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.

Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam

Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D

Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D

When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.

At the end of this post, we will have:

  • A brief strategy of our company: what we do, how, and why.
  • A table with our beacons — successful games roughly similar to what we want to make. Similar in gameplay, team size, budget, etc.
  • A composition of the team we need to assemble.
  • A roadmap — a development plan for our game.
  • An outline of our marketing strategy.
  • A financial model — how much we will spend, how much we will earn.
  • A large number of my caveats throughout the post.
  • Jokes and I hope witty remarks.

All the final documents can be found here.

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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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About the book "Piranesi"

Cover of the book "Piranesi"

Cover of the book "Piranesi"

"Piranesi" is both a continuation of the magical stories of Susanna Clarke and an independent book.

The book has no direct connection with the world of English magic [ru] from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell". If desired, one can find a connection and even say that the worlds are the same, only at different times: the events of "Piranesi" take place in the early 2000s. However, the author did not give any hints on this. Therefore, I consider the worlds to be different for now.

Susanna continues to persistently and effectively dig not even in the direction of animism as the basis of world perception but in the direction of extremely holistic view of the world, in contrast to the currently dominant reductionism.

The latter blows my mind. As an engineer, I'm an intuitive reductionist due to professional deformation. Reading "Jonathan Strange" and "Piranesi", I felt how Clarke, like Peter the Great, cuts a window in my brain to another picture of the world, a different world perception. And it's wonderful.

By the way, don't confuse holism with, say, an engineering view of the world, a-la systems engineering [ru] or even science. The latter is about decomposing reality into isolated parts with clear boundaries and synthesizing "pure" models of the world [ru], while in holism, the parts have no clear boundaries and penetrate each other.

But it is my interpretation, there are interpretations when holism is just an alternative name for a systems thinking/view — it's hard to find literature on this topic now, so it's hard for me to say where the truth is.

So, "Piranesi"

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