Indie Game Dev is Way Harder Than You Think

Welcome to the stand-up. Today is a extremely special episode. We have Adam Eunice. We have Nolan EI EI-O And of course we have the master vibe coder teach For those that do not know EI EI-O you probably know him through some of his epic games including one Million check boxes and I forget if it's a million chessboards I forget the exact name. What was it again? One million chessboards. Yeah, one million chessboards I just couldn't believe it in my head, but it is truly one million chessboards And then also Adam if you remember the tower he is the pixel king Adam making a insignia the game I believe it is wish listable and demobile at this point. Yeah, you got to go check it out. I'm seeing Sign up or you're a loser. Yeah, wish list and sing the arts team if you're not a broke boy

That was the song that was the song that was the song So this is a very special episode because this is gonna be more towards game development But we don't have our signature game developer Casey with us today Instead we're gonna be talking about probably more of the lifestyle and the choices of what it takes to do More of the indie style gaming and what we're building and I actually first like to start with Nolan Because fun fact about Nolan is he used to be a jane street boy And if you do not know this jane street is a big fan of oh camel. So why are your games not ridden no camel?

Thank you finally asking the real question. I'm glad we're hitting hard at the beginning. Thank you. This is real journalism This is yeah, journalism You know, I think this is the first time that anyone's asked me that which you know might shock you. Yes, that does not shock me at all But unfortunately, honestly, I think there's one of the few people that know what oh camel is so that's okay I wrote One tenth of a game engine in okamel primal have you know anyways? Let's let Nolan talk No, so I I think the answer here is kind of boring to be honest like the tooling that jane street has for writing okamel is just phenomenal Like it's so fun to write okamel there and at least like while I was there

Writing it outside of the firm was just like way less fun than writing it there I think that's changed a lot. I mean tj. I don't know like you've definitely written okamel more is higher than me You're having a good time. You're doing some biving. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah Maybe maybe agents fix this maybe the tooling's just gotten better But uh that was that was most of it Um tooling is Yeah, that's the the ever I don't know the ever present okamel problem of adoption is just like This compiled sometimes, but then I can't get it to work on someone else's machine and I don't understand because this language should be easy to compile But whatever I we're not going to write about okamel, but you should we can have you just come on stream sometime

We'll hang out and write some okamel together would be fine. Oh, they sick. Yeah, I miss it came a lot nice We're gonna make it the number one game if we're gonna take down unity Front down what happened. I don't know. Did you push on a pride? Never we're gonna figure this out. How are we gonna figure this out? That is your problem. Do you guys need the wheel?

Yeah Don't guess where your issues are you can see exactly where they are happening with century get all the context You need to debug any problem because code breaks so fix it faster with century That's right. Yeah, comedy and okamel the the two. Yeah The computer says day one and that's really like the field that okamel is trying to just really we're gonna Adam you use unity. Why do you not use okamel great question?

Honestly, I didn't know about okamel until I That's a unfortunately also a common phrase I've only had a year Yeah, we'll give them some more time. We'll give you don't don't get them distracted right now. He needs to finish and say yeah That's the problem. Hey, we're in the day of agents tj. He can just do a quick rewrite okamel Just hey no mistakes translated all boom okamel in games. Do you have to say make it fun?

Not just oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, that's the key feature for like make a few mistakes here. No hack make a few mistakes But like fun right like fun little like speedrunning. Yes, yeah Make sure it's exploitable make free subtle exploitable speedrunning glitches that will consume some people's entire life Or at least like all of their like teens and 20s. Yes, right. Yeah, like we can you know, but when they're 30 they can yeah they'll move on right We don't want to make such an addictive one that they continue to speed run well into their late 30s That would be a little too much probably Also, they need to buy the sequel the refresh that we nostalgia drop when they hit 30 so we don't want to leave too many

You know, that's part of the problem there just for a summoning so video Now we're talking that's that the key oh, by the way, okay, since we're on this topic Did you know that fortnite rocket writing was also an accidental exploit? So if you don't know if you shoot a rocket someone else can jump and land on the rocket and ride it Until it explodes or hits an object And this was just a thing you could do and epic never Intentionally put that in the game. They only accidentally discovered it was a thing later on Prime knows that because he used to be a fortnite streamer True I used to be a fortnite streamer. That was how we got started Look at you now No, you guys you guys were supposed to not say anything for longer. I was hoping that that would be like a 15-second pause

I know can we zoom it on Nolan's face because he just goes Hmm I'd like to exit this interview All right, all right, all right. Let's actually let's actually get to some real question So yeah, I have to know because I think a lot of people want to know this where did EI EI? Oh come from other than the childhood old McDonald's on Okay, so it was my sister's first word and when Oh, that's right. It was the first like intelligible thing that she said which I don't know Maybe that tells you something about my sister. That's that's for you to decide And when I was like 13 or 14 and he just chose it as a name for the team liquid starcraft forums You all know team liquids Yeah, which I That was I mean, I I had so much fun. I was like, you know, staying up all night watching Starcraft in in Korea

I have like a little sign up here. You can barely see But it has like a little blue line at the top. That's from going to a professional Starcraft game a couple of years ago um in in soul But I picked the name there and then eventually I like started writing mostly about about Dota not not Starcraft Oh Yeah, and it wasn't I mean, this is like right before esports became like big money, right? So it was still a little bit more pre-international No, this was like the first couple of internationals, but Yeah, so you know whatever things were we're taking off, but they weren't where they were now Which wasn't in the same spot. Yeah, but the point is that I have like the first time that I made internet friends was via team liquid

Right like I have a bunch of people that I know from the forums from writing stuff just from like posting You know, I've tens of thousands of posts there and So then when I started making games It wasn't really something I was planning to do for that bomb the thinking was like I hadn't been coding I'd been managing so I was like I'm gonna make some games to kind of remember how to code and then I'll go like start a start up or something And so I picked the name just because I was like well, this is what my internet friends in omias and like it doesn't matter that much Probably if I could like go back in time I would I would maybe think a little bit harder about it, but that is the origin story

