My Web Game (playable on anything): https://xitter.cf/t.co/9wZNUisWbx We are the Vengeance of Gamedev
The gutters of Atlantis
Joined January 2022
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Haven't done this in years, Posting a video of my game that I believe will show it in a positive light.
I've been crunching so incredibly hard the past month trying to bring to life a revolutionary control scheme I'm dubbing "MASHLESS" that allows the player to execute a full set of combat manuevers and attacks with nothing but directional input!
And I'm showing it off here, appologies for the crappy play (you'd think i'd be better at playing my own game after laboring over it for so many forsaken years), but it's difficult playing a game with phone controls using a darned mouse!
Anyhow, don't expect this post to get many eyes, maybe it will, but the algorythm is fickle.
It's like they always says, "You gotta start somewhere!" And starting today we start posting videos of our game, and every time we make a post, that's a small, small chance that maybe our game can get some eyes and we can start turning our luck around.
So anyway, this is our grand "MASHLESS" reveal, I've so much faith and blood sweat and tears in this project, but we've still a ways to go...
Wonder why gaming went to hel? This is a fantastic summation from Thomas Mahler, one of the few with the stones to tell it like it is.
At the heart of this decay was the notion all developers were valuable, everyone had important stories to tell and skills to impart to the game and this was rooted in the self indulgence of shared ideology, or a love of the love bombing that had taken the industry.
This was doomed for failure from the start, and anyone that's watched gamedev over the decades knows GOOD teams that make great games are incredibly rare and that most projects ultimately fail.
The golden geese that produced the golden age needed to be fostered and protected.
But people started to be given funding for next to nothing, and people were hired with weak portfolios and the sentiment started to shift, and in the echo chambers, people started to believe their own self indulgent dreams, that all of this was going to go famously, that all the games would be fun, and this new-age style of gamedev where everyone held hands and sung kumbaya would product endless fantastic franchises and expanding audiences.
Too many outsiders and fair-weather publishers with more money than brains pumping our industry with money and diluted the hard-fought pursuit of fun.
I see a lot of people expressing shock and sadness over BioWare shutting down. And I get it.
But here's the uncomfortable truth:
The BioWare that made Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Dragon Age: Origins and the original Mass Effect trilogy had largely ceased to exist long before yesterday's announcement.
BioWare's decline began around the time the doctors left and much like what happened at Blizzard, most of the original talent responsible for building those legendary franchises had moved on years ago.
What remained was the brand. The IP. Basically just the name on the building.
But a studio's name doesn't make great games. Insanely talented people do.
And that's the lesson our industry somehow keeps refusing to learn.
The people who built those studios, who poured their blood, sweat and tears into establishing their creative identities were the actual assets. Their experience, their taste, their leadership, their ability to recognize what made a game special in the first place was always the thing that mattered, not the brand.
You can't simply replace those people, keep the logo on the door and expect the magic to continue.
Yet, that's precisely what publishers have been doing for the past 10-20 years.
They've spent billions acquiring studios and IPs, seemingly under the assumption that the creative output would continue regardless of who was actually making the games.
And when the original talent inevitably left, the remaining teams were expected to fill shoes that were often impossibly large, without necessarily having the experience, leadership or creative vision required to do so.
And... the results speak for themselves.
I think we'll eventually look back at the COVID-era acquisition frenzy as one of the most destructive periods in the history of our industry.
Publishers were buying studios left and right, paying absurd valuations mostly just to secure IPs... and developers were often all too happy to cash out.
At Moon Studios, we got quite a bit of crap for refusing to sell when seemingly everyone else was getting acquired.
I remember telling our team back then that I'd seen this movie before.
The exact same thing happened in the 90s, when EA went on its acquisition spree.
Studios were bought, their founders and creative leaders gradually lost the freedom to make the games they believed in, the original talent became frustrated and left and eventually the studios all became a Ship of Theseus.
History doesn't repeat itself perfectly, but it sure as hell rhymes, and that's exactly why I never wanted Moon to end up in that position.
And I don't think we're even halfway through the ultimate fallout of the latest acquisition frenzy.
