bdickason

Very cool to see an Indonesian dev on the homepage of HN!

Dig the site layout. Left nav is interesting, glow around screenshots is a nice touch.

One more idea.. You've worked across great companies and great games. If you were going back now to your former self striking out to ship your first commercial game, what are the 3-4 pieces of wisdom you wish you'd internalized back then?

I'm sure it will flow when the time comes :P

For me.. the most interesting part of the whole Warcraft saga would be more discussions around the arguments/design decisions of.. "we should include ___."

For example... War2 stuck with two races (and introduced alliances w/ other races like elves) instead of adding new races. How did you get to that decision? did you do any prototypes? Was it just a pure argument? What did you find in the process?

That kind of behind the scenes design discussion is rarely surfaced (and often messy) but is as interesting (to me) as the technical decisions.

I'm glad it was helpful! Sorry you're going through some tough times :( Hope you can find a way through and find the support you need from friends and family. Share your creations would love to have a look!!!

Awesome - i've been meaning to look into ableton live plugins or Max. Would love to use my software background to improve my production workflow.

Lots of fun toys. Nothing productive :D

Revamped my blog to have a funky 3d background and animated cursor after years of minimalism: https://bdickason.com

A little screensaver inspired by After Dark: https://bdickason.com/static/experiments/flying-stuff/

A little toy using (mobile) screen tilt: https://qwertle.bdickason.com

A funky RTS designed for mobile: https://chasm-nine.vercel.app/

A start of a little 3D RPG: https://misty-woods.vercel.app/

Note: all experiences in varying states of completion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just found your blog yesterday reading up on the stories of how Warcraft and Starcraft were made!! Have been hacking on small games and a tool to build 3d environments for a while and get very inspired by hearing stories from back in the day. Thanks for making everything public. I really enjoy your writing.

"my only claim to fame from that time is that I’m part of the final member list of ACiD Productions under BBS Modifications."

This is a pretty rad credential. ACiD and iCE were hugely influential in my early career and I looked up to the early and late members. Very cool.

Thanks this is helpful!

I started my project without cargo at first and tried to start writing code without a cargo.toml. I was surprised that cairo didn't default to 2021 until I specified it in the .toml file. Good point that cargo init/new would have solved this!

I guess my point about the compiler was that it seems to rely on cargo.toml for many 'optimizations' that I would expect to be defaults. (Examples include the two i mentioned above).

But I'm new to the language and understand that most people will just use `cargo init` and google a few other common cargo.toml settings to improve compile times.

I recently spun up a project in Rust (a small game using Bevy) and the main issues I ran into were around smart defaults for the compiler. I was surprised how many lines I had to add to my cargo.toml to just complete a simple game example.

Some examples:

It defaulted to the fully backwards compatible version (vs 2021) which threw errors as I went through some recent example code.

(I think) I had to add a few lines to my cargo.toml so the compiler would not rebuild bevy every time I recompiled (when I only changed 1 line in my program).

I've been using Godot off and on for the past month prototyping a mobile game. The editor loads/refreshes very quickly on a macbook air m1 (which hasn't been the case w/ Unity of late). The workflow is intuitive and for reasonably scoped games, it's a great fit.

I was surprised to not feel limited by gdscript (having no python background and doing most work in JS for the past decade). I picked it up quickly and it's well documented and integrated into vscode.

Not sure if it would be my choice for a large game with millions of entities (e.g. an online RPG that needs an ECS system) but for small 2d games it is a delight to work with.

I may be the minority here, but I hope Godot doesn't try to cater to AA/AAA devs and keeps small indies front and center as the focus.

Same - I think this might be a clever timtam add disguised as a programming article !

This is very cool. I love the focus on builders and do think there's a gap in easy to use 2d web-friendly game engines currently.

Phaser still requires a ton of boilerplate code compared to the example games here.

Both Godot and Unity are very similar to each other and aren't great for say.. hacking together a quick js prototype and sharing it with your friends on the web (or with a lil' device).

As someone who previously found art very inaccessible, I loved diving in with p5 and feeling like I finally found a medium (gen art) that I can freely create and experiment within.

