
I Quit My Day Job to Spend Two Years Coding My Dream Game It Sucks, Please Help - rmason
http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/quit-day-job-spend-two-years-coding-dream-game-fucking-sucks-please-help/
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imgabe
FYI for those who may not be familiar, thehardtimes is a satirical site like
The Onion.

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jws
Apparently I am satire.

I made _" minecraft but you start on your own tiny-prince style asteroid in an
asteroid belt, play around there then eventually maybe work to make some sort
of propulsion for your asteroid so you can go bump into other asteroids and
get bigger and meet your neighbors and eventually colonize really big ones,
sort of mostly cubical asteroids where I fudge gravity so you can stand on any
face and sort of smoothly roll around as you cross the edges"_.

Frameworks annoy me so I just used OpenGL on macOS and iOS. Likewise I built
my own multiplayer networking. Physics is just physics, so that isn't a
problem once you discover quaternions, except that I had to change it to make
things work better. Spectral harmonic lighting with ambient occlusion made a
nice looking world. Bump maps are hard to paint, so I built a rig and wrote a
bunch of software so I could sculpt a bump map tile in modeling clay, lay it
in the rig, let it cycle through 8 different lighting directions while taking
pictures, then compute the bump map for the game to use.

Eventually we could run around and modify my little 128^3 starter asteroid.
And I had a bush (well tree) which I made in Blender. It was the test case for
the 3d models for non-cubes. If you stood real close to it you could hear me
saying "I'm a tree…" over and over. Had to test my ambient audio system too.

And there it stopped. I still feel badly that if you manage to find it, run
it, and the server, and mine to the center of mass of your asteroid, and pass
through just the right spot with your little person you will be flung so far
into space you won't even be able to see the sun. Darn that 1/ϵ hiding in the
physics code.

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jarsin
I just code my game at work

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synicalx
Chess, not checkers

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ben_jones
Theres a similarity between people who have never been entrepreneurs dropping
everything to be entrepreneurs, and people who have never developed video
games dropping everything to be game developers. Many chase the romantic
notion of "the dream" rather then the dream itself.

Ironically both entrepreneurs and game developers have to learn to be
entrepreneurs.

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lbtech
Hopefully the author of this didn't quit their day job to write comedy...

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ukyrgf
> If you want to write an article, you must first send 10 headline ideas and a
> sample piece of satire to: Ideas@TheHardTimes.net.

I can't imagine how insufferable a job it is checking that mailbox every day.

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kathe-rine
In the same vein: [http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/friend-skims-html-
tutorial...](http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/friend-skims-html-tutorial-
coming-idea-largest-open-world-video-game-
ever/?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation)

~~~
rhizome
URL without tracking params: [http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/friend-skims-
html-tutorial...](http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/friend-skims-html-
tutorial-coming-idea-largest-open-world-video-game-ever)

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sp332
This just reminds me of a disabled game developer who doesn't have a $100k job
and is trying to get money together for medical expenses.
[https://twitter.com/ForgetAmnesia/status/919254493035819008](https://twitter.com/ForgetAmnesia/status/919254493035819008)

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valbaca
I'm only disappointed that they wrote this from the perspective of some random
office drone going in blind.

I'd love to see an article from the perspective a coder that tries to go from
40-hour-9-to-5-100k-with-benefits to do their own game.

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miguelrochefort
Poe's law

