Similar to the rest of the tech industry, game dev is a very wide field, if you want to work on large games I would suggest you figure out where in the pipeline interests you most (technical art, gameplay, tools/engine, networking, audio, rendering, live Ops) and build projects that revolve around that domain. If you want to work on smaller games then you just have to start making games. To me, the only real difference between game programming and most other programming is the need for more complicated math so making sure you have a solid understanding of the maths used will serve you far better than learning any specific language/engine.
Asking how you can get into gamedev is kinda like asking how can you be a professional musician. Sure, you need to know and like music as a base, but becoming a concert pianist, a jazz drummer, a metal guitarist or a hip hop mc are very different paths.
Similarly, there’s a big difference between working on Elden Ring vs a small indie or even one of the millions of match 3 mobile games.
It’s still odd to me that the sentiment on HN around the iCloud CSAM scanning was very negative, but from what I’ve seen the sentiment around AI tools built on scanning prior works (Dalle, Copilot) seems pretty positive. In my mind they’re one in the same. There’s an expectation that the files you upload to a cloud service won’t be viewable to anyone without your permission, but until recently there was also an expectation that the work you upload to the internet, no matter where you uploaded it, wouldn’t be used by entities for their own personal profit. At least the iCloud scanning had the facade of being for an altruistic purpose going for it.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed over my career bouncing between the video game industry and general software industry is that every decently sized game studio I’ve worked for has had people in the role of technical artist, these are the people who bridge the gap between art and engineering, but I’ve never seen a similar role though at massively larger software companies. I’ve seen people with strong design sense in engineering and people with engineering skills in design, but it’s always been siloed enough that they’ve never been able to really make an impact one way or another on the final product. I’ve always thought I would reuse that same structure even if I was making non video game software.
I refer to these people as the "glue" between two departments.
At big companies, this is mostly a management issue.
Questions like these are common
1.) Is this person part of the design team or engineering team?
2.) Who does this person report to, and how is his sprint planned?
And, as a company grows in size, managing people becomes a more important issue than focusing on minor product details.
Organisation is always a compromise. Rather than seek the perfect structure, it’s better I think to address what makes structure get in the way of doing the right thing. Better structure may follow, but it’s a constant fight. Different challenges call for different people to work together.
Nope, a Technical Artist will own the art pipeline and tools for artists as well as help produce specific pieces of art that need programming skills. They're an artist who can code or a coder who can make art. So they're using both talents to interface the artists to the game engine and runtimes.
In games a Product Manager doesn't really exist as a specific role generally and is distributed between the Production and Design teams.
I’ve had to opposite experience as someone who’s worked extensively with platforms that utilize webviews, when Safari 15 released it broke a lot of WebGL things with their shift to using Metal and all I can say to users that are experiencing problems is update your OS or disable the experimental feature to use Metal with Safari, which both feel like awful answers. Safari has become the modern IE in my mind.
> Fun fact: even with the latest release of Chrome, Safari is surpassing Chrome in Interop 2022[0]
There's only two things that Chrome is noticeably behind Safari on (Interop-2022-wise).
1. Colour spaces and functions.
-- Easy enough to implement, it's just some matrix math in the graphics stack.
-- It's not something that web developers in particular are crying out for just yet.
-- It's more for designers who want to remove the scss build step out of their build stack while still being able to make hue changes (using css' custom properties instead of scss' variables). But scss won't be going anywhere until css nesting has broad browser support. I'd argue that nesting is much more desired than expanded color support.
---- In fact, I just had a look at the last state of css survey. Nesting was the third most requested feature. Color spaces didn't even appear in the list. Going further, a search over the ~2k comments shows 47 responses using the word "color" and 168 using the word "nest".
2. Subgrid.
-- Google has/had been working on a new layout engine (LayoutNG) for chromium for quite a while. Subgrid support is/was easier to implement and maintain on the grid component of their new layout engine (GridNG), so they didn't bother making an implementation for their older layout engine. Microsoft and Agalia have both been working on the Subgrid implementation for the chromium core to push it forwards faster.
-- Personally I'm fine with this delayed approach to make sure it all works. It's more reliable for web developers than Safari's often maligned: "Hey we released this feature and don't care that it's broken. If 10% of it works we consider it a success." attitude.
> Say what you will about Apple, but I think the team behind Safari has been doing some fantastic work to make up for its reputation
I'm not going to give Apple a pat on the back for trying to catch back up to web standards only after lawmakers start eyeing up Apple's monopolistic and destructive web and app store practices.
I feel like I was pretty explicit in my attempt to separate Apple from the team working on Safari :P
Regardless, 10 years ago Microsoft was OSS Enemy #1. Today they've done a complete 180.
