Richard Pickering

@thdxr Only 8? Shame. Must do better.

you're not working hard enough our team works 8 days a week

@JezCorden Make fun games. Optimise for fun, even above graphics. Don’t make games an opinion piece - become obsessed with making things that people find a challenge, love and is fun.

If it's true that Bungie will lose 400 staffers, that's more than Ninja Theory, Compulsion, and Double Fine combined. Before you consider the tons of other studios closed over the last few years ... What's the solution here?

Exactly. The best games came from constraints. Look at almost any of your favourite games from the 90s and 2000s and they faced financial hardships, limited hardware on consoles and PCs, a smaller market with fewer verticals (way less casual gamers), etc. Devs made games out of the passion of making games. They wanted you to have fun. They wanted their game to be a memorable challenge, and for it to be something that if you completed it, you felt like you'd earned it. That they'd make a lasting notch on your experience as a gamer. Many games made today are difficult to lose at. That have no real payoff. And that try and push all kinds of views (whether you agree with them or not). Games are for fun, and are built for the audience. They're not meant to be built for the Dev. I look forward to seeing what Xbox does in the next few years.

Microsoft > Give devs over 7 years to make games > Devs make games for non-xbox audience > Artistic push over gameplay > Spend billions > No game/console sales Polygon > Microsoft you're actually the bad guy!!!!

I loved the combination of having just about enough money to make an ambitious game if they really stretched themselves, and absolute talent from the 90s and early 2000s. It seems that the lack of constraints on many studios, and the lack of seeing a bottom line has led to some really self-aggrandising games.

South of Midnight cost $100,000,000 to make and no one bought it. You can win all the awards. And critical acclaim. It means nothing. Those are fake metrics. Did gamers buy it? Did it generate profit? No? Then you failed. Simple. Generate a return on investment or get fired.

Games are made to be fun. It's unfortunate that there's so many games out there that simply aren't. In the graphics arms race, the microtransactions, live services, etc. the games industry forgot two things. Make fun games. And stories that resonate with gamers. It seems Xbox is going back to that, and I for one welcome it.

Microsoft should sell Xbox before it ruins everything polygon.com/xbox-microsoft…

@unclebobmartin @astuyve I’m finding Orca IDE is great for organising my work and keeping worktrees categorised on each task.

I’m using terminals. The simpler the better. At some point, we’re going to want a better way to see and review what the agents are doing. It would be very interesting if we had a tool that categorized their actions and allowed us to examine them in some efficient way. Right now their actions just stream by the terminal so fast it’s hard to keep track of it

I spent a few months using codex/claude/opencode desktop apps but I've mostly given up and gone back to the terminal. tell me why I'm wrong/what I'm missing

I keep using the analogy of flexible and inflexible architecture. AI provides an opportunity to add flexibility in systems that was either incredibly difficult before, or practically impossible. But a flexible system offers little value. Inflexibility needs to be used to harness repeatability, determinism, safety, correctness, etc. I'm enjoying a Spec Driven Development workflow now, with Blueprints intermediate task/test descriptions, and generated task lists. Blueprints being business goals, values, needs, etc. defined with basic acceptance tests, and reconcilable against the code into tasks.

if anything you want your agents to do is deterministic, such as managing a queue, or sorting a list, create a script for the agent to use. Agent's don't do deterministic things well. It's our job to force determinism upon them.

@makmersion @JamieMoranUK Further proof - art style > ray tracing

Just finished the trilogy with my wife - captured this on Series X. Thought the lighting, especially on Marcus, was particularly impressive. Especially for a 2008 360 game. Kind of crazy what a res bump and some simple AF pulls off. You could argue this looks better than some new games.

There’s a lot of Gears Of War Hype to get ready for E-Day You can play All The Gears Games on Xbox , that have amazing upgrades, like Gears of War 2 Now with: 60FPS✅ 4K✅ 16x AF✅ Quick Resume ✅ Looks pretty amazing From XboxSeriesX

I think it just shows how much of the industry is based on very simple systems at heart. A lot of the economics of tech systems involve optimising a system that could still be done manually - or making something possible that would simply be considered too costly to do manually. Random example - food ordering apps. The original form of this was to call the restaurant and make the order by phone. The friction of having to explain your address (navigated to by an ACTUAL MAP) being completely removed, and no longer having to speak to a person other than the person making the delivery. But very much still possible without a single computer involved (other than those within telecoms exchanges, etc.).

i used to say programming was creative work except LLMs are fine at programming and are literal 0s for more obviously creative work i think we mistook enumerating a lot of possibilities and picking one for being creative

@americanmcgee Still happens in the UK too - signalling cable is stolen from railway lines as it's copper and can be sold on. Very annoying - causes huge delays.

