My last job was as a data analyst, database admin, programmer, IT support, and internal auditor for a non profit.
You will note that my actual job title was Data Analyst. And that I was doing the work of at least 5 different job descriptions, while only earning the wages of one.
VP level managers were beyond incompetent. They were actively harmful to the mission of the organization, wasting absurd amounts of money on proprietary software for tasks that could easily be done with a simple HTML 5 website, paying outside contracting firms for translations you could use Google Translate for just fine, oh, and requiring the databases my team managed to interface with the accounting team’s database for a new service we were going to provide with a newly received grant.
But they did not realize that we would need access to the accounting database. Even though they asked us to interface with it.
Then we explained that we would … you know, actually need access to the accounting database, as the whole point was to make sure that we were doling out charity money for individuals in a way that followed internal standards to make sure we were not not being defrauded.
So we run some analysis with the data we do have access to, as the accounting database is only fully accessible by the head of accounting, and they are busy or on vacation all the time.
We notice significant discrepancies between what our system, the one that basically the entire org uses to manage clients, including disbursements, and what accounting says has actually been disbursed.
Then, personal life happens to me. After 3 years of seeing therapists and psychologists at the best medical organization in the state, they tell me that I am likely Autistic.
I tell my family this.
My family attempts to send me to a long term mental institution far away from any major city, as they believe I am actually schizophrenic. You know, while holding down an 80k a year job, making more money than any other member of my family, having no delusions, not wandering through the streets screaming at things that arent there. My brother’s girlfriend does that, but thats uh, fine apparently.
So, I grab all my stuff and put it in my car, and stay at a motel for a while… Because I am sharing an apartment with my brother and his gf, and they both think I need to be sent to a mental institution for reasons they are not able to actually explain.
In this time, my brother removes me as an authorized user on our shared phone plan, and uses the parental control feature to stalk me on foot and in his car.
I am preeetty good with computers, and manage to replace nearly all unnecessary Google parts of Android with open source stuff, thus disabling the parental control and tracking my brother is able to do.
He cancels my phone plan and disables my phone number within 45 seconds of me completely removing all Google related bs.
I get a new SIM card.
Ok good! The phone is successfully de-googled Android, and works with a new SIM card. Great!
Problem: All of my online accounts, including banking, require 2FA linked to a phone number that is now disabled.
Then, my car gets stolen and I get the shit beat out of me, wallet and phone stolen.
Homeless for a while.
Eventually manage to get a phone. Call the non profit I used to work for. They help homeless people after all.
The project my boss and I were working on, to rectify database discrepancies between the main system we maintain that the whole org uses, and accounting’s database? Well the point if this project was to have the underlying digital framework to be able to help people who are in exactly the situation I am now in.
But, because I lost my job, the project was cancelled.
Also the head of accounting quit right before my life turned upside down, you know just about a week after my boss and I ran the comparison audit. I am sure there was no financial fraud going on though. Mhm, yep.
So I have now been basically homeless for a year.
Good thing I qualify for SSDI (hooray Autism?), other wise I would have starved or frozen to death months ago.
As a fellow autist i am not sure if i would handle such a chain of events so well as you did.
I actually have some context for autism-schizophrenia.
Both medical disorders as well as adhd/add/ocd/dislexia/bipolar are all part of the neurodivergent family,
Therefor its common for overlap between these conditions and for different medical diagnoses to be more common in a single family tree. You may have (had) a schizofrenic family member and to some your autism resembles parts of it.
None of that matters to how your family treated you because even if you did have dillusions or psychotic feelings they are still no reason for forced therapy. These conditions, are very misunderstood and the only person that can truly know if they need help is the neurodivergent person themselves except maybe if they cause proven major harm.
I have studied up a lot on neurodiversity and mental illnesses.
My family just gaslights me constantly. Anytime I display any emotion other than basically nodding and agreeing, I find out later they are describing it as a manic episode to their friends and the rest of the family.
A manic episode is … you know, an episode, as in a sustained period of time with very very heightened emotions, where the subject does not seem to be aware of or able to control their emotions.
I would get excited for a few minutes, describing a breakthrough in coding I made at work… or maybe angry for a few minutes while describing all the apathy I see in society toward the homeless, if not outright hate.
Then back to normal conversation.
But things like that, to them, are manic episodes.
I do not care for them any more.
