I took part in a few of the later Speedhacks, around 2004-2005, I think?

Allegro will always have a warm place in my heart, and it was a formative experience that still informs how I like to work on games.

EDIT: Hah, actually found my first Speedhack [1]! Second place, not bad! Interestingly, the person who took first place (Rodrigo Braz Monteiro) is also a professional game developer now.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071101091657/http://speedhack....

Here is the repository owner explaining the process himself: https://github.com/Piddewitt/C64-Game-Source-Code

Nice work and interesting still, but maybe we can correct the title?

https://www.cgccards.com/news/article/13534/

History both repeats and rhymes, in this case.

  result = switch(shape) {  
    rectangle = function(r)  
      return "a rectangle with width " .. r.width  
    end,  
    function(s)  
      return "an unknown shape"  
    end  
  }

[0]: https://gist.github.com/krajzeg/9bd8806fb72c1ae22eb931b42b3d...

I have zero interest in mushrooms or dying fabrics, and yet, I can't help and be infected by this site's enthusiasm. Great way to start a day!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41460276

Points: 240

# Comments: 51

My favorite is WarioWare: Twisted [1] including a gyro sensor (+ a rumble pack) to enable gameplay based on turning the whole GBA around. But there were also add-on real time clocks (Pokemon), light sensors, and other things.

It also had the Nintendo e-Reader [2], which technically connected to the cartridge port and loaded like a cartridge, but was its own unique piece of weirdness.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarioWare:_Twisted!

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_e-Reader

For these cases, the exponential lerp trick is very useful, and not universally known. There are many games (some of mine included!) that use the less correct linear lerp and run into trouble with their animations feeling completely off once somebody runs the game on a 240 Hz monitor, or anything different from the 60fps that used to be standard.

For this reason, I appreciate the article. It's usually hard to access this type of hyper-specific knowledge, as it is most often passed as an "apprentice-style" oral tradition from the senior people on a team to the more junior members.

I know it's partly on me for not knowing the domain, but I honestly suspected somebody is trying to make fun of me with some concentrated technobabble.

Especially since I wouldn't expect the topic (configuration languages) to require complex mathematical machinery to work with. Now I have something interesting to dig into.

They are offering a free upgrade from Plus to Pro for one year, but that does nothing once that time elapses - you have to pay the Pro fees or drop down to Personal, which is not viable for most games.

I'm always skeptical of subjective feelings of tough-to-quantify things getting worse or better, especially where there is as much hype as for the various AI models.

One explanation for the feelings is the model really getting significantly worse over time. Another is the hype wearing off as you get more used to the shiny new thing and become more critical of its shortcomings.

However, in the context of receiving the same run of text that GPT-3 did, printed on a sheet of paper, I would probably just go "eh, this is a math question, don't be a smartass".

If somebody asked me: "Hey, what's the area of a room 1235 x 738m, here's a calculator?" and the calculator gave me 935420, I would just say "935420 meters squared" as long as the rough number of digits seemed correct (and maybe as long as the last digit was 0, but I think with a less mathy person that wouldn't matter).

Should the calculator give me "3984" instead I would be like "wait, that's not right, let my calculate this by hand", which is what GPT-3 tried to do. It's just way worse at doing math "by hand".

A very interesting anecdote and another article which makes me wonder how a statistical prediction model can come so close to actual reasoning while seemingly using completely different tools to get there.

I heartily recommend PICO-8 for anybody trying to get into hobby/solo gamedev from the programming direction.

That's a big topic, and one I'm not an expert on - if I was forced to pick my weakest gamedev suit, marketing would be it.

What worked for me was picking a social media outlet I felt comfortable with, then using it to its fullest. For me, that was Twitter, back in the 140-character days way before all this Musk mess. Twitch might work for you, if you enjoy building up an audience around a stream - though with a coding stream you're mostly going to get other programmers (not necessarily a bad thing depending on the game).

The biggest boost in recognition for Slipways was as a result of Twitch/YouTube content creators featuring it. Content creators (not necessarily limited to YT/Twitch) is where I would focus my efforts these days when trying to get the word out. The smaller-to-medium-sized ones are usually very approachable and eager to try stuff out.

If your main goal is to enjoy yourself, there are very few programming tasks as varied and fulfilling as writing your own game engine. Personally, I'm glad there are alternatives.