#developing new industries

[ianmiller42]

Sustainable Fuels for Aircraft

The question for today is, have we lost our ability to do things? Everybody “knew” man could not fly, but the Wright Brothers refused to accept such wisdom and continued anyway. George Stephenson ignored the common wisdom that a horse and carriage was the only way to travel. But somehow now problems have got too big and one person can no longer deal with them. So what do we do? Why, we get a…

[girlwiththegreenhat]

team fortress 2 finally getting rid of the bots after 5 years

work on the team fortress 2 comic continuing after 7+ years

half life 3 development looking more likely than ever with legitimate code, file, and voicework leaks referencing a new non-VR single-player game from valve featuring a HEV suit wearing protagonist and Xen creatures and concepts

shoutout to the valve fan that found the genie lamp. you a real one

[chronurgy]

It's the modernization it's the mechanization it's the way the old world has to die for the new world to be born and by killing gortash you've slowed it down but you haven't stopped it because ideas can't be stopped and the industrial world that will destroy your way of life is coming and you can't stop it by killing him any more than the luddites could stop it by smashing up a few factory machines

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Outdrawn

f/f contemporary romance

two cartoonist who’ve been rivals since uni, and now have competing webcomics online, have to work together on the relaunch of a cult classic at the comic press they both work at

they both struggle with art-related physical and mental health issues, and complicated families

[shadowen]

I call this piece "The State of American Labor, 2024".

[devsgames]

Despite it being a while back now it's still wild to hear about the literal man-children determining the fate of a game you worked on getting detained by the police!

One of the men mentioned here is former CCO Serge Hascoët.

He was the VP in charge of a project I worked on who did regular reviews on it (and many other projects at Ubi at the time), and is/was very close to the CEO of Ubisoft Yves Guillemot. Oh yeah and he perpetuated a culture of harassment at the studio and sexually harassed women.

His "special abilities" (which every junior designer had to be forewarned about before entering a meeting with him) were:

'banging his head against a wall and simply groaning like a child when he didn't like an element of a game instead of actually providing useful feedback on it'

'being abnormally bad at video games to the point people had to take into account that he was going to judge it based on his limited abilities'

'getting distracted by the smallest most insignificant thing and doubling down on it'

'wanting to make literally everything an RPG' (ever wonder why there was a certain era of Ubisoft game that was deadset on loot drops, item rarities and simply making lots of tiny numbers go up? Yeah that's partially his fault).

He also originated the term "AAAA", which was an inside joke for a long time at the studio because everyone used it despite the fact he never explained what it meant.

Anyway fuck these people and everyone who perpetuates and doesn't stand up against harassment in their workplaces!!!!

[kikuism]

one more thing and then i'll shut up but i think it's so true that if there's no joy for the writer then there's no joy for the reader. you can just Tell when the author had fun writing, there's a vitality behind the prose that speaks to a genuine enthusiasm for the craft. even if the subject matter is dark, you can still tell if the author enjoyed writing or if they just didn't care. and for lady macbeth i just can't help but feel the latter. and i can tell bc i have read all their previous works and felt the Energy behind the beautiful prose. this one felt....so dull. i never felt like i was being pulled into the story because it kept me at such a distance. it seems to me like it was written without much enthusiasm. various elements were so shoddily put together too—the relationship with her new handmaiden and the monster romance 🙄 it felt so random, they were there just for the sake of being there. i really don't feel like the proper care and attention was put into crafting this book that i've felt in their previous works. there was no passion here

[schrondingers-dumbass]

Having a moment to wonder about gacha games.

How many are actively such compelling rpg’s with great production and writing and I’m wondering if it would be better for the gacha model to be non-viable and they were full price games, or if it is the business model that allow for the teams to take so many swings and make them good.

[confused-alot]

when do we start gatekeeping pnf from the creators they gotta be stopped before they fuck it up

[sagittariangirl27]

This reminds me of one of my first tumblrs. I started with erotic art, and ended up finding myself. I will be back here soon.

[askagamedev]

What forces cause game dev to crunch harder than most other forms of software development?

When I started writing, I had one answer to this question. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized that I don't think think we actually do crunch harder than other forms of software development. Sure, we work a ton of hours during crunch time - I've got too many battle scars of my own to ever deny that. But I think that you're taking too narrow a view of "form of software development" and should instead consider "maturity of product". Here's what I mean.

Consider the kind of software development that doesn't crunch. It's usually the old, established, boring software - banking, inventory, web development, often long time services that have been running for a long time with long-term established clients. These are very well-known quantities, with well-understood requirements. The urgency of delivering new features is not super high, because those clients are likely deeply engaged within the ecosystem already. It costs too much for them to take their business elsewhere, so they'll probably continue to do business with you.