Well, if it makes you feel any better Arnold was always told that he needs to change his last name because it was too hard His snatching snitzel as his example that he would give that everyone would say But now his name is iconic. It's the thing you say when you you know Swarchenegger's just like that's the word That is the man and so true you can be kind, you know E.I.E.I.O. when I see an article of E.I.E.I.O. in it you think manly you think Arnold Schwarzenegger Right the connection Governor material follow question. Why Adam C. Eunice this big question here Well, you know It's just a name that stuck you know from from Couldn't couldn't shake it you know I have like a couple Gamertags, but they were never anything that anybody else called me by and so it was never like I never felt comfortable enough

really sticking to one And now yeah now I just used them to safely play online and not be recognized Why why the sea like why are you Adam C. Eunice? Honestly, honestly, I John C. Riley I'm a huge fan of him I was like that's crazy I'm not a little official the middle and if you're not way too quickly, I was like, okay reason I was like we do have a lot of Bractivity so that makes sense No, no it was just uh I think it was just the Twitter handle that I picked And when when I I'm not gonna tell the true story, but I think that's just that's just what happened I just picked it to a handle and what every handle after that it's offline Josh don't cut this well I think it was like I think it was a decision that I thought I made

in an original thought But I realized like a month later that a guy that I went to uni with also had see in his like middle initial and also used it everywhere And I think I just went oh yeah, that's my that's my name and I mean it is my name but But I think adding the C was him. I think he did that and I just yeah It does kind of make you feel very distinguished. I feel like like I like I think too. Yeah, yeah Yeah, mine was because I My parents told me you can't pick an online name That you would get recognized by that you would like, you know say that you would dox yourself So instead of TJ to breeze I picked tdv because I was really far away from that And then now my job is to get recognized on the internet. So take that mommy dad

Uh, no, they actually like that. I make videos. There's a decent chance my dad will watch this and say like You're so stupid. Why do you keep doing that up? Yeah, it took me to see this took me forever to realize that it was TJ like in my head You were just teach for a long time. Yeah, yeah Well, I mean, that's like what a lot of people call like call me teach so that I was like that that works, but uh Guess guess my actual first name do you guys prime? Do you even know?

Obviously, it's uh telescopic jobs telescopic jobs Actually, that's so funny because a lot of people think that that's real still which is insane I made a plugin called telescope for any of them and like a lot of people I think we're like I just told him like I named it after myself after we started this meme of calling me Tells up juniors like that's crazy your parents named you that It's like yeah, that's why I go my teach though Oh, babe. Hey, your name's Timothy right Timothy James Joel Timothy Joel. Yeah, the full docs Yeah, yeah, the full docs. I think it's probably out there. I don't think it's super hard to figure out I'm pretty sure like you can find it with my social security number somewhere. I'm sure

Yeah, what was your what was your social? Yeah, so that's I do wish I still had my beef dude I lost my my golex a lot. Yeah, I lost my beef anymore but Yes, so anyways, enough about my username. Oh, we do have to go back to that when no one said I can't I didn't know your name was Teige it was like teige being Clark Kent and then pulling off the glass of the thing superman It's just like oh teach Yeah, yeah, exactly it's a different guy Completely different guy there. Anyways, all right Well, I have I have plenty more questions, but TJ Would you like to maybe direct us into more serious? I can't believe you stole my okay more question because obviously I was gonna ask that part, but I mean I don't see your name on it

Oh, look at it. I don't see your name on it. I'm looking right at it right now. It has okay. Well in the question. That's mine Um No, I was interested so you guys mentioned offline not part, you know before we were recorded just Knowled in some of how like you got in introduced to making games and part of that was through Adam Which is part of the fun of like we wanted to have you both on at the same time So I thought maybe you could talk about that a little bit and just give a little bit of that backstory and just uh So you know, so the listeners out there could hear that side too Uh Yeah, like backstory to like how we started making games. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah And any complaints about Adam and how he teaches a sprite you can start out in there

Uh, let's see. So I started making games maybe like three three years ago almost exactly three years ago and Originally like this was not really a thing that I was planning to do for particularly long It was mostly a way to get back to coding. I love games. I played tons of games my whole life right used to write about games um and Started making games like really small games in like good dough I think like one bit of advice that you see a ton on the internet I think it's really hard to give good advice about about game development But one I think very broadly applicable often repeated bit of advice is just make a ton of games right like make You know, don't like the classic mistake is that somebody makes an MMO that takes them four years and nobody plays it

And you know, they learn so much along the way Um, so I was making these tiny little games in good dough And found Adam's stuff because I was trying I like made all of this pixel art and it all looks terrible And I was like so like There's this weird thing when you're you're bad at something where you don't understand what like you don't even have the the like Faculty's to understand why it's bad. You're just kind of like looking at it and you're like this is this is terrible And I don't know the first step towards fixing it um And I never got I never got good at pixel art I ended up kind of moving away from making more more typical games into the weird stuff that I do now Um, but one thing that I remember really enjoying about Adam's channel

And sorry Adam to compliment you live He is I think a lot of the stuff that you see on youtube about making games is super edutainmenty Right like the audience of people that kind of want to imagine themselves as game developers is much larger than the set of people that Actually have the time to sink into making a lot of games I mean, I think also probably the audience of people that wants to talk about games is larger than the audience of people that actually makes games and can talk about those in a compelling way Mm-hmm, and so I think early on I was watching all this other content Right, and I watched this video and I'd be feeling like I was learning a lot And then I try to think about like what did I actually learn from this and the answer like nothing right like nothing applicable to making stuff