My dad was a drunk, has always been extremely right wing, is generally unlikeable due to always arguing and never being able to consider that he might be wrong about something, believes in Q Anon insanity, and manufactures firearms in a way he took pride in explaining to me is ‘untraceable’.
My mother does have a neurological condition, and has the emotional maturity and intellectual capacity of an 8 year old.
My brother was a rave kiddie burn out who gave himself serotonin shock syndrome before he turned 21 via waaaay too much MDMA and Ecstasy. He believes shadow people are real, and was constantly trying to force me use hallucinogenic mushrooms while living with him. Oh, and he explained to me how its ‘funny’ to him to joke around with his actually schizophrenic girlfriend by just telling her that the past 30 minutes of events /did not actually happen/ and that she was having a delusion or hallucination. Then he says ‘ah just kidding, love ya babe!’
Me on the other hand got nearly straight As in highschool, went to Uni and got two Bachelor’s Degrees in the time it took 1/3 of my classmates to drop out with nothing. Ive since worked for a large tech firm, a logistics company and that nonprofit, doing data analytics/programming, etc.
So yeah my family are just bad people, and I have no problem with them just assuming I am dead.
Where i come from messing with schizophrenic people like that, saying things are a hallucination that are not, or acting like a hallucination is real is considered abuse/neglect. Its actually very dangerous and could significantly worsen her condition… she needs to get out but its quite possible she psychologically trapped with your brother. As sad as it may be saving her isn’t your responsibility to carry though, but if there friendly connections that could help, she may need someone more mature looking over her.
I asked my partner for an extra opinion on your “manic episode” it doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. Manic episodes tend to last hours. This just Appears to be a temporary state of mind.
What i think could more accurately explain it is that you where overloaded and exhausted by sensory experiences which can be physical experience like light and sound but also mental ones like remembering a long to do list, receiving new information. Its very common for autism.
Different from what society seems to assume many autists are very emotional beings but we often struggle to express those feelings or to connect them with neurotypical emotions. We tend to learn automatically to exercise the self control to contain or genuine pure feelings but when we are drained those emotions leak, which can actually be a really good positive moment of reflection and selfgrowth… granted if your with good people willing to listen in kindness.
I hope your in a better spot with better people where you are now. Being family i assume it may be hard to really get away from those people but i wish you strength in keeping their nose out of your mind.
I would tell my other family members what you just said about my brother, and they would tell me I am delusional.
Yeah, she needs help. Is she gonna get it? Probably not.
She comes from the Mormon FLDS cult. She once described to me that when she was a teen, her then baby brother fell and had a rusty nail pierce into his skull.
Mom decided a bandage would be fine.
Fast forward 15 years, baby brother has a slew of mental disorders and recently suicided.
But you know what, after how many times I bent over backwards to help her and my bro, and they basically just gaslight me about everything, all the time?
I dont care. Theyre /perfect/ for each other: both are manipulative liars with differing flavors of addiction problems and insanity, so hooray for their toxic co dependant relationship.
And yes… I know that having normal human emotions, while talking about subjects that illicit normal human emotions, in normal humans, is in fact normal.
Sorry if I sound dismissive but… after years and years of handling all my family’s emotional problems for them and being rewarded with less than nothing…
I feel free.
Yes, what happened to me nearly killed me many times, and I am lucky to be alive at all.
But it all opened my eyes.
So much less stress. Yes, being homeless, without money for food was actually /less/ stressful than constantly trying to figure out how to please my ridiculous family members without angering them all the while I am never allowed to express any anger toward them whatsoever.
I… dont know exactly where I am going to go now. I am in a motel, halfway across the country, that at least I can afford to live in and eat for the whole month.
It was very difficult to get here. Torn ligaments, broken bones, torn muscles, starvation, exposure, and so many fentanyl addicts to get the fuck away from.
I have a lot of talents and skills. I would like to make my own video game someday, with those talents and skills.
First I gotta get my ID replaced, and probably fix up my credit score (all my cards were stolen) before I can actually rent anywhere.
I figure I can actually get a Steam Deck and dual boot it as a workstation with the dock. Seems like the most computational bang for your buck, better than any laptop I can see for a similar price.
Its also portable in case I have to move again!
Have any games actually been /developed/ on a steam deck? That might be a first if I can pull that off haha.
A steam deck is basically an arch linux laptop. I bet there are ways you could connect it to a bigger monitor and keyboard to simulate a proper pc though part of why it performs well might be the lower res for the smaller internal display.
