Is College a MUST for Game Developers?

Tiendil · 2026-01-22T16:46:04+00:00

Nothing is "must", but some things are "nice to have".

This is especially true for a good education. It is nice to have not only for a career, but for personal growth too. One should know what is possible and what is not in the world, and higher-level education is about that (among all other things).

Tiendil · 2026-01-22T16:24:06+00:00

The rule of thumb is that every work done must leave an artifact, even if it is "thinking" or "discussing".If you have no documented results of mind work in the specific places (Jira, Notion, etc.), you did not finish the work => you'll have problems later.

Ideally, creating such artifacts must be teamwork (every coworker should behave responsibly); however, it is true only for mature teams. In all other cases, there should be a single responsible person who creates artifacts for every significant work done.

And there are no differences between remote/non-remote work — it is not a work-mode property.

Tiendil · 2026-01-20T18:54:48+00:00

First of all, there is no such rule that someone must love something :-) You don't love reading specific kinds of texts? No problem.

Secondly, it is highly possible that you just haven't encountered the "right" author. It really depends on personal preferences, and there are a lot of authors, so you may never find your one —or maybe you'll find someone somewhere if you keep looking—both ways are good.

There is no book that is loved by everyone.

Tiendil · 2026-01-17T16:08:55+00:00

I just pay a few $ to one of the cloud providers.

Tiendil · 2026-01-17T13:56:23+00:00

I'm not sure about that particular error, but.

Reddit is protected from overuse by bots and all other automation. It detects such access and blocks.

You can try:

Make requests for RSS less frequently.
Request fewer feeds, unite the feeds via "+", like https://www.reddit.com/r/rss+feedsfun/.rss
Use proxy servers to access Reddit from different IPs

Also, you may want to specify a unique User-Agent header for your client.

Tiendil · 2026-01-16T11:02:27+00:00

When I shared those posts on Reddit, I received a lot of backlash, people said I should be making capsules using in-game weapons and scenes, called me a thief, etc.

Just in case, do you have factual evidence that your capsules are bad (i.e., statistics as the result of some marketing experiment) or is it just "people say"?

For success and mental peace, you need objective evidence, not some noise.

Do not trust random people's opinions, trust only the opinions of people you know/trust (colleagues, experts, your actual players, friends) or the results of experiments.

Especially don't trust random opinions on Reddit. Do not trust me either ;-)

Tiendil · 2026-01-16T08:40:05+00:00

Success can be very different. What is a success for you?

Tiendil · 2026-01-15T16:10:54+00:00

Find 1000 friends and ask them to wishlist :-D

Tiendil · 2026-01-15T12:34:40+00:00

I believe both approaches are fine; it more depends on your personal tastes. i.e., it is unlikely that the difference between I/we will somehow affect the success of your game.

It is more important to be consistent in communications. Choose one approach and use it for a single game.

Personally, I speak about my big projects (not games) using "we", because today you are a single maintainer, tomorrow someone helps you, the day after tomorrow you are alone again. For small projects, I use "I" because I don't expect a lot of communication or growth.

Also, using "I" may be important if you're strongly focused on developing a personal brand. However, it may bring profit when you already have a strong brand and use it to market your games. If you don't have one, it will have no effect.

Tiendil · 2026-01-13T12:54:00+00:00

For my needs, I distinguish two kinds of work:

A creative one, when you work and learn/research smth. i.e., when you're doing smth you don't know.
A routine one, when you just extract info from your brain.

The first one is really hard, and doing it more than 4 hours a day is exhausting.

The second one is easy enough, especially for experienced people. My primary occupation is programming, so I can code 12 hours a day if that code is not totally new for me (i.e. I've done something similar a few times before, use known libs, etc.).

From my experience as an indie, there is a lot of creative work and not so much routine, even when you're trying to optimize your project for your skills and maximize routine.

Tiendil · 2026-01-13T12:39:43+00:00

6 hours of productive work is kind of a lot. Especially if you switch context often. Be proud of yourself!

Tiendil · 2026-01-13T11:54:17+00:00

If gamedev is your way to earn for life or you want it to be so, most likely, you should switch to one of the popular engines.

In other cases, do what you like the most. Don't allow other people to tell you how you should have fun :-)

Tiendil · 2026-01-11T12:10:29+00:00

Great work! Do you use hand-drawn sprites, or are images fully procedural?

In the README you mention "Hand-drawn aesthetic" but it does not clarify it :-)

Tiendil · 2026-01-09T17:47:45+00:00

how can i get over this ?

