Valve didn’t even get that far… Their next big game is free and has over 200,000 concurrents right now in invite-only beta!

How close to cost does one of the richest men in the world get on their Astroturfing campaign?

I think it’s worth remembering that most of humanity hasn’t been involved in anything resembling meaningful productive work for many decades.

From this, we can conclude that the general state of our society, including education, will not be impacted by the introduction of AI, it already sucks.

We didn’t ‘start failing our children’ in 2027, we started failing them in 1927, and more likely we have never NOT failed to educate people in how to not suck.

I wish more people of good conscience would take changes and work towards applying them meaningfully instead of letting the absolute worst people take maximum advantage of whatever advantage could be had of whatever change is coming.

We can probably get a couple more things in too. Call it the, ‘Trump is the best, and Republicans have always been right on every issue Act’.

I also don’t believe in intellectual property.

I think there are legal tools which people can employ lawyers against in an attempt to hurt each other.

Indies don’t have access to those legal tools in the first place, so if anything, ‘It can’t be our intellectual property’ is likely a useful defense against large-scale aggressors, but ianal.

My point is, engines are fine.

Even though I like my jam games hand-rolled C or JS with assets made in paint (or laid out in text!) it’s a matter of taste. Even unity, which I could shit on at length, is fine.

Running around hosting purity tests about engines, or AI, only hurts creators who are just trying to make something by whatever means are available to them.

It was awful and I don’t miss it at all.

Being able to read any book without going to the library, let alone getting off the toilet, is a fucking miracle and anyone who makes that more difficult should be viewed with contempt by every intellectual.

Nothing peaceful about spending 2 hours finding a book, finding a citation about a fact you were interested in, thinking, ‘did so and so really write that?!’ and then having to wait 3 weeks for an interlibrary loan only to discover that the author did, in fact, make it up in the first place and add a citation to make it appear that it was fact.

Books are peaceful, reading is great, I prefer reading on paper, I don’t miss the part of the process the card catalog was involved in.

It’s why I don’t use engines!

I couldn’t imagine using an engine for a jam game and getting what I want out of the jam.

But I can respect that decision, because for some folks it’s the vision, for others it’s the marketing, for some it’s making the assets.

There are a lot of pieces that go into making something that stands out.

I don’t think it misses the point at all.

Playtesting with an LLM is just another way to feed the process, with it’s own set of tradeoffs.

This game is the early access version of path of neo.

Look, it’s the ban the Internet guy calling into letterman in the 90s.

Yeah, people were saying the same thing about internet use in the aughts and we’re all here still and doing fine.

It managed to achieve the lofty quality of 10,000 identical uninteresting mobile RTS games before it.

It’s cute and these little jam games are important but pretending they’re the same as what studios do is fairly delusional.

I have dire news for you, itch.io is hosted in the cloud! In a data center! The horror!

• A game jammer who always codes their own engines during the jam because using a pre-built engine is cheating.

By who? The game is playable.

It’s not like your average play tester making 20 bucks an hour is some kind of artistic genius, mostly they’re just working the bugs out.

The guy made a thing with a computer. So what? Get off your high horse like clicking a mouse a few times is some kind of proof of the ‘creative process at work’.

So he spent his time differently, great. If he decides to be an indie, he can spend the next 8-24 months going to conferences and begging for reused art assets and small checks to pay people on fiver or buy models on the unity store, he can spend the same amount of time going to conferences and begging for creative feedback and small checks to pay people to work on the design.

This is not where it is. It’s when the next person really does have a great idea, and doesn’t need to beg a publisher or spend thousands of hours honing an unrelated skill like blender to build a prototype.

Things have come along quickly and are speeding up rather than slowing down.

At least people aren’t parroting that tired old, ‘This exact thing must already exist in the training data’ argument which has been fallacious from the start but is wearing excessively thin since new models use almost exclusively synthetic training data to begin with.

People who haven’t had the opportunity to see it don’t realize that wealth distribution is fractal, and the more money you have, the more obvious this is.

I like to think of it in terms of stack of 300X (I could buy your year in a day’s interest) and work your way up.

$1

$300

$90000 < if you’re reading this post, you are probably around here.

$27000000 < This is the rich person in the post above, notably still in the middle.

$8100000000 < Private jets, billionaires, there are a few thousand of these.

$2.43E12 < Musks, Bezoses, etc.

GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!

It’s only a problem for people who always do what they’re told.