The Poor Man's 3D Camera (2017)
etodd.ioNice writeup!
Did this game ever launch? Is there a playable version? The official website is broken [0] and the Steam page still says "Coming soon" [1]
Hi, author here. Sadly, I had to cancel it. The source code is here: https://github.com/etodd/lasercrabs (I briefly tried to rebrand and release it as-is). The story is here: https://etodd.io/2023/06/27/making-games/
Great writeup. A lesson in troubleshooting.
One thing I don't get though is the programmer's choice of a tripod bot. It seems like the least stable bot form. Once a leg is lifted the bot should begin to rotate towards the unsupported side. Having two legs in the air at the same time should be a no-go. At that point it begins to make sense to have thrusters on the underside to keep it stable or to have it gyroscopically stabilized.
I know it's just a game but the whole exercise was about tweaking things until they made physical sense to the players. This tripod bot choice made no sense to me.
I wasn’t too worried about the spiderbot legs since they had no impact on gameplay. The bots originally had four legs. Over time, triangles became a major part of the visual motif of the game, so I slowly changed all the squares to triangles and everything had to come in threes.
Discussed at the time:
The Poor Man's 3D Camera - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15797045 - Nov 2017 (36 comments)
Author has a similar post on his blog, poor man's multithreading, took me down a rabbit hole for many many months getting equivalent in Qt for a multithreaded opengl renderer 8 years ago. Ended up learning a lot on profiling, memory alignment, rolled some toy stuff like a circular buffer, lightweight mutex and a serialization lib. Fun painful times but probably wouldn't do it again. Funnily enough it was also one of the first things I asked gpt when it became widely available and it laid out a decent enough example with glfw and stdlib.