Romero talked about how they would just pass floppy disk to each other. It's just bigger disks now.

As someone who inevitably gets thrown into the "devops" side and the like:

The vast majority of developers can't integrate code or even resolve a merge conflict (and god help you if someone convinced the team to do rebasing instead...). They just stop working and then whine three weeks later during a standup that progress is halted on their deliverables. And, because of the stupidity of "devops" as a job role, there is an increasing culture that development should not have to worry about this kind of stuff.

So good project management becomes splitting up files to minimize the chance for conflicts and spreading tasks out to minimize the times people will be in the same file, let alone function. And if they do? Then you do whatever the latest buzz word is for "peer programming".

But it has guns.

I think they’ll get over their nightmare with the hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve made so far lol

Our last major college project that spanned multiple semesters was worked on by 5 devs all editing the same source files over Dropbox. The school had servers for svn, but no one knew how to do source control. It was exactly the type of shitshow you would expect.

As a craftopia player palworld definitely feels like a bit of a reskin, but one that gives players a lot of what they wanted (mainly being able to explore freely in multiplayer mode which is severely limited in craftopia).

One element palworld leaves out is being able to create your own automated processes (like automating a farm with a series of conveyer belts, chests, and various machines). They say they’re still planning to develop craftopia so I am pretty excited to get the elegance of the pal world pets (which craftopia had too, but not as shiny) and the fun of automating your own homestead instead of setting up prefab stations.

I guess I'm a little confused, because wasn't their previous game Craftopia? I'm fairly certain that game sold relatively well for an indie game, at least 25,000+ copies if you base it off the All Time Peak Players on Steam Charts. For a small team of just a few people, that's a decent chunk of money (I think it sold at $30 around launch, so roughly $750k for 25k copies sold before Steam takes its cut). Craftopia came out in 2020, so they're saying they've learned virtually nothing in 4 years, not counting the dev time Craftopia had?

I enjoy Palworld, I think it's a fun game that has a lot of potential, but I'm not sure I'm fully buying into some of these responses.

As a side note, a lot of Craftopia people complain they abandoned that game, but looking on Steam it shows several recent updates across the last year, with one even coming out just yesterday and a huge one in November 2023 and a new roadmap posted in December 2023. So, I'm not really sure where those players are coming from regarding that.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to what Palworld grows into, as I really do think they have something rather special here. It's got a lot of rough edges and a couple core design problems, but those can eventually be addressed with some hard work. Hopefully they use the massive cash influx they've achieved with their recent success and hire some competent, seasoned developers to come in and get their shit in order. I'm not holding my breath too much, though (remember when we thought Valheim devs would spend their game success lottery money to massively boost that game's content and polish?).

Next big game: Digimon, but with guns

My realisation long ago is that the games industry just doesn't work like the rest of the software engineering industry. The most cowboy engineer you've ever worked with is a voice of reason in the game dev industry.

It turned out it's not true, they did use VCS. However, they mention a pretty horrifying story about VCS nonetheless.

They were a team without prior or professional gamedev experience, and they were using git. The first senior engineer, and first member of the team who actually was a professional game developer, was someone who ranomly contacted them due to liking Craftopia. But he didn't have experience with Unity, only Unreal, so they just said mid-development "Ok, we'll just throw away all we have so far, and we'll switch to Unreal - if you're willing to be a lead engineer, and will teach us Unreal from scratch as we go."

And then, they also mention this:

Surprisingly, [the new engineer] had no experience using the version control system git.

According to him, Perforce seems to be a better match for Unreal Engine.

But Perforce is too expensive. This is not the amount that a company like us would pay.

If you can't use Perforce, you should at least use svn instead of git.

Fully trusting his words, I also migrated my version control system from git to svn.

Version Control System

At this point: That should be a synonym for "git" unless you REALLY have a good reason not to.

Version Control System - something like Git, Subversion, Unity Teams' VCS, etc.

They're translating from an interview that was being given in Japanese.