Turniper
1d ago
In my experience, it's a lot of rising standards of living and population growth. The house my grandmother is born in is still currently occupied by her brother. They've doubled it in size since 1930, added a nice shed. It still has a turf stove as it's only heating, but it's got electricity and got access to non-wireless internet service in 2018. But my grandmother was one of 11 kids, and her brother and his wife are the only people living in that house today. The land it sits on will simply only support 6-8 people even at full cultivation, and many of the improvements they made to the property were only possible because of money sent home by relatives that left. The local council strictly controls further development of the area. You can't just settle anywhere you'd like anymore, so the village that supported 200 in 1920 still only supports around 300 today. So, most of them move abroad. And they settle in cities instead of building a new homestead in a strange climate, because most of them did not leave home with more than a few hundred dollars.
Turniper
1d ago
Three of my grandparents were born in houses slightly larger than my pantry. I have more variety of foodstuffs available to me on days when I need to go food shopping than my Irish grandparents did at the weekly trip to the grocery/coop when they were children. It's truly wild how far we've come.
Turniper
5d ago
Whew. I wrote 10.9k words of prose last week. That was a new personal best, and it was hard. Resulted in me getting nothing done on the game dev front, but I'm still really satisfied with how much I wrote. That's like a 4 novels a year pace. Gonna aim for just 6k this week, along with some work on the game. I'm starting to become guardedly optimistic that I will be able to keep this up indefinitely and make ends meet, even without any funding for the game project.
Turniper
13d ago
Whew. I've been trying to hit 2000 words a day of fiction this week, and I'm largely succeeding. Currently at 6.1k written, and I'm not even quite done for today (I consider sun-thur my workdays). The downside is it's not words for the story I'm getting paid/have a publishing offer for, but honestly, I don't really care at this point. I don't need money in the short term, and I'm having way more fun writing drunken monkey wuxia and urban fantasy than I was writing isekai xianxia.
I'm enjoying the pace, aggressive as it is. It really feels like good exercise, like I'm building that writing muscle. The downside is I haven't had any time to work on my roguelike. But hey, there's only so many hours in a day.
Turniper
22d ago
Unity/C#. I was a C# dev for half a decade, so it's old hat. I did try to get into Unreal but the learning curve is steep and I dislike both blueprints and how you're encouraged to use headers/the recompile times that causes.
Turniper
25d ago
Sorry, totally blanked on this. Can make next week. Were ya'll just doing it in discord?
Turniper
25d ago
I'm working on PC with a controller first. I'll probably try both mouse and keyboard and actual console releases if I finish it though.
Turniper
28d ago
I'm central time. Friday is probably worst for me, because I work Sun-Thurs atm to match my fiancee's work schedule, but I could make it work. My ideal would probably be like 2 on thursday.
I've got two things I'm currently working on, coding a roguelike and writing fiction. I met my bare minimum goals last week, one chapter and a little code, but hope to do a lot better this week.
On the roguelike front, I didn't do as much as I'd hoped. I implemented damage over time, debuffs, and 'major boons', rewards that modify a character ability instead of just a stat last week, which sounds like a lot but it's very focused on adding burns to attacks atm and needs a lot of genericization.
/images/172347954427298.webp (Screenshot of the 'major boon' screen)
This week will hopefully be a lot of building out the 'core loop' of the combat side of the game. Adding a second enemy type, making terrain actually effect pathfinding, and adding discrete rooms instead of just continually spawning enemies in the same one.
On the writing side, I'm struggling a bit. I currently write and regularly post for a web serial, and try to get one 3k word chapter a week out. I've been dealing with a lot of avoidant perfectionism that leaves me doing all my work on Sunday hours before my posting deadline. I'm also feeling kinda burnt out on the story and more interested in writing other stuff, but I have a publication offer for it/am currently making a bit on patreon, so I feel obliged to push through and get it done. My hope is that if I spend more time with my butt in a chair writing other things, I'll get the juices flowing again.
It's weird not having a 'steady' income right now. Even though I'm doing just fine between investments and other stuff, I have years of runway and standing job offers, it causes me to overindex on the one project that actually is paying, even though it's probably the one I'm least interested in working on atm. I just need to channel that procrastination in a postive direction, rather than towards a third Elden Ring character.
Turniper
1mo ago
I'm definitely down for a weekly standup session. I actually write a moderately popular xianxia story, and have been trying hard to break the habit of leaving all my work until Sunday mornings.
Turniper
3mo ago
I think people don't actually know what they want, until you give it to them. Baldurs Gate adopted a lighter version of this philosophy to smashing success, I think if you made it both possible to save-scum at lower difficulties, and difficult to perfectly recreate a path (Lots of small random chances that shape outcomes leading up to specific choices) it would be wildly successful. It's not gonna be my next project, but I have some notes in this regard for the game after the one I'm working on where I plan to add some elements like this to a Fire Emblem style tactical base game.
Turniper
3mo ago
Hey, as long as you're fed and free and your heart is still hungry, you've got another chance to take a shot at the goal. Make sure that you document what you achieve at this job so you can show what you've done with your time if it falls through. It's terrifying to step out on your own for the first time, especially with an unsupportive family and no resources, but you've got smarts and grit on your side, as long as you make good decisions you'll build something from the ether. Best of luck!