There's going to be a very rude awakening for quite a few publishers when they discover that the studios they acquired for billions are worth a fraction of what they paid. And that shoving ideology down peoples throats ultimately came at a cost that they didn't quite grasp.
They didn't actually buy the creative vision, the institutional knowledge or the culture responsible for making those studios successful.
They bought the names, the buildings, the IPs and whatever teams happened to be there at the time.
But those things don't matter at all.
You can buy a studio. You can buy its IP. You can even buy its entire back catalogue.
But you can't buy the magic that made those games special in the first place.
And the sooner our industry understands that, the better.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
Yes, from my perspective you're very close.
"It only takes a few (well-placed) people to move the direction of the project. The rest go with the flow, or are so micro-focused that they don't notice the tilt left."
You're close, but the truth is that while you're correct that only a few people can steer a project, it is supremely rare for those people to actually care about the project and be actually competent, let alone to have the team of people who are comopetent to back up those ideas!
A lot of the decay stems from society at large. We are so participation trophy obsessed any more, that the few talented, bright kids today that should be getting praise and being selected to be in this position, or start this studio are lost in the sea of other people with participation trophies, and they're all brainswashed into thinking they need to agree with everyone else, and support everyone else.
That's not what produced a great industry or great civilizations.
A great company needs a sane and tangible hierarchy based on ability and personality. People need to be in positions of agency not because they are amenable, not becaues they are kind and nice, but because they can get shit done!
It HELPS if they can get shit done while being inspirational, the best leaders are both, but below great leadership, compentent leadership is not nice, it is demanding, and it will grind people down to get the results.
That's the sad truth. But its' how we get great things in this world.
You cna't make an omlette without cracking some eggs.
That said! Gamedev is such a crazy awesome endeavor, and you don't have to grind people to pulp to get results, you just need to give them the opporutnity to do thier jobs and do it well and they will drive themsleves to crunch.
It's a crime what became of gaming, because this industry used to be full of self disciplined, fantastic developers of all stripes and backgrounds, and we sold it all away so we could play patty cake and blow smoke up each other's bums.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
Def some truth in there, but what a lot of people don't realize is these people aren't that different from you or me.
Most of us will believe what we want to believe, and we are prone to misconceptoins.
The biggest misconception of gamedev was that they were the majority.
They believed that because they only hired people who thought like them, and that's all they see in their day to day in their bubbles they OBVIOUSLY they are a majority.
They would go on reddit, get all their views parroted back, they would go on the news on get their opinoins affirmed, they were part of this well oiled machine designed to amplify thier confirmation bias.
But it warped their perception of reality in ways that made them innefective as game designers, part of that was endless toxic positivity... "why try?", "why work hard?" Everyone is just going to say your work is amazing so long as you do the same in kind, it's how these work places work.
But more than that, they started to drink their own kool aide, they started to think there were invisible modern audiences out there that thought exactly as they did, they thought there would be customers buying the game because they shared the same cause, had the same desires to see the games succeed as they did.
This industry as a whole lost sight of the very difficult process of making games and experiences that are actually worth playing and experiencing.
So while you had studio still doing some good work, making neat art, making fantastical worlds.... the hard earned skillsets that make the fundamental elements of the "secret sauce" got lost in the agenda, in the affirmations.
Greatness and fun games, do not come easy, they require endless effort, toil, and failure, but most of all STANDARDS! And a meritocratic environment where these efforts hold value in the culture of the studio, not mindless pandering.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
But it's taking a LONG time for these engines to take off.
I think it's telling that the AI isn't quite as powerful as many people thought it was.
What IS happening though, that I hope the engine makers are taking note of, is talented people are getting tech that they can use to show of unique competencies and talents.
THAT will be the future of engines, not the AI tech itself, but those quality devs that emerge as capable of utilizing it.
But I'm not sure it's going to be fully AI powered dev that makes this tech head and shoulders above the rest.
That's the thing about engine tech, is it needs to be good, it needs ot be almost PERFECT.
That's the point of the engine, is that people use it, which means it needs to be performant, ergonoic and work with the suit of other tools.
