

In case anyone here hasn't heard of Fig they are crowd funding equity investment into videogames.

More info on their site here: https://www.fig.co/

CoD seems highly likely. I can't think of any other idtech 3 engine descendant that is still going in year 2010+.

One funny side effect of this was that dev kits for the PS3 were rack mounted 1U (?) units. As a game developer this was ridiculous because we each had one of these on our desks, usually with a tv sitting directly on top of it. Thankfully this was changed to something reasonable on PS4. The PS4 dev kits are pretty cool looking IMO.

Yes, it is awful. I've spent significant time in Japan and can't believe how quiet the trains are - including the high-speed bullet trains - compared to the awful screeching of the train I grew up riding: BART.

If it exists anywhere it would be in third party publishing deals where the developer takes an advance on royalties with the possibility of more royalties if the project is profitable. I've been involved in a few deals like this and although I have no proof of Hollywood Accounting I've had my suspicions.

We're using rclone for a nightly offsite backup to Backblaze B2. It's working well for us.

Great question! Perhaps tech related to mp3 compression and miniaturizing storage. I can't name any specific contributors, however.

While thinking about this it made me feel like that is an example of a powerful force of history - "to the victor goes the spoils." There was a lot of tech foundation innovated by competitors in related products that made the iPod possible but since the iPod was the breakout success of the era it's all some of us can remember.

I find Mercurial so much easier to use than Git. Many of the concepts are similar but the hg interface feels much easier to learn and use.

If Slack's desktop client was written in efficient C++ using platform specific UI framworks it would likely be one to two orders of magnitude more efficient across all important metrics. Unfortunately the desktop app is basically an entire web browser instance running JavaScript code.

I can see the appeal, however. Write once run anywhere is a hell of a drug.

I've used Scaleform a good amount. It's not 100% compatible with stock Flash but it's pretty darn close in the use cases I've been exposed to.

Scaleform has a complex code base but clearly it is possible to reverse engineer the Flash runtime and make a compatible player.

Hi, I'm Mark Cooke, CEO of Shiny Shoe and project lead on Merica Match. Our goal with Merica Match was to do a Colbert-esuqe lampooning of the election within the context of what we believe is a high quality casual match-3. In the game players can choose from Trump, Clinton, Sanders, and Cruz as they try to help their favorite candidate match their way to the White House. Merica Match is a re-imagining of one of our previous games with a new theme so we had some existing retention/monetization data to give us at least a little confidence that players would like the game and that it could be a viable addition to our portfolio.

While I wish we had released the game six months ago when many more candidates were in the pool, no Pokemon Go hoovering up mindshare, and even more political shenanigans to make fun of I'm glad we got this out in time for the conventions. Like most small studios launching a mobile game we're struggling for visibility and don't have a huge UA budget. If anyone has any feedback on the game I'd love to hear it. I can also answer any questions about development or design decisions.

In the case of DotT a significant amount of the original game code was re-used. Both the C run-time as well as all the original SCUMM code, a domain specific language invented by a team at LucasArts for creating adventure games.

On top of that is a modern C++11 engine harness that inter-operates with the original code, provides platform services, adds a brand new rendering system and art pipeline for the remastered art, etc.

Nice write-up Cheese! And good work on the Linux port.

I'm Mark Cooke, CEO of Shiny Shoe and producer on both the Day of the Tentacle and the Grim Fandango remasters. If anyone has any questions about the production of the remasters I'd be happy to try to answer.

Agreed. It seems likely Unity is on the IPO path.

I have no proof for this but I'd guess they are making a lot of their money from their video ad network. By making it super easy to integrate into mobile games built with the engine they get a lot of ad publishers on board easily and can then sell ad space.

Lots of games use C# because the popular Unity engine uses Mono as a runtime for user code.

Anecdotally I have some friends writing business software at various BigCo companies that use C#.

Edit: it's perhaps worth mentioning that there is some more nuance to the Unity situation with their IL2CPP tech. Bottom line: engine users are writing C#.

This is how all traditional game financing deals work and isn't anything unusual. How the recoupment on the advance on royalties is calculated is where you can usually see if the deal is generous or not. Sometimes the entity funding (in the old days it would always be a publisher like EA) would try to set recoupment terms that made it difficult to ever earn a royalty for the developer taking the advance.

As someone running a bootstrapped small business that lives and dies on cashflow while we try to reach larger success that statement struck me as crazy.

It would be fun to spend some time working in a venture backed company since it's so different from the reality I operate in currently.