ye_olde_gamer

Not the ones I've applied to. If a company can't even tell you about itself without hyperbole, why bother?

Side note, but fun fact! Fortnite, the uberpopular battle royale game, is actually itself a mod of the original Fortnite (now called "Fortnite: Save the World").

Originally a tower defense game (you build structures and traps to defend your base against invading alien zombies), some Epic & Unreal Tournament developers decided to fork it into a PvP (competitive player-vs-player) battle royale game instead, loosely based off Player Unknown's Battlegrounds.

It became a surprise hit, propelling Fortnite from "niche DIY tower defense game" to global pop-culture phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite_Battle_Royale#Develop...

(edit: this was reposted... old comment was in the wrong thread)

Only if you limit yourself to a particular kind of company, I think? I've worked as a dev for decades, but not for proper, actual tech companies... mostly a mixture of small biz and nonprofits. No two orgs were alike, even though my job at each one was very similar.

Speaking of Easy Anti Cheat, it's coming to Linux! https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-la...

I think there's a slight distinction to be made between "games that have built-in low/no-code content editors" and "games that can be modded via an SDK, but you have to code".

The former are good for any creative kid (or adult!) and don't require you to learn a programming language, just logical thinking (as in logic gates/flows). The latter, depending on tooling, can require everything from simple Lua scripts (a common game modding language) all the way up to learning UnrealEngine or Unity.

Games with built-in content editors:

* Warcraft & Starcraft series (oldies but goodies)

* Fortnite

* Minecraft

* Neverwinter Nights series

* Divinity: Original Sin series

* Age of Empires series

Code-moddable games: Too many to list, see here: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Moddable/#p=0&tab=Top...

In particular I'd check out Warcraft, Neverwinter Nights' DM mode, and the DOS editor for a good sampling of what the industry can offer. They are a great stepping stone to actual programming, with triggers, conditionals, and other flow control structures all wrapped behind a veneer of fantasy gaming.

(edit: sorry for potato formatting. no idea how HN handles text formatting)

I would hate to work for a company that treats me as commodity labor, bidding for my time but none of my values or interests.

That's not to say salary should be secret (dear god, no), but how cool a company is IS an important metric in and of itself.

Maybe let him try modding existing games? Steam's community workshop pages are thriving, especially for easily modded titles like Bethesda games.

Back in the day, Warcraft III had a built-in script and level editor and people thrived on making mods and entire new types of games with it (murder mysteries, tower defense, battle royale, DOTA...). It's how I got my start as a coder, modding games that I enjoyed without the boring pressure of "business logic".

I think Fortnite itself has a creative mode with limited logical programming: https://www.firetechcamp.com/course/build-an-escape-room-in-...

Proper modding support is supposed to arrive soon: https://www.pcgamer.com/fortnite-creative-mod-support/

Eh, we'd probably just have kept buying Fortnite skins and never have heard about this to begin with.

If nothing else, Epic managed to lower in-app commissions for small indie devs, which is a small win at least.

Epic's first-party games are often a showcase / development driver for new versions of UE, though (the way Unreal, the game, first popularized UE, the engine). If Epic can't publish their own games on iOS anymore, they would have less incentive/ability to iterate UE on that platform even if that license wasn't canceled.

It's a loss for cross-platform gaming altogether. Apple just really doesn't give a damn about their users =/

Fortnite notwithstanding, Epic also makes the Unreal Engine, which is one of the biggest ones alongside Unity -- especially for cross-platform games. Hindering iOS development of UE will affect a lot of other game devs, both huge and indie.