Unreal 2.5 is so old, your perception of engines is probably way outdated. Things are so much easier and more cohesive now, you’ll definitely enjoy modern gamedev tools. Since you’re already an experienced programmer you should be up and running with Godot in only an hour, there’s a tutorial in the official documentation that you can skim. You can probably look into a Godot crash course video on youtube too for a quick overview.

I just want something that will say : here’s your main, here’s your player character, we’ve taken care of the collision detection and inputs and rendering, there’s no gravity. Paint the tiles on this screen, and get going.

Are you looking for a framework or a game engine? You talk about frameworks in the post but it sounds like you actually want something that does everything for you, which is more in line with engines. There are a lot of 2D engines out there like Godot, Unity, GameMaker etc. that are all pretty easy to use.

I used Unity in the past but am mostly a Godot fan nowadays. Try Godot, it might be what you’re looking for.

What the other person said. Cross compiling is as simple as adding a flag assuming you have the dependencies. I tried it and it works well (though my programs are pretty simple). See also the official docs on cross-compiling.

I don’t get the hate for whitespace personally. It was maybe an issue 15 years ago, but modern code editors easily solve its issues. You can collapse whitespace blocks, the editor can automatically replace spaces with tabs, etc.

The small binary part is just for fun - but generally my use case is to have an easy to use language that can cross compile easily so I can just pass binaries to the person I’m working with.

Performance should be relatively the same across every distro, there are benchmarks online you can check. I didn’t like Bazzite with my short time using it though, being immutable means you have to jump through hoops to install something that isn’t available as a flatpak. Like I mentioned in another comment the battery life was also not great, and I found it to be a little slow in general.

When I’m on battery I mainly use the browser. When I’m plugged in it’s usually gaming.

Battery life is really good, on par with Windows on my current laptop. For some reason battery life was really bad on Bazzite, like 30% worse or so. I don’t know how it compares to other distros.

I switched to Cachy 2 months ago and I think my distro hopping days are over. It’s so, so responsive and reliable. People scared me off arch-based distros for being bleeding edge but so far it’s been very stable, I haven’t encountered any major issues.

If you’re thinking about switching, do it. Switched off from Bazzite and I’m not looking back.

This has huge potential and I already love the UI they have, but it’s still in very early alpha if anybody is wondering. There aren’t any transitions or animations or anything yet, and the export button just rick rolls you (yes, really).

Agreed. I’m starting Dawn of Sorrow now and man, that game suffers from the most generic early-mid 2000’s anime art style. The portraits are very uninspired, and I think Soma Cruz maybe has the most boring main character design in the franchise. He’s the generic anime pretty boy with a cool coat.

The game’s still very fun though, but I just can’t take the character portraits seriously.

Start at Symphony of the Night then make your way up! I wouldn’t recommend playing the '80s and '90s Castlevania games unless you enjoy borderline unfair arcade games.

Boy oh boy, what a post. Somehow they managed to make it less clear than ever what they even want to do with the platform, here are my favorite highlights:

With the use of AI now ubiquitous and ‘AI slop’ rapidly replacing the content we see online, this trust gap is where we think Stack Overflow can play a role. Our renewed vision and purpose moving forward is to be the world’s most vital source for technologists. By providing a trusted human intelligence layer in the age of AI, we believe we can serve technologists with our mission to cultivate community, power learning, and unlock growth.

That’s some advanced corpo-speak, doubling down on AI but also acknowledging that people don’t like AI-generated answers and providing a “human intelligence layer” to “unlock growth”. Did an AI write this? Lol.

As AI becomes more pervasive, the efficacy of AI systems will increasingly depend on access to verifiable and accurate knowledge. That will extend to job opportunities too as people look for guidance on exciting career prospects, and this is why we aim to Unlock growth for those who come to Stack Overflow or use our products.

I can feel the growth unlocking the more of this I read.

Knowledge Ingestion converts high-value content from tools like SharePoint, Confluence, Google Drive, and others into structured, trusted knowledge inside a Stack Internal instance. It’s designed to eliminate silos, accelerate onboarding, and scale institutional wisdom.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to ingest knowledge, but now that I can eliminate all these silos, I’m sure that my team can finally gain some institutional wisdom. Also I’m having a stroke. Help-

From their new page on AI. God, who asked for this? How much time and money did they waste integrating these useless AI tools? I was optimistic that they mentioned OCR but the more I look into it the worse it gets, nobody wants to generate AI images in their text editor. I don’t want a chatbot to tell me facts about butterflies in my presentation tool. Wtf? I’m not usually this upset about random AI integrations but this is the exact thing Microsoft would do and why people would choose onlyoffice instead.

Edit: Well, the good news is that this AI garbage seems to be a plugin that’s not included by default, so they at least have some sense in them.

I guess it just wasn’t in my circle because I haven’t heard much about it since release, but good to know it’s more popular than I thought

I forgot about this, but AFAIK you’re still better off with fstab to give yourself all permissions for everything to work properly.

I was just adjusting my fstab today… Genuinely blows my mind how far Linux has come and I still have to delve into hard to read text files to open my damn drive when I boot my computer.

I haven’t worked on anything that big but I have gotten a ton of feedback on my free games and apps, some of which was really harsh. Positive reviews are always fun to read but usually I focus on the negative reviews. Negative reviews are hard to read but tend to be the most insightful, you get an idea for the things in your game that need work or are too frustrating for others. I think your review is pretty good feedback in general.

Many people definitely need a reality check - just don’t be rude. Lots of people think their game is going to be the next big thing or that somehow people aren’t going to compare it to games that are extremely similar and probably the same price.

I was at a gaming event once and one of the demos I tried was extremely unintuitive and at some point you had to search the floor for a key that’s way too hard to see (me and friends spent like 5 minutes running around a dark room). I pointed this out to the devs and they got super defensive, telling me that it’s not supposed to be obvious and you’re supposed to be looking for items for real. This is how not to take feedback. When someone says your game sucks, take notes and try to improve.

In terms of taking feedback, the best advice I can give is just be open minded. When someone says the game sucks, no matter how stupid their feedback is, just give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they suck at video games and the tutorial needed to be clearer, maybe the writing really is boring and not as interesting as you thought, maybe it’s just not clear enough where you’re supposed to be going, etc. It’s good to get perspective of others.

Not all feedback is useful though, sometimes the game just isn’t for them. If Dark Souls actually took all that criticism about the game being hard and added an easy mode, it wouldn’t be as gripping or popular as it was. Don’t let players bully you into changing your vision just because they wished your game was a different game.

TL;DR: Feedback is always good, don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. For devs, keep an open mind but don’t let it get under your skin.

I work in the industry. You’re pretty much right. I wouldn’t recommend people to get into the field unless you’re SUPER into making games and are okay with working way harder than others. That said, other tech jobs are also suffering right now, layoffs are way more common than they used to be throughout the entire field feels very competitive.

MIT is the de-facto license that says “Do what you want with the software, just give me credit. Also, I don’t owe you anything”.

It lets people do basically anything with it but protects you from:

• People who would steal your project and claim they were the original creators (your name and copyright info is filled in the license which they have to include and mention)

• Any sort of liability or warranty - people can’t blame you for any damage done by your software