DizzyDoo

No, though I wrote the level/puzzle editor in Python, which would generate json that was read by the game, which was written with the Unity engine and lots of C#.

I did this for my first Steam game, which let me go full-time back in 2015 as an indie game developer and where I still am today. [1]

I'd get up early and get a few hours in before my more ordinary programming work as a Python backend developer at a fintech startup. And then on Saturdays I'd get something more like a normal days work done on the project.

It worked, and I'm glad I did it, but it definitely was a temporary situation, I don't think it's something you can do long-term without facing burnout or neglecting other important areas of life like family, friends, exercise, reading books, etc. So that last paragraph of the original post - making it sustainable - I'm glad to see it in there.

[1] The Cat Machine - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/

It's worth noting that the quality of games currently released on the Nintendo Switch is currently pretty abysmal[1], with as many Unity asset flips and low-effort 'games' as on Steam.

Perhaps it's not as bad as the situation on mobile, but a quick look through the recently released list on the eShop shows how bad things have gotten.

[1] https://kotaku.com/fans-are-pissed-about-the-switch-eshop-s-...

There was also Ian Gow MP who was assassinated with a car bomb by the IRA in 1990.

You should update your Twitter to point to your new website? Its pretty much identical to your old website, so perhaps it doesn't matter at all.

Wow, hang on, you're bringing up Diablo 3's auction house as... a positive example?? That's a new one. It was, and still is, widely agreed to be a colossal, almost game-sinking failure, and Blizzard couldn't shut it down quick enough, once they understood the ramifications of their decision:

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24152225

[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/09/diablo-auction-house/

[2] https://twitter.com/Tocelot/status/1439632031726456832

There is a website, and it's here - https://digiplaygaming.com/, but it really doesn't contain any worthwhile information. "We'll host your web game" - okay? But I was doing that back in 2009 when I first sold a license to my first commercial flash game. It's not hard to embed a game in an HTML document. Clearly NFT's and crypto stuff feature somewhere in there but it's not spelled out, and because it's not spelled out I'm instantly 100% suspicious.

This is exactly right.

I actually think the worst thing about the suggestion you're replying to is that it is an over-generalisation. "Most players will do X", "they nearly always do Y"... yeah, okay, but what about the 10% who don't? The 1% or the 0.1% who don't? What about the ones who do as you describe, except for 5% of the time when they don't, or when they get lucky? I've hit genuinely lucky shots in a game, accidental good plays, for the receiving player they probably thought I was cheating, and yet I wasn't. The potential for false-positives is horrible, and you end up outlawing legitimate behavior based on a poor understanding of play.

It's not just a big deal, it's a massive market. There are many people who will pay an enormous amount of money for custom written cheats, there are whole SAAS-style subscription services for different game hacks, it's... all a bit silly.

It's when there's a whole cottage industry around this that you know things are out of hand.

No tutorials to link you to, but there's significant overlap between anti-cheat systems and anti-virus/anti-malware systems, which makes sense when you consider their aims. Searching for academic papers about anti-virus approaches to dealing with networking, memory and filesystems will be helpful.

I'm still playing PUBG, though just FPP, and rarely run into what is obviously a cheater - maybe once every two months? But while things have got better, you're right, when things were really, really bad it hurt the game's community terribly.

I do think that anti-cheat helps, if the developers are mostly engaged with it, but it's a long fight over a long time. Most of the strategies to do with 'ban waves' - ie, not banning cheaters immediately - are pragmatic concessions to that reality.

I once had an unusually good match in a popular FPS game, triggered some statistical tripwire, and received an automatic ban for 48 hours. "Just in case". Streamers and pro-players often have their accounts whitelisted from this system, because it would be laughable to happen publicly and show off just how 'security theater' it truly is.

Could you expand on "code your game correctly"? Let's say I'm playing your (correctly coded) game and I've got an aimbot, that snaps onto someone's head, how do you detect/stop that from the server-side (the only place you can trust)?

Plenty of games have a server-side checking system that works on reports and statistical checking and it's a bit of a joke, like you say, it's an impossible fight. A pro-player of an FPS game is statistically so far beyond even fairly hardcore players that they trigger that constantly, so quite a lot of the most popular pro-players have their accounts and their alt-accounts whitelisted by the devs or the esports tournaments that host private servers. Which, of course, undermines the system entirely.

The problem with "a working report system", by which I take it to mean you have actual humans reviewing reports, does get you somewhere, but it doesn't touch 'humble' cheats, ie: rather than headshotting everyone 100% of the time, a cheat that lowers your recoil 15%. For an already very good player, -15% recoil in CS:GO or PUBG is a crazy, crazy advantage... and yet you couldn't notice it by looking at a video.

Even though it's an impossible fight to win completely, I don't think the answer is to "give up early".

I mean, this is already happening! Have a Google for "Hardware CS:GO aimbot" and there are some crazy things people are doing to cheat in video games. Stuff that attaches to the CPU, ones that attach to the mouse to fake input that way, it's really quite ingenious. The market for these devices is enormous.

I guess radar cheats where the ethernet cable to split to a second computer could also be considered a hardware cheat, since it's running between an airgap.

