Very cool. What tooling do you use/recommend for the "small game over the weekend" scope? I keep running into either the oversized industrial end that requires serious investment to even get out of the gate, or the very lightweight offerings where you have to reinvent everything from scratch.
Not OP, but IMO, Godot. Extremely easy to import assets of any type and prototype a game. The only thing that I would consider a barrier is(if you don't already know how) setting up the initial tilemap and spritesheet. But either using Godot's documentation(which can be found inside of the editor) or through a YouTube tutorial I feel like compared to Unity/UE5 its much better for building quick prototypes.
Plus you can basically put it together in a variety of languages:
It has support for spritesheets of course, but also Tiled map files (https://www.mapeditor.org/) which I use to build level maps.
If I'm building a game that can be implemented via the DOM (like if I don't need an update() loop), I love getting away with just using React or Elm. For example, any sort of grid-based game or board game.
I don't use Godot for browser games because (1) its browser support got worse from v3 -> 4, (2) I just want to write Typescript, and (3) it's just bigger and more complicated. Of course, the best game engine is simply the one that compels you to actually build and hopefully finish games.
Btw, give Pico-8 a shot. In a few months I'd built more games in Pico-8 than I finished across the rest of my life since the scope is so tiny.
I had a website keep rejecting my registration at checkout, and Customer Support explained that I was tripping the bot filter for my password being too random. I had to introduce them to the concept of password managers, in 2020. It's a wild world out there.
> anything that is not the business critical stuff
That's an important qualifier. For skilled teams in performance-critical domains, the inflection point where any outside code becomes a low-quality/low-control liability is not that far.
If you open it up, the strip is actually a thin PCB glued to the underside of the top of the case. Mine was a little loose, pressing it down made things work a bit better. It does still get worse at tracking when the batteries start running down (a sign that they need replaced/charged!).
Even when it’s working well, its resolution is disappointingly low though. More like a mouse with a scroll wheel with fairly large detents than the trackpad-like scrolling I was expecting.
To be clear, the original "bidet" fixture as found in some older European bathrooms, a second toilet bowl to squat over and manually wash, is far from useful for anyone, let alone the elderly. If people are horrified to hear the word, that's probably what they are picturing. There's also the shower hose dog wash thing which is almost as bad. To avoid confusion, the toilet seat spray feature (which is great) is often termed "bidet seat" or "washlet".
MacOS has been no exception to the enshittification trend, but Windows has always led by piles of shit, and is now shitting laps around the competition. Apple is trying to sell Apple to you. Microshit is selling you.
I was pretty sure myself that must be the case, until I raised kids in a trilingual household, and it's not even close. Children's natural ability for retention and adaptivity with language is truly mindboggling to witness. A child can overhear a new word once in passing, no explanation but context, and use it in conversation out of nowhere six months later, correctly. It's far from just more time.
In linguistics, this is called the 'poverty of the stimulus' argument, and is used to argue that there must be some kind of soft blueprint for language - whether in the brain (certain areas appear to be highly associated with language - Broca's, Wernicke's, etc) or in logic itself.
"The speed and precision of vocabulary acquisition leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available before experience with language and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already a part of his or her conceptual apparatus" -- Noam Chomsky
As a tourist, maybe. Bopomofo (aka. zhuyin) is universal in all children's books until 3rd-4th grade, and is the most common keyboard input system used in Taiwan.
Chess is not a fully "solved" game, so the actual perfect move is not generally known. Like any other engine, Stockfish just tries its best and is not infallible.
Technically, the tablebases for 7-piece chess are fully solved, and since we are talking about games starting from partial board states, you could trivially compare both engines to the "perfect" move for a huge number of board states.
I might reinstall and try again when the Rust lobby chills out.
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