game development

Many years ago during the golden age of Wii hacking, Team Twiizers posted a rather cryptic message on their blog about trying to get in touch with Nintendo's anti-piracy division to discuss a possible exploit that would make it super-easy to disable all of the Wii's anti-DVDR security and launch Wii games from unauthorized recordable media. The goal was to establish some kind of relation with the console manufacturer stronger than angrily glaring at each other's update servers.

There are two incredibly effective marketing techniques both involving the creation of throw-away value propositions to get someone to accept another, related value proposition. The first one is the foot-in-the-door technique, where the throw-away proposition is relatively non-committal, and the related proposition is more involved. The idea is that getting someone to accept the throw-away proposition mentally prepares them to accept the later related one; since the person already has dealt with you, there's less transaction anxiety.

I've pushed SimKit (my 3D rendering code I've been working on) to git. It's a work-in-progress, and doesn't even have any renderers or material system code written yet. But it's designed to be a fairly good 3D engine for doing game development in C++. Maintaining this is the reason why I had no February 1GAM release, and why March will similarly be absent barring a miracle.

One of the more frustrating facts about the game industry is it's core conceit of being a fundamentally elitist, hierarchial space where the voices of people not actively participating in "serious" game development are marginalized or dismissed. The word serious is in scarequotes particularly because it's a meaningless distinction based on social class rather than on any form of merit.