My oldest is 7, and my youngest almost 5, and they came into gaming in a round-about way. My sister was visiting when the oldest was 3 or 4, and asked to play "an old Sonic 3D game". So, I pulled the Dreamcast out of storage, hooked everything up, and she played for all of 15 minutes before getting bored. However, my daughter was enamored. Immediately asked to play and even knowing how janky old Sonic was, I obliged.

Honestly, the rest is history. I'm not exaggerating when I say that our living room TV currently has a Dreamcast, a Gamecube, an Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and Switch hooked up to it. Both girls are huge Sonic fans, and play everything from rereleases of the Genesis games, to every brand new Sonic game that comes out, along with a whole mix of other age appropriate games (3D Marios, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart all being staples in our household).

My point in all of this is that if you expose them to the older stuff at a young age and it clicks, they'll explore the gaming landscape in their own way. I've also got an 11 year old brother that plays Fortnite with his friends every day, but also is trying to collect every single Lego game that's come out since they started the Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. series of games. Kids will like what they're going to like, but having parents that are enthusiastic about the breadth of what the medium has to offer will encourage them to dig being the modern offerings.

Slightly NSFW, some plumber's crack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysUjYAi0WcQ

As for the second, that's more suggestive and I don't care as much either way. Personally me for me I've just been going down the archive trying each day. I enjoy competitive games, so once I miss a word I don't have much interest in continuing on.

However, looking back on it I miss those weeks and months on end of having 6+ hours a day to be outside, working my body, but doing tasks that let my mind wander all over. No doubt those years of daydreaming helped me become the person I am today, and everybody has to grow up at some point, but I do wish I could get more of that back into my daily life. In fact, I think a large part of my current path towards early retirement is just to have that sort of time back.

Targeting (and wishlist-able now!) Steam first, with development actively happening on Windows, Mac, Linux and the Steam Deck. Closely followed by mobile, where I’ve currently got iOS builds working for a proof of concept, just not proper controls. After that we’d love to target consoles.

Edit: Also, thank you! The game has evolved a ton over the last year and is really coming into its own stylistically, bit by bit.

This was very much a passion project and an idea I’ve wanted to see alive for decades, and also let me explore some tech I wanted to get deeper on. I’m bullish on the the tighter integration of CPUs, GPU style cores, and shared memory. Our game, LocoMo, relies heavily of GPU processing of entities under the hood.

You can see me do a walkthrough of the current state of the game here: https://youtu.be/NbB0DCX8Pis?is=vGEw5oTMu_W9f-zT

For what it’s worth, I haven’t staked my investment portfolio on there being a bubble, I’m just preparing for the worst and doing as much work as I can with Claude before a potential massive rug pull happens.

It took about two weeks of really running it through its paces, and constantly slamming against the limit on it to convince me I had to upgrade to at least the 100/month sub, and at this point I wouldn’t blink to bump that to the 200/month if necessary.

I 100% believe we’re in a bubble, and that this level of compute isn’t sustainable at this price point, but for as long as I have it, I’m going to run it at the redline.

I’m a solo dev working on a project that I’ve just gone full-time on, after about 1.5 years of part time work. It’s a codebase that I laid the groundwork in, and has very well established systems, standards, and constraints.

The work I’m using Claude to do is the exact work I would be doing myself, but it does it at somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10x the pace I could have. I don’t know that I could get the same rate of production if I managed a team of 2-3 programmers. Right now, it’s literally almost perfect at taking my iterative suggestions, and implementing them at that accelerated pace.

Honestly the hardest part is dealing with the fact that at the end of the day, I have to understand this codebase perfectly (solo dev and all that), so I have to take in changes to it that are also 5-10x the rate my normal intuition would. But, again, the plus side is that it’s implementing them essentially exactly as I would have, as it has ~20k lines of code that I wrote to use as an example.

If I were to hire even one other programmer, I’d be paying well north of 5k/month, and I’d not only be managing a super computer programmer tool, but an actual human being as well. $100/month might as well be free comparatively.

Couple constructive criticisms:

- Is there a pause button that I'm missing? If not, add one, I want to actually play this more but I need to be able to take breaks

- The beginning is too easy. I'm biased as I like difficult games that encourage mastery, but I found myself dying early on runs because I was getting impatient with how slow the early progression is

- I haven't played enough yet to know whether monsters eventually come from the top, but eventually they should, it would greatly increase the difficulty curve - Hitboxes feel a little meh, and don't seem to match the sprites

- If there's sound, it wasn't working for me, which leads to...

- Pump up the juice. You've got a great core loop, but you need the juice. One of my favorite game dev talks of all time would be perfect for you to watch and iterate with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U)

- Monster diversity. Again, maybe I didn't play long enough yet to get to newer monsters, but from what I can tell the only diversity is their looks, health, and approach angle. Monsters that are faster and incentivize different movement, or that shoot back at you, or blow up after shooting so you have to avoid, etc.

I'll stop there, don't want an absolute laundry list. Keep at it, you've got a unique foundation, it'd be a shame not to polish it up!

There's more here than just the sanitation narrative, she's tapping into the focus Zen puts on the present, that these every day chores ARE the meditation, or in this case, the artistic expression.

What I mean is that traditionally I think peoples' ideas of lookup tables are things like statically baked arrays setup at compile time, or even first thing at runtime, and they never change. But if you loosen your adherence to that last idea a bit, where a lookup table can change slightly over time, you can get a ton of mileage out of a comparatively small amount of memory compared to wasting cycles every frame.

As for the right tool for the job, I've read tons of dev logs and research papers over the years about moving work to the GPU, but this last few months stint of ripping my game inside out has really made me see the light. It's not just lookup tables built at compile or early runtime, but lookup tables modified slightly over time, and sent to the GPU as textures and used there.

Follow this train of thought long enough, and now we're just calling memory writes and reads "lookup tables" when they aren't really that anymore, but whos to say where the barrier really lies?

But that's just like, my opinion, man.

Great article!