Jason Bakker

I also had a great time! Was good to put some faces to names.

Regarding "all designers should be programmers", I think that it's a good idea to try to influence game designers who are starting out to learn how to code. For me personally, I find the programming knowledge that I've learned is integral to my design process. However, I don't think that invalidates the skill of designers who have gained the ability to think systematically the hard way (through experience working on games in larger teams). And the flip side of the coin is that if all designers knew how to code, that might actually push the needle too far in the other direction - there might exist game design space that only gets explored because a designer's brain isn't "wired" to understand how systems work on a programming level. When I think up ideas, my mind almost always jumps straight to code feasibility, which I've thought might actually be shutting down some ideas that would be ultimately worth exploring.

Yep, I've been sucked into the daily wrap-up videos again. They're put together really, really well, and for me are a weird mix of feeling like I'm learning heaps about the creative process and managing a team of people, and nostalgia for the teams I've worked with and projects I've worked on.

I've attempted to play three separate Legend of Zelda games, and it hasn't caught each time. First was LttP on the (emulated) SNES when I was a teen - I think this didn't catch mainly because I'd been playing awesome JRPGs like Lufia II and FF6 and was looking for something more story-driven. A few years back I tried Twilight Princess, then Phantom Hourglass, but though I can see the quality in both of them I just don't really enjoy the puzzles or the world. One of the key problems for me with the series is how the whole world feels like it was built expressly for you to pass through it (ie. shops selling only exactly what you need to buy in exact amounts, dungeons laid out in just the right way). I guess for some reason I'm not able to suspend my disbelief for that stuff (maybe because I never got into one of them as a kid).

The Legend of Zelda. You can lead me to the chopping block now.

I think you could do internal edits of the object, but if you're talking about changing the order of the array, or adding or removing objects from the array, the reason is that a foreach is functionally similar to a for loop where you create a temporary variable to hold the current array object. // objectArray is an existing array of objects foreach(Object currObject in objectArray) { // play around with currObject } for(int i = 0; i < array.Length; i++) { Object currObject = objectArray[i]; // play around with currObject } Because currObject is a temporary "pointer" to the object inside the array that only hangs around for this iteration, if you made it equal something else (ie. currObject = someOtherObject), it wouldn't affect the array itself. It's generally a bit tricky to play around with ordering/adding/removing while you're iterating through an array in any case - the way I usually do it is to loop through once and figure out what I want to do (ie. make a list of objects to remove), and then do the operation in a way that isn't looping through the array.

This is super exciting. I'm travelling + going to weddings and stuff during this period, but will try my darnest to make a game that includes a sweet cybernetic arm.

The goal of object oriented programming (as I understand it) is to compartmentalize functionality; when you're dealing with a galaxy of planets trading/spending/producing, it makes sense to me to have a class that represents the galaxy as a whole, and can connect planets to other planets in order to facilitate trade, etc. Setting up a singleton to do this may not be the most Unity-friendly way to achieve this however; I'm basing this off pre-Unity experience. The PlanetManager approach is just the way I'd do it - if the LateUpdate method seems to work fine, then you should be able to hold off making a PlanetManager until you need it.

Wow, definitely. Thanks for that!

Sorry for dredging up a post from a few pages back, but I just wanted to quickly say that this doesn't really go away once you start working in the industry - working with other people helps a bit, but you can get just as lost on a team as on your own. If you're able to show that you've been able to make it through the process of making a game and get it done, that's the biggest factor that I've found positively affects hiring chances. This is why a good portfolio is more important than a degree - you can show that you are able to work through the tough times in game dev and get a thing done.

[Edited for clarity.] Ah, I see what you mean. I think in this case I'd have these processes called in a special function, as opposed to in each planet's update. If you have a list of all planets somewhere (such as in a PlanetManager class), you could have three separate functions for iterating through all planets and calculating production, trading, and expending. This way you can call these functions every frame, or (if you wanted it to be a turn based game) you could only call them each turn. Planet ∟ function Produce ∟ function Trade ∟ function Spend PlanetManager ∟ variable PlanetList // list of all planets in the game ∟ function DoAllPlanetProduction // iterates through each planet and calls Produce on it ∟ function DoAllPlanetTrading // iterates through each planet and calls Trade on it ∟ function DoAllPlanetSpending // iterates through each planet and calls Spend on it If you set it up in this way, you could pass the list of planets through to each planet's Trade function, and that planet could iterate through the list of all planets and decide on which one(s) to trade with.

They are pretty nebulous terms, but in general for me alpha has meant core gameplay feature complete (bugs allowed) and a certain percentage of content in, and beta has meant all features complete (no crashes or NMAs) and all content in (even of some of it is going to get revision). These definitions are very publisher-oriented though - you'd probably want entirely different definitions if they were just for yourself.

I think the first answer here ( http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/614343/how-to-implement-preupdate-function.html ) will give you what you want, though the question is whether you really need it; what's the situation in which you're setting one up?

"Bitwise" operations are ones that use special bitwise operators for figuring things out, and take advantage of the fact that a number in code is just 0s and 1s. You can think about it as switches on a switchboard: decimal binary 1 0001 // the first bit is switched "on" 2 0010 // the second bit is switched "on" 3 0011 // both the first and second bits are switched "on" In this case, the tilemap code is using a number as a bitwise flag to describe what a tile needs to look like on a tilemap, and the four switches are "stone above", "stone to the right", "stone below" and "stone to the left." The code uses a bitwise operator to create the description of what is needed for a particular tile: var tileVal = 0; if there is stone above: tileVal = tileVal | 1; // tileVal will equal 0001 if there is stone to the right: tileVal = tileVal | 2; // tileVal will equal 0011 if there was stone above, or 0010 if not and then will use that tileVal to grab the tile that looks correct for that situation (eg. when there's stone above and to the right). Just found out about this thread, it's awesome I'll hopefully visit back every now and then to see if I can help out!

Every time Chris said he wished The Banner Saga was more "snappy" I kept having flashbacks to the episode where the crew were making fun of the Snappy Gamer website. Turns out their demand for snappiness was years ahead of it's time.

I'd highly recommend considering donating to her Patreon to support her continued work. I've been trying to say something about being careful re-appropriating other people's words and thoughts to fit your own perspective, but couldn't manage to do so without re-appropriating Brice's, so I might just say that when someone who is a social justice activist speaks out in this way against the pendulum swinging too far towards vitriol and hatred, the people who are being affected by marginalization and systemic oppression in the first place are the ones who should decide where it should lie.

That'd be amazing! Even though I've only played my copy of the base set a couple of times, I've really enjoyed this podcast. I think it's for similar reasons Dota Today is enjoyable even when you don't have much in-depth Dota knowledge - it's fun to hear people be excited and enthusiastic about a cool game. And also infectious... going to have to break it out again over the Christmas break!

I don't really see the point of making all of these comparisons between men and women, particularly in such concrete terms. It feels weird to have your thesis be preceded by the above quote, then be constantly making qualitative judgments about members of a gender like "workaholics are mostly men" or "hardly any women improvise." And a statement like: Is just patently untrue, I don't know how you could say that unless you were blind to the inherent gender bias that exists in (pretty well) everyone's perceptions of everyone else. In my mind, using gender as a lens for how people are treated is basically all that it is good for. People are people. (Not trying to be combative here by the way. I hope it doesn't come across that way; I'm just thinking out loud in response to the link.)

What I realised as I wrote my post is how many bad decisions were made in sequence to allow this to be present in the final game. It's just another pretty decent argument for objectification being a systemic societal issue as opposed being due to the "odd bad apple" or an "unfortunate coincidence."

What the guy in the article said made sense to me - they wouldn't have specifically coded it like fabric, they would have applied a fabric effect to her whole body (in order for the dress to move properly), and then would've been in the situation of deciding whether to put the extra effort in to make her breasts move properly or not. (And made the wrong decision there!) The way I see it, the issue isn't necessarily rooted in the implementation phase, but in the design phase. An outfit like that shouldn't have been chosen, as they weren't able to execute on it technically. And then more importantly, it shouldn't have been chosen for a myriad of reasons to do with gender representation, objectification, etc.

Just wanted to pipe up and say you guys were referred to (in a most flattering fashion) on the most recent Shut Up & Sit Down podcast, by Quinns (who is massively into Netrunner).

Don Quixote is difficult, but it's so much fun. I really like the stories within stories thing that it does.

Hah, sounds like I got lucky, or maybe that he's gotten more comfortable with performing? There were posters up saying "the artist requests no photography" and the crowd actually complied, which was a nice surprise.

M. Ward opened for Neutral Milk Hotel here in Melbourne the other night - thought he was pretty cool! Great voice. I'm a pretty big fan of NMH, and they were transcendent.

Or did you complete it? Play it? Enjoy it?