aschearer

Neat! I am working on something similar and arriving at similar conclusions. eg sqlite local index. I am not ready to give up human authoring, though. How do tackle the quality gate problem and conformance? For programmatic checks like linting it’s reasonably clear but what about checks that require intelligence?

Enjoyable reflection. Resonates with me.

Making games is incredible but also very challenging. That’s part of its appeal. Highly recommended.

EHG | Remote | Full-time

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Great write up, very interesting. Shame y’all couldn’t get funding even after Day of the Devs! Hang in there, game looks cool.

I've been using Claude to help write a complex prototype for game dev. Overall it's been a big productivity boost. However as the project has grown Claude has gotten much worse. I'm nearing 15k lines and it's borderline more trouble than it's worth. Even when it was helpful, it needed a _lot_ of guidance from me. Almost more helpful as a "rubber ducky" and for the fact that it kept me from deadlocking on analysis. That said, discussing problems and solutions with Claude often does keep things moving and sometimes reveals unexpected solutions.

If Claude could write the code directly unsupervised, it would go wild and produce a ton of garbage. At least if the code it writes in the browser is any indication. It's not that it's all bad, but it's like a very eager junior dev -- potentially dangerous!

Imagining a codebase that is one or two orders of magnitude larger, I think Claude would be useless. Imagining a non-expert driving the process, I think Claude would generate a very rickety proof of concept then fall over. All that said, I wish I had this tool when developing my previous game. Especially for a green field project, it feels like having access to the internet versus pulling reference manuals -- a big force multiplier.

Evidently also planning military training for all men…

EHG | Remote | Full-time

EHG is hiring! We're looking for a talented game dev to help lead development on Last Epoch. If you love ARPGs and want to work with a great team (and me!), check it out:

https://eleventhhourgames.bamboohr.com/careers/74?source=aWQ...

I made a top-down 2D survival horror game with doors that could be opened, closed, locked, unlocked, and peeked through. Zombies could open them when unlocked. Sincerely hope to never make a game with doors that aren’t proximity activated in the future!

+1 to design documents. Would add another reason they're useful: reducing miscommunication & misunderstanding between stakeholders. In my opinion, a tech document's goal is to uncover missed specs, invalid assumptions, broad architectural errors, if we're actually prepared to build (i.e. can we speak credibly to what/how), and finally to reduce miscommunication between various teams/disciplines.

I'll add I think tech doc review is just as important as writing stuff down. In my experience it's often done poorly. Doc should be ready ahead of time, sent to relevant people, read ahead of time, and a list of open questions and comments seeded before the meeting. The meeting should have a notetaker. The meeting should be shorter rather than longer. Have fewer people rather than more. The meeting should not be about reading the document top-to-bottom, but about answering open questions and confirming everyone is on the same page.

Programmers always want to automate content creation. I get it as I’m a coder and it’s a fun problem space. Plus creating content is super time and skill intensive. It’s really hard to get right in my experience. Kind of like trying to automate writing a novel…

OK I read the article. I'm very skeptical of this approach. I doubt we can actually uncover fitness functions that reliably maps to "fun", and I believe it would require huge engineering effort to keep the game "simulable." Their examples aren't convincing. What would be convincing is a full, complex, and _fun_ game using these techniques.

Also the article seems like an ad for their AI solution.

Beautiful game, incredible attention to detail. Sorry it hasn't sold 10x more copies but at least you got to make great art!

I would love to hear more concrete recommendations or reading. It's an interesting hypothesis! That said I am a bit skeptical given the game industry has failed to sort this out for several decades... perhaps it's simply ignorance but occam's razor has me thinking there's another factor. Still, it would be interesting to hear more.

I'm in the trenches. Making games is amazing, but the business is brutal. Very hard to find a "geyser of money" and monopolize it for years let alone decades. Contrast with Google search or Microsoft Office, etc. The tech advances quickly, dating past work. One fad gives way to the next. There's a fixed amount of attention for an ever growing amount of content. etc. etc.

