Max!

LOL, I overlooked some edge-cases and it _was_ more complex.

The main bit is to differentiate branching (where we want to blend overlapping rails) from joining (where we ignore everything but the active rail). You can see there's no "jump" when they come together, now.

🎵 Gradius II 🎵

‼️❕❗❕🤩

Branching path sketches.

My elaborate planning process before writing a metric ton of YOLO code, haha.

Seamless branching paths was so much more annoying than I thought -- not least because I did it Totally Wrong(tm) first, only to realize later I could rewrite it from scratch in a much simpler way, lol. #indiegamedev

🎵 Gradius II 🎵

paging @alexstrook.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/alex...

Imaged: finally writing a scene-graph/component-system _right_

Reality: debugging a memory stomp in some nasty quirk-for-quirk UTF-16 compatibility code

Props to Omar (IMGUI) begin pro-actively approachable.

Tell that to an EEE CEE ESS acolyte.

(Amongst other things, it was pinned to an ancient version of IMGUI, lol)

❤️ 👍 Good to know!

For context it was a short-term gig on a big legacy codebase from some by-then former employees, so I was just there a debugger/fixer 😅

This plays out in design too -- existing iterations, with all their warts, always "feel" worse than the vague platonic ideal version in your imagination.

The naive-assumption levied against adapting prior work is the never-true assumption that the *new* imaginary code won't also be riddled with load-bearing quirks and technical-debt.

99% of technical projects don't start with "what programming language should I use?" but rather "Is it worth-it to adapt or scrap some preexisting legacy system?" -- and even if you make the right choice you're always plagued with doubts that maybe you didn't.

I was on a project that strained it. E.g. we had properties in inspectors that either displayed directly-writeable, recorded-animation-playback, or simulation-preview values, which meant building a lot of UI state in parallel that IMGUI's hidden-state didn't love to coexist with.

(And that's me steelmanning! I think both of those deps are best-in-class!)

I wish there was a sweet-spot between "too-lite" libraries like IMGUI and "too-heavy" frameworks like QT.

What makes UI programming hard -- and I'm talking about editors here, no just menus -- is intrinsic tightly-coupling with your data model. Transactions, Undo, Bindings, Concurrency, Serialization, etc. And for non-trivial content that model has to account for not just correctness, but performance.

Getting that annual feeling where I wish someone would pay me to write a game programming textbook.

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LEGO model of the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop, with miniature personal starships attached and against a black background.

My LEGO model of the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop! 971 pieces, 30.7cm/12in long. Lovingly packed with detail.

Okay three, two, one, let's build...

very different experiences of domestic employees vs. north american subsidiaries

Norms... and better labor laws.

Stories in Games Aren't Problems, They're Solutions Lots of video games have terrible stories, but that's no reason to give up telling them.

I'm not going to re-write a whole piece I already wrote 8 years ago, so here

www.vice.com/en/article/s...

On paper, the future's never looked brighter!

"design-by-committee games" blurs the critique with aesthetic judgements.

Don't let anyone tell you American companies don't make anything anymore. Sure, we don't make products, or media, or jobs, or culture anymore. But we do make stocks! So much shareholder value!

Addendum: relying on a revolving door of young precarious contractors is turnover by another name.

Staff turnover is definitive evidence of bad management. This simple fact gets lost when wall street rewards C-suite for juicing quarterly reports with hiring/firing cycles.

Media/tech consolidation bad.

Made a new targeting system that works more precisely from screenspace as well as new lock on missles

#gamedev #indiegame #ue5