FYI for those who may not be familiar, thehardtimes is a satirical site like The Onion.

Apparently I am satire.

I made "minecraft but you start on your own tiny-prince style asteroid in an asteroid belt, play around there then eventually maybe work to make some sort of propulsion for your asteroid so you can go bump into other asteroids and get bigger and meet your neighbors and eventually colonize really big ones, sort of mostly cubical asteroids where I fudge gravity so you can stand on any face and sort of smoothly roll around as you cross the edges".

Frameworks annoy me so I just used OpenGL on macOS and iOS. Likewise I built my own multiplayer networking. Physics is just physics, so that isn't a problem once you discover quaternions, except that I had to change it to make things work better. Spectral harmonic lighting with ambient occlusion made a nice looking world. Bump maps are hard to paint, so I built a rig and wrote a bunch of software so I could sculpt a bump map tile in modeling clay, lay it in the rig, let it cycle through 8 different lighting directions while taking pictures, then compute the bump map for the game to use.

Eventually we could run around and modify my little 128^3 starter asteroid. And I had a bush (well tree) which I made in Blender. It was the test case for the 3d models for non-cubes. If you stood real close to it you could hear me saying "I'm a tree…" over and over. Had to test my ambient audio system too.

And there it stopped. I still feel badly that if you manage to find it, run it, and the server, and mine to the center of mass of your asteroid, and pass through just the right spot with your little person you will be flung so far into space you won't even be able to see the sun. Darn that 1/ϵ hiding in the physics code.

I was wondering why there was a popup about get thehardtimes in your inbox. I was really curios what the author would be sending in the newsletter. Now it makes sense! :)

I came to the comments to ask exactly that. I got to the end of the article and thought, "no way this is real."

I just code my game at work

Chess, not checkers

Theres a similarity between people who have never been entrepreneurs dropping everything to be entrepreneurs, and people who have never developed video games dropping everything to be game developers. Many chase the romantic notion of "the dream" rather then the dream itself.

Ironically both entrepreneurs and game developers have to learn to be entrepreneurs.

Hopefully the author of this didn't quit their day job to write comedy...

> If you want to write an article, you must first send 10 headline ideas and a sample piece of satire to: [email protected].

I can't imagine how insufferable a job it is checking that mailbox every day.

The piece feels like a first draft. The editor in me is screaming that it needs to go back to the author with a note that says "this is at level 1. What can we do to take it up to level 2?"

(But nobody is willing to pay editors anymore, so everything we read tops out at level 1. Sigh.)

I thought it was hilarious.

In the same vein: http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/friend-skims-html-tutorial...

URL without tracking params: http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/friend-skims-html-tutorial...

This just reminds me of a disabled game developer who doesn't have a $100k job and is trying to get money together for medical expenses. https://twitter.com/ForgetAmnesia/status/919254493035819008

I'm only disappointed that they wrote this from the perspective of some random office drone going in blind.

I'd love to see an article from the perspective a coder that tries to go from 40-hour-9-to-5-100k-with-benefits to do their own game.

Poe's law