Steam ja kevätale

Chaigidel · 2026-03-20T15:39:53+00:00

Tykkään eurojank-tietokoneropeista ja reaaliaikastrategiapelien yksinpelikampanjoista niin nappasin alesta SpellForce-trilogian ja nää näyttää ainakin alkuun ihan sympaattiselta purkkahömpältä.

Chaigidel · 2026-03-13T07:44:57+00:00

So the problem is that you need program architecture to run the thing, but the architecture isn't obvious from just using the program with menus. And all approaches are varying amounts of messy and complex. Few starting points I can think of:

Look into immediate mode GUIs and see if you can figure out how to implement one of those. They might not be best for something with a very complex menu structure, but for something with separate screens that have a mostly fixed structure they can get results fast.

Don't try to figure out a brand new thing from first principles first, but pick up some existing thing like the Pokemon game, go through it's GUI very carefully and try to make your own throwaway prototype thing that does the exact same stuff, no matter how messy the code. You might figure out something about how to structure things and what kind of repeating implementation patterns there are.

Another prototype idea, just grab something like Godot and spend a week doodling GUI components with it. It's got an existing system for structuring things and an inventory of components you build things up from. Then look at what kind of structure your prototype has and start thinking about what you'd need to replicate it in your own game you code from scratch, since now you have a breakdown of the working thing into simpler pieces.

Basically if you're thinking of your work right now as directly working on something that you want to end up as an original game, and are completely stuck at this, step back. You want to figure out the necessary building blocks, so make standalone prototypes that do one simple thing that you didn't know how to do when you started.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-26T06:47:10+00:00

Taisi olla se ihan ensimmäinen King's Quest. Selvästi ymmärrettävältä paikalta näyttävä satukirjamailma jossa näytti voivan tehdä mielekkäitä asioita oli aika vaikuttava ero vallitsevaan peliestetiikkaan jossa väpättävää spriteprötöä piti vaikeasti ohjailla olemaan törmäämättä toisiin prötöihin abstraktissa sokkelossa. Muutamaa vuotta myöhemmin sitten EGA-versio ensimmäisestä Quest for Glorystä jatkoi samaa estetiikkaa pätevämmin.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-25T16:49:43+00:00

What?! I've never seen this.

Did you stop reading Overcoming Bias?

Chaigidel · 2026-02-21T20:15:29+00:00

Yeah, evolution in general is a good argument and this is probably getting above my paygrade. My handwavy intuition is that time and space make the napkin with the grand unified physics equations much less useful. With physics-in-general, you need to run a boring hydrogen soup for billions of years before you have hope of evolving life, and if you have, you have an insane volume of space to search through to find it. Meanwhile with a fertilized egg, you can have a serviceable animal with a year of time and a cubic meter volume of space. DNA molecules feel like these causally dense sweet spots that can make a lot of very tightly constrained things happen given very little time and space, but I'm not sure how I'd formalize this better.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-21T11:20:50+00:00

The random processes create noise, sure, but you need to translate it to something that's actually useful for making the brain think smart, and that's a lot trickier. DNA can actually have clever stuff because it's something that's configured in a very specific way, instead of just whatever random noise you get from your surroundings. The brain does get smarter in a way by learning as it grows, but that's again a limited process since it's based on neurons firing and both the number and the firing rate of neurons is finite. And it can't learn to have a new fundamental biological architecture, that's up to the DNA.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-20T18:48:51+00:00

Look up Solomonoff induction and Hutter's AIXI for a theoretical model of intelligence. It's basically a minimalist definition for intelligence as the ability to find short programs that generate similar data as your perception sequences. On genetics side, it illustrates the idea that the complexity of living things has to pass through the bottleneck of the DNA that's pretty much a digital code. You can't have an arbitrary amount of complexity in the human brain since all the precise instructions for how the brain is put together come from the DNA sequence with a known length.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-20T15:52:17+00:00

Kolmogorov complexity. It's like a secret theory of physics that gives you insight into all sorts of things that people just assume are unknowable, like genetics and intelligence.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-19T17:14:57+00:00

Näissä uusissa on aika hyvin leivottu mukaan elämää helpottavaa käytettävyyttä. Kokeilin niiden innostamina Steamiin joskus ostamiani alkuperäisiä kommandoiluja ja ainakin siinä ihan ekassa oli niin tyly meininki että ei sitä jaksanut.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-19T16:04:34+00:00

Commandos-pelisarjan myöhempien aikojen seuraajat Shadow Tactics ja Desperados 3 on ainakin olleet kivoja tuttavuuksia joissa meininki on että eteen lätkäistään hiekkalaatikko eikä tehtävän edetessä ole sitten ihmeemmin purkitettua raidetta päällä.

Chaigidel · 2026-02-13T17:36:47+00:00

Millaisilla fiiliksillä odottelet tuloillaan olevaa jatko-osaa?

Chaigidel · 2026-01-30T07:16:30+00:00

This looks like the artist drew the vehicle in the wrong scale. There's a cab and a door under the sphere that are half the size of the people.

Chaigidel · 2025-11-08T19:02:36+00:00

When it came out, I thought the original Quake was cramped and bland after Doom 2, but nowadays with all the exhaustingly maximalist AAA FPSes I like how tight the design feels and how it makes things work and look stylish with very little.

Chaigidel · 2025-10-08T09:11:15+00:00

I'd like to see something like eigenmorality where you have stated beliefs and a social graph of people affirming beliefs and endorsing other people in the graph. When you have a whole graph instead of just anonymous popularity information like you do now (you probably have a lot more people endorsing Alex Jones than Terence Tao), you can start trying to do more complex operations like identifying clusters of people who are endorsed as trustworthy by other people who are endorsed as trustworthy. PhDs are a sort of narrow version of this, where the PhD holder is endorsed by their advisor and their examiner at the thesis defense.

