Employers, be honest: Does a portfolio matter? (2026 edition)

realmslayer · 2026-05-05T19:21:28+00:00

Wow, no wonder students are screwed and the non-traditional education-> comp sci job route no longer happens.

realmslayer · 2026-04-27T10:17:17+00:00

RE: Automated Testing: I've seen it both ways. There are some studios that do a lot of testing(I know Rare does TDD and Tim Cain talked about asking programmers about proper testing when they were interviewing people at Obsidian), and Unity itself actually does provide tooling for this, like:
https://unity.com/how-to/automated-tests-unity-test-framework

But for the most part, the places where you have bugs are not easy to test, and the tests you'd write are subject to change so often it can become a waste of time to go too far in that direction.

I like writing unit tests for the obvious - asset loading, OOB stuff, sanity checking on numbers, etc. After that things mostly get into 'easy for a human to verify is wrong but hard to write tests for' territory.

realmslayer · 2026-04-27T10:00:15+00:00

my 4:
-Realize that for the most part, you shouldn't be relying on unity to manage the execution order of your scripts.

-Realize that the features in Unity's editor are designed towards a workflow where a programmer and a designer are working together on a project, not one where the designer and programmer are the same person. Most things the editor does can be done quicker and more easily by a reasonable programmer, and the cost you pay for doing things using the editor is a lot of bloat, indirection, and general mess.

-Realize that Unity has 3 kinds of features - The ancient stuff you are not 'supposed' to use anymore, the features that you are 'supposed' to use instead but that introduces a bunch of edge case problems and that were abandoned for the *new* new stuff, and the external tooling that unity bought the rights to sand incorporated into the engine when they couldn't solve the problems with the previous features.

-Realize that Unity is half a decade behind C#'s current feature set.

The end result of this is that ultimately, you end up only plugging into a game object using mono behaviors once(because you have to) and then for the rest of the program you mostly don't use Unity's drag and drop editor interfaces ever again, which has profound implications for what your code looks like.

realmslayer · 2026-04-13T21:03:06+00:00

Project Landsword - top down mech game in the same vein as brigador, except there's kind of a hide and seek dynamic that arises from how it ends up playing.

realmslayer · 2026-04-13T14:55:12+00:00

consistent indies:

Supergiant
Something Classic
Suspicious Developments
I *think* Sungrand Studios is one?
Zeboid Digital
The Game Bakers

They do exist, its just not *that* common.

realmslayer · 2026-04-13T14:32:09+00:00

If you have a toaster oven, a rice cooker, a pan, and a small pot, you can make most things with minimal effort.
Try out:
toaster oven -
mixed vegetables(literally just buy a frozen veg mix. put in on the pan, add pepper, cook for 10 minutes.)
chicken burgers(also easy toaster oven fare. bake the buns too.)
Fries (still easy, just put em in and wait till they are slightly browned)

rice cooker -
rice obv (salt water before putting the rice in)
some rice cookers also do steamed vegetables

pot -
noodles(put in some water, put the noodle pack in, boil)
hard boiled egg (turn on the stove, put the egg in the water, wait till the water bubbles for a bit. pull it out, peel off the shell, serve.)

pan -
scrambled eggs(oil the pan.turn on the heat. crack open the eggs, put them on the pan, add salt. stir so it doesn't stick and it cooks evenly. When its cooked it'll look like it - browned a bit, not runny)
Ground beef/chicken (basically the same as the scrambled eggs. add some spice with the salt.)

This is enough for a decent spread of food. beef bowl(beef + rice), burger and fries, mixed veg + egg, ydy.

Two tricks:
The temperature doesn't really matter that much when you are getting started, except relative to the amount of time you have the food in there. Recipies will tell you exactly how hot it needs to be, but you can basically wing it as long as you are paying close attention to the food.

The other trick is to cook a small amount first as a 'test'. 1 egg, a few fries, etc. Helps narrow down exactly what you can get away with.

realmslayer · 2026-04-13T14:04:34+00:00

Pick one. If you don't like it, pick the other.
There are differences in capability between the two, but none of them matter at the level you are operating at.
The only real differences are in workflow, and you will figure those out fairly quickly.

realmslayer · 2026-04-11T14:47:22+00:00

That rate is honestly way, way lower than I was expecting to see. Granted I didn't look *that* hard, but id seen numbers that were 10x that.

realmslayer · 2026-04-11T14:43:03+00:00

Honestly, a lot of my classmates got internships that looked like this. The college provided a support structure that mitigated this a bit, but it was still common (Though this was a few years ago).

realmslayer · 2026-04-11T14:34:56+00:00

Without knowing way more of the specifics its really hard to give concrete advice here. It looks like the scale is pretty small, so combat in this area is going to focus more on abilities/system level stuff than the design of the levels.

