Summary

Rob is learning Rust, and feels like he's total beginner again. Rust's concept of ownership and its handling of strings are just different than any other language he has worked with, but JD ensures him that this is how everyone feels when starting with Rust...

JD spent the last week working on their game, starting with rewriting everything. He explored using a game engine instead of React for the visualization, and really likes the approach. He set up the new game engine Bevy, and hacked around to integrate it with a gRPC API. One problem he didn't anticipate is that querying state in the game can only happen during the game's core loop. Running at 60Hz, this means any API request takes at least 16ms. 😫 This will require some research in the future...

Diving deeper and deeper into game design and development, JD is amazed and inspired by the experience of the community. Looking specifically at user experience and Data-Oriented Design. For anyone who's interested in this, here are a few talks JD watched this week:

- Understanding Data-Oriented Design for Entity-Component-Systems (Unity at GDC '19)
- Building a Data-Oriented Future - Mike Acton

And here are the two blog posts mentioned in the episode:

- Introducing Bevy
- Specs and Legion, two very different approaches to ECS

Sorry for the audio quality in this episode. We had a small technical glitch and lost one of the high-quality recordings.

Stay in touch

Website: https://www.devnlife.com
Jan David: https://twitter.com/0x6a64
Rob: https://twitter.com/RobPando

Summary

Rob is back home after a stressful trip to renew a passport. For JD it was the first week after his vacation, and he had to readjust to work again. He also wanted to shape some work after their discussion in the last episode, but didn't manage to get as far as he hoped. JD wonders if it makes more sense to focus on game development, or invest equally in building up a community around the project. Rob's concerned that someone might steal their work, and is not too enthusiastic about the idea of open source. The two start a long discussion around this, diving into the pros and cons of open source, the difficulties of monetization, and their fears and concerns regarding the success of the project.

Stay in touch

Website: https://www.devnlife.com
Jan David: https://twitter.com/0x6a64
Rob: https://twitter.com/RobPando

Summary

Rob and JD catch up after their last episode on Shape Up. Rob has been studying game engines, and bought a Rust course. JD just watch the talk Bending the Curve from RustConf, in which Esteban Kuber talks about the difficulty teaching Rust to experienced programmers, and shares how it is necessary to unlearn certain assumptions from other programming languages.

JD has been thinking a lot about how to really start the project he wants to do with Rob. Both are freaking out a little bit given the complexity of the goal they set themselves. JD expects a lot of research ahead of them, while Rob fears that this might demotivate him. The two discuss ways how to reduce the risk, and get to a playable prototype as fast as possible. This puts many earlier ideas into questions, and brings back a discussion about game engines and multiplayer. The two discuss building a singleplayer game first, and only if it is successful start working on multiplayer. But with so many unknowns, they probably simply have to start and learn more about their project before making such a choice.

Special shout outs
Passionate game developers mentioned in the podcast and their most recent games:
Ryan Ford https://ryanford.itch.io/goobers-in-the-mix
Cody Loyd https://codyloyd.itch.io/bug

Stay in touch

Website: https://www.devnlife.com
Jan David: https://twitter.com/0x6a64
Rob: https://twitter.com/RobPando