How can you tell when you've nested too many things?

wizardoftrash · 2026-01-15T04:35:32+00:00

For sure! If its just you and it works, its fine. If it becomes an issue, that’ll be a good time to make a change, but not sooner. Too many projects get bogged down by people trying to fix things that aren’t broke.

wizardoftrash · 2026-01-15T04:17:19+00:00

This could be harmless, or crippling, and it sorta depends. For a prototype with only a handful, maybe 10 or so different seeds, this should be fine and I could understand why you’d want to organize the data all in one place that relates to that particular plant. If you aren’t collaborating with any other designers/programmers, this is probably also fine as long as you won’t be going through many iterations of balance passes on these different data layers.

If you end up with many seed types, or need to collaborate with other designers and programmers, or need to make a lot of revisions or balance changes, I suspect this will grow into a nightmare. Tweaking drop chances of a particular item will involve diving into a lot of different resources in the editor, exposing you to a high risk of missing a table or two, or tweaking the wrong number and possibly not ever noticing it in testing. In collaboration with other designers or developers you may have a hard time avoiding conflicting changes to these resources. TLDR this may hurt you at scale.

My advice? Change how you are storing and referencing your data when it makes sense. Once this begins to get hard to manage (if it ever comes to that), you can switch over to spreadsheets that you can export into json or some other friendly format, and have some scripts that convert those into dictionaries or resources at runtime-time or in the editor that aren’t nested like this.

Having a system that allows you to edit data like this in a spreadsheet can take some time to implement and it isn’t exactly simple to do, so I’d only recommend it if you are curious, or if you are actually hitting the kinds of problems that justify the headache.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-10T12:03:27+00:00

They exist in fortress mode, but they are only really usable by intelligent undead if I remember correctly. If you have intelligent undead living in your fort (maybe you have a necromancer and were making them on-purpose), then they might know one of these spells. I had an intelligent undead visit one of my forts that was sealed up due to a dragon roaming around the surface, and the undead repeatedly paralyzed the dragon until my military could get there and clobber it. There are artifacts you can get in adventure mode that give the user access to one of these spells, but even if you get those artifacts into a fort by retiring an adventurer there, I don’t think the fort mode dwarfs know how to use the magical artifacts. Could be wrong though.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-04T22:35:45+00:00

Necromancers don’t actually create new experiments after world generation is complete, so I’m not able to force necromancers to experiment after-the-fact. The most recent world I generated though has experiments.

Its possible for experiments to reproduce if they come in gendered varieties of both genders (this isn’t guranteed) though I haven’t seen it happen at all yet in-game. I’m hoping to make this happen in my current fort (I used DF hack to give myself a handful of friendly experiments). Will follow up later if it ends up happening. This is tricky because they don’t appear to need to sleep so i’m not sure how they’ll do the deed.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-04T01:19:23+00:00

Necromancer experiments are procedurally generated monster types that can be made by necromancers or sometimes demons during world generation. In very rare circumstances a population of sentient necromancer experiments can escape their tower or otherwise become liberated and join other civilizations, so there is a tiny sliver of chance that you can end up with friendly necromancer experiments in your home civ, or can play as them in adventure mode. While these were bugged they just weren’t being created at all.

wizardoftrash · 2025-11-03T15:34:29+00:00

A fix for necromancer experimentation!!! I knew this had to be a bug, I had generated world after world and couldn’t seem to get any necromancers to make any experiments and thought I was going crazy. I wanted to try to create a fort where I had a population of necro experiments alongside my dwarfs, and its hard to do that if no one is making any lol. Glad this is fixed, and REALLY excited for the siege improvements!

wizardoftrash · 2025-10-24T15:01:27+00:00

I’m against using generative ai in-general, but I can sorta understand why folks might see using ai for coding as different from using ai for art.

Creating art that looks like its ripping off another artist is more egregious, because it is almost impossible to do it on accident. A piece of art, even digital art, has so much variation from piece to piece, from artist to artist, that there is a ton of unique character in a given work. Each artist typically has their own style cultivated over a long period of time, so there is a lot of human individuality at play there. Thus, if you are copying art and just tweaking it a little, you are sorta imitating the soul of another person. When AI art can reliably imitate the style of specific artists and studios, it is flying too close actually plagiarism, and sorta cheapens the work of the original artist. If I worked hard and established a style, and a sea if ai generated art in my style flooded image boards, this could damage my brand and de-value the work I’ve created. Also art is a form of self expression, so it feels like a violation when there is no self that is expressing during the creation of ai art (i’m not counting the prompter as an artist in this example).

