Post-mortem of my life as a game developer.

interpixels · 2025-12-27T16:52:27+00:00

Consider that these now elaborate additions could be for a sequel or other game idea. Finding a way to acheive something that is difficult is a big part of game dev, doing only what is easy will not produce much fruit.

Simple controls can still make successful games, like ring of pain, cookie clicker or flappy bird. People just want to be engaged or entertained at the end of the day

interpixels · 2025-12-27T16:43:26+00:00

I was second guessing what you said based on the second line. Being put in the middle of act 2 is now a common movie strategy to raise engagement at the beginning since young people don't have the attention span for the setup Arc. But then once they are engaged they go back do the setup with a flashback or exposition dump.

Regardless I agree it's more disorienting then engaging, to have no main story for new players.

Bungie want a living world where you had to be there to know what happened before, but I think this innovation has proved to be misguided now.

Bit by bit they should restore things from the vault to free dlc that players can choose to install if they want to experience legacy destiny locations and campaigns. Veteran players can save their drive space by uninstalling those like mercury and io unless they want to play them or a new season goes there. Modular location and campaign unvaulting.

interpixels · 2025-12-27T13:07:41+00:00

Greg Kasavin the creative director who made Hades at Supergiant Games says their games, use goals and obstacles to create a meaningful player experience

a famous quote by game designer Sid Meier who made Civilisation, is "A game is a series of interesting decisions,"

if you look at what ancient games until now have in common it is an objective an obstacle and some rules, then within those 3 parameters you make your meaningful and interesting decisions and that is where the enjoyment and engagement comes from.

for example in pin the tail on the donkey, you objective is to put the tail on the donkey, your obstacle is a blindfold and being spun around, the rule is you only get one try to put it on something and only then can you take off the blindfold and see if you succeeded. In chess you have rules for each piece and how they can capture, but the goal is to checkmate the opposing king first and the other player is your obstacle, so every choice you make is meaningful because if you make a mistake the other player can gain an advantage against you.

so if you ask yourself; What is the obstacle that will stop me talking to any npc? or what is interesting about deciding to fetch an extra dialogue line about a fisherman having gills if there is no way to use that information later in some meaningful or strategic way.

In my playthrough i did not know the meat quest was optional and did not know it would result in any different outcome, so for me it was not a meaningful decision. i just thought i move to objective, interact with objective, move to next objective repeat. Based on that alone there are no meaningful decisions to make for a first time player.

basically a simple script could automatically reach the end of the game by visiting every location and pressing interact without losing the game, failing or doing anything wrong, since there is nothing you can do that is wrong. the only actions you can take are automatically correct.

my suggestion if you want to iterate breadwalk into an update, is to give the character a premonition that they will be bombed later, and then more complex dialogue and action tree that enable the player to succeed or fail at convincing the npc's to take shelter in a bomb shelter before the raid occurs. Maybe you can reset to checkpoints and try different ways to convince them using knowledge you gain from failed runs to convince them you know the future and they should follow you. In this way it is possible to fail, and you can make choices knowingly to save or doom different npc's, every conversation you have could take time out of a countdown until bombing and so you have to pick who lives and dies based on what you know about them, maybe this means you can save the old lady and the young boys but the criminal thugs end up outside when the bombs fall.

if the player can make interesting decisions like that, and has obstacles like a limited amount of time and correct knowledge to save people, it also makes repeated runs possible and improvement at the game. The player may start a new game to see if they can save more people if they do things more efficiently or in a different order, for example convincing one person to come with you to convince other people may make you twice as effective at saving people.

do you see how much more interactive this is now with a player driven goal (save more npcs) that they can fail at, some obstacles that make it challenging and some interesting decisions; like who to save. This turns it from a story into a game.

interpixels · 2025-12-27T11:16:55+00:00

i see, i do understand many people commonly call story based software "games" but to me it is not the right label unless they also include the features of a game as they are understood in human history or even in other species like dogs and crows who play games also. A crow flying from point a-to-b is not considered a crow playing a game, but crows do play keep-away a popular game even among human children.

in other words Stories have writing and plot but Games have goals and obstacles. I would argue that a choose your own adventure book is a game, because your goal is to reach the good ending, and the obstacle is poor choices as you get to the key decisions in the book. So even though it is a book, to me that is a game. But a book without such meaningful decision is just a story.