But when you watch people that are actually doing the work and talking about their decisions, I think you learn a lot more there So that is that is how I ended up finding finding Adam's work and I Made slightly better pixel art learn things like your pixels should be the same size and to use a consistent color palette and other Dead simple things that I think are in literally my first blog on the site Um, but uh, yeah, that's that's that's the background and I think no one played any of the games that I made in that era Not literally nobody, but like Like I got like a hundred players for my second game and I was like oh, this is this is incredible. Mm-hmm It's funny because that's also basically the way that I found Adam was I was just playing around with making some games

Just like the concept of making game and then I found Adam's channel And I also really liked the art and then me and prime somehow found ourselves in a scenario where cursor was like yeah You guys can make a video game go ahead to do it in a water tower Yeah, just put the game in the bag, bro Hey, that says and I was like well, I don't know what to do and we were both like I don't know we should and I was like well the coolest person I know that makes art for games and makes games is Adam I don't know him at all. I've only watched his youtube videos and he happened to be In the US what in the first time what since when Adam that that was a year ago today by the way Yeah, that was literally today a year ago. No

One year ago. Oh, yeah, yeah, it was right in this area. Oh, yeah, that's crazy That's cool. Yeah, I was in I was in San Francisco for GDC Um, and you just you guys just reached out and I was like oh, I'm gonna be around and I hadn't yeah I hadn't been in the US since 2011 Yeah Yeah, and then it was like okay Well, do you want to fly down and make a game in a water tower with us? We're doing a 24 hour stream and And that's how the friendship started which was awesome. So Can second Adam being really good at making YouTube videos if you guys aren't following him. You definitely should And he makes really good pixel art. It's addictive to watch mm-hmm. Yes. Very true. Very true. He's the pixel king

Okay, so then know it so you were starting off you found some stuff there and then like how did you Kind of transition out of like making some more like a doe based stuff into like making crazier things Yeah, so uh, do you all know what the recur center is feels like something you might know about I don't think so. No, okay. This is gonna sound like a almost like an ad. I swear it's not um So early like Middle of that year I went to this place called the recur center, which is like a thing in Brooklyn It's kind of like a writers retreat, but for programming. Oh cool show up for like six or 12 weeks It's free. They like make money with like placing people in jobs or something doesn't really matter

Uh, but the point is like you're in this room with other people that think it would be fun to program for six or 12 weeks on stuff that isn't for their job Right, and I've known about it for a while. It's like 20 minutes from me Um, but I was there and I started kind of experimenting with like doing weird things or remember the first thing that I did Uh, that was stranger was um Do you know the open search spec?

No, um, this is okay. So you know like in chrome if you type in like a website URL and you hit tab Yeah, yeah, and then it like lets you search that website directly, right? Yep Uh, so like you need a spec for that like the browser like how does the browser know what endpoint to hit in order to like search that website open searches that spec It's just an XML document you throw uh, you mentioned it like the the head of your your next file and um Yeah, no, I mean it's old, right? There's also like 14 things called open search, but this is the open search search spec So I happen to know um or I'd kind of like remember that there's this extension of the spec that let's You offer search suggestions

So like you can offer an alternative endpoint and you like hit that endpoint And the endpoint returns back like suggestions for what you might be searching for which makes a lot of sense, right? Did you make a dungeon crawler? I didn't make a dungeon crawler Um, but I was like you know what like all you need for a game is like you're typing Or like you have some input mechanism and some output mechanism and this works right like you type a character It hits this endpoint the endpoint returns suggestions the suggestions are automatically displayed in the browser Like you can make a game there and so I made wordle um, what I called I called wardle Not knowing that that is Josh wardle who created world's last name um

And then like met him like a year later and that was that was funny, but um So I made that and I was like in this environment where instead of just kind of making it and shipping it off into the void They're all these like nerds around who are like wait. This is like this is kind of funny Uh, this is this is compelling um and someone posted on hackernos at the first time that I got on hackernos And I think like that is how I started kind of nearing and I'm like oh, I like like it's funny to make computers do weird things It's funny to make jokes um and so I started noticing like I went back and I made some more traditional games While I was there and I remember the last thing that I made it was like a tiny little

Vampire survivor's clone. Oh, like you know people were like doing all sorts of things like right because vampires The virus had just popped off. Yeah, and I was showing it at this gameplay test And people were giving me feedback and I could like feel myself because I'd made some more weird stuff by them I could feel myself like not like being like I don't want your feedback Not because like it's not good feedback because like I'm in I don't want to make games like this And like you're giving me advice. I'm like a thing that like I wish I hadn't made Because like everyone around me it was at this uh this the bar that we were talking about earlier Yeah, um had all these like weird interesting experimental things

And I'm just not like I'm much better at that than I am at building like a beautiful well thought out You know kind of within genre game So that's kind of where I uh I think that that was the the thing that really pushed me towards getting weirder and weirder and weirder I do have to say I thought it was the most programmer description of a game of all time was Well, you just have some inputs and then you have outputs. So it's like that's a game Yeah, it is so this is I think about this a lot with like the the stuff when I'm making a game that is running in another application So like that or like I have like flappy bird running in macOS finder or whatever Um, that is how like the terms that I'm thinking of you like find like a surprising way

That an application gives you input and output like for example in mac finder I can query to determine that you have clicked on a file Um, and like that is that is sufficient input right and then output can be renaming files Um, this is a terrible way to think about like real games that people want to play Yeah, but it's a great way to invent games that you can write blog posts about the people Which hey If that's uh, that's a whole new genre of games, but it does work and they are funny. So it makes sense Yeah, I think I think if I made if that's all I did I would get a little sick of it, but it's really fun sometimes. Yeah Is there like uh, do you ever have like a like a personal win condition for a game like is it oh I need

For the player to feel this or is it more like a personal expression thing like how do you When do you know when something's finished? Oh, oh, that's a good question Um, and I would I would love to hear hear your answer Uh to to this as well um I think it depends a lot um For like the bigger multiplayer experimental stuff thing I think it's kind of vibes like I think a lot about like how are people going to ruin this And I want to be really confident that it's hard for people to ruin it right because then just like You get kind of get one shot and if like a bunch of people go to the website And it's just like slurs and porn or whatever You know depending on how people want to ruin something. It's just like not. It's not fun

