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
That “Solid Snake Method” sounds a lot like the emacs doctor…
In case you don’t know what the emacs doctor is: It’s an easter-egg of the text-editor emacs (it is, however, mentioned in the manual). The doctor is a chatbot based on ELIZA, and meant to portrait a psychotherapist. Since it is a rather simple script, it is very limited in what it can do, and mostly just reformulates user input as questions.
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.)
I don’t know if that’s still the case, but when this game launched it required you to be online while playing (despite it being single-player), and you had to login with a Ubisoft account.
Afaik you can only develop UWP apps on retail Xbox. Aka Windows Phone apps. Aka “those shitty programs with horrible UI that made Windows 8 everyone’s favourite Windows version”.
I made the mistake of buying the Europa Universalis IV base game, and getting 3 months of subscription for all DLCs… Im playing the Anbennar mod, which is a fantasy total conversion of the game. There goes the little bit of spare time I still have…
Sorry for being pedantic, but the only confirmed information in that article is “payment processors”. The author seems to just assume that this means credit card companies (what is a reasonable assumption, as said), but it does not sound like that part is confirmed…
Are there trustworthy sources that it’s VISA/MasterCard, or is this speculation?
I mean, I would not be surprised at all, since they have a history of misusing their power (iirc they were the reason OnlyFans nearly went SFW), but before calling names, I’d like to be certain.
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.
The “backlog” is not something to work through, it is a lesson to learn: Do not buy a game unless you have time and are motivated to play it that very moment. If you buy it to play it “later”, or “next week”, you very likely are not going to play it, and it is just wasted money.
(The same is true for books, by the way. And when it comes to books, I refuse to learn this lesson.)
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.)
As a gamedev I never saw this as a big issue. Just run Debian Oldstable on your build server, link whatever you can statically, and you are good.
(However, I am talking on a purely theoretical level here - we only released one Linux game, and that was before I joined the company. I will explain our actual reasons in a separate post.)