Tis been awhile since I’ve visited this online journal, that’s because I’ve had a full time job since the new year (which has been taking up waaaay more than full time hours 😅 oh games industry)! Once an NDA’s involved all the neat and interesting things I look at on a day-to-day basis run into some problems sharing, so I’ve been quiet. Thus a journal update will not revolve around game development for the second time.

My partner has been plagued with health issues that we’d like to avoid exacerbating with a Covid infection, and in 2019 I had a nasty bout of pneumonia (to the point of being prescribed an inhaler for the first time in my life – also a fancy test in a hosptial to see if I had asthma after my symptoms cleared, no asthma here! whew) so I’m in no rush to be sick again, that experience was absolutely miserable. We’ve followed credible information around Covid since the start of the pandemic, particularly around transmission and how to keep that down. Thus far we’ve avoided any illnesses in the household! Legit, not a single sickness for over two and a half years! Until now.

Over the years my partner and I have evolved from dating and “living together” to a concrete family unit, both of us have children from past relationships and in my partners case there’s a Parenting Plan that regiments all sorts of fancy rules enforceable through the courts, as part of that plan the kidlets have week-long periods of ‘parenting time’ for vacations regimented and scheduled for the years to come. This last week was one of those weeks.

Good and the bad, a bitter sweet last week. Together with some friends Angel and I booked a nice, Covid-safe vacation together while the kids were with their father. I have pictures! It was lovely, friends agreed to bubble-up together (none of us spent any air-space time with any other humans up to 2 weeks prior to our vacation) so we could have a stress-free relaxing time at a lovely cabin next to a lake.

It was really the most relaxing, enjoyable vacation I’ve ever had. With one, small hitch: one of those Parenting Plan agreements is to have scheduled evening video calls with the ‘other parent’ and the kids each evening. Each day while at the cabin one of the little ones started showing symptoms that progressively got worse each call. Turns out they had a big family gathering where both Grandparents, an aunt and that aunt’s child were all coughing and sick. They were definitely coming home sick.

Welp, we’re sticking by one of our strong goals/values, that if Covid enters this house it ain’t leaving – we will not be party to continued transmission. An additional goal is to avoid gettin’ the adults sick, we’re unsure if our efforts will bear fruit there but after a trip to the hardware store I’m feeling pretty strong about the strategy! Angel turned their crafting skills over to creating Corsi Boxes to help keep the air clean, on top of that improved ventilation (combo corsi boxes, another HEPA air purifier and windows open 24/7) we have the largest space designated a masking space while bedrooms are occupant-maskless zones. Operation stop-transmission-cold is underway!

Speaking of that new job, here’s my new Covid-as-safe-as-can-be (with a likely active infection in the house – the little one showing the worst symptoms [fever and deep chest cough atm, can hear the phlegm] either has very sensitive sinuses at the moment or is incredibly anxious, but either way won’t let the rapid test swab further than just 1cm up the nostril – they’re already quite miserable so we’re not pushing the issue and are moving forward assuming Covid) work environment! 🙂

Both kids have snack stations and various extra-special amenities in their rooms to enjoy mask-free, they eat their primary meals in there. For Angel and myself, our bedroom doesn’t have much space outside of the bed itself… so we opt for the other air-space-safer mask-free zone, the patio!

It’s only day 2 of our ‘new normal’ at home, so far too early to tell if our transmission mitigation efforts will yield success. Our plan is to keep it up for at least a week, certainly until symptoms have abated. Afterwards we’ll keep the ventilation and new corsi boxes goin’ and ditch the masks, because it is really quite inconvenient to not be able to sip a drink while workin’ or playing board games. That said, aside from the poor little one with the gnarly symptoms+fever, maskin’ at home hasn’t hindered us having a good time.

I’ll admit – I’ve been stuck in a bit of recursive doom-scrolling behavior. There’s a lot going on, and I’ve been capturing a small small fraction of it in a goofy digital scrapbook as I continue to shelter at home (in my best effort to prevent myself from being part of any chains of transmission during a global pandemic). A reoccurring theme is that a small number of “bad actors” take action that cause grief for a disproportionately large number of other people. Anyone playing games online will be very familiar with the behavior, but under different names: “Hackers” and “Cheaters” may be more familiar.