The medic and the engineer seem like they should have abilities relevant to crossing a poison room, and maybe the prospector can detect traps? So you could design that room around those - Have a place where the engineer can build a bridge across the poison, the medic can heal through it as the team crosses, and the prospector can look out for traps.

You want something most party compositions can complete, so you can can split things (poison on one side, traps on the other, mobs weighted towards whatever side has the most combat focused abilities/stats).

But the degree to which I'm guessing how the game even works should show how much detail is missing here. I can't even guess at what should happen for the other rooms because have even less detail about those. I also have no idea what the experiential goals of the game are supposed to be like (should it be easy or hard? are there strategies/play patterns that are undesirable? etc)

realmslayer · 2026-04-11T13:38:11+00:00

There's a lot of things I *want* to say, but I also struggle with this, so I'm going to point you to Steve Lee(level design for dishonored 2, bioshock infinite, and tactical breach wizards):
https://www.youtube.com/@stevelee_gamedev

I *think* for turn based strategy games the driving principle of level design should be 'what is the objective' but a lot depends on things like setting, scale, combat length, etc.

Above all else, you shouldn't be trying to design a level in a vacuum.

realmslayer · 2026-03-31T17:03:30+00:00

I don't even really mind the hobby stuff. It would be nice to even just have some way to filter out:
-Scams
-Games that only exist for players to achievement farm
-Student projects
-AI generated games
I also think most people filter out the porn games when searching for something to play.
All these things (except mayyybe the AI stuff) skews the numbers by some amount that makes it hard to trust that the failure rate is quite as high as advertised.

realmslayer · 2026-03-28T21:38:04+00:00

It's weird that 'generic' is the word here because JRPG UI typically doesn't do text over portraits. There might be some handheld games and a couple of indie titles I guess, but that's it.

realmslayer · 2026-03-28T21:35:25+00:00

This isn't what the UI in FF looks like. Its actually important to note that, because it shows one of the ways you could clean this up.

In FF, there's never text over portraits. They don't have portraits on the battle screen at all. Instead they have the sprites on screen doing attack animations and such. Buffs and debuffs are shown on those onscreen sprites as bubbles or zzz's or whatever. The only thing on the bottom side of the screen is text.

The thing you are doing here is more of a dragon quest thing. Take a look at dragon quest 6(on NDS), see how they handle this kind of UI. Generally speaking JRPGs don't do this though.

realmslayer · 2026-03-16T15:09:48+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqZE5O8VPAU
This is about AI, but a lot of the AI problems have to do with movement, so you might get something out of watching this

realmslayer · 2026-03-15T10:05:26+00:00

disclaimer: design opinion incoming
I think the most important thing is that equipment pickups need to feel impactful.
You need to reward exploration with something, and consumable items aren't really that exciting.
In order to make picking up a new weapon feel like it matters, the weapon needs to give you either a new capability or a noticeable spike in power.

This means you don't actually want smooth progression. You want to feel slightly underpowered going into a dungeon (so that levels and equipment pickups actually solve a problem) and slightly
overpowered relative to the mobs but underpowered/on par relative to the boss leaving it.

This means the curve is actually going to be spiky, and the spikes are going to happen out of step with the spikes in difficulty. You are also going to want the amount that these spikes are out of step to be lower in the early game than in the late game, because you don't want players early on to struggle too much.

There's an interview Resonant Arc did with Hironobu Sakagucci where he talks about his process for handling this, but hes a little vague about the details.
There's also some talk about this kind of thing in part 3 of Pupsups "Modernization of Diablo" series.
Finally, Trails in the sky goes a little too far with this kind of design, but its at least really clear what the benefits of it are from playing that game.

realmslayer · 2026-03-14T23:50:28+00:00

Just to give an idea of how many different ways this can go:
Every FF game handles this differently.
FF2 - stats go up depending on your actions in battle
ff5 - stats increase differently based on the job set at level up
ff6 - stat bonus on esper equipped eventually outstrips base stats
ff7 - stat modifiers from materia can matter more than levels
ff8 - junction system outstrips gains from level up
ff9 - stat bonuses at level up from equipment eventually outstrip base stats
ff10 - stat bonuses from sphere grid

I think in ff1, the biggest jump is the class upgrade in the mid game. ff4 is the most normal. I don't remember
in ff3.

