🌞🌞🌞 Week 2 of Claude Code It's been a wild week, and my AI sentiment is growing. It's a powerful, but dangerous tool. But like a knife can be used for bad or good. Gen AI IS bad, mainly because it allows bad capitalistic actors that don't care about other humans to keep them out of the process rather than making space for them to thrive. However in the hands of the right people, it is absolutely an accelerant. I'm an automation engineer with HIGH standards for good automation. So finding the right way to train AI and the right things to add/remove from the workflow is crucial to being good at it. Quickly realizing that several harnesses/success gates aren't as necessary as I thought. So if you aren't cleaning up things regularly and rethinking your workflow, you are wasting valuable time/tokens. Your ROI on AI starts to drop. I did hit max usage on my $100 plan for Fable, and 84% for all other models. My primary goal was teaching it everything I've been doing for the last 3 years. I needed it to understand the timeline and the goals. Both for our own record and also for its own understanding of WHY the code is very different. Took me about 3 days to fully go through with it. And after that the rest was really, how do I get it introduced to what we are doing on a small scale. So since the end of the first week was creating a good art pipeline that supports human artists, I decided to have that art pipeline output interact with the framework. And this morning was the final test of something with basic art functionally fully working landed and meeting the standards of the framework enough to work with it. Now every widget's art comes from that art pipeline, and the `Close` button at the bottom of the screen was also created as its own component for the framework and works exactly as I need it to. Close the UI. Well act as an action button really. So this was the first slice of getting AI into our own company's work. And I feel really good about what's about to start happening with our own product. The basic art styles of all the widgets now come from our art pipeline, the widget scaffolds to work with the framework are now built via AI. And that close button is all of it working together for new functionality. This next week is getting my second brain online and then teaching AI to do a larger part of the framework to add more substantial features. I'm stoked for the future ahead.

😔😔😔 Sad face... this is TOO much like @BroccoliGames Coffee Caravan. Like use the power of AI to be creative at least. You have the power of a genie at your fingertips folks. Use that extra time you gain to do research and experiment. It's a beautiful time to be an indie.

Sadly not everyone has the privilege to make that sacrifice. Ultimately, I had to make the choice to switch because it's been so hard getting a job otherwise. This space is filled with so many who disagree with my own opinion, experience, and passion that I can't get a job and can't feed my family. So I hope you understand that while you are able to make that moral choice, not all of us can. Some people can vote with their wallet, but that's only the people who actually have the privilege of having a wallet right now. The real problem with AI really is the capitalistic side of it. That it robs people of their survivability. I have near 25 years of engineering experience. I always felt like I could fall back on that if things didn't work out in game dev. In the past year that relevance of that ability disappeared so fast. I respect those of you who can afford to be anti-AI, but I hope you don't judge those of us who have had to make the choice to switch for survival sake. Because it was designed to basically force us into this situation at some point. And I can't get a normal job any more. When you've been paid at a certain level, every normal job just worries that eventually you'll leave so they go with someone else. Being "over qualified" has been a real problem for my survivability. And there's too many people in this space with too high an ego that have barred me from getting work behind the scenes. So to the few people that have given me opportunities, I appreciate you more than you know. 💖💖💖

🥺🥺🥺 Day 2 of Claude Code Alright I'm 48 hours in y'all, and 2nd game fully published. The first was just diving in, this one was about building the beginning of the foundation. Went from 28%->77% usage on the $20 plan, but it was necessary. I'll explain below.

😅😅😅 Day 1 of Claude Code There's an inevitability happening in our industry that we can't ignore. AI is everywhere so how do we adjust as game devs and still respect humans. I have some ideas, but I have to learn first. Published after my 1st literal 24 hrs in Claude.

Day 10 of UI/UX Skills Sooo with that framework revelation was making sure my MegaGrant demo was accessible through a walkable pad. Sooo here's that. You can leave and come back easily. I also realized a thing, so I'm making some framework upgrades to show off said thing.

Day 9 of UI/UX Skills Had a revelation the other day that my framework was actually close to handling what I need for UI demoing. So committed to some framework upgrades to be able to walk onto a pad and show the UI only while on the pad, and dismiss the UI with a button.