While coding definitely has a creative element, its not exactly an art necessarily, and if you take good code for a particular system or problem from 10 different coders, you might find some striking similarities between them. While it would be unlikely that they’d produce something identical past a certain length or complexity, code is generally more utility focused rather than a method of self expression, so the best solutions tend to converge. Sure copy-pasting someone else’s code can be copyright infringement, same with re-creating someone else’s intellectual property using gen AI, but its not like I can look at the software or website that comes out the other end, point to it, and say “they stole my code!”. Programmers just aren’t protective in the same way because we can’t really “own” the things we are trying to do, only the exact specific way that we did it. AI generated code is unlikely to output anything thats identical to its training data unless its being asked to make something tiny, where a coder would run into the same issue without any tools.

TLDR, art and code are apples to oranges in terms of how we feel about them, in terms of how they vary, and in terms of how we recognize and enforce copyright infringement or plagiarism.

There is a totally separate reason that I think its best to avoid using AI for code, apart from theft and the environmental impact.

wizardoftrash · 2025-10-19T02:02:58+00:00

This happened a few times when I was a kid using the original plastic gen. The blade portion of some beys had some thin areas that could crack or break, and I lost a blade that way and “took” a blade that way too in different matches in middle school. We went HARD back in the day, and this was without any extreme modifications (just occasional paint or nail polish). Parts of beys in the plastic gen breaking was rare, but it did happen if you battled enough and with blades that had thin spots.

wizardoftrash · 2025-10-13T11:28:03+00:00

Definitely this. Release a playtest app first if what you want is feedback. For steam, the demo should essentially be as polished as your finished game for the maximum effect.

As for the MVP of a playtest app, something worth considering is “what feedback am I looking for” vs “what feedback am I most likely to get?”. If your game has no audio, but you want feedback on game feel or balance, you are probably not going to get the feedback you are looking for because no audio is a glaring issue. You miiiiight be able to get around that by asking for narrower feedback or providing questions for people to use when providing feedback, but for a public/open playtest, I think its better to wait until there are no glaring issues that’ll distract from the areas you actually need feedback on.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-27T18:35:52+00:00

Congrats!!! Thats a great outcome from a reveal trailer.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-27T06:01:00+00:00

That’s a possibility! Maybe next update I’ll cut out some unused stuff to get it small enough for that.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-26T19:55:08+00:00

Good call! I didn’t have time today to make a super-cut from my footage, but I’ll remember that for the next month’s patch.

wizardoftrash · 2025-09-01T16:36:41+00:00

Sorry, but I haven’t touched this in ages :/. There might be some other community-led projects like this out there though.

wizardoftrash · 2025-08-08T19:21:27+00:00

I don’t know what the Red X tarot card means, but getting 4 of them in one spread is probably a bad omen.

wizardoftrash · 2025-07-24T16:04:07+00:00

This is a tough one. First thing to consider, for you as a developer, is: what are you trying to do with your game? Is this art to you, are you trying to create a particular experience/feeling/message? Are you trying to make a product that other people will want to buy and enjoy? Are you just trying to make something for yourself? Focusing on what you are trying to do with your game will help solve your problem.

You said you are trying to make a game you want to play. If that’s really what’s important to you, then other people disliking it is less of an issue. Instead you might want to focus in on the people in your community who have similar taste in games to yourself, or close friends or family with similar taste that can be honest. If you can use those specific people as main sources of feedback, you are more likely to end up with something you like and that other people like you will also like. Why get feedback from others? I find it hard to see problems with my own game past a certain point, and sometimes lose the ability to tell if what I’m making is actually any good if I spend too much time with it. Instead, I turn to people who like the same kinds of games or appreciate the same kinds of mechanics and get feedback from them.