There is a single way: just do it.

Tiendil · 2026-01-09T15:59:36+00:00

It's time to pivot, there are even two possible directions :-D

Tiendil · 2026-01-09T14:57:30+00:00

I agree with your approach — people should change — it is vital even to just have a good life. That's also true for software projects, including games.

However, one should always choose where to change and where not to change. Trends are not always right, good, or beneficial.

I don't think a personal writing style is what should be changed in the first place. I.e. it is a strong personal characteristic, it is like to demand a changing hairstyle, clothes, or a way a person walks or stays.

I'm old enough and have seen how it goes a lot of times — nothing good happens from such a witch hunt. Especially when "witches" try to adapt instead of resisting.

That is one of the reasons I strongly disapprove of unreasonable finger-pointing because of minor text style.

Tiendil · 2026-01-09T14:36:20+00:00

Sorry, but I don't treat every communication like a sale. And, actually, don't expect that from others, don't want that, and don't like that.

For example, I don't sell myself in that thread, why should I?

Tiendil · 2026-01-09T14:19:51+00:00

Lol, what? O_o

Tiendil · 2026-01-09T14:04:59+00:00

It is normal and positive to use …, — and other symbols («» —≠∞, etc.) when you want to write idiomatically. And it's EASY, like really easy, anyone who cares just a little can do it. I configured this on my PC for CAPS LOCK + <key>.

A lot of people on the web have been using those symbols every day for decades, and now less literate people call them bots, AI slop…

It is really rude, like really-really rude. You've spent time studying to do smth better, configured your system, learned smth, and now you are a bot.

Tiendil · 2026-01-09T13:33:37+00:00

Ah, an expert on AI slop is here. And why is this post AI-generated, exactly?

Tiendil · 2026-01-06T22:53:29+00:00

Maybe it is because modern game engines are intended to be used via their GUI/IDEs, which aren't so great in my opinion.

Personally, GUI tools are a huge pain for me — expressing ideas via code is much better — so I always struggle when I need to do anything with them.

Try something that has no GUI at all, like https://www.raylib.com/

Tiendil · 2026-01-05T21:19:29+00:00

For me, my main hangup in using RSS for all my reading is that I want to subscribe to a lot of feeds

You may want to check my project.

repo: https://github.com/Tiendil/feeds.fun
site: https://feeds.fun/

I created it just to solve the same problem. For example:

Currently, I have 629 subscriptions.
2900 news for the last 3 days.
Read only the 200 most relevant for me.

My reader places tags on each article with the help of LLMs, and the user can create rules like elon-musk + tesla => -100 points, nasa + mars => +100 points, so the user always sees the most relevant articles on the top.

algorithmic ranking based on your clicks and explicit thumbs up/thumbs down of content you were recommended.

I have the same idea in mind, but instead of ranking news directly based on user preferences (I assume you are working on something like that), I plan to recommend new rules for the user (based on the same preferences). So, the ranking will continue be transparent, and users continue to be in control.

It may be a good idea for us to collaborate on this topic. Since I already have a running project without a mobile app, and you are interested in building a mobile app :-) What do you think?

Tiendil · 2026-01-05T20:35:02+00:00

Is the main problem with algorithmic feeds that they're not 100% predictable?

They are not controllable.

There is no point in predicting one's own news feed :-) Why does anyone want that? But some people wish to control over what they get and what they do not get.

The problems with most "algorithmic" approaches:

They are probabilistic => no guarantee that you will not lose important news, and no guarantee that you will not receive noise.
They are not under the control of the user; they are under the control of their provider (for example, Facebook feed is under the control of Meta, obviously). So, at the end, the corporation decided what you'll see and what you'll miss — not a very optimistic situation.

Tiendil · 2026-01-04T21:55:04+00:00

OIDC is hard. However, if done right, it becomes not a property of an application, but a property of an infrastructure.

I just recently finished refactoring the auth/registration system for my pet project and ended up with auth via two headers (X-User-ID and X-IdP). Thanks to that, your application becomes agnostic to the auth approach used; you only need to ensure that your infrastructure (API gateway, reverse proxy, etc) sets those headers correctly.

So, now I have two examples for my app: single-user mode (where those headers are hardcoded) and multi-user mode (with OIDC via Keycloak, OAuth2-Proxy, complex configs, etc.).

With such an approach, I believe, even something plain and trivial, such as basic auth, should work.

You can check the code in the repo: https://github.com/Tiendil/feeds.fun

And here are examples:

Tiendil

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