Backstage of an Indie game developer currently working on a third person shooter. ES-EN-FR #videogames #gamedev #indiegamedev
Viña del mar, Chile.
Joined January 2020
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Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
I was a programmer my entire life, worked extremely hard, very successful, my code made millions…
Last night, I spoke to Xcode and told it to create a Swift app for MacOS that had a drop zone for HTML files and to convert the animation into 4k still screenshots and assemble them into a ProRes 422 .MOV.
Kept editing in Final Cut Pro and 20 minutes later, 2400 lines of code were written and it works absolutely beautifully. It added common quality of life features without asking.
I do not recommend anyone start down the traditional programming path. AI is the disruptive technology that turns entire industries upside down. Learn accordingly.
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
I can't express how lucky I was to have spent my formative years with an internet that was shaped by >110 IQ nerds instead of third world content farms struggling over 5$ of ad revenue
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
I sold my first company for $15M and took home $497,982. owned 4.8% at close.
gross to me was $709,275, taxes took $211,293. that math is why I own 88.02% of everything I've built since
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
You have to fall in love with your process, not the trophies that come with it.
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
to all the people vibecoding games
FYI the "coding" part of a game is very easy now and takes maybe 25~% tops of the work
the bulk of it is artwork, assets + animations, map design, game design, and iteration
and none of that is easily AI-able
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
I think the main thing AI has taught me, through all the time savings it brings, is that I’m not a very interesting person
Faced with a surplus of free time, I realize I don’t really have hobbies besides content consumption
I’m forced to conclude that I don’t have very deep friendships, and am not a core member of any particular community
I’m not very cultured, I’m finding, and don’t have abiding interests in art or literature or history or much that isn’t directly related to my work
I have a work-centric life, in other words. AI pulls back the curtain on just how impoverished such an existence is, by disabusing me of its necessity
Given the freedom I’ve always said I wanted, I’m at a loss as to what to do with it, except plow myself even harder into work, thus exacerbating the lesson
There’s nothing more confronting to humans than freedom
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
My reply to someone considering starting a video game company:
The distribution of possible rewards for starting a video game company are generally not very good today. The market is well served, and gaining a foothold requires strong execution on both business and product issues, along with a substantial amount of luck. Plan to burn through seven figures with a not-great chance of making it back.
If you do go for it, some bits of advice:
Identify your customers clearly before you start. Not just a broad community, but specific people, and imagine them as you make decisions.
Initially, build the smallest, most concise game you can imagine anyone paying for. It will still take much longer than you expect.
Once something exists, hill-climb the value. Hopefully you will have some elements that clearly bring joy to people, which you can magnify. There will inevitably be tons of things that people find confusing, frustrating, or just boring that you will need to fix.
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
gonna play the heck out of GTA 6 simply because of its status as a cultural artefact: the final big game built before LLMs
no-one will ever invest this much in a game again, no software will ever encode this quantity of hands-on human labour again. the last of the great pyramids
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
One thing game devs should learn is ABS: Always Be Shipping.
I learned that working with @notch As Mojang grew and new coders joined the team, there were complaints about old code/shortcuts/“bad” technical decisions.
My response was usually: without those decisions, none of us would be here. There probably wouldn’t even be a Minecraft if everything had been done the “correct” way from the start.
Games are explorative. You build, test, cut, rewrite, hack things together, and keep moving. A shipped imperfect system beats a perfect system that never makes it into players’ hands.
I’ve never worked on a game where you didn’t have to go back and touch old code/systems later anyway.
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
After coding 100% agentic for 6 months, my key observation is that software design is more important than ever.
Felipe Reed Game Developer retweeted
Remember: Game designers in the 80s and 90s were computer science majors who loved literature, classic fantasy and AD&D. There is a very obvious reason the AAA market had been declining for so long. I don't need to spell it out.
