Orteil

hey, i'm orteil! i made Cookie Clicker. it was an accident

[orteil42]

i believe an important kind of creative process is "i didn't know that wasn't allowed"

[orteil42]

i started noticing it years ago but i'm a little let down by how much in AAA games seems to rely on "tell don't show". Sims 4 takes you on magical multi-steps adventures through text boxes. No Man's Sky has your character go through all kinds of technomystical nonsense and it's just text boxes. Paradox games are riddled with events that are just text boxes but at least they've got a little flavor picture to go with it usually

[orteil42]

as a french kid i was very confused about Superman's archnemesis being constantly referred to as "the former wrestler"

[orteil42]

controversial stance but i do wish i could live forever. i certainly live like i'm going to live forever. i take my time. realistically however my lifespan is dreadfully limited and there are things i've "been meaning to do" that i will never get around to. the Emoji Movie came out almost 10 years ago. in all that time on any random day i could've decided to sit down and watch it, and i did not. how many more decades will slip by like this? conceivably, it could be all the decades i have left. watching the Emoji Movie would not be, after all, a crucial use of my time. much better things to do. i could easily postpone it over and over and over until my final breath where it may not even register to me that i never did watch the Emoji Movie. no great loss, certainly; and yet i find myself intrigued by Patrick Stewart's involvement

[orteil42]

by 2050 all the original King of the Hill episodes will be lost media, only survived by their youtube poop versions. another 200 years and these will be considered canonical

[orteil42]

i know you're already typing "of course the cookie clicker guy would post that" but i really do have a fondness for exponential automation bootstrapping scenarios. one of my favorite old minecraft modpacks had stuff like solar panels and replicators. what you do is you painstakingly amass the components to create your first replicator (which involves rubber farms, ore quarries, processing lines, etc) and go to great lengths to power it through cranks you have to turn or coal you have to dig up. at some point you build your first solar panel. very slow energy output but it passively powers your replicator for free. what do you replicate? solar panels. you can then craft more efficient solar panels out of those solar panels. your energy output accelerates and so does your replication rate. eventually you're producing so much extra energy that you can justify plugging in a second replicator, and then a third, which you replicated for free. your replicators replicate replicators along with the solar panels that power them. for fun, you drop one diamond in the system and your entire chest network fills up almost immediately with thousands and thousands of diamonds. you will never run out of anything ever again. i don't think that modpack has replicators anymore

[orteil42]

New technology discovered: 🦑🥪Squid sandwich! You may now craft 🦑🥪Squid sandwiches out of 1🍞bread and 1🦑squid.

New technology discovered: ♻️Recycling! You may now uncraft 🦑🥪Squid sandwiches back into 1🍞bread and 1🦑squid.

New technology discovered: 🥪Sandwich efficiency! All 🥪sandwich recipes now yield twice as many sandwiches.

[orteil42]

i believe this song is what being a single-celled organism must feel like. i just feel 10 microns wide listening to it

[orteil42]

more game dev reminiscing while i go insane in the code mines. i'm 90% sure i've made a very similar post before including this preamble and i've decided i do not care

okay so a thing that defined my childhood as Kid On The Computer (in the Dedicated Family Computer Room) was scouring through shareware CDs and finding things that let you make things. music, particle effects, layout formatting. Thinkin' Things. The Incredible Machine. Adibou with the flower-growing and cake-baking. finding out i could drag a text file onto QuickTime and it'd play it line by line like a little movie was enough to fill 8-year-old-me with a sense of wonder, if short-lived. my favorite thing, however, was any game with a map editor. Wolfenstein 3D or Age of Empires or the Spiderweb Software RPGs, or the eventual holy grail of Warcraft III's World Editor. or uhhh Blobbo. you can create little worlds! for you to live and play in! endless possibilities. in Blobbo (pictured above btw)

this interest naturally evolved into wanting to make the games themselves. if you've been following me you already know where this ended up but at the time my mindset was informed by the limitations of: 1. the family computer runs Mac OS 9 and basically nothing made after 1998 is compatible with it and 2. while scrappy and motivated i am a 9 or 13 year old internetless amateur and can only use silly little things made for amateurs. drag n drop, visual scripting, block-based programming. i am certainly not smart enough for anything more complex than Klik & Play (later Clickteam Fusion) or Cocoa (later Stagecast Creator). i did not hear about Xcode until much later and even if i did, HyperCard was already a little too rich for my blood.

