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Title
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wtaysom
05/27/2019, 2:20 PMNifty. Trey Smith is totally channelling Steve. Man, I've missed that enthusiasm. š
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Ivan Reese
05/28/2019, 5:24 AMI found this really disheartening.
I'm almost certain that precisely zero of the "never been done before in a game maker" claims are true. That was an immediate red flag for me.
The actual programming features they're building are, well...
ā¢ a slightly nicer UX (eg: animated preview thumbnails) for the "Behaviours" from Director and Flash
ā¢ a slightly nicer UX (eg: live editing) for the "triggers" of GameMaker / RPGMaker / StarEdit / Fear & Loathing / every game builder tool.
ā¢ and then you bottom out in a pretty gnarled scripting language in a tiny little feature poor editor window.
What I found most disheartening, though, were all the "hyper-causal" games being demoed and discussed, and the implication that this tool is your ticket to the top of the app store. I don't mind casual games, but these all seemed woefully unpolished... almost mass-manufactured. Like a resurgence of shovelware. Call me a snob, but I like my games ā from itch.io to AAA ā to be finely crafted. I didn't see passion for games anywhere in this video ā I just saw passion for the games market.
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wtaysom
05/28/2019, 6:17 AMYes, the reality distortion was strong! The only novelty I saw was in the semantics (as far as I could tell) of their node language: not data-flow, not a state machine, not a flowchart. Instead it looks like you start at the initial point on each behavior iteration and walk down the DAG. (So a little bit like Max Cycling though Max is probably best thought of as a bunch of objects that send with gray wires as pathways where symbolic messages might be could be sent and dashed wires for more continuous data-flowish signals.) Moreover, the whole system looks to suffer from the common problem of hidden data and state, which naturally leads to the what-the-hell-is-going-on so endemic to programming.
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Mariano Guerra
05/28/2019, 7:47 AMthe startup world is like that, every launch is a revolution that will change the world. I've seen most of those parts in other places but they are put together in a nice package and allow to create powerful things for non technical people, I many times wish programmers created for ourselves what we create for game developers
disregarding something because we have seen the parts and this is just existing stuff put together nicely in a comprehensive package will disregard 99.9% of new things, even on this forum
bashing someone who tries to put something they created out there trying to make something more accessible doesn't sound like an attitude that is useful
let me apply that style for this forum "everyone here is hyping a quick prototype that just puts excel on the web as a revolution that will augment human intellect, I've seen the parts, it's just a better UX and the results are not what a real programmer would do, also, they emphasize how you will save money, time and will be more successful, all about work, nothing about virtue"
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wtaysom
05/28/2019, 7:58 AMMind with 50 years of interactive computing behind us, anything new is more likely bad than good. (Though I do think Buildbox's node thing is pretty interesting and might work out well for them.) In fairness Trey Smith, one can simultaneously present well, exude enthusiasm, overblow the horn of promise, know it's part of the game, recognize shortcomings, and hopefully be aware of it all. Many of the best do.
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Mariano Guerra
05/28/2019, 7:59 AMnobody recognizes the shortcomings in the launching event
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wtaysom
05/28/2019, 8:00 AMI could not agree more. A launch is not the time to post the front page of the issue tracker!
And it is not even a stone-tablets-from-haven presentation: we'll get you more documentation, we'll get you more assets, "state" is a bad name for this node, "switch" might be better.
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Mariano Guerra
05/28/2019, 8:04 AMthe casual gaming part could be managing expectations of what's possible with the tool or just recognizing that there's a niche where the tool works
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wtaysom
05/28/2019, 8:08 AMYes, I think he played that well both to customers and investors. The best things (presentations, products, what have you) tend to be at the edge of get-hype, get-out, and cough-bullshit.