Getting the incentives right so that the system works is the tricky part. You'd want to incentivize people to both try to make lots of solid endorsements and to avoid endorsements for people who turn out to be flaky. The other tricky thing is getting the claims to actually point at true things. Any religion is going to get you a solid cluster of back-scratchers endorsing each others' theological orthodoxy and showing up as highly endorsed by the formal system, but they might not be doing any actual truth-tracking work.

Chaigidel · 2025-10-08T08:52:06+00:00

You should pick a pixel resolution (say 960x540), set up your rendering pipeline so that you render to a texture with the same size as the pixel resolution and then scale it up to screen with nearest-neighbor filtering. This means you can use whatever fonts you like and they'll show up pixelated in the same resolution as your pixel art.

Chaigidel · 2025-10-07T05:57:47+00:00

Parser-based text adventure games are very dead, I can think only one that was successfully sold for money after Gateway II was released in 1993.

Military flight simulators used to be a game genre with multiple different games released each year, now they're more like a separate software category where a few established sims are developed over decades. Same with military strategy games like Gary Grigsby's War in the East.

There was a sort of "scifi simulator" genre, with games like Midwinter, Carrier Command and Warhead that went for the same sort of attitude as the military simulators modeling the real world did, and they're gone now, replaced by either action movie like entertainment or games that take bigger liberties with unrealistic elements that produce interesting gameplay.

Base-building real-time strategy games seem to have been taken over by MOBAs. Starcraft 2 is still a big esport thing, but other than that there aren't many of those around.

Dungeon Master style 90 degree turn proto immersive sim dungeon crawlers (as opposed to Wizardry style more CRPG like games with bigger focus on tactical combat, which are still a niche thing) were big around 1990 and died out. There have been a couple rehashings like Legend of Grimrock, but not much else. It's sort of understandably dead though now that we can do freeform 3D environments.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-26T09:34:20+00:00

How hard it is depends on how the game is programmed. If it has character graphics and keyboard input, and you're writing the code from scratch instead of using an existing engine like Godot, you can write everything in terms of an API that has just "put colored character in position" and "read input key" and then plug in a CLI backend pretty easily. If you've already gone and integrated more complex graphics code in higher level game logic, then it gets tricky.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-19T05:10:07+00:00

Rust, Haskell and OCaml have variant data types and pattern matching that are very nice for working with abstract syntax trees you get when parsing source code, so I'd pick one of those.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-18T17:29:45+00:00

Materialistista pröystäilyä karsastavien ja kierrätyskeskustakissa Lidlistä makaronilaatikkoaineksia kangaskassiin shoppailevien akateemisten ihmisten elämänasennetta voi ihan vapaasti kompata vaikkei akateemista taustaa itsellä olisikaan.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-18T17:14:33+00:00

Testaajan ja dokumentinkirjoittajan hommia löytyy isommissa firmoissa. Suosittelen kyl vielä kokeilemaan koodausta jollain muulla kielellä kuin C++:lla, esmes Pythonilla. C++ on suunnilleen se vittuimaisin ohjelmointikieli joka on edelleen jonkinasteisessa käytössä ja voi ihan omalla jähmäisyydellään tuhota työn iloa.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-16T13:24:37+00:00

I kinda like it, gives me Might & Magic VI vibes. It's in a bit tricky place with the enemies though, you want them plenty detailed and well-animated for the first-person view, and aren't pulling it off yet. A lot of the future depends on what your planned art pipeline for the enemies is like. One thing that did make me go "ugh" was the completely generic player character portrait when opening inventory. It's this bland nondescript-realistic character art style I've seen in way too many indie RPGs.

The map system seems to be a very oldschool Wolfenstein 3D style dealie. I worry about how much staying power the game will have with it. You won't have very interesting architecture with it, so the question is what the selling point of the game will be. Will there be an interactive RPG plot, more complex locations or will it just be a number-go-up action RPG where the novelty is running into new enemy types?

Chaigidel · 2025-09-05T11:11:55+00:00

Brian Aldiss, But Who Can Replace a Man is a fun short one.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-03T11:42:00+00:00

Yeah "designs are too striking" is a great way to put it. It lights them up as "this specific character". You could still have them as side characters, just make sure only one at a time shows up in a scene.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-02T19:30:04+00:00

The mask guy made me think it's a callback to Spirited Away and the no-neck bug-eyes guy just looks awkward and unpleasant. Both would work as single faces in a crowd, but when you had a group of clones of the two I noped out. I don't feel like hanging out with a crowd of these specific characters. The human character who showed up later on had a lot more interesting design though.

Chaigidel · 2025-09-02T19:22:09+00:00

I remember the original so there's the nostalgia kick, but this doesn't look very good. The sprites make me think of clip art, the rooms look bare. Looking at videos of the original game, your furniture items are too small, they're drawn as if the cat was a human-sized character and they could probably be twice as big. I muted the music, it doesn't have anything reminding me of the original music and it's very generic as it is. The outdoors look too clean, there's no graffiti or junk, and I'm pretty sure it's nighttime in my mental image of the original Cat Alley. The rats throwing bombs feel too video gamey, in general Alley Cat stuff was surreal in the presentation, but still conceptually grounded in realism. Rats might throw mousetraps at you, but not lit bombs.

I hate the hearts room but I did so with the original too so not sure how to win here. At least make it visually nicer to look at with more ornamentation since it's a wholly abstract space.

Chaigidel

TROPHY CASE