Jibb Smart 🎮

Pinning a thread of my Twitter highlights, starting with my very recent work on @FortniteGame, redoing their gyro controls and adding flick stick. This has been a hugely rewarding experience! ...🧵 twitter.com/FortniteGame/s…

Thanks for flagging this one so quickly, folks!

Fantastic! Thank you, Eric!

Making games when you’ve done games before, makes it easier to make new games 🤯

I still like to point to Knockout City as setting (or revisiting) a standard for online multiplayer games that should be the norm. If buying a game isn't a bet on whether or not it'll even exist in 12 months, maybe their viability would be less dictated by a herd mentality.

@BarjiYT Trouble is, most 3D games do some logic in the horizontal plane, often with Vec2 instead of Vec3. Using .X and .Y to talk about your XZ plane is yuck. So I prefer an XY horizontal plane :)

How is this even a debate?

@AgileJebrim Since I work on projects with other people where I don't decide the language and I don't decide what editors folks use, I value this portability. But yes, this is definitely a kind of tech debt that makes some benefits less attainable.

@JibbSmart The moment you have the underlying representation stored as text is the moment you bring parsing back into it. The whole point is to be able to use a bytecode directly for instructions making it trivial to process without errors.

Examples of simple steps away from raw text-editing to program computers: It'd be easy to make a code-editor that eliminates the possibility of imbalanced (), {}, [], "", '', /* */ by representing these as blocks that can be created, removed, expanded, contracted, and moved...

I still like text for underlying representation since someone CAN edit in Notepad if needed, and merging is usually doable without a format-specific tool. But then the issues prevented by this special editor can now happen on load, and it needs a good way to fix them.

We can eliminate many kinds of runtime errors and compilation errors while still letting programmers just type on their keyboard (if that's their preferred way to program) by being a program editor that supports typing instead of a text editor that tries to assist programming.

@RayEpsilon Super cool!

I made my mass physics horde climb on top of itself... We really fell in love with our third-person camera, but it highlighted to me a lack of verticality in our combat. Typically you'd reach for the inclusion of some flying enemies, but given that we support physics and collisions with thousands and thousands of enemies, I reworked some of the system this weekend to encourage our goblins to climb over each other. And it is absolutely horrifying. Forever indebted to @nickydooodles2 for making all these goblins that we can blow to bits. Help us out with some wishlists for There Are Millions of Goblins! store.steampowered.com/app/4336530/Th… #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame #indiegames #gaming

@ENENRAGame So slick!

Very early WIP of the next ability: Overclock ⏲️ When entering overclock, you physically 'draw' paths in the world and when the timer is up... well: (VFX, SFX and literally everything to do with this mechanic is WIP)

But without all the stuff it needs to become useful for actual games, once it can do something NEW, I can see its potential utility for pitching and brainstorming.

The path to what you're imagining is WAY shorter and easier and cheaper from ACTUAL GAMES NOW than it is from something like Genie.

Folks, I get that Genie gets you excited about new possibilities of what games can be. But adding in the stuff it NEEDS to actually make games -- consistent, coherent, robust, and doing more than mimicking games that already exist -- you've gotta think about HOW we get there...

@ChadGrenier And using raw input to avoid Windows' default mouse acceleration, right?

@ottrTweets We don't have any mouse accel whatsoever. We're investigating why players think we do, but I can assure you we don't have any accel in there. We would never.

Good changes but why didn't they disable mouse accel 🥀

@proxy_vector @aakashgupta When the people who built an internal tool/system leave without teaching others how to maintain that system, that's usually bad news. Either suddenly, when an issue is discovered (or created by other changes), or gradually, when the system is "improved" without understanding

the real question nobody's asking - is the goal to understand the library or to ship working code with it? because if AI helps you ship faster but you dont deeply understand the internals, maybe thats... fine? we dont memorize TCP/IP specs to use the internet. the 17% gap matters most when you need to debug at 3am with no AI access

Anthropic just released the receipts on a fear everyone’s been hand-waving. 52 junior engineers learning a new Python library. AI group scored 50% on comprehension tests. Manual coding group scored 67%. That’s a 17% gap on foundational skills, and debugging showed the steepest decline. The productivity trade looked even worse. The AI group finished only two minutes faster on average, and that difference didn’t reach statistical significance. Several developers spent up to 30% of their time just composing queries. Here’s what actually matters: they identified three failure patterns that predicted sub-40% scores. Fully delegating code to AI. Starting independently but progressively offloading work. Using AI as a debugging crutch without building understanding. All three share a common thread: removing the cognitive struggle that produces learning. The high scorers (65%+) did something different. Some generated code first, then asked follow-up questions to understand what they’d produced. Others requested explanations alongside the code. The fastest group asked only conceptual questions, then coded independently while troubleshooting their own errors. The gap between “AI makes you faster” and “AI helps you learn” turns out to be enormous. And most workflows are optimized entirely for the former.

Hey folks, We’re stepping up our focus on the live game. We know that as we prepare for the exciting seasons ahead of us the underlying foundations of the game *must* still be stable. Please engage with this thread as the team focus on getting your feedback reviewed and prioritised. Thank you in advance, and usual rules apply from previous posts about being kind to each other 🤝

@aggressa @ArtOfPilgrim Not an official one -- it was by Brooke, I think, and it made whatever it was connected to think it was a DualShock 4 or Switch Pro Controller (IIRC)

@JibbSmart @ArtOfPilgrim Xbox controller got a gyro adapter?

Hey 3D artists - what objects humble you? Let's see if we can get some help going in the comments.