That's very typical internet too. Yeah. Yeah, and it's yeah, and it's just like it just happens right like this and this the sucks But um, if you don't do something about it is what people do for kind of the smaller like The way I think about this is that I make games and then I also make things that aren't really games like the the wordal thing No one's gonna play that that exists so that I can write the blog about it right and teach people something interesting in this contactanism and they're I think it's kind of when there are no more problems left to solve like I get to a point where I'm like this technology is not meant to run again Like it's you know macOS I pushed macOS finder to four frames a second

I had to add like double buffering to it. It was a lot of work and like this is like where we call it I can't make it any any faster And so that's normally what I'll do and sometimes I get to that point and like the game just isn't interesting enough And so I just don't I don't post about it Do you have a lot of like ideas that you started that just didn't just didn't go anywhere?

Uh Not that many like I'd say like more often than not I finish what I start but that's great I think it's like close, you know, it's probably like 64 or something Wow, that's a much better ratio than anybody. I've ever met in my entire lifetime I was gonna say though Adam you can't get away from the reverse question though Because no one wanted to hear your answer and I want to hear your answer too So yeah, I'm also I'm curious. I know it like you've both done like game jam game like I remember you you placed really well at uh Ludum Daryl a while ago and then you also have these really long running running things Yeah, I mean I am such a like a uh boring case of a gamer because like I literally just have that

The exact story everybody else has of like you know, I grew up and I had a spin in Tendo and I was obsessed with that And then I got a PlayStation and I was obsessed with that and you know by the time I was maybe 11 or 12 I was like I want to make games. Oh, this is what I want to do So I think I just for the big game It's really just me trying to channel the Feelings that I got playing like final fantasy 10 Into a project and wanting other people to feel that and so because it's such a conventional shaped thing that I'm making It's done when it's finished, you know when I can get to the credits and you can you know It's got 20 hours content and side content probably Um for the smaller games that I feel like comes a lot more from

A more like I study design at university. So The idea of like hacking stuff together and prototyping and wanting to explore a concept um That get that edge gets scratched by the smaller projects and so Yeah, I feel like that they are two very different modes Uh, and I've tried sort of in the middle as well. I had like a couple of six month projects Um, those can be fun to I think the the tough part is then like When a project Needs to become a product and you have to like support it as a piece of software or something like that It becomes there's like a threshold there you have to cross over Uh, when you release something and the more time you spend on it the more it has to sort of justify the time you spent

So yeah, I tend to stick To one end of the spectrum at a time Yeah Yeah I mean, I think like game jams are so nice for the like I'm just going to express this one idea right And then like maybe a lot of people find it compelling and you do something else without but like having the freedom to do that without the like I worked on this for six months and so I feel like I should get something out of it. Yeah, but things really yeah Oh speaking of just as a fun aside our buddy cakes We should link it prime in the description of the audio just he's a long time twist streamer friend He just released his tower defense game. He's working. I've been working on a twitch for like four years We should just give it a shout out

I am giving it a shout out right now the link will be in the description for other people This is not an ad. It is just he's a friend of ours who raids us a lot on twitch And I want to make sure we're shouting not everywhere because he finished a project odd stream after four years So it's awesome So people should go check that out that just remind us of cakes Yeah, yeah, I'm okay. Yeah, and yesterday I was uh, I opened up steam to play a A game that you may have heard of slay the spider-to and when I opened it up mean my son are doing a little co-run together Oh, I opened it up. It said it said hey tower defense maniac or something like that And I was just like see more and it said here's a bunch of games the tower defense

And it's like balloons and then tangy was number six nice. That's sweet. Yeah Yes, so anyways, that was just a quick aside that I wanted to make sure because I was thinking oh We have a friends on who made games. We also have to talk about our other friend who just released a game so um Anyways, Adam the question I was going to ask you though was from any of your like smaller projects where you're working on like game jam or something else You take any of those ideas put them in insignia like any good examples Uh Actually, there was one recently that's not from a game jam at all. We had like an on-stream game used to play Uh Called well, we call it just clinkers. It's like a there's a food. It's like a candy in Australia that is

covered in chocolate and there's only three there's like three kinds in a packet But you don't know which you're eating because until you eat it because that's kind of chocolate So we we just use it as like gambling in the stream so people were deemed points and I bite into one And they guess and if they guess correctly, I've been used to rig in the game and we've we've we've decided that uh We're not doing it anymore because um one I don't think I think they're phasing it out But also like I can't stand the taste of them anymore Over like six years now. It's like killing me. So um It's in the game now or at least it will be we're gonna put like an in-game It's like a one-in-three chance thing

So that that happened uh There were times when I would do a game jam like we've thought about Specifically working on like an insignia in-game mini game through jam Mm-hmm certainly like yeah a few different ideas of sort of crept in actually yeah like one of the main mechanics in the game came from a jam So oh nice. Yeah Say more about that. Yeah Uh a game I made called trauma back in I think it was 2020 To maybe or 2020 one of those One of my therapist told me about this. Yeah Yeah, that's what it's it's kind of like it's a platformer where you play as uh a girl who's in therapy and The way that you play it is it's a platformer and you get like um Abilities that send you off in different directions in the screen

Uh, so like to clear a jump like she can't jump on her own you can only move around And you have to touch these like specific Like trauma points to like read about or like to like prompt conversations and then once they kind of like little puzzles And once you solve a puzzle And you kind of like heal the trauma Um, you get to like you get like a card and then you play that card to use the ability So like at first you look over a little node and it'll like throw you away But then like after you've solved the little puzzle like you'll use that node and the card you get from it to like This is a jump card or this card thrust you forward or and by the end you get like six or seven cards And you can chain like a really long jump sequence just you're just pressing space to play the cards

