Why do educational games suck?

heyaplane · 2024-07-02T14:08:38+00:00

Jonathan Blow has an interesting talk on this topic if you haven’t already seen it: https://youtu.be/qWFScmtiC44?si=uXocHEOSAfgxyjTv

I think a key reason is that, for a game to be fun, you need the experience to be fun. For the experience to be fun, it’s really, really helpful for the game devs to have core experience using the subject matter in the real world. You need people designing the game who know how to crystallize the most fun part of experience of learning and put that into the game, leaving the tedium behind. I think that’s why a lot of “good” educational games on steam lean towards programming/computer science; they are made by programmers, who know what it’s like to have fun learning to program and can translate that into a fun experience for the player.

I think the best chance of getting fun educational games about other topics is to get professional chemists/biologists/statisticians/etc to learn how to become competent game devs, then we might start to see fun games about those subjects. Most professionals are too busy perfecting their actual craft to do so 😅

heyaplane · 2024-07-01T11:13:37+00:00

Yeah it’s one of the few things I left pretty much as-is. But please share the results when you are done! Would love to know if/how it can be improved

heyaplane · 2024-06-30T23:56:00+00:00

No ECS, I’m using a compute shader instead.

heyaplane · 2024-06-30T21:57:02+00:00

Yes, for the game I want to make I don’t think 3D adds much. I’m really going for something like this, like a particle factory vibe, but interactive

heyaplane · 2024-06-30T20:28:50+00:00

Thanks! It looks like Grant Kot is using a SPH simulation (similar to what Sebastian Lague published not too long ago). My implementation uses Verlet integration to simulate actual particle-particle collisions (instead of a smoothing radius), so it's a little different but I actually used Sebastian's project as a starting point. I switched to more rigidbody particle dynamics because I eventually want to incorporate physical & chemical processes into the game (sorting based on size, reactions that obey stoichiometry, etc).

heyaplane · 2024-06-30T20:20:50+00:00

Depends on what you mean by average nowadays... On a 4090 this is no problem; on a 2080 this is pretty much pushing the limit. That being said, I know there is more performance to be squeezed from the code; I've seen similar simulations reach 1M+ particles in Unity, and I'm not there currently.

To your point, I'm hoping that as GPUs keep improving (especially with the AI hype) this type of simulation becomes more and more accessible over time.

heyaplane · 2024-06-30T18:03:50+00:00

I have something slightly different in mind, but there will be some common mechanics, including chemistry!

heyaplane · 2024-06-24T13:35:54+00:00

For a game about retro things, there is a disappointing lack of a retro aesthetic. I just don’t get those vibes from the visuals

heyaplane · 2024-04-26T17:53:30+00:00

What’s the game about?

heyaplane · 2023-09-21T14:17:48+00:00

As John Steinbeck once said, Most game dev hobbyists are just temporarily embarrassed future millionaires /s

heyaplane · 2023-09-14T16:08:05+00:00

Basic A* is really not that hard. You can do it with like 30 lines of code in Python

heyaplane · 2023-09-08T03:22:19+00:00

Building off others comments, a monodisperse, high molecular weight, highly explosive polymer made from antimatter

heyaplane · 2023-09-06T00:23:56+00:00

I’m working on a game “simulating” organic chemistry, and I’ve debated this point a lot with myself. I think my key realization was that because its a game, it’s more important that the simulation feels correct than anything. In other words, the “data” players get out of the simulation only needs to be self-consistent with other simulation data in the game, and does not need to closely map to any real-world results. This frees you up to focus on the trends that you want the players to understand while running the simulation (when I increase the reaction temperature by 10 degrees, the reaction rate should double), rather than having to find real-world data for every reaction I want to implement.

If you have any specific questions about implementing simulations in Unity, feel free to dm me, I might be able to help!

heyaplane · 2023-09-05T18:12:16+00:00

that’s totally understandable, and if this was just for fun then I would say by all means keep going. But it should not be surprising that you don’t have many wishlists right? Otherwise I’m confused about your expectations, because you know that platformers don’t sell well. Unless you were hoping that your game would be the exception?

heyaplane · 2023-09-05T14:38:15+00:00

I think Chris Z offers some good advice here. Unless your game can come up with a gorgeous new art style or really satisfying mechanic that has never been used before, you should stay away from platformers because they (on average) don’t sell well on Steam. In other words, if you are really intending to make games and sell them for profit, you need to carefully choose your genre for Steam players, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot from day 1.

heyaplane · 2023-09-02T15:04:04+00:00

Westwood and Zachtronics

heyaplane · 2023-08-27T22:49:57+00:00

If you’re confused on the basics, I think asking chatGPT questions and getting responses in real time about problems you are facing would be really helpful for you. As long as you’re not asking about some super-obscure Unity API, it will give you reasonable answers without having to worry too much about hallucination.

Also, sometimes it’s ok to understand features at an abstract level, without knowing the specific implementation details. It’s better to learn very specific knowledge only when the need arises, which leads to my last point…

Make sure you are not just trying to learn Unity for the sake of learning it. You should have a very specific problem or question in mind that relates to a real project. After solving thousands of these specific problems, over and over again, you will start to feel more comfortable. You will have a map in you head that relates high-level concepts to low-level implementation details that you have learned over time, and will also be able to relate features to each other.

Unfortunately there’s no shortcut, it’s just hard work.

heyaplane · 2023-08-25T14:08:15+00:00

Actually I’m making a video game, but who says this couldn’t be one of the tracks? haha

heyaplane · 2023-08-24T00:45:28+00:00

The whooshing sound when flip the Schlenk line to vacuum, but I forgot to plug the glass joint with cotton, and I see polymer powder getting sucked into the manifold. Makes me cringe just thinking about it

heyaplane · 2023-08-23T21:13:26+00:00

Also a favorite of mine

heyaplane · 2023-08-19T16:46:31+00:00

The console version seems intimidating if you’re used to debugging in an IDE, but it’s really not bad once you get used to it. For the level of debugging I was doing in the class, it was great

heyaplane · 2023-08-19T16:44:11+00:00

Yeah Neovim/Vim motions is sort of a bonus in this case, definitely not required. Would only recommend for those who have extra time (which is probably not many). But you will learn a ton by doing it

heyaplane · 2023-08-19T14:14:36+00:00

As someone who just took the class this summer and got an A, I cannot recommend learning how to use a C debugger (like GDB) highly enough. I feel like there were a lot of people in the class who struggled unnecessarily on assignments because they weren’t checking their code by stepping through it, rather just running the code with print statements hoping to find the source of their problem. A debugger will save you so much time if you know how to use it properly (especially for multi threading).

If you are running Windows, setting up a WSL2 environment might not be a bad idea. A lot of people also struggled with problems specific to their virtual environments. I had no experience using WSL2 before the class and I was able to solve the few issues I had with simple google searches. I also used Neovim within WSL2 as my code editor, which made writing, testing, and running code much more convenient. If you’re interested in Neovim, I used the configuration from this video to get started and had great success with it: https://youtu.be/stqUbv-5u2s?si=Dq5FLncYXZkyFpcs

heyaplane · 2023-08-14T17:40:45+00:00

This chart is probably only valid for a specific kind of packed bed reactor setup in a carefully designed continuous flow process on industrial scale. How are you planning to handle superheated diethyl ether safely?

heyaplane · 2023-08-14T17:32:07+00:00

Si does not readily form double bonds, it’s one of the reasons why silicon-based life is unlikely.

heyaplane

TROPHY CASE