There are different skills than just physical execution. Pokemon isn’t easy because RNG or because it’s turn based, it’s easy because the NPC team compositions are awful, the AI sucks, and the game only has very lenient soft caps on grinding. A mod like Radical Red solves these things, and I’ve played other turn based games with plenty of RNG which require lots of skill.

This almost sounds like a prediction of contemporary meme culture where every situation or emotion is conveyed though a shared collection of phrases and images.

How do you determine if someone is coming across a post because they searched a keyword? I arrived here because I sort by new comments and someone must have just commented.

I don’t really want to do everything in one language but if I did have to pick it would probably be Julia. It’s slightly simpler than Python, and significantly faster without relying on APIs written in C. And has some really great features like broadcasting, multiple dispatch, and a good type system. The only place I feel like Python has it beat is quantity of libraries and support network, which both basically come from the same origin of just having more users. I’m hoping more data science types switch over in the next few years, since Julia is already great for most things mathematical. And I hope that momentum allows Julia to perhaps reach out to other domains.

For retro games my answer is probably Yoshi’s Island. If you include modern games I’d likely go with Hollow Knight. If VNs count then Echo.

Big fan of Julia for anything that requires a lot of computation. It feels easy to write things in an optimized way without having to work against the language.

I have a soft spot for Common Lisp. It encourages me to write chunks of code that are very evergreen in the sense that I could easily use them in a future project without modification. I don’t find myself using it all that much though.

Write the whole thing, and only then, scrap it and rewrite it. This way you actually have a good understanding of the entire implementation when you are rewriting. When I refractor while writing my draft I will slow myself down and trip over myself, I’ll be way more likely to rewrite something I’ve already rewritten.

Sure there is a limit to the size of projects this can work for, but even for massive projects they can still be broken into decently sized chunks. I’m just advocating for not rewriting function A as soon as you finish function B.

There was Wurm online which was a complicated messy sandbox MMO. I also remember plenty of physics and combat sandboxes in the Flash space. Sim City was a city builder sandbox. As for block building sandboxes there was Infiniminer.

As for survival, many games have had survival elements. A core mechanic of roguelikes is something called a hunger clock. It doesn’t necessarily have to be food based but the idea is a game that is about exploration and conquest having a mechanic that limits exploration creating tension where you have to explore with purpose instead of meandering. Some MUDs might be able to be seen as precursors to massively multiplayer survival games like Rust.