game dev technical designer/systems designer/tools designer/unreal generalist on other people's video games and also my own video games

also on tumblr and mastodon and bluesky and whatever, same name

I have a friendly game dev chat discord server you're welcome in if you don't be a fuckwit

I made a website for people fleeing Unity called Ugh I Guess I Want To Move From Unity To Unreal (Dot Com)

I made a website for documenting obscure Unreal engine information called Unrealscoops.com

I have an internet forum at IMPROMPTU DOT ZONE



I played No Man's Sky for a few hours tonight, the longest I've played it for in about a hundred years, because I can never really get into it because they forgot to put any video game in the goddamn thing, but at some point since last time, they did sprinkle some in there, not a lot, just a little, and that's all you need. It needs to be reactive and it never was, and this time I played for like, 4 hours and 2 reactive things happened. Which is a record! I was able to get into it.

The first thing was I shot a random spaceship that flew overhead, and the fucker turned around and kept swooping me until I finally refueled my launch thruster and took off and shot him down. In my day shooting these guys didn't do anything. The second thing was I mining lasered an egg, just one of a million weird objects I laser in a day, only this one was an egg and I got attacked by a bunch of scary animals whose egg it was. Good shit. It's still an exercise in frustration in a lot of ways but not as much as it was. One of those games makes you want to make your own one of it.


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in reply to @joewintergreen's post:

definitely have my own list of stuff i'd focus on for a PGC space game and it's all pulling in the opposite direction of NMS's "a mile wide × an inch deep".

interesting how the balance of intrinsic (find a planet that looks interesting and take screenshots / try to find weird stuff) and extrinsic (gather X, upgrade Y, unlock Z) continues to shift. imo it crossed a point where the latter exists almost directly at the expense of the former.

i like the work they've done to support self-directing as far as "set any recipe as a quest" etc, but there still always comes a point where the last step of something turns out to contain a million steps all gated on each other and i feel like i have to quit. i can set my own goals and reach more of them than ever, but fewer than would let me feel ok about putting a lot of time into it