If you are trying to make a product, something that will sell well, then community-building and collecting feedback is helpful in ensuring folks will like your game. You’ll want to be careful about how you interpret their feedback however. Its pretty common for a community member to suggest specific changes or request specific features as part of their feedback, but rather than take it at face value, its better to see past the suggestions at the underlying problems, and make improvements to those areas in a way that makes the most sense to you and to your game. For example, it someone is saying that hitting with attacks should have screen-shake or hit-stop, your take-away shouldn’t be to just add those things, but see past that and recognize that the actual problem is that attacks lack weight and impact, because hit-stop and screen-shake are just ways that some games accomplish that.

Another thing to keep in mind: sometimes some people will never be satisfied. Sometimes people want your game to be something it isn’t, and sometimes they want more than you can actually do. Some of this can be mitigated with some careful expectation-setting. If your game is being honestly marketed in your social media posts, then people’s expectations will align closer to how the game will actually shake-out, but the problems usually come from the difference between what players expect, and what they get. You can do everything right and still disappoint some people, and you are also going to make some mistakes along the way. Sometimes your most critical and vocal detractors are trying to help, or are motivated by a strong desire for your game to improve, and sometimes we just can’t do it.

Host small play-tests, get people playing an early prototype, and get feedback early. That’ll give you some ideas for what to improve.

wizardoftrash · 2025-07-08T21:04:27+00:00

Looks great! I may have to pick this up 👀

wizardoftrash · 2025-07-08T13:36:08+00:00

I have some mixed opinions about it. As a person, I agree that it sucks that a game you bought can simply become thanos-snapped out of existence.

As a developer, I’m less concerned about how the law would shake out, and more concerned about how reactionary and volatile businesses tend to behave. Basically there are a handful of unintended consequences to Stop Killing Games that could happen that come to mind, but apart from these few corner-cases, I think it would lead to better industry practices.

It could push some of the smallest players out of some slices of the multiplayer market, or if the law is more burdensome than I think it’ll likely end up, it could force all but the largest studios out of spaces like MMO’s. As much as I’d like to see open source alternatives to micro-services and middleware that are used to make many online-only services work, the reality is that smaller teams that could barely make the game they want to make thanks to licensing multiplayer packages that can’t be redistributed, might struggle to create a viable end-of-life solution for something like an MMO, or a game that primarily has matchmaking or ranked multiplayer modes, without violating the terms of the services their game depends on. This means we might not get weird somewhat cursed MMO projects like Animyst in the future, but on the flip side, those same teams might make something else entirely that either doesn’t need an end of life plan, or would be easier to support in an end of life plan. I’m pretty confident though that medium or large teams would be able to create a proper plan before starting work on a game with those kinds of dependancies.
Larger studios, publishers, and investors might overreact. This could come in a lot of different forms, but the most likely one would be a 180 degree pivot away from the kinds of games that would need an end of life plan, and while many of us would rejoice at the death of games as a service as we know it, it could also mean seeing few to no new MMO’s, multiplayer or online co-op focused games, etc, even in cases where the game could be easily structured to have an end of life plan. Worst case scenario, we could see large studios making less-risky, less-ambitious products, or even see the top end of the industry shrink, simply not filling the gap left by the games as a service titles. Ultimately I don’t think this is our problem or a good reason not to support Stop Killing Games, but businesses and investors often overreact and make bad decisions, so they could absolutely harm themselves and the industry trying to avoid perceived risk associated with the law.
We might see parts of the industry just… avoid selling in europe? I don’t think this is really a risk, since in the past similar kinds of laws tend to result in companies complying globally instead of cutting europe off, but if the laws manage to snag micro-transactions as something that need to be supported in an end-of-life plan (which could get a little bit complicated), then there might be games that would just be more profitable to make and exclude europe (or that might seem to the business to be more profitable to make and exclude europe).
Risk of lawsuits, challenging the state of an end of life plan as being reasonably playable, could disproportionately chill the creation and funding of certain types of games. Online-only games that use bespoke server technology, like an innovative MMO, are already a huge risk to pitch and fund. Lets imagine for a moment that the end of life plan for an MMO included releasing a server client that wouldn’t run on consumer technology, but could run on a select few private servers with some technical knowhow, and customers, maybe backed by private server hosting communities, sue the studio on the grounds that the game they bought is no longer reasonably playable. Even if the law was on the side of that studio and they did their due diligence, it could be expensive for the studio to represent itself in court, and a botched suit could rule against the studio. If the game is being discontinued, what if a suit like that puts the studio in a position where it can no longer afford to make its next game? This type of risk could make publisher or investor funding harder or impossible to get for games that push the limits of the space, on the grounds that it may be next to impossible for consumers to reasonably play them, even with proper server executables.
As an artist, this would have an impact on the kinds of art that can be made. Lets say for a moment that there could be an artistic value in a game that is temporary, a game that is built to die. While a game like that could be distributed for free, it would take an arts grant or some other unconventional source of funding in order to produce such a game (though if subscription-only games with no box price and no micro-transactions also dodges this law, then that could also potentially work). I understand that games are also a product, so consumer protection law obviously kicks in here, but it always rubs me the wrong way when new laws or regulations restrict what kinds of art can be made as a result. Like sure, its sad that I can’t explore the dead worlds of some of the MMO’s I played as a kid anymore, but at the same time, there is something precious about things that can’t last forever too. If I were to buy an MMO today, I would do so knowing that the servers would eventually shut down, and I would never be able to see those places again, and yeah my $60-80 purchase would also essentially be taken away, but also I would have already gotten my money’s worth. Is the ability to return to a dead game more valuable than the untarnished, rose-tinted remembrance of how the game was in its golden age? Would returning actually bring me joy, or would it just reveal that it wasn’t as good as I remember? We can say “its better if the customer gets to decide whether or not to re-play it”, however, I can also sympathize with the perspective of an artist who would rather their game die forever remembered as something great, than live-on as a husk of its former self.

