My week in game dev #17

Alright, some questions. I like questions.

Do you listen to music when coding?

I absolutely do. You’d not think it would work, but somehow the music curtains off the rest of the actual world as well as all those unwanted thoughts that constantly distract when coding. If the music is familiar then it can actively help push the listener into the essential coding flow state. It probably has its roots in those chaotic coding pits of the 1980’s where there was usually some commotion or another going on and headphones were essential work wear.

I tend to obsess over a particular band or album for a while then move on to something else - or endlessly shuffle-play my 1000+ ‘Good Stuff’ Spotify list*. Today has been a The The day. ‘Heartland’ seems apt given this week’s awful news. Mostly it’s Underworld and Faithless. If I’m really really stuck then only Kraftwerk will suffice.

*I buy physical CDs of all the stuff I like

Annoyingly, podcasts don’t work because if they’re worth listening to, then they require concentration. Good for driving, though.

This reminds me of a moment of great mirth back in the days of Cascade when we were writing 19 Boot Camp and someone stated that they like to walk with a workman…

Any thoughts on generative AI?

Lordy, don’t get me started. Basically, in the realm of artwork, I regard it as a parasite, eating creativity and destroying the hosts from which it feeds. Without source material - real people’s work - it couldn’t work. So the whole thing is based upon a theft and fraud. I’m not sure why the mother of all class actions hasn’t already put those pushing this shite out of business. It must be coming?

We were looking at fab.com recently. This is the asset store owned by Epic/Unreal. Half of it is worthless AI junk and the button to exclude it is switched off by default. Epic are basically saying; we’re happy to destroy the creatives working on original art by stealing their existing work and laundering it such that it can’t quite be recognised enough to clearly violate the owner’s copyright. e.g. willingly killing off their own creative customer base that they ultimately rely on. My better half, who drew the icons for BS5 and BS-R rightly asks - why would even bother investing time creating stuff for these markets anymore? It’s a good question.

Let’s be clear, art assets produced by generative AI are worthless garbage. Any project using such assets is by association also worthless garbage. Once more, most of this is driven by publicly traded companies ‘looking for savings’ and needing to tell the analysts on the quarterly earnings calls that they are deep into AI, the latest thing. The gains will be short term.

We’ll have a yellow sticker on UrbX saying “Guaranteed AI free”. Maybe everyone should.

How’s UrbX going?

Now then, yes, I believe I said the Kickstarter was days away last time. And it sorta was. Since then I’ve been doing a bunch of pretty dull jobs, such as importing map data and packing it into binary for the Next engine. This was way harder than expected. Now I’m just finishing the system that saves level states allowing return visits to areas of map, making for a far more sophisticated game. It’s standard stuff, but trickier in assembly-land where the data has to be small and unreadable.

The good thing is that the Next engine now runs real map data and initialises all the game objects from those maps. This transition was hard. Assembly code can be really brittle to work with. You think it’s organised for flexibility but it really isn’t.

Also, we’re a bit behind on our cover art stuff. All told, I think we’re too late for a Kickstarter this year. We’d be ending in December - the Christmas zone. Probably not wise. Anyway, none of this affects development as such, and we’ll have far more game to show when we regroup in the new year. I’m a bit disappointed, but it is what it is.

Do sign up for Kickstarter info here though :) It’s hugely encouraging seeing that number tick upwards!

The good news is that we’ll hopefully have a decent demo to show at Crash Live in two weeks time. We’ll have some cool flyers to give out, too. They’ll be worth millions one day! Hope to see you there :)

Fire any questions my way. I like questions.