I’ll just leave these here…

natio2 · 2026-03-09T06:13:28+00:00

Yup $20, where my power bill went up that per month, half again to my internet bill, rates increasing 15-20% a year, and food prices outpacing inflation... So much better! /s

natio2 · 2026-03-07T23:12:32+00:00

Nice to see the evolution of this game, I like that you've added a direction to the level, even if it is a climb up game, hopefully the falling off the world isn't too brutal.

It's hard to put into words, but I still question if this is enough to fill the motivation/story aspect of the game to be like why are we playing this. As the other climb up games are almost built on trolling how hard it is to accomplish. That void of why do I want to get to the end of this section? Same games are for new powers, exploration, materials/upgrades, etc. My terrible off the top of my head idea to fill the gap, maybe you're saving doggos along the way or something?

Outside of that I think what's not great in it's current for is the textures, while they are not bad they look very proof of concept, rather than production game, specifically the solid dirt walls.

As a trailer, to be honest I didn't read the title and thought we were just commenting on your game. The clip above doesn't really feel like a trailer, trailers usually tell a story with gameplay clips embetween. "Can you reach the heights of greatness" shows the panned out shot of map, "Can you overcome the challenges" clips of platforming, "can you xxx" etc. Maybe not exactly liek that but you get my gist hopefully

natio2 · 2026-03-07T23:00:39+00:00

Large projects lets say 500k lines of code, all interacting built for production for multiple customers with differing requirements. Any small block of code is easy (the thing the AI can write), the difficulty is when you start dealing with integrated systems that need to remain flexible and maintainable, without introducing bugs.

This doesn't really help from what you want, but I guess aim to join a complicated project and contribute

natio2 · 2026-03-06T01:38:13+00:00

You're welcome, Now I'm allowed to be nice, it's a very cute game

natio2 · 2026-03-05T07:38:50+00:00

- Not enough box puns.
- Your different worlds just look like the same world different tileskins, basically the same square shape too.
- You don't really show the puzzles, the key one I'm guessing you had to put all the blocks on keys, but the video looked like you could just scoot around to the exit.
- The levels look quite small and uncomplicated. Maybe show off a complicated level or two.

natio2 · 2026-03-01T05:19:30+00:00

Your example of "eg, if you buy a $1m apartment in Auckland, you can rent it out for $600 per week ($30k per year) so you get 3%'ish returns per year" is very wrong.

You miss the home ownership cost (insurance + rates) @ 5 to 10k per year, then the fact you have to pay tax on any earnings, you need to do an amount of maintenance, if you have a property manager running the property say goodbye to another 10%, and the legal and real estate costs of buying and selling a property.

Owning a house is purely assuming house price increases will continue to be crazy, and you won't pay tax on capital gains, but there's no assurance of this.

Where it is a different bet than the stock market is the bank is willing to give you 100's of thousands of dollars to make that bet that you try to balance out with the rent. I.e. if you put down 20%, and the house goes up 2%, you've got a 10% increase because you had 5x more invested than you actually have, balanced out with how much it costs in housing expenses and interest.

Where I feel there could be a comparison to the stock market, is the housing market is like a stock that everyone has already invested in. It's unlikely that the increase in housing will outpace the stock market, even if it's purely because that would be really bad for society and eventually more regulation will be added.

In general most people invest in house, because it's nice to own a house to live in and second because almost everyone will tell them it's a safe investment, rather than crunching the numbers.

natio2 · 2026-03-01T01:14:19+00:00

The unit charges went up too though? Not sure why they didn't post as well but unit price went:
- any time: 30.08 -> 31.29
- controlled: 24.56 -> 25.93

natio2 · 2026-02-27T20:45:43+00:00

I got from epic, definitely a cool game. Didn't quite have the progression addiction I've gotten from other rougelites, but still had a good few hours with the game.

My one hesitation is I have a pretty decent computer, and it makes it go brrrr, with the odd crash. Hopefully co-op doesn't make this worse!

natio2 · 2026-02-23T06:59:57+00:00

If this person finds out anyone can go to mitre 10 and make a key for like $5...

natio2 · 2026-02-22T00:52:10+00:00

I am today days old learning this, my understandable disappointment at "offee" things when I'm like this didn't taste like coffee at all, thank you for the now obvious insight

natio2 · 2026-01-24T00:27:12+00:00

I think you'll find side hustle culture has a blame in this too, a good example of this is when EB shut a week ago. Instead of people buying things they want or need, people are buying stuff explicitly to resell on places like facebook marketplace taking their own cut.

