Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Ah, yes. The C++++ programming language.

Who even uses the right shift key?

Easy:
Everyone (or basically everyone) else is an NPC and is therefore irrelevant. Their opinions do not matter.

AI is all fun and games until the NPC begs you not to shut down the game.

I forgot to git fetch, so I spent quite a while doing exactly WHAT MY TEAMMATE HAD DONE JUST HOURS AGO

Hey dfox, trogus... Show us your sticker collections!

It's truly amazing how much a single line of perl can do. Such a time saver.

I only wish that I could understand what it does two days later.

Best of NPC recruiter, 4/11:

Recruiter: I was impressed with your background and industry experience and thought you would be a perfect fit for our series A startup *10 minute drone of how awesome they are*
Me: *eyeglazing over* What role is this?
Recruiter: What roles are you looking for? Where do you see yourself in 3 years? We're looking for a program manager or dev lead to manage a team"
Me: I'm looking for an SDET role.
Recruiter: ......*silence* so you want to run scripts, hmm.... Well, looks we don't have an exact fit at the time, but let's keep in touch for future opportunities! You never know when you'll -
Me: ... Why did you even contact me? What about my profile struck you as being aligned to anything you were looking for?
Recruiter: Well, you have a master's in CS and worked at [BigN#1] and [BigN#2] and -
Me: Thank you for your time, been a pleasure *hang up*

I want my 15 minutes back.

Kind of regret including the comma

The whole idea of development is ego boosting. The idea of turning thought into action by building something is very intoxicating. The power to create something from nothing. To be able to construct a world where everything in that world follows my rules of existence. Whether those objects be a database, or an NPC in a game. Development is literally the power of a god!

Some people say I have a god complex. Yes, of course I do, I am a software developer...

Do these NPC devs even read the README of a project before spewing some dumbass stackoverflow like garbage in an issue thread?

Do your damn job. Being a good software engineer is not like TiKtOk or cHaTgPt where some "magical" answer or entertainment is spoon fed to you, do your absolute best to solve it yourself first, before causing more chaos out in the opensource world.

just saw a tweet praising a company because of their choice to use swiss servers and they had a pompous sentance in parenthesis like (upside to banking secret culture)

like, dude, at the end of the day, guaranteed their 'server' is just a linux box somewhere, just like anywhere else in the world just STFU

god i HATE ignorance, hype, and stupid tropes that managers just automatically subscribe to with their 2 brain cell NPC brain

Sometime ago I was introduced to that game "Stardew Valley", as a way to relax and unwind since it is a dynamic-pace simple-storyline and even simpler interactivity open world.
Well, it worked like a charm (sarcasm). I have a save where I am a profit-maxinizing capitalist who tries to score a million gp in an year - so a regular gamer approach. It wasn't the goal here.
So I got a second save where I just go along, getting enough to get by and no hurry to build farm buildings and whatnot, but slowly building up NPC relationships.
Man, what a good metaphor for life. That approach actually unwinds me.

But the dev in me is just like "just, woah! that is an stellar use case for GPT+3 APIs! You could have NPCs with dynamic adaptative dialog! *And* you can monetize it (piracy-proof!) by charging for API calls! No shops, no collectibles, just a unique but scalable experience!"

What is wrong with me? I gotta change into the second-save mindset...

Is there a specific reason your company is called 'Hexical Labs'? If so, could you share the story of where it comes from?

The program 'x' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt install x.

Wow, thanks! I didn't know! I've always wanted to know how to install programs with apt.

Please, fix the printer

Not a rant, but I think it's really cool, so I just wanted to share this with you guys. I recently went to a small symposium by an alumnus of my university. He uses the program Mandelbulb3d to explore the wondrous world of fractals. He's recently started to apply Neural Style Transfer to fractals. His website is julius-horsthuis.com.
↓ this is 1 (composite) formula, by the way

I really feel like coding right now, but I don't have time. Problem is: when I do have time and I have to code I probably don't want to anymore.

I was on the train and a woman came aboard. The only available seat was next to me. She takes this huge laptop out of her bag. While I observed this, I thought: she's going to code. She logged in and.. GitLab! She was writing R code.

I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.

Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.

1. asset management

2. asset change management

3. behavior change management

4. data management

5. combinatorial design management.

6. Combinatorial Behavior management

7. Feature completion

ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.

ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.

This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.

DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.

COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.

COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.

FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.

I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

I just came across this again

No need for indentation

Hello, world!

