I want to add another post giving you the same advice to drive the importance of it home. Make shit.

I got interested in gamedev 20 years ago and never released anything despite still tinkering sometimes. The old saying is “fail early, fail often,” because that’s what learning is. Make shit.

His comment at 7:07 about how “it makes it look like these objects can’t be perceived” is exactly the context that struck me. It begs for a Cthulhu-esque encounter of some type. Remedy could make masterful use of this in the next Control game, for instance.

Neat about the first music videos to do it, too. I only remembered seeing it in OKGO and Watsy videos.

/edit: Of course he goes on to mention Control. It’s a good fit.

The Google Maps app already shows what it wants instead of what’s nearby. Now the Gmail app shows you what they want you to see instead of ordering by date. I imagine the goal is just to replace everything with a “Google” button. You just type in words and hug “Google”, and it serves up its own info instead of anyone else’s pages. Sigh.

I will say that in my many years of hobbyist gamedev, and never releasing one, I regret tackling bigger projects when I’ve done them. (And not polishing things to a level I was happy with, and releasing them, even when I was making small ones.) So convincing yourself, and the public, that you can release games, is pretty empowering, and I recommend it. It’s also a great way to learn in general.

I don’t know how much experience you have coding, but you likely won’t reuse TONS of code. I know some people, even hit games, have brute-forced development. But In general I think a lot of people who learn by doing will learn from making games. And if you choose to re-use those mechanics, you’ll probably naturally be inclined to re-make things more efficiently, and to better quality. (Though, don’t be afraid to use whatever works, when you can. By learning you’ll know what does and doesn’t work when it comes to some problems.) I think that’s actually another pro in the “plus” column.

Really, just listen to what Kissaki said.

Though I’d say also consider that as an indie dev, YOU are your brand. If “Uncharted Sectors” is the brand/world you want to lean into, that’s awesome. But don’t sell short the value in yourself. I loved Balatro, to use a recent example. If LocalThunk makes another Balatro game, I’m interested. Likewise, if LocalThunk makes ANY other game? I’m also interested.

Yeah really. It’s been years since I saw a 90m movie.

Imagine investing in another company being led by Elon Musk these days.

When I get another job lined up that’s my goal. A job and these bills. And that car loan. And maybe a house… Man. Maybe two jobs.

I don’t know the value of echolocation in this case, as I’m generally ignorant here, but it’s straight wild to me that they went purely on visuals.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t for shitty cars causing deaths.

That said, I always wondered why we don’t find a system like RFID that could penetrate concrete and asphalt, and plant passive receivers in roads? We re-pave roads so damn often in this country (the U.S.) it seems like we could’ve knocked it out in the past couple of decades, minus our most rural areas.

I know RFID itself isn’t strong enough, but I imagine that would’ve been an easier problem than figuring our complete self driving. Not to mention making GPS a secondary system for U.S. road travel in most cases.

Maybe it’s just a dumb shower thought?

I have used voice commands. “Hey Google, show me the way to X,” on the way to my car, or “Hey Google, call X” when I have to call a place I don’t know the number to. But I rarely do anymore, as Gemini takes longer to execute than it previously did. And the idea that a five second series of “speak command, register, and execute” will go even further and replace a tap to start an app or something, is hilariously bad. It’s like they never used the AI they were shoving into everything.

I sometimes think of “who bought these?” I mean, I’m a little bit of a data hoarder. I never want to lose those Google chats and emails I’ll never look back on. I downloaded my Twitter data (that I’ll never reference) before deleting my account. But what nerd mother fucker like me, has the money to pay hundreds of dollars on this, and a subscription fee, for a service to take data I’ll never own?

If I had that kind of money to waste, I’d just use that extra monthly subscription money to buy media to fill up servers (that I bought with the cost of the Pin,) on my home network.

And I don’t even have a home network or a house, but bet your ass I’d have those and a million other things before this became a remotely attractive option.

This is like Quibi. You see it and you can easily understand it on one, far-off, level… But here in reality I’m just left confused. “What were they thinking?”

Hence the power of the shout “sudo rm -rf*”!

When it was new to me I tried ChatGPT out of curiosity, like with any tech, and I just kept getting really annoyed at the expansive bullshit it gave to the simplest of input. “Give me a list of 3 X” lead to fluff-filled paragraphs for each. The bastard children of a bad encyclopedia and the annoying kid in school.

I realized I was understanding it wrong, and it was supposed to be understood not as a useful tool, but as close to interacting with a human, pointless prose and all. That just made me more annoyed. It still blows my mind people say they use it when writing.