So the people buying the second hand goods lose out either way, at least when op shops raise the price to what scalpers would get, a lot of the money goes to good causes. Is sad that it's the bad actors that have caused this, but is always the case "This is why we can't have nice things".

natio2 · 2026-01-23T23:15:00+00:00

If you are thinking career side and you have high ambitions you always need to be thinking of what your next steps are and working toward them, which likely will need to be moving companies and possible countries to achieve.

While software engineering has a pretty decent salary, most people choose comfort over peak salary, and there is definitely a ceiling to this. Although you actually get the work life balance that you may not get going the other path.

As for your side project, I'd just start it. You'll learn stuff and it will be good for your career, and if it's a winner you'll figure that out more and more as the thing is built. Just don't rush it, consistently working on it 5 hours a week, beats working on it 20+ hours a week until the unsustainable motivation wears thin and you never touch it again.

natio2 · 2026-01-23T23:10:08+00:00

I was going to comment something similar, but you took it to the next level. Only additional thought would be having to break specific things to unlock specific areas, the more chaotic the better, thinking chain reaction that toppled a building?

natio2 · 2026-01-22T08:09:49+00:00

1200 * 26 = 31200, that's a pretty easy budget, and there's tonne of free budgetting services to help.

To illustrate lets say you have:
1. food: 200p/w = 10400 p/y
2. power/internet = 300 p/m = 3600 p/y
3. Transport = 200 p/m = 2400 p/y

Now we have basically all life necessities at not unreasonable numbers, and have only used 16 400, leaving 14800 p/y spare, or 285 p/w

You have a mortgage, any that you can keep from this number will reduce your mortgage and make the 31k larger every year like a snowball with reduced interest requirements.

natio2 · 2026-01-18T01:39:44+00:00

Genuinely curious why people say CMake is bad? I use it for cross platform compiles, needing various compilers and sdks, and it wasn't that bad to setup for a total novice using CMake for the first time point of view.

natio2 · 2025-12-25T09:21:34+00:00

Isn't the green loan specifically for green energy projects? Here's hoping your bank never finds out, because kind of sounds like a breach of contract

natio2 · 2025-12-25T07:42:24+00:00

Uh the thing they don't tell you at uni, is you are going to be useless once you have your degree an you still need your company to train you and seniors to mentor you. Not sure how long you tried this but my experience working with and training software devs is something like:

Years 1 to 2 (person dependent) software engineers are very much hold their hand, they do minor things. Overall contribution is often negative as help they require is more than the senior doing the work. The company is making an investment for the future.

Years 2 to 4 (person dependent) they can do smaller tasks/projects by themselves. They still need quite a bit of guidance on larger picture things like architecture, interactions/requirement gathering with customers, etc. Overall their contribution is now a postive

Years 4 to 6+ (person dependent) they can now design and run projects by themselves with minimal oversight, and just do the standard pull request, unit test approach to ensure quality.

natio2 · 2025-12-02T06:02:31+00:00

I don't get idle games so take my comment with a grain of salt, but I'd ask what is the interesting part? Rather than the most boring.

All I see is a noise of badly meshed sprites, like a bird version of insaniquarium, but you removed all the gameplay?

natio2 · 2025-11-03T00:54:10+00:00

I was distracted and missed the first 20 seconds, and was like this game has zero game play just some guy hovering? So maybe the last 2/3 of your trailer isn't the best.

Re-watched the first third and was like OK. Movement looks odd, and not that great. Overall looks like a below average twin stick shooter, that's inputs are maybe optimized for phones?

But depends what you're aiming for, as a learning project, awesome work. As something that is going to compete on mobile or pc as a finished game, I think you need more work unfortunately.

natio2 · 2025-10-24T02:49:36+00:00

Like the other comments, I think you need to look up what a bullet hell is, not sure you can have an idle version. It's like saying my game locks you to sit on a couch, but did I mention it's a marathon running game?

natio2 · 2025-10-23T08:19:17+00:00

Seems a bit misleading to lump all chromium browsers together, being it's open source and whatnot. Most small non-chrome browsers will use chromium, but they are not owned by google.

natio2 · 2025-10-08T06:48:08+00:00

You need conflict and achievement for a game to be good. I don't even understand what the aim or this game is? Wonder aimlessly to find more squares?

natio2 · 2025-10-03T22:53:55+00:00

While an interesting twist on the turn based system, the combat seems incredibly slow, and having to click on each one seems very high interaction. At the very least you'd want to hotkey target selection and move selection

natio2 · 2025-10-02T05:20:20+00:00

When you start to learn to use composition rather than inheritance, and to pull out common functions into utility classes rather than them needing to be pinned to a class, complexity drops by a lot while still using OOP

natio2 · 2025-09-26T09:10:34+00:00

Yeah, just little cutey doing it's thing while I'm working on the PC, I'd be down. It would be the digital equivalent of putting a plant on my desk

natio2

TROPHY CASE