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    3. Any beginners advice or resources on developing a 2D RPG/Puzzle video game?

      ~comp Ask (advice)
      Hey guys, I hope this is the right place to post. So my adhd hyperfixation has recently shifted towards an idea for a game and I want to indulge my ADHD by learning all I can about game...

      Hey guys, I hope this is the right place to post.

      So my adhd hyperfixation has recently shifted towards an idea for a game and I want to indulge my ADHD by learning all I can about game development to see if I can achieve this idea to the point that maybe I can put it in "Early Access" to fund even more resources on it.

      But I'm not sure where to start. I'm looking into Godot because it's free and open source and has a lot of community resources, but also wanted to see if anyone had any ideas here.

      I have some coding experience, a lot of technical experience and pick things up extremely quickly.

      The basic idea is that it's a 2D Sidescrolling RPG, but with Match-3 "Candy Crush"-esque mechanics for battles and fighting.

      Extra details If you've played "You Must Build A Boat" or "10000000", it's a LOT kind of like that, in fact those games kind of inspired me, but more refined with a lot more in depth RPG elements and it's a bit more forgiving focusing on keeping a "flow" going, since one of my biggest pet peeves is YMBAB's RNG being very unforgiving and you'll randomly just sit there staring at the board with no moves until you die.

      So the systems/mechanics I'd need to combine to work together are the following:

      • A Match-3 type board where you match tiles, make special tiles by combining 4 or more tiles, all the features of a typical match-3 type game, just tied to outcomes outside of the board-interface.
      • An RPG element, with character attributes, leveling, items, spells, weapons, gear, potions, etc. These elements effect what tiles are on the board during gameplay, effect the chances of certain tiles, and effect health, speed, mana, or grants special in-game abilities like "Precognition"(gives a hint for a move), or "Scroll of Revival"(You can continue without starting over), etc. Attributes also effect things like tile chances, so a higher strength will get you more combat/physical tiles, or a high intelligence will get you more magic tiles.
      • Visual Elements include an auto-running sidescrolling viewport while Dungeon Running. Character auto-runs until encountering enemies, running is not controlled by player. Match-3 board will be beneath that. Time between enemy encounters can be used to clean up the board and match unneccesary tiles, make special moves to line up for next battle, or to replenish health.
        • During Battles, it'd be an over-the-shoulder battle view, similar to Pokemon style battles. Character will have health, enemy will attack character at regular intervals, player will have to balance matching combat/weapon tiles to attack enemy, and matching health/mana potion tiles to replenish health or mana(if they have potions equipped). Enemy can cause environmental effects like poison(some tiles will be poisoned so you lose health if matching them), or being frozen with ice(You need to break tiles next to the ice tiles to break them), or confusion(switches the colors of tiles). Will be block/parry mechanics, occassionally for a few seconds before the enemy strikes, you're required to match a designated tile to either block or parry that attack.
        • In a saferoom it'd be like an isometric kind of "inside a building" format like in Pokemon, just more detailed. I'd like to have saferoom customization and the ability to upgrade your character or gear too.

      Anyways, I'd love any advice or resources. Or if you'd like to help out or discuss the game idea more I'm up for that too.

      6 votes

    4. Job hunting absolutely sucks right now

      ~life Ask
      Feeling pretty discouraged after taking yet another spin around the tech interview circuit for naught I was feeling pretty good this time around as I've interviewed with this company before and...

      Feeling pretty discouraged after taking yet another spin around the tech interview circuit for naught
      I was feeling pretty good this time around as I've interviewed with this company before and was runner up for previous role. The hiring manager contacted me for this new one, and again I aced it until the final stage where I got punted for the all nebulous "culture fit" reasoning. My mood isn't helped by the constant AI doom clouds hovering overhead that makes me wonder if I need to make bigger career changes.

      How's everyone else fairing out there?

      78 votes

    6. That one study that proves developers using AI are deluded

      ~tech Ask
      I've found myself replying to different people about the early 2025 METR study kind of often. So I thought I'd try posting a top level thread, consider it an unsolicitied public service...

      I've found myself replying to different people about the early 2025 METR study kind of often. So I thought I'd try posting a top level thread, consider it an unsolicitied public service announcement.

      You might be familiar with the study because it has been showing up alongside discussions about AI and coding for about a year. It found that LLMs actually decreased developer productivity and so people love to use it to suggest that the whole AI coding thing is really a big lie and the people who think it makes them more productive are hallucinating.

      Here's the thing about that study... No one seems to have even glanced at it!

      First, it's from early 2025, they used Claude Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7. Those models are no way comparable to current gen coding agents. The commonly cited inflection point didn't happen until later in 2025 with, depending on who you ask, Sonnet 4.5 or Opus 4.5

      The study was comprised of 16 people! If those 16 were even vaguely representative of the developer population at the time most of them wouldn't have had significant experience with LLMs for coding.

      These are not tools that just work out of the box, especially back then. It takes time and experimentation, or instruction, to use them well.

      It was cool that they did the study, trying to understand LLMs was a good idea. But it's not what anyone would consider a representative, or even well thought out, study. 16 people!

