Just enough effort and content to get someone who's never seen it before to want to see more, and no more. If you're not sure, then when you think you might be ready, find a few random people who haven't seen it before and just show them and ask for feedback. Repeat a few times the show everyone.

Same, but for 3D tools and game engines. So far, each time, I've managed to talk myself down from that ledge by looking at the vanishingly small amount of spare time I actually have to commit to such (compelling) nonsense.

Can I call Battle-Passes & Micro-Transactions one thing please

Not lost to time. We're old, but us PS1 era game devs still exist :-D. That was an easy trick too. Want mirrored ice reflections? just render the character upside down under the semi transparent ice plane. It might need some draw order hacking, but its cheap and looks good.

To be fair, your friend could have used less esoteric language.
For most game-dev use cases 'piecewise affine' could just be "lerp between nearest two values from an array". If what you'd already created worked and wasn't a performance black-hole then I'm sure it was fine.

It's a common trick that we've been using in game cameras for a few decades. For bonus points developers can also handle momentary occlusion (like pillars) differently (Journey does this) and smooth the motion into occlusion handling using something like sphere casts (Veilgaurd does this)

This is one of the many reasons why limes are just, better.

Yeah, billboards were another good way to go if you never really saw the wheels too close up and you had a limited number of expected view angles. Otherwise the sprite sheet sizes could get big really quickly (even accounting for mirroring or any other image trickery).

Finding useful screenshots of ps1 era technology is tricky.
You'll have to imagine an image of an extruded pentagon for the main tire treads then a quad with a wheel image (roughly alpha clipped circle) for the outside. 12 tris per wheel.

Wheels in racing games were just a massive pain back then.

You should see how we used to build and render car wheels :-D.

or... Blender :-D

Here's the results from some Geometry nodes stuff I was messing with recently. And I'm no expert in this stuff I just bashed nodes together until I liked the results.

I build the stuff at the top and my geo-nodes just instantly give me the stuff at the bottom.

yes and no.
I'd love to have made another Grow Home game some day (I was tech lead on both) but now that's not really an option.

I would have attached googly eyes to those by now.

Sounds perfect.

Rare drop rates like this have always been a bad design decision to solve a specific design problem. "how do we ensure some items are rare, and so perceived as more 'special' ?". Better design is if rare items simply required more complex steps, resources, risk and skill. e.g. cake in Minecraft

I don't think I've ever clicked the wishlist button so quickly after discovering a game.

Waiting for some more light, then I imagine I'll do be doing the same from here.

Done

Thanks for sharing, I'd not seen this video before, it's great. And yes, AA was a guess, based on some assumptions from previous experiences (ages ago) with stencil buffer nonsense. I had to stop doing pure graphics coding in the end. I couldn't keep up with the pace of bleeding edge developments