There are some great free options to learn game design. Godot, blender. I am most certain its doable to build something but getting a livable wage as an indie game dev itself is a real challenge. Watch indie game the movie for reference on it. Chatgpt, even the free version can also quickly help you get up to speed to plan such kind of project. (Its also a huge autistic blessing to get an ai perspective on how your mails/messages can be interpreted and how you could interpret mails/messages from others.
Speaking as someone who has studied game development, i hope to make my own games aswell but purely as a hobby cause id be unrealistic to believe to get an income out of it.
i could never accept a job in the industry where my talent is exploited for profit so even as a portfolio it wouldn’t do.
So yeah, big suprise that me, autistic data analyst is also pretty deep into FOSS stuff.
My plan would be to dual boot it with PopOS! I jave been using (and actually doing quite a lot of useful testing) for PopOS! untill my life shittified. I am very familiar with it at this point, and at least the way I was using it on an AMD GPU/CPU(x86/64) was /very/ stable, amd because its ultimately based off of debian, it has a /huge/ library of free software.
The Steam Deck actually has an official dock now, basically quite similar to a laptop dock… set it in, and the dock connects to keyboard mouse monitor external controller, etc.
And I have already been learning Godot for a while too! Especially after Unity has just kind of shit the bed in terms of the recent ‘you owe us a cut of all the profits’ bullshit, Godot seems like a great option.
I have already found a lot of good tutorials and used them to prototype basic map system, third and first person animations and camera movements, and Ive already spent time blocking out about the first year of getting core systems and mechanics in place. Godot Script or whatever is very similar to Python, which I have a lot of experience in.
I am also a decent writer for dialogue and such, and could honestly just use chatgpt to fill in the gaps haha, and I could use speech synthesis until I can afford to pay voice actors. Also, I know how to 3D model and do textures as well!
The most time consuming things for me personally would probably be adding in more custom animations, as that isnt something I have prior experience with.
Mixamo does have a lot though, and I may be able to sort of isolate parts of them and have other anims be partially or totally procedural.
As for player models themselves, Godot already has something like a plugin called like HumanCreator or something, which would serve as good foundation for a character creator, and could also be set to use various bounded variables as presets for different NPC races or factions or whatever.
Beasts and animals are a bit trickier, but I can always try to tackle that /after/ I have made decent progress on other parta of the game.
Further, as I have often been bored with not much elae to do, I’ve already spent a lot of time writing down worldbuilding ideas which also inform, impact and in some cases define much of the actual gameplay I am going for… backdrop lore for the world itself etc.
Finally: I do not need to immediately be making a living wage, as I have SSDI to keep me alive until I feel that what I have ia good enough to start up the kickstater, indiegogo, or steam early access.
While you could always try PopOS i would expect the hardware and customization to Arch to perform better. Valve needed the best gaming performance and making games tends to require a similar or slightly higher performance then what playing will require.
For world building i can recommend obsidian as a good note taking app to connect dots and links between different files, there are some great tutorials about it. If you can afford it chatgpt plus can be mighty powerful as you can program a specific gpt for specific world building needs, a culture specialist, a character specialist, a storywritter, a dialogue and book generator,… each can hold multiple text files which it can reference from.
I am expecting game development to change a lot the coming years thanks to AI, i have seen some early experiments of ai generated animations. Personally i would keep things basic for a start and focus purely on game play and coding. Games and ideas change as you build on them and looks are most easy to change later.
I again very much appreciate the advice, and its nice to know /someone/ is rooting for me lol.
Now… this may be an unfair criticism at this point but:
When I first got into Arch (and this was /before/ the Steam Deck was a thing) I found it to be a chaotic mess that required reading literally hundreds of pages of /unofficial community wiki documentation that was often wrong/ to even get a stable bare metal build of Arch working that could actually you know like function as a working computer, without having to bugfix for 3 hours before I could use basically any program… and then some major dependency would update, conflict with another major dependency and blam back to ok now I have to rethink my ENTIRE arch build AGAIN.
Oh, right. The community was basically just awful. Terrible.
PopOS! on the other hand was uh… dl iso, flash, boot, run installer, reboot, then install apps and configure the OS, and I rarely ever had a dependency update bork the whole OS.
Now, granted, that was 1) When I was less well versed in linux and 2) Before the Steam Deck, so its possible that the Steam Deck OS has more or less corralled the expanded Arch Universe into actually having some sane standards merely by being the biggest and most important fish in the Arch pond.