If I write a cheat for your game that operates on the kernel level, how would you detect it from the game that runs in user space?

Thanks for the link, what an interesting pdf.

What I still don't quite understand about coops is how they practically come about? The pdf you linked to says that 84% come into being from scratch. If you need to buy some mechanical equipment and rent a factory, does everyone who joins the coop at the beginning pay into those start-up costs? Or is the investment in the coop usually entirely from the outside like bank loans? Is there ever a distinction between coop members who have invested money into the firm, and those who join later that haven't?

My understanding of co-ops, while I haven't experienced them first-hand, is that they are still capitalist in nature - they are usually profit driven (though not at the expense of workers), pay is not equal, and the difference is a democratic decision making structure.

Worker co-operation (coops) models [0] exist and can take the form of a dozen employees, or scale to really quite enormous companies like Mondragon[1].

I've come across lots of them in Europe, and a few where I live now in Canada, but I don't know if they're common at all in the US?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

The phenomenon of 'seeing' or imagining Tetris shapes and 'fitting' them around things is known as the 'tetris effect'[0] and is quite common. In my experience you don't need to play Tetris that long to experience it. It's so well known that the Tetris Company named one of their most recent games after it [1].

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Effect

Yes, it was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNnkDyGgvGk

I wouldn't have been surprised to find out my F-91W was counterfeit! But I just went and watched a "30 ways to tell if your Casio watch is fake" video on YouTube and it looks like my watch is legitimate. I probably wasn't careful enough with the strap, it just disintegrated at one of the connections to the face.

I got a Casio watch from Amazon about five years ago, there was a deal on and it was about CAD$20. A budgetary driven decision, for sure!

But it's been fascinating to see, over the years, how many times I've been approached (in a coffee shop or some other public place) by serious Casio enthusiasts, keen to ask about my watch and to show theirs. There's so many variations, colours, limited-runs editions... I seem to have accidentally stumbled into a niche with lots of passionate hobbyists - I'm sort of glad I had to replace the awful strap, which snapped, so I actually have something to contribute to the conversation. I had no idea Casio watches were such a big thing, but now I'm not at all surprised there are modding projects like this.

I agree, higher quality conversations happen more often on forums and they're much easier to search and access if you're not a member.

But forums are also much easier to moderate than Discord - a message or image you might not want posted in your Discord scrolls up quickly (as people react to a troll or something inappropriate), and you tend to need moderators on-hand a lot of the time to react quickly, which can also mean moderators from a bunch of different timezones are required. On forums, yes, a rule breaking message can be posted whenever, but the pace of chat is much slower and the immediacy of effect on everything that follows is lessened.

The amount of work to bring a new game engine to even remotely near the feature-set of the main existing engines is enormous, so congratulations on getting this far. I hope you're able to grow a team of contributors who can help you with this.

I think the biggest missing thing that I notice in new engines is that no one is seriously making a game with them. I know, making the engine is more than enough work already, but if it's not you having _somebody_ aiming to release a product made with the engine ought to be somewhere in your priorities. You might have lot of interesting tech, but unless end-user developers are using it in real ways you might find out later you're not headed in the right direction and meeting real needs. You can see this with the difference in emphasis between Unity (not game developers) and Unreal (Epic definitely are), to Unreal's benefit. And I say that as someone who uses Unity in my full-time job every day.

... but of course, you need a base feature-set to attract devs. So it's a big of a chicken-and-egg problem.

I've played a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress and I'd never describe it as 'easy to start'? The learning curve is notorious and for most people involves watching a lot of YouTube tutorials and copying actions.

I'm hopeful that the upcoming Kitfox Games version makes it very accessible to lots more people.

A short Twitter thread from Pat Contri on this is something I found provides helpful balance: https://twitter.com/PatTheNESpunk/status/1414300310659473408

"Wow, those Charizard cards from your childhood are now worth lots of $" has been a common, popular headline across media in the last year, and now it looks like old video games are next. And as Pat says, I think there's reason to suspect that, in this instance, this is artificial pricing.

I've had people email pitching me on embedding crypto-mining programmes in the games I sell on Steam. It's intensely sinister stuff.

I got an email just yesterday pitching me on a special 'credit card for gamers'. I was meant to push a special credit card to my customers. The website has zero information on what % interest this credit card has, but even if it's totally normal and above-board: eww. I make computer games, I don't want to push credit cards.

It's all so slimy.

I do think you're correct, but one particularly sticky issue is what you do with all the subtle cheats. Rather than developing an exploit with wall-clip, radar, auto-headshots and so on - all obvious to a human moderator - what if you make one that just lowers recoil by a smidgen, 20% or so.

If you're watching the game as a moderator you could never tell that's what's happening. Yet -20% recoil, especially for a competitive esports player, would be such a massive advantage as to make that player the best in the world, but a way that looks quite legitimate.

Do you mean just support SteamOS? The biggest problem is, as a few other commenters have mentioned, there's no further break-down in categories other than "SteamOS + Linux" (and the url is .../linux). So you can't tell the Steam Store "I only support distro x, y and not z". I can't hide it for those who I am not actually supporting, Steam will advertise it to them regardless.