I think Valve has the capacity to make some truly excellent stuff, but they only seem to care if it increases their wallets in a significant way.
After Architect, I’m very cautious about any Valve multiplayer game as it is bound to become infected with ways to extract money (or “value”, as Gabe Newell puts it) from the customer.
Aw man, I recently bought RE5 and 6 from Humble Bundle just to see how bad the games are.
RE5 is bad, but in a somewhat enjoyable way. It helps that Chris Redfield’s biceps are as big as his head, which adds to the accidental funniness.
I remember buying Duke Nukem Forever in a Humble Bundle, a bundle that I had virtually every other game for the price. I remember only paying $1 and I gave *all* that money to charity.
I played DNF. I still felt robbed. To this day I haven’t completed it due to how terrible it is (if my memory serves me, I’ve been minaturised and I’m driving around in a tiny car? But the controls are awful and Duke now seems like a Trump like character whose charm is entirely devoid in modern times. It was already wearing thin back when it was released, too).
Genuinely thank you for the context.
So many times I read gaming news on forums such as this and reddit where the discussions just assume you know what people are talking about, and as a guy in his mid thirties who has completely disconnected from online gaming but is on the lookout for a good game or two, I would like at least some context!
Huh. Thank you very much for clearing that up - I don’t really watch LTT anymore (not really for a long time, even before the whole i n c i d e n t) so it’s great to have some perspective.
Shame, really.
Linus from LTT is not behind the Framework company/products: https://frame.work/gb/en/about
He may have done a video about them, but that’s about it.
I see coding tasks with juniors a way to actually have a two-way conversation with said juniors and get them engaging.
What I tend to do is I’ll give them an objective, and then I’ll ask them what they think needs to be done. Each step of the way I’ll try and correct them and get them going in the right direction.
If all is well, everything is cleared up, the junior knows what to do at each step, and then they go off and do it. Then I do the code review and the conversation restarts.
More often than not, the junior dev will get mentally stuck on a problem that they cannot conceptualise. That’s fine - I tell them to leave it, work on the stuff they can do, and then we’ll tackle it together.
Generally speaking, good junior devs can conceptualise a task about 50-80% and will get stuck on the other 20-50%. An excellent junior dev can be given a task and independently complete it - the code may not be perfect or up to a middle-senior coding quality, but they can get the job done.
The bad junior developers are the ones who need their hands held at every step of the way and never seem to improve or improve at such a snails pace that it is taking effective resources away from the team (i.e. senior devs - 1 or more) to explain the task repeatedly.
At this point, you need to raise that up to your line manager and have a serious discussion about whether you and your line manager think it is worth the investment to keep teaching this person while making said line manager aware of the problems (and make this based with facts that both you and the line manager can clearly observe and/or have observed).
For the others, you should go from a path of having to explain fundamental concepts (mostly because you both missed out on the weird edge cases of the task at hand) to in months being able to leave said juniors to the task and have them mostly complete it without any help from senior devs. And seeing that progress is why mentoring & code reviews is great - seeing that personal development in real time is an incredibly rewarding feeling.