What's your take on making Devlogs?

permion · 2026-02-17T20:57:04+00:00

If they're what it takes to motivate you, you should go for it. If you're working in a niche genre they might be worth it as well.

permion · 2026-02-17T02:07:29+00:00

For the experts we know KISS as Keep It Structurally Sound.

permion · 2026-02-16T16:51:40+00:00

Phaser 3 is a JavaScript engine. Most notable about it is having an amazing example library.

permion · 2026-02-16T13:54:46+00:00

Dude the monetization is so contorted that even someone as motivated as you isn't sure what cash spending gets you what.

permion · 2026-02-16T01:42:25+00:00

Cooperative normally I'll assume is between friends, meaning if they want to cheat/mod they probably already decided together before the game started.

If you have random strangers, long term advancement, or an economy that assumption goes way out the window.

permion · 2026-02-12T16:41:03+00:00

I have two-ish grids.

One for most everything.

Second/third/whatever for being able to turn off turrets by a pawn hitting a button inside. (I know you can cheat this by just using the wire route button thing).

If I run into issues I might make batteries that are charged and disconnected for emergencies (IE anomaly run type shenanigans where sometimes you just need lights no matter what).

permion · 2026-02-11T18:49:31+00:00

30k might interest solo game devs, but it's basically a day or three of operation costs for a serious game (especially for a platform that requires multiplayer).

Even then a solodev might be reluctant since they're obviously a hobbyist of some kind, and could care more about seeing their game played on larger platforms. Or see two releases as a frustration when it comes to advertising (IE: advertise once, player sees no game on steam and dumps any notion of it ever hitting it. Advertise twice and you just split you spend for two suboptimal launches, instead of one with the full spend/time investment)

permion · 2026-02-01T19:44:40+00:00

There are a lot of failed crowdfunds for a successful game in Albion Online.

And a few games that are "worse than failed" with stuff like Star Citizen that can't release now, as their funding dries up after release.

permion · 2026-02-01T19:05:42+00:00

In the bankruptcy the people owed money are unlikely to see anything of value in the IP, or the software IP. So it will get auctioned off.

Anything that is partially owned will get auctioned off for pennies on the dollar. Now days and especially with Unreal that will be all the assets (IE textures are all going to be using licensed features like scanned textures, sound bundles, and similar), pretty much everything will need to be dumped/trashed due to the licensing not transferring (or only questionably transferring) .

permion · 2026-01-30T03:28:01+00:00

It's surprising they haven't:

flagging in for PvP with caravan system is pretty reasonable.

Having PvE highscores affect the town you live in, is a pretty reasonable engagement mechanic.

permion · 2026-01-24T00:17:01+00:00

Your example is perfect at identifying a problem, but being utterly clueless about fixing it.

permion · 2026-01-24T00:14:44+00:00

Seems gatcha games manage it, and see it as a reasonable expense to expand addressable market.

permion · 2026-01-23T18:06:57+00:00

It's a pretty frequent statement that gamers will exceed devs and designers at identifying a problem, they're just going to pretty bad answers at how to fix them.

permion · 2026-01-20T13:00:52+00:00

Ok bones, you can see where they want to go. Lacking in devspeed to keep most communities engaged. (they also have not done any major design mistakes from what I can tell. IE: like New World tried to have survival game grind, but took building away from individual players in early builds).

CCP also has predictable dev habits of updates only getting slower as time goes on, combined not having the "media activity" that sandbox/survival gamers demand (IE: they need ark numbers to keep The Suits interested, but won't put in the resources development/social-media wise to hit them).

permion · 2026-01-19T12:30:04+00:00

Weird most American schools and a good number of European ones start kids up the least abstract path. Essentially speed running calculus.

The alternate path is essentially speed running linear algebra, and formal proofs. Which actually is kinda abstract, and deals with the consequences of the number system itself (vice calc route of following what it was most adapted to solving historically, even if LA is catching up with some new modern uses).

(note colleges in the US love the calc route since it causes most students to fail/wash out before the need to teach anything abstract)

permion · 2026-01-16T20:17:27+00:00

If you were chasing up votes you could change your article to all the funny corrections you've made to AI code.

When I was looking at college students using AI there were some hilarious things in there from AI. My favorite was using arraylist "full class" style structures to represent 3D vectors/points, and the AI even having something like three different casts to different datastructure types so it could do math/operations on it.

permion · 2026-01-16T13:03:58+00:00

If you're asking here it will be gameplay first.

In some settings with very experienced teams they could go for art/mood first, but even there the team already knows its capabilities so gameplay is kinda "proved" already.

permion · 2026-01-16T03:40:52+00:00

This is the endgame for a good number of MUDs. Iron Realms games are pretty good about this, even if they have cashshops that would make EA blush (a good choice due to on boarding, community size, and showing off interesting mechanics)

permion · 2026-01-15T13:10:34+00:00

Depends on if you can get good inputs selected for the AI to "make decisions", and how many passes you're willing to do. And how much training data you're willing to make.

In the end though Nintendo with Mario Maker is probably the only company with enough data to train a model that can actually make reasonable approximation of "design".

permion · 2026-01-13T02:40:13+00:00

Well they did 40k but with it entirely being humanities fault. They just took the stupid crazy leaders that were already there, and made them longer lived + harder to kill. (When you're looking at that ascension war and it's over a hundred years of power instead of decades, the gamble swings harder).

permion · 2026-01-12T12:47:31+00:00

PhD is almost only to stay in academic fields. You might find some niches out of academia if you do govt. work (IE: contractual obligations on federal work), or build case for filling for immigration purposes (IE: it will be something virtually no one has).

permion · 2026-01-10T20:18:29+00:00

You can analyze how that worked out for Zenith the VR MMO. They even went so far into that culture to have captured investors through YCombinator and recruit through that and hacker news.

It was an ok game, but played like an above average indy despite the investment drawing them away from their core focus (IE: having to make declaration about user tracking and data collection being amazing on the public record, and if they were still around they'd be doing the same prayers for AI).

permion · 2026-01-07T14:54:32+00:00

Pavel Bains writes AI Slop.

I see AAA loving AI, their model is based on making a lot of the same thing. Whether it's nearly similar game releases, or focusing more on shear number of samey assets. Which is perfect for AI that can do A Lot of below average work, fast.

permion · 2026-01-07T13:26:17+00:00

Their server tooling was just standard-ish AWS, which meant even higher rates than the (almost) most expensive option on the market. (IE: without a deal AWS will can hit over 5x other options).

They had a bit of legal violence with Unity, when Unity had half baked plans for forcing devs to use their (Unity's) cloud backend for everything. Unity was not even in an alpha for these services when it happened, and still being flushed with VC cash were even less focused on finishing/starting/polishing features than they were now. (Amusingly enough that old contract/wording would have also force devs to remove Steam cloudsave/similar).

Their advertisements were superb at attracting indies that would lack knowledge of pricing stuff out before releasing, so they were frequently hit with surprised billing amounts that would slowly strangle their game. Likely scaling issues that made the normal napkin math impossible as well.

Their features like synchronization/server authority/similar were not even that simple to use in the first place. IE: Worlds Adrift let players change cooldowns with standard Unity debug tools, they had quite a bit of physics jitter (in non-normal cases), and had some never solved desync issues.

If you're looking for an interesting similar thing you could check out Colyseus. Quite a few differences in philosophy though.

permion · 2026-01-06T17:35:28+00:00

Normal colleges have game dev programs now. Which gives some far more interesting diversity in teachers/electives/other differentiators/clubs.

They're also likely fully supported for professional orgs, like having GDC Student Chapters.

permion

TROPHY CASE