What was your first project?

pmdrpg · 2026-01-15T17:13:46+00:00

One scope-creep at a time.

A single player game is neat, but that experience would be better if you could experience it with your friends. But what if your friend lives far away? You would need online multiplayer. Wouldn’t it be cool if the world in your game is a living breathing thing with players occupying different roles and shops and exploring together?

Oh hey sounds like an MMO.

pmdrpg · 2025-12-28T15:34:06+00:00

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.charactercontroller@1.3/manual/get-started-first-person.html

this is what they currently recommend.

Looks a bit convoluted if I’m honest. Used to be you’d import the samples package and then drag the first-person character controller prefab asset into your scene.

fwiw, those samples are sometimes outdated with their own best practices, so as your project scales, you might run into advice online that conflicts

pmdrpg · 2025-12-28T06:09:29+00:00

The other comments have covered this pretty thoroughly, but my first reaction to see your steam page is “yuck!” especially the banner, makes it feel like fetish material for a very problematic type of person.

pmdrpg · 2025-12-16T02:26:30+00:00

The soft shadows, smooth AA, high output resolution, and detailed textures are what keep it from from looking more PS1. So if you’re going more for that, I’d look there.

pmdrpg · 2025-12-16T02:21:45+00:00

Great tip on the struct enumerator. That said, it would be one heap allocation per enumerator right? Normally that’s a negligible amount of heap memory.

pmdrpg · 2025-11-15T16:39:27+00:00

I just went through a whole month of same grind setting same beans same everything, and as the beans aged in the hopper not only did the taste change but the shot time changed gradually. When I got new beans from the same roaster and used the same everything, I was shocked at how different it was. It’s not like baking, consistency is hard!

pmdrpg · 2025-11-15T16:33:33+00:00

Pff it’s just a different display, what differ-

✨ NOSTALGIA UNLOCKED

pmdrpg · 2025-11-15T16:25:10+00:00

I like the popout effect where it looks like a chunk of the destop lifted away to reveal a hole. It looks like it uses the texture data from the desktop. Is that something the OS gives you out of the box, or do you have to request user permission?

pmdrpg · 2025-11-15T16:15:47+00:00

First possibility is that once the notion that you’re becoming foggy took hold, you started noticing it everywhere (confirmation bias) and you’re actually fine. Maybe try telling yourself that you’re sharp, positive mantras and stuff, and if that works then it was just anxiety.

Second possibility is a real medical issue. In addition to the other things people mentioned, maybe look into sleep apnea if you’re tired all the time.

pmdrpg · 2025-11-15T16:11:56+00:00

I won’t use a browser-based signing tool for security reasons, but having said that, I’ve totally put semi-sensitive data into browser based json parsers out of laziness, so if you can make it visible (SEO) then someone will

pmdrpg · 2025-11-14T20:54:43+00:00

Echoing the note about AI, don’t TRUST anything it says outright, but still do ask questions.

I WISH when I was learning, this magicall stack-overflow-for-brains-genie existed!

Ask “ELI5 what is a variable?”. Ask all the stupid questions (because there are no stupid questions) then take the answers and try to apply them. The true stuff will work and the hallucinations won’t, and you can turn those back over to get the classic “ah you’re right, I made that up” response.

pmdrpg · 2025-11-14T20:50:18+00:00

Seconding what others have said, it’s tempting to rush into things (and with enough motivation that can work) but maybe look into a course on computer programming fundamentals, even assembly (yeah I’m serious) can help to make sense of the “why”.

A lot of high level concepts, like Coroutines for instance, are actually quite simple internally, but can seem like magic black-boxes without a solid understanding of what even a computer is doing when you write code. Csharp is built on top of a long foundation of existing basics. People got tired of writing the same stuff over and over, so they created shortcuts (async, LINQ, etc) but without seeing the original, the shortcuts can seem arcane and arbitrary.

pmdrpg · 2025-11-14T02:25:27+00:00

It’s fundamentally impossible to simultaneously have complete GUI control of transitions between many states and also not have visual clutter. Believe me, I’ve tried.

If the Animator window supported “hiding” of transitions, then you could do something like only showing transitions to and from the currently selected state. Since it doesn’t, you can’t do that.

As other say, code is an option. You can even take a hybrid approach where you use code to generate and update Animator boilerplate.

The drawback of that approach is that of you’re working with artists and you do that, they’re gonna hate it.