Though I still am fond of PopOS!, I will give a more desktop oriented configuration of Arch a try as a dual boot, and I would be very appreciative if you could point me toward an Arch config that is know to work with reasonable stability on a Steam Deck, if such a thing exists.
Please let it have at least by default a DE, or configurable DEs either in the installer or in different flavored downloadable isos.
Yeah, I was trying out Arch back when it did not by default have a DE and you had to manually figure out all the dependencies to install one, via CLI.
Please dear god do not put me through that again lol.
I will try out Obsidian… is that available on F Droid, Aurora, NeoStore or just plain old Google App Store? Just got the shitty $200 phone from a grocery store right now.
I will look into ChatGPT maybe later, after I am actually living somewhere hopefully permanently. Did not know you can customize different use case for it now, very neat!
I also have seen some procedural methods of generating animations in demonstrations for research papers…
… but there was one tutorial I found of someone implementing… not quite as good, but probably a framework that could be built into something close to GTA’s style of ‘when the world or objects clip into your character, it modifies their animations so they do not clip through the world or objects’… already, in Godot, with available code to just grab.
You would probably have to do a bit more work to get it up to Euphoria engine quality, but this guy already figured out the fundamentals /and implemented them in Godot/, so thats why I was considering it.
You are absolutely correct though that ultimately that is not really a core feature and probably shohld not be first priority.
I am thinking though that procedural level design is going to be a fairly important core feature of what I am going for.
This may sound absurd for a single dev, but I would like to make something that can eventually be turned multiplayer, but is initially single player for early dev and testing purposes. Stability testing with NPCs, really want to make more in depth AI routines for both combat and non combat tha most games have, present in all NPCs.
Hub zones would be defined cities or encampments that feature a higher number of NPCs, but are smaller than the overworld map, and are where a lot of NPCs would just be going about their daily business, a bit more in depth simulation than just MMO style quest givers just standing there waiting for you.
I am guessing that having a small town that actually feels alive, with actual people doing actual normal people things, and have a decent amount of them, the hub zones will either need to just be totally disconnected from the rest of the game as its own contained level… or perhaps i can come up with some lore and gameplay friendly way to make it so the rest of the world is graphically opaque on the outside or less expensive to render, and all the other AIs of the world and other hub zones go into some kind of simplified simulation state, or just pause or something?
Probably would also be a kind of safe zone for players to more safely socialize in, enforced either by a world/game mechanic, or just lots of npc guards. Still brainstorming that part. Procedural generation could possibly be used to simply lay the foundation of multiple differing hubs simply as a dev tool so i dont have to level design tens or settlements/cities.
Then you would have the overworld, larger but more sparsely populated by npcs, and with a hopeful balance between graphical goodness and draw distance. For actually making the overworld I am going to attempt to grab a decent quality heightmap of the real world (game is set in real world, a bit in the future), then manipulate it in either Krita or perhaps a decent open source 3d heightmap editor, then possibly use some procedural generation to paint trees, bushes, rocks, handle cliffsides and valleys where the heightmap resolution is insufficient to handle the terrain convincingly, abandoned cars, garbage, etc… instead of manually plopping them all in, as seemingly every modder of every game that has ever been modded does.
In the overworld would be more or less dungeon entrances of various kinds. Like the hub zones, the dungeons would be basically seperate levels from the rest of the game, with every AI not in your particular dungeon going into a simplified simulation state to allow for more complex and numerous AI baddies or what not to exist in the dungeon, without murdering your oc or framerate.
Due to the setting of the game, theres a lot of tectonic activity going on, sometimes a volcano might go off or something, maybe an asteroid or satellite impacts the ground and changes the terrain, so different psuedo random world events could cause some ‘dungeon entrances’ to pop into being, others to disappear. The dungeons themselves I would like to be able to have basically procedurally generated, with a number of different styles of dungeons.
Add this all up and you get something approximating say Fallout New Vegas… or maybe Kenshi…, but the overworld itself changes, and the actual high risk high reward dungeon areas actually organically change simply as time goes on in the game, so that no two playthroughs are the same.
I could also make it so that, when various conditions are met, various NPCs dispositions toward you changes such that, among other things, they could start you off on various quest paths that may have large impacts on the world , a specific faction, or a hub zone.
Then if the single player works… make at least part of the game multiplayer. Yeah I know God help me with that rofl.
My last job was as a data analyst, database admin, programmer, IT support, and internal auditor for a non profit.
