282 karma · joined October 22, 2014
Honda didn't put them there just to look cool, and ease of maintenance certainly wasn't the primary design factor.
I have had a previous employer use my personal information to manually create and post fake reviews of his own products under my name. Nothing surprises me anymore. I only found out because I received a notification email asking me to confirm my review (which I had not written). Needless to say, I quit.
Computer chips implanted into the body to regulate vital functions. Nanobot technology to repair or modify biological cells. Countless methods to sustain and prolong your biological life.
Eventually the biological dies, but the virtual simulation is not interrupted. Instead, your consciousness is uploaded to the world's mainframe server, where your mind is allowed to continue on it's journey of self-discovery within the virtual world. You and your loved ones can continue to interact virtually, forever. Where you can continue to explore, to learn, and to experience life long after your death.
You are virtually immortal.
Thanks for the support!
I definitely made the mistake and learned my lesson with building Ethereal Legends - scope and speed are key elements. You have to keep it small and ship quickly. Allowing the project to grow beyond my ability made for poor results and long development cycles.
I certainly won't make that mistake on the next game!
Making the game was a brutal experience. Little to no money because I was taking so much time off work to make the game (I'd work maybe 4-6 hours at my job, then go home to work on the game). Deteriorated health because I sat for 16+ hours PER DAY in front of the computer. Morale was extremely low because few people wanted to help me (building a team is super hard) and more often than not, people I talked to about it just assumed I wasn't even capable of making a video game, much less a video game business.
I basically just trudged through it. Forced myself to complete it and ship it publicly. I was rather happy with the end result - the game wasn't perfect, but it was mine. Player reviews tell a slightly different story for a countless number of reasons.
The day I the game went live I was so excited... but that emotion quickly faded as I realized I wasn't going to even come close to my sales goals. To date, I've sold less than 200 copies. Thousands less than I expected, and not nearly enough sales to make another game. Literally can't even pay rent on my tiny apartment for one month using those funds.
About 4 days after launch, I realized my traffic and sales had flat-lined at zero. I came to the painful realization that I had just spent three years of my life making huge sacrifices of my time and money to build a product that no one knew existed and only I really cared about. All of my efforts merely in vain. Despite numerous post-release product updates, it stayed that way for months, until yesterday with the summer sale. I've sold a few more copies over the last 24 hours, but again, I can totally forget about becoming a full-time gamedev. I literally don't even have the funding or even strength to make another game - as a solo developer who isn't a unicorn, it simply requires too much investment for too little return.
Building my game was one of the most influential and exciting experiences of my life. Trying to make a paying job of it was easily the most depressing path I've ever walked. I even thought my experience shipping a game in a modern engine would help me find employment as a gamedev... NOPE! I literally can't even get a rejection email from most of the hundreds of places I've applied to. Needless to say, I went back to SysAdmin full time because it's a stable, paying career. Which is also depressing because it's not really what I'm passionate about... I'm just good at it.
All the dreams of making a living building video games? Crushed. Forget about it. If you're able to do this and you're still passionate about it, consider yourself extremely lucky.
edit - the game is here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/428980/Ethereal_Legends/
Unfortunately, I've got an S6 as my daily user phone, and there is currently no stable version of LineageOS that supports the S6 (as far as I'm aware).
I wanted to make a change in my life, and build a better future for myself. Everyone I spoke to said that going to college would be a great idea - there was no way the investment would not be worth it. My parents, my coworkers, my friends, and of course the advisors at my school - they all said it would be worth it. Not a single contradiction throughout countless conversations.
So I went to college, at my own expense. I had no money, so I pulled federal loans like so many others. $25k and 1.5 years later, I realize that college isn't teaching me anything I could not have learned for free on YouTube/Google. Angry at the scores of people who deceived me into believing college was a good investment, and angrier at the institution for acting like predators upon my naive desire to succeed, I dropped out. When I spoke with the Dean of my school about how I was not feeling challenged after paying exorbitant fees, she said these exact words: "Well, maybe college just isn't for you."
Needless to say, I now know more about my chosen career field than most average college grads, due to experience. However, years later I'm still $25k in the hole - the only significant debt I've ever incurred in my entire life.
For me, college was a literal waste of $25,000+ and nearly two years of my life. At this point in my life, I'm telling everyone who asks that college is a complete waste of time, money, and energy.
It's a very different thing to write code with good intentions, only to have it repurposed by others for nefarious intent.
It's obviously not a black and white matter, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. The important thing to remember, though, is intent. What was that code or feature originally intended to do? If it was intended to be malicious, then why write the code?
I actually do not believe this is really a legal issue, and is instead a moral and ethical issue on a personal level. It is only becoming a legal issue because we have no other way to deal with it, since not every person operates on the same moral code. If more software developers went out of their way to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard, maybe fraud wouldn't be as prevalent as it is today, and we wouldn't need to have this discussion in the first place.
Like... a HUGE gap.
wtf.
Yes, the job in question was in the gaming space, working on an unannounced virtual reality title.
This has been the only time a company has ever asked me to divest interest in my own company and/or IP before being hired. Granted, I have only recently begun looking for work, but I cannot imagine this being a common scenario.
Instead, I imagine these guys as sharks that do not have my best interests in mind; only their own.
As for my game, it's called Ethereal Legends, and is now available on Steam. To bring things back onto the topic of this thread, the code for my game is also available on GitHub!
Needless to say, I decided against that job.
The very best article I've found on the subject is here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_...
Highly recommended reading.
The issues we're discussing in this thread start with the game designer. Cognitive flow is a real thing, and game designers have learned through decades of research and testing how to put players into a state of cognitive flow. They've only recently (within the last 5 or 10 years) begun learning how to monetize your cognitive ability, bringing players to the brink of a flow state only to hide reward behind a paywall. The player is psychologically conditioned into a purchase by simply playing the game.
Nearly everything else being discussed in this thread is a secondary issue stemming from the game designer's desire to increasingly monetize their game. This desire to monetize has given rise to the use of tactics that permeate the gambling industry. These tactics are designed to do little more than CREATE addicts - players who will return to your game and continually spend money.
This, I believe, is the root cause of this issue - game designers who do not respect their players or their time. Designers who have specifically chosen to abuse and extort the emotions of their players in order to increase profits.
These designs are evil, and as a game designer myself, I find the practice abhorrent. If you are a game designer reading this post, and you build games that fall into this category, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.
Any founder with a legit business who shows his project to Hacker News and gets ~40 some odd people to comment on it would almost certainly want to keep up that conversation.
There are a few Azure services to which the spending limit does not apply, but as long as you know what they are then you can choose to use them on your own volition.
My concern is how many recruiters would actually download and run a 1 or 2 GB application simply to see my resume, when they instead could visit my website and watch some quick videos.
My guess? None.