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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • The best part is the job opening…

    Actively use and promote AI-assisted development tools to increase team efficiency and code quality

    Probably the boss of the person who had to write the job opening demanded they include something about AI, and the person who wrote it decided to turn their sarcasm up to 100. The only way to make it more clear would have been sarcastic casing:

    Actively use and promote AI-assisted development tools to InCrEaSe TeAm EfFiCiEnCy AnD cOdE qUaLiTy







  • shocking and horrifying the player is kind of the whole point of the game

    I disagree on the “shocking” part here. DDLC is psychological horror. It does have shocking moments, like the end of Act 1, but this is not the main point. It is way more about relationships than about shock moments. Sadly discussing that part of the game (the later acts…) is massive spoiler territory, so I’ll stop here.

    The fact remains though, that it is a horror game, and if the end of Act 1 is already too much, then sorry, but it is only going to get worse. A lot worse. (Or, if you enjoy psychological horror: Better. A lot better.)









  • Near-Mage. It’s a point-and-click adventure from the same studio that also made Gibbous, and set in the same world. However, the theme is much lighter. Gibbous was (while still a comedy) about cosmic horror. Near-Mage is fantasy.

    While I definitely recommend the game, it is lacking a bit when it comes to riddles. Most point-and-click adventure games have lots of them, where you need to think, give up, and then just try random stuff until something happens. This is almost completely missing in Near-Mage… There is almost always a quest goal that directly tells you what to do - up to the point that situations that give you a choice are explicitly marked as such.

    On the other hand, just like Gibbous, the game is beautifully drawn and animated, and all dialogues are fully voiced. The characters are likeable and - call me a furry if you want - really cute. What keeps me playing is mostly the world - there is always new stuff to discover, even in late-game, and the mix of fantasy and (what I assume to be) Romanian folklore is great.






  • I’ll give you my point of view as game developer.

    Disclaimer first: I work as a coder, everything I say about publisher interaction is second-hand knowledge.

    We have made one Linux game. It was the first one of our two “indie” titles (quotation marks, because both of them ended up being partially funded by a publisher, so they weren’t really indie in the end), where we had promised a Linux build on Kickstarter, long before a publisher got involved.

    The main reason why we did not do native Linux in our publisher-funded games is quite simple: Our publishers didn’t pay us for it.

    There are actually some publishers who are very keen on getting native Linux versions for their games, but we sadly have not released a game with any of them yet…

    The publishers we released games with did not agree to the buget that we think is needed to do a Linux port of sufficient quality. If we would lower the price for doing a Linux port to the point where our publishers would agree to it, we would take on a lot of financial risk ourselves, so this is sadly not an option.

    If everything worked as it is advertised by engine developers, making a Linux version would be quite cheap: Just click a few buttons and ship it. This is, sadly, not the case in real-life, as there are always platform specific bugs in game-engines. Our one Linux game was made with Unity, and we had quite a few Linux-only bugs that we forwarded to the Unity devs (we didn’t have engine source code access), and had to wait for them to fix… For the engine we mainly use nowadays, Unreal, we have a rule-of-thumb: “Engine features that are used by Fortnite are usually well maintained.” There is no native Linux version of Fortnite… (We did try Unreal’s Vulkan RHI in Unreal 4.26 for Steam Deck support in one of our games. Let me put it this way: The game in question still uses Direct3D on Steam Deck.)

    So, from experience we expect that the chance that we would have to find and fix Linux-specific engine bugs is quite high. Therefore we have to budget for this, what makes offering a native Linux version relatively costly compared to the platform’s market share. Costly enough to make our publishers say “no”.

    This, by the way, also answers the question why publishers are willing to pay for the way more expensive console ports. There are also way more console players, and therefore potential customers out there…

    (I can only guess, but I would expect publishers to be even more reluctant to pay for native Linux, now that WINE works so well that getting a game running on Linux needs typically zero extra work.)