Meanwhile, the technical work is very sophisticated and game engineers can work elsewhere, so they justifiably want to be paid well or they will leave to adjacent industries. Plus life is expensive in America. Six figure salary ain't what it used to be. People overseas, including western Europe, will do comparable work for peanuts. Article basically gets it correct. Not sure the problem can be solved. Joe in Seattle wants $150,000. Jozef in Poland wants $50,000. Case closed.

Still, I'm grateful to get to make games with cool people every day. Carpe diem!

I mean if direct influence is the metric -- Fox has low millions according to Google. What do you think, 5 million people in a year under Murdoch's "direct" influence? Looks like Taylor Swift sold 4.35 million concert tickets in her latest tour. So who has more influence? Hard to say, in my opinion. We'd have to start unpacking the content of the information being propagated. How much of the information is novel? How receptive to new information is the audience? What is more impactful a news segment or a lyric? Seems impossible.

Or going about this another way, who was more influential: Hearst/Pulitzer or Freud? In my view, Freud flipped the world on its head meanwhile the other two are simply "yellow journalism."

Are we excluding religious founders? Even still, in no particular order and not exhaustive: Marx, Freud, Rand, Nietzsche, Skinner, Locke, Socrates, Darwin.

Eleventh Hour Games | Remote (US Timezones) | Full-time | Multiple roles

We're a growing company working on Last Epoch, a cool new action-RPG! We have a number of open positions including a Gameplay Engineer, Senior UI Engineer, Client Optimization Engineer, Backend Engineer, Technical Art Director, and Technical Director!

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I'm also a fan of logs. If you have some more examples of how you typically log things to be most effective, I'd love to see 'em! I'm still finding my sense for when it's too much versus too little. Best way to incorporate runtime data. How to structure log messages to work well with other systems. Hearing from others and seeing battle tested examples would surely help. Or if you're down to chat a bit I can send you an email and continue the conversation. Will check out Pachyderm in the meantime~

My random thought for slacker news consideration:

I recently read "The evolutionary origins of modularity"[1] and it talks about NNs that are evolved based on task-performance vs task-performance plus "graph cost" and finds that the later greatly outperform the former. Graphs in the later group ended up being more "modular" which allowed them to evolve to meet changing requirements more readily.

Could we analyze computer programs and create graphs representing modules? And links between systems? A node would a method. An edge would be a call site. Graph-modules – clusters of highly interconnected nodes – would represent the real fault lines of the application, which could be juxtaposed against the developer’s conceptual model. The cost of the overall graph could be calculated and used as a metric – aiming for some lower bound.

1: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.286...

Inflation: according to several calculators online, $100 in 2003 is roughly $170 (rounding up) in 2023 dollars. So 70% over 20 years. Meanwhile Case-Shiller has grown 123% over the same period.

Interest rate: in 2003 the interest rate was in the high 5's. Today it's in the mid 6's. So let's call it a wash.[1]

What I'm saying is, today someone is buying the same house, at roughly the same interest rate as someone twenty years ago except that today 1) the house is twenty years older, 2) it's also about 30% more expensive after adjusting for inflation.

I grant that means the person needs fewer than 2x the resources, but my point still stands.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

Twenty years ago the Case-Shiller index was 140. Today it's 312.[1] The index tracks individual home sales over time -- that is a single home sold repeatedly. I interpret that to mean someone purchasing a home today must have roughly twice the resources to purchase the same home as someone in the past. Which leads me to conclude it's harder to own a home today than in the past all else being equal.

What's your interpretation?

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

I live a few blocks from a highly rated high school. The elementary school is next door. The middle school isn't far, either. Point being, this is an excellent place to raise a family. That being said, with one or two exceptions all my neighbors are retired with adult children or grandchildren. (Not living with them, to be clear.)

I can't fault my neighbors for deciding to stick around in their nice, large homes with bedrooms to spare -- especially if they've paid off their mortgages or renegotiated during the pandemic. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with this picture.

