Top all-time · #745
Shamus Young
Personal blog · shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtalegameswritingprogramming
Shamus Young's personal blog at shamusyoung.com covers games, writing and programming. Since 2008, 86 different Hacker News readers have linked it 148 times, most often “Procedural City Generation - Developer's Log”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Often recommended · 17 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Shamus Young's blog for long-form writing on games and the game industry, procedural city generation, and his novel Free Radical.
- Recommended for · 17 comments
- Called the Mass Effect retrospective 'an epic', the novel Free Radical 'a fast, fun read', and programming posts 'awesome'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Procedural City Generation - Developer's Log7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2009-05-04
- Build A Terrain Engine For Video Game Development4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-04-19
- /shocked/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-01-23
- The Late Shamus Young (Twenty Sided)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-15
- Twitter: This game is bad for you3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-27
- A 50-chapter retrospective on the original Mass Effect games2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-02-03
- Free Radical, a good SciFi novel fully available online2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-20
- /twentysidedtale/?p=420102 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-06
- The Challenges of Game Development2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-09-08
- Cryptocurrency and the Blockchain: What Is This Stuff?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-06
What Hacker News says?
For something similar, I always liked this blog series: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2940 Unfortunately it seems the author passed away a few months ago
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=2940
on “Nightdrive”Submitted Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry as a story · 367 points
HN discussionShamus Young had a gaming equivalent (unfortunately I can't find the actual comic, the Internet Archive may have it, though): https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=9866
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=9866
on “AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux”Submitted This is What Irony Tastes Like: Capcom and the PSN Outage as a story · 197 points
HN discussionYou might have heard of Shamus Young (of Activeworlds fame). He became religious (though admittedly not 'devout' in the traditional sense) as a teenager in an atheist household and eventually brought his family along for the ride, and even goes so far as to make the claim that it was a net positive for his life. His 'autoblography' is fairly enlightening as to his reasons and experience with it (it's about more than…
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=13918
on “The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget”Submitted This Dumb Industry: Wilson Boxes as a story · 158 points
HN discussionhere's an inside story from a developper in a DotCom era web company: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35194 He's also explaining a lot of entrepreneur/technical details, since most of his usual audience is not familiar with those, unlike HN.
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=35194
on “Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?”Submitted No Man’s Sky One Year Later as a story · 128 points
HN discussionTwitter deliberately promotes outrage. While hateful screaming is nothing new in the world of politics (or elsewhere), for Twitter and other ad-sellers this is a way to capture attention of users and drag them into flame wars. See this blog for one case thereof: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=46541
on “The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019)”Submitted Telltale Autopsy as a story · 126 points
HN discussionI've read elsewhere ( https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=42010 as linked by another member) that the latest kickstater updates were showing something very different from what they where working on at the start, like they were preparing pitches for a publisher: So they ask for people's (and your) money to make 'just' a remake with updated graphics and then they blow all that money doing something else, in ord…
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=42010
on “System Shock 1 source code released under GPL”Submitted Programming terrain from scratch using C++ and OpenGL by Shamus Young (2006) as a story · 107 points
HN discussionThis was a good article that goes over what happened with the Kickstarter project: https://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=42010
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=42010
on “System Shock 1 source code released under GPL”Submitted How to implement 'realistic' swordfighting in video games. as a story · 81 points
HN discussionReading this, I can't help but think of this great novella, Free Radical, based on System Shock http://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked/
Comment linking /shocked/
on “Neural implant lets paralyzed person type by imagining writing”Submitted This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch as a story · 62 points
HN discussionDon't be intimidated! There are a lot of things you don't know about how to make demoscene-style programs, and the reason you don't know them is probably because you haven't tried to learn them yet. I'm pretty sure that if you start learning when you're n, a lot of things will seem self-evident when you're n+2. Here's a series of really good blog posts from someone who decides to make a shiny procedurally-generated…
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=2940
on “Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes”Submitted Zenimax vs. Facebook Part 2: Problems of VR as a story · 49 points
HN discussionHere's an interesting approach to do this from a game worked on by Shamus Young, http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20777
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=20777
on “Show HN: 2D field of view demo”Submitted Linux vs. Linux Users as a story · 46 points
HN discussionThere's definitely reason to believe it's on a "spectrum", and I seem to recall I've seen studies that suggest probably everybody is on some sort of months-long cycle (not always directly correlated to the calendar, which would be relatively uninteresting). Many creative people who squeeze their creativity dry as coders or artists or whatever have observed this seems to exist. I've noticed it myself, here's another…
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=26444
on “‘I Don’t Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium’”Submitted Build A Terrain Engine For Video Game Development as a story · 45 points
HN discussion> Or ActiveWorlds Every time I see news about the "Metaverse", I remember the articles Shamus Young (RIP) wrote about ActiveWorlds and the DotCom bubble crash: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=35399 The metaverse doesn't seem quite that bad (Facebook's people seem to have an understanding of the medium they want to operate in), but the basic "we're going to make the user experience worse by replicating…
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=35399
on “VRchat bans mods, embraces EAC”Submitted Why Is Game Writing So Terrible? (2021) as a story · 43 points
HN discussion> It's pretty clear that Blizzard was not following their own guidebook here. I can't imagine them banning a player who said "Free Catalan!". The banning was only because it was anti china. An anti-Spain statement would have just resulted in some scratching of heads, not a 1 year suspension and revoking of prize money. As far as I've read (which is basically nothing but https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p…
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=48310
on “Gamers for Freedom: A handbook for protesting at this year's Blizzcon”Submitted Starcraft AI bot war as a story · 42 points
HN discussion> basing a book around a role-playing campaign can lead to books which read just like they're based around role-playing campaigns... Like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars? Guilty pleasures, they are two webcomics that re-imagine those two works as role-playing campaigns. The Star Wars prequels actually make more sense that way. http://www.darthsanddroids.net/ http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=14
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?cat=14
on “How to Write a Novel”Submitted Procedural City Generation - Developer's Log as a story · 40 points
HN discussionThe whole shamus projects, from books (I read his autobiography) to programming posts are awesome. His game "Good Robot" was greenlighted recently so we are going to see his first released game soon, which is pretty interesting coming from a guy who talked so openly about it http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20638
Comment linking /twentysidedtale/?p=20638
on “Pixel City – Procedurally generated city (2009) [video]”Submitted Windows: The Dread of Updates as a story · 36 points
HN discussion