      But wait! They did a follow up study later in 2025.

      This time with about 60 people and newer models and tools. In that study they found the opposite effect, AI tools sped developers up (which is a shock to no one who has used these tools long enough to get a feel for them). They also mentioned:

      However the true speedup could be much higher among the developers and tasks which are selected out of the experiment.

      In addition they had some, kind of entertaining, issues:

      Due to the severity of these selection effects, we are working on changes to the design of our study.

      Back to the drawing board, because:

      Recruitment and retention of developers has become more difficult. An increased share of developers say they would not want to do 50% of their work without AI, even though our study pays them $50/hour to work on tasks of their own choosing. Our study is thus systematically missing developers who have the most optimistic expectations about AI’s value.

      And...

      Developers have become more selective in which tasks they submit. When surveyed, 30% to 50% of developers told us that they were choosing not to submit some tasks because they did not want to do them without AI. This implies we are systematically missing tasks which have high expected uplift from AI.

      And so...

      Together, these effects make it likely that our estimate reported above is a lower-bound on the true productivity effects of AI on these developers.

      [...]

      Some developers were less likely to complete tasks that they submitted if they were assigned to the AI-disallowed condition. One developer did not complete any of the tasks that were assigned to the AI-disallowed condition.

      [...]

      Altogether, these issues make it challenging to interpret our central estimate, and we believe it is likely a bad proxy for the real productivity impact of AI tools on these developers.

      So to summarize, the new study showed a productivity increase and they estimate it's larger than the ~20% increase the study found. Cheers to them for being honest about the issues they encountered. For my part I know for sure that the increase is significantly more than 20%. The caveat, though, is that is only true after you've had some experience with the tools.

      The truth is that we don't need a study for this, any experienced engineer can readily see it for themselves and you can find them talking about it pretty much everywhere. It would be interesting, though, to see a well designed study that attempted to quantify how big the average productivity increase actually is.

      For that the participants using AI would need to be experienced with it and allowed to use their existing setups.

      I want to add that this is not an attempt to evangelize for AI. I find the tools useful but I'm not selling anything. I'm interested in them and I stay up to date on the conversations surrounding them and the underlying technology. I use them frequently both for my own projects and to help less technical people improve their business productivity.

      Whether AI agents are a good thing or not, from a larger perspective, is a very different, and complicated, conversation. The important thing is that utility and impact are two different conversations. There isn't a debate anymore about utility.

      I know this probably won't stop people from continuing to derail conversations with the claim that developers are wrong about utility, but I had to try. It's just hard to let it pass by when someone claims the sky is green.

      I understand that AI makes people angry and I think they have good reason to be angry. There are a lot of aspects of the AI revolution that I'm not thrilled about. The hype foremost, the FOMO as part of the hype, the potential for increased wealth consolidation really sucks, though I lay that at the feet of systems that existed before LLMs came along.

      It's messy, but let's consider giving the benefit of the doubt to professionals who say a tool works instead of claiming they're wrong. Let them enjoy it. We can still be angry at AI at the same time.

      75 votes

    8. Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (March 2026) — Version 1.5 can search for posts

      ~tildes Text 409 words
      This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app. I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care...

      This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app.

      I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

      Recently:

      Version 1.5.0 (Mar 21, 2026):

      • Search for posts
      • [Android] Fixed touch ripple on inbox conversation rows
      • [Android] Fixed support for high-RAM devices
      • [Android] (1.5.1) Fixed comment reply sheet on Android 11-14
      • [iOS] Fixed blur on Sort button on iOS 26
      • [iOS] Fixed ugly shadow between panes on iPadOS 26
      • [iOS] Fixed overly large vote label on own comments

      Edit: Currently on TestFlight only on iOS for the next week or so.

       

      [iOS] Version 1.4.5 (Jan 2026): Fixed UI bugs on iOS 26

      [Android] Version 1.4.5 (Apr 2025): Fixed YouTube bugs, voting bugs on Android 11 and earlier

       

      Search has been near the top of my to-do list for a long time, so it feels good to finally release this feature.

      I did some custom UI this time and I'm pretty happy with how it came out. Despite its basic appearance, it required a decent amount of detailed UI programming on both Android and iOS, to avoid breaking the adjacent Sort feature. I also had to redo the search results screen a few times, due to navigation quirks on each platform.

      There are a couple related features that didn't make it this time: Searching for posts and comments within your own profile is not possible yet. Also "find in page" for comment text is not here yet either. These are both pretty high priority to me, and as usual it's a matter of making time and finding motivation to work on it.

      Also on Android, expect a hotfix v1.5.1 coming out soon, to fix the comment reply sheet on Android 11-14. Big thanks to the user who reported this bug! The hotfix is already available to sideload, and under review on Google Play, as of this writing.

       

      Previous topic: April 2025

       

      Where to get it

      Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

      Or sideloadable APK at https://www.talklittle.com/three-cheers/

      iOS version on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/three-cheers-for-tildes/id6470950557

      Join TestFlight for iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

      38 votes