danschuller

Links of MSDN pages seem like they have a life in weeks. They can be helpful to stumble across but never as a longer term reference.

I don't see why you couldn't keep all versions of a tweet to browse (and allow direct linking to) but just display the most recent with a "This tweet has been modified link" that displays the revisions.

The "car" one

Pokemon Go was also made in Unity.

I think Slay the Spire was Java.

The British government created some tax credits and a company legally took advantage of them. It's a none story and just the Guardian baiting.

An actual interesting article would be on the tax credits themselves and if they were a good idea. It seemed to me, as someone who worked in the games industry, they were a good idea but came 5-10 years too late as by the time they were available the majority the UK's triple A game industry had collapsed and large amounts talent was brain drained off mostly to Canada but also Europe and America.

Maybe 30% of the people I started with no longer work in UK and haven't for years. And I was the same I've only recently come back (terrible timing on my part considering what's happening in the UK at the macro level but that's a different story!). In fact one of my coworkers who _did_ stay works at Rockstar North on the GTA titles.

Canada had a tax credit scheme for games companies that the UK was unable to react effectively to. Again an actual interesting article might ask if UK games companies collapsed due to inability to react to the market or because they moved, or couldn't compete internationally for talent due to other countries having better tax environments.

Unfortunately it seems to be things like https://electronjs.org/

I like to listen on desktop and as far as I'm concerned there's nothing good.

For Mac I suffer itunes. For Windows, I ended up installing Blue Stacks and using Google's Podcast app. Nothing native or web-based worked well for me. Unreliable or being delivered through Windows Store which constantly crashes for me were my main issues.

For a while I used live bookmarks with Firefox, that was great but shortly after Firefox removed that feature :)

This is one of a number of replies to modern C++ not being a good match for modern game development needs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18777735

I think this is quite an exciting time for realtime software development.

Moore's Law petered out, at least for single core. and our tools haven't changed much since the 90s. Now we're able to pull away from C++ into languages that are safer and faster to iterate with, while giving up none of the efficiency - in fact we can gain speed ups. .

Mike Acton works for Unity now.

This has not been my experience. Game developers I've worked with have generally been pragmatic and willing to use the best tool for the job.

Also triple AAA isn't that old! There's not a generation retiring quite yet :) People who want to still be in the industry are. I've seen the industry get older on average as I've worked in it.

Forms of middleware have been there since the early days of AAA style games - sound, video encoding etc. such as RAD Game Tools

That patch might be small but I imagine the path to the patch had more details than mentioned in the article. It would be nice to hear that side of it to.

For someone benefiting from the patch it's a great story, from a developer viewpoint there aren't enough details for it to be satisfying.

Are you saying Frances broken door knobs and fondness for kitsch is holding them back?

Definitely agree is very slow - even for "simple" things like echoing lines.

The one thing I do like is I can make assumptions about how the scripting language works - like writing a if-statement for instance. This lets me write simple scripts pretty fast. Especially compared to bash which tends to be quite quirky and requires a lot of checking docs.

I think net neutrality would do better if was rebranded as the "free market" for the internet. Then it's got a cultural touch point that people already understand.

It interesting, the person I'd say I sound most like in the world is my Dad. Humans often fail to tell us apart on the phone. I assume this is true for a lot of families!

Also the games industry - I'd add soaring content costs for "AAA" games. Trees, crates, terrain, clothing, props from cups to cars etc. etc. these things take and cost a lot to make and the required fidelity only ever increases. It's unsustainable.

Interesting stuff with scanning real world items and photogrammery but these techniques aren't widely used yet.

Marketplaces for models don't tend to solve this because quality isn't consistent and unique content is preferred.

Sorry Gumroad, I often get those mixed up :)

I'm using Gumtree for payment and distribution, it's worked very well for me.

As for marketing, I've just replied earlier in the thread with a little more detail.

For a site with tutorials on game development, most of your readers will be using adblocking software. Therefore most popular monetization methods are: selling a book, a course or locking off content behind a paywall.

Here's an example of premium content: http://aigamedev.com/premium/interview/dying-light/

Here's an example where the author sells the source code for his articles http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/

This blog is about all sorts of tech stuff but he sells his book "Game Programming Patterns" (which is very good!) in the side bar. http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/

I didn't have a detailed marketing plan. An early channel was this article I wrote for tutplus:

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-build-a-...