Just starting at one point and sort of like clearing this crazy like Celeste style gap So yeah that the ability of like like the concept of chaining Like directional style abilities into like one big platforming leap That's kind of like what insignias um ability system kind of yeah, that's how it works All right, I got I got I got something for you Nolan It's so I my favorite blog that you wrote was the one million checkboxes blog And the reason being is that as you started off you started off with this like really simple concept I want to send a million checkbox down that people can like look at and and click it And it's a very like approachable and consumable idea like okay I get everything you're about to say but then

You start going okay. Well, how do I send the data down Okay, like this is actually a really big problem because a million of anything is a big is a big number Right, like it's just it's just a big number to send down and so I can't just send down like a JSON map or an array That's encoded in in JSON because it's just gonna be Huge and so you start kind of going through this process of like working through and sending down the data through binary stuff through You know, I forget if it was WebSockets that you sent it down via or whatever it was and he ended up having to pack everything down into bits And then you talk about okay, well at first my infrastructure was in Python and then That just was not going well

So I switched to go and things went way better for whatever reason magic I guess those the magic wow Crazy how compiled languages are just so much better at that kind of stuff and so I just I love that process of Going from I'm gonna build an idea to this is actually how an idea can realistically execute How how often at this point do you still run into a situation where you've learned as much as you did say on a million check boxes because now You've seen a lot you've seen some shit and so now it's like okay, well, I'm not gonna start off in Python on a single box I'm going to you know, you kind of like you pre-plan for some things to come down. Yeah, so I've been thinking about this a lot like

The firefighting like that right like I launched one million check boxes. It's like a single small VM It's running in Python. It's like you know People are going create you know, there are hundreds of thousands of people trying to check boxes firefighting like that is just really fun right like you also learn a lot But like it's super motivating right like you learn exactly what you need to do To keep the site up for the next like two hours Whereas these days, I'm you know, just thinking a lot more but like okay like let's imagine a number of people like for the snake game right I made like a game that you play over our sage. It's like massively multiplayer snake for something like that I'm like all right. What's a number that's insane?

You know 2500 people are not gonna concurrently play my stupid SSH snake game So let's make sure that we support that out of the box and then like I did that and like it we could I could support that But it might have been more fun to like launch that game Without really thinking about performance at all and then seeing what what broke Um, so I think like I don't I don't want to say I don't I don't learn anymore anything like that um for for the chess game that I made last year I still I still learned a lot But it's harder right like You know way I'm prematurely optimizing right and it's like hard to say because I am putting things out on the internet There are a lot of scary thing like like I don't want like a massive bandwidth build that I wake up to or something like that

There are things that like you actually do really have to think about um, but I don't know. I kind of feel like I should be moving a little bit faster especially since Sometimes the things that I'm preparing for just like truly don't matter or like they are just content Right like I think the decisions that I made for the snake game that I made recently We're primarily because I just wanted to learn a lot about how to write a super efficient terminal application But I didn't like make that choice my users didn't make it for me Yeah, it was a very good blog by the way. Yes, it's they stuff. I really enjoyed How you put together especially the unicodes and the vertical the vertical movement classic first

First problem of any uh, uh, terrible game. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah I thought you were gonna say you really liked how we gave terminal shout out That's what I thought you were gonna say for that was why you really like the blog post It was a good shout out. It was real. It is it is funny though like because you would think you know from just Like oh, I'm gonna make something that runs in the terminal. You're like oh, it can't Take a lot of bandwidth or it can't take a lot of data But we ran into this tube and some of the early stuff for Terminal shop and we ended up not having to fix it to the same extent because it's not like updating is often And just updates when people take action so we don't have to redraw

I think at one point we were sending down like the first hour is like 60 frames a second no matter what was coming The thing that we did initially that made us send an insane amount of data was we had a big a huge React Miami logo and it was saying like coming soon and so you ssh in and it was just like you know coming soon But then we had something in there that was like spinning or something something that made it so we had to like sender or fresh or No, you know, it was my coffee because I did build a particle system No, pretty sure we never put that in the application So I actually think it wasn't even we didn't even redraw it was just something with but with one of the Like charm things where we had a time or running somewhere

So it just forced a refresh of like their framework So it was like counting down the seconds until we said we would release and so every second it would send down or like a bunch of times a second I think the default ticker would send out this huge. I don't know Because we made you have to zoom out to look at it because we wanted the picture to look It was like one thousand but two thousand you know right And then and well we took a picture and we did the like picture to antsy Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we took a physical picture I'm saying right and so it had like a million terminal escape sequences in it right because it was like every Every character had its own to like make it a different color and make some of them bowl

Going from pink to more pink right is just it was the worst possible case so every Every character had probably like at least you know 10 to 15 characters We were sending right and then we made you zoom out to be like oh, we can't show this at you know 40 by 80 or something like that you had to be at like 100 by 800 and then we just for sending that like 60 times a second for no reason it was a static image I just remember that like DAX comes out as like guys. We sent like a hundred gigabytes in the last hour or just like Huh also at at that point We were like is the whole selling coffee over SSH thing? Are we just screwed?

It's like maybe we can't even build this as an application. It's the coffee. That's the problem I thought for sure the problem with our margins was gonna be trying to get good coffee to people and physical product But it turns out it's just bandwidth It's just egress costs from our container um We did eventually figure out oh when the time when there's a time running it resents this so we fixed that eventually But I was cracking up about some of it because you just can't even imagine that you're going To have this bandwidth problem over SSH because it seems absurd. It's text. Yeah, it can't be that big. It's text Turns out it can't be I don't know know if you want to talk about for the for people who didn't who haven't yet

yet read the blog post Some of them like fun stuff you did for the the snake game Yeah, I mean my favorite thing that I did was that I like patched the go SSH library Which I wrote like a whole a whole separate library or a whole separate blog post about because it's so wild to me Yeah, but like the the gist of that right is I'm working on the game working on the game Doing all this profiling because I want me getting to be super fast and I make like a one-line change And so I make this change and my CPU usage drops by like half and like at this point I'm running like I have like a harness with like 500 bots that are connecting sending moves um and Yeah, so CPU usage drops by half and I'm like thrilled right like I'm like oh man like this change like I've done something awesome