I've seen all these posts on AI games made in a weekend or a week... Where are the AI games that have been running for 6+ months that post about their dev experience? Can anybody point me in that direction so I can study the longer term value of AI? Cuz I don't see it yet 😅😅😅

Day 8 of UI/UX Skills Learned a lot by adding this frame. Lots of little lighting and shaping tricks. I started to freehand without the tutorial near the end to start creating the effect I wanted. Really starting to feel the understanding. 😊😊😊 Open for Verse/UI work

Day 7 of UI/UX Skills Going through tutorials to build my knowledge base. The goal isn't custom quality yet, it's committing time and building knowledge. Using AI just for asking questions. Invest in your own skills, with AI for assistance. This is a Candy Crush button 😊😊😊

Day 6 of UI/UX Skills Spent the day researching and learning about variants and making a component with settings to tweak a button with various properties. Will be useful in the future. So much to learn. Looking for potentially a 6 month contract for Verse/UI work folks 😉😉😉

Day 5 of UI/UX Skills Sooo getting into the actual art side of things. Never been an artist, but I feel like UI is more mathematical so it'll be easier to build the skills. It's also responsive!!! WOOHOO!! Still on the hunt for commissions in Verse+UI, hit me up folks 😊😊😊

Day 4 of UI/UX Skills Pushing the boundaries a bit and focused on the generation of variety for widgets and how to go about that in the future. Each feed now has options/combinations. Next up will be creating something from scratch in Figma. Excited to get into it! 😊😊😊

Day 3 of UI/UX Skills If I'm going to demo consistently to get commissions, I needed a better system. Inspired by the UI template, I've setup a demo room, and adjusted the Scene Graph feed components to be modular to show off one UI piece at a time or as many as I want. 😊😊😊

Day 2 of UI/UX Skills Working on the ability countdown using a timer widget from Epic. Created a new material that does the math/texture with a duration/progress. Closer... need to add a colon still and add it to the widget fully. Getting there 😉😉😉 Open for UI commissions

Upgrades to my reusable UI Feed system. Figured out Exit anim setups, as well as an optional capacity for Feeds. The notis at the bottom also have a duration. Next is Ability Timers I'm open for UI/UX commissions. I can do the verse, and I make them designer friendly 😉😉😉

A break from game dev to live the nerd dream 🥰🥰🥰

Notification feed with dynamic widget sizes, but consistent slide speed yay!!! Next is timer and exit animations.

Next work for one of my two clients requires a few "feeds". So started working on a generic Feed that is primarily UMG and intuitive for designers that can support different widgets. Verse handles the stackbox positioning and adding widgets, but widgets animate themselves.

UEFN still has a long way to mature. Give it time. Even if you include Creative 1.0 we wouldn't be at this point yet.

Love this interaction. People like @tomjank have valuable, hard to advertise skills that I think a lot of people overlook in this ecosystem. Design sense from life experience like Tom's Pixar storyboarding history make a huge difference in your end product that adds up 🔥🔥🔥

Starting to get into the 3D part of my framework... so just learning some of the new APIs. Yay for scene graph cameras. Was able to create one of my favorite effects without post processing.😊😊😊 Next exploration will be virtual pointers.

I'm sorry WHAT?!?! We seriously got Alchemy before GTA 6 🤣🤣🤣

Cool that is roughly my assumption as well. I have high standards for automation as an automation engineer which is why I haven't taken the time to dive in much myself to explore cuz I know right now it isn't worth my time for my expectations. I always follow this:

Highly recommend this video if you haven't seen it, my favorite "onboarding" talk out there: youtu.be/fbzhHSexzpY?is=jZP9…

Still need to add cross Resource communication so the logic can scale and you can graph a "Prop" from other parts of the system. But I've already got a rough draft implementation using Scene Graph Events that should work. And when that's done, I'll have a better fancier demo.

Every "Prop" is an event stream that saves the latest value that is spit out to be used in things like computed properties. Any "Prop" can be accessed in any editable as a string identifier surrounded by square brackets. Those numbers in Min/Max can be a Prop ref instead.

The above results in the below. The full framework currently clocks in at less than 700 lines of code and supports 3 data types. The values can be referenced by any other component in the system and the editables can take dynamic values from other components in the system.