Compare this to a tech startup that lacks this kind of long-term product service. They have no long-term established clients with a strong business relationship. In such a case, I would expect to see a ragtag group of developers crunching all the time no matter what kind of software they're trying to build in order to get a viable product and establish a userbase/clientele. Startups expect to hustle as much as they can in hopes of securing funding, launching the product, and hoping to get rich along the way.

If you consider the game industry, we have both - the long term, long-running established games usually crunch less because things are known quantities for them. They know who their customers are, they know what they're making, and they're pretty good at making it. Building regular content updates to a long-running game is really minimally crunchy. Conversely, new games and new products - especially the first title from new studios - necessitate spending a lot of time figuring out what they are trying to be and who they are for, which often necessitates startup-like crunch conditions to get it done on schedule.

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[power-chords]

I was today years old when I learned that Sprint started out as a railroad company.

[reticent-fate]

i know nothing about biochemistry but i simply think it would be funny if i made a fake "medication fact sheet" for the digihrt comic

especially since i have lore regarding "HS Pharmaceuticals"

[bones-and-whatnot]

It’s Headcanon Time!

If you’re like me, you’re just constantly asking yourself “What the fuck is up with the timelines of Donkey Kong Country and the mainline Mario series? What the fuck is up with that? What is it?”

I had an idea about it. So, I’m going to share it, here goes.

Are you guys ready for CONVOLUTION?

- After the events of Donkey Kong ‘94, the original DK (AKA, Cranky Kong) and his son return to their home, the extremely isolated DK Isles.

- Things on the DK Isles are great, they’re really bustling. Cranky and Junior are sharing things they learned in the city with the other animals, teaching them about clothes and buildings, everything is swell. (Meanwhile, on Crocodile Isle, the Kremlings are discovering the wreckage of abandoned human factories and warships. It’s fine, though, it’s not like they’re gonna internalize the ideals of industry and conquest and develop an obsession with becoming human or anything. That would be ridiculous.)

- One day, while out exploring the isles, Cranky finds a cave or temple or something that contains six watches. Alongside the watches is an inscription, something about “capturing a moment”.

- Even back then, Cranky hates the idea of change and thinks everything should stay just as it is, so he winds the watches up. To his surprise, however, nothing happens.

- Angered by this development, Cranky takes the watches to the top of a mountain and uses his simian strength to throw them off in various directions, far enough that they land in the sea and he never has to see them again.

- Unbeknownst to old C. Kong, the way the watches landed in the water has made them form a wide ring around the island and its neighbors. This ring then forms a time bubble, leaving the outside world frozen in time, but the DK Isles untouched.

- Fast forward 36 years, and the watches have finally unwound (each of the six watches takes six years to unwind), ending the spell. During this time, the Kongs, Kremlings and other animals have developed society and Cranky has grown old, with an adult grandson (36 years is enough time for Modern DK to be an adult because Kongs age slightly faster than humans).

- However, during these 36 years, none of the inhabitants were at all aware of the time magic that was at play, because none of them ever left the isles.

- After the bubble pops, the outside world continues on without having aged a day, the events of Donkey Kong Country occur, the watches lose their time-stopping magic and eventually wash up on the shore of the nearby Northern Kremisphere (leaving them to fall into the Bears’ possession), and the isles at some point regain contact with the rest of the world, with Cranky presumably seeing Mario and going “What the fuck.”

Thank you for your time.

[koishua]

yukhei coming back with a diss track tyvm

[antirepurp]

it's been a thought in my head for a little while but when people say that the writing in frontiers feels like something out of the IDW comics largely due to iann flynn being a writer on the comics i don't see it as an objectively good thing honestly. not because i don't like the comics or anything but because comics and video games are inherently different mediums and there are cases where you have to keep that in mind when writing for one or the other. there are much fewer limits to what you can do with a comic even within something like an american issue format. you can have a story involving multiple protagonists with their unique sets of skills in a comic because implementing something like that is as simple as hiring an artist to draw them for you. to do so in a game requires building gameplay styles for these secondary protagonists, unless your genre has very standardized gameplay for all involved characters, like RPGs, or you're doing a walking simulator or a visual novel or a kart racer etc etc. frontiers is a bit of a lackluster case of a story that would've needed the game to spend longer in development to tell itself in a way that would've done it the same justice a comic-implementation would've done. like we've all experienced rhea island in some form or another, it is one of the most glaring examples of places where story elements must have gotten cut out because there wasn't enough time to implement gameplay to support them, and unless you're hideo kojima and can do whatever the hell you want it's going to be very hard to justify including a 1 hour cutscene going over the part of the story that would've been better off as actual gameplay anyway.

obviously i enjoy the writing in frontiers it turned my brain into spaghetti but i hope that should flynn be involved in the writing for the games in the future they'll get better at writing specifically for games if that makes sense