Mikina

And attention. Can we finally stop talking about him? Who cares at this time.

I though Twitter is publicly traded and has stocks? That would mean that he definitely has a duty towards investors who bought the shares to lead the company in a responsible way, and if he claimed that he destroyed it on purpose, it should lead to a lawsuit from them. But I ain't no lawyer, only vaguely remember hearing something like that. Or does he own 100% of the shares himself and is the sole investor?

Thats why I'm so conflicted about it, because its pretty difficult to find out whether its the level of Ubisoft corporate greed, asset flipping based on whats currently cool, and then just abandoning it for other new thing, or just an indie studio that's trying to do their best, but discovered mid-development an amazing idea that's way better than what they have been working on so far.

There's a lot of red flags, which I'm concerned about, but I also really like what they came up with and hope that it's not just a cash grab based solely on current grey zone in copyright infringement, that's abusing generative AI for that effect. I don't blame them for benign excited about generative AI, but in this situation and given their history, its unfortunately definitely a red flag.

I'm really conflicted about this game. I really love the idea from game design standpoint, it's a perfect mix of genres, while also serves as an amazing case study in how theming is really important for games. Craftopia apparently had exactly the same capture mechanics, but with real animals instead of monsters, and you could also use the animals to work on your base. No one really cared about it too much.

But reskinning it from animals to fantasy monsters/pokemon, suddenly entirely changed the feel of the mechanic and made it much better. And that is a really simple change, but with such a great impact, and a really important lesson in game and theme design.

I also kind of understand that they have given up on Craftopia and started pursuing this project instead - while it sucks for people who enjoyed Craftopia, the idea of mixing monster collecting game with a survival game is genius, and works really, really well. It makes so many simple mechanics much more fun to interact with, once you're doing it with your Pokemon instead of by yourself (or through an automation machine). But implementing it into Craftopia would not be feasible, and I don't really fault them that much for deciding to start mostly from scratch.

I also don't really mind that they've decided to use the Pokemon aesthetics - it's a look that fits this genre well, and it's kind of OK to just go with it - I mean, almost every souls-like game tries to look like Dark Souls and give the same vibe, because it just fits so well with the overall theme. So, IMO going for the same look that has been proven is fine. But, and this is why I'm conflicted about it, it's really really not good when you have members of your team tweeting how you've figured out a way how to bypass copyrights using AI, giving example on pictures of Pokemon, boasting how they look different yet you probably won't be able to tell which ones are original, and which are generated.

And now that I've seen this video, it's way worse than I thought. I literally couldn't tell the difference between the game I've spent playing last two days, and the Pokemon mod. The monsters look almost exactly the same, making it seem like they really did just go with "lets feed Pokemon into AI". And that sucks.

On the other hand, I think the developers are getting too much flak for liking AI in games. I've seen them being criticized for their other game, that is a party game where you give prompts to AI to generate pictures, and then vote which of the players didn't know what theme the pictures should be about. That's a pretty funny and great idea, and I don't see why it's shown around as a proof that this developer is evil.

Are they? I don't know. The game designer in me hopes that they got excited for the Palworld idea, cut some corners (which is suspicious and pretty sad), but abandoned Craftophia just so they can work on a project that's amazing idea that wasn't done before, and that they will focus on it in the future. Unfortunately, it's starting to look more and more that it's really just a quick cash-grab, where they just asset-flipped their game to make a quick buck, and will forget about it once the hype dies down.

I hope that's not the case, and that they really do enjoy working for the game, and are as excited as I am about the potential of the concept. I guess we'll see in the follwing months and years.

Don't forget debugging! Throughout my carreer, I never really forced myself to just go with debugger (especially since when games are considered, where you are dealing with tens of instances running the same Update, so manual breakpoints are usually harder to use than just scrolling through printed values in a lof) and over-relied on debug logging.

It was a mistake, and took me several years to realize that conditional breakpoints are a thing. And once you get into profiling, memory optimization and what-not, you will be greatefull that you've spend the time getting comfortable with all the debugging tools you can use.

Trying to learn a debugger or profiler as you go through solving a problem at a job sucks. Am currently in the process of having to debug and solve shader performance issue, and oh boy that's a lot of terms and tools I've never seen before, and most of the colleagues are as dumbfounded as I am, since when porting games you usually don't need to deal with low-level rendering.

Oh, definitely. Blaming the opponent is something that I've also started doing, but also quickly found out that it doesn't really work as well as blaming teammates in regards to your mental state.

"My noob teammates kept feeding the enemy, so there's not much I could've done even if I played better." shifts your guilt almost entirely on them. "The noob enemy chose an ease cheese strat" always has the slight problem that you always have to add (consciously, or you just know it subconsciously) "that I didn't recognize in time and I didn't manage to counter". And that feeling will nag you :D

I 100% agree! Am a pretty new user of Nobara as a daily driver, switched like a month ago (I did have extensive CLI experience with Linux servers, along with Kali VM for work), and I've only realized what DE actually is only a week ago, because no one mentioned how important choice it is - it was usually just a note, that wasn't given enough importance.