Okay, guys and gals... I need your creative minds. I need a concept for sort of a property manager for my game.. I have an idea of my own, feel free to tear it apart or throw it out the window.

So basically.. You'll no longer have one Computer System (and you wont instantly hit the login screen for that System on startup) Instead, you'll have a lot of things. They will probably only be represented using text and menu's (likely no 3D or 2D environments or anything.. Though, a setup like News Tycoon would be epic, but I think that would be too much for this game.) You'll basically start off with a small space (probably a basement) with x amount of free space. In that space, you'll need to add things like a desk, chair, and a laptop, or tower + monitor. You can also buy things like server rigs with a ton of space, but those are pricy and bulky. Each item costs X amount and takes up X amount of space. Also, you'll need a desk for a monitor (or multiples..) and other things.. (Like your rubber duck collection ;P JK) You can also rent and manage servers. (renting is more exspensive in the long run, but things on your server are not on your property. But, if you own a server on your property you can rent space to to NPCs) As well as manage your devices, properties, stocks, etc..

Also, there will be in-game time. Depending on how "comfortable" you are will determine how long you can stay up in a day. In-game events will take place later on at specific times so staying up (or not..) will need to be managed well. Especially if you're being targeted by a rival (NPC) hacker.

Was gonna make a meme about the npc wars on devrant. Just not inspired. So settled on one I have been thinking about. Inspired by devrant events.

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

NPC stereotypical dev: "I self identify as socially awkward."
NPC stereotypical dev: <Gets irrationally angry about friendly banter.>
NPC stereotypical dev: "I hate people who try to interact with me socially."

And knowing is half the battle. GI Joe!

Thanks!

I think I had another insight.

Long story short, you're not the main character. You're not an NPC either. You're a spotlight!

Looking at yourself in the present doesn't make sense. You're not gonna understand yourself this way. In general, you're nothing but a history. In the present, you're an unbiased observer reading a history book.

This way of thinking is hard to pick up, but in a nutshell, for every emotion you feel, ask yourself: "Where did this feeling come from?"

This framework immediately takes the guilt away. It is what it is, the history doesn't entertain what-ifs. Once you memorize your own history word by word, only then you can really understand yourself and be free of trauma.

CS teacher: "I want you to do this project using DSDM. Every member needs to be appointed a role that is best suited to their abilities."

He has never heard of Agile.

What keyboard macros do you guys use when you have programmable function keys?

Also a funny little story that I just remembered. My brother used to have a key that would type his password cause he was THAT fucking lazy. He was writing an NPC for a private Ragnarok Online server that I was testing with a couple people. Apparently he had hit that function key in the middle of an announcement command.

So basically, everything went as planned, but then while announcing an event, it would announce his password to THE ENTIRE SERVER. Lucky for him, there were only three of us online at the time, and we told him as soon as it happened.

The NPC has stated that the personal data of atleast 2000 people was leaked after the attacks on the websites of the philippinian goverment on april 1, the data contains; names,adresses,passwords and school data.

Over 7 administrators of schools, universities and other goverment structures have been called out for not reporting on the leakage of personal info on public facebook groups and violaton of the NPC in under 72 hours.

The representatives of the next structures stood before the comission on the 23 and 24 of april

- Taguig City University

- Department of Education offices in Bacoor City and Calamba City

- the Province of Bulacan

- Philippine Carabao Center

- Republic Central Colleges in Angeles City

- Laguna State Polytechnic University

The agency has reported that none of the organisations had notified about the personal info leakage yet.

This is a good reminder that you should inform about security/personal info breaches everyone that might be related to it as soon as possible, even if it seems unecessary.

I finally got a working D&D Dungeon Master AI working right, a lot of actions have to be presented before the full combat round, but the results are all unique, but it still isn't creative enough to add more then 2 npc with conversation skills, I think there's some hidden blocks in the backend :/

"HTML5 Games!"
But I see that it still using the f*cking <canvas>... What change?
When I read "HTML5 Games" I thought that it would be interactions between html elements: When the <span id="bullet"> element touchs the <div id="npc"> then npc.health - bullet.damage
Idk, perhaps I must read more info...

Fucking glitching circular ai
Bumping into walls and shit and repeating the same npc scripts

I created this game
Every time a new gamer joins his actions are recorded
When or if he deletes the account or loses it his account is renamed and he is added as an npc

Thus I can stage new interactions based off the old accounts

aren’t I clever ? I made this account and an ugly old woman shows up lol

me: PC music
yоu: NPC music