Speaking of Engine Rooms, during the development of Madness Returns, we lost ours for a few days. Well, sorta. About mid-way through production, we went on a long weekend holiday (May Day I think it was). And I was the first one back to the office after the holiday. As soon as I walked in the front door of Spicy Horse, I knew something was wrong. Lights were flickering on and off. And from the server room, I could hear a strange cyclical whining of all the cooling fans - running to max speed, and then back down to zero over and over again. "Oh, shit." We COULD NOT have downtime. Because we were funded not by EA but by a bank in Los Angeles. And the structure of our development deal (called a Bond Finance Deal) did not allow for us to slip the schedule - if we slipped the schedule, we handed EA control of the project. I called the grunt-level electrician. He poked around, shined his flashlight here and there, probed a few electrical panels. Looked concerned. Called a local-level government electrician. That guy poked around. Looked more concerned. Eventually the guys from State Grid showed up. By this time the show was outside, in the alley between the two Spicy Horse buildings. There it was discovered that someone had STOLEN one of the power lines leading into the building. A copper thief! Wtf. Back in the day, this was a thing. People would steal copper and other metal. Lots of stuff would get stolen - bikes, laptops, scooters, etc. I think I went through 4 or 5 bikes in my first 5 years in Shanghai. Anyway, a new line was installed in a few days. With power restored, we made up for lost time and stayed on schedule. Thankfully, that thief did not inadvertently hand EA control of the project. These days that sort of stuff doesn't happen anymore in China. People certainly don't steal power lines. Ha. But all the other kinds of petty theft have practically gone away as well. Plenty of videos on YouTube showing people leaving laptops, phones, and bags unattended in public without issue. But, yeah, that was the time a copper thief almost handed EA control of Alice: Madness Returns 😂

@SandyofCthulhu I love games with tongue in cheek humour and that feel fun. I'm not so easily offended that I miss out on humour and comedy. It's a shame that's a normalised part of modern society.

Are games insulting you? The Entertainment Software Association says that a "requirement" of games is to avoid naming difficulty levels in a way that "demeans players". For Wolfenstein, id Software literally gave the hero a baby bonnet and pacifier if he choose the wimpy difficulty. I guess the Entertainment Software Association's dictat is why Doom: Dark Ages replaced "I'm Too Young to Die" with "Aspiring Slayer." (Pussies) I am perfectly happy to be demeaned by a game that says I'm picking the baby level. You?

@jasonfried I would so pay an extra 20 or 30 dollars for a mini handbook like this with any software product I want. Even open source ones. Like for tmux cheat sheet bindings and such.

How can you not just fall in love with the mini manual, top right corner.

@dhh I think this is a crucial point many fall down on. Dynamic typing doesn’t mean no checking, and certainly doesn’t mean unsafe. It means you have to Engineer - like with any language, as an Engineer. And that means verify, check edge cases, and gain confidence in the build.

Agents don't need types. They're perfectly capable of pulling off incredible refactorings without. Give them a linter and a test suite, and you have all you need. Token efficiency is where it's at.

@rebeu_furtif I don't want hyper-realism, I want hyper-stylised.

les trucs de RTX path tracing 120 fps qlawi jsp quoi là n'arriveront jamais à la cheville de l'atmosphère de ce jeu (2009)

The amount of research depends on what I'm building really. If a command line tool or something for my own productivity, I quite like just writing code with basic docs. Equally I'm not always time rich (I'm a new Dad) and so get AI to build something. Alternatively I'll be at my desktop.

as a Programmer, how much RAM is enough for you ? 1. 8 GB 2. 16 GB 3. 24 GB 4. 32 GB 5. 64 GB 6. 128 GB 7. 256 GB 8. 512 GB+

@MaksShamihulau @PR0GRAMMERHUM0R

@PR0GRAMMERHUM0R Yep OOP is fucking fuck

objectOrientedProgrammingIsAnExceptionallyBadIdeaWhichCouldOnlyHaveOriginatedInCalifornia

@RetroMoviesDB Going to be honest, I'd give up the entire Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. Nothing further - don't need anything in return.

Dredd deserved a sequel. I said it. It was raw. Brilliant and movied like lightning. Who's with me?

Perhaps controversial, but "white privilege" is the absence of negative bias towards them before knowing them. Lack of prejudice. It doesn't help to reduce the prejudice by us acting like this is a privilege. It should be a default expectation for anyone. Of course, this is before entering socio-economics and discussions on that side - I just mean that I don't think the concept of "white privilege" is doing what it's intended to do anyway. It just sows division, when we should be looking to remove prejudices against people of colour.

Insane

@Telegraph Can I choose a random lottery of the population instead?

❓Who would you rather have as prime minister?