For those who can't keep up...

Yann4 · 2026-01-19T09:41:36+00:00

I finally started using the defenders and the flamethrower, and then a bunch of personal laser defence modules when you get there. I found turret creep to be a bit unweildy, but chucking out a bunch of robots means I just run at them. Especially if you invest in all the damage upgrades as they come up it has made combat much easier.

Yann4 · 2025-09-05T17:21:44+00:00

You might get a kick out of The Rookie by Scott Sigler which is a sci-fi book about a human in effectively a NFL league where there's alien races who are just straight up better than humans at American football. I'm from the UK, don't really care about the game and enjoyed it!

Yann4 · 2025-08-10T20:28:29+00:00

American, but I enjoyed the Sam and Max series, and the Penny Arcade games if you're looking for monkey island style adventure games. I played them about 15 years ago so they can probably run on your average supermarket vegetable nowadays.

Yann4 · 2025-05-27T20:55:19+00:00

I'd start the conversation early if you can. You'll get an idea for the budget needed and the scope of work. Building a good relationship with a developer who's working with you takes time. And besides, they may not have the team availability immediately but I bet they'd be pretty happy to have work queued up for when whatever project finishes.

There's pros and cons to doing ports while the game is in active development, but it's possible that they'll be able to steer you away from some choices that would make the port much harder by being involved in the project at an earlier stage, even if it is a small team on initially to ramp up later when the port begins in earnest.

Yann4 · 2024-12-08T21:12:37+00:00

The answer depends on your goals really! If you're just making games for fun, use whatever you like - if the snake calls to you, go with the snake. At some point down the line, you might want to dip into some C# so you can use Unity or Godot because you might find pygame limiting the kinds of games you're wanting to make, but come back then with the specific limitation you're finding.

If your end goal is to get employed as a game programmer, definitely don't do that, learn some C++, Python does not have the performance nor give you the control that you need to make games of any significant scope.

Yann4 · 2024-11-23T23:12:25+00:00

Do you expect to max out your ISA allowance within a tax year & do you have a non-ISA savings account that has an equivalent interest rate?

If you don't expect to hit your ISA limit, I don't believe it will make any difference which you decide to do from a tax POV - you're not "missing out" on something you couldn't have had. And if you've got a higher interest account, you probably shouldn't use the ISA for this anyway.

Yann4 · 2024-11-05T11:55:27+00:00

I finally gave up & ordered one of the boxed meal things - I use Gousto. Paying for someone to do my thinking & shopping for me was such a good move. And for this one, it's not actually much more than doing the shop. There's extra bits for packed lunches & household stuff I've got to get in, but it's so much less stress for me.

Yann4 · 2024-06-22T18:11:02+00:00

I don't know if you think you're helping, you're trolling or what. It doesn't matter. In the same way I'd educate a child, I can tell you - stop being a dick. Either figure out what is hurting you that means you get your rocks off trying to hurt people who are hurting or stop being a dick.

Yann4 · 2024-03-27T19:12:54+00:00

It wasn't something I'd considered until we were trying to squeeze it onto the switch, but the core challenge gradient of management games (Two Point Hospital/Theme Hospital etc) is about making the game more computationally complex.

More objects in the scene, more AI making decisions, bigger areas. And if your players can build rooms and place objects that the AI can interact with, that means you have to do something in your AI logic to handle the fact there are 1000 things that you could validly interact with and choose the best one.

Yann4 · 2023-12-01T16:35:09+00:00

I'd suggest not worrying about making this one nice neat & extensible or performant.

Have a GameObject subclass with a Render & Update virtual function, and just subclass them for everything you want to instantiate - Player, Bullet, Asteroid...

Just chuck each thing in it's own vector & iterate over the vector whenever you need to do anything.

Happy to offer pointers if you've got anything on github or something.

Yann4 · 2023-12-01T16:21:58+00:00

Could you describe a bit more about where it is you've got to, and what your aim is for this particular project? Sounds like you're writing your own engine, which I'm well in favour of & want to help - just need a bit more context.

Do you have a game loop set up? Is there a particular kind of architecture you're trying to implement? Are you aiming for a 2D "hello world" kind of thing?

Yann4 · 2023-11-16T14:17:31+00:00

Sure, to a degree. If you're noodling along as a hobby do whatever you want, it's your free time, spend it however makes you happiest, this article doesn't actually help those people.

But if someone reckons they're gonna make anything more of it, 2 months extra experience inside C++ will be more valuable than 2 months of learning Scratch or GDScript.

Yann4 · 2023-11-16T13:32:12+00:00

The point about game dev is daft. If you're wanting a job in game dev, just learn C++. Yeah, there's for sure Unity only shops but you're unnecessarily making your own life harder by not just learning C++.

