I’ve been a Game Engineer for 15+ years and there are many things that can help improve your toolkit. Experiment, learn new tech, and selectively copy. Experiment: make micro demos and test out features and gameplay you think of, try and find the fun. Learn new tech: new tech is popping up every day and it can give you more freedom to make what you want. Copy: if you see something in a game, movie, etc you think is cool, try and copy it and see if it fits what you’re trying to achieve.
I’d recommend YouTube channel Game Makers Toolkit to learn about game design and mechanics and Mix and Jam to learn about recreating existing features from games.
Most of all you need to make sure you pursue what you’re interested in and have fun.
What difficulties did you experience? I’ve upgraded many projects from ancient C# v2 and more modern versions. There are always some things that need to be addressed, but as long as you look at the changes from the one version to the next it’s easy enough to figure out what needs to be changed. Most modern IDEs will point out the issues in an upgrade report.
Bit hazy now, but at work every time an LTS change happens the first team to do it publishes it's notes on how it fixed various issues. Off the top of my head I remember a problem with swagger, but to be fair that's a third party lib. Problems with other 3rd party libraries with version mismatches (i.e one dependency wanting one version and another wanting a different one). It's not some major gripe, just it has never been smooth sailing! :)
I know that a lot of companies (I’ve worked for and colleagues worked for) were asking Microsoft for an all-in-one solution like slack that would integrate with their office and share point systems. They didn’t like that Microsoft had similar products but as different apps.
What was the product? How did teams bundle kill your growth? Office already bundled Skype and teams was a natural progression for Microsoft in response to slacks and zooms growth in taking Skypes market share. I don’t think Microsoft is innocent in this, but still think it made sense from a business point and from what companies wanted from Microsoft.
In my experience, VR is hindered by a new “boys club”: a group of people that aren’t game developers, but invested early in VR tech. Issue being that this group of developers can build decent VR controls and mechanics, but don’t know much, if anything, about how games should be made. Too many VR games are plagued with clunky controls, poor gameplay mechanics, and uninteresting progression. And to top it off these VR companies refuse to hire veteran game devs because they don’t have VR experience.
In a case like Unity, low latency stuff can be moved to the job/burst system. Coroutines are generally for gameplay logic. Things that need to be done overtime in a single context.
Where you getting this information that tasks and IEnumerator can’t be used for games? I’ve been using Unity for 10 years and tasks and Ienumerators are used as coroutines all the time. Recently worked on Hello Kitty Island Adventure and almost all game logic goes through an async coroutine library. Most memory worries are in graphics and object overhead, not coroutine stack allocations.
I mean you don't want to use a Task for per frame work like and use a coroutine instead because tasks are pretty heap allocation heavy. When did I ever mention ienumerator?
I have a lot of fond memories of Shoes and the project that spawned it Hackety Hack. I used shoes to make dnd character sheet creators, munchkin score cards, and guis for lots of board games. Hackety Hack was a fun way to learn Ruby and Shoes made it very easy to make simple guis.
I have 2 Vizio tvs and neither is connected to the internet. I don’t use built in tv functionality because they all perform terrible and show unwanted content. I use 3rd party streaming boxes without issue. My oldest Vizio is nearly 10 years old and still works as well as I bought it and still on the same smart software from 10 years ago.
I owned a Vizio a few years ago, and that was my experience - I just needed a panel to turn on and show HDMI1, and bonus points if whatever was plugged in to HDMI1 could turn it on as well. That said, I don't think you and I are the majority, and a lot of people find it beneficial for these TVs to be online and stuff so they don't need a stick/box of some sort. Coming from the days of three remotes to watch a DVD with a stereo, and missing the days of Logitech Harmony, maybe it's not so bad to have one box and one remote handle everything for the average user. They clearly don't care about the ads or quality, so we shouldn't push that on them
I’d recommend YouTube channel Game Makers Toolkit to learn about game design and mechanics and Mix and Jam to learn about recreating existing features from games.
Most of all you need to make sure you pursue what you’re interested in and have fun.