Essays about game development, thinking and books

Places to discuss Feeds Fun

I continue developing my news reader: feeds.fun. To gather information and people together, I created several resources where you can discuss the project and find useful information:

So far, there is no one and nothing there, but over time, there will definitely be news and people.

If you are interested in this project, join! I'll be glad to see you and will try to respond quickly to all questions.

Grainau: hiking and beer at 3000 meters

How it all looks from the ground.

How it all looks from the ground.

For her vacation, Yuliya decided to show me the beautiful German mountains and took me for a couple of days to Grainau — it's a piece of Bavaria that's almost like Switzerland. At least, it is similar to the pictures of Switzerland that I've seen :-D

In short, it's a lovely place with a measured pace of life. If you need to catch your breath, calm your nerves, and enjoy nature, then this is the place for you. But if you can't live without parties, you'll get bored quickly.

What's there:

  • The highest mountain in Germany plus a couple of glaciers.
  • There's skiing in winter. If you really need it, you can find a place to ski in summer, but the descent is short, and the lifts are turned off.
  • A large clean lake and a couple of smaller ones.
  • A huge number of trails for hiking.
  • A huge number of waterfalls, streams, and a couple of mountain rivers.
  • Restaurants with beer.
  • Beautiful fallen trees in the forests, private property, fences, cows with bells, and "racing tractors" (I don't know how to name this phenomenon better, but tractors are moving fast there :-D).

This is briefly, and now in detail.

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«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative

My favorite version of the Princess.

My favorite version of the Princess.

It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.

But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.

I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.

ATTENTION: SPOILERS!

If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.

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Hello, World!

Nice to meet you, friends!

My name is Aliaksei, but feel free to call me Tiendil — it is my nickname for the last 20 years or so :-)

A few words about me:

  • By occupation, I am a software developer, mostly backend, mainly in Python.
  • For most of my career, I've been working in game development on big projects and own indie games.
  • I like playing games, reading books, and writing long-reads about partially complex topics.

You can find more about me:

This is my first blog post in English, but not the first one in general. I have blogged in Russian for a long time and have always wanted to share my thoughts with the English-speaking world. At last, I found some time to adapt my blog, and here we are!

Most of the future posts will be bilingual (English & Russian). Also, with time, I'll translate my most interesting old posts.

Once again, nice to meet you! Feel free to contact me by any means.