Item — HN Reader

There was an interesting profile on Lucas Pope in Ars Technica years ago. [0] What struck me was that he's very development tools oriented. Development not as a means to an end, but as much a love letter to the process itself. Comes through in every aspect of what he does. Couldn't come up with anything more inspiring if I tried tbh.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/from-uncharted-to-obr...

2 comments

Adding a new game object to a game increases its complexity ("combinatorial explosion"). Good tools are needed to deal with this.

"Great tools help make great games. Spend as much time on tools as possible" (c) J.Romero.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFziBfvAFnM&t=884s

The biggest "explosion" there has got to be Dwarf Fortress, where the interplay of every object and aspect of the game causes some really interesting emergent behaviour (like catsplosions or whatnot).

You tend to get these kind of emergent behaviors easily when you design a game around entity component systems.

This goes for any type of product development. Speed is a requirement for innovation (you need to try lots of things to see what sticks, and if you can only try things slowly then not many things will be tried), and good tooling is a requirement for speed.

Best, of course, is if you find ways to use off-the-shelf tooling (maybe with some exaltation) so you can spend more time on the thing you're supposed to be doing. Either way, you should have a toolmaker in the team.

this person ships

founders: you want a toolmaker that can build fast iterable tools that effectively balance the needs of Eng/Product/Design when you grow past 10+.