You will note that my actual job title was Data Analyst. And that I was doing the work of at least 5 different job descriptions, while only earning the wages of one.
VP level managers were beyond incompetent. They were actively harmful to the mission of the organization, wasting absurd amounts of money on proprietary software for tasks that could easily be done with a simple HTML 5 website, paying outside contracting firms for translations you could use Google Translate for just fine, oh, and requiring the databases my team managed to interface with the accounting team’s database for a new service we were going to provide with a newly received grant.
But they did not realize that we would need access to the accounting database. Even though they asked us to interface with it.
Then we explained that we would … you know, actually need access to the accounting database, as the whole point was to make sure that we were doling out charity money for individuals in a way that followed internal standards to make sure we were not not being defrauded.
So we run some analysis with the data we do have access to, as the accounting database is only fully accessible by the head of accounting, and they are busy or on vacation all the time.
We notice significant discrepancies between what our system, the one that basically the entire org uses to manage clients, including disbursements, and what accounting says has actually been disbursed.
Then, personal life happens to me. After 3 years of seeing therapists and psychologists at the best medical organization in the state, they tell me that I am likely Autistic.
I tell my family this.
My family attempts to send me to a long term mental institution far away from any major city, as they believe I am actually schizophrenic. You know, while holding down an 80k a year job, making more money than any other member of my family, having no delusions, not wandering through the streets screaming at things that arent there. My brother’s girlfriend does that, but thats uh, fine apparently.
So, I grab all my stuff and put it in my car, and stay at a motel for a while… Because I am sharing an apartment with my brother and his gf, and they both think I need to be sent to a mental institution for reasons they are not able to actually explain.
In this time, my brother removes me as an authorized user on our shared phone plan, and uses the parental control feature to stalk me on foot and in his car.
I am preeetty good with computers, and manage to replace nearly all unnecessary Google parts of Android with open source stuff, thus disabling the parental control and tracking my brother is able to do.
He cancels my phone plan and disables my phone number within 45 seconds of me completely removing all Google related bs.
I get a new SIM card.
Ok good! The phone is successfully de-googled Android, and works with a new SIM card. Great!
Problem: All of my online accounts, including banking, require 2FA linked to a phone number that is now disabled.
Then, my car gets stolen and I get the shit beat out of me, wallet and phone stolen.
Homeless for a while.
Eventually manage to get a phone. Call the non profit I used to work for. They help homeless people after all.
The project my boss and I were working on, to rectify database discrepancies between the main system we maintain that the whole org uses, and accounting’s database? Well the point if this project was to have the underlying digital framework to be able to help people who are in exactly the situation I am now in.
But, because I lost my job, the project was cancelled.
Also the head of accounting quit right before my life turned upside down, you know just about a week after my boss and I ran the comparison audit. I am sure there was no financial fraud going on though. Mhm, yep.
So I have now been basically homeless for a year.
Good thing I qualify for SSDI (hooray Autism?), other wise I would have starved or frozen to death months ago.
Wow what the actual rollercoaster.
As a fellow autist i am not sure if i would handle such a chain of events so well as you did.
I actually have some context for autism-schizophrenia.
Both medical disorders as well as adhd/add/ocd/dislexia/bipolar are all part of the neurodivergent family,
Therefor its common for overlap between these conditions and for different medical diagnoses to be more common in a single family tree. You may have (had) a schizofrenic family member and to some your autism resembles parts of it.
None of that matters to how your family treated you because even if you did have dillusions or psychotic feelings they are still no reason for forced therapy. These conditions, are very misunderstood and the only person that can truly know if they need help is the neurodivergent person themselves except maybe if they cause proven major harm.
I appreciate you saying that.
I have studied up a lot on neurodiversity and mental illnesses.
My family just gaslights me constantly. Anytime I display any emotion other than basically nodding and agreeing, I find out later they are describing it as a manic episode to their friends and the rest of the family.
A manic episode is … you know, an episode, as in a sustained period of time with very very heightened emotions, where the subject does not seem to be aware of or able to control their emotions.
I would get excited for a few minutes, describing a breakthrough in coding I made at work… or maybe angry for a few minutes while describing all the apathy I see in society toward the homeless, if not outright hate.
Then back to normal conversation.
But things like that, to them, are manic episodes.
I do not care for them any more.