Nearly 3 years of my life devoted to this... I'm sooo close. So far the most elegant version of my framework's API, declarative with no direct access to internals. Handling invariants (min/max) via Verse's current parametrics was a nightmare, but I figured it out @TimSweeneyEpic

It's my birthday!!! It's been a crazy busy month of working towards a new routine after moving into a new apartment with my girlfriend. So haven't had time to work for weeks. But I'm getting back into the groove again. Been REALLY wanting to share what I'm working on. 😅😅😅

I missed #PortfolioDay yesterday... since I got my personal game design "grimoire" loaded up for the @chartisgames Mobile Incubator, I wanted to share some old designs for a UGC platform that never came to be. I'm so excited to get back to design work after my framework. 😊😊😊

Unreal Fest was a great time 😊😊😊 Good to touch base with both old and new peeps

Making progress on getting things to work. 😎😎😎 4 displays on my one laptop (@elgato's Prompter screen is just another monitor source). Sony a6000 vertically setup behind the teleprompter. Ignore the random mess and cable layout. 😅😅😅 Just trying to make things work lol

Planning out my new desk setup before I start plugging everything in. Really excited for this new routine after everything I've learned over the years. 😊😊😊 The mic and camera are on arms so the setup can transform and I can record content from different angles. 😎😎😎

End of an era. This was the apartment I moved into WHILE I was interviewing for @FNCreate, where I created that first 2 week UE project to prove my skills. Interviewing 10+ people for 5-ish hours. Now I commit fully to my own company, a life long dream I was too afraid to reach for a long time as I wanted to do it right and have the security of a sure thing. But now I have something that I feel so sure of. I've invested 2.5 years into this one idea that game logic could be so much simpler and have more structure. Something not replaceable by AI, but instead maximizing the ability to comprehend game rules. I'm so excited for the future in my head. I know one day I'll be able to share it and I can't wait for the day people get to see it and understand it. It'll make sense and speak for itself one day. The journey will be long... but that's Irrelephant 😘😘😘

Sooo... since @ImmatureGamer didn't have any 2XLs, I told him it'll at least fit my girlfriend. So I totally got her to rep The Creative Juice Podcast ❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

For those of y'all not in the Unreal Fest discord. I look forward to future events folks. It's been real... Truly... back to work 😘😘😘

So while moving, I found my @Fortnite @wizards_magic cards. Full foil playset of the non lands, primarily to celebrate my time at Epic 😊😊😊

As I prepare to blow up Demo #3 to a scale that shows the framework's potential, I had to up my debugging game a bit. This'll help sooo much lol...

⚠️⚠️⚠️ Public Demo #2!!! Made some quick updates to my framework so I can now do Currencies and I have the ability to create Buy actions using my new Ability Contexts and dynamic text with multi-data type support. Already so powerful after 35 hours of work, demo in replies...

⚠️⚠️⚠️ 2.5 years of working on the same goal over and over again I've recorded the 1st 20 min video of v4 of my framework to demonstrate the beginning of what it can do as I write it from scratch. Maybe it won't make 100% sense to folks yet. But soon it will. Link in replies...

For v4 of the Framework, I'm fully documenting my development so I can look back on it... and potentially share it for others to follow along. For now, it's private. I'm also capturing screenshots and video as I go as well for each entry (the numbers are 30 min segments). 😊😊😊

After months of contract work... I'm finally back to working on my framework again. Starting v4 from scratch before Unreal Fest. 😉😉😉

Saw this comment and want to clarify, maintaining a site like @TheFortForge at such a small scale is not expensive and is more often than not free if you have a dev background. Charging $8/mon and claiming $300 a month in costs at this extremely small scale is misleading 😬😬😬

Example of the view bindings menu moving the order of bindings around, breaking workflow:

This video from @Skadanker helped me when I first started doing custom buttons: youtube.com/watch?v=hNbIrsfr…

3 years... the UEFN space is REALLY starting to look like a legit indie scene. The recent UI updates and total experience has made a HUGE difference in quality and uniqueness from demos to releases. I genuinely love seeing the growth of all my creator peers. Keep going 💖💖💖

The UI update (events) from last week is AMAZING. So I went back and updated my first portfolio game that I put out a few weeks ago. Added a new portfolio as well as improved the UI. BEST part is that the UI switches seamlessly between the portfolios remembering state PERFECTLY!