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Offerings to God
I watched Amadeus (1984) today. I had never seen it. That scene with Salieri dropping the papers has become a meme on twitter, and I happened to use it to make a point in a blog post, so I figured I should actually watch the movie. People say it’s a great movie. And they were right. It’s one of those…
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Compass-maxxing infinite loop intuition build
In my Lv.99 lich post, I talked about intuition and rational builds. Intuition builds are creatives who have high levels of instinct about their art, who can immediately tell if something feels right or wrong. They rely on a finely tuned internal compass that strongly guides every artistic decision they…
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The haircutter
I went to my usual barber shop today. This is not a place I particularly like. I chose it at random at some point and kept going there out of inertia. The people are fine, I don’t hate them. But none of them can trim my beard properly. My hair’s easy, number one buzzcut, no one gets that wrong. But the…
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AI usage
This post contains all instances of AI usage for all artistic artifacts that I produce in the future that are made with the help of any AI tool. There’s a section for each artifact, and in that section there are generally links to the conversations with chatbots related to that project. I will generally…
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Soul society (revised)
Imagine a people. They are human-like in nature, but in many ways inhuman. They communicate telepathically. Not a single word ever spoken, no sound ever made. They share memories and emotions, hopes and dreams, pains and sorrows. A presence allows them to see everything, near and far, as if by instinct…
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The desert walker
A man is walking alone in the desert. As the scorching sun burns his skin, his sweat fails to cool him, and eventually fails to come out at all. His hands are filled with holes, and as he tries to protect his eyes from the sun, he fails and they burn. In the distance he half-sees a pool of water, he…
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Soul society
One who goes by “Luck Downloader” at gmail dot com asked me, “Hey, I was reading your latest and I had a question. In one paragraph you say rational builds are less advanced souls than intuition builds. Why do you believe this? And isn’t it convenient you think this while describing yourself as a pure…
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Lv.99 lich leaks secret hemisphere debucketing guide and oneshots millions
E-mails I was speaking with one Kirill Losev via e-mail, and in our 22 e-mail long chain spanning 6 days the conversation turned to the topic of finishing games and creativity. I’ll provide some commentary on the e-mails, but they will also be posted in full. Kirill 1 Hey man, sorry to disturb you again…
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The follower
A biker drives on the highway. He goes fast, as he should, but whenever he finds a large vehicle, he matches its speed and drives close behind it. He does this consistently, and one might wonder why he does so. Isn’t it more dangerous to drive right behind a truck, as he can’t see ahead of it, and it…
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The foreign man
A foreign man loves the culture of a nation other than his own. He cherishes it and cultivates it, every waking moment laden with the symbols and rituals of a culture that is not his. With the peculiar characteristics of his birthplace - a kind of narrow sense of order that doesn’t fit the openness and…
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Karma demon
A long time ago, there was a boy who lived in the village. He was very intelligent, but had one serious shortcoming. This flaw became apparent to everyone as he grew older. The boy was so proud of how smart he was, he thought everything was beneath him. He pretended to listen carefully to the teachings…
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Dashed lines
I was implementing word hovering behavior with my text system and I was trying to copy how Artifact’s looks, and it made realize I didn’t have a proper dashed line drawing function. My previous function had this signature: function layer:dashed_line(x1, y1, x2, y2, dash_size, gap_size, color, line_width…
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1 in 4
Recently Balatro’s developer, localthunk, gave two interviews about his game. One with Dan Gheesling and another with the Eggplant Show. In both interviews localthunk mentions negativity bias, which is the tendency people have to focus on negative events more than positive ones, in the context of how…
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Son of a Serpent
I used to believe this more than I believe it now. It’s not that it’s false, it’s just an incomplete truth. I posted it in the context of posting things to social media and not letting it affect you negatively (Lessons learned from releasing my second game - May 18, 2021): There’s a negative side of…
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Unity's Runtime Backstabbing of 2023
On Sept 22nd 2023, Unity tweeted an announcement changing their new new runtime fee plan to something better. Developers and gamers alike rejoiced. On that same day, however, Unity made another tweet. One that was met with much more cynical and judging eyes. This one: I am in many gamedev discord servers…
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High level game design
When people speak of luck, they mean that there are things outside of one’s control and/or knowledge structures that affects some outcome. Let’s call this the unknown. A game’s success is both composed of the known and the unknown. For instance, consider the image below: Here max_oats is saying that…
