91–95 of 95 posts
I gather it's a game, it's graphically simple but in fact is really hard, and it was a commercial success early on (due to a Humble Bundle?) -- but I haven't really played games since the ZX Spectrum was new. Never heard of it, or the developer, and I have no idea what people are/were excited about.
(For other ZX Spectrum era folks: it sounds like a harder "Manic Miner" and I hated that.)
I’ll take the chance to reference Super Hexagon by the same author. Incredibly fun and addictive game as well while being super simple. I recall reading somewhere that the author spent only a day or so writing it. And PPPPPP, the soundtrack for VVVVVV, is neat too!
I'll add a shoutout to PPPPPPowerup!, an album of remixes of PPPPPP, and MMMMMM, an album of metal covers of PPPPPP.
When I was near the end of high school, my family visited London, and I was thinking about being a game dev. So I sent Terry Cavanagh an email, and to my surprise he completely agreed to get lunch. He was extremely kind, gave me a lot of interesting life advice. I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot, he was never really one to get grand vis…
What did he say, exactly?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot This is important. Too many people assume that novel ideas come from abstract concepts. Yes they can, but they can equaly arise from playing with the medium.
Playing retro games seems like a good way to get ideas. The VVVVVV gravity mechanic is pretty much Gravity Man from Megaman 5 (I guess Megaman is not the first time it was used either). Mining retro game mechanics was probably easier at the time VVVVVV was developed as the explosion of indy games has probably reused the best forgotten ones of the 80s/90s. It's getting close the time mechanics from 00s games can be re…
When I turned 30, I was like what the heck, I'll get a game boy color and play some games I played as a kid. That's since spiralled into gbc, gba (all models), psp, ds/3ds, ps1, ps2, xbox, 360 etc. Along with a now fairly sized collection of the requisite games.
I've been picking up all the games I missed on those platforms, because most people seem to have only played 2-6 games per platform when they were kids, same as me. I'm getting recommendations from friends of games I'd just never gotten into and coming out loving them and having many new perspectives on which game mechanics work and which don't. Especially given barely any modern games are coming out that are compelling enough for me; I barely ever gamed anymore before getting all this old stuff - new games just seem like the same old copy+paste for the most part.
Atm I'm playing through coded arms on psp, pikmin 2 on gc and timesplitters fp on xbox.
The gaming world has lost so much magic and fun stuff imo. From weird hardware like the motion sensor in kirby tilt n tumble, light sensor in boktai to game mechanics like the furious lassoing in pokemon ranger, or the unique gameplay of Archer Maclean's Mercury.
I haven't done a game jam in years but I'm so ready to smash it if I end up doing another one!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not rage at or sarcasm. Maybe you have optimized your stuff so far that you have to use Compiler Explorer to tell you how many cycles a change will cost you in a user transaction. I doubt you do, but maybe you do. Someone surely does this, somewhere. Maybe finance developers do this actually. I’m sure there are enterprise devs who throw all industry “best practices” out the window, because they all seem to be designe…
In my experience in enterprise code nothing really matters except the DB. From a performance perspective. The amount of compute you can save in application code is peanuts next to a poorly written query or worse, a poorly designed data model. I've seen code take 10 minutes (yes, really) to complete a request. Naturally that's 99.99% database time. The application code, which was C++, was nothing. If we switched to Ja…
I remember a time when people in this field were in this field because they wanted to be in this field. They wanted to do a good job. They learned on their own time, and practiced on their own time. They brought those skills into their employer and used those skills to make things better.
Now we have people who view IT as a route to management, and nothing more. They do shit work. They do a lot of it. They don't care.
I long for the time I remember when people actually cared. I feel like I'm one of the remaining sane people in the world.