i don't really know how to articulate this but gamedev programmers are on an entire other level to non-games programmers

repeatedly needing to solve problems that have never existed before, because the world you're creating them in has never existed changes you as a person ive built everything from mining trucks to fiber networks to the undersea cables that connect countries to CDNs to apps to business CRMs and middleware but games asked more of me than any of those things ever did

because when you create new worlds you create new problems

the peak of mount stupid is always trusting your tools

everything works because of reasons. those reasons come with assumptions. not being able to identify and test those assumptions will run you face first into a wall you cannot mantle

the output of almost anything can "lie"

https://twitter.com/DownieSeb/status/1799054720386138480

when i say "lie" i mean "not say what it appears to be saying"

if you type 'show ip route' on a cisco router you will get a routing table and you will believe this to be the egress path for certain networks as listed

but that's not actually what that is

happy mothers day to my evangelical christian mom who accepted me when i came out. with all the conservative media she consumed i was expecting the worst, but instead all i got was how she's always been:

primarily worried about my safety, and my happiness

her and my brother: in hindsight she actually really hates gender roles. when she was younger she was personality-wise a tomboy, but presentation wise, quite femme. she would get annoyed at how gently the women played sports and always play with the men so she could play rough and not get in trouble

we memed the 'graphics are done first' guy but people don't really understand how a game comes together

at the start, you don't know everything about what it is
and you want to avoid wasting time building what it isn't

enter: R&D

the purpose of R&D is to answer questions🧵

https://twitter.com/chhopsky/status/1572030127776878592

the definitions of production phases varies studio to studio so i'm going to use the ones i like most:

- pitching
- R&D
- pre-production
- production

hot take: video game designers should at least once try designing tabletop games

not only is it a fantastic prototyping tool, but it highlights two very important game design concepts:

1. state tracking is data storage
2. rule enforcement is cognitive load

let me explain 🧵 state:

when you're designing game systems, you throw all sorts of stuff in ram. ammo counts, health, etc. in a tabletop game, all state must be tracked physically. this means game pieces, card, tokens. you must be able to see and parse game state using physical objects

people think programming is harder than writing but the compiler rejects that it can't interpret

but a blank page in your google doc will not tell you when you've written incomprehensible nonsense

people see GPT output of both and when they get no errors think 'this works' 🧵 i remember once a friend who was learning unreal asked gpt how to do something and the answer he got technically would have worked but it was the stupidest possible way it could have been done and was a terrible idea. no sane developer would have implemented that

🧵on the fundamental theories behind public communications for games

people often complain that games need more transparency, but the thing is, features and designs change all the time

if we posted every day from inception, 99% of what we posted would be incorrect at launch

https://twitter.com/chhopsky/status/1774124447542178257

your players will never trust you even if you are 100% transparent because plans change and they will learn that they can't rely on the information you tell them

but live games operate development 'just in time' and the pipeline is always going. things always just make it in

story time: the launch of Dauntless (2019) was the most difficult launch of my career

we planned for 260k ccu peak (players online). during open beta (2018), we'd hit 65k with some wrangling

it fell over at 10k ccu. took 3 weeks of 15 hour days 7 days a week to get it stable

https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1759587277972361306

it was a FOTM viral breakout hit with the launch of the Epic Games Store

but 12 months of code changes and infrastructure upgrades and we'd 1/6th'd our capacity before we hit issues.

we'd load-tested every service up to 260k, and run bots to 100k. didnt matter. shit broke

dan, like most AI people, either failed to understand the work, or is lying to make this look impressive

stable diffusion did not read people's minds. he's very conveniently either omitted or left out how this actually works, because it would show that SD didn't do shit

🧵

https://twitter.com/danberridge/status/1631489991435243520

fMRI output is indeed reading your brain, but dan's skipped a very important part

you can imagine trying to construct an image from a brain scan, probably, right?

but what's this "semantic decoder" bit? whoops, it actually powers the whole thing

for reasons unbeknownst to me i've started photoshopping various crash screens as things to drop on twitter when someone has said some dumbass shit and you're gonna dip then i just started making custom ones for anyone who responded, about something they work on. cc @heytred

HAHAHA ENGINEERS KNOW WHAT'S DYING AND THIS IS VERY FUNNY

https://twitter.com/EddieMakesGames/status/1604947666466754560

for non-engineers: datetimes can be represented by the number of seconds since the unix epoch. january 1 1970. if you feed int(0) in it will return a datetime of january 1 1970. try it for yourself

epochconverter.com

a context-collapse attack is one in which an attacker misrepresents a post containing keywords as bigotry, and uses the resulting fallout to drive traffic out of context. successful context-collapser attackers usually hide behind identity or account size to avoid criticism context-collapsers rely on that people don't dig for original sources, they get angry, take away that the target is bad, and go about their days. the defence side of the context-collapse attack is that the victim is prevented from talking about it without 'attacking a [blank]'

good thread

was having a discussion with a new writer about 'writing people who are different from you' and imo framing it that way missed the point

'writing things and experiences you understand'

this comic seems to be ABOUT blackness. what does this writer know of it?

https://twitter.com/sailorsctaustin/status/1538227174716715010

i live in a majority chinese suburb. if i ask my brain for a character in vancouver they're likely going to be CN because that's my normal

but i wouldn't attempt to write a chinese character whose story is about the experience of being chinese in canada. because i dont know!

thread about data analysis and product management in games. i've worked with this guy. whenever we did anything together it slapped

https://twitter.com/Tritemare/status/1537903735002648576

i dont know many data people on here except maybe @ajseps @ChadJessup @soupychloe @guldeuxchats @SmolBoricua ok thats a fair few i guess

it’s okay, i still think you’re a good player i am going to be Very Annoying about @EliasTries and @MeanMisterKien’s #PlayersTheSeries

IMPORTANT SOCIAL TIPS:

if a post of yours starts blowing up badly and making people angry: go private immediately. do not attempt to explain yourself

do not post through it. it will accelerate faster than you can deal with. nope that shit the fuck out of people's hands if it made someone angry the first time then no amount of context you add will help because tweets are viewed in isolation and it will continue to spread without your added context

do not. under any circumstances. attempt to post through it. delete->private->fixed forever

absolutely incredible seeing the people who blew up their lives and credibility to leave tech or games for crypto now starting to scrub it from the internet, leaving a wasteland of deleted tweets and resume gaps on linkedin spent the last 20 minutes laughing my ass off now seeing a former mutual who went down a crypto rabbit hole and unfriended anyone who wasn't enthusiastically supportive of it. they didn't last a month at one of *those* companies and are pretending it never happened