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Super People's major update
It’s been 1 month+ since Super People released and the developers just announced their first major update to the game so I thought I’d write a small post on it. My previous posts on the game: Super People design review Thoughts on Super People’s test session Thoughts on Super People’s final beta Skill…
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Game quality is all that matters
Recently I got into a small discussion with a few other devs over how much your reputation as a developer matters. The automatic position most devs have on this is that it matters quite a lot: if you have a good reputation further releases will be more likely to succeed, whereas if you have a bad one…
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Self-expression vs. vesselization
I was watching this talk by Edmund earlier and it’s a very good one. I think I agree with pretty much everything he says in it, except the very first point: I think honesty is what art is and, you know, business makes it dishonest. It’s a difficult field as an artist to be in, because, to some degree…
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Skill death spirals
Recently I’ve been playing Rumbleverse a lot after watching NL play it and also because I need to somehow fight my Super People withdrawal, and it’s a very fun game. However, playing it has made me think more and more about a problem I’ve mentioned in my past two Super People posts, which is the problem…
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Thoughts on Super People's final beta
Super People’s final beta just ended so I’ll go over my thoughts on it, which are a continuation of these two previous posts: Super People design review Thoughts on Super People’s test session To summarize, in the first post I looked at the game’s design from a high level personality based perspective…
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Deep instinctive changes
This post is a response to this discussion on twitter. When I first played PUBG for hundreds of hours I could visibly notice myself becoming better at making and sticking to plans. The game is so open and you’re constantly threatened, so if you want to get good it forces you to come up with your own…
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Unity and Godot, artists and their hatred of money
A week ago John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, said this: More specifically: Creatives are the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots. It’s a good, somewhat Trumpian quote that rings true to me. And the response by most indiedevs was about what you’d expect…
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Super Auto Pets mechanics
Start I’ve been playing a lot of Super Auto Pets recently. I was kinda late to play it because last year when it came out I was quite auto battler fatigued, so I couldn’t bring myself to try it. But I finally tried it like 2 months ago and have about 100 hours in it since then and I really really like…
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Authorship isn't real
Information wants to be free, culture follows evolutionary flows — viral memetics — and accreditation, provenance, patents, copyright are all burdens that strangle the free flow of the work and ruin its memetic fitness. Recognize memetic culture cedes no authorship, no credit; art is produced in a lucid…
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Competition isn't real
There is no competition among indie developers. The more successful indie games there are on Steam the higher your future chances of success as an indiedev. Outsized success creates demand for more games similar to it, and as more of those games are created and each further outsized success happens,…
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Luck isn't real
Your body and your mind are you and you are them. Your body speaks to you through instinct, your mind speaks to you through reason. You feel in control of your mind because reason is weak, you don’t feel in control of your body because instinct is strong. Body to mind coercion is the default state. Strong…
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Why indiedev creativity is stagnant and how to fix it
April Fool’s Day is a great example of how agreeableness acts as a blocker on creativity. Only on the day where wild and silly things are socially accepted do companies try aggressive changes to their products that might make them a lot better, as the social cost of change becomes lower. For instance…
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Thoughts on Super People's test session
This past weekend Super People’s devs ran a test session aimed at seeing how TTK changes and the removal of crafting would affect the game: In my previous post I went over the game’s design and outlined a few things I’d change to likely improve player counts, and they were mostly focused around removing…
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Super People design review
I’ve played Super People’s closed beta for about 300 hours for the past month or so. I have a pretty good understanding of the game by now and I managed to reach a good rank (~#40 global, although if the game was properly populated I’d barely be able to reach top 500 at most, since I’m not that good…
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The cons of compassion
Agreeableness is one of the traits in the big five personality index. This is a statistically derived survey-based personality assessment tool devised by psychologists over the past few decades. It can be divided into two subtraits: compassion and politeness. The compassionate are more likely to empathize…
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