Why isn't the neighborhood filled with young families? And when these older folks do finally move, will young families be able to afford the increasingly expensive mortgages? Looking at the Case-Shiller index, it's scary -- almost double the pre-2008 peak![1]

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

I came across this paper a decade plus ago and it stuck with me. Specifically, there were a few things:

1. We derive pleasure from anticipation, so ensure there are a number of things to look forward to.

2. Likewise we derive pleasure from looking backwards -- so the above is a two-for-one.

3. When making decisions in realtime, we tend to slip into "reptile-thinking" and that in turn leads to unhappy-decisions. They cite a snickers bar versus an apple. So try to make more decisions upfront, aligning them with your goals. e.g. bulk cook versus figure out lunch daily.

4. Day-to-day life has a huge impact on our happiness but we often architect it in ways that make us unhappy. e.g. moving into a big house in the burbs and therefore having a long commute. Think about our goals and design daily life so they flow more readily.

Edit to add my own twist on the paper and a challenge:

If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?

Thank you! -- it runs on a Steamdeck, or so I'm told, so hopefully it will run on Linux, too.

I think what you say is right, too. There's something special in that last push, and there's a sense of loss afterwards.

But then you get down to earth and start over. Best of luck with your current or next project!

Well I'm just a dog on the net, so what do I know? Best of luck in your journey. I hope you find what you're searching for!

Meditation is a good analogy. I haven't found sitting and meditating for 15-30 minutes especially mind-expanding. Listening to music and walking my dogs, however, sometimes takes me somewhere expansive. That is to say, I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all rule here. More like we should experiment with ourselves and our patterns, and that we can use the signs left behind by fellow travelers as a cue to look more closely in certain areas.

With all that said, 1) I don't think it's important to literally write "morning pages" (nor does Ms. Cameron, in my reading). It's important to find the correct medium _for you_ that manifests ideas in the world. 2) I think the signal-response pattern _is important_. It's not enough to put thoughts/feelings/whatever into the world. You need some means for things to return to you.

Flip it around though, as a fellow weirdo -- what stimulates your creativity?

That's an interesting theory and certainly meshes well with the book's thesis!

My project was a video game I co-created called "You Will Die Here Tonight." After many years, we finally shipped! I find there's something special about actually finishing work. That growth occurs up in the thin air at the summit, if you catch my drift.

Thanks for sharing, that's interesting to read. I've just finished the third chapter -- but I'm really just reading through at this point, not following the course. I've just come out of a long creative project, so I'm grazing. I agree with you that the book can be off putting if you aren't in the right frame of mind. I, too, would have scoffed reading it in the past.

The catalyst comment was more my ruminating about the creative process. Like I said, I think the signal-response element is critical, but perhaps not sufficient. Could you spend years in that pattern and not experience any benefits? If so, what's the missing ingredient? I wonder...

I was fortunate to stumble upon the practice by accident. I was journaling just because, and my two dogs ensure I have plenty of solitary walks through nature. It really is incredibly important to have that time, and to maintain a curious, open mind.

Likely there are other ingredients. Some sort of catalyst may be needed for the process to get into gear. (Full disclosure, I'm still partway through the book so perhaps Ms. Cameron discloses them, but I stand by signal-response practice from direct experience.)

To hazard a guess, I would say joy/wonder may that catalyst. Or rather, our sense of wonder will lead us to joy which triggers the necessary inner reaction.

I'm curious to hear more about your experiences.

I recently stumbled upon "Artists Way a Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" and really resonate with a practice it puts forward: "morning pages" and "artist dates." The exact nomenclature isn't important, but the idea of a "signal and response" pattern is, in my opinion, spot on. Like meditation, it's one of those things that sounds far fetched but that you can try for yourself -- and the results will speak for themselves.

Difficult to have "rational and informed discussion" when one side's guy says he'll be "dictator for a day" and gets a pass. Hard to imagine that there's a middle ground waiting to be uncovered by open-minded investigation.

I'm reminded of that quote by Satre.