Game Development

Chris McFarland

01:59

yeah, watching others play your game opens your eyes

something obvious to you might not be obvious to them

PearsonArtPhoto

I found a lot of those...

Almo

02:20

@ChrisMcFarland yeah

Like when your game says "Touch here to continue" they touch elsewhere and tell you there's an interface bug.

Chris McFarland

lol

Almo

"Oh I didn't see that"

true story

Chris McFarland

yeah it needs to be the biggest, glowiest, sparkly thing

Almo

yeah :(

Chris McFarland

I saw a lets play vid of my game once

Almo

02:21

how did that go

Chris McFarland

guy couldn't get out of the first room cuz he couldn't figure out how to open the door

Almo

:O

Chris McFarland

even though the interaction text said what button to press to open the door

lol

Almo

wow man

PearsonArtPhoto

It's funny, there is nothing that I thought was obvious that someone else didn't see, but there are many things that I thought were obvious that almost no one saw.

Almo

02:22

:D

pizza time, talk later. :)

Chris McFarland

;)

yeah
the biggest thing I added to my game was a blue arrow above this demon statue for when you had enough souls to turn in to level up
The screen had a text sentence saying what to do... but wasn't as obvious
so a bright blue arrow helped make things easier

PearsonArtPhoto

Colonial Sea Trader Dev Vlog 5- UI/ UX after playtesting at an event

►

I also met @DukeZhou

Didn't get a chance to play his game, unfortunately.

Chris McFarland

hehe cool

Almo

03:31

@ChrisMcFarland the blue arrow worked

you got any clues on why submitting a score to steamwouldn't work?

github.com/Facepunch/Facepunch.Steamworks/issues/76

Chris McFarland

03:49

dunno, don't think I've ever had a failure
board isn't set to read-only on the Steamworks end?

Almo

@ChrisMcFarland there's trusted and "-" i have them set to trusted

which i thought meant the client was trusted to add values

Chris McFarland

ah, try setting to -

I think Trusted means it has to come from an authenticated server using Steam SDK or something with one of your private keys

(it's been a while since I read about it, I could be wrong, but that's what I remember)

Almo

ok will try

just a sec

Chris McFarland

I have all mine set to -

What title are you working on?

Almo

still says fail :(

Cognizer

so with - you can submit scores from your client?

Chris McFarland

03:59

yeah, though I haven't tried doing it with Facepunch yet

Almo

ok

might be an issue in the lib, but I'd expect that to have been found by now

but some were saying it had one of the settings for updates vs replacement wrong too

but I have 0 entries in the table so that shouldn't matter for this test

Chris McFarland

does Facepunch give you access to the raw API at all to try?

Almo

I'm not sure, to be honest

is there anything about whether the title is published or not?

or if I just set up boards on the system I should be able to connect?

Chris McFarland

hmm, has Valve approved your title's early build? I dunno if that would matter

Almo

I don't have any builds submitted

I'm going from the editor

Chris McFarland

04:03

I dunno sorry
Try searching the steamworks forum too

Almo

ok thanks for trying though :)

stuck on another bitch puzzle in The Witness

great game though

PearsonArtPhoto

11:28

And my notes are all added to Trello...

Bálint

14:42

Man, PHP programmers don't get a lot compared to others

I feel sorry for them

Bálint

15:47

@JoshPetrie The "make games, not engines" post from your website is gone and I can't link it in comments

Is there a way for you to bring it back? It was the number 0 tip I gave to beginner game developers

Stephane Hockenhull

18:02

@Bálint These numbers don't take into account where those programmers are located in the USA.

It gets even crazier when it's world-wide.

I program in C++ mostly and make much less than this graph, however the average income in my region is $36,344 USD.

Average income in San Francisco: $104,879 USD and the cost of living follows accordingly.

So relative to the region I'm doing quite well but I'd have to triple my salary to maintain a relative income in San Francisco.
We'd need to have the numbers calculated first by normalizing the person's salary by the region's average income.

Bálint

@StephaneHockenhull Right

And based on a blog post from couple of weeks earlier, PHP is generally used by poorer countries

@StephaneHockenhull Wait, average income per year or per month?

Stephane Hockenhull

year

And that's just average numbers. I'm a senior programmer of ~20 years experience.

If I made as much as that graph suggest, plus scaled for my seniority, holy #@$% I'd be swimming in cash here :P
Gold plated driveway mansion HAHAHA

Bálint

Man, that's a lot, the average salary here per year is around 14000 dollars

Stephane Hockenhull

yeah but cost of living scales to match.

Bálint

And yes, everything is relatively cheap, but due to something called "world market" it's hard to get your hands on "luxury" items

Stephane Hockenhull

18:08

it's 5,000 to 10,000 /month in SF for a tiny appartment.

Bálint

And by "luxury item" I mean stuff like smartphones, laptops and even cars

And I can't really say anything, because I still live in the first world

Stephane Hockenhull

oh yeah, even here stuff's expensive relative to Californian dev salaries.

I dunno about your place but here we got safety inspections for cars.
Hurt a lot when you gotta pay $1000 for a full exhaust repair job because there's a tiny leak.
Can't just keep driving that old $500 rust bucket car.

