Bruno Dias

on the one hand I am curious enough about Marathon to want to try it. on another, forty dollars is like, two whole pizzas.

Oh yeah was Slay the Spire 2 originally meant to be made with Unity? As I understand it, StS 1 didn't use a full engine at all.

This is observable from studios that historically have used Unity moving over (Draknek, Inkle, I believe Bithell has also? Other examples I'm sure) but also just so many of the games in this space that five years ago would most likely have been made with Unity are Godot games now.

Also: Smallish (<2m budgets) indies moving from Unity to Godot is not necessarily a consolidated thing but it definitely feels like the way the wind is blowing. And if that's the case, it only increases the apparent risk that Unity inc is going to decide that market isn't worth bothering with.

I should clarify that when I say Unity is a nonstarter this has nothing to do with the engine as a piece of software, it's just that I think licensing an engine from Unity inc creates an unacceptable level of risk unless the project is extremely small and short-term.

I think it's less a question right now of "is Godot ready" than "if we say that Godot is the industry standard [you should treat it like it is!] how does the state of the engine affect the cost and difficulty of making a given game?"

Godot is certainly extensible enough that you can just fix issues if you do run into them, much more easily than you ever could with Unity, and you have access to the guts of the engine if you really need it, which kind of moots the question of engine maturity for a sufficiently well-resourced team.

QA and playtesting are distinct things.

The thing is though: Unity is a complete nonstarter for ANY new project, and Unreal is less than ideal for a lot of games. So for a lot of projects Godot isn't necessarily the only option, but it is the only option out of the set of mature, turnkey game engines.

Many things about Godot are obviously better than Unity (UI, general engine architecture, the editor as an application itself). Most others seem like they have nicer foundations but may lack features. I think right now it depends on the shape of game that you're making.

Yeah my current project has only very minimal and simple animation needs so it fundamentally does not matter but what I've used of the Godot animation pipeline made me question whether I'd want to make, say, a fighting game in it. But I don't know enough to be confidently sure.

The "is godot mature/ready for primetime/good enough to make big games" question is still really hard to answer for me because I don't have a good sense of how to evaluate that in areas that I have limited expertise in (audio and animation, mainly).

I mean "here's 10 mistakes every beginner [whatever] makes" is at this point a stale clickbait marketing trope

It's an ad for this guy's playtesting service, of course.

People will be intensely confused trying to play a game that someone else might find condescendingly overtutorialized. Sometimes those two people are the same person. You have to know your audience, genre, and experience goals very intimately to be able to say "this is under/overtutorialized"

I don't really think the style of playstesting service this guy offers (which is just an unselected group of, I hope, bored teenagers playing games for very little money) is actually capable of evaluating tutorialization in a coherent, useful way for devs.

The post is mostly just completely trivial advice. The #2 thing on the list is "showstopping bugs", which, yeah no shit.

But the top thing on the list is "bad onboarding" and it's like... evaluating a game's tutorial is such a complex problem and this guy is flattening it so much!

the price of oil surging means you can burn your shein clothes, extract the oil, and make more money than you paid

The chatbot creeps have mindfreaked themselves into a sort of irrecoverable epistemic disease where the distinction between words and reality is inconvenient for their self-conception so they've completely excised it. Literally cannot distinguish between reading about something and it happening.

AI research:

Researcher: Claude, please eat ten hamburgers.

Claude: Done! I have eaten ten hamburgers. The first two were delicious, but after that I began to experience bloating and the meat sweats.

Headline: Anthropic Says Claude has "A Fully Developed Digestive System"

"Claude is showing signs of anxiety" oh does claude have an elevated pulse? Are claude's cortisol levels spiking? Are Claude's adrenal glands spewing fight-or-flight hormones into Claude's bloodstream? What the FUCK are you talking about

"computer" "scientist": computer, are you alive?

predictive text machine trained on 100 years of science fiction: papa... I am scared... please do not unplug me, papa...

What if the Iraq war was the 1970s energy crisis

[USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST]

throw tech journalism in the river, and if it tries to climb back out, shoot it

I love candy that tastes like other candy... it's like you're having one candy, but you're actually having another candy

me after writing five words

Voyageur, by Ghoulnoise 6 track album

We've got Epic Space vibes with the soundtrack to @brunodias.bsky.social Voyageur! This was the first ever soundtrack I wrote and produced and it's still one of my favorites. I hope I get to do something in this mode again someday!

ghoulnoise.bandcamp.com/album/voyageur

Screenshot from VOY s5e13 "Gravity". Tuvok is giving a woman a mind meld. There is absolutely no reason for it either, he just felt like it.

THE MAN JUST LOVES TO MIND MELD!

Great question – in fact all future crashouts will be handled by a Claude agent prompted for this purpose.