I ran an experiment to see how far it could get with a top-down 2d game, like a more challenging version of "draw a pelican." I'm waiting on Fable to rewrite the whole thing now, but I was impressed by how far Opus 4.8 got with it: https://github.com/jmtame/scrapland
Started out as a one-shot attempt, but ~200 prompts later it's at a place where it's at least fun to watch the AI teams destroy each other.
Yep that’s right. First sentence was poorly worded, but I was trying to figure out why moving to Austin made me feel nostalgia, turns out it was the Cumulus clouds. Both Austin and Illinois have them, but the Bay does not.
When I moved from the Bay Area to Austin, the first thing I realized: I missed seeing Cumulus clouds, which I saw a lot growing up in the midwest. Bay Area either has blue skies or Cirrus clouds, but never did see Cumulus clouds there.
Thanks for sharing this. Going to try it out on a game inspired by Rust. It's helpful re: the point on rodney - I've had a hard time getting the testing to work well in the browser.
This comment should be higher given how much FUD is in these comments. Hacker News having a meltdown about a bunch of backoffice folks getting laid off while they’re still aggressively hiring SWEs is… something
I remember my first few weeks of Claude Code. The high will wear off as you bump into the limitations, and then it starts to feel like you're more of a "manager of a junior-ish dev." The work shifts to clarity of intent and capturing edge cases, rather than purely coding. It's a fun time when you first jump in, but don't be surprised when your excitement reverts back to baseline.
Fair enough, I tend to avoid overly negative people. Criticism can come from a good place to suggest improvements (radical candor), but agreed that some of the comments are just personal attacks. I think we're both in agreement that those aren't people we'd want to work with.
Nice, nothing like a little personal bias to inject into an interview process. If you can't handle criticism and you're just looking for sycophants, you're probably not the type of employer or hiring manager most people want to work for anyway.
The origin story of Rust is classic: they got tired of Day Z and wanted to make it better, so they hired some random contractor to copy Day Z with elements of Fortnite and Minecraft, the developer complains that he's entitled to more money from the success of the game, lawsuit follows, and then Facepunch supposedly claims the original version was so buggy they have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Unclear if they were just trying to start fresh so the lawsuit wouldn't follow them forever, but it started out as just a clone of another game and they turned it into a hugely successful business (and an incredible game). Most games have a short shelf life, but I've watched at least over the past 4-ish years, and the rate that they continue to push changes is impressive.
Rust has so many compelling features as a game. It was the first game where I felt like I thought about it while I wasn't playing it, because your character remains "in the game" and your base can be raided even if you log off. I don't play a ton of online games, but that was a very new and different concept when I first discovered Rust.
The game reminds me of sitting down at a poker table in a casino. It's very unforgiving - you grind, invest a lot of time, and make calculated bets as to whether you can win or lose a raid, but you can instantly lose everything in a failed raid.
I wish someone would make a browser-based version that was fun to play, and I've thought about it for some time, but the struggle is scoping an MVP that is as compelling given the constraints (eg a 2d or top-down version makes it harder to do things like build multi-story buildings and raid them).
Started out as a one-shot attempt, but ~200 prompts later it's at a place where it's at least fun to watch the AI teams destroy each other.