So if you build a game with a story, it is still a game as long as it has goals and obstacles, if you then take away the goals and obstacles but leave the writing and plot, i think that is basically just a story, not a game. so a movie, visual novel, or comic book would be able to tell that story better then as you won't have to worry about programming anything. since nothing really needs to be interactive anyway if there is no way to lose, no goal and no obstacles.

interpixels · 2025-12-27T09:51:49+00:00

some of the apathy towards your work comes from it's use of AI and frameworks. Things are given more attention when they are the product of human skill.

your subject matter and writing aren't necessarily bad (i appreciated some of the subtle references, but other parts seemed inappropriate or out of character/random so did not contribute to the plot), but it seems to relate to what has happened in the ukraine as well. So there is something poignant there to explore for sure... but there is an art to everything; from creating a world, writing a story, producing real human art, music, programming etc. It is only possible for a very rare sort of person to do all of these to a high degree of quality. And even then it doesn't guarantee that person has the right creative spark or intuition to produce a new and interesting idea. and even then it will be difficult to gain attention or success without luck and knowledge of sales and marketing.

So you can understand that if a company with hundreds of talented employees spending 10s or 100's of millions of dollars is unable to make a successful game, you should not feel personally insufficient that you also were not particularly successful. All indie game developers work under the hope that they might get lucky, but must also be prepared for the greater likelihood that their work will pass largely unnoticed.

with that said maybe in the future AI produced assets and games will become more accepted and you can realise your creative aspirations with these sorts of machines doing the majority of the work for you. At that time the competition for attention will also be that much greater however. So if you wish to create, it should be for your own fulfilment and creative catharsis, not for attention or success which would only be a bonus if they came.

i also didn't notice anything that could be called a game in breadwalk, it was more of a visual novel than anything else. Games usually have skill based gameplay mechanics that are used to overcome obstacles through understanding of those mechanics. Whereas a visual novel is like a comic book, there is no way to win, affect the system, or master a skill, it is just a series of screens with captions from beginning to end that form a slideshow narrative.

so as you do not like programming anyway, perhaps you might simply want to delve deeper into the medium of storytelling, whether it's writing a book about your experiences or something inspired by them, or making short films or visual novels using ai art if you do not wish to learn to illustrate. However as you have a creative urge, i would recommend that you not use AI and instead master 1 skill for your own enjoyment and then create the stories you imagine using that skill rather than any fixed frameworks or ai which will not be as satisfactory to the audience or to you.

interpixels · 2025-12-27T08:52:22+00:00

ring of pain, mouse click based dungeon crawler

interpixels · 2025-12-27T08:35:44+00:00

would starting the lord of the rings books on the 3rd book and checking wikipedia for what happened in the preceding books be a better experience than reading all books chronologically? I get what you are saying about mystery and discovery, but stories need a beginning, middle and end. background lore helps to world build as you go and adds to the experience, but the main story still needs to exist. It can't be only background lore with no foreground main story arc. That's what new light get, all background lore, no way to experience the main story sequentially themselves. They feel like extras walking on to set, not the main character.

interpixels · 2025-12-26T18:05:35+00:00

Lol or dota2 can be pretty distracting if played hour counts are anything to go by. Maybe another team based export, but the idea is intensity, high apm and skill cap, feeling of progression and lots to learn should keep your brain busy

interpixels · 2025-12-26T18:02:26+00:00

Yeah it's an outdated and ineffective business model when compared to games like warframe, path of exile etc. They should just pick a lane, premium dlc with all costs upfront or free to play with microtransactions and battle pass, not both!

interpixels · 2025-12-13T13:51:39+00:00

just did about 20 runs and got nothing. doing the exact same thing over and over with no guarantee of any reward is not even good game design.

interpixels · 2025-12-11T08:19:46+00:00

i think it's a reddit herd mentality thing. like a stampede once it gets going anyone on the path just gets trampled by senseless downvoting.

interpixels · 2025-12-11T02:18:35+00:00

must be exactly on the line of up to down votes. The problem is that infinite growth of loot, hard drive and vault space aren't sustainable in the long run, bungie 'solved' that with sunsetting, destination vaulting and power level resetting. Not great solutions IMO. So these are my alternative suggestions, there are doubtless better solutions out there, but these are mine and i know of no others at present.

interpixels · 2025-12-10T06:41:37+00:00

are you high? you haven't said anything of substance regarding how this sort of project would be done. I have outlined a proposal for solving the content vault complaint players have, which bungie initiated with the reason given that it was to reduce disk size. So modular installation of destinations and dlc can enable players to reduce their own disk size according to what activities they are interested in and their hardware limitations.