Turniper
3mo ago
I'mma be real with you, I find your plan kinda terrifying. I'm about to leave my job to embark on a startup-esque project, but I've got a decade of work experience under my belt, a cash runway of between 1-2 years, and both substantial passive income and lucrative part time contracting opportunities with the employer I'm leaving. You don't need that to start a startup, there's a middle ground to be found, but were I in your shoes, I'd be looking to move out to a place where I'd nabbed a stable 9-5, and I would grind it out no matter much I hated it until I had more security. Your living situation is intolerable, but it's very likely that your startup will fail, most do, be sure you have an income to fall back on if it does. Good luck though. I've been following your updates for what feels like years now and while I may disagree with a lot of your thought processes and decisions, I think you're a bright guy and I'm rooting for you.
Turniper
3mo ago
Yes, but the law as it stands today is also that if you commit a crime, the local DA may at their discretion simply ignore it if they don't think it's moral or feasible to convict you.
Turniper
3mo ago
You're gonna be publicizing your idea as much as you possibly can in four weeks. Not even disclosing what the idea is now is silly. Far more startups die because nobody cares about them than because their idea was scooped.
Some basic stuff: Have a marketing flow for people who don't wanna pay now. Even if they're not buying, if they got on your page they might later, so try to at least get them to enter an email or something so you can send them marketting or discount offers later.
For B2C stuff, quality of service will determine your retention, but actually getting people in to try it is the most important part. Consider a free trial, discounts for inviting friends, etc.
Finally, you wanna iterate fast. Don't think of this as a big event like a game launch. You're more likely to get zero hits day 1 than too many, even if you're launching on the app store or something. Have analytics for your sales funnel, know where your traffic is coming from, and how far they get into the process of signing up for a subscription. If you get good traffic but low conversion, fix that. If your traffic itself is low, change up your advertising strategy. Building a web audience is a long term process.
Turniper
3mo ago
My synthesis take is that the ideal game has actual narrative consequences for gameplay events. You fail a fight? Someone dies saving your ass. It's the total divorce of choice from consequence that so many modern games favor that makes the design space feel stale, everyone is afraid to actually make choices matter.
Turniper
4mo ago
I'm leaving my job in a month to focus on game dev and writing fiction, but if the idea was cool enough and the team was right I wouldn't be opposed to derailing that. I'm primarily a react/C# backend guy with ~10 years experience but I've worked with a dozen front end frameworks over the years. Feel free to shoot me a DM now, or reach out in July, I'll be done with work and back from vacations by then and fully settling back in to my new schedule.
Description is kinda vague, but I assume you're something like Naval's Airchat? A new modality/system of interaction to make large scale web interactions less inhuman?
Turniper
4mo ago
I'd just chalk it up to a learning experience. The only leverage you have against a shady contractor is the money you haven't paid them yet, the know you aren't gonna wait long enough to get some form of actual judgement against them to complete the job, and they'll just leave town if you try to get a financial judgement afterwards.
It sucks, but if you actually try to enforce that balance reduction term he's just gonna split.
Turniper
5mo ago
Hyperinflation isn't a obvious and necessary conclusion of inflating away obligations. It's what happens when the government effectively goes utterly bankrupt, and can't pay any of their obligations in real terms. If your governmental shortfall is only 30-50% you can print enough to have massive sustained inflation without turning into Weimar or Argentina. It's still bad for everyone, and reduces 90% of citizen's living standards drastically, but plenty of nations have survived running double digit inflation for a decade.
Turniper
6mo ago
If you peg your payments to an inaccurate inflation measure, that means you can reduce them over time without actually needing to directly say you're cutting payments.
Turniper
6mo ago
I don't get this take at all. If we're in a world where we're basically fully labor-post scarce, that applies to defense too. If nobody needs people to operate factories, nobody needs people to fight wars either. The relevant question will be where exactly did all the power accrue? A government? A single corporation? Many corporations?
Turniper
7mo ago
Nope, probably still a few years from completion, but we're getting towards the end of the story.
Turniper
7mo ago
Democratic federal authority hangs by a thread atm and they don't currently have anywhere near the mandate Kennedy did when putting down segregationists. If Biden arrests Abbot, my current read of the situation is he would basically be certain to lose the presidency as a result. You might disagree on how the votes shake out, but it's pretty clear Abbot thinks the same. It's precisely because Biden is extremely unpopular and this is an election year that he's being so bold.
Which is a lot LESS than ordering troops to defy Federal authority, which is just about where we are.
Abbot is very carefully not doing that. The recent court ruling does not forbid Abbot from continuing to place razor wire blockades.
Personally, I think that the way this ends is with Biden doing nothing substantial until he gets an actual court victory or wins the election, and Abbot then backing down.
Probably Trump. I've been a lifelong (Well, 12 year) Democrat voter, but I'm pretty dissatisfied with the direction of the party at the moment and I don't dislike Vance. Tbh if Trump had just refrained from flirting with insurrection back in '20, I'd be a lock.
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