Or full 3D scenes that are interactive?

This is amazing.

This was a really popular project. For those who haven’t poked around generative art recently, check out artblocks.io. You buy a piece of art (limited edition) and it creates a unique (randomized) piece for you on the spot. Pretty rad.

(I don’t work for artblocks)

Heavy user of ETH, SOL, Polygon (MATIC).

I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘eth or solana.’ I suspect that multiple chains will be useful for different applications.

For example, games which want super low latency will want a solution like solana. Even polygon slows down today and their usage numbers aren’t huge.

Solana has the fastest and cheapest transactions. That makes it my choice when it comes to defi apps.

I’m holding all 3 but I do think Solana has a great community and strong developer support.

Hey! Author here :D

I'll try to describe this in a bit more detail: Zero-to-one is a type of product which is created from scratch. At many companies, there are existing products and you add features or improve them to grow them. There are other products where you start something completely new. Think Dropbox launching 'Paper' which is a tool to make documents.

Deeply Understanding People means spending time to interview users or run user research, derive problem statements from those discussions, and then turn those into hypotheses. This is different from some PM's who like to focus on metrics and look for patterns in data.

So I'm saying: My strengths are product strategy (of the zero-to-one variety) and understanding people (vs metrics).

As for the style of writing, I aim to write simply and clearly. I'm obviously not hitting the bar here :) Do you have suggestions for equally good alternatives to this sentence? I'd be happy to update it.

My follow up question would be: Would a capacitive touch screen with 0.5s latency have made this the killer feature? Or did the capacitive touch screen enable high speed input?

I'd argue the latter, but it could be a question of framing?

Author of the post here - I had no idea there were so many more people out there like me passionate about speed (and frustrated by how slow apps/devices are these days).

Thanks everyone for sharing really awesome examples in the comments here - from Games to Receipt Printers to Apps, it's clear that speed is valued.

Or... that there's a big opportunity to bring back lightning fast products :)

Things is a great example here. Lightning fast, lets me quickly add or re-order todo items, and does nothing else.

Agreed. I typically strip every feature possible out of my phone (and run in low power mode) and gravitate towards apps/products that just get out of my way.

When I built my blog, I tried to find every opportunity to reduce cruft (even stripping out extra CSS classes) so reading it would feel as close to a native app as possible.

You could argue that HN succeeded because it's focused on speed above all else.

(Also - fellow former Q1/Q3 player here, I competed in CPL, Quakecon, and a few other events).

This is amazing!! In a world full of 'please wait for your receipt' and dot matrix noises... this feels totally magical.

Thanks for sharing this, it's crazy how much super fast experiences still surprise us.

I think you're right. Speed is a component of the User Experience. My point in writing this is that when you abstract to a higher level, the beauty of the UX was that you can instantly do whatever you want. Your thought -> your touch -> action.

However, I think you make a great point that the two are interrelated.

My straw man starting point would be: A poor user experience that is lightning fast can still be a great experience.

But a great user experience that lags or is slow will typically not be successful.

The iphone succeeded because it coupled a great user experience that was so fast that it felt like interacting with objects in the real world.

This is interesting. Would love to see an interview with Dino Ignacio / Deadspace which has a super futuristic in-game UI.

Congrats team - excellent product! I e used it since Zeit and absolutely love it.

I use it as a one line deploy tool for my personal sites. It’s incredibly simple / set-and-forget and supports custom domains, rollback, etc.

For my simple sites it feels like hosting is just solved. Every time I rev my site I just push to git and I’m done.

Coming from someone who conducts lots of remote job interviews (not yc), some basics still apply: 1. Make sure you have solid internet, switch off your video if audio is breaking up. 2. Invest in a cheap mic (e.g. $20 lavalier) so you can be heard clearly and headphones so you can hear clearly w/ no echo. 3. You can’t read the room / body language as well so make sure you pause occasionally and ensure you’re answering the question sufficiently. 4. Like any interview, undertake a calming exercise beforehand (deep breathing etc)