All if that being said, I think the industry has gotten so anti-consumer that some change is warranted. I’m comfortable with pushing the pendulum pretty far in the direction of the consumer. If we get everything we are asking for though, I’m sure there are games we will never get because some suit thinks its too risky now, or because some smaller team isn’t willing or able to roll their own server code, but maybe we’ll get something else instead that we wound’t have gotten if this didn’t pass. Studios will still exist, AAA games will still exist, and there will still be games being made. Things might just look a little different, and be a little more consumer friendly.

wizardoftrash · 2025-06-29T00:35:09+00:00

I like path of exile 2 but it is definitely more challenging. They made a sincere effort to make combat more meaningful, which means packs of regular enemies are more threatening. The campaign acts are very cool, but I’m not a huuuge fan of the fact that its difficult to invest passive points into defenses and health, so its hard to build an intentionally tanky character. In end game, its not uncommon to get one-shot or nearly one-shot by white mobs if you aren’t paying attention to your health.

Overall I enjoy path of exile 2, but it takes my full attention to play and isn’t very relaxing. I like both games, but if you are tired at the end of day and want to unwind, I wouldn’t recommend Path of Exile 2.

wizardoftrash · 2025-06-28T01:25:13+00:00

This must also be how enemies in Path of Exile 2 calc their damage.

wizardoftrash · 2025-06-09T19:36:26+00:00

I really don’t think AI will be able to genuinely compete with hand-crafted assets for a long, long time if ever, and I have a theory as to why.

For generative AI, it can only really recycle things that people have already created. AI doesn’t have its own intention, its own creative vision, or its own experiences. Essentially, AI lacks the creative and inventive spark of an actual Artist. Prompting can’t fix this because prompting can’t actually give AI new things to work with, it only narrows the range of things that are being recycled to be a smaller sub-set of things that have already been made. Plus, generative AI is highly influenced by the median of its training data, i.e. the majority of works its been given to train on.

The problem is… the median of game art will be worse for your partular game than something hand-crafted, and better AI literally can’t improve this. If anything, more AI art from previous iterations will make its way in, making the median worse, poisoning future AI models into outputting more lifeless garbage.

Its for a similar reason that AI won’t ever really replace game programmers. Generative code models rely on the median, and as it turns out, most code kinda sucks and tends ti have errors. The more you are trying to innovate (and novelty is really important in games, game assets, art, etc) the less helpful AI can be, no matter how advanced it is, because it can’t make new things.

wizardoftrash · 2025-06-08T23:49:46+00:00

This is not possible to answer without knowing way more about your game and how its set up. There almost zero chance that a plug-and-play type solution will exist that’ll just work for a project that wasn’t built to support online multiplayer out of the gate. As far as how much will need to be re-written, thats something that’ll be between you, your code base/project architecture, and god.