And come to think of it, Unity is doing a really good job of managing all that of late, integrating with web, unifying in the URP and all that.
Who knows what ends up being the future of gamedev, but for the forseable future, there doesn't seem to be anything pulling ahead of the big 3 of Unity, Unreal, and Godot ATM. Not even really inklings.
I guess we could lump all those AI games making their custom engines could be lumped into one giant mass of games... but most of those don't really have any singular killer feature, nothing that couldnt' be ported to some engine.
It's kinda funny, for all the hubbub about AI, the engine that would be pulling ahead right now would be the one that had banked most on just core functionality and neat new features. Because the AI doesn't really help with that stuff. The things that made any of the current engines great to work with still have value.
The AI adds value in various other ways, but they don't totally eclipse what engines do or how those cohersive workflows make games better.
Weird how 5 years into this AI revolution and no one has any idea what the future of game engines are, or gamedev is.
We're all just chasing these wild ambitious certain everyone else is pulling ahead, but with no real evidence that that is actually happening.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
I kinda feel like blueprints were one of the greatest features of the Unreal Engine.
It's entirely possible Unreal is able to leverage AI to do amazing things, but I hate to say it, it also feels like a bit of a hail mary because their projects weren't going especially well.
There doesn't seem to be any AI powered engine that's standing out and taking up all the spotlight, as much as everyone predicted that.
If AI were truly the future, then AI generated engines built from the ground up would be emerging by now with a huge leg up over the comopetition.
I'm actually really happy Unity didn't take huge gambles on AI. Unity is a fantastic engine, and it's dominance is no accident, it's because it's usable, effective software that does amazing things.
Yes, AI cand o some various aspects of software well, or really fast... but it doesn't do new things particularly well, and it doesn't reach the level of polish that engine tools require on its own.
But maybe i'm not understanding the sorts of features you had in mind for Unity 7.
The thing about tech, is its easy to think of all the amazing things that could be, how this thing or this team could make this new amazing thing.
But actually reaching that tool, that innovatoin, that is another thing ENTIRELY.
How much of this industry has fallen on its face chasing AI features or some flashy new thing?
And how many companies have actually PROVIDED that new thing?
I honestly can't think of a single revolutionary feature outside of art generatoin that's come out of this AI era due to the new AI tools and such.
It's a shortcut to repurposing and porting some feature from this project to that project... but that doesn't put u in the lead, it just puts you near the other existing product.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
Honestly?
Most of them are actually passionate and care.
They love their art, they love working in the industry.
But it was a death by a thousand cuts.
And the toxic positivity did take its tole. It snowballed over time.
Basically it went like this... The code was the first to decay, because code takes cold, calculated logic. You can staff a building with a bunch of progressive back scratchers and get amazing art, but you're not going to get amazing code. And over time, that art is going to drift towards content no one's going to want, and over even more time, they extend their ranks and the art becomes uneven. It's why games have INCREDIBLE art here, and then you see this character over there that just isn't up to quality.
They've been indulging themselves is what they've been doing. Blowing smoke up each other's bums, filling their ranks.
Oh, and they've been canceling a lot of people. And signalling to each other that they'er the good ones, and celebrating every act of violence that happens to their "enemies".
They also go out of their way to sniff you out. I remember when I first got a new job somewhere, people would go out of their way to ask me about political opinoins, "That new staffing choice by X, sure is alarming don't you think?".
I had a coworker out of nowhere scream nearly at the top of his lungs, "WHY IS HE SO EVILLLLLLLLLLLL!?" (I'm sure you can guess who i'm reffering to) in the middle of the office.
I worked in Austin and then Portland, so I got a front row seat to this well ahead of everyone else, likely a couple years before anyone else in the industry, and about 6 years before the gamres themselves started to see the ramifications of this becauese games just take so damn long to develop.
The sad truth... is that gamedev was taken over by a bunch of smarmy, self serving goofballs. And no one stopped them, because the money people are back scratching, smarmy, goofballs.
That's what gets me the most, is how easily they did this.
It wasn't a grand plan, it didn't happen over night.