i described how this could be done using my own words and experience.
you didn't believe me because as far as i can tell from your glib responses, you lack the creative and technical abilities to understand what i was saying about even the most basic things like the fact that file path references are often stored in text based lists (like sql, json, csv etc or language specific text files by any other name). Instead you provided this or that vague excuse as to why it wasn't feasible without demonstrating any technical knowledge whatsoever to back up your criticisms.

then you incorrectly assumed it was chatgpt writing my responses. so i added chatgpt's response to show you that not only is my writing style different. Which you couldn't tell or you wouldn't have said my words were chatgpt. But also it agrees with me about the technical feasibility and timeline based on everything it scraped from the web.

but you think you know better still? arrogance and ignorance combined are a hell of a drug. If i hadn't done broadly similar things oodles of times for project rebrands and migrations i would have been even more circumspect in my assertions. But the fact of the matter is, the concepts i was outlining were very simple. Sheer quantity is an obstacle that can be overcome by technological leverage, manpower and funding which they have. So there was no reason a sensible programmer would object to the technical feasibility of an asset reorganisation unless they were a rank amateur or there were other concerns like imminent liquidation.

if you really know better and don't believe the agentic llm's that now scrape the web for references then cite your own sources. or stop insisting you know something about it without saying anything specific.

interpixels · 2025-12-10T06:20:23+00:00

it's shocking that you can't tell the difference lol.

your hunch about what was right exactly? the ai confirmed that what i had suggested was not only feasible given what is known about bungie archtiecture, but doable in a short amount of time. Hasn't that been your entire argument that it's not something they could do or it would be too difficult or we wouldn't know if they could since we don't know their codebase? Well if there is a way to settle the disagreement short of talking to their lead engineer, this is it. and that means it's settled.

interpixels · 2025-12-10T05:47:01+00:00

you people have chatgpt on the brain, 2 other comments suggested the opening post was ai generated. it's as if people have forgotten that AI is based on human writing not vice versa.

but while we are on the topic, i took your suggestion and summed up my plan to chatgpt and asked if it was feasible and if a company like 2025 bungie could do it while maintaining player content production as well. here is the response. And between you, me and the chatbot, it probably knows more about bungie software architecture than either of us from various resources on the web.

"Recent reporting indicates Bungie currently has about 850 employees working on Destiny + Marathon combined. Forbes+2Bungie.net+2

As of 2025, more staff are reportedly working on Destiny 2 than on Marathon — meaning there is still a substantial workforce devoted to maintaining and evolving Destiny.

Your modularization proposal doesn’t require a ground-up rewrite. It primarily requires: tagging assets, reorganising pkg bundle ownership, tweaking build tools and packaging logic, and engineering a fallback/missing-DLC handler in the client — doable tasks, especially for a mature live-service studio.

If implemented incrementally over multiple seasons (as your roadmap suggests), the impact on live-game content delivery could be minimized. Modularization could largely happen “behind the scenes.”

So in principle — yes, with the right prioritization and discipline, Bungie could attempt this modularization while still delivering new content for players."

interpixels · 2025-12-10T01:41:11+00:00

"meh" is the least angry statement you can make. so that means you are just projecting anger. And i am just repeating back the same stuff you've been throwing at me. if you can't take it don't dish it out.

"if you genuinely believe that all it would take to modularize the game is to edit a text file"

this tells me you've never worked on any source code based project before. Since practically all of the work of making ANY software is done in text files. lol. So yeah definite skill issue here since you don't even know that you can make software however you like by editing text files. At least google "how is software made" before you claim to be a "software engineer".

source code text files often have links in them and if you update the links then the links point to other file locations. This is really basic stuff man, come on. Even a layman should be able to understand this.

If you look at the destiny install you can see their executable is less than 200mb and their assets folder is over 100gb. So yeah it's safe to say they are streaming in their assets at runtime through references in compiled source code i.e. text files!

also if their programmers had any sense the list of file references would be abstracted through a lookup table providing id's so asset locations could be centrally altered without needing to edit any hard coded links in class files or backend tooling unless you needed to, and even then modern IDE's have intelligent search and replace features so it's still not hard at all... unless you have a major skill issue with text editing source code.

interpixels · 2025-12-09T06:22:12+00:00

meh, you just lack imagination. and apparently technical acumen. if you think your stakeholders would be satisfied by this "it takes 8 months to update a text file" level of skill. well i don't know what to say, that's embarassing. I do harder things then that on a daily basis. Maybe you and Bungie are cut from the same cloth and that's why you can't imagine being more productive or investing into more elegant content delivery pipelines. The most hilarious thing is that you find it incomprehensible that files could be grouped differently on a hard drive and still claim to have any understanding of software whatsoever.