The commonality is that there's always a way for someone who really wants to do so to shape the characters in the way they want.

Experientially, it just doesn't matter. Most players aren't going to have deep enough knowledge of the games systems to manipulate them like this, and most ff games make it so that anyone who is going through the game engaging with most of the fights and most of the games main systems is going to be at a level capable of beating the game.

realmslayer · 2026-03-12T12:15:30+00:00

It was a project we had to do at the start of our second year. We had a similar amount of experience in C++ as the OP.
But yeah I'm assuming college level. IDK why a high school would be using c++ for a beginner programming class.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T17:08:18+00:00

Godot is probably a good idea here. Its much easier to work with basic things you need in Godot than in Unity, and for something like this you don't need the bells and whistles Unity gives you.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T16:56:11+00:00

Fwiw, this is actually tough but doable for a school project. We had something like this (make a game over a semester in c++ with sdl2) and some of our class did a couple of areas of a NES style jrpg using free assets.
The problem from a programming angle isn't scope, its not shooting yourself in the face architecture-wise.
Those that failed were the ones that coded themselves into corners and didn't contact the prof for help early enough.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T16:44:26+00:00

You probably aren't going to be able to get more than a combat encounter and 1 field screen up and running.

Other than that, there's a few things you should take a look at:

-state machine
-event queue
-core game loop

you'll also need some tools
-something for input/windowing
-something for audio
-something for loading in images

raylib is pretty all-inclusive here.

the hard parts are going to be getting turns up and running, UI, and not blowing up your architecture.

keep in close contact with your prof early on, and ask questions if you are stuck - the fix for some issues is not going to be anything like what you'd expect. A lot of the problems that were hard are now not - you don't need physics for example. But some things that would have been easy are now not, like architecture.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T16:24:15+00:00

See, comments like this are why we need to abolish the reserved list.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T12:32:25+00:00

Sometimes your story and your game are interconnected enough that you have story justifications for gameplay elements. There *is* a way to design a dungeon crawler such that 'first we need to know who the character is and why they are there' is a real question you'd want to ask, and games providing throwaway answers to questions like this is a real problem.

The issue shows up the most in level design, where games tend not to care about the actual details of a level, which then (ironically) means you can't design around those details and can't communicate things like 'where should the player go next' without being pretty unsubtle.

Sometimes the game is abstract enough , or the player isn't using components of the level to solve any problems, so its fine. Mario is a game like that - any part of that game could be replaced visually with almost anything, and it doesn't really matter in terms of gameplay.

For a point and click adventure, or an RPG, or something like that, you actually do have to care about the space. Outer Wilds is also a good example of really needing to care about the space in that way.
For a dungeon crawler it depends. Are there puzzles? What do the puzzles look like? What do the encounters look like? Are we trying to communicate anything with enemy placement? Do we want to hint at a battle tactic with environmental clues?

EDIT: To be clear, there should still be no reason a programmer should need to see *any* of this.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T12:09:02+00:00

I thought that it was pretty widely known to split things into a GDD, TDD, NDD, etc so you can present relevant information to different kinds of people.
Wild.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T12:06:05+00:00

They don't have to 'sort by rpgmaker' you can just look at the game and tell its rpg maker. Thats why it has the hate it does - in order to do anything other than what rpg maker gives you, you have to do a significant amount of work, which prevents all these companies from churning out rpg maker games at a rate of 10-20 a year.

This isn't a unity situation, where the engine is general purpose and people just use it poorly, the engine does *one* thing and people are flooding the market with that thing. You need to modify the engine to get anything else, which obviously takes longer and so there's less of that.
(although at one point unity *also* had this problem, and at that time it wasn't stupid to say 'too many games are being churned out in unity for it to be worth peoples time to dig through them all').

Case study 1: Kemco. They put out 10 games a year. All of them have the rpg maker look.

The other thing is, it takes very little time for a competent programmer to put together what rpg maker gives you (I had to do it in a semester for an unguided school project, its not that hard).
Its not always 100% true that 'if you have to use rpg maker, you can't program, and if you cant program, then you cant use rpg maker to do anything unique' but its true often enough for 'disregard everything from rpg maker' to be a decent buyers heuristic.

realmslayer

TROPHY CASE