My dad was a drunk, has always been extremely right wing, is generally unlikeable due to always arguing and never being able to consider that he might be wrong about something, believes in Q Anon insanity, and manufactures firearms in a way he took pride in explaining to me is ‘untraceable’.
My mother does have a neurological condition, and has the emotional maturity and intellectual capacity of an 8 year old.
My brother was a rave kiddie burn out who gave himself serotonin shock syndrome before he turned 21 via waaaay too much MDMA and Ecstasy. He believes shadow people are real, and was constantly trying to force me use hallucinogenic mushrooms while living with him. Oh, and he explained to me how its ‘funny’ to him to joke around with his actually schizophrenic girlfriend by just telling her that the past 30 minutes of events /did not actually happen/ and that she was having a delusion or hallucination. Then he says ‘ah just kidding, love ya babe!’
Me on the other hand got nearly straight As in highschool, went to Uni and got two Bachelor’s Degrees in the time it took 1/3 of my classmates to drop out with nothing. Ive since worked for a large tech firm, a logistics company and that nonprofit, doing data analytics/programming, etc.
So yeah my family are just bad people, and I have no problem with them just assuming I am dead.
Where i come from messing with schizophrenic people like that, saying things are a hallucination that are not, or acting like a hallucination is real is considered abuse/neglect. Its actually very dangerous and could significantly worsen her condition… she needs to get out but its quite possible she psychologically trapped with your brother. As sad as it may be saving her isn’t your responsibility to carry though, but if there friendly connections that could help, she may need someone more mature looking over her.
I asked my partner for an extra opinion on your “manic episode” it doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. Manic episodes tend to last hours. This just Appears to be a temporary state of mind.
What i think could more accurately explain it is that you where overloaded and exhausted by sensory experiences which can be physical experience like light and sound but also mental ones like remembering a long to do list, receiving new information. Its very common for autism.
Different from what society seems to assume many autists are very emotional beings but we often struggle to express those feelings or to connect them with neurotypical emotions. We tend to learn automatically to exercise the self control to contain or genuine pure feelings but when we are drained those emotions leak, which can actually be a really good positive moment of reflection and selfgrowth… granted if your with good people willing to listen in kindness.
I hope your in a better spot with better people where you are now. Being family i assume it may be hard to really get away from those people but i wish you strength in keeping their nose out of your mind.
I would tell my other family members what you just said about my brother, and they would tell me I am delusional.
Yeah, she needs help. Is she gonna get it? Probably not.
She comes from the Mormon FLDS cult. She once described to me that when she was a teen, her then baby brother fell and had a rusty nail pierce into his skull.
Mom decided a bandage would be fine.
Fast forward 15 years, baby brother has a slew of mental disorders and recently suicided.
But you know what, after how many times I bent over backwards to help her and my bro, and they basically just gaslight me about everything, all the time?
I dont care. Theyre /perfect/ for each other: both are manipulative liars with differing flavors of addiction problems and insanity, so hooray for their toxic co dependant relationship.
And yes… I know that having normal human emotions, while talking about subjects that illicit normal human emotions, in normal humans, is in fact normal.
Sorry if I sound dismissive but… after years and years of handling all my family’s emotional problems for them and being rewarded with less than nothing…
I feel free.
Yes, what happened to me nearly killed me many times, and I am lucky to be alive at all.
But it all opened my eyes.
So much less stress. Yes, being homeless, without money for food was actually /less/ stressful than constantly trying to figure out how to please my ridiculous family members without angering them all the while I am never allowed to express any anger toward them whatsoever.
I… dont know exactly where I am going to go now. I am in a motel, halfway across the country, that at least I can afford to live in and eat for the whole month.
It was very difficult to get here. Torn ligaments, broken bones, torn muscles, starvation, exposure, and so many fentanyl addicts to get the fuck away from.
I have a lot of talents and skills. I would like to make my own video game someday, with those talents and skills.
First I gotta get my ID replaced, and probably fix up my credit score (all my cards were stolen) before I can actually rent anywhere.
I figure I can actually get a Steam Deck and dual boot it as a workstation with the dock. Seems like the most computational bang for your buck, better than any laptop I can see for a similar price.
Its also portable in case I have to move again!
Have any games actually been /developed/ on a steam deck? That might be a first if I can pull that off haha.
A steam deck is basically an arch linux laptop. I bet there are ways you could connect it to a bigger monitor and keyboard to simulate a proper pc though part of why it performs well might be the lower res for the smaller internal display.
