Commenting late, but just want to thank you for this. I've been using it for a bit now, replacing vterm for my setup. I'll be sure to submit feedback via github.
For similar reasons, I strongly prefer org-mode to markdown. I find that with org-mode and extensions (such as in-line elisp) I have a _significantly_ more powerful system. For example, specs can have tasks and roadmaps inline which reduces risk of drift. The biggest downside is, unfortunately, not enough folks are emacs proficient.
I hadn't considered HTML and I'm definitely going to try this.
Great write up. Love to see more of this topic on Hacker News! We've been building in this exact space since 2023, though we jumped directly into 3D with real-time multiplayer from the start.
My take: The "not a game" positioning feels like surrendering before the real design challenge begins. With our first experiment (Retail Mage [1]), we deliberately created a hybrid between traditional game structure and AI improvisation. We released it precisely because we were getting similar feedback from folks that an early implementation was too open ended and didn't "feel like a game." While I think we proved our point, we also learned a lot (including some mistakes we made).
That said, I _also_ think we can build _more than games_ with this technology. I think we’re edging into a new genre or medium: more improvisational and participatory than either traditional games or film. Structure still matters in this space, though. Without it you're really in the fanfic engine or writing assistant space. That’s fine! But it's a different goal.
Honestly, I'm very interested in this space. I was just speaking on a panel about this Monday at GamesBeat in LA and a few of us have a new podcast about this topic "Playing With Inference" [2] with folks like Nick from AI Dungeon as guests.
Last year, my startup launched Retail Mage as our first answer to the question of if there was any point in introducing ML/GenAI into the real-time gameplay loop. I hope this to be the first of a series of articles on what we learned.
Some other highlights, specific to the Hacker News folks:
- We have our own AI backend, running in AWS.
- Costs were a major issue and we did a lot to lower it
- We use a hybrid approach of mixing traditional game AI with machine learning
- We have not just AI NPCs, but an AI world interaction model
When I look back at it, Dugin was right back in November:
"So we have won. That is decisive. The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy."
Dugin wasn’t exaggerating when he said, “We have won.”
Today’s White House display is exactly what he meant. A decade ago, the GOP would’ve never echoed Russian talking points. Now, they’re openly aligning with them.
This isn’t just isolationism—it’s the dismantling of U.S. hegemony from within.
These are the FP8 distilled versions of DeepSeek we've started testing at Jam & Tea.
We use LLMs for real-time gameplay. We released Retail Mage last year on Steam as a tech demo of what we can do. We've found FP8 to be the current sweet spot for accuracy and performance for our use case. It's one of the many techniques we applied last year to bring our real-time inference costs down by 3 orders of magnitude to make Retail Mage releasable.
Anyway, we're just sharing this with anyone who finds it useful.
You can read a few more note by our ML engineer, Yudi, on LinkedIn here:
Everything swatcoder suggested in his comment is good. I just want to add/emphasize:
If you don't actively stay up with the tech, your understanding will atrophy. Consequently, because you intend to remain a PM, your tech will never be as strong as someone who is dedicated to it and you need to be okay with that.
Another classic example for this are engineering managers: people management (like project/product management) is its own discipline with a deep set of skills, research, training, etc. To become a good EM means you _will_ sacrifice some of your technical edge. That "deep technical understanding" that good EM's maintain is built on a foundation of years as a practitioner and, even then, requires continual investment.
I don't mean to discourage you, I just want to ensure you have realistic expectations.
Given all that and given your goals, I think you should just ask yourself a question only you can answer: how do you best learn?
If that's in the classroom, then go get that masters (online or in person). If that's with hands on projects, then set aside time for tinkering and get going. Likewise with books, videos, meet-ups, etc. You know what motivates you and what techniques keep you focused (because you'll need that discipline).
Regardless, I wish you luck and enjoy the journey!
- I had 10+ years of experience in linux/unix development
- Career change to AAA game development which is predominantly Windows based
- Day to day do Unreal C++ developing in Windows with Windows toolchains
- Still use WSL (and thus bash) for everything else, including DevOps related work, cloud/container development work, and personal notetaking/productivity via emacs+org-mode.
So, some of us have reasons to co-exist in multiple OS's. I tend to write up scripts in Python if I can so that there's at least a chance that I can run them in both Windows + Unix environments.
> IMO, it's not really open source if its run by a company that will eventually use its position to squeeze its users for cash.
I know it's not as popular or sexy as it used to be, but the whole point of a foundation like Apache was to avoid these situations, even more than the way the Linux Foundation is setup. Apache _explicitly_ manages projects to avoid these downsides.
- Single corporation ownership. Projects cannot get out of the Incubator unless they demonstrate a diverse and healthy community. That doesn't mean popular, it doesn't necessarily mean best-in-class, but it means that there shouldn't be just one entity backing a project.
- Membership in Apache is _personal_ not a seat for a given company. If you're a committer on an Apache project and you move jobs, you're _still_ a committer on that project
- The Foundation owns the trademarks. There have been fights about this in the past, but the whole idea is that the _community_ owns the name, so some corporation can't claim to be the sole or official owner by naming their company or product after the open source product.
The core premise of the Apache Software Foundation is community over code, that healthy, diverse communities have a better chance of standing the test of time than open source projects backed by a single individual or company. That's the thesis at least.
The is starkly different from several other foundations, notably the Linux Foundation or Eclipse Foundation which are modeled more around industry consortiums.
Both models have their place, but I believe Apache better models the core values many of us feel strongly about when it comes to free and open source software.
Looks impressive. Like some others, I'm getting the bug that says "You are already connected" when I try to play.
That said, this is still good work, especially considering your experience and age (I checked out your 2D physics library on github and I found the trailer on youtube).
One suggestion: As someone in the game industry, I personally wouldn't label it an MMO as it doesn't include many of the features, particularly the "massive" part of MMO, that is usually associated with that term. The work is already impressive enough, you don't need to give it a label that could open it to criticism.
Otherwise, this is solid work. If you're aiming for a career in the game industry eventually, it's a good foundation to build on.
While I get that it's the AI product, the vulnerability here is the k8s configuration. It really has nothing to do with the AI product itself or AI training or anything related to machine learning or generative AI, it's more about poor cloud computing platform security.
Game developer here. Read Zevin's book. As expected, some parts are spot on, some are wildly off, but within the industry there is also a wide range of experiences.
If you want to learn more about actual game development stories, I recommend Blood, Sweat, and Pixels:
Last year, I launched a new game studio that's using gen-ai in the core game loop. Finally had a chance to write up one of my takes on what makes ai-in-games interesting: that it closes the designer-player feedback loop.
May seem a bit obvious to to the Hacker News crowd, but within the game industry I haven't seen it discussed as much. Curious for other takes and feedback.
Sometimes I’ve thought of creating physical cards or a binder or something like that which would act as a physical representation of my digital ebook library so that I and others could quickly peruse it.
- https://cautomaton.com
- https://jamandtea.studios
- https://earlgrey.ai
- https://bsky.app/profile/cautomaton.bsky.social