So I'm exploring that I'm trying to figure out like why because this was not a change this was to make things faster Like why why did that work? And I realized like actually all I had done was I had broken my harness like instead of my bots getting data They just got a single message that said your screen size is too small um I had like broken because like SSH. There's like TTY's like whatever You know the details here don't really matter But I had broken my testing harness and that's why performance improved because I wasn't really testing my game But then I'm like thinking and I'm like wait If my bots weren't receiving any data from my game, why did performance only drop by half right like why did performance not drop by 99%

That doesn't make any sense So I start capturing packets and like looking at all of that and Eventually like see that if you're just ssh to a box and you press a single key ssh sends you know like about 90 packets Uh, and what's going on there is that um There's the the ssh is doing something called keystroke obfuscation the basic idea is that if I see what letter or what keys Sorry, the timing at which you are pressing keys But nothing else like all I have is like keep press keep press keep press pause keep press Well that pause maybe that means that you're reaching for like a you know the number pad or something like that Like you're pressing something that's harder for you to get to so ssh just send junk data all the time

um to like Obfuscate the actual key presses that you're making, but it sends like if you the way it works is that it's perpetually sends this junk data as long as you whenever you press like one key And that's really bad for games because you're pressing like one key a second and junk data gets sent for about one second And so it's like one key press turns into 101 packets um And this is not something that you're supposed to be able to disable And it's like I found the patch and I like read through the ssh code and was like if I just pretend if I like claim to the client That I'm just running an old version of ssh that doesn't know about or sshd the the you know server side component That doesn't know about this feature. Maybe they won't send these these junk packets to me and that totally works

um So I did that and then I posted about it and a bunch of nerds got really mad at me because I wrote this whole blog Yeah, and I didn't acknowledge like the blog starts out with like I am working on a high-performance game over ssh And I just like deadpan see that without acknowledging that that's deranged um But it like wrote and it like broke containment like it made it to people on like hacker news or Reddit Whatever who don't know the type of stuff that I normally do So the right comments are just people being like this, you know This dumbass vibe coder has no idea what he's doing like yeah stupid is Yeah, because people are typing in their passwords to very secure Boxes over your connection to the snake game. I don't even know. I don't know what they were mad at me about

Yeah, it's funny because we had the same not well We had this problem and we chose to keep it in because we were worried about someone actually some somehow finding something You could exploit over that way, but yeah, we had a bunch of people complaining too of like Third They're harvesting people's public keys, which was the funniest. That was a real complaint. Oh, I got this too Yes, yeah, it's like yeah, yeah, I'm gonna What am I gonna do? Public yeah I know it was the funniest complaint and like tons of upvotes and people like this is this coffee site is a scam to From big data to get all of your public keys and you're like What am I gonna do with With only the public key I don't know Do you know what the first word of public he is?

I know it was like it was so funny. Yeah, so I similar similar thing of people getting very upset About those when you're like, I think it's okay guys like it's it's fine. Yeah Also, it's not like you tried to upstream it back to go and get them to remove it or so I can see you know But I did ping so the recours the place I mentioned earlier Oh, yeah, the lipo that go one of the go crypto maintainer is this also a recurse alum and so I think we On like the recurse chat to be like am I like is this really stupid?

Like yeah, am I fired if I do this and he was like for your game. It's fine. Don't worry about it. Yeah Right. Thank you for lipo had the official authors approval just reply with a screenshot That's right people getting upset like I got receipts By the way, I do I can I make a quick shout out for your SSH blogs So if you haven't checked it out you should go check it out, but this was my favorite joke Of the entire thing which is why does the snake game render strangely for me snake out snake snake snakes out run makes use of uniblock a unicode block elements since these were added in 1991 Your terminal may not fully support them yet. For example Mac OS's terminal app renders them poorly try using a different terminal

It's like my favorite thing in the universe is this thing right here. This was I cannot tell you how many issues I got in Neovim From people using terminal app and being like Neovim's broken. It can't do callers and you're like I don't understand how and then turns out oh this the default terminal Mac can't figure out how to update No, you can't update it. It's the technology the the private key to the repo was lost and so they just have the same stuff It's actually stuck in 1999. It's old From that uh that site uh that you had up I just want to note that um in keeping with the SSH aesthetic the whole site uses tables for layout and only HTML that was available in 1995 with no CSS. Oh, which I was very proud of

That was tables for layout actually kind of sick like kind of Table for layout actually really good. Yeah, it was like honestly, you know what? Really easy to think about You guys here heard it here first. It's coming back after this podcast. You're going to start seeing tables for layout the Google search trends Big it's going up frames remember frames bring this back Like uh first off, but iFrames are all over the place. You go to any news. Okay Now you got me now you're gonna ruin my life and I'm gonna be very upset you go to any of the news outlets We're talking about it doesn't matter what it is tech crunch the only news out that I go to is the prime time Okay, I'm timid and well, I synthesize this for you

but if you go up on your tabs and You you look at you can highlight and hold something over and I'll tell you how many megabytes like twitter right here While having an actual video right here of doom being loaded and being played is taking up about 211 megabytes it says it right there if you go to any news place It will be 1.5 gigs every single time and then you go and you start perusing their code And it's all just these big videos being pushed into iFrames And it's just insanity going on in the website iFrames the devil. I just want to throw that out there But they're very fun to play with you can totally do that. I made an entire business iFrame game in common on uh Facebook the old Facebook apps they used to have way back in the day. I'd load an iFrame

