Also been enjoying Sea of Stars, it’s like the modern love child of Super Mario RPG, Lunar and Chrono Trigger
Indie Game Developer working in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Also been enjoying Sea of Stars, it’s like the modern love child of Super Mario RPG, Lunar and Chrono Trigger
Dnsimple for me. Swapped from GoDaddy like 10 years ago and haven’t really felt the need to explore elsewhere, the costs are pretty good and never had any issues.
Re-iterating TeaHands and Walops points. I think for me the biggest one is to start small. Like…pick something small, and then go smaller than that. I find that it can be useful to set a bronze/silver/gold endpoint for yourself:
This can help with motivation, because “failing” can often make you stop working because you de-motivated yourself, but not quite reaching your furthest estimation is motivation to push yourself.
Also something to keep in mind is that if you don’t make your bronze goal at first, this just means that you have a skill that needs to be improved: scoping. This is something everybody struggles with. I have been a professional gamedev for 10 years and I still scope things to how I think things should go, or I scope time to “feature-complete” (ie it ticks the all the boxes it was supposed to), but not “complete” (there might be bugs, the art doesn’t look right/etc…)
Also, version control is super useful, not just for tracking down bugs as Walop called out, but also for motivation. If you commit at least one thing at the end of everyday, you are basically keeping a journal of your work. This can be useful to look back on and realize even if you feel like you didnt get that much done, you can go back and see “hey I actually did all this stuff over the last week!”
I have a pretty basic org-roam setup I think. I keep my org files all in a directory called “org” that I sync with syncthing (previously I used Dropbox), and whenever I setup a new machine, I just grab that folder and put it at my user root (with Dropbox I would just symlink the folder from “~/Dropbox/org” to “~/org”).
Now no matter what machine I am on and where I make my changes I have them all up to date.
I generally have large nodes that contain all my knowledge, and I split them up as they get too big. E.g I used to have a single UnityEngine node, but over time I have split it up into many different nodes: EditorWindow, ScriptableObjects/UnitTesting/etc…
I have at least one node for each of my projects, and there is a “Tasklist” heading in each of those project nodes which contain all my TODOs, those project files are tagged with the name of the project, so that I can easily write an org-agenda search to grab all the TODOs from a single project into a single view without anything else I have stored in the file (which includes a project synopsis, architecture notes/UML diagrams, general notes, etcc…).
Since I am already in emacs when I am writing code, this keep it very simple for me to have this information as accessible as all my code files are. When I discover a new language feature or have to look something up, I just open up the node for that language, and put that new information in, linking to the source where i grabbed that snippet, or where the full MSDN documentation is stored if I need to go more in depth that my short description I write it. Copying down the information helps me internalize it, and I can easily just search through that file for information I have stored. This means that even if I don’t have internet access, I have access to all my previously looked up information I maybe have forgotten.
Lumberyard was just a fork of cryengine, that’s not what required a rewrite. They threw away all the FPS work that they hired a company to make for them, and redid that from scratch, and then also just rewrite systems all the time because they have no plan.
Star Citizen is the freelancer sequel, it’s just stuck in development hell
A Hat in Time and Yooka Kaylee scratch that Banjo itch pretty well.
The first time playing Elite with a headset was magical. Looking around my ship and while flying through space (or even just while sitting docked in the stations), and the spatial audio coupled with VR just put shivers down my spine. That engine whine chefs kiss
Seconding Bloodlines, this game has stuck with me since I first played it as a child. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the sequel, but also dreading that it ends up being awful and ruins any chance of more games.
SSDs have been around for a long time, and have been affordable for quite a while now. While optimization should always be happening on the developer side, its not crazy to start requiring 30+ year old technology to use modern games.
600ish hours in Hunt at this point, and while you can give away your position to the idle players, that only matters at the top end of the Matchmaking system where the “bush-wookies” lie. With the self-revive for solos trait that got added, it helped even the playing field a lot. Previously getting hit by a sniper was a game-over for solos while for a duo/trio it was the start of an encounter, with your teammates able to revive you after they kill or chase the sniper off. With self-revive you have a chance of popping up when they aren’t watching, or when they are pushing to your body from their perch, and either fighting or retreating.
Also I wouldn’t say the developers have a toxic relationship with the player base at all. They are constantly making fun changes to the game and adding in new features to change things up. They also test out new features during temporary events and see how people like them before implementing the into the game wholesale. And this is done via looking at gameplay statistics, not just listening to the very vocal subset of people who hate any change to the game.
Really anything by Grant Kirkhope, Banjo Kazooie Yooka Laylee, etc, and on the Rare train, Donkey Kong Country 2 had great music.
Also love the Undertale soundtrack.
I’ve been unity Unity professionally for 10 or so years now before I went indie, but I generally love FOSS software so I have been trying to learn Godot and plan to swap over after my current project is finished. I will say that the documentation support for Godot Mono isn’t that great. I hate python-esque languages so I will still be using the Mono version, but often it requires a bit more googling or trial and error to make sure something works in the mono version.
Honestly this seems like the biggest downside of federation. It makes sense for like furry_gamedev to have its own community, but having multiple general purpose gamedev communities seems like unnecessarily splintering. I wonder if Lemmy will either add a way to combine them on the user end, or for the community side to be able to link themselves together.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of communities acting as entry points. Each one could act as a “node” which helps for redundancy in case one goes down, and if it only works one way then a community could remain separate if they really wanted to, but the larger community could still have posts from B showing up.
I don’t know if I could focus on work when I am jamming out to a song about drinking Pina Colada’s with my friends :D
Lyrics really mess with me working, although if its in a foreign language I find it a little bit less distracting. I had a friend that had a Pandora channel for instrumental movie scores that he would use when writing novels. But after a while he realized that upon re-reading his stuff he would know what was playing when he wrote certain parts lol. The epic battle scene music from LotR would change how he wrote compared to just flying over the shire.
Just throwing out another one since I remembered it. When I really have to crunch mode, I usually stick on the Vicious Delicious album from Infected Mushroom and just block out the world while its going.
Oh I’ll have to try out the Social Network soundtrack, thanks for the reccomendation!
I feel like Unity has just cut off the top of their user funnel with this and guaranteed their slow fall into obsolescence. Large companies using Unity won’t move away immediately, neither will many indie devs currently working on projects they are too deep into to pivot. But any new game developer will either go to Unreal or Godot if they want something ready made to ship. Companies will see what all the new talent is using, and will slowly start moving away from wanting to use Unity, since their incoming employees have other skills.
It won’t be a fast death. The “leaked” cap at 4% will quiet people down and not make anyone go bankrupt, but I do think they have irreversibly hurt their future with this wild swing.