But just a group of back scratching subversives over time pushing their luck, and pushing things just a LITTLE bit further because they couldnt' help themselves.
Had they stopped a few years in, and didn't force their politics into the content, they could have totally captured gaming for all eternity, but they just couldn't help it.
They're fanatic, and what's really sad, is they don't even think they did anything wrong.
They genuinly think they were cutting down and destroying the careers of bigots and Nazis. That they are the superior game creators, that they were doing this world a servicve as they indulged themselves, and played patty cake at the office as meritocracy and gamedev died...
For over a decade those of us in the gaming industry that wanted to do the hard work and provide the customers what we all wanted were called racists and bigots. They employed subterfuge in a million and one ways in the work place.
If you were seen browsing the wrong website, or watching a Critical Drinker video, you were put on "THE LIST"...
Slowly cut form social circles, overlooked for upward mobility and, in time, outright let go.
The schmoozers, the back scratchers, the toxically positive, the always smiling, and overly positive cannibalized the entire industry as they smiled, jocked and jeered, RELISHING in the bodies piling up of their slain enemies.
Now these DICK HEADS, all as one demand we mourn the loss of their jobs, the loss of control they held over the industry with bloodied knife.
For YEARS we had to listen to these posers wax poetic about how progressives and leftoids were the creative ones. That gamedev is predominantly leftist because leftists were the creative ones, they were the smart ones, they were the artists and the thinks.
For 10 years you SMARM FUCKS gleefully owned this industry and through every subversive tactic, collectively shat on your coworkers, your countrymen, your customers, and the fragile practice of gamedev.
All so you could huff your fucking farts, and cash easy paychecks.
Musta been nice while it lasted, the free ride is over.
Now we all must suffer this horrific decline.
FULL CLIP: Asmongold says the number one reason game studios fail is that when activists are involved in development, they don’t care about video games and instead push their ideology after reacting to EA shutting down BioWare 😳👀
“This is the big problem, is that whenever you have activists inside of video games, the big thing that's a problem is that activists don't care about video games fundamentally. It's not like the activist. All they wanna do is, they just wanna make a character g*y. The problem is that whenever you have those people that are involved in development, they have no interest in what the gameplay loop is. They have no interest in how fun it is to play. They have no interest in how interesting this boss fight is. They don't care about the narrative outside of how it dovetails into their ideology”
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
AI is a weapon.
It can be used to defend gamedev from the decay of burnout and corporatization, to democratize gamedev, but it can also be used to shoot it in the face.
There are many ways that AI can bolster and weaken gamedev, systematically, and culturally.
And we are experiencing all of the positives and the negatives simultaneously at breakneck speed.
Best thing to do is take a deep breath, and get back to making the beset games we can in the best means we can.
And that relationship between AI and the game is going to be different for everyone based on what they believe to be logistically right, and morally right.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
This is where the real debate is.
I think most everyone agrees that for character controllers and animation states the AI isn't quite there yet, and these systems interconnect in so many complex ways that simply brute forcing it until it works doesn't cut it.
The AI can iterate and force the emulations and the graphics settings and the UI's and such, but in the realm of play is a totally different beast.
Once you distill all these systems of movement and animation down to their essenses, it doesn't really matter if it's AI generated tools or tuning values in a bit of scripting.
The process inevitably becomes the same.
This is where the fun is made, this is where the game goes from good to great. And you can't prompt the AI to make the punches feel punchier or the jumps feel jumpier without endless excess code and noise that starts to muddy the process of finding the fun.
This is where the human element will remain for at least some bit of time while the elements of content genertaion, world building, post processing, etc, all of that gets sucked up by the AI prompt based methods.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
People are free to preach the gospel of AI referencing that post. But the point was to show that the vast majority of people don't' understand AI or it's limits or how it adds values to games, and where games still benefit from human made systems and tunings.
I've spent many years on my current project developing many features, if I threw away every feature that wasn't fun, I would have no features in my game!
Something we are losing in this AI era, is the will to push through mediocrity and make things GREAT! So much of what makes a game fun is in the nuance and the skills and perspectives that comes through endless tuning and failure.