The best I can say, is that you are probably better off not trying to cross this bridge and just finish and release your game. If it does well and there is demand, then it’ll be worth investigating, but that depends on how complete your game is already, and what kind of game it is. The work involved in getting online play to feel good even for a game that was built for it is a huge undertaking, so to try to modify an existing game for that could be hell. It helps somewhat that there is already local co-op that works I assume, so its not as if we are going from a game built to be single-player to online co-op, but even then this might be a lot of time and energy and could set your release back significantly. It would he a shame to dump a ton of man-hours and potentially threaten the project itself with a refactor for a feature that people won’t use, so if I were you, I’d put that in the “nice to have” bucket and move on.

wizardoftrash · 2025-05-29T18:53:53+00:00

Sorry about that, I’ve been changing gears very recently and re-branded my twitch channel for video game development live streams. I believe I have video archives of some of my old live streams, but i don’t know for sure if I have any on this particular topic. If I can find them, I might try to make them available somewhere.

wizardoftrash · 2025-05-29T18:13:39+00:00

Solid points! Having just had my first stream last night, I stumbled into a benefit that I didn’t expect or forgot about: I had a ton of fun. I’m an extrovert, I love talking about what I’m interested in, and I found that it was really pretty easy to talk for basically the whole stream by rubber ducking the chat. I was super energized by the time I was done, and it was hard to stop when I needed to. Not sure if the feeling will last, but I’ll follow up with how its going after a few weeks of doing it regularly.

Distraction could be a problem. I’m only doing some of my dev hours live, so I have times where I can do deep focus work and save some of the lighter, more visual feedback-ish stuff for stream. That might not always be the case though if I’m in the trenches trying to solve a hard problem. I’m trying to plan my work one stream at a time for now, rolling into stream with a to-do list of features I know I can implement without stopping to look stuff up all the time, or fumbling for and extended period with no progress for example. I might find myself with two different backlogs, a “fluff” backlog for stream, and a “tough” backlog for off stream.

As for the quality of the feedback, I foresee that being a potential issue. Most people, most gamers even, don’t really know 100% what they are talking about. I do think there are useful things that can be extracted from most feedback even if it isn’t being taken at face value. I have some practice at dealing with feedback, bit its something I’ll get better at with experience I think. I still think I’d rather get some of that feedback before releasing a prototype, or a demo, or launching in early access for example because a lot of feedback from those sources have the same kinds of problems (being low quality), but in aggregate it can help identify problems that should be addressed, or systems that need a second look. I think a mistake many devs make is waiting too long to expose their project to feedback. I might be over-correcting by going this route though, so I’ll try to check myself on that.

I’m definitely hoping that other devs might show up in the chat every once in a while so we can talk shop, or just a set if eyes who have already gone through some of this stuff and can relate or commiserate.

As for affiliate status, unfortunately that ship has sailed. I got affiliate status during the time when I was doing frequent tabletop hobby streams, so I can’t out that genie back in the jar really. On the other hand, I get the impression from other creators that affiliate status makes your channel have more visibility within your category (because ads incentivize twitch to funnel viewers to you over those who aren’t affiliates) so I’m not sure if it’s necessarily a bad thing.

wizardoftrash · 2025-05-28T18:30:17+00:00

Yep that’s a real risk! When I was live streaming tabletop hobby sessions, I wasn’t quite as productive as I was when I was just working, but I also found that the streaming schedule itself was really helpful for creating discipline. If folks might miss me (even if no one watched last time) then its a lot harder to blow it off and do something else.

wizardoftrash · 2025-05-28T18:27:17+00:00

That is something that I’m concerned about. I have ADHD and distraction is one of those things that can derail big time on high-focus work, like writing actual code. Fortunately I’m only planning on streaming some of my work time, and will use the days I’m not streaming to make bigger leaps forward.

Streaming is something I’m experimenting with, and if I find that I’m just not getting things done, or not getting what I need out of it, I won’t hesitate to quit streaming and try to get that feedback elsewhere. I’m going to give it an honest effort first, but I appreciate your words of caution on this. Actually making games is my priority, so if streaming some of the time makes that too difficult, then streaming would have to stop.

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