61–70 of 82 posts
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).
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I second this but mostly because I'm an unrepentant nerd who REALLY wants one of these to show off at my tech workshops for kids :D
Yeah, being able to access even one to give hands-on could be pretty valuable.
https://github.com/hackclub/sprig/blob/main/docs/GROWING_A_S...
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Appreciate your perspective. What's the point in doing anything if you don't enjoy it, or if it doesn't culminate in something you do enjoy? My metric when I decide to do something isn't "how cool will Hacker News or Hack Club think this is?" It's, how much will I enjoy doing this. You may call it kid shit, and maybe this is the hard-headed kid in me talking, but I hope I never change.
This is a great attitude that you'd think would be more common at a place called "Hacker News". The temptation to get "finance brained" is incredibly powerful in this industry, especially as you get closer to Silicon Valley, and the more young programmers resist it the better off we're going to be. Thanks.
Messing around with Raspberry Pis is kid shit by comparison. It's fun, but it's not going to advance much of anything. The Raspberry Pi is literally a "get kids into STEM" initiative, and yet it's used mainly by adults who want to cosplay as "makers". And even then, eventually they usually end up in a drawer.
If you want to mess around, Raspberry Pi game consoles are fine but if you want to make a significant contribution, time's a-wastin'. If the rocket takes off and you're not on it, there goes your chance. So yes, set a time limit on the kid shit. Put it away by age 20 or so, and start thinking about what really matters and what's really gonna change things.
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Second this. It should be drilled into the heads of everyone who wants to get into game development: USE A MAJOR ENGINE. No exceptions. Time is money, and hand-rolling an engine is a waste of yours. Unity and Unreal have many, many more man-hours of work put into them than anything you can build, so by choosing one of them you can avoid pitfalls you WILL run into starting from scratch, on top of the labor you'll save…
Counter-point : the tradeoff you accept when using a commercial engine is that they're extremely general purpose, which can be unsuitable if you're trying to do something weird. Look at Braid if you want a good example. Using Unity or UE to build that game would almost certainly require more work than writing a simple 2d platformer engine. Furthermore, the story of how it came to be is, in fact, inexorably linked wit…
Unity has 2D platformer support built right in, and the tricky bits -- like the time mechanic -- could be written as an extension. Heck, there's probably a time rewind mechanic in the Unity Asset Store as we speak. They've so far advanced that you're just never going to keep up writing a bespoke engine because they've benefited from being integral to the industry as a whole. Furthermore, the skills you develop on your own with your little bespoke engine aren't going to translate into the industry, where everybody uses Unity or Unreal.
It's kind of like how you're never going to build a graphic design business using GIMP, Krita, or Inkscape. They're all nice tools for amateurs and dilettantes, but entire industry standards and processes have coalesced around Photoshop and Illustrator, so that's what you use. The open-source alternatives are decades behind the curve here and in some ways, will never ever catch up. Good luck getting PANTONE support, which is critical to graphic design for print, into GIMP or Inkscape, for instance.
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This is a great attitude that you'd think would be more common at a place called "Hacker News". The temptation to get "finance brained" is incredibly powerful in this industry, especially as you get closer to Silicon Valley, and the more young programmers resist it the better off we're going to be. Thanks.
It's not really about finance brain. It's about where are you, as a smart, talented programmer, going to have an impact? For the past ten years, ALL of the major innovations in the software field have been based on GPGPU. Learning how to program GPUs is thus a core, foundational skill if you want to contribute significantly to the biggest innovations of computing. And of course there's so much else to learn on top of…
Except for the bare pcb thing, it looks cool.. I cringe thinking about long-term exposure to bare PCBs, sure RoHS is a thing, but it's R(eduction), not E(liminiation).. And those guidelines are under the assumption that the electronics are packaged and not touched to bare skin.. PCBs are still made with fibers which can penetrate the skin, and I'd be worried about exposure to soldermask, solder and what other chemica…
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This is a great attitude that you'd think would be more common at a place called "Hacker News". The temptation to get "finance brained" is incredibly powerful in this industry, especially as you get closer to Silicon Valley, and the more young programmers resist it the better off we're going to be. Thanks.
It's not really about finance brain. It's about where are you, as a smart, talented programmer, going to have an impact? For the past ten years, ALL of the major innovations in the software field have been based on GPGPU. Learning how to program GPUs is thus a core, foundational skill if you want to contribute significantly to the biggest innovations of computing. And of course there's so much else to learn on top of…
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Appreciate your perspective. What's the point in doing anything if you don't enjoy it, or if it doesn't culminate in something you do enjoy? My metric when I decide to do something isn't "how cool will Hacker News or Hack Club think this is?" It's, how much will I enjoy doing this. You may call it kid shit, and maybe this is the hard-headed kid in me talking, but I hope I never change.
This is a great attitude that you'd think would be more common at a place called "Hacker News". The temptation to get "finance brained" is incredibly powerful in this industry, especially as you get closer to Silicon Valley, and the more young programmers resist it the better off we're going to be. Thanks.
Trust me, people don't get into programming video games for the money.
Anyway, this is a funny perspective. Zach Latta, the Hack Club founder, got a Thiel Fellowship. I would not characterize Peter Thiel's philanthropy as 100% mission driven. I also don't think he's a supervillian. But there is a finance angle, not a negative one, to even the most seemingly twee retrocomputing things.
Maybe if you saw Hack Club's deck, you would comprehend.
Any talented non-college enrolled young person could also consider a Thiel Fellowship. There are many opportunities out there.
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It's not really about finance brain. It's about where are you, as a smart, talented programmer, going to have an impact? For the past ten years, ALL of the major innovations in the software field have been based on GPGPU. Learning how to program GPUs is thus a core, foundational skill if you want to contribute significantly to the biggest innovations of computing. And of course there's so much else to learn on top of…
Many people who in retrospect are truly innovative almost definitionally spend their time doing things other people don't regard as valuable (at first at least). As an extreme example of someone who prioritized a life of play look at Claude Shannon. He literally had a shop for building toys at home. I'm grateful he wasn't overly attracted to what others regarded as impactful at the time. That being said I still don't…
> spend their time doing things other people don't regard as valuable...
Sprig is an educational project, shepherded by adults affiliated with big name institutions like MIT and Google. They are extremely conventionally successful smart people who think "nurturing programming talent" is valuable. What are we even talking about? These things don't happen in a vacuum.