There are some great free options to learn game design. Godot, blender. I am most certain its doable to build something but getting a livable wage as an indie game dev itself is a real challenge. Watch indie game the movie for reference on it. Chatgpt, even the free version can also quickly help you get up to speed to plan such kind of project. (Its also a huge autistic blessing to get an ai perspective on how your mails/messages can be interpreted and how you could interpret mails/messages from others.
Speaking as someone who has studied game development, i hope to make my own games aswell but purely as a hobby cause id be unrealistic to believe to get an income out of it. i could never accept a job in the industry where my talent is exploited for profit so even as a portfolio it wouldn’t do.
Ah yes excellent, you actually agree with me!
So yeah, big suprise that me, autistic data analyst is also pretty deep into FOSS stuff.
My plan would be to dual boot it with PopOS! I jave been using (and actually doing quite a lot of useful testing) for PopOS! untill my life shittified. I am very familiar with it at this point, and at least the way I was using it on an AMD GPU/CPU(x86/64) was /very/ stable, amd because its ultimately based off of debian, it has a /huge/ library of free software.
The Steam Deck actually has an official dock now, basically quite similar to a laptop dock… set it in, and the dock connects to keyboard mouse monitor external controller, etc.
And I have already been learning Godot for a while too! Especially after Unity has just kind of shit the bed in terms of the recent ‘you owe us a cut of all the profits’ bullshit, Godot seems like a great option.
I have already found a lot of good tutorials and used them to prototype basic map system, third and first person animations and camera movements, and Ive already spent time blocking out about the first year of getting core systems and mechanics in place. Godot Script or whatever is very similar to Python, which I have a lot of experience in.
I am also a decent writer for dialogue and such, and could honestly just use chatgpt to fill in the gaps haha, and I could use speech synthesis until I can afford to pay voice actors. Also, I know how to 3D model and do textures as well!
The most time consuming things for me personally would probably be adding in more custom animations, as that isnt something I have prior experience with.
Mixamo does have a lot though, and I may be able to sort of isolate parts of them and have other anims be partially or totally procedural.
As for player models themselves, Godot already has something like a plugin called like HumanCreator or something, which would serve as good foundation for a character creator, and could also be set to use various bounded variables as presets for different NPC races or factions or whatever.
Beasts and animals are a bit trickier, but I can always try to tackle that /after/ I have made decent progress on other parta of the game.
Further, as I have often been bored with not much elae to do, I’ve already spent a lot of time writing down worldbuilding ideas which also inform, impact and in some cases define much of the actual gameplay I am going for… backdrop lore for the world itself etc.
Finally: I do not need to immediately be making a living wage, as I have SSDI to keep me alive until I feel that what I have ia good enough to start up the kickstater, indiegogo, or steam early access.
While you could always try PopOS i would expect the hardware and customization to Arch to perform better. Valve needed the best gaming performance and making games tends to require a similar or slightly higher performance then what playing will require.
For world building i can recommend obsidian as a good note taking app to connect dots and links between different files, there are some great tutorials about it. If you can afford it chatgpt plus can be mighty powerful as you can program a specific gpt for specific world building needs, a culture specialist, a character specialist, a storywritter, a dialogue and book generator,… each can hold multiple text files which it can reference from.
I am expecting game development to change a lot the coming years thanks to AI, i have seen some early experiments of ai generated animations. Personally i would keep things basic for a start and focus purely on game play and coding. Games and ideas change as you build on them and looks are most easy to change later.
Best of luck, stay safe, i am rooting for you!
I again very much appreciate the advice, and its nice to know /someone/ is rooting for me lol.
Now… this may be an unfair criticism at this point but:
When I first got into Arch (and this was /before/ the Steam Deck was a thing) I found it to be a chaotic mess that required reading literally hundreds of pages of /unofficial community wiki documentation that was often wrong/ to even get a stable bare metal build of Arch working that could actually you know like function as a working computer, without having to bugfix for 3 hours before I could use basically any program… and then some major dependency would update, conflict with another major dependency and blam back to ok now I have to rethink my ENTIRE arch build AGAIN.
Oh, right. The community was basically just awful. Terrible.
PopOS! on the other hand was uh… dl iso, flash, boot, run installer, reboot, then install apps and configure the OS, and I rarely ever had a dependency update bork the whole OS.
Now, granted, that was 1) When I was less well versed in linux and 2) Before the Steam Deck, so its possible that the Steam Deck OS has more or less corralled the expanded Arch Universe into actually having some sane standards merely by being the biggest and most important fish in the Arch pond.
