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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I find broccoli discorse fascinating, because it seems like there’s a lot of people who feel the need to shower it in praise because it’s the default “eww vegies suck” vegetable.

    IMO broccoli is ok. it’s like median tastiness veg. Makes some dishes good, makes others suck.

    But if you look at the dishes where broccoli is good, it’s always something along the lines of “we lathered this in cheese” or “dunked in salty oil and roasted”. It’s good and the broccoli definetely makes it better, but I also question if you just like cheese and oil.



  • The reaction to “I’m not your fucking therapist” being “Do you believe there is truly not a single valid reason to use windows whatsoever” is just as absurd IMO (though some of these threads show that, yeah, some people think that).

    The scenario described by OP is they’re just complaining about something about Windows/iOS/whatever just to vent and these people come in thinking they’re being helpful by mentioning an alternative. I’ve come to find that there’s 2 (relevant) personality types; people who complain because it’s cathartic, and people who complain because they want their problem solved. Linux users are overwhelmingly the latter. So, from their perspective, they see someone who is complaining yet expects people to just sit there and listen, hence the “I’m not your therapist” comment.

    I don’t think any of that is new, except for maybe the OS part. As a kid I remember seeing a bunch of interactions like this and it’s always been much more a personality than a culture thing.


  • Honestly to me it seems like nothing has actually changed, except the names of the teams behind critically acclaimed games.

    Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.

    Though I do think you have a good point about asking what PP considers AAA. Something I’ve noticed is that there’s a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, see some big AAA release and act like it’s not AAA because it’s the first time they’ve heard of the studio / publisher. BG3 is the most obvious example of this (~400 people from my search). Expedition 33 also outsourced a ton of it’s work so it also gets paraded around as “only 30 devs!”. It’s especially frustrating that people will call these games a “wake up call” for AAA studios as if it’s not a huge risk.

    Though I don’t think EA (and from what I’ve seen Ubisoft) dying this slow death is a herald of the industry at large dying. We’re seeng a lot more publishers that try to carve out their own little corner of the industry, such as NewBlood, Iron Gate, Hooded Horse, and as you mention Kepler. They’re funding and releasing plenty of successful titles. I think there’s space for, and already space taken, for various publishers to fill the same position as EA did in it’s prime.

    You also seem to take this argument that these megapublishers are a prerequisite to having people with proper gamedev skills? As I see it, that’s either not changing, is effecting nearly every industry in NA & EU, or just not a thing. Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago. To my understanding Sandfall did a similar thing with E33 but what I saw on the subject might have been embellished and/or I’m misremembering.


  • I would agree if we were in a Hollow Knight or metroidvania community, but as it appears to me this thread visited TheBat just as much as they visited this thread.

    What could they have done to not see this thread? Keyword blocking won’t work, because skong is only referenced in the image, unfollowing / blocking the community has a huge blast radius because it’s the highly generic /c/memes. Etc.

    At some point you just exhasperatedly blurt out that you don’t care as much as people are assuming you do. I agree that it’s annoying to hear that too, it’s a bit hipsterish, and it’s mostly unwarranted given the low stakes. But I sympathize with it.


  • Is that not a relevant thing to say?

    Not OP, so I don’t necessarily feel this way about skong, but have you ever had your feed filled with discussion of something that you just don’t care about? And then you go talk to your friends and they’re also talking about it? Then you talk to a relative and they’re asking you what all the fuss is about? All while you give 0 shits about it?

    I’ve been there, and it’s easy to just get plain annoyed at the subject coming up, even if innocuously. It’s the real life equivalent of squidward tuning into boxing because it’s not about cardboard boxes, only to be greeted with 2 cardboard boxes going at it.

    And if you’re somehow in doubt that skong has satuarated discussion everywhere


  • One of the most annoying parts of online dating is the fact that there are a ton of profles that treat the textboxes as though their ordering pizza (mataphorically). Like they’ll use the first box to say that you must like cats, the second to say that you should have a moustache and the third to say you need to be adventurous, as if the point is to type in your ideal mate and have them materialize at a local park for you to meet.


  • From seeing discussions among those Zelda fans (which to be clear I am not one), the issue is that the mainline games are now a completely different genre, but treated as though it’s the natural progression of the series.