Prior to in-game monetization being a norm there’s another label associated with bad actors in the gaming industry: “Pirates”. Business needs and game development weren’t nearly as integrated as they are now, so many a game were released that had trivial security around piracy, contrasted by games that included incredibly obtrusive “anti-piracy” software to “solve the problem”. Anyway, this isn’t a history lesson, the point is – the behavior of bad actors can have a fairly significant disproportionate effect in areas you would never expect.

Understanding the potential harm a bad actor could pose is critical in deciding how to approach it. In many RTS games for example, core underlaying peer-to-peer network strategies cause the game to fail if one computer does something the other computers don’t expect. This simultaneously solves network problems (how computers agree things are happening in the same virtual space) and also the “Cheater” category of bad actors in a multiplayer environment – but also it doesn’t disallow cheating in the single-player experience, a space where if you do manipulate the environment for your favor it doesn’t create a bad time for anyone else.

Getting to know Bad Actors

I don’t think it’s fair at all to assume all those whose behavior may fall into the group labels I’ve identified so far (“Cheaters”, “Hackers”, and “Pirates”) as bad actors. Fairly consistently – whether it’s in games or real life – the primary trait of a bad actor is to take the action knowing or suspecting the scope of damage they may cause, but either just don’t care or the damage is the intent in the first place. There are various benefits to behaviors, and when people observe other people taking action that’s advantageous to them it validates making the same decisions for themselves, jumping ahead and not even suspecting their actions could be causing damage (it’s so common so it must be fine!).

Identifying bad actor behavior in generalized cases helps build preventative measures – reactive measures are really expensive in an effort:outcome ratio (and depending on the game, those efforts may never happen as once a game is released effort may be redirected to new projects where it’s much more efficiently spent)

• Hacking
  • Dramatically lowers the barrier of entry for cheating or piracy
    • Very disproportionate effect by enabling other bad actors
  • High risk of forcing reactive response for business desires
  • May provide benefits!
    • “Modding” unless fully supported requires quite a bit of hacking, and sometimes a modded experience is the best experience a player can have in a game
• Cheating
  • Player vs. Player environment
    • Creates a very poor experience for players not also using cheats
    • Disproportionate effect slowly builds the more they play
    • Player vs. Player is already high anxiety for many players, even the idea others are cheating can cause players to disengage (sad times, bad experience)
    • Viral effect, to enjoy the game players may feel they must also cheat as well
  • Multiplayer cooperative
    • Reduces impact of players not cheating on the game, reduces other players challenge
    • Depending on game, may impact monetization
  • Single Player
    • Reduces personal challenge, zero disproportionate effect
    • Depending on game, may impact monetization
• Piracy
  • May impact monetization
    • It’s really hard to say by how much, there’s no data on an argument of “Each pirated copy is a lost sale”
    • Anyone whose lived paycheck-to-paycheck knows this can’t be 100% of the cases, when you don’t have a lot of money you take what you can but don’t take what you can’t (afford)
    • Also (and completely anecdotally) people who do have the means to purchase things with what would effectively be pocket-change for them will take something for free if it’s easy enough instead of paying for it – so yes, there would be at least some lost sales
  • Potential viral advertisement
    • Epic Games explicitly uses the offer of free games (that otherwise wouldn’t be free) to draw people to their platform
  • Enables Bad Actors outside of the game
    • Pirated copies are very susceptible to hacking and may be packaged with malware/viruses etc.
    • Disproportionate effect not just within your game but now creating personal security vulnerabilities for people

It’s not an exhausted set of examples but I do hope it sets the stage that not all behavior in these realms necessarily indicate a bad actor. In fact, there’s been cases where behavior usually associated with a bad actor can have beneficial effects for a game or its community of players. I think the most succinct method of identifying a bad actor is that they have a tendency to act in bad faith, and unfortunately, attempting to meet an entity acting in bad faith with well-intentioned or good-faith actions only feeds the bad actor.

Motivations of a Bad Actor

I created this heading to explicitly say: the motivations of a bad actor are irrelevant.

