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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 31st, 2025

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  • Oh yeah, I love game jams and do them all the time! I’ve done some on itch.io and global game jam, but mostly do ludum dare.

    Have you considered publishing your prototypes?

    I’ve considered it before, but most of them are unpolished/not in a state I’d be proud to share, and would require more work. It’s also logistically complicated for some, since I also build things without a game engine sometimes, and those don’t have a standard build process for clean binary releases. If I release the source code, then I have to do the whole software licensing thing, possibly provide support for people who try to build it, and feel bad about AI scraping my work.

    I’m also an unreasonably optimistic person and always feel like I’ll be able to finish them some day. My rational brain knows that’s not true, but that one’s not in the driver’s seat.


  • This is extremely relatable for me. My game dev projects are basically just me entertaining myself by implementing difficult or interesting things that I’ll never release. I’ve been in the exact same position as this guy more than a few times, and have basically accepted that I’m probably never going to actually release a game lol. I have a lot of cool prototypes that never turned into a real game, even when I tried scaling down to something smaller. Luckily, I’ve gotten good at identifying when it’s time to move on before dumping years into polishing an incomplete concept (iirc, my longest project was nearly ten years long!)

    Maybe some day I’ll partner with a designer to help me get over the inevitable design barrier, but honestly I’m pretty happy with the prototypes I have made over the years. Some are very unique, some are technical achievements, and some are even fun. I’m not motivated by the idea of profiting from any of this. They’re just arts and crafts projects to me, like old doodles you’d keep in a box somewhere. I’m fortunate to be able to do this without worrying about making a profit from it, and hope other people find a way to get into this for the sake of it too. It is a uniquely rewarding hobby.



  • Both C++ and Objective-C aimed to be “C with classes”. C++ does it by hijacking existing syntax (struct), Objective-C does it by adding new syntax, while leaving the original minimalism of C untouched.

    In fact, it’s a strict superset of C, which means it doesn’t change anything at all in C, it only appends. So every valid C program is a valid Objective C program (which is not true for C++).

    You know how some C programs are valid C++ programs though? Well, those same programs can use Objective C features too, meaning you’re able to use them in C++… Meaning you’re able to code in “Objective C++” (which is very common for interop purposes)









  • Feeling embarrassed is a weird reaction. If it actually helps you in your job, there’s nothing wrong with that. Get that money. Whether you like programming enough to actually get good at it is a personal choice. I’m someone who has been extremely passionate about it my whole life, and when I was younger, I had a much lower opinion of people who only did it for a paycheck (the “9 to 5 people” who didn’t know the difference between Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows until they took computer science in college). These days, I couldn’t care less. The tech industry stopped being a meritocracy long ago. This recent wave of AI slop is just the boot stomping on the population of people who exist within one standard deviation from the average.

    But as you’re sitting around scratching your balls while the agents generate your code for you, take the time to think about this bit of doomer outlook:

    The “vibe coding” thing is a fad that won’t last. The only reason it exists now is because the current state of LLMs isn’t good enough to do everything on its own. These agents currently need a human in the loop to babysit them when they fuck up, as you’ve no doubt noticed. They’re also highly subsidized because the AI companies want to collect data in order to train them and make them better. If/when they’re truly able to build a product on their own from prompt to ops, then the price hikes and layoffs will come. Maybe they won’t even raise prices, maybe some billionaires will take the company private and only give access to their friends, family, and the young white christian men they’re using as blood donors in their longevity experiments…






  • Idk, I definitely have days where I’m highly productive for more than 4 hours, but I also have days where I work even longer and accomplish nothing. I don’t think a number like that is particularly useful for anything, and only good for micromanagers who need to feel like they can hyper-optimize every single thing.

    Interruptions definitely fuck me up though, without fail. Maybe it’s the type of work I tend to do, which generally requires me to keep a lot of context in mind. An analogy I’ve heard that I think works well: It’s like fixing a car, but you have to disassemble the entire dashboard and steering column just to reach the part you need to work on. As you’re doing that, someone asks you pick them up so now you have to reassemble everything to be able to drive the car to pick them up, and then disassemble it all again just to get back to work.