The other day I was updating something and a test failed. I looked at it and saw I had written it, and left a comment that said like “{Coworker} says this test case is important”. Welp. He was right. Was a subtle wrong that could’ve gone out to customers, but the wrong stayed just on my local thanks to that test.

I would have questions about how they work with a team and structure.

Are they going to be okay with planning work out two weeks ahead? Sometimes hobbyists do like 80% of a task and then wander off (it’s me with some of my hobbies).

Are they going to be okay following existing code standards? I don’t want to deal with someone coming in and trying to relitigate line lengths or other formatting stuff, or someone who’s going to reject the idea of standards altogether.

Are they going to be okay giving and getting feedback from peers? Sometimes code review can be hard for people. I recently had a whole snafu at work where someone was trying to extend some existing code into something it wasn’t meant to do*, and he got really upset when the PR was rejected.

Do they write tests? Good ones? I feel like a lot of self taught hobbyists don’t. A lot of professionals don’t. I don’t want to deal with someone’s 4000 line endpoint that has no tests but “just works see I manually tested it”

I’ve definitely had some coworkers that in retrospect we should not have hired. But I’ve also had people I was iffy on that turned out great. Hiring is hard.

I think having areas with weaker or stronger enemies is fine. Good, even. So long as you can tell by looking at them what you’re getting into.

Dark Souls generally does this. A rotting skeleton is a low threat. A giant knight in black armor and man sized sword is a bigger threat.

Oblivion will often have dudes that visually and behaviorally are the same, but hit way differently because of the numbers assigned to them. You can’t really look at a scene and understand what you’re getting into.

Other games also do a bad job here. Borderlands for example will have identical looking bandits, but in this area they’re indestructible level 100, and that one they’re push over level 5. The ass-creed Viking one did the same thing. Archers on one side of the river you could ignore, but the far side would one hit you.

I think a lot of studios don’t want to invest in the extra art assets and stuff when it’s cheaper to just use the same monster model and assign it different numbers.

I feel like trying to combine

• high vertical power growth
• non linear “open world”
• power fantasy

all together is just fundamentally at odds with itself.

Personally I’d prefer to see less vertical power growth. I’d rather have the numbers stay somewhat constrained.

Like, let’s say the most damage you can ever do with a lightning spell is 100. Work backwards from that to figure out how much health things should have. We want a master mage to be able to blow mooks up in one zap, mid tier in 3, and big scary shit in 6.

A novice mage zaps for 20. We want mooks to take 3 hits, mid tier stuff maybe 10, and big scary stuff a lot.

Mooks: ~60hp Mid tier: ~210 Bosses: 600

If your gameplay is then deeper than a simple stat check, a novice can persevere and win against a big challenge.

I really super dislike it when you have stuff that looks like a mook or a boss, but is statted otherwise. I remember in Oblivion some witch lady was oddly high level, and she kept fighting despite having like 50 arrows in her face.

Something like that, but with more thought put into it than a Lemmy post from the couch.

Oblivion was kind of really bad though. It had the worst level scaling of the genre.

I think the spell crafting was also toned down and more gated than Morrowind. And the equipment I think was overly simplified.

I… I played a lot of guild wars 2. It’s a good game!

But about 40 games total. I don’t want to be a mono-gamer so that’s nice.

Nine Sols is squarely in the “good but not fun” category for me. It is well executed but I did not enjoy most of it. Also the story is a bummer.

I reinstalled Sekiro after finishing it to see if my memory was rose tinted. No, sekiro is still like music. Even cleared the “you should lose this fight” tutorial boss.

This is a good answer.

At my job, there was a desire to do a big rewrite of the system. It was a disaster. We spent like 8 months on this project where we delivered no value to customers. Then there was essentially a mutiny from the engineering team and we killed it.

We’ve since built on top of the original system and had, in the words of product leadership, “the most productive quarter in the history of the company”.

Now, why was it a disaster? The biggest reason was that people, especially people in leadership positions, did not understand the existing system very well. They would then make decisions based on falsehoods and mythology.

Path of Exile 2 is pretty good. Wasd movement and a dodge roll are nice. Some parts are still rough, but it’s been out like a month.

I don’t really trust that just anyone will make something new and fun. Something that tries to extract money, sure.

Seems kind of bland, but I guess we’ll see

There’s a couple bands I like that do email for updates and such. I think the one from Worriers uses Ghost, based on the fine print at the bottom of the page ( https://getittogether.laurendenitzio.com/ )

Personally I like it a lot more than social media. I think moving everything to Facebook et al was a mistake

I had an NPC in a RPG that was kind of like this. A werewolf was going berserk in a church. The players were like “Reg! Get out of there!”. Reg sees the werewolf rip a corporate stooge in half and come running at him. He goes, “Bro. Fucking metal.”

Rolls really high on his social check. Werewolf high fives him and just runs by to go murder more corporate leadership.

Satire is dead. Not enough CEOs have followed suit.

I don’t think I’ve ever desired to have speech as an interface for a device.

Yeah, I could yell at it “Open the browser and go to uhh the order of the stick comic index page” and maybe it would get it right. Or I could just… click on the browser, type oot and pick it from the drop down. Faster, no error, no expensive processing.

I don’t drive (cars are a bad form of transit and I’m lucky enough to not need one) and I’m not hands-full in the kitchen often.

As someone else said it really depends on what they’re actually asking for.

If they’re like “how do I make the screen turn off after an hour?” then telling them to switch to Linux is a bad response.

If they were like “I cant upgrade to windows 11, and I don’t even want to, and I don’t want to spend money. I just want a web browser and steam with security updates” then talking about Linux is a viable conversation path.

I really liked midnight suns. I enjoyed picking what cards to use. I enjoyed the gameplay where you can use your cards, environment, and movement to win effectively. I even liked the socializing parts. Yes, I want to play videogames with Spiderman and hang out with Captain marvel.

Thinking about it, a combination of “You need good gear to win” AND “You need good player skill to win” might not be my cup of tea.

I only have ~250 hours in Path of Exile 1, but I never got really deep into theory or build craft. I don’t really love the spreadsheet and forums mode of the genre that much.

I guess we’ll see!

This sounds more my taste. I played a fair amount of PoE1, but a lot of it ended up feeling like I was just running my stats around. I’d win or lose because of gear. Like, I could hand control over to someone who’d never played before and they’d do mostly fine.

Contrast with like Sekiro where handing someone the controller they’ll probably just get stomped, since it has a bigger player skill factor.

A balance of those two extremes sounds nice.

It is a peeve of mine in a game where it’s like

• go to a cave. It’s empty
• go to a town. Guy says cave is haunted please clear it out
• go back to same cave. Now it’s full of ghosts and skeletons!

I feel like this has become less common in the last decade though