This may sound strange, a lot of discussion around these topics devolve into motivations, whether someone is “innocent” of poor motivations for their disruptive actions – and from a development perspective, it really doesn’t matter. Whether someone obliviously ruins a significant number of peoples good time or maliciously takes joy in it, it’s still ruining other peoples good time. Attempting to assess motivations implies a reactive approach, so indulging in debates of motivation (for example, to apply targeted punitive measures) is a fairly exponential spend of time and energy that doesn’t prevent the damage in the first place.

Appeasing a community with punitive measures (ex: targeted banning) may yield some loyalty from that community, and in some cases that loyalty may be very important – but if the underlaying systems/rules/structure are enabling bad actor behavior, well, it will never stop and you’ve now committed to punitive maintenance.

Preventative measures

The games industry has an advantage that many other industries (or say, governing bodies) do not have – if something isn’t working, you just create a whole new virtual world from the ground up with the lessons learned. Analytics can be a powerful tool if the goals in analyzing that data are to learn (as opposed to ‘prove a point’), but they can only inform in hindsight. Lessons learned need to be applied in new work, and in a live environment that can be… tricky. But! Whole new virtual world? Much less tricky (but still tricky if creating a follow-up in a series, gotta be careful of expectations set).

There’s no magic bullet, the environment is changing all the time at a very rapid pace (one of the reasons I absolutely love creating games) – but there are a couple things I’ve learned that I’ll share

• Don’t trust the client
  • Basic idea – if you find you’re spending a lot of energy trying to secure something on the client… just don’t, if your game gets popular enough to attract bad actors you’ve started an uphill battle in keeping the client secure
  • Reminder! If it’s not a multi-player game then the “Cheating” category are extremely limited in affecting others game experience (some online communities, like speed running, may have opinions though – be aware of your audience)
• Don’t assume what you’ve been doing is infallible
  • Games with zero thought into security may not run into adverse effects of Bad Actors
  • I honestly believe a very small portion of humanity would fall under the Bad Actor category – chances are you could simply never have attracted them
    • All about risk management – imagine a Bad Actor will end up in your game, how can you mitigate potential damage? Not taking action and not suffering direct consequences could just mean a lucky dice-roll
    • Reminder about disproportionate effects, small numbers of Bad Actors can impact the experience of a very large number of players – a horrible situation when caught completely by surprise
• Leverage a server for secure game logic with third-party hosting services
  • One of the massive shifts in gaming is the acceptance that networking is something that can be an expectation
  • Hosting services (ex: AWS, Microsoft Azure, there are many) need to be very good at keeping on top of their own network security (ex: preventing DDOS or other network attacks), offload that headache
• Deterministic simulations for sensitive game areas, client presents, server authoritative
  • In Soulite Monsters the game server and client were written in the same language (C#) thus easily shared code, the client would do all the hard work of drawing images, UI/UX flow, and presentation elements for the player, even showcase rewards/combat for the player – but the server would run a very trimmed-down simulation of certain mechanics, some examples
    • Player Inventory (due to either bug or malicious intent, if the client inventory fell out of sync from an action the server had absolute authority)
    • Expedition generation (scroll consumption) and choices within
    • Monster Combination
    • Village Upgrades
    • Combat
    • Merchant Transactions
• Learn from others experiences
  • Don’t just rely on your own games, participate in other game communities, see what kind of impacts Bad Actors have on them

Bad Actors exist outside of games

I’m pretty sure throughout our lives we’ve all been (or are even actively being) impacted by Bad Actors in all sorts of situations. Sometimes people (or groups!) simply have very strong motivations and refuse to act in good faith (even if they have learned to at least appear to be acting in good faith). I’m nearing 40-years old, I’m tired of that garbage, I can imagine others are well. I highly recommend that if you feel someone is not acting in good faith, or operating as a Bad Actor, to go beyond what is happening in the moment and dig into how to minimize that type of impact on your life.

Observe, learn, build preventative measures – actively engaging may be forced on you at times, unfortunately. With enough preventative measures preventing Bad Actors from soaking up reactive energy, well, the imagination really is the limit of where you could be putting that energy instead.

