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Game Dev

What do the best programmers do differently?

If you want to get better at any skill, then one great way to improve is to ask yourself "what do the best people at this skill do differently?"

Here is an excellent post talking about all the various things that very skilled programmers do, it's a list of 15 attributes that those skilled programmers have.

For me my highlights would be:

• Know Your Tools Really Well: I'm a huge fan of experience in general, the more code you write the better you become. And in the same way the more you use a tool the better you become at that tool. That's why when people ask me what engine they should use I say just pick one and stick with it, you become a lot more capable by deeply knowing a tool rather than just being familiar with it. I made an entire video on this very important topic: "Why I keep using Unity, MASTER one TOOL!"

• Break Down Problems: Every issue you encounter in programming can likely be broken down into much more manageable pieces. If you think "I want to make an MMO" then that seems like an insurmountable task! But if you start by just making a Character Controller, then just an NPC, then just a Quest System, then the Client-Server connection, etc. If you break it down into tiny problems it becomes a lot more doable.

• Never Stop Learning: Obviously I'm a huge fan of this one, that's one of the reasons why I do what I do. I love to learn and I love learning something deep enough to be able to teach. There's never a point where learning stops, so I look forward to continue learning new game dev/programming things in my 80s.

• Never Blame the Computer: One of the things I most love about programming is how it's deterministic, meaning the same code will always yield the same result. So if you wrote some code that doesn't work, it's not the computers fault, it is executing the code exactly as intended so whatever issues you have are in the code itself and not in the machine. One comment that drives me crazy is when people say: "I followed your tutorial exactly and it doesn't work!", but that's simply not possible, if you write the exact same code then you HAVE to get the exact same result.

All the other attributes are also excellent, if you want to become a better programmer yourself then definitely go read the entire post. And I absolutely love the last line, "Don’t trick yourself into thinking that you can skip the hard work. There is no shortcut. Good luck with your journey."

So yup keep writing code and making interesting things, the more you do the better you become!

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Game Dev

The MASSIVE Difference lighting makes

In order to find success with your games you NEED to make sure they look good. Obviously it needs good gameplay but if the game looks amateur then most people will ignore it at first sight and won't ever get to play it. And in order to make your game look good one thing that makes a huge difference is lighting.

Here is an excellent post with before and after images that perfectly display that massive difference.

The difference is also due to more models/props but a lot of it is simply due to lighting. The first image has almost no shadows and no ambient occlusion which makes the whole scene look extremely flat. The grass looks like just one green blob and the ground has no detail (normal maps)

By comparison, the after image has (I'm guessing) some high quality baked lighting, it has ambient occlusion making everything feel more grounded, the floor has dirt and rocks that cause some nice shadows, and the grass has more variety with shadows between different types.

Plus it also has some post processing to play with contrast and maybe color correction. Put all those together and the difference is night and day, so make sure you spend some time playing with all these tiny elements to make your games really stand out.

Gaming

Triple I Initiative highlights premium Indie Games

E3 used to be the big event where massive games were announced, but they usually just focused on AAA games with massive budgets and not indie games. So a few years ago some indies got together to build the Triple I Initiative to highlight those top tier indie games. Now this is one of the best events all year, lots of awesome games (unique games) shown in this one livestream.

In total 35 announcements across 45 minutes with no ads and no hosts, just games! These are definitely Triple I games, not hobbyist games but rather really solid games made by indie studios. All of them look excellent.

Unity themselves wrote a blog post talking about some highlights from the stream (made with Unity)

• Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core is a co-op FPS action roguelite where you fight alien horrors on procedurally generated caves.

• Tears of Metal is a Scottish Musou Roguelite.

• Frostrail is a snow based co-op survival extraction game.

• Star Birds from Dorfromantik and Kurzgesagt!

• Outbound is a jolly driving camping exploration game.

• Blacksmith Master lets you build and manage your blacksmithing store.

• shapez 2 is the awesome automation game in 3D.

• Timberborn is getting an update, as is Vampire Survivors, and V Rising.

And plenty more!

Fun

Quit your Indie game for a 9 to 5!

One regular comment is "I quit my job to work on my game!" but what about the opposite?

It's a funny joke but there's actually some benefits to it. If you're trying to make a living with indie games alone then you're going to be stressed out all the time as you are trying to find success in such a difficult industry.

So having a "normal" job to pay the bills and do game dev on the side is usually an excellent path. You can't make as much progress as if you're just doing game dev 100% of the time but you do get some much needed stability.