Though I still am fond of PopOS!, I will give a more desktop oriented configuration of Arch a try as a dual boot, and I would be very appreciative if you could point me toward an Arch config that is know to work with reasonable stability on a Steam Deck, if such a thing exists.
Please let it have at least by default a DE, or configurable DEs either in the installer or in different flavored downloadable isos.
Yeah, I was trying out Arch back when it did not by default have a DE and you had to manually figure out all the dependencies to install one, via CLI.
Please dear god do not put me through that again lol.
I will try out Obsidian… is that available on F Droid, Aurora, NeoStore or just plain old Google App Store? Just got the shitty $200 phone from a grocery store right now.
I will look into ChatGPT maybe later, after I am actually living somewhere hopefully permanently. Did not know you can customize different use case for it now, very neat!
I also have seen some procedural methods of generating animations in demonstrations for research papers…
… but there was one tutorial I found of someone implementing… not quite as good, but probably a framework that could be built into something close to GTA’s style of ‘when the world or objects clip into your character, it modifies their animations so they do not clip through the world or objects’… already, in Godot, with available code to just grab.
You would probably have to do a bit more work to get it up to Euphoria engine quality, but this guy already figured out the fundamentals /and implemented them in Godot/, so thats why I was considering it.
You are absolutely correct though that ultimately that is not really a core feature and probably shohld not be first priority.
I am thinking though that procedural level design is going to be a fairly important core feature of what I am going for.
This may sound absurd for a single dev, but I would like to make something that can eventually be turned multiplayer, but is initially single player for early dev and testing purposes. Stability testing with NPCs, really want to make more in depth AI routines for both combat and non combat tha most games have, present in all NPCs.
Hub zones would be defined cities or encampments that feature a higher number of NPCs, but are smaller than the overworld map, and are where a lot of NPCs would just be going about their daily business, a bit more in depth simulation than just MMO style quest givers just standing there waiting for you.
I am guessing that having a small town that actually feels alive, with actual people doing actual normal people things, and have a decent amount of them, the hub zones will either need to just be totally disconnected from the rest of the game as its own contained level… or perhaps i can come up with some lore and gameplay friendly way to make it so the rest of the world is graphically opaque on the outside or less expensive to render, and all the other AIs of the world and other hub zones go into some kind of simplified simulation state, or just pause or something?
Probably would also be a kind of safe zone for players to more safely socialize in, enforced either by a world/game mechanic, or just lots of npc guards. Still brainstorming that part. Procedural generation could possibly be used to simply lay the foundation of multiple differing hubs simply as a dev tool so i dont have to level design tens or settlements/cities.
Then you would have the overworld, larger but more sparsely populated by npcs, and with a hopeful balance between graphical goodness and draw distance. For actually making the overworld I am going to attempt to grab a decent quality heightmap of the real world (game is set in real world, a bit in the future), then manipulate it in either Krita or perhaps a decent open source 3d heightmap editor, then possibly use some procedural generation to paint trees, bushes, rocks, handle cliffsides and valleys where the heightmap resolution is insufficient to handle the terrain convincingly, abandoned cars, garbage, etc… instead of manually plopping them all in, as seemingly every modder of every game that has ever been modded does.
In the overworld would be more or less dungeon entrances of various kinds. Like the hub zones, the dungeons would be basically seperate levels from the rest of the game, with every AI not in your particular dungeon going into a simplified simulation state to allow for more complex and numerous AI baddies or what not to exist in the dungeon, without murdering your oc or framerate.
Due to the setting of the game, theres a lot of tectonic activity going on, sometimes a volcano might go off or something, maybe an asteroid or satellite impacts the ground and changes the terrain, so different psuedo random world events could cause some ‘dungeon entrances’ to pop into being, others to disappear. The dungeons themselves I would like to be able to have basically procedurally generated, with a number of different styles of dungeons.
Add this all up and you get something approximating say Fallout New Vegas… or maybe Kenshi…, but the overworld itself changes, and the actual high risk high reward dungeon areas actually organically change simply as time goes on in the game, so that no two playthroughs are the same.
I could also make it so that, when various conditions are met, various NPCs dispositions toward you changes such that, among other things, they could start you off on various quest paths that may have large impacts on the world , a specific faction, or a hub zone.
Then if the single player works… make at least part of the game multiplayer. Yeah I know God help me with that rofl.