    The classic zelda games are primarily puzzle games, with a little bit of combat and intricate hand-crafted exploration to spice it up a bit. The modern zelda games (BOTW & TOTK) are exploration games with puzzles to spice it up. If you were a classic zelda fan, the niche genre you loved used to have regular releases by a major developer and now doesn’t.

    Plus, there’s a “all my homies hate skrillex” effect here; the series is massively more popular now, but the newcomers have a different idea of what makes a zelda game a zelda game. By sheer numbers they dominate a community that is now reshaped by their presence. In other words the zelda fan community is itself a different genre.

    For what it’s worth, I haven’t played that much of the series. Link to the Past I didn’t care much for, Links Awakening (new one) I honestly hated, and BOTW I liked but had a couple issues with. All I’ve written above is based on passively seeing a bunch of discussion.



  • I believe the reason it happened, in short, is that Take2 (the publisher) were really obsessed with the release being a surprise, at the cost of far too much.

    For one, this meant that basically every job listing for the game never described what the game you’d even work on was. Most of the devs they got were juniors who:

    1. were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
    2. did not necessarily know much about the game, or even the genre (supposedly, besides Nate, only 1 dev was an active KSP1 player and another was aware of the game but never really played)
    3. this game was their first sizeable project

    For two, it meant that a lot of management roles were taken up by people from Take2 to enforce the secrecy (who also saw KSP as having franchise potential, but that’s a rant for another day). Few of them intimately understood what makes us dorky nerds enthusiastic about KSP.

    This is also part of the reason they avoided talking to the KSP1 devs; they were afraid of some of them even hinting that a sequel was in the works. As to why they continued to not talk to them after announcing the game I’m not sure. Perhaps they were afraid they’d tell the uncomfortable truth that the game was making the same development mistakes as KSP1 and more.






  • As someone who’s used both, I’d have a strong preference for Odin over Rust if it were at a stable 1.0 release. As it stands now (or, at least, when I used it), Odin is very much in flux. Spend enough time with the language, and you’ll either find a bug with the compiler or the semantics will change after you update.

    That said, it would be my favorite without those problems. It is a really simple language in a good way. There’s no fancy language features that are just syntax sugar (well except maybe context, but I find that to be actually convenient). You can understand everything in an afternoon if you are already familiar with programming in other languages. Rust is pretty much the opposite in all of these reguards.

    Rust also has the benefit of being pretty recognizable at this point, so if you say your project is in Rust then people will know what that means, unlike Odin. More “resume-able” in a way.

    So, in short:

    • Odin if you’re doing it as a hobby
    • Rust if you want something “real”


  • While I do agree that math gets much easier with interest, and that it gets more interesting the further you get into it, and that math is inherently beautiful, etc. I feel this argument has to fall flat to people who don’t already agree. It’s the education equivalent of when someone says they couldn’t get into an anime and then the fans tell them ‘oh it gets really good around season 9’. You could be completely correct, as you are here, but it’s utterly unconvincing if you don’t already “know.”

    To be fair, I think this is mostly a problem with math curricula. Math classes up through high school and early college seem to focus on well trodden solutions to boring problems, and at some (far too late) point it flips around to being creative solutions to interesting problems. I think this could be fixed eventually, but such is the system we have now.


  • I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.

    One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the :visited CSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the :visited tag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.

    It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.


  • I don’t think this can really be answered until after the fact. Anything that I (and I suspect most) people could say about an artstyle are going to be particular to an instance of that artsyle. If I’d give advice as someone who is neither an artist nor a game designer, what attracts me more than anything is a unique artstyle, which, if I’m gonna give a brutal opinion, starting from a vague category like ‘pixel’, ‘hand drawn’ or ‘3D’ probably won’t get you there.

    I feel like I even struggle to answer your question at face value because it doesn’t align well at all with how I conceptualize game art. For example, Cruelty Squad is a game that I don’t think I’d have gotten if not for it’s artsyle. Like, sure, it’s 3D, but it’s a lot more like a PilotRedSun animation than it is a game like TF2. Or take a game like Factorio: most of the assets of that game are pre-rendered 3D sprites, so despite being artisticly unique in a way that interests me it doesn’t fit into the categories you’ve asked about. The best I can say is “I dunno”, and I don’t think anyone else can answer it further than that.