I make video games [1] and TikToks [2] about them. I’m a solo game dev doing the coding, design and business/marketing stuff. I’ve worked in mainstream games and as a CTO at a few companies but my passion is making small games I can prototype in a few days and release within a week or so. After trying a lot of different roles the satisfaction of building something hundreds of thousands of people play that I have total control over is deeply fulfilling.
What's your experience with tiktok? How well does it perform in terms of attracting people to buy your stuff? Do videos besides plays on popular memes du jour do any good?
It’s been amazing. I’ve had about 30% of people that follow me join my Discord which is 10x higher than I expected. Meme videos do the best but a loyal fan base see and enjoys my regular dev style videos too. I do the same on Reels and Shorts with less success. But I enjoy learning which videos do better on each platform.
I really like the refactoring challenge idea. Any tips on what’s worked or not? Do you do domain specific code or try and keep it generic? I think having them not write code is particularly good way to handle this.
- Showing code is optional. A bit of storytelling to set the scene is enough. So you can keep it generic, or you can add some details, as you wish! Just make sure that the candidate understands the scene. If you present something generic and feel they don't understand, tell it again with more details. If you think you've lost your explanation in details, start over with less details.
- Be sure to know what answer you want. The number 1 thing we want is for the candidate to talk about adding (non-regression) tests. But the candidate can talk about many different things: profiling, tracing, A/B testing of the new implementation, etc. If they don't talk about the #1 thing you want, try to subtly bring them to that point ("how do you ensure that the new implem works as well as the previous one?")
Not specific to the refactoring challenge:
- Ask for feedback. After each challenge, we ask the candidate their honest opinion on the challenge.
- Grasp a feeling of whether or not you'd like to work with this candidate. Try to challenge them, correct them, ask them to explain things in more details and see how they react.
- We do it with 2 interviewers: main and observer (watcher?). Both from the technical team (so 2 devs). We encourage anyone from the tech team to do it if they want, even juniors.
- We do the 3 challenges in 1 hour but that's a bit short. 1h30 would be better, if the candidate is ok with that.
I've used this in the past to see how AAA games implement various graphic effects. It lets me see the textures, shader's and building of the various buffers (back, depth, etc) for an individual frame of the game. This is a great tool for learning exactly how games are put together graphically.
You can install typings (npm install -g typings) and then search for type definitions. For hapijs, it would be `typings search hapi`. Then you can install using `typings install dt~hapi --global --save`.
The list is truncated in web view on Github. If you use Visual Studio they all have nuget packages which lets you search for (and add them) easily to a project.
If you're using a library and can't find bindings then I've found it's worth the time creating them yourself for any reasonably sized project. This is annoying and time consuming up front, but the benefits you get down-stream easily repay this initial investment.
To me, this was the silliest thing about working on a large typescript project. It slowed build times, we had issues with GitHub throttling, and the typings were commonly incorrect or incomplete.
I've spent some time prototyping with Defold and found it a joy to work with. The write once run anywhere is great but the real power comes from live changes. You can edit code while the game is running and see live changes. Iterations taking a few seconds (even on target platform) is a huge win for game devs.
I'd recommend checking it out as an alternative to Unity if you are making a 2D game.
This is an ambitious statement =] But yes, the engine at the current state may be decent for certain use cases. We're working to make it better, obviously. Give it a try at a game jam neat you. Or at the upcoming Ludum Dare.
[1] https://attackmove.io/playit
[2] https://tiktok.com/@attackmove