Topic: S.MG - The Ministry of Games. - page 4. (Read 27185 times)

Oh, I see, it makes sense.

Problem is that he thinks he need no previous experience to do that, and this path always lead to spectacular failures.

I understand, but for the sake of the Industry, I want him to fail: such an arrogant and ignorant person can be quite harmful, and we would stay much better if people like him wouldn't try to meddle in things they don't understand.
"We" is both people in game development, and, to a lesser extent, players themselves.

Don't kid yourself.  Just because I left the gaming industry some 15 years ago for better paying and more relaxing pastures doesn't mean I don't know anything about it anymore. The more things change, the more they stay the same, especially in this industry.

Oh, I completely agree. I have no intention of challenging Nethack's cultural impact. But that is not what I said. It's quite clear that Netwhack is just a toy game I made to see if I could do it; I presented it as something I did in my spare time, I was quite clear about that. The point was, "that's something I did in my spare time, what have you done?"

I brought it up as my way of showing why I am in this discussion. To show that what I say is the perspective of someone who is a competent programmer and who has studied and practiced the art of game design from many angles. If you want to talk practice and experience it's fair to say there are many others here (thestringpuller, ff) who are far more experienced and involved in the industry than I am. But it is also fair to say that I am as far above someone like greyhawk as tsp and ff are from me.

But, it's really not that important. As I have said before, I would really like S.MG to succeed, because I want to play a new game. It's really that simple for me. I've long since given up trying to figure out why they choose the hard way forward. It will be an interesting social experiment; if they succeed, how they do it, and if they fail, how they will handle it. I'm not even interested in which scenario is more likely. I guess you could say my point is, I wrote netwhack ten years ago, and today, S.MG has nothing. And try as they might to surpass what little toy game I have written, so far I see nothing on the table except a lot of insults hurled at people who know better and who have accomplished far more.

I love you. You're amazing!

Exactly.

oic, you're talking about technical aspects.

That's not what people mean when they talk about things rivaling other things. It's about cultural impact. In the context of gamer culture the things that rival nethack/rogue are ADVENT, Space Invaders, Elite, スーパーマリオブラザーズ or id Software's 1992 Castle Wolfenstein remake. Your copy with a few bits slapped on is not one of these.

A. Stop interjecting yourself in the discussions of adults as if you were one. You aren't one.
B. Learn to spell.
C. Look up what words mean, read up on what's being discussed. S.MG is not a "fund".

Yeah, funny, isn't it? And yet, there it is: Netwhack.

 

My, look at all that egg on your face! BTW, serious love = less than 3 months. It's just that I don't get paid to develop nethack clones. If there was any money on the line whatsoever I would put out a game better than nethack in about that time plus a few.

Fun fact of the day: Nethack's item and monster data is compatible with Netwhack. This is because Netwhack was initially written in C++, and was initially a port of Nethack to C++. Most of the data you see in-game is original though, as I didn't want to offend anyone on the devteam... yet  

That's a vaguely more sensible post.

Creative stuff is professional though. The creative element in a game varies from quite a bit to very small indeed.

The vast majority of people in the game dev world are engineers or artists. The artwork is creative in a way obviously, but it's usually little different to working on The Simpsons or whatever. It takes talent and effort but you're a cog in a machine, and there is no shortage of good artists.

In both of the above cases you're looking for experience every single time. Within the indie world, many people are surprisingly experienced and amazingly talented. Often there is a mix, and often there has been a lot of tutoring going on. In almost every case, advice is given by other indies to help out on a lot of areas that you simply can't know about without having experience.

I also wouldn't describe creative stuff as willy nilly. That indicates you don't understand the nature of creativity or how it applies to game development.

In your second paragraph you say 'the experienced are never the dorks declaring that on some lolforum'. Actually you're very wrong. I, and many other game developers, well known and otherwise, are on a number of forums.

Being obnoxious when you don't know who people are, let alone when some of us are not anonymous, is very poor business sense. That is how people will see you, gamers, and professional developers.

I may have been on the fence over the fund if it wasn't for your attitude, but if anyone asked me now whether to work for MP I'd say no way and point them here. It makes the fund wreak of lack of professionalism. Don't you see that?

And yet there it is -- my fully functional roguelike, in all it's glory. Disturbing, isn't it?

Well, I have no idea where the line is. MP makes the calls as to the future, apparently history goes into it but I'm pretty sure it's not the whole story. Perhaps the confusion comes from your mixing professional stuff (such as for instance being a banker) with creative stuff. Willy nilly creative stuff is a hit and miss affair, there's no escaping that.

Otherwise it certainly helps to be experienced. It's just the experienced are never the dorks declaring that on some lolforum. Compare noob MP with the string of noobs on parade here, hi I'm X doing Y vs anon nobody doing nothing. Not a very hard call to make in the end.

I'm interested in learning the subtleties in the distinction between Mircea's known position that a person's capability is measured by the successes they have demonstrated, and how that seemingly conflicts with your statement.

Yes, things change and past success does not guarantee future success, but it helps to be experienced, no?

Or do you feel that the true measure in demonstrating success is tied to agility/adaptability in a string of successes?

I do think the more entrenched you become in a school of thought, the more likely you are to have those with more perspective eat your lunch, but where is the line here?

Nethack predates Java by about as much as your mental age.


This is pretty much spot on.


This is pretty much nonsense. The only way to establish that someone KNEW what they were doing with games is in the retrospective. Same as movies and everything else in the line.


Dream on. You've got a ways to go to carry the man's coffee yet.

Cognitive dissonance. You should see people's faces when I argue that Visual Studio is a really good IDE.

I don't see that at all. Sure, it's something of a meme to hate Java, but there's really nothing else that is as useful. Nothing else really compares to what you can do in Java. Most of the complaints about Java are 10 years old. Which says a lot for Java. I mean, I just love it when people say that Java is slow or that it doesn't have closures, it's almost as if they are the fish that didn't make the jump and they're being left behind, in the past. You can actually see the clouds forming in people's brains as they stop thinking when you tell them Java is as fast as C for many implementations, and has had closures for years.

This. Although flash and mobile stuff shouldn't take years.

And not to have Mpoe-pr anywhere near pr. You can imagine how that will turn out with journos, gaming forums, reddit, et al! Popcorn time.

The company concept may yet be ok - not that I have evidence of that - but the pr will kill it even if it is.

If you know what you are doing and do your homework, you also know you don't want to work for him.
Unless, of course, he pays you upfront and gives you carte blanche.

If you are thinking about Minecraft then yes, it's definitely profitable and written in Java, but if it wasn't it would have so much better performances...

I am no fan of java and you have to be crazy to start any web project in it these days, but there are successful games that still run in Java profitably.