I just started running sword combat playtests this weekend for my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, which is about a girl who goes looking for her sister.
This week I'll start playtests for the combat system of my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, an action adventure with combat inspired by Sekiro.
In this first round I want to see how players respond to the composure-driven knockdown system, and if they find the sample boss fight difficult enough to be interesting, but genuinely fair. In the background, I'm thinking about how to improve the training mode (it only kind of worked on my daughter), so the game can teach you how to play without telling you how to play.
I've been using and tuning a tool I built myself to help me lower my LDL and ApoB: https://www.heartroutine.com/. I still don't like how the daily check-in system works (it's still too dumb) but it's keeping me consistent for now.
In a few days I'll start running playtests of my combat prototype for my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, some kind of SNES Zelda and Sekiro inspired combat adventure.
Periodically thinking about what the future of helping small teams build software will look like and keeping my personal site up to date: https://piinecone.com/.
I built HeartRoutine to help me lower my LDL and ApoB. I recently started beta testing it on some friends, too, to see if anyone other than myself would find it helpful: https://www.heartroutine.com/.
I've started building the combat prototype for my next game, Today I Will Destroy You, inspired by my love of going-on-an-adventure-with-a-sword games and Sekiro-style combat.
When I have time between freelance work I make games and tools for myself.
Put One In for Johnny Minn (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3802120/Put_One_In_for_Jo...) - A small soccer game all about scoring nice goals. While I don’t expect it to do well, I’m very happy with how it came out, and it’s the first game I’ve made that I’ll release on Steam! Comes out on Thursday (March 12th).
HeartRoutine (https://www.heartroutine.com/) - I built this a few months ago to help me stay on top of my heart health. I enter my numbers on the (offline) app, and then configure my goals (like “lower Apo B through diet and exercise”), and then the server emails me every morning asking me what I ate yesterday, how I exercised, etc. The goal is to stay on track, and to be able to bring a cardiologist a very detailed report.
> Someone needs to figure out a way where we can turn this around and empower ( I hate this word, but I dont have anything better in my vocab ) employees
My friend and I are trying to do this with a matching tool we've been working on lately. You describe what you're looking for (pay, schedule, etc.) and then you only hear about jobs that match your criteria:
If you like the job, you can accept the match, and then you and the employer are introduced.
It's early days still and we have plenty to iron out, but we've started making matches, so please check it out and let Ryan or I know what you think (at team at polyfill dot work).
I’ve been living in Europe for 7 years and working remotely for US companies. Here is what I do (please tell me about better ideas!):
1. Apply to US remote jobs on the east coast and mention working from Europe. I’ve had a lot of luck overlapping for half a day. Not so great in a leadership position though.
2. Contact colleagues you like working with at US companies and see if they’re open to working with you. Someone vouching for you on the inside helps a lot.
3. Specialize in something valuable, pitch contract work, and try to convert that to full-time (or part-time or whatever).
Plug: my friend and I made a thing to address this problem because we have it too:
You say how much you want to make, where you work from, etc., and it emails you when a company wants to hire someone like you. If you try it please let me know what you think.
I'm using a fork of Unreal Engine 4.20, and I'm using the substepped physics that UE ships with. I have a fixed timestep PR simmering for if and when it's time to implement a proper rewind/replay system for all vehicle movement.
I attempted the standard prediction/correction implementation used for deterministic movement systems and got it working for the deterministic aspects of the vehicle's movement system, but naturally couldn't make it work for the core, non-deterministic physics, as that will require fixing the timestep and probably doing other things I haven't thought about / don't understand yet.
