You are onboarding developers wrong (Featuring Ambient Game Engine) | Hacker News Reader

You are onboarding developers wrong (Featuring Ambient Game Engine)

dickymirrors.substack.com

47 pointsfu7kt14 comments

Interesting take, but I have never not wanted to try out a game engine until I saw this article's screenshots.

Like, since I was a literal child in middle school I've always loved tinkering on new projects in an unknown game engine: I remember writing code in the most truly random environments (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenix_Project) because I was more enamored with tinkering on demos in different game engines than actually writing games because I wanted to learn how to make my own game engine like a "real" game developer.

But that first screenshot in the article felt off, and then the second felt even worse, and I went to the actual site to make sure it wasn't just the screenshots and if anything the screenshots were nicer (brighter, better organized) than the actual site!

I think it's because I associate a game engine with an upbeat optimism, and selling the idea that you too can make cool shit!... and even the tiny ones have this homely feeling of I made cool shit! and I'm sharing it!

Meanwhile going with brutalism as your core theme feels like it's takes a shit on the idea that anything could actually be cool. It doesn't feel warm or invigorating in any way shape or form.

I didn't even realize I could have such a strong reaction to a game engine landing page, but I guess there's a first time for everything.

(Also I totally acknowledge I might just not be the target market for this, positioning is half the battle of marketing, so maybe the real lesson is knowing your market well)

Well, there's always Unreal, Godot, and Unity. Ambient is something very different and takes advantage of WebGPU and WebASM to deliver a networked 3D gaming experience in the browser. IMO this is a fantastic example of what our whole internet is only just now capable of in a nice little package. Sure both Unreal and Unity will export to web, but there's a whole lot in between loading one of those up and shipping it.

You should try out the Ambient quickstart. You won't regret it.

One of the other important things is not too out-shadow people's own creativity.

If you start with high-content flashy demos that paint a certain picture, people aren't going to activate their own thinking-muscles & dream up their own uses. Having lo-fi roughed out assets is less intimidating and more open ended for the target audience.

Ambient does a much better job imo targeting people who would use it & be excited, by turning off & turning away the those who just want to be razzle dazzled by flashy demoes. That shit is actively harmful to have as your audience.

Interesting take on the take ! May I ask how old you are ? Those screenshot are not fancy indeed, I do recognize that. But middle school me would have been really excited if a website told him that he was about to program something like that.

I do find the grey theme sad and kinda kitch, too. But not the underlying promesses.

29, and I would think if anything my tolerance for drab grey industrial park motif went slightly up over time, not down.

Overall it doesn't inspire "I'm about to program that" for me. I think it's not unlike old Teenage Engineering, which felt whimsical and light hearted in a way that attracted you to play even if you'd never touched a synth before... vs new Teenage Engineering, which is $1,600 flat-pak desks that you're not sure you're allowed to sit at even though you've touched a million desks before

The worst part is, they could look modern simply changing some colors. If the characters were bright red, it would look like the very-modern game “SuperHot”

(https://store.steampowered.com/app/322500/SUPERHOT/)

No. Sorry but no.

The main reason the screenshot in this article looks so amateurish is not grey or red. It's the whole layout around it, and the UI of "35.3°C" temporature meter.

I didn't realize VSCode is so big. Big enough for people to safely assume it's the default IDE. (It probably is)

Making a bunch of entities easy for devs is a great lift to provide out of box by Ambient Game Engine.

Then AGE auto-magically shares it to every client connected to the space. Lives up pretty well to ambient computing's good name!

> One of the commonalities I have found is that in most organizations, developers have no idea how to run the full stack, there are conflicting understandings of how things operate and people tend to be cargo-culted into the first pattern they learned when they got hired and just repeat a pattern to close tickets over and over hoping no one figures out they don’t know how anything works.

I'm quite cynical myself, but I believe OP needs to work for better organizations.

It works. It was real surprise for me, when at some moment, I made run examples from tutorial. Usually what I seen, was very simple and not impressive.

The article got me interested in looking at the game engine.

It isn’t supported by any browser I use so I could not be onboarded.

Great advice for software products.. I’ve taken some good notes from this. Thanks

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