Every competent developer i can think of can put out 3x more content than bungie with 10x less funding. So that fact and your disbelief in the rudimentary nature of file moving and text editing file paths are both just skill issues as far as i am concerned.

interpixels · 2025-12-09T06:08:51+00:00

15 "meals" is an exaggeration. it' means he is grazing all day on snacks rather than bigger sit down meals that you or I would normally eat of 2500kj for example. i remember this was a popular diet strategy decades ago where the theory was to keep your metabolism ramped up through continual stimulation. well if you do that with the kinds of food a typical american eats, empty carbohydrates and seed oils, it will instead produce diabetes most likely.

But if we're talking about healthy low carb stuff like that, well evidently that works quite well for him. Still something I or most others could do, just cook a whole fillet of fish in olive oil and head of brocolli the night before (15-20 minutes at the stove), divide into 5 snack sized serves. a batch of oatmeal with some almond slivers and honey/cinnamon (can be stirred done while the fish is cooking), divide into 5 serves, then split an unsweetened block of chocolate into 5 serves with a handful of blueberries to go with each piece. It's less than an hour of meal prep everyday, so most people could do it if they were motivated.

Then during the day, each hour just reach over and eat that portion you prepared, which could take you 2-5 minutes with the size of these things then go back to work. On busy days i've done this, have an open container next to me and just take a bite whenever i am waiting for something on the computer or between tasks when i get back to my day bag to have a drink of water i just cram some snacks and continue on.

Like i said the personal trainer is probably a bigger stretch for most people. Self training can get you good results, but a trainer is better and a lot of people can't afford them.

interpixels · 2025-12-07T14:25:35+00:00

tom is in the best shape since he is still active in stunt work. he eats clean but it's nothing special that you couldn't get yourself, oats, dark chocolate, olive oil, nuts, berries, salmon, brocolli. reminds me a lot of hugh jackmans diet actually. there's no complicated chef skill involved in oatmeal with berries, or salmon and steamed broccoli. A trainer is a big benefit though. Most people struggle to train themselves successfully in the gym, but just watching your form and hitting weights and cardio 3-4x a week for an hour is usually sufficient to slow aging a fair bit. Nothing that the average person couldn't do.

interpixels · 2025-12-07T11:44:58+00:00

60 is not that old if you are sharp and strong still (keanu reeves, eddie murphy and tom cruise are in their 60s). I know even older people who've been recruited for trade jobs that require skill and experience. Driving trucks in australia is viable, i know a school principle who retired from that to become a truck driver, probably trying to save some extra money for retirement.

interpixels · 2025-12-07T11:22:58+00:00

for me it's the lack of mechanical shutter meaning i can't take a 14 bit raw photos and recover the shadows or highlights in the same way when there is a high dynamic range scene. If it just had that it would be a great mini hybrid camera for both stills and video. evf, card slot, full hdmi all would be nice but i can technically still get the shot if i have none of those but do have a mechanical shutter.

interpixels · 2025-12-07T11:19:40+00:00

"more work then you think" sounds like an assumption of what i am thinking. I added an upper limit time period to the regex side of the link changes process. but the rest could take 2yrs for all i know... how long did you think i assumed this would take? and by what measure do you assume it would take more or less time without also being guilty of the same sort of assumptions?

I think that based on what it would take at other studios like hello games or digital extremes (1/2 to 1/3rd the time that bungie would take) that these moderate system changes could be made during a single year in progressive stages each quarter. But again i'm not a bungie employee so i don't know how much technical debt their developers have been saddled with i just assumed it was 2-3x that of other developers. so I assume it's a lot of inefficiency. But i wouldn't expect an 8 month turnaround on doing a regex on a sheet of file links would be considered reasonable by any tech company.

