Essays about game development, thinking and books

Migrating from GPT-3.5-turbo to GPT-4o-mini

Guess when I switched models.

Guess when I switched models.

Recently OpenAI released GPT-4o-mini — a new flagship model for the cheap segment, as it were.

  • They say it works "almost like" GPT-4o, sometimes even better than GPT-4.
  • It is almost three times cheaper than GPT-3.5-turbo.
  • Context size 128k tokens, against 16k for GPT-3.5-turbo.

Of course, I immediately started migrating my news reader to this model.

In short, it's a cool replacement for GPT-3.5-turbo. I immediately replaced two LLM agents with one without changing prompts, reducing costs by a factor of 5 without losing quality.

However, then I started tuning the prompt to make it even cooler and began to encounter nuances. Let me tell you about them.

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Concept document for a space exploration MMO

The expected poster for the game. (c) DALL-E

The expected poster for the game. (c) DALL-E

As a hobby, I write concept documents for games. This is first in English. I have a few more in Russian and will eventually translate them.

One more concept for The Tale 2.0.

Title

Lords Captains MMO

Yep, it's a rip-off from Warhammer 40k and Rogue Trader, but it will do for the concept.

One-liner

Explore the infinite universe on a starship with millions of souls on board, unite and develop abandoned worlds.

Platforms

Browsers, mobile.

Genre

Exploration-driven trade-political MMO PVE sandbox.

Closest analogs

EVE, Sim City, Crusader Kings, 4X games, Rogue Trader.

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Two years of writing RFCs — statistics

The number of RFCs over two years

Slightly more than two years ago, I became a Lead/Engineering Manager for Palta's payment team. I left the company at the end of 2023 for another sabbatical [ru].

It is time to sum up. I will start with my favorite initiative.

From the first month, I promoted the idea of preceding major changes with text documents — RFC — Request for Comments.

In this post, I will analyze two years of applying this practice to share the experience, summarize the results, and have convincing arguments for my next job.

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Simulating public opinion in a game

The demonstration (in Russian) of a technical prototype of manipulating public opinion and explanation of how it works.

I continue participating in World Builders school. For the last month, I've created a technical prototype of game mechanics for manipulating public opinion.

You play as the chief editor of a news agency, who sends journalists on quests and publishes articles based on the results of investigations focusing on themes that you want to promote.

The top video is in Russian, so I'll go through the main points below.

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Procedural news headlines without complex text generation

A screenshot of the interface for selecting a news connotation (from the prototype of the game about a news agency). News: the arrest of a teenage witch for drunk driving.

A screenshot of the interface for selecting a news connotation (from the prototype of the game about a news agency). News: the arrest of a teenage witch for drunk driving.

From the player preference survey, I gradually moved on to working on a game prototype.

The game will be about a news agency. You will be the chief editor, and your task is to manipulate public opinion by investigating events and choosing a connotation of news: where to draw the public's attention, what to hide, in what tone to present themes, etc.

Therefore, the whole game will be around the text of news.

Creating large blocks of detailed text for each news item looks pointless — the game is not about reading news but about managing them. Therefore, it makes sense to build interaction only around headlines.

But how can we make the displaying of news both interesting and simple?

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