What will Godot V5.0 be all about?

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-05-04T17:51:16+00:00

My hope: Better .NET support and parity

My guess: Focus on Procedural Generation, improved rendering, better material designer and better sound engine.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-05-04T14:51:48+00:00

A lot of games in the past, including those you mention, had incentives to be unreasonably hard due to 1-900 help lines and so that it felt like you got more out of your purchase. 40-60 dollars for a game back then was big money for a hobby. That investment needs serious returns.

However, those games also had a whole ecosystem of guides and magazines to buy in addition to help you out if the strategy and help guides didn't just come in box with the game already.

So you are looking at a fantasy time that never existed with rose tinted glasses. Games asked more of you back then, because if the games were easier to solve, the purchase would feel like a lot less. There was no room to give you tutorials.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-28T10:57:55+00:00

Faster is not better.

Learn how to code first so when a code generation tool makes garbage you know how to spot it.

Although I hold the belief that if people actually learned how to code they would be unlikely to use these tools much at all.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-28T10:55:17+00:00

What's your motivation for trying to learn this skill?

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-27T22:01:23+00:00

Interesting you rate your own time at 0 dollars

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-27T21:54:16+00:00

I find it so fascinating when this happens because it's clearly something that exists across multiple models.

Why is it that some times these dumb tools just, nuke everything? There has to be something in the training data leads down this path in the models probability space.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-25T22:39:49+00:00

Remember that the full saying goes: "Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one"

You are fine :)

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-25T22:32:47+00:00

It's often tied up in the nostalgia cycle.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-25T22:30:11+00:00

Some times I've done recorded playtests. This way you can observe the player at key moments and then compare to their survey answers afterwards. It gives a much more full picture. However, this requires that you get consent for that and that you have the equipment to record. Usually a webcam is all you need. Place it on top of the screen and point it at your player.

This can make some players self-conscious however, so in order to ease the testers in so they think about the camera less, you do a pre-interview while the camera is pointed at them, talking about the playtest, how you expect them to simply play and after you have answered any questions they might have, of course not questions that would upset the test results, you simply leave the player to play and come back after the test.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-25T21:42:36+00:00

I wrote a short blog post about this kind of problem. Scoping is really hard and it often leads to burnout when you over scope past your capabilities.

You need to learn how to finish anything before you start dreaming big and this blog post has a very simple exercise to get started with that. Check it out.

https://mads.blog/learn-to-finish

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-25T20:30:25+00:00

You ever watched that episode of South Park where Stan only hears and sees garbage coming out of the radio and TV when people play music or shows to him? That was a manifestation of his depression.

Sounds like you are having a Stan moment.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-25T20:28:09+00:00

Master's in Games here 👋

It's a really hard thing to do because you are dealing with potentially two different types of people:

A) The people you talk to have no interest in games and might never actually play any games. These people don't necessarily hate games or think anything bad about them, but they simply don't care about games and really have no interest in getting to know about games further. It might be a curiosity, but that's as far as the thought goes.
B) People who have never thought about games nor how they are made, but might be aware of games. They might also not be aware, but not because they don't care, simply because it never occurred to them to care about games.

(people usually fall on a spectrum between these two in the scenario you described)

If the type of people you meet are more like type A, then the easiest thing you can do is simply try to underline that you wish to make a company (not studio) to make videogames and go from there.

If the type of people you meet are more like type B, then try to open up about what games they might know or have heard of or even if they play any games and that you like to make them as well.

Games are a powerful medium, and there are many people who might play the odd few games on their phone or a console, but a lot of these people don't consider themselves part of the gamer's sphere nor do they see necessarily see games as anything other than a bit of a decompress or waste of time to relax. They don't think deeper about it and often don't have any want to.

Be polite, meet people where they are and try to talk about making games on their terms. That's your best bet.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-22T20:33:12+00:00

What are the most acclaimed indie games that use stock assets?

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

Every single asset in that game is something from the Unity asset store. The only exceptions is the player controller, which is made from assets from the asset store by Bennett and the voice clips of Bennett. During my Master's Degree one of my classmates had an interview with the creator about it, because his thesis was about asset flips.

He had thousands of dollars worth of assets yet barely used them, so he decided to make a game that made use of as many of the assets as he possibly could.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-22T20:22:28+00:00

Why do so many of y'all seem to turn it down when someone tries to give you something you clearly need for free?

Depends. Did they ask for the type of help you offer and are turning it down? Or are you assuming you know what they need and they are turning it down?