Personal anecdotes I don’t feel really impress the potential scope of the disproportionate effect of Bad Actors, so I shall leave you with some real-world examples

• The Economic Cost of Fake News (includes an example of $300 billion in losses, very little was spent in causing those losses)
• 2021 Ransomware Attack caused catastrophic fuel supply line issues (you may have heard about that time some were storing/transporting gasoline in plastic bags in a panic)
• Majority of pandemic related misinformation linked to just 12 sources (dramatically impacts the entire world causing unmeasurable death and suffering, just 12 people)

I figured my neglect of this online journal hit an all-time high so I thought I’d do it while Angel investigates Roblox Studio, a tool used to make games for Roblox. “Who needs a bridge?!” was just triumphantly shouted as a bridge was blipped out of existence in a game anyone in the house right now can play, load, and (now) find an absent bridge.

Of course the resident 7yr old, being a Roblox veteran, piped up in reply to the rhetorical question “YOU NEED THE BRIDGE TO CROSS THE WATER!”

This is already fun.

So I didn’t know too much about Roblox, and I still don’t, I have research to do. What I did know was…

• Platform, not a game – relies on users to create content/games for other users
• Multiplayer online focused
• Games looked very primitive
• Plagiarism galore, from movies to music to assets from other games (“Mario”, “Mickey”, etc. etc.)
• The kids like it

That was my information launching point as my news feed started getting spammed with how much revenue Roblox Developers were pulling in. The same flurry of news articles let me know that the company has recently started being publicly traded and is has a pretty high evaluation. Those two things alone really piqued my interest, based on what I already knew!

Back in the days I was working for corporate entities (fingers still crossed I can avoid that scenario in the future) I put together a business plan for self published games. That plan was the seed of what I’m attempting to accomplish now and had a time-frame of around a year and a half. Part of that plan was to leverage the flexibility I have by not convincing dozens of people a decision is great (not even just great, but you won’t believe how great it is! Let me show you in this 22 slide Power Point presentation! So can I do the 1hr of work now?) before making it. The pandemic has already thrown any specific examples in the plan for a fairly significant loop, but that’s cool, I get to lean on that flexibility! Lean right into Roblox Development.

I’ve finished my first project Read Play Game, and what I’ve accomplished with it I’m very proud of. I’m in the process of Game #2, intended to be available on PC (itch/steam/etc) and Mobile, and potentially consoles as well if things look good. I had estimated Game #2 to be around 6-8 months of work to launch with monetized features, and additional couple months to iterate and check the metrics and see if it’s a good candidate to bring in enough money to pay the bills. I’m still quite a bit of work away from showing anything publicly for it, so right now seems like a great time to put a pin in it and see how viable it would be to bring in revenue from a Roblox project.

Now, to the people who I pester to read my things, you may be asking yourselves “what about those agnostic systems, those seemed cool and beneficial” – yes, and they still are, for Unity or almost any other engine that would support C# as a language. Also I have every intention of revealing Game #2 at a future date whether this Roblox experiment yields positive results or not (I already have the title copyrighted, once you have the fancy paper you just gotta finish the thing), so those systems and tools will definitely get lots of use. Due to Roblox’s unique development pipeline it would be difficult to bring in work or tools from other game engines in general, so that’s one negative in Roblox’s favor. I have the list about what I knew about Roblox, now here’s what I’ve learned so far about developing for Roblox:

• Creators see 24.5% of revenue generated from their games
  • Face-value this doesn’t seem like much, I’ve included an image of how that’s split below these bullet points – as an independent developer my App Store Fees are 30% and I don’t have to worry about platform or support infrastructure
  • Even if I 100% make a game myself and put it on an app store, after fees and taxes I’m realistically seeing less than 50%~ by the time I actually get to claim any money, cutting that in half to not worry about a whole lot of things (including managing multiple platforms like Play Store, iOS, Steam, Itch, etc. etc. etc…) is actually not a horrible deal
• Roblox Studio is… not horrible
  • I think only other developers would understand what a big deal a brand new tool not being horrible is, I may grow to loath it (or love it!) once I start actually creating with it instead of just poking around, but it’s a good initial impression
  • It is in a weird space of competing with Unity or Unreal, but instead of building out to multiple platforms (PC, Console, etc. etc.) