itch.io

I don't think I'll be able to change your mind at all. I've known many smart people who have fallen into endless pits of bitterness, and it takes a while for them to crawl out of it, if ever. But let me just throw these things out there, and I'll stop bugging you about it:

• If you're feeling depressed now, and you don't change anything in your life, then your depression likely won't change either. At least try going outside more or doing some more physical activity to try to induce some hormonal changes
• Yes, there are a lot of horrible people in the world who will harm you when you interact with them. But there are good people in the world too who can enrich your life when you interact with them. And you shouldn't let the horrible people prevent you from meeting the good people. (And to be fair, we should all try our best to be less horrible to others and strive to be good people too.)

Okay. I sincerely wish that you do find fulfillment in the things that you do. I was merely suggesting alternatives that you should consider that might bring more fulfillment to your life.

[Game jams and stress]

To be honest, I find it to be the opposite. I find game jams to be less stressful because the time pressure means you don't feel any obligation to make the "perfect" game or to code cleanly. Since the game is made in such a small amount of time, it doesn't reflect poorly on me if the final game isn't the greatest or if I don't finish making a game at all. Instead, I can focus on making the most amount of fun in the least amount of time, like taking a weekend to put together a jigsaw puzzle.

 [tech corpo]

By "job in Silicon Valley," I wasn't really referring to the tech corpos and the tech bro hustle. I was referring more to the lifestyle of being at a company that has attracted the top talent in the world. You get to work with other like-minded people on interesting problems with the latest, most interesting technology. You can burn through tens of thousands of dollars of computing resources over your lunch break running algorithms that only a few hundred people in the entire world have access to. The company pampers you with perks, and you get to do it in a place that attracts the best of everything from around the world--the best food, the best technology, the best weather, etc. 

[Game communities and harassment]

Just based on the games from some of these communities, I can imagine that the people in those communities can be pretty toxic. I'm not familiar with the latest communities, but in the past, I thought some were considered to be more friendly (assuming that you try to avoid being toxic yourself). Weren't there subcommunities of Twine and RenPy that were more diversity focused and less toxic? Isn't the fan fiction community mostly women-focused so that they can avoid harassment from men? I think Hanon Ondricek was trying to make a secret adult subgroup of the more mature IF community too.

[depression]

Being an emotionally stunted introvert, I don't know how to respond to this. But if there's anything I can do to help, feel free to reach out.

In what sense did you find game jams to be a waste of time?  I've found them to be useful to prototype new game ideas and to try out new frameworks. When I've game jammed on a team with others, I've often learnt new approaches to making games from people with different sets of expertise from me. And there's also a social aspect of game jamming where you get to be exposed to how other game makers and see all their weird creative processes and ideas. I've also found game jams useful for getting more time in certain parts of the game development process that I usually don't reach. In making actual shipped games, the most important stuff is often at the end--refining the gameplay mechanics and narrative to make them more fun, controlling scope so that things can ship, game testing with real users, etc. With game jams, I can actually spend some time improving my skills in these areas because I actually ship a game at the end. I am, admittedly, pretty good at fast coding and am pretty experienced with game jamming, so I'm more able to shape my game jam experiences to what I want.

I'm a bit saddened to hear about your job. You seem pretty talented. I'm not sure why you aren't working a more challenging job in Silicon Valley where you get to work on interesting things with interesting people. Or why you aren't slumming it in academia where you can just spend your time pursuing your own research directions. I know you think of yourself as the smartest person in the room. And though that may be true, that doesn't mean you can't have peers from whom you can learn things and who can challenge you.

In terms of finding something smaller to work on because of limited free time, I've sometimes wondered if you should do some game jams, to get a feel for building smaller, faster-to-prototype games. These never-ending mega game projects are great for students, but aren't great for people with jobs unless you happen to really like that sort of thing. Personally, I think if you have a challenging, interesting career, then your job usually satisfies your desire for deep projects, and then your free time ends up focusing on less intense aspects of your hobby.

Narrat v2 looks good. Using prefix notation for operators is an unusual choice that may inhibit adoption though. I'll keep a watch on it. It's good to have RenPy alternatives that can be played on the web.

Also, sorry for ditching you on the Discord. I think Discord is rate-limiting access to the site, so when I accessed it through a proxy, I was quickly kicked off once the limit was hit. I imagine I'll bump into you another time though.

I'm not particularly experienced with it. I used it in a mini-comp game once to gain experience with it, and I ended up embedding it into Twine's Sugarcube engine in order to get a proper UI and saving. But there were bugs in the ink.js saving code, so I submitted fixes for that. I wrote a little blog post about my initial impressions. My initial impressions still hold now. The language is a real workhorse language used in real games, which is good. It really shows in the versatility and practicality of the language. But its syntax is a mess. And I couldn't use it in other games I wanted to use it for because I really needed a primitive for choosing randomly from a bunch of events but with conditions on when the events were valid. I think that primitive is getting more common in simulation-style games, and those are the styles of games I lean towards making. Newlife uses it. I think storylets is based on the same idea, but I've never used StoryNexus, so I don't know. I've seen a YouTube GDC video from Valve where they mention using the same primitive in their games.

For more conventional dialog trees, I think it's great though. The Twine-derived languages just become too messy for more intricately scripted conversations with lots of choices.

Someone came by the AIF discord last year and tried to promote the dialog engine and Å-machine, which are Prolog-style langages, and they also seemed promising if a bit difficult to get started with. But I think they also lack the random events with conditions that are useful for simulation-style games. But you might find the design interesting.

In my gut, I think an interesting engine will be something based on storylets and chatGPT. Basically, you have little storylets with conditions on when they can fire and changes in the game state. And these storylets and gamestate are fed into chatGPT to generate text that reflect the change in game state. As you know, I'm currently interested in going in the opposite direction with board-game-style narrative games, so I haven't had the energy to really explore what's going on there though.

Sounds reasonable. I'm currently having trouble using Discord through a proxy at the moment, but I'll be sure to check it out if I ever figure out what's going wrong there.

How is Ink working out for you? I would have thought that you would need a language with storylets or QBN to handle all the procedural text generation needed by your game. I found that Ink lets you randomly choose text or conditionally choose text, but it doesn't have a primitive for randomly choosing text with conditions (or better yet, something that could assemble storylets into a more coherent story)