BiggestBulb

philomory, 7 months ago

I don’t think I could possibly pick just one.

• Playing Civilzation: Call to Power, together was one of the first shared activities I ever did with the woman who is now my wife.
• When I was in middle school, my dad made me a text-based game (mildly Roguelike, even, if I recall correctly) set at school centered around going to classes and solving puzzles/collecting school supplies.
• Years ago, I made a game myself for my then-girlfriend to play that secretly just an elaborate proposal wrapped in a video game.

Honorable mentions would go to Xenogears, Metroid 2, Ur-Quran Masters, and obscurities like Rollin’, Tranquility, and Omega, which collectively ended up defining my taste in games, more or less.

luthis, 9 months ago

Prepare to laugh your ass off.

I’m due for surgery next month to finally get my ass sewn back on after listening to this.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jDbJbCuKl4

carlytm, 10 months ago

Another +1 for Photopea from me. I had been on-and-off wrestling with Wine to get Photoshop to run since I had switched to Linux, but since discovering Photopea I haven’t felt the need to bother with that. In addition to the website version, if you aren’t religiously anti-Electron, there’s a desktop app for it on Flathub.

DevCat, 10 months ago

In 1995, Musk and his brother, Kimbal, started Zip2, a web software company, with US$28,000 of their father’s (Errol Musk) money

Tesla Motors was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who financed the company until the Series A round of funding. Both men played active roles in the company’s early development prior to Elon Musk’s involvement.

Responding to a screenshot of a CNN headline that read, “2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could help solve world hunger, says director of UN food scarcity organization,” Musk tweeted that if the U.N. World Food Program “can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

WFP director David Beasley called his bluff, and actually outlined how the organization would use the $6.6 billion. Musk, who is worth approximately $239.2 billion, never responded to Beasley.

TheVampireSaga, 10 months ago

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6736b57e-3bd2-41e0-a8e2-d04b204574e4.jpeg

End of an era, gonna miss boost till it’s on Lemmy now

ernest, 10 months ago

why not both gif

EnglishMobster, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

So! If you don't have much experience in programming, you DO NOT want to write your own engine. Period.

"I wrote my own game engine" is the kind of thing you'll see masters/doctorate computer science students (or crazy industry veterans) do. While it may be possible to write a simple text-based game that only uses the command line, it gets complicated fast.

There are some libraries out there like PyGame which let you set up "toy" games quickly (in Python), but no shipping game is going to be built entirely in PyGame.

When you're out applying for jobs in the industry, having a studio you're applying for say "We built our own engine" in 2023 is a red flag. There are multiple battle-ready game engines that have made thousands of games. Most places want to build games in either the Unreal Engine (C++) or the Unity Engine (C#). There is a third one I should mention - Godot - which is a flexible FOSS game engine. But most places use Unity or Unreal.

There is so much that goes into making a game engine. Not only are you making a game, you're making a tool that lets you make a game. You're making stuff that can read model and animation data. You're making something that can handle a bunch of different input methods. You're making something which needs to calculate lighting and collision, parse images, run scripts, save and load data, multiplayer games need a full networking model with local prediction, correction, and latency mitigation, etc.

By definition, making your own engine is untested. You are going to run into issues, whether you have 1 person or 1000. What starts off simple quickly balloons as you want to do more than just show white text on a black screen. Something like Unity has had a bunch of production games (like Hearthstone) use it and find all the issues already so you don't have to. There is literally zero reason to make your own engine today.

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I myself work at a AAA game studio, as a programmer. I've worked on the Battlefield series in the past, although it's not what I work on now.

Let me give you the advice I wish I had 15 years ago, when I was starting out: think small. It is far better to have made 10 projects in 1 year than 1 project in 10 years. The only way to "make it" as an indie dev is to be incredibly talented, incredibly lucky, and have an incredible amount of funding. Even supposed "one-man teams" like Toby Fox had help making their games; it is very difficult to make a game with 100 people working on it, let alone 1.

Make small toy projects that you can do in a weekend. Drop it if you spend more than 2 weeks on it. Don't be like me where I spent years working on a dream project that I never got in a good spot to show to anyone. When I talk to people now, when I talk to interviewers or coworkers, I don't really mention my white whale of a dream project I never finished. I mention the little games I made for gamejams, the ideas I had and how I played around with them.

It is so much more impressive to show an interviewer an active GitHub and a bunch of free games you've put on itch.io. I've literally gotten jobs because of it, but it took me years to realize I was doing the wrong thing and needed to pivot.

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With that rant out of the way. C++ is industry standard. Any programmer will need to know C++ inside and out. Even if you don't work in it directly, you're almost guaranteed to be working with something that works in C++. But C++ is a hard language to learn.

If you have taken a programming class already, I'd recommend Unity. Unity isn't as common as Unreal, but C# is easy to learn and somewhat similar to C++ (not that similar, but a lot can carry over). It is code, though, so you need to know syntax.

If you've never taken a programming class before and you're self-taught, then I'd actually recommend Unreal. Unreal has "blueprints", which is a visual scripting language. This means you don't need to know the syntax of what you want to do; you just grab nodes and connect them together. It's very easy to understand and intuitive, and it helps you build the foundation you'd use if you ever delve into the code side. You can make a whole game in blueprint, without touching code - the game won't be huge and mega-performant, but it'll be relatively easy to make and doable by a single person working on a very small project.

Bear in mind that there are other disciplines in game development other than programming as well. That's sort of the best part about making your own stuff - you have to learn to do everything, from art to design to programming. Designers typically aren't expected to know much about code, but they are expected to be creative, collaborative, and intuitively know what makes something a fun game to play. If you find out that programming isn't for you but you still really want to get into game development, making all these tiny projects is a great way to exercise your design muscles as well.

ernest, 10 months ago

I just need a little more time. There will likely be a technical break announced tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Along with the migration to new servers, we will be introducing new moderation tools that I am currently working on and testing (I had it planned for a bit later in my roadmap). Then, I will address your reports and handle them very seriously. I try my best to delete sensitive content, but with the current workload and ongoing relocation, it takes a lot of time. I am being extra cautious now. The regulations are quite general, and I would like to refine them together with you and do everything properly. For now, please make use of the option to block the magazine/author.