And cars start at $17,000 once all the fees are in

Plus scooters in the snow aren't that great so that's not an option :D

Bálint

Yes, safety inspections exist here

Stephane Hockenhull

How picky are they?

Bálint

I'm not really sure, I don't have a car

But my grandpa has a very old car (35-40 years old) and they never had to repair anything on it

Stephane Hockenhull

18:21

here it's mandatory, every 2 years. A tiny scratch on the windshield and you gotta replace the whole thing. It's ridiculous.

Not even a crack, just a scratch.

Bálint

We have stickers on the license plate saying when they were last examined

I think you only need to take your car to examination every 3 years

Also, do you also have stickers on your license plates marking when a car can go outside?

E.g. A green sticker means anytime, a red means only when there's no smog

Stephane Hockenhull

Nah we don't have that. We're all coast so there's practically no smog.

It's all the "safety" stuff that's a budget killer. Especially how windshields need to be absolutely perfectly flawless.

One tiny rock and you're out ~$1000...

Bálint

@StephaneHockenhull You don't need to replace the whole windshield after it get's a little crack

There are resin based solutions to that

And it's relatively cheap

Stephane Hockenhull

only if they don't notice it at the inspection.

Bálint

Windshield Crack Repair Resin from Ultra Bond

►

These are technically safe, they don't crack further

The problem with these is that if you drive on a hump, the stress in the glass could break it further, even into a spiderweb

And it's very cheap

amazon.com/Sealer-Resin-Windshield-Rock-Repairs/dp/B06XPYF9LJ/…

Hmm, the price doesn't show up...

It's $12

Stephane Hockenhull

18:39

If you do it yourself it has to be absolutely flawless. They fine-comb over the windshield for tiny pits and scratches here

Bálint

Well, what could you lose

On one side you win 988 dollars if they're fine with it

On the other side, you lose 12 if they aren't

Stephane Hockenhull

Oh, I know. still bugs me.

oh great, now all my ads are gonna be windshield repairs for a month :P

Bálint

19:10

@StephaneHockenhull Use an adblocker

Stephane Hockenhull

19:21

Sometimes I get good targeted ads, I'd miss on those.

Steve's a D

19:38

hey, i come from a traditional programming background and im making an UE game with a few friends. At first, we set up a git repo for everything, but it appears that isn't working as smoothly as expected

how do you all collaborate on game projects?

Stephane Hockenhull

What's a "traditional programming background"?
Like, got a farm, cows and chickens and code wearing plaid shirt and denim overalls?

Steve's a D

software engineer by trade, ms stack

and lol

@ the second part

like, do we each make blue prints (and their assets) independently and manually copy them in the folder? that seems naive, git isn't working, my buddy suggested another source control (something i've never heard of before), but instead of just chopping at the block for a week and seeing what works

Stephane Hockenhull

Git isn't good for game assets unless only one person work on specific asset files.
It doesn't do edit-locking.
Generally, Git is for code only.

When we have game data assets that are shared in the office we have a bunch of cards that people have to physically grab or else they suffer having to do their work all over if there's a conflict.

Steve's a D

i was interested in seeing how the gaming community solves this issue,

okay

Stephane Hockenhull

But that's because we only have 2 or 3 people occasionally working the same asset.

And we're all local.

Steve's a D

19:44

yeah we're all remote

Stephane Hockenhull

You're gonna need some other solution than git then. There's add-ons for Git but I heard mixed opinions on those. I can't recommend anything regarding git

Steve's a D

okay yeah, i tried the git path, and there was a plugin to help handle large binary files

but it still seems like a subpar solution

FrostyFire

@StephaneHockenhull what about perforce? Is it good for game dev?

hi @Steve'saD

lol

Steve's a D

hey frosty :p

Stephane Hockenhull

it works. "good" is entirely subjective.

FrostyFire

19:46

true...true

Stephane Hockenhull

Everyone ends up hating every solutions at the end of any project :P

FrostyFire

^

Steve's a D

@FrostyFire what was that other source control you suggested

FrostyFire

@Steve'saD perforce free for 5 and under users

sorry 5 users

the users should be over 5

Pikalek

@StephaneHockenhull In a traditional programming background, you will only see examples of Von Neumann architecture - none of the heretical Harvard stuff

Stephane Hockenhull

19:52

There's no such thing as Von Neumann architectures anymore :P
Practically all CPUs are internally Harvard architectures that bend over backward to pretend to be Von Neumann.

FrostyFire

...here we go

Stephane Hockenhull

Any CPU with a separate icache and dcache :P

FrostyFire

lol

Pikalek

Blame the architects man. Form over substance. All they care about is the cache.

FrostyFire

CPU cache is super expensive too

Pikalek

19:59

Isn't cash expensive by definition?

Bálint

20:10

@Pikalek It's expensive because it uses a different type of memory

One that's fast in small sizes

It's like the difference between f(x) = x^2 and f(x) = x, the former stays smaller if x is between 0 and 1 but after that the latter is the smaller

Pikalek

20:27

@Bálint I know - it was a (failed) of pun conflating cash, cache & different types of architects.

Bálint

...

Man that hurt

Pikalek

Yeah, I should probably save that one for the classroom. Someone else teaches econ across the hall - what could possibly go wrong?

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