Hi everyone,
I'm Gabriele, and I'm here to keep growing as a programmer. I've spent the last 5 years working with C#, and now I'm keen to explore new methodologies and frameworks — and meet some new people along the way!
I also studied Game Design for 3 years at AIV (the Italian Video Game Academy), and these days, besides my job, I spend my time developing video games — mostly with Unreal Engine, though every now and then I play around with Godot too.
On top of that, I'd like to use this as a chance to improve my English, so feel free to correct me anytime. 😊
Top comments (1)
Hi Gabriele!
Nice to meet you!
I barely speak English, so I hope others will help you with that.
More important topic though:
I like to sass people from the Software Engineering Night's Watch with Ygritte gifs into small programming related toy challenges, or thought experiments.
Let's take a toy example, since I barely know games:
In Unreal Engine let's say your task is to clone the game Crossy Road.
The game has a potentially infinite map -> you can't represent that in finite memory.
The game has a lot of moving actors such as 'cars' -> calculating movement and collision for each one is costly.
The chicken always remains on an invisible 2D grid of discrete points. The player cannot move around freely, and stop a movement mid-action and end up in a weird coordinate.
Couple this with the fact, that sometimes the chicken has to jump on wood logs floating in the water... The chicken must start from a point on a static non-moving grid, and end up on the exact middle point of the log.
Timing this jump perfectly - as a human - is barely possible, therefore something must be introduced which provides a tolerance for error from the user, and also cleanly eases the quadratic jump-fall trajectory of the chicken, from starting on the ground to landing on the log.
Now this can become a bit more complicated when the chicken is jumping between logs floating in the water but in the opposite direction.
All in all though, the map, the cars, the jump... all have this really strange modular arithmetic smell to them.
I'm very bad at games, but maybe this toy problem might feel interesting to you, since it covers basic things in a self-contained small toy problem.
It is also a question about how to pull it off, because Unreal - to my limited knowledge - has a code plus heavy annotation based way to be worked with, but also a strange UI way where people drag around business logic in graphs.
I'd like to take this Italian opportunity to ask:
Are there any speedrunner/exploiter crows in game dev still, like DDRJake?
Or do game dev crows just play with eachother, respecting the assumptions of the games' code?