Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.
And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.
Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D
This is how an AI-assisted article should be: they used AI to decompile, find things out (with some very interesting techniques listed at the top of the article) but the article itself is human-written. It shows they used AI to help themselves understand, not used AI to do everything.
Not OP, but I have to agree with them. The text just makes too much sense. There's no irrelevant shit tossed in for no reason, and I'm not really seeing any annoying LLM-isms.
> I picked it out of a lineup of discounted games in a mall and it hasn't left my psyche ever since.
This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.
Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.
It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.
Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.
I think this is similar now in most things. Music or blog posts etc. Yet when you try to discover something, for some reason it's really hard to find good quality material.
A few years ago there was mathematics progress in recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind since.
This was a good example where a talented engineer worked hand in hand with AI to get the decomp to work.
I think some people are brute forcing it through a lot of agent time and expense, but they used 6.1 Sol Medium, a great but not a top capability AI model+effort.
This matches what I've been hearing regarding talent and experience making a big difference in task speed and cost when using AI. When prices stop being subsidized, this will be a key factor when evaluating engineer performance: "you've used a lot of tokens and don't have much to show for!"
Who knows where this is going to end, but Talent+AI still beats Vibe work by a lot.
I tend to agree with this perspective however I'd like to point out that using token quantity and cost as a measure of productivity is counter-intuitive. The variance for a given task can be extremely high regardless of the input, not to say that there isn't any skill to prompting or that talent doesn't matter.
Ultimately it feels pretty similar to using lines of code as a measure.
Instead I recommend setting a budget per head and evaluating performance traditionally, allowing for exceptions in exceptional circumstances of course.
This is great write-up and it's great that we can use AI tools to peek behind the curtain of how games like these were made.
Hopefully it gives more people a creative kick and we see a revival of more games inspired by some of those game mechanism and potentially even move away from using the well-known set of engines to build games with.
This is so fascinating. These kind of isometric games were really defining in my childhood so it's amazing to be able to peek behind the curtain in terms of how it all works to render. So interesting about the lighting and how they had pre-rendered .spr files for windows alongside the regular lighting. So cool!
The move to 3d sim games was such a mistake for the industry. Pixelart was way better at the time. It took like 15 year to make it look good again and that with cartoony cell shading anyway.
Interesting that the Pizza scoring rules are that simple. I remember that the in-game encyclopedia said something that kids and teens prefer big portion sizes. This led me to always create a Pizza that just had an entire fried chicken on it, as it was easy to reproduce, made a lot of money (big ingredient costs = big margins), and gave good ratings.
And I definitely noticed that Pizzas covered with an even tomato sauce did better than blank ones, probably from the symmetry rules. I just assumed it was hardcoded that people do not like naked pizza.
Interesting note for the translation: The game is German and they went deeply into the whimsy, e.g. most of the demographic groups had funny and very colloquial names. It seems they translated "Grufties" with "Goths". Which makes sense considering the real meaning of Grufti in German (members of the Goth subculture), but in the game the term was actually used as funny way to refer to old senior people (people almost in a "Gruft" = "crypt"). So it's obviously a mistranslation, pulling the word straight from the dictionary. Maybe "Cryptid" would have been more fitting. :D
Of course, I might be wrong.
> the named animation sequence
noone abused verbs like this in the before times. a named animation sequence?? as opposed to what, ephemeral anonymous animation sequences?
And in this context, literally yes that's what it sounds like. The .ani file can contain multiple animation sequences that each have a name.
This is how I found most of my favorite PC games as well, including this one.
Often there were these vertical mesh cylinders with a very low effort sign stuck in them that just read the price and that was it. You had to dig through layers upon layers of arbitrary games and surprisingly often found real gems.
It was an eye-opener for tween me to realize that some of the best games made in that era were about as popular as some of the worst games from the same era.
Thank you for the article, a really fascinating read! Good start to my morning.
A few years ago there was mathematics progress in recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind since.
I think some people are brute forcing it through a lot of agent time and expense, but they used 6.1 Sol Medium, a great but not a top capability AI model+effort.
This matches what I've been hearing regarding talent and experience making a big difference in task speed and cost when using AI. When prices stop being subsidized, this will be a key factor when evaluating engineer performance: "you've used a lot of tokens and don't have much to show for!"
Who knows where this is going to end, but Talent+AI still beats Vibe work by a lot.
Ultimately it feels pretty similar to using lines of code as a measure.
Instead I recommend setting a budget per head and evaluating performance traditionally, allowing for exceptions in exceptional circumstances of course.
Hopefully it gives more people a creative kick and we see a revival of more games inspired by some of those game mechanism and potentially even move away from using the well-known set of engines to build games with.
But all of them need one step, free assets under Creative Commons or similar licenses).
I remember the big change of OpenTTD when it became finally all free software.
I wish to know Blender3D to help this projects, but I am a regular IT guy.
>Fast Food Tycoon 2. There's a very good chance that you have not heard of this oddball 2001 business simulator
nope, never hear of
>I actually call this game Pizza Connection 2 because that's the European name!
ah yes, I played that at a friends house!
> Goths stay home until 09:00.