i started making things that could qualify as actual games when i picked up TNTbasic and, once i purchased my first laptop at 17, got a taste for selling my own little interactive toys by starting a shop in Second Life where i'd sell scripted objects i modelled in Blender. by this point (2008?) i am both developing heaps of little unfinished games in GameMaker and Flash and familiarizing myself with javascript. i am making actual video games. i can build my own little worlds on my own terms. i didn't realize until later that this meant map editors in other games no longer held anything special for me. to this day, firing one up has me checking out the breadth and depth of features offered, then rapidly feeling like i could just be making my own things instead. i miss it! i miss when map editors felt special

on principle, i still think map editors are wonderful. a game with that sort of functionality becomes a creative medium in its own right. people building adventure worlds in Minecraft for others to explore, or telling stories through AoE2 maps or Spore planets. i think it's an incredible hobby! but tragically it's a little too close to my actual job and the relationship has changed. (i feel similarly about developing game mods.) perhaps if i was in any other line of work i could still connect with it as a hobby? i do still make things that don't have too much overlap with game dev. cooking a dish is making a thing. posting online is making a thing, and i do get up to that a healthy amount

at the end of the day "things that make things" is still my favorite kind of project to develop and i do love hearing other people got into making their own things because of something i made. to put it bluntly: the way i cope with my predicament is by hoping it's contagious

[orteil42]

i wouldn't say i love programming. but i do feel inexplicably drawn to programming. and to making things complicated for myself

[orteil42]

it's weird to think that since i've coded in javascript for over 20 years now and have released tangibly successful projects with it by all metrics i should qualify as some kind of language expert. and i do know how to make a lot of things with it! but without any kind of formal training i can't begin to suspect what fundamentals i might be missing still. taught myself just enough to make what i want to make

[orteil42]

i wouldn't say i love programming. but i do feel inexplicably drawn to programming. and to making things complicated for myself

[orteil42]

i sometimes miss being a completely naive novice programmer when i was like 13. never cache anything. recalculate everything every frame. endless faith in the computer. this thing can update 786,432 pixels 60 times per second surely it's got time for my bullshit

[orteil42]

developing audio software. i fix a bug that's been bothering me for a while. doing so i also lay down important infrastructure for later features. i feel accomplished with my tangible progress. ctrl-f "todo". 146 hits

[orteil42]

i need to keep going until i at least have something to show off on here. so far it makes music. i can add tracks and place notes and edit the instruments and play the songs. everything i need for filters is in place. parameter automation and audio samples not in yet but already prototyped in some older project so not too daunting. i've put so much work into this already and it is so cool but it is so not showable yet

[orteil42]

due to being browser-based it will not have VST support :))) i also took a glance into VST bindings for a possible Electron build and while that's technically feasible it's looking to be much beyond what my patience can afford. my program does however let you add whatever instrument and effect plugins you want if you can code it in javascript. i'd also like to look into adding support for sf2 soundfonts when i have the time

[orteil42]

developing audio software. i fix a bug that's been bothering me for a while. doing so i also lay down important infrastructure for later features. i feel accomplished with my tangible progress. ctrl-f "todo". 146 hits

[orteil42]

i need to keep going until i at least have something to show off on here. so far it makes music. i can add tracks and place notes and edit the instruments and play the songs. everything i need for filters is in place. parameter automation and audio samples not in yet but already prototyped in some older project so not too daunting. i've put so much work into this already and it is so cool but it is so not showable yet

[orteil42]

developing audio software. i fix a bug that's been bothering me for a while. doing so i also lay down important infrastructure for later features. i feel accomplished with my tangible progress. ctrl-f "todo". 146 hits

[orteil42]

i strongly feel there should be a bart simpson emoji

[orteil42]

[orteil42]

i strongly feel there should be a bart simpson emoji