I didn't draw a single piece of PNG until i am 38.
Now i am about to release my second solo developed game.
My art is nothing great, but a year a ago wouldn't even believe i could draw a single sprite.
That's because of pixel perfect rendering is not handling rotations and position changes great.
It looks fine in motion, but i can improve with using semi transparent pixels on the edges.
Be competent and able to prove it. Work with in-demand tools - for me that's .NET, React, Azure, SQL dbs etc. For others it may be go, python, java, AWS, GCP whatever is in demand near you. Probably not Rust, C or C++ etc - I'm sure there's demand for that too but at least near me they're a lot rarer.
Some people do well working with obscure stuff like cobol and Delphi etc, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless it kind of just falls in your lap somehow.
Web development is pretty big, if you can work full stack even better. At least that's what I do, and I don't have any trouble getting jobs.
If you struggle with simple interview questions, work on fundamentals. All my technical interviews have been quite easy but the interviewers have been very impressed. This tells me most devs have poor understanding of programming fundamentals. Being able to do well at interviews is not that hard and it opens a lot of doors. Things like advent of code, codewars etc are good practice. Maybe dust off your old DS&A book and go through it again. A good DSA understanding will help you in your daily work as well, it's not just about interviews. You're not supposed to memorize algorithms, you're supposed to understand them, understand what makes some algorithms faster than others, understand how to use different data structures to improve your algorithms. Understand how to judge the performance of an algorithm just by reading it (big O and such). It's extremely useful and important, I use this knowledge on a daily basis and it helps me do well in interviews.
Also be good with databases. The database is the core of an application, it can and should do most of the heavy lifting. An API is basically just an adapter between a frontend and a db.
There are a few comments from the companies that hired him in the og twitter thread [0]. Sounds like he was actually really good at interviews. Kinda shows how broken the hiring system is if you can smash an interview but fail catastrophically at the job.
You think? I'm extending the term to actually getting a job in "traditional" organizations. You already have to optimize for keywords etc, don't you? It's not human interaction but a "process".
> he targeted mostly (YC) startups eager to hire (AI) engineers quickly so they can scale.
But they got an "AI" engineer didn't they? Or no one in management could define what an "AI" engineer is?
Tbh I'd give the guy a high paying job, but in marketing.
Claude 3.5 was released 1 year ago. Current LLMs are not much better at coding than it. Sure they are more shiny and well polished, but not much better at all.
I think it is time to curb our enthusiasm.
I almost always rewrite AI written functions in my code a few weeks later. Doesn't matter they have more context or better context, they still fail to write code easily understandable by humans.
Claude 3.5 was remarkably good at writing code. If Claude 3.7 and Claude 4 are just incremental improvements on that then even better!
I actually think they're a lot more than incremental. 3.7 introduced "thinking" mode and 4 doubled down on that and thinking/reasoning/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is particularly good at code challenges.
As always, if you're not getting great results out of coding LLMs it's likely you haven't spent several months iterating on your prompting techniques to figure out what works best for your style of development.
> More people need to get away from training their models just with words.
They started doing that a couple of years ago. The frontier "language" models are natively multimodal, trained on audio, text, video, images. That is all in the same model, not separate models stitched together. The inputs are tokenized and mapped into a shared embedding space.
Gemini, GPT-4o, Grok 3, Claude 3, Llama 4. These are all multimodal, not just "language models".
Are the audio/video/images tokenized the same way as text and then fed in as a stream? Or is the training objective different than "predict next token"?
If the former, do you think there are limitations to "stream of tokens"? Or is that essentially how humans work? (Like I think of our input as many-dimensional. But maybe it is compressed to a stream of tokens in part of our perception layer.)
which i found interesting, because i remember Carmack saying simulated environments are way forward and physical environments are too impractical for developing AI
Yeah in that way this demo seemed gimmicky like he acknowledged. He said in the past he would almost count people out if they weren’t training RL in a virtual environment. I agree, still happy he’s staying on the path of online continual learning though
i wish people would stop mentioning W4 Games as a porting option.
their lowest revenue tier costs $2000 a year. most indie games sell a few hundred copies.
You'd be hard pressed to find console support for much less than that - compare it with Unity or GameMaker's console support tier and you'll find it's pretty similar.
It can take hundreds of dev-hours to port your engine to consoles yourself, so having another company handle it for you, for all 3 consoles, for only $2000 is a pretty good deal!
Most indie games sell on Steam/Steam Deck first and port to consoles later, usually after being picked up by an indie publisher.
The $2000 is also to port to all three console platforms, it's $800 per. This makes it feasible to say, only target PlayStation with W4 and use the community Switch port.
That is crazy coincidence. i just released demo my rogue like breakout clone on Steam next fest. i picked a more of a bullet hell/shoot em up kind of approach. Faster the better.
I had great fun playing yours. Sound design is especially good.
Your coins look like coins, i'm a bit jealous and will do the same :) So you're going for a longer play style, with many levels, and a character build where you have a very strong ship at the end ? I think trying to tell stories around such a simple mechanic with nicely designed levels and background is a great idea ! If you release out of steam at some point, I'd love to try it. I'm allergic to that platform and its constant updates, my gaming pc does not connect to the internet and will stay on windows 10 forever.
I'll give it a try. Itch quarantined your page, i'm not sure why. I don't care because my gaming pc is airgapped but you might want to look into it. When clicking download i got this :
WARNING: This Page Has Been Quarantined
Our system has flagged this page for additional review due to potential suspicious behavior from the page owner.
If someone has asked you to download from this page and you don't fully trust them, or their behavior isn't what you recognize, then we don't recommend downloading this file until our team has reviewed the page.
Password-protecting files or pages is a technique often used by scammers in an attempt to block virus and other security scans from detecting malware. Do not trust password-protected files unless you fully trust the uploader.
Thank you. It is kinda like Tetris, blocks falling constantly. you have limited time to get strong and destroy blocks.
i struggled greatly on balancing. My solution was to make director behind the scenes to make sure player never gets bored. Downside is; game is quite hard for non breakout players. Aiming is crucial.
i did release the demo on itch.io
But it lacks some features. i will update it tomorrow.
%5 goes to idea maker, i get it. What happens to other %95 ?
Is it evenly distributed, or assemblymade takes a percentage?
I am interested in contributing to projects if it's evenly distrubuted among developers or assemblymade gets a cut no more than %5. Please be clear about it.
https://www.instagram.com/arcadenest_games/
I find my age to be great period to learn new skills. It is never too late.
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