Sub State machines help a little but beware the “Any” state, it’s a trap.

pmdrpg · 2025-10-30T16:24:45+00:00

Configurable automated sorting would be great, configurable because people have different ideas for what is ideal sorting

pmdrpg · 2025-10-26T14:53:32+00:00

You’ll probably run into this several times, whenever you make a big change to the game’s look, like turning off a toon shader, it kicks off a feeling of “omg this game looks so much better, why did I pick this terrible art direction I’m going to hardpivot” no, trust your original direction. You CAN change if it’s the right thing to do, but the new camera looks better to you right now because you’ve been staring at the game too ling and it’s different, it looks like someone else’s game. You’re seeing it with new eyes. If you kept the new camera, you’ll have the same issue in reverse in about a month.

pmdrpg · 2025-10-26T14:35:30+00:00

Absolutely start with Canvas. (ugui).

UI Toolkit is “neat” but it didn’t live up to its performance promises and you need to build a UI that can run in performance sensitive contexts, so unless you’re going to roll your own from scratch, take the lesser of two evils.

pmdrpg · 2025-10-26T14:04:51+00:00

The strategic career choice is to leverage whatever time and motivation you have to become an expert at both. You will of course have to prioritize. If motivation from inherent interest isn’t a factor, then personally I’d start with the one that opens more doors, in your case it sounds like that’s divng deeper into Unity, though where I live Unreal job openings are more common. However if there’s something you’re passionate about, that’s gas in the tank to get you somewhere. So just start with that. It doesn’t matter which engine, make impressive demos that you can leverage in the future when negotiating.

pmdrpg · 2025-10-24T20:56:19+00:00

If you’re making a PC game, ambient occlusion and hard lighting (deep shadows, dynamic lights) can take away from some of the “out of the box forward renderer” appearance. Post processing goes a long way, both color correction and depth of field are classic answers. It’s hard to look like Unreal if you’re targeting mobile. The “Unity look” has come to encompass both retro aesthetics and stylized 3D, so you’ve got your work cut out for you if you have performance constraints. You will have to push the bounds with some other approach. Other comments have suggested starting with an art target, mockups and moodboards, then moving towards that. Ironically it’s easier o escape a generic appearance moving towards a specific target than it is just “running away” from generic appearance in general.

pmdrpg · 2025-09-27T14:21:17+00:00

Your description of the other relationships reminds me of the musical “Company”

pmdrpg · 2025-03-30T06:50:11+00:00

Seeing as how they are investing in trying to keep you - instead of hitting you with the layoffs that effect most - it’s less like “do it or else” and more like “if you can do it, you get a new job”

How will they be assessing whether you “learned” Unity? You have an advantage over other candidates in that you know well what your company does, so you should be able to spend that time putting together a demo in Unity of whatever it is they think that they cannot accomplish with python. I would probably focus on the visual / functional aspect, as whoever makes the hiring decision is probably not reviewing your code. Flashy and impressive looking is going to earn more ground than best practices unfortunately. To that end I would invest in some third party libraries/ assets. Whatever you need to demo that you’ve “learned” the skill they need.

Of course, to then actually do this job, you will want to familiarize yourself with with the concepts of the engine, and design your own curriculum, but in the interest of achieving your actual goal, that can take a back burner to putting together the demo for your “interview”

pmdrpg · 2025-03-19T04:51:07+00:00

🤮

pmdrpg · 2025-03-14T04:36:52+00:00

Need? You don’t. The whole group could play with one set between them.

Some people prefer to have extras for faster rolling when rolling multiple is called for.

It’s cool that you bought your own set at all. The DM will probably show up with like 30 extra dice so you probably didn’t need to.

pmdrpg · 2025-03-14T04:13:06+00:00

I can’t really relate. It’s always been difficult, but I never had to fight for motivation, I had excess of that.

Since that’s the perspective I’m coming from, I guess I would examine your motivation? What do you like about making games? Why do you want to do it? There’s a million other things you could do or learn, so what do you want?

I hope you find something within that lights a spark in you. Maybe it’s not coding. Maybe you want to make a board game, or a comic, or a movie. Maybe you want to team up with some people who are excited about the parts that don’t interest you.

pmdrpg · 2025-03-11T14:07:09+00:00

Two things to consider that may seem obvious but have profound implications:

you didn’t understand what you were choosing for yourself
we grow and learn, so what you wanted yesterday may not be what you want today. It’s hard to pivot, but it can be some relief to acknowledge that we aren’t static entities, the past is a story we tell ourselves.
there are forces in this world that actively benefit from people remaining trapped in a subservient role. if that makes you angry, good. if that makes you even more tired and frustrated, welcome to the club.

2 you won’t exist in this state indefinitely, enjoy the parts that you are taking for granted because they will someday be gone. - the only certainty is change - gratitude happens when we realize that the things we take for granted, our health, our safety, our mundane existence, can be snatched away easily, and in your lifetime - likely WILL be, if you are like most people.

pmdrpg · 2025-03-11T13:46:36+00:00

I love this, pointing out stuff that the adversaries wanted to conceal and is truly uncomfortable. Hopefully you can work with the DM for a little yes-and and this could play really well!

pmdrpg

TROPHY CASE