I believe one of the main problems in modern America is the dominance of corporations. Corporations often strip away the individuality and responsibility of people, leading to actions that are morally questionable, all in the name of profit. While my proposed solution is gradual, I think it can be effective over time.
As consumers, we need to start reducing our reliance on products and services provided by large corporations. Instead, we should support small and medium-sized businesses. By doing this, we can shift public perception to view corporations as detrimental. Choose local restaurants over chain establishments. Gradually switch to software that isn’t owned by major corporations. By taking these steps, I hope we can begin to improve the situation.
Game developers and writers often view time travel mechanics as overly powerful, necessitating artificial limitations. For instance, you might be unable to save a deceased parent. While such restrictions make sense in literature, they feel constraining in games. Take Life is Strange as an example—the protagonist is unable to save a life due to the universe’s limitations.
In contrast, I use Git, which functions as a time machine for code. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, yet it still has its limitations. This makes me wonder: is it possible to design a narrative game with time travel mechanics that don’t rely on artificial constraints?
The code cout << "Hello World\n"; is part of the C++ standard, and C++ has grown a lot over the years. For new streaming functionality, let’s start doing function calls with comma-separated parameters, like log("Hello World", 123);.
The world just dropped the frame, but I’m not in VR. That’s strange.
One downside of your game becoming extremely popular is that you might feel confined to the universe you created. Players will eagerly demand more content from that game—sequels, DLCs, and so on. Personally, I want the freedom to create multiple game universes.
🌸 Tue, Jul 9, 2024 🌸
Once John F. Kennedy said:
We set sail on this new sea of virtual worlds because there are new joys to be discovered, and new benefits to be won, and they must be won and used for the happiness of all people. For computer games, like all forms of technology, have no conscience of their own. Whether they will become a force for good or ill depends on us, and only if we occupy a position of wisdom can we help decide whether this new medium will be a source of delight or a new terrifying tool of manipulation. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of computer games any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of other media, but I do say that computer games can be designed and mastered without feeding the fires of addiction, without repeating the mistakes that we have made in extending our influence across this globe of ours.
Obviously, JFK did not say it, but I feel he would.
🌸 Tue, Jul 9, 2024 🌸
I like to contract words in my C++ code, e.g., cmd instead of command, args instead of arguments, but some words I am so used to typing in full that if I decide to contract them, it makes it slower for me to type, even though it is fewer keystrokes.
🌸 Tue, Jul 9, 2024 🌸
Hey! I feel one and a half days of rest helped. Let’s start another marathon!
🌸 Mon, Jul 8, 2024 🌸
I’ll take a break today from game dev. I was quite a good run about 7 weeks, every day for 12 hours, I had one day break, went to the camp ground. And now I’ve hit the wall. I assume just over the year my stamina has gotten low, hopefully next run would be longer.
🌸 Mon, Jul 8, 2024 🌸
Three weeks ago, I began working while standing, which has significantly alleviated my chest pain, likely a lingering effect of long COVID. However, maintaining an 85-hour work week as I had planned is proving to be unsustainable. Yesterday, I hit a wall and ended up spending the entire day in bed, unable to muster the energy to work.
Additionally, my three-week plan for the first milestone of the Ordy game is falling behind schedule. The workload is overwhelming, and with only a week and a half left until the milestone deadline, there’s still a tremendous amount to do.
🌸 Mon, Jul 8, 2024 🌸
I am struggling with Visual Studio 2015 for almost 2 weeks. And I made up my mind: it is a piece of garbage.
In particular, I am trying to set up a new configuration in the configuration manager, and sometimes it just tells you it cannot do something for some reason, and then still does it, and everything becomes borked, and I have to start over, and over, and over again. And it still does not do what it is supposed to do.
🌸 Mon, Jul 8, 2024 🌸
I believe college in the US is a waste of time and money. I have an MS in physics and engineering, and I got it for free in Russia. And I recommend that way. College in the US is too expensive and does not provide enough knowledge and skills for the money and time you and your parents spend. Nowadays, you can learn everything online for free and way faster than what you can learn in college. One benefit of college is that it forces you to learn; without college, you need to find a way to motivate yourself.
🌸 Mon, Jul 8, 2024 🌸
I really like the AD feature on Netflix. It is subtitles for blind people; they have an additional audio track that describes what is happening visually. And if I feel FOMO about some TV show, I can put it in the background and listen to the show and do some useful things that do not require a lot of cognitive attention like 3D modeling or level design.
