@tef oh, oh yeah. Rust’s whole ouvre is not that at all. I mean there are cases where some refactors are easy and really safe because of the ownership model and borrow-checker, but exploratory programming is not - broadly-speaking - what I would associate with Rust.
@glyph@tef I've been struggling with expressing this for a long time, with the love that roguelikes and procedural games tend to get in the circles I run in online.
I want hand-crafted experiences. I moved away from general-purpose tabletop games to curated indie experiences a long time ago for the same reason.
(Doesn't mean I don't still like an occasional D&D slashfest, but that's precisely because it's the specific experience I want, not because "you can play any kind of story in D&D").
@tess@tef There's a strong temptation to lean in this direction when one is interested in both the technology and the experience-crafting that goes into games, because the tech is super hard already, and by the time we have something working, we desperately want to have an actual experience to play with, without doing 3-4x the work over again. So some kind of procedural generation seems almost necessary to get over that hurdle. But the sad reality is that it's a corner you can't cut.
also the procgen content that we do enjoy is very heavily tailored by artists who use code as their brush, and who deeply understand those algorithms. it takes MORE time to develop well, not less.
@tess@tef This is where my limited reservoir of empathy for the "prompt engineers" out there comes from too. I understand that they want to make stuff and their stupid limited human hands and brains can't move fast enough to do it. Much like mine.
@glyph@tef quite the opposite; it's fine if the tech is rudimentary/jury-rigged; the game experience is what is important.
It's why there are very few really compelling tech demo games, but a lot of really great hacks of existing games and games built with very simple off-the-shelf tools.
@tef I don't think the analogy holds. If what I've read online is accurate, the reason they don't build the whole plane out of the black box is that the material used to construct the black box is too heavy. Rust is more like a method of engineering that's kind of tedious, and energy-intensive at construction time (the long compile times), but uses lightweight material to build a robust thing.
@tef Taking the analogy further, I think interpreted or JIT-compiled languages (Python, JVM languages, .NET, etc.) are kind of like black-box material. Yet we build our whole applications out of them. Maybe that's one reason why our computers don't fly (in the figurative sense of being really fast) as we think they should. That's why, in principle, I like the idea of developing a whole application in Rust, though I haven't yet done it.
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