He was extremely kind, gave me a lot of interesting life advice. I remember him saying that he got most of his ideas just from playing around with mechanics and experimenting a lot, he was never really one to get grand visions.
Anyways, great fellow, glad he opened source V (as he called it).
This is important. Too many people assume that novel ideas come from abstract concepts. Yes they can, but they can equaly arise from playing with the medium.
Mining retro game mechanics was probably easier at the time VVVVVV was developed as the explosion of indy games has probably reused the best forgotten ones of the 80s/90s. It's getting close the time mechanics from 00s games can be reused though...
Return of the Obra Dinn was a 2018 mystery puzzle game, where you have to figure out how everyone died in an ill-fated voyage at sea. Amazing game.
I searched Reddit for "games like Obra Dinn", and this led me to Case of the Golden Idol, a 2022 game with similar mechanics. The developers were quite open about being inspired and influenced by Obra Dinn -- and they ended up creating something in the same genre, but very much their own creation, with their own flavor. And also very enjoyable.
Originality is nice, but I'm not at all convinced it's a prerequisite for quality.
Not to say starting with a firm idea is bad... more like it may be hard to avoid playing around and improvising with the medium in any case.
* You can't get a no if you don't ask * "Never meet your heroes" is a sham and you need to meet a few shitbags before you can really appreciate the realest of people.
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There’s a lot of weird stuff in the C++ version that only really makes sense when you remember that this was made in flash first, and directly ported, warts and all. For example, maybe my worst programming habit is declaring temporary variables like i, j and k as members of each class, so that I didn’t have to declare them inside functions (which is annoying to do in flash for boring reasons). This led to some nasty and difficult to track down bugs, to say the least. In entity collision in particular, several functions will share the same i variable. Infinite loops are possible.
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This sounds so bad, and confirms my prejudice that gaming code is terrible.
Games are one of the hardest things you can build since they have end to end complexity unlike most projects that can be cleanly decomposed into subsystems.
game developers must consider things that people like enterprise developers never concern themselves with, like latency and performance.
these days, at least where I work, everything is dominated by network latency. no matter what you do in your application logic, network latency will always dominate response time. with games, there is no latency unless you are writing a multiplayer server, and there are many ways to solve that, some better than others.
playing a single player factorio game, having huge factories on five planets, robots flying around doing things for you, dozens of ships flying between planets destroying asteroids and picking up the rocks they leave behind, hundreds of thousands of inserters picking up items and putting them onto or removing them from conveyor belts, and updating the status of everything in real time at 60 frames a second kinda hints at what computers can do today if you keep performance a primary concern. corporate developers never have to think about anything even approaching this.
i'm convinced that 2-4 experienced game developers could replace at least 20 traditional business software developers at any business in the US, and probably 50 enterprise software developers anywhere. They aren't 5x-10x as expensive, either. Experienced game developers simply operate on another level than most of us.
Maybe it's because my factory hasn't gotten big enough or I'm playing a MOSTLY vanilla install, but all that's happening and the game is still only using 2% of my CPU.
I can't imagine the immense size of a factory you'd need before the game started stuttering.
I don’t want to take away from Game developers but as a “corporate developer” I can attest that a lot of what you said about us is blatantly false.
I’ve spent a lot of time optimizing the performance of many backend services. This is a very standard practice. Having highly performant code can save companies a ton of money on compute.
In fact I’ve worked on a stateless web server who’s architecture was completely designed around a custom chunked/streaming protocol specifically to minimize latency. All changes to the service went through rigorous performance testing and wouldn’t be released if it failed certain latency and throughout thresholds.
Suddenly having to prefix `this.` in JavaScript to every member bothers me a lot less
Code can be terrible, but fun: interesting bugs created and found in novel ideas.
Code can be wonderful, but boring: a calculator application which is well written, but drab in implementation.
Code can be terrible, and boring: some poorly thought-out B2B product that has hundreds of edge cases, each of which have numerous, similar but distinct bugs.
Code can be wonderful, and interesting: Doom, etc.
btw also fuck you for veni vidi vici, jeez that took me a while!
And I remember actually enjoying the process! I was playing on my phone though and took many breaks - I liked this game a lot in this setting.
My boyfriend at the time (who'd bought VVVVVV for me), on the other hand, was attempting a no-death-all-trinket run. I could never understand just how damn good he was at gaming.
Oh, and PPPPPP (the soundtrack) remains a staple. Especially the associated osu! Stream tracks.
But great game all around, I should play it again...
void Graphics::print_level_creator(...) {
/* We now display a face instead of "by {author}" for several reasons:
* - "by" may be in a different language than the author and look weird ("por various people")
* - "by" will be longer in different languages and break the limit that levels assume
* - "by" and author may need mutually incompatible fonts, e.g. Japanese level in Korean VVVVVV
* - avoids likely grammar problems: male/female difference, name inflection in user-written text...
* - it makes sense to make it a face
* - if anyone is sad about this decision, the happy face will cheer them up anyway :D */
Is opening up your source code worth it? Terry Cavanagh thinks it was for VVVVVV - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25727963 - Jan 2021 (16 comments)
Many games are held together by duct tape - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22043156 - Jan 2020 (154 comments)
VVVVVV Source Code Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011465 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)
VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011358 - Jan 2020 (223 comments)
VVVVVV 60% Off On The Mac App Store This Weekend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347676 - March 2011 (1 comment)
And PPPPPP, the soundtrack for VVVVVV, is neat too!
I always find it interesting when indie developers pivot to an entirely new genre of game after some initial success, some wonderful gems came out that way (such as Fallen London -> Sunless Sea -> Cultist Simulator).
It’s a super fun game to learn. It looks impossible to start out but then your brain adapts. It’s like seeing through the matrix.
Also shared it with many people and made them go crazy. I believe I still have 5 or 6 copies in my Steam inventory. Just in case.
Same for V, SMB, Braid and so many others. Sometimes, all you need is a little inspiration and crappy graphics.
Amazing that he ever made a decent game out of code like that!
One can spend months agonizing over the true nature of things and how ideas and concepts relate to each other and eventually distill it all into some object oriented organization that implements not just your game but all possible games.
One can also just cycle the game's state machine in a big function, haha switch statement go brrr. Reminds me of the old NES games which would statically allocate memory for game objects, very much in the "structure of arrays" style, they too had game logic just like that.
Also reminds me of old electromechanical pinball machines. You can literally see the machine cycle.
I'm still pissed they abandoned the EcmaScript 4 proposal back around 2007-2008.
Finished a few days ago, great game, great music.
And music in this game is top tier.
I remember getting it in a bundle which I bought for some other game, and VVVVVV turned out to be my favorite.
The original desktop release in 2010 was based on flash (presumably using Adobe Air for desktop? There was also a flash web demo), but there were issues, and flash was really hard to port to linux. So they rewrote the entire game in c++ in 2011, for easier porting. It's that rewrite that is what's labeled as "desktop version". It's the most up-to-date and polished version.
The "mobile version" is a fork of the original 1.0 flash code base, and IMO it's only really interesting because it's much closer to what Terry originally wrote.
It's one of those twists that reward programmers that can think outside of the box and execute instead of downloading some generic libraries and making yet another platformer.
The game looks fun, might give it a spin.