Games are very simple, and people keep speaking to these large, complex porotype features that the AI can try. We used to call that scope creep, and we understood it was largely bad.
Good games are a methodically considered "chord" of features that you have faith will be fun, and making those as fun as possible often takes ingenuity and endless tweaking.
THAT SAID!
AI will be creating debug features and tuning mechanisms and setups that I could see amplifying this process.
But what worries me, is that people will simply relenquish all of gamedev to the AI, believing AI to be faster, and better in all aspects, that if you're doing anything slowly and methodically you're falling behind. But GREAT games are made slowly and methodically. Some elements of those great games will be sped up, but we seem to be hypnotized into thinking that we are at an inflection point where any area of your game you're not supercharging with AI will be lesser than, and that's kinda tragic.
It's as if all the world decided only AI can survive, only AI can recieve investment and attention, whether that AI is productive in the short term or not.
It's this reckless gamble that OTHERS have made, that is having a MASSIVELY negative impact on the lives of all developers.
AI gamedevs jump from project to project, they try this thing and that thing in the matter of a week or so, and they are becoming so short of attention, and losing the qualities of commitment and ability to spend long periods of time to make systems truly great any more.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
It's also a cultural problem.
Games were once made by gamers for gamers, when you have a culture that respects work ethic, and WANTS to make good games, you get teams that genuinly focus on their crafts and put out good games.
There is a ubiquitous drive and need to do good work to promote the efforts of those doing that work because the system is an extension of the players.
Somewhere along the line gaming became a money printing machine, attracting the wrong people, happened in the 80's too. To say nothing of the social engineering that happened on top.
There were too many distractions, to many forces looking to diminish the efforts of making great games for ulterior motives and self preservation among the coattail riders.
It's been so long since we had this culture we don't know how to bring it back. We're all scratching our heads wondering how gaming becomes strong and sustainable again.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
The 'participation trophy' has ruined an entire generation. There's an entire group of people that grew up expecting to get rewarded for doing absolutely nothing.
@JimNorton
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
I agree with your assessment.
But where they are supremely incompenent, and what did in the entire industry, was thinking empire building led to better game sin the first place.
Indie devs are already churning out better games with single dev teams, or teams in the single digits.
Even with the obvious truth staring them in the face that smaller, harder working, and more talented team leads to superior products they can't change their ways.
Because the very existence of AAA requires a large staff and large teams to justify their entire existence.
The entire fuckign industry was a house of cards, a throng of people faking it till they made it, blowing smoke up each other's behinds to justify exessive paychecks and inane monetizations.
All the marketing, the beuaracracy, the massive team management, the big buildings, it was all an illusion built around that small core of quality gaming that the very core teams built up over time.
Blech.
Like I don't know wtf anything even is any more.
It's all nonsense, nothing is in service to anything, everytihng is a con, in serviec to this giant machine that just produces ungrateful people gassing each other up a everyting goes to shit.
And I realize it makes me an asshole for poiting out.
But I'm just so very tired of watching everything in this world go to absolute shit.
IllTemperedTuna retweeted
Ha sorry you caught me worked up responding to AI glazers who think AAA is going to leverage AI to make the next great game.
I don't think people should feel ANY shame using AI. it's an INCREDIBLE learning tool, use it to learn the dark arts of gamedev that this shitty industry kept chained in a cave in a basement.
There's lots of things AI does very well, and MOST OF ALL it does a great job of helping people learn gamedev!
The entire comment section here is full of AI evangelists.
I systematically asked every single one of them for a SINGULAR example of what they espouse to be common fact, "How does AI amplify gamedev?".
NOT A SINGLE ONE has given an example.
The AI hype for gamedev is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.
Xbox strategy manager Brandon Stirrup has deleted his X account after facing a lot of backlash over his recent comments about AI in game development.
Stirrup had spoken openly about Xbox using AI and said developers who refuse to embrace AI shouldn’t be in the business of making games.
He deactivated it because of the large number of replies he was getting.
There are also claims that Microsoft isn’t happy about the situation and that it has caused some internal discussion