I don't think you have to be a dumb optimist to buy into this. Personally I think Microsoft's change mostly came from realizing that being a government contractor is much more profitable than serving consumers directly and playing nice with open source is really important for attracting talent. (And they've also innovated on ways to profit off of open source with things like Copilot)
There's some really great people working on Safari right now. I don't think a lot of this talent would've been attracted to the team if Apple didn't at least do some open source virtue signalling
> I don't think you have to be a dumb optimist to buy into this. Personally I think Microsoft's change mostly came from realizing that being a government contractor is much more profitable than serving consumers directly and playing nice with open source is really important for attracting talent.
Most likely, it came from them realizing they had lost their platform monopoly due to floundering so badly with consumer mobile.
Apple invested tons of resources to accelerate their initial iPhone OS efforts, and had a polished experience you couldn't get from third party integrators. Google capitalized on the technology gap for most non-smartphone third parties in releasing a quasi-open-source mobile platform, seizing the market that Microsoft would normally sell their platform into.
Their emphasis on backwards compatibility (and general developer distrust of Microsoft's long-term support of new API) wound up making it very difficult to get support for newer platforms, especially on new architectures like ARM.
My opinion however this wound up being overall healthy for them, because they have always mostly sold to companies and strived for more recurring revenue via support contracts and the like. The explosion of new platforms and of mobile devices meant it was easier for them to sell SaaS products like Office 365, and to treat Azure as their new platform play.
Microsoft's Open Source policy reflects that they now need to attract new customers in a diverse technical landscape, vs try to lock in existing customers to a Microsoft-created ecosystem. It also reflects the difference in their revenue being services vs software.
Meanwhile some other developer is really glad their software, that only supports iOS [previous-version] and hasn't been updated for the latest Safari, isn't generating shitloads of bug reports because some of their users updated the browser separate from the OS, and they aren't having to test multiple OS/webview combos.
Your particular case might have worked out better, but in general being able to test on an OS version and not have that change out from under you is really helpful.
It's a fundamental piece of functionality that you target with a release, if you're using webviews, and a ton of apps do. It's possible to argue that it shouldn't be, but it is, and that does come with some real benefits for developers.
On desktop, the popular solution to the same problem is to bundle an entire web browser.
Spending time reminding myself that there is no soul, god, afterlife or anything likewise as a reminder that we’re just animals and our consciousness’ need to be anything more is ego getting in the way of being truly empathetic and reverent of the time we have here.
I ran into this situation earlier this year, minus the horrific personal tragedy, I hope he's in a better condition now, I'm deeply sorry about having to go through that.
I called AWS To deactivate my account in May of 2020 because I was going through some medical hardships and wouldn't be able to maintain anything on there for awhile and I wanted to double check that I wasn't going to keep getting charged if I forgot to manually turn something off. I thought all went well and it would be turned off, until I checked my bank around a few months ago and noticed I was still getting charged for AWS.
I spent 3 weeks trying to get support to why I was still getting charged and for much more than I had ever set uo, but they wouldn't tell me anything because none of my emails matched any accounts they had on record. I finally got a support person to slip when I told her the name of my company and she said it was similar to the email on file, but that it was a Gmail account. I've never made a Gmail account for my business and I was the only one that ever had access to the AWS account. I don't know how someone could have gotten into the account and changed the email, but I couldn't log in and the only thing I could do was have my credit card company cancel the charges (which could only go back 3 months) and prevent new charges. I'm still baffled about how this happened, but I've moved to GCP and will never go back, those 3 weeks were insanely frustrating.
I wanted to fight tooth and nail, just because I'm sick of ultra-large corps' ability to get away with stuff like this, but my wife was worried about Amazon's retaliation and not being able to use Amazon to buy things which is half the problem. I don't really have any advice, but maybe if enough people share their stories something will make it to a headline.
That's interesting, because Niantic went from lab to maturity amazingly well, but only after being spun off from Google during the Alphabet restructure.
That’s a good question. In my experience: most companies want to hire full time resources most of the time. Some tasks really are not compatible with part time work, e.g. anything with site-ops responsibilities.
Find a client that wants you bad enough to forgo their preference for full time, and make sure the work you’re doing allows for it.
It helps to be more senior and have a longer proven track record.
In one case I had a 6 month contract building internal tools for a large company. It was a very unpleasant job, but they really liked me. After the 6 months were up, they offered me a FTE position. I politely said I had other goals I wanted to pursue. I had no intention of continuing with them, but they were persistent and we were able to negotiate to two days a week.
In two other cases startups approached me and I was honest and said I liked them but I didn’t have 40 hours a week to devote to their project, and they were cool with part time.
Earlier in my career I also worked freelance gigs with variable hours, little projects or on-call. That wasn’t so great, haggling with clients, more overhead (billing, unpaid travel, etc.) —- a lot less money and more headaches.
Presuming you're working with your client directly and success is in measured in outcomes not hours, you get to craft exactly the engagement that works for both parties.