Do authentication through an iFrame and through uh uh uh uh the url Quick quick proposal for a game. I don't know what it needs to be But we need something about iFrames But it's like both the iFrame in the internet way, but also the dark souls way the yeah, yeah, yeah, like Oh, yeah, you know what i'm saying something about them makes you invincible I don't know how I trust Nolan's brain to figure that out in six months That's an outputs right there. No one puts outputs inputs outputs inputs outputs input out iFrame output iFrame think about it I had a friend. I don't know what happened to this project who is working on a thing because blue sky still has a fire hose Right, like you can get all of the the data from blue sky. Yeah, and so you get a site

It's more than you think right no So it we he just made it was a site that had an individual iFrame for every image and every video That I posted to the site like scrolling like as fast as it could It was like actually pretty sick like it was mud to watch yeah But I don't know maybe it's too scary to put online Spencer if you're listening There you go new blog post as well get that up Well, there's definitely something in uh like the game jam community I don't know why but it's kind of like you know that that thing about How everything evolves into crabs in game jams. There's this thing where guaranteed At least one entry in every game jam is a game where the game is being played across multiple like view ports

Like multiple windows or multiple. It's like a platform or new character jumps between the way So maybe there's an iFrame idea there where you have like multiple iFrames, but it's one game being played across them Oh Oh draggable iFrames the solve puzzles that's oh something like that I was just with iFrame souls like it has to be yeah I he's cooking still pro yeah yeah yeah all right no can't cook on stream can't cook on screen You don't have to think about that one after that just reminded you got yeah that like hit me all right It hit a you just nerds stipend you just changed his next six months tj. Yeah, sorry apologize I did not mean to do that too, but I am excited for iFrame iFrames iFrame sweared yeah

I have to ask this for both of both you two I know it's it's a very topical question and it you know This is invaded every part of our life. So I'm actually very very curious about this Nolan with all of you or we'll start with you with all of your kind of adventures in doing these little projects Obviously you do a but I assume you're doing these for like learning and they're kind of just like funny And it's kind of like this This in-between ground of learning and just making something ridiculous out of inputs outputs as you say How much do you leverage AI using this kind of stuff like what where is it Fund to continue or is it just like a no-no or is it all using it?

It depends a lot so like as an example I was working in something last week That was mostly I don't want to say like fully vibe-coded like that doesn't feel fair I think I was thinking about it more than that But resulted in me like I mean this thing that like puts the bouncing DVD logo over cloud code when cloud code is thinking And then I really liked where that was going like I liked the kind of power that I had there But the code was not great And I wanted to turn that or am turning that into like a broader thing that lets me like run arbitrary games on top of arbitrary terminal applications Which I'm really excited about And so what I end up doing was rewriting most of that code by hand Um, I think separately but kind of similarly a thing I run into with a lot of stuff is I want to write about it

Right like I want to explain on my blog how I thought about this how things worked And if I'm just kind of like all right, you know put the DVD logo inside yourself make no mistakes And then like try to blog about that right the blog is pretty boring Um, I said no mistakes and then it did it no that's right yeah Yeah, and then it made a mistake and I was like can you please fix your mistake And Really it's just bad is bad and some of the fun right of all of this is like understanding Um, so I don't know I think I use it as a prototyping tool I use it a lot to um Write stuff that I already know how to write And I don't know I'm probably swapping kind of using agentic stuff a lot that also using like cursor tabs

Still different really good like I love writing in VS code we're writing in in in cursor Uh, by hand, but without boilerplate Nice not an ad but could be not that but not only agree with you too Curse tab right yeah, like I think it just It doesn't change the experience in the same way right like it like it purely removes Uh, it removes stuff that I don't want to deal with While still letting me do the thing that I've loved doing for my whole life So I'm also I'd love to hear your side because I know that I I mentioned this on a different podcast But effectively uh in 2000 home let me just get up the exact numbers in a 2024 18% of people uh at gdc said hey, we don't we don't really like Agentica or we considered harmful to the industry by

It was at 30% and as of today as of just the last little bit since last gdc for 2026 It's at 52% say that uh Genai is largely negative for the industry And so you are kind of in the thick of it because you're like the end part of a game You already have like a lot of established patterns and so a lot of the conventional wisdom around it all is like This is a great time to be like, you know, there's this buck tell me about it and it's just like here's the bug right here I uh are you using it much in that do you find that it's any useful?

How does it kind of change in the last couple years your development? This is uh, I could spend the rest of the podcast talking about this uh, I would say Like Because I started working on the game before there was any anything like this for me Like there's obviously like the personal you know like The fun and the experience of learning how something works and building something I feel like we all kind of you know relate to that And there's obviously the fear that that will go away If the computer is doing more than you're doing less and so there's just less of you There's just less reason to be interested or less Yeah, it's just like Less The more gaps get filled by the by the AI I I do use it like I don't I don't really vibe code

I feel like my my code base for insignia. It just it's not compatible like there's so much logic in there That's that's written by me that I'm not really asking it to do anything boilerplate or like you know simple anymore It's like okay. I'm trying to thread these two things together. I do I do tap a lot like When I'm If it's just something that's helping me get where I'm going with fewer keystrokes then it's fine But I need to know I need to basically mentally sign off on every line Um and maybe I've thought like is this just a control thing but no I really do think like it's better for Everyone if if there's a human who understands how everything works um In terms of like The game industry and how that affects it. I mean, I think the game industry has already got a problem with

uh quantity versus quality and so I think the biggest fear is that the sea of like just Slop that makes it hard to curate Games that people have really put a lot of energy into or that are worth people's attention is just it just becomes harder to curate when there's just more and more stuff and I guess as with a lot of industries like AI has this quality of being Insanely powerful but also at the same time the people who it Can most appeal to are people who aren't qualified to make like good designs like they're just entry level trying to get in and the fact that the concept of something being able to do all the hard stuff for you Is really appealing to people who can't write it themselves. So what kinds of games are they

Gonna make that's kind of the yeah the fear I guess It's an interesting idea that uh because it is if you're releasing an indie game on steam like uh I remember when a tangy TD speaking of that when he released one of the first comments that's on his chat was Dude, I can't believe you released it right after slay the spire And so there's already like this whole thing where people talk about like oh release collision You're totally screwing yourself if you release right next to some other big title in all this And so I can imagine that if the amount of releases increases by a hundred x It doesn't matter if your game is To like several standard deviations more fun than everybody else You have an entire like see now to kind of swim through as opposed to just like oh there's a few releases today

