You conveniently left out the qualifier of my statement.

That I have ever known.

Probably unlike the field of electrical engineering, every /single/ person I have known in my life has relied on me to provide free expertise in software related issues of all possible kinds, and also simultaneously mocked my expertise and ability any time I suggest they do something or use something that will actually work, but they do not think it will because -insert utterly nonsensical concern about issue they do not even know how to use basic vocabulary to describe-.

This is apparently a rather unique phenomenon that happens to those who are programmers and know software.

Software and programming is in every modern computerized device, but an astounding amount of people who use such devices both realize they are not experts and will seek the help of a software expert for assistance, but will also feel as if they are better able to solve a problem when -literally any random thing they do not like for any random reason is different in any other way-.

If you attempt to explain anything to these people at this point it does not matter if you are correct, they will be angry and abuse you quite often.

I do not hate the tech illiterate people I have known because they are ignorant.

I hate them because they are abusive.

Finally, when it comes to the kind of game I want to make?

I want to make something I would enjoy playing.

And I have found that I enjoy games that offer a mix of skill based challenge in the sense of being able to quickly execute exact commands to the controller rapidly and with precision, but also with a larger sense of strategy, and also with multiple possible ways to solve a problem, some that are obvious, and some that are non obvious and encourage thinking outside the box.

And I have also found that every technically incompetent person I have known is utterly incapable of enjoying this kind of gameplay.

And that is fine. As I said, I want to make a game for myself and people with similar game preferences, and mental capacities.

I have been surrounded by abusive morons my whole life and I have no interest in making a game that appeals to such people.

Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner.

Sure if you are a bigger entity and have more money to throw around, there are other engines that’ll probably be a much better fit.

If youre a broke ass indie dev, I am not really seeing a better choice than Godot right now, as youre not gonna be able to afford a more expensive engine without /usually/ pulling some kind of asset flip scam type thing.

Sure there are some very good more niche 2D only development engines, but even with a lot of them youve still got some kind of liscensing to deal with.

That basically leaves Unity and … OGRE, as far as I am aware for possibly good choices for a 3D game.

Unity is currently self destructing, and OGRE, at least as far as I have tried, is pretty hard to get a native dev environment working on linux. Maybe I missed something or got confused, but I kept running into error after error trying to set up its more advanced features, which seem to require windows specific dependencies.

I guess you could run it in a VM but that seems basically insane, and even if I was to set up a dedicated Windows machine just to develop on OGRE, it is far more clumsy to work with than Godot.

That is a neat story, thanks for sharing!

Best I’ve got doesn’t have to do with Godot, but I think its neat.

The year is 2003 or 4, and I am beta testing the 0.5 release of Project Reality, which later more or less evolved into Squad.

I know nothing about coding at this point being still in middle school.

What I do possess is apparently pattern recognition.

We are in a last minute waaay overextended beta testing session trying to iron out a mystifying bug:

The whole new feature of implementing squad specific kit bags that are only obtainable at certain in game locations is working.

But… sometimes it is not. At all. Sometimes you can grab an unlimited number of kits without restriction, sometimes you cant and have to follow the newly coded rules that limit kits by being in a squad, and having a total pool of requestable kits per squad and per your whole team.

We get in vehicles, we get out of vehicles.

We go to different parts of the map.

We die then respawn via suiciding.

We die then respawn via being shot, killed as infantry with different weapons, killed inside different vehicles.

We join and leave amd create and disband squads.

We die on the water, we die on the land.

We die on islands, we die on beaches.

We shall never surrender!

Er, well the goof off testers wont, the devs are getting frustrated.

Absolutely none of this has any discernable effect on the problem.

After what must have been about 3 hours… we are basically just fucking about as testers as the actual devs including the one who actually coded the new system is in despair, we are gonna have to push back the massively advertised release date of about 8 hours from now.

Fucking about a bit and watching random zany attempts at most impressive suicides with those who we are at this point joking are just the chosen ones able to spawn unlimited specialist kits with c4 and anti tank weapons…

Something clicks.

I hold down the tab button to bring up the scoreboard with player names.

I start telling a few of the testers who have not already left to try spawning kits at various locations.

Everyone goes sure man why not.

After doing this with myself and 5 other people… I have a theory.

Everyone who has non alphanumeric characters in their name is able to break the kit limitation rules, everyone else is bound by them.

The lead dev is skeptical, but checks the code again anyway.

About a minute later he screams over the mic on teamspeak.

About 10 minutes later, he has fixed what was probably a really simple but easily overlooked bug in how early python parses string values and passes them to other functions or data types.

The server is back up, everything works correctly now, and Project Reality 0.5 is released only a few hours behind schedule, instead of the next week or two when the team would be able to organize another large scale testing bout.

Lol and thats the story of how i saved a mod release date wooo!