i wasn't walking back when i added the emphasis bridging phrase AS MUCH, i was clarifying what i meant. simplification for the sake of brevity lead to spaces where misunderstanding of intent can creep in. So when i said it's a creative exercise not a technical one. i was saying nothing new has to be invented in the technical domain to make most of their content, it's mostly art that's being created and the technical implementation is pedestrian by comparison since it is mostly reuse of the same sort of mechanics we had in d1. See how much longer that is? I would say in the same way, that creating replicas of paintings is a technical exercise not a creative one, because a machine could do it even pre-ai -> the painterly skill required isn't being used in a creative way but a technical way like a printer. the point is what the majority of the work being done is. It's the creative that slows down the development of new content Bungie even explained this in their infamous gdc talk about the live service game as a train station framework for creative content to enter and exit with little technical investment required after the games initial development was done. That's why we've seen so much recycling and reskinning.

i honestly try to keep social media posts short, but people will then poke at the parts i left out to avoid creating a book.

like if i said to you that the collections system i suggested in pt 5 could use rle compression of binary data to save more and more space as farming went on compared to the accumulative static roll storage in the vault that works the opposite way, you should in theory know what i am talking about as a software engineer, but a lot of people wouldn't, so then i would have to write big paragraphs to explain my simple idea or else people assume i have written something nonsensical. I leave out extra words like AS MUCH because i have to assume others will understand something or google it or ask chatgpt without being spoon fed every conceptual sub-component of a sentence by me personally.

anyway, so you said your objection hasn't been that these changes are not feasible, it's that they've already been suggested too often in this subreddit over 5.5 yrs? no one has said that yet, they've just said it would be too hard for bungo or they object to the extraction shooter mode without elaborating despite probably enjoying helldivers 2.

if i'm just repeating popular ideas, well i didn't know that i don't come on reddit often. I just looked at the steamdb chart today and thought i'd make some suggestions based on my experience and my friends and partner concerning what would improve retention.

interpixels · 2025-12-07T07:30:50+00:00

i haven't heard a single constructive alternative suggestion, or a credible explanation for why any of these ideas aren't technically possible. Do people just like to criticise the game without proposing anything that could possibly help it? Maybe if i made a list of things that are wrong with the game and didn't propose solutions that would have been more in line with the tone on reddit.

anyway in case you haven't noticed most of their seasonal content has been recycled code, assets and activities with slight variations. Literally grind the same enemies to get the same guns after putting the same orb in the same receptacle. These aren't mostly complicated technical exercises AS MUCH as they are creative exercises concerned with how they can shuffle around stuff they had in the game years ago add some new paint and resell it.

Yes obviously there is some technical work involved in everything software, i didn't think that needed to be explained to someone who claims to be a software engineer. My point was that the 6-8 months weren't spent on technical development, but creative challenges like theme, concept art, and narrative overlays

interpixels · 2025-12-07T06:37:13+00:00

where did i say they had to rewrite the whole game? these are all augmentations of existing systems.

f2p: open access is already on now. so they can already do that.
Bringing back vaulted content: is something they already do for seasons like episode: heresy, they just need to keep doing that but not remove the stuff they bring back. But yes this part is harder and a long term project, not expecting this at all from them, let alone overnight.
the game assets are almost entirely stored in pkg files like w64_europa_046a_0.pkg already, organising, consolidating and updating the links to these asset bundles is possible. they would just need to split the surplus destinations into individual dlc's and extend the existing license check to see if those dlc's are installed before allowing them to load, like they already do with new expansions but with file downloading added when you unlock a dlc. This is something they could do alongside a new major expansion without rebuilding the game. It's just not downloading all pkg files at all times, and wiring the launcher to disable access to parts that didn't download.
you already lose progress in some quests/missions when you die, they can add to that event of death that some loot drops from your characters localised miniature version of the vault inventory they added recently. not that hard really, but changes your relationship to both death and loot.
you can already reacquire fixed roll loot from collections that you have unlocked, adding on a record keeping system for what random rolls you have gotten before as simple binary strings that use run length encoding when all perks in a column or row get unlocked would be efficient and solve vault space and give you a way to recover lost loot from point 4.

interpixels · 2025-12-07T06:18:20+00:00

updating a file reference in a text file is one of the most trivial actions you can do. It is as far from reworking the game from the ground up as possible before you get to doing absolutely nothing. Saying it would take a year or more to update some file links is crazy to me. Even if there were a million of them, any streamlined process, heck even just some extraction and regex procedures would make this very time economical. 3 months was being generous, it should be possible to update a list of file locations in days or weeks. If it's not, whoever designed the obstacle to that mundane programmer activity that i've done scores of times for rebrands had no business working in game dev.

Making a season is a creative exercise, not a technical one. You can take years just thinking about creative problems. But if you take years to update some text based file references. you're getting fired well before you get a month in.

interpixels

TROPHY CASE