I think a reason I think that people in games are more opposed on average to AI is that a lot of people that aren't Software developers do stuff in games right and I think that like gen ii for people that are artists is probably On average more threatening right like if uh There are a lot of people that need a lot of art assets for there are a lot of people who don't care really what the assets look like Right, they want an asset for like They're writing a blog and they want a little header image right and Now they're never going to pay or a lot of those people aren't gonna pay someone to do that Right, and that is taking work away from people that maybe make really beautiful art and then also make

Uh, a living partially kind of making these things for people that are less likely on average to pay them So I don't know when I've talked to people in the games industry. I feel like um There's an awareness of kind of the broader Whatever stuff that gen ii is doing whereas a lot of this you know like tech twitter discussion is very focused on uncoding right Yeah, there's there's definitely this like I try to come at it from different sort of like Like ethical perspectives like you can It's very easy to say like you know a i took our jobs kind of thing um and I think there's a There's an argument that someone could make to say well those jobs don't deserve to exist anymore And they'll just they'll just be some other job that people will do instead that I mean

I don't mind if people are sympathetic or not to that, but it's definitely a thing like I eat right now like i'm You know budgeting next parts of my game. I've got you know people who work with me who I pay and they produce assets And if I could just if I just do the plane, you know economic watch cheaper and what can I get away with Yeah, I could easily like If if you're not today like a year from now probably cancel out a lot of that stuff, you know We were talking about sooner before You could probably make a got a game soundtrack in sooner So I mean it kind of just like As a as an industry as a community of people like it's nice if we get to stay here It's cool if we all have jobs and get to do stuff still

Um, and then I guess there's also the I think the asset side of games because There's just seems to be a different um Sense where code Is not as expressive maybe or it's it's kind of more like it feels like mathematics where it's like You know you discover maths. You don't like own maths or create maths So in the same sort of sense you kind of like A solution for how to sort a list is not something anyone feels any ownership of but you know a character a face That somebody drew that's like they're drawing they feel like they own it and so yeah like At all AI that that generates assets has to have been taken from like a thing that a person drew Mm-hmm. So there's some there's something there that just feels a bit like a year as well

I definitely feel that where I feel pretty okay using Whatever agentic coding tools, but feel much less comfortable with kind of the broader Whatever generating asset stuff. Mm-hmm. I do think there's also a thing like primate a good post recently Right where you said Like I'm sick of getting everything I ask for or nothing that I want right that was the quote Yeah, which I think a lot of people a lot of people liked are resonated with a lot of people And I've thought about that a lot when it comes to kind of game stuff where I think like sometimes you know In whatever the broader software world You're just kind of making a tool and it needs to do a thing and like the details here don't necessarily matter that much

But if I'm like making a game I want to make a lot of the decisions myself And it's really easy if a tool makes something for you for it to make decisions without you realizing that it made a decision at all Right like you're just kind of like oh that's obviously what it looks like because the tool made it Whereas if you had done it yourself you might have Whatever considered different different approaches And I think the more you're trying to make something that's like fun compelling artistic interesting The more being aware of those decisions matters Yeah, process is it's it's the whole thing for a lot of it And I'm sure you're all all all of your experiments You know there are things that you learned or things that you did because of

Constraints that that came up in the process of you making it and if you yeah like you said if you just Asked the AI to do something and then it did it and that was your blog post. It wouldn't be very interesting Well, I type make it fun. So it's kind of different, you know, like that's what's unique about my games Yeah, I type of make it fun. So You guys just don't know the prompt. You have prompt skills. He's honestly and speedrunnable Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Well, maybe what we should do though is it would be fun to have maybe even both you back on We can talk about this for a little bit longer. I didn't know you were gonna have so many opinions about it That's I think we should have a longer discussion about it would be a good time

To know more about the game just the game side because I do find it. Yeah I made this post somewhere and it actually was one of my few like I'd call more viral kind of like shorts And it's just like I don't really understand it because as a programmer I guess I've grown up around this notion that you go on GitHub You go grab some code you bring in your project almost everything's MIT license You don't really think a lot about attribution every now and then your lawyers go over and say hey You can't use these libraries and you go okay I would never use these libraries anyways about being about about like of course of course corporate kind of I even remember specifically Out my previous job We actually had a big discussion about can we legally use react because at first there was like this kind of weird

Legal language saying that react if you use react they actually own your software This is before a big license change over at the react thing And so there's a lot of discussion of can we even build with react this is very dangerous and so Uh, I just have always just had this mentality like oh, yeah, you just take it and so when when Jenny I came out I just never even once thought about this process of like oh Yeah, that wouldn't be like that never really crossed my head during the first initial parks I didn't you know, I didn't all shallows are clear. I did not think about it very deeply I just was like oh, yeah, of course. I go on get up all the time and take code This is no problem. I just go to stack overflow but I'm being now. I'm just like here's new stack overflow

And then as you start thinking about you go. Oh, this is a little bit different and then designers just feel so much different And then this is like that meme that exists where it's just like hey, I took your code cool I took it from somebody else. Hey, I took your design. I hate you and I'm gonna kill you Like vastly different experiences And so I I'm just so curious about that whole side because I just have no Like I have no experience on that side Casey is my effectively my version of trying to learn about it. Yeah Well, okay, so then People in the comments leave a comment if we should do that because I think it would be fun I have to leave right now. I'm already late for dinner with my grandparents. I'm gonna be in big trouble

Otherwise, so okay, I have to leave this very moment. Okay, bye everyone doesn't see it up The name is TJ Nolan Adam if you want more please let us know in the comment Thank you very much for joining us for the stand up

Indie Game Dev is Way Harder Than You Think

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