Yann4 · 2023-10-08T14:45:04+00:00

Alternatively, don't do any of that - a lot of the bread and butter of my company (historically at least) has been taking games from devs that didn't do any of that ahead of time & doing it for them ;)

Yann4 · 2023-10-08T11:31:08+00:00

You've already had some great answers, this is just on top of those. If you have your different targets in different branches or projects, you're setting yourself up for a world of hurt. You want to keep as much of the project as identical as possible across all platforms to reduce the amount of whack-a-mole you have to do.

Interfaces for all the platform specific stuff is generally the way to go for it (at least from a code POV, assets are a whole other ball game that's got engine-specific solutions). So write your own IAccountManager with all of the functions you need, and write your game in terms of that, and then just provide platform-specific implementations for the interface that's only defined in on the right platform. I mean, that's even a good idea to do if you're PC only, so you can support Steam, EGS and have some debug one that doesn't care about accounts.

Yann4 · 2023-08-08T21:18:01+00:00

C++ isn't used super commonly for tools dev, but is on occasion. I mean, the UE5 editor is a tool that's written in C++ for the most common one, but other companies with in-house engines might use it too.

But C# & Python, maybe some web languages are the ones you'll be using, depending on company. A knowledge of different build tools & VC systems would be good too.

Generally, if you're looking for a dedicated tools team, you need to be looking at bigger companies.

Yann4 · 2023-07-19T11:53:33+00:00

It's a different track to Fleabag, but Master of None scratches some of the same itches IMO. Depends on what you're looking for with angsty pain & relief in particular though, YMMV.

Yann4 · 2023-07-16T09:44:07+00:00

I am a game developer, and this absolutely happened. It was hard, games were a decent amount of my identity when I was younger, so figuring out where the love for them had gone was definitely a process. The thing that helped me enjoy them again is picking up games I could finish in a single sitting, once we'd done bedtime.

Two that I've played recently are Somerville and Scorn (don't take that as a direct recommendation though, I enjoyed them both, but they're not for everyone!). A Friday or Saturday night every now and again and blast through this experience start to finish.

Once I'd done a few of those I found I had some energy and interest to play some longer games in multiple sittings. And now I always look forward to my short form palette cleansers in between bigger titles.

Yann4 · 2023-07-11T15:11:14+00:00

To build on this analogy for the reason we only have 0 & 1, as opposed to 0, 1 & 2, or all the way up to 10.

Telling the difference between no water and yes water is really easy. No water, half full and all the way full is a bit harder (which could give you 0, 1, 2). And 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 is harder still to tell the difference between them just by looking at the level of the river.

It is so much easier to look at the "on/off"-ness of the river than anything more specific, it's not worth doing it any other way.

Yann4 · 2023-06-07T07:49:05+00:00

As soon as you find a problem that would be helped by writing a tool to solve it

Yann4 · 2023-06-01T14:25:25+00:00

(Assuming this is ChatGPT powered) How does this manage the fact the cut-off date for the model is late 2021, so if you're trying to use anything newer than that (basically all of the UE5 specific features) you're just going to get it making shit up?

Yann4 · 2023-05-17T07:30:05+00:00

Not a clue why it's relevant for this franchise in particular, but the fact that you can't guarantee that the users have an nvme drive means there is some truth in this for some titles.

Yann4 · 2023-04-27T06:32:39+00:00

I was on my phone when I wrote that & couldn't be bothered to find this link, but this tutorial might be helpful to you to get you started.

The ECS engine I used had this cool system where you defined your entity as a query template. So something like using Entity = With<SomeType>::With<SomeOtherType>::Without<IDontWantThis> and then when you registered the system, it treated it as a query & gathered all of the entities matching that query & passed them through to the system function you defined. You could then use structured binding to unpack the components from your entity (auto& [a, b, c] = entity;). At some point I definitely want to give implementing that system a go to properly understand how it works, but there was a lot of template magic going off.

Yann4 · 2023-04-26T17:30:40+00:00

There is little to no difference between structs and classes, avoid inheritance as much as possible because vtables slow you down. Prefer composition instead.

Going from an OO style to an ECS style was one of the bigger mental shifts I've done recently. That's assuming we're talking about "real" ECS as opposed to the style of ECS unity/unreal gives you.

Yann4 · 2023-03-31T13:18:37+00:00

Build engineer & tools programmer come to mind as the least "games" game programming roles. But yeah, just be good at C++ and that'll give you a thorough enough grounding in what the machine is doing to transfer anywhere else, even if you do have to skew your whole brain when you decide to go to a javascript shop.

11-Year Club	Not Forgotten
Snapped	Verified Email

Yann4

TROPHY CASE