As a game dev, this GitHub is comical to me. Bordering on parody of the kind of academic navel gazing that game devs stick their nose up at. Cherry on top is the ugly screenshot.
This seems like the wrong site for you, then? Hacker news generally has stories about interesting new ideas. It's not really the place to discuss incremental improvements to C++ and Unity.
I can think of a couple games that sprang from odd academic navel gazing like this. A sibling comment mentioned Jonathan Blow; when I read about this project, it immediately reminded me of Braid. I remember when procedural generation was an ivory tower topic. Hell, every development in 3d graphics started life as a totally impractical paper at a conference. There's a lot of things that are mainstream in games now that were once niche academic notions.
To me at least, the great value of this site is that people can and do write their honest opinion. Maybe the style of the parent comment wasn't that good, but I agree with the take that there does not seem to be much of value in the project, it enables a style of game that has been done to death by amateurs and indies, and there are probably better tools out there for making that kind of game as well.
Braid features actual novelty in game design, enabled exactly by not using an engine with a fixed view on how a game works. I don't see how this compares.
> it enables a style of game that has been done to death by amateurs and indies
What style of game is that? I guess RPG? I think that's just because it was a convenient way to demo the concept.
The two interesting things about this, AFAICT, are that it enables mutable state during development in an interesting way, possibly allowing for repl-driven development of running games. That's neat. Like, play the game, get to a point where (for example) the game balance isn't right, and pop into a REPL to make adjustments. And possibly, rewind and replay the scenario in the process to try alternatives, which is related to point 2:
If this is using a datomic-style model, it's presumably keeping an immutable history, allowing for both an interesting development environment (where you can play, rewind, adjust, replay, etc) and interesting new gameplay possibilities.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that game devs should immediately jump on board and start developing on this platform. Again: I don't get the hostility. "Hey, here's a neat little game engine based on unfamiliar concepts." "That's dumb, nobody could develop a AAA game on that today, you should be ashamed for posting it!!" Just...chill out a smidge.
Saying this while telling me this is the wrong site for me. Nice.
My comment isn't hostile. My opinion on this github has value and I am not alone. I could have worded it 'nicely' but if you find every brutally honest comment to be hostile, then maybe this site isnt for you.
I'm not telling you this is the wrong site. I'm suggesting that maybe if you're looking for news on mature, production-ready game development software, with no hobby project tangents, there's probably better places to find it.
And I'm not offended by your 'brutal honestly'. I'm just mystified. You could comment "this is neither production-ready nor industry standard!" on half the posts on this site. Personally, I like being exposed to quirky new ideas, even if they don't always pay off. If I found them actively offensive, I'd have to question why I was wasting my time here.
I think it would've been better received if you elaborated a bit more on why you find it bad. And a bit more on where did it come from (how a gamedev world is compared to it). I mean i can guess what you meant, but it's a bit ambiguous in what way you meant that exactly.
The screenshot is not "ugly", but I agree that the README is functionally useless -- no documentation, no examples, no indication of why I'd want to use this. Fails on a fundamental level to communicate what it's about.
On the other hand, making things intellectually stimulating: even if you waste 100h making clojure datomics in order to make 1h of level content, 1h>0h, and if it were boring and therefore you wouldn’t make it at all, you’ve come out ahead. The “Jonathan Blow uses Jai” thesis of indie development.