🌸 Fri, Jul 5, 2024 🌸
Is the 1st Newton’s law of motion just a special case of the 2nd one?
🌸 Wed, Jul 3, 2024 🌸
Do you play online games? Why do you play online games? Do you use online features of the game? I’m asking because I’m trying to understand what’s appealing in online games. I play Overwatch and VRChat, but in WoW or Diablo, they’re technically online games, I play solo.
🌸 Mon, Jul 1, 2024 🌸
HTML5 was a bad idea years ago; it is a worse idea now. Let’s go native. Discord constantly eats 4% (used to be 15%) of one of my CPU core; it should be near to 0. I periodically need to refresh X.com page because it becomes super unresponsive over time. It takes forever to withdraw my money from Bank of America ATM - HTML5.
🌸 Mon, Jul 1, 2024 🌸
PureRef is a great little tool, but lately I’ve realized I just paste images directly into Blender. I use a plugin called ImagePaste. Plus, grease pencil.
🌸 Mon, Jul 1, 2024 🌸
The many-worlds interpretation implies that if you go and buy a lottery ticket, there is a 100% chance of winning the lottery. It’s just that you are most likely to end up in the universe where you did not win.
But I am wondering, should I go and buy the ticket just to make another me happy?
Aliens do exist. Today I met a family with two kids and a dog at an empty campground. There were about 40 spots, and maybe three spots were taken. The family picked the spot right next to me. The family had an older kid, a newborn, and the dog. The dog was barking non-stop. The dad was constantly pitching to the older kid. The last straw was when the newborn started crying at 12 noon and didn’t stop for two hours. At 2 a.m. I packed up and headed back home.
AIs sometimes gives very appealing ideas, but then you try to piece everything together to a coherent outcome, and everything falls apart.
I just got a message from Valve; they are not recommending going live on July 3rd because of the sale event and would not be able to promote my game, so I am discussing later release dates. The Steam page is live, though. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3058180/The_Final_Act
I need to do proper scoping for the 3-month and 6-month long games. I know I can scope a game for what I can make in one month, so it shouldn’t be that hard to do for the 3-month game and eventually for the 6-month game. The same technique just needs to be scaled up by a factor of three and six, respectively.
Just a reminder: I am doing a one-month game jam and at the end of this month, I am going to publish the game on Steam. Steam page is up: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3058180/The_Final_Act
I’ve got it! Here is my rough outline plan for the next eight years.
I am going to make games. Currently, I am employed full-time, working 40 hours a week at my day job. However, I can dedicate an additional 45 hours each week to work on my games.
Step One: I will scope a game that I can make in three months and publish it on Steam. In parallel, I will look for investors. While I don’t necessarily need them, securing investment could allow me to quit my day job earlier and execute my plan faster. By the way, all my games are going to be free.
The first game will help build a foundation of supporters, and donations from these supporters will start coming in. I will then scope the next game for six months. I’ll rinse and repeat this process for the next two years.
At this point, I expect to have enough income from donations to quit my daytime job and focus fully on making my own games. I am aiming for around $3 million. With this income, I’ll set up a program to aid my friends and family, no strings attached, so they can enjoy their lives. I’ll probably start with $500 per month, increasing the support as my income grows.
Throughout this process, maintaining creative freedom is essential. While finding investors can accelerate my plans, I will ensure that any partnerships allow me to retain control and creativity in my projects.
Years 3-5: Over the next three years, I will continue making a new game every six months. As I gain experience and work full-time on my games. This means my games will become more and more attractive and awesome. I can relax a bit and work 60 hours a week instead of 85. By the end of the fifth year, I expect to have earned $250 million.
Years 6-8: I will keep up the momentum, aiming for a total of $1 billion by the end of the eighth year.
I will regularly re-evaluating my plan at every step.
About half a year ago on a whim, I wrote a post about the development process. I thought a lot about how I can optimize it and came to the conclusion that just working solo, the outline of the process takes about 10 steps, each step introduces overhead, even and the polished well-working team, adds the human factor, and everything just barely crawling. If I can work solo, I think I can have a productivity of 5x developers, minimum, and honestly, I am estimating it to be about x100. So instead of having a team of 100 developers with exactly the same productivity as myself, it is cheaper and more fun to work solo.
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