For now, the system works like this:
- basic client vehicle movement is non-deterministic physx + deterministic overrides
- special moves are deterministic but client-predicted
- weapons systems are deterministic but client-predicted
- server-side anticheat model is derived from me moving around and generating believable movement curves so the server can check that any given client move it receives is appropriate given its history / state of the world
- server also (supposedly!) handles noclip and flying cheats (this was a fun month)
- clients predict hits, server authorizes them
- simulated proxies (other clients in your world) mostly move according to projective velocity blending[0], though there are special cases for some of the special moves (spins)
- collisions are blended between the replicated state of the world and the client's local simulation [1]
- probably most importantly, the server creates replay files during matches which the game coordinator/serving system scoops up and saves, so I can (at some point) generate useful statistics and review matches to detect and improve cheat handling
I would have loved to do the networked physics really right, like Rocket League did, but I couldn't quite pull it off (I'm one guy with kids and a job and just not enough brainpower!), so I opted for what I hope is "good enough" for a small project like this: give the client a great experience, put all vehicles and projectiles in mostly the same position at the same time in all worlds (since they're momentum-based entities latency-based predictions are usually quite accurate), run an anticheat model on the server, and save replays to find and review anomalies.
If the game does okay and people are enjoying it I will get that fixed timestep/rewind replay PR done.
I hope that was a good answer! Let me know if I can tell you anything else. Something I didn't mention here is the networked projectile movement, which was the most fun to work on. I plan to write about that, too, at some point.
I love reading these kinds of posts. Whenever I’m reminded that I’m not alone, I get a little bit more self-compassion and that makes me more excited to release my game and helps me appreciate all the progress and hard work to date.
I’ve been working on King of Kalimpong [0] on and off since playtesting a one-week prototype of it in 2014. I had no idea how much work a networked physics vehicle/movement shooter game would be. (I should have, I was 8 years into a programming career).
Working part-time was critical (for many reasons), but so was learning that progress is a product of discipline, not motivation, and that I needed to learn “infinite endurance” (I think that’s what Chris Hecker called it).
Once I adopted the perspective that I was some finite number of 3-4 hour blocks of concentration away from turning a goofy idea into a game that anyone could play, finishing became something that felt inevitable — as long as I kept going.
I’ll take the time to write about my experience after I release (which is now months instead of years away) in case any other game developers get anything out of it. Until then, thanks for another reminder that I’m not alone!
Dang, that's annoying, sorry about that! And thanks for checking it out so thoroughly. I queued this up and my friend or I will get to it soon. Really appreciate the QA :D
If you want a heads up when it's fixed you can email me at team at polyfill dot work. I will only email you once: when the bug is fixed!
I think you should probably do that -- niche job boards seem to do well, (or, at least, I've convinced myself that that is the case). I should also mention you can do this with the developer job matching tool my friend and I are making:
If you hit "onsite" as a developer or employer you'll only be matched with in-person employers/developers. It's very much a work in progress at the moment.
Hopefully the fact that we're not doing this for our developer job matching site is not its death knell. We're building up developer preferences first, and then we can ask employers to create job descriptions and potentially match with developers.
Scraping, in our case, wouldn't work anyway because most job advertisements don't have the information we require.
(For the curious, my friend and I are making https://polyfill.work. Developers say what they want -- pay, schedule, etc. -- and polyfill introduces employers and developers when they want the same things)
> architect designed classes, lead designed methods, and programmers filled them out
Incredible. So they all have to take vacation at the same time (and stick together too — the architect lays out the suitcase, the lead gathers the clothes, etc.)
I used to do the same thing but I got tired of doing that (and they didn’t always respond with the details, but often with another request). Now I just send them to https://polyfill.work.
They have to enter pay, etc. and if it’s a fit for me I’ll hear about it.
(Disclaimer: I made polyfill and it’s a work in progress but I’m looking for feedback on the developer onboarding part so let me have it if it sucks!).
I don’t send them my polyfill profile page because then they’ll have my email and uuid and I want polyfill profiles to be pseudo anonymous.
I don't see part-time dev work advertised as often as it is available. I've been working part-time for a few years, and the way I've found jobs is one of:
to try to address this problem for myself. I want to just say how much I want to work, how much I want to make, and what I like to do, then get emails when something that fits comes up. It's an ongoing work in progress though and will take more testing to get right.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3802120/Put_One_In_for_Johnny_Minn/
https://www.heartroutine.com/