I wrote it before starting the book (to test the waters) and had a link to sign-up to the mailing list. I used mailchimp for email collection.

I have ~50 articles related to gamedev on the same domain, so these get organic SEO and backlinks:

http://howtomakeanrpg.com/a/

I quite enjoy writing them. The ones with a more technical bent get a lot more traffic than the others. 50% of my traffic is organic SEO. I haven't tried ads yet, but it's on my list.

More recently I commissioned some new art that I give away as a mailing list sign-up incentive. This hasn't worked very well so far :) I have to work on the messaging.

Tracking time spent is something I want to do but don't - each article at the very least takes a couple of hours. So there's 100+ hours, done in a very incremental way.

This is a good idea, and then potentially classes can be recorded and that would be another product (or special tier). I think this applies equally to other similar products.

Yes, it's a simple purchase and then the customer has access to all the content.

I am but I don't know how long it will continue!

My side project is: "How to Make an RPG" (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/) which I released in June.

It's a collection of code samples, art and digital book that shows the reader how to make an old-school, Japanese-style RPG. So, it's super niche! I wrote a little about my process here:

https://medium.com/@DanSchuller/my-first-side-project-part-1...

There was supposed to be a second part to this article but I haven't written it yet.

It's been over $1000/month very comfortably so far but it is trending down. This isn't uncommon for this type of project - there's often a spike followed by a slow decline.

Still, for the last three months I haven't actively worked on it and it's still sold well. I've moved country and been finding a job (all sorted now), so I haven't had much free time.

I'm not really sure where is good to go after this project. For now I'm building on the base the book introduces, just for fun.

I very much enjoy anything by Vernor Vinge, who's a computer scientist. He explores the idea of a universe where, in some areas of space, p=np. But it's not a dry read, it's fun stuff.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the_De...

This is really neat.

I'd curious to see the movement code they ended up using in their own game, though it's understandable if they don't want to share it.

In game development it tends to help solve some common problems.

Games need a lot of iteration, C++ compile times can easily get very long i.e. minutes. You might object that compile times should never be long: "oh this never happens if you do X or Y" but in reality every C++ gamedev shop I've worked at has had long compiles times. Templates and other things of that nature tend to bloat it.

Anyway so reflection helps with:

  - Hot-reloading code
  - Tweaking reflected values at runtime
  - Exposing functions for scripting languages (without having to write lots of repetitive boiler plate code) 
  - Saving / Loading 

(And networking but that's not something I've experimented with personally!) Depending on how it's implemented, at least for games, it's worth it.

I wrote a digital book, plus art, engine and example code about how to make a JRPG style RPG. (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/ <- the current copy is pretty terrible!).

I'm still in pre-release but early-access has been available for mailing list subscribers since January. Release should happen "soon".

Profit-wise: ~$500 a month (apart from the first month which was ~$5000). If I include my own time, I've roughly covered my costs.

It's taken about 3 years (!) to write the book in my spare time, usually an hour each morning. In a lot of ways it wasn't a great side project:

  - Hard to make
  - Small market
  - Complex
  

But it's the first commercial side project I've attempted and I've really enjoyed the experience. Rather than jump straight on to a new project, I'll probably spend time after release experimenting with marketing (google adwords, content marketing etc).

(Previously I've written a programming book published via a traditional publisher and my day job is as a game developer.)

Location: Hong Kong (for now! I'm British and plan to return to the UK after my current project is finished) Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: 3d, realtime systems, C#, C++, Unity, Lua, Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danschuller Email: dan@godpatterns.com

I'm finishing up a project that I took from concept to complete release on three platforms in 14 languages, as the sole software engineer. Previously I've founded and run my own company and acted as teamlead for various software projects.

I'm open to non-games roles.

Awesome. I even use Visual Studio and C# but didn't know about this!

This a total tangent but I always thought it might be interesting if an IDE pulled data from source control (and presented it inline somehow).

How "hot" a function is - has it reiceved a lot of edits in the recent past? Or is cold and old (and therefore you'd imagine reasonably bug-free for most use cases).

I think the number of unqiue people editing a portion of code would also be interesting to know. As you might expect multiple authors to have different beliefs about the point of the code and therefore the code is probably going to be more muddy and less clear.

I didn't know the combat system for Ultima V was paper-prototyped first. That's an interesting tit-bit! I've never actually seen it done on games I've worked on but since reading about it in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, it's been something I've been looking for an opportunity to try out.