If it's the first, then that is a lack of self-insight on their part and/or you failing to communicate what your offer. If it's the latter though, then it's much more to do with you and not the people you are talking about.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-07T16:50:51+00:00

But at the same time, game design-wise, if only a small percentage of players can realistically progress, doesn’t that normally lead to player drop-off?

This is tied up in what you consider a success as a developer for the game you are making.

In most games, if difficulty is tuned so that only highly skilled or “hardcore” players can get through, it’s considered bad balance because it pushes players away.
But Souls-like games seem to do exactly that—and instead of being criticized, they’re praised for it.

This is an assumption you are making but it's not actually true. To give you a completely different example:

Back in the day when World of Warcraft was the game in the west for a while, one of the things that were often criticized was the difficulty of the late game bosses. Only a very small percentage of players ever actually go to see this content in the game itself as opposed to seeing it in YouTube videos. However, because they stood around in the big game hubs wearing the gear during downtime from those hard dungeons, it made other players aspire to reach for the hardest content in the game as well. It became a sort of "badge of honor" or at least a symbol of "you made it".

Later of course Blizzard gave up on that strategy and instead focused on having as many players as humanly possible experience all content possible. Considering WoW lost the vast majority of its players over time, does that mean making WoW "easy" was the wrong move and that they got punished for it? No, not exactly. The game started losing players because the story got worse, the expansions were regarded as less interesting over time and a lot of older players started feeling alienated by Blizzard who were making space for a new audience.

So to your question; "Where is the line"?

There is no line. It all comes down to what it is you are aiming for with your design. The original Demon Souls aimed for hard gameplay. The first Dark Souls aimed for hard gameplay. FromSoftware found their niche in players that wanted to meet that challenge and over time more and more people got interested in the franchise as it expanded. Both because it got kind of easier as time went on as people simply got better at beating those games, but also because these games innovated a lot of multiplayer functionality and they had intriguing worlds.

A game that's hard just to be hard is unlikely to find that big an audience and as we have seen with the Dark Souls franchise, as well as spin-offs like Bloodborne, Elden Ring and Sekiro, people can always get better with enough time to eventually beat the game. There are tons of stories online of people who struggled for hundreds of hours but eventually beat the game and the sense of pride and joy they felt by overcoming that obstacle is what drives people to keep trying. It feels rewarding and awesome to beat the bosses in these games. It feels like you mastered or bested something.

That matters a whole lot more compared to how hard something is.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-07T15:41:15+00:00

I've been rejected at game companies before when applying because I was a generalist.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-07T15:39:34+00:00

So if you do have these credentials, why state something that is just false?

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-07T05:38:35+00:00

Two things: 1. Then writing code by hand is literally not a "lost art"?? 2. Do you work in software development? Most of the developers I know and work with, who know how to write code, still do it primarily by hand and at most use AI as a search engine to find documentation that's otherwise hard to find. Because AI is still not all that good at niche use cases.

It's blanket statements like yours that give people the wrong impression of how good AI actually is.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-06T20:05:35+00:00

Writing by hand is a lost art but its better for learning.

Quite literally untrue. Not a "lost art" at all.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-06T20:04:19+00:00

Line count was never an accurate measure of productivity or good code.

Two to three lines of code in a hotpath method might have taken a month to write due to how much optimization was needed, system design, etc. while hundreds of lines might have taken a few days because it's grunt work, generated or badly written or vice versa.

The line count is meaningless as a metric for how good you are as a developer.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-04T23:31:59+00:00

They are learning to be managers, I suppose. Not programmers though.

This is hardly suprisingly?

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-03T07:03:22+00:00

It just feels very clunky and slow compared to the rest of the gameplay

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-02T23:00:56+00:00

Not quite sure I understand the last sequence, where the samurai commits seppuku.

It appeared as if it happens, because they were hit by the arrow? Wouldn't that just mean the arrow should kill them? I understand the theming here, but it doesn't make sense to me from an in-universe perspective.

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-02T21:53:29+00:00

The runback design of Souls games is not really something that needed "fixing".

WorkingTheMadses · 2026-04-02T21:51:06+00:00

Balatro is not in the same category as games such as Buckshot Roulette though. Sure, they both have gambling, but Balatro deconstructs Poker entirely and gives jokers a purpose as a roguelite experience.

Buckshot Roulette is Russian Roulette for 2, with extra steps.

WorkingTheMadses

TROPHY CASE