So please, if you're ever recommending any linux distro to somenone who's asking, please include a short paragraph about what DE is and how importnant choice it actually is, and that they should not ignore it. I hated Gnome, and KDE feels so much better (only found about it when reinstalling broken first Fedora install to Nobara), but I didn't know I can switch or that there was that choice in the first place - I though KDE vs Gome is a back-end thing, similar to X11 vs Wayland. It's not, but people don't usually explain it when recommending distributions.

That's a great insult, I love it :D

I'm only on Linux for a few months (as a daily driver, always used headless servers before that), and I'm almost certain that my Fedora install came with both KDE and Gnome in Wayland and X11 flavors pre-installed out of the box, and I could just choose between them at login screen. Or am I wrong, and I do I just not remmeber installing the other manually? I mean, that's also possible, it's been a while.

AFAIK Fedora comes with Gnome and KDE, both in Wayland and X11 version, out of the box, and you can just select one when logging in.

I agree - was switching to Fedora about month and a half ago, and only learned about KDE vs Gnome like a week ago, when I was reinstaling to Nobara to fix some NVIDIA issues.

I did hear terms like KDE or Gnome thrown around, but never really realized that it's actually and important choice. And once you add X11 vs Wayland to the mix, it's suddenly so confusing I just subconsciously choose to ignore that choice and went with whatever the OS installed for me. I though that DE chouse is similar to X11 vs Wayland choice, i.e something tha is more about back-end than front-end, and didn't realize that's literally how your OS UI looks and controls, instead of how it works in the background (which I now know is what X11 vs Wayland is actually about)

Turned out I really don't like Gnome (Which was default for Fedora), but love KDE, which was thankfully a default for Nobara.

So, if you're ever recommending Linux to someone, be it in a comment or somwhere else, or someone is asking for a recommended distro, please include a short paragraph about the importance of choosing the correct DE, and explanation of what it is and that you can change it!

tl;dr: Was never toxic or angry, and was consciously trying to not blame others but focus on my performance, but eventually gave up on DOTA, because it's too complex to play seriously and captain a team. Switched to Starcraft2, and realized how mentally taxing and depressing it is when you don't have a team to blame, and that you unconsciously blame teammates because it's a powerful mental defense mechanism. I've never felt worse, stressed and anxious, than after a loosing spree in 1v1 Starcraft.

I've spent hundreds of hours playing DOTA in highschool, and eventually I've reached the conclusion that unless you play with (and ideally are a captain) in a premade team, there's not really a point in playing - you will never get better alone, and you will unconsciously always blame other teammates, making it harder to learn your lessons and improve. (I'm deeply flegmatic and forgiving in regards to others, a archetypal support main, so i never was getting angry or toxic, thankfully. So I was usually more focused on my own performance and didn't care that other fuck up - or so I thought)

I've also quickly realised that the knowledge required to be a captain is something that even after thousands of games, and hours of research, I'll never be able to get. There's so many variables you need to know just to pick a team comp and get through the ban and pick phase, and then you add itemization to the mix, knowing what your team should do based on the current minute, hero picks, and items chosen by your and enemy team.. I really respect any pro player due to that, because its isane how many variables they have to work with.

And so I switched to Overwatch, because there, the meta is a little bit easier to follow and there's not that many variables in play, to be able to lead your team.

I wasn't able to get a stable team willing to take the game seriously, and eventually I've also noticed that I still tend to subconsciously focus on what my team did wrong, instead of my own gameplay.

So, I switched to StarCraft 2. And oh boy, those were the worst few months of my gaming life. The meta was eaiser to grasp, I knew what to do, the issue was building the muscle memory to execute it correctly. But there are plenty of resources, from training maps to The Staircase method, so I was making a pretty good progress.

However, the Ranked. Here, I've realized how much blaming others in team games is a necessary defense mechanism, because in this game, you have only yourself to blame for every loss. Hitting that play button in Ranked was terrifying, I was regularly depressed and felt terrible after every loss. It was so taxing to my mental well-being, because most of the games you play, just end with: "You suck. That was a beginners mistake. You'll never be good at this game, and you have only yourself to blame. Just give up.".

There's no blaming teammates, theres no " I've made a few mistakes, but my team also...", which as it turns out, being able to do that is a tremendous help in regards to your mental health.

I still had fun, it was a great challenge and I enjoyed learning the game and slowly getting better, but the losses, and especially loss streaks, were so stessfull and taxing, to the point where I was literally anxious to the point of almost having panic attacks every time I wanted to hit that fucking Find Ranked Match button.

But the wins, oh boy I've never felt better in my life. But, you know - as an average player playing at your rank, you should hover around 50% win rate. And that's a lot of losses.

I'd recommend this experience to everyone who keeps playing competitive games with random players. It was eye opening in regards to how you handle losses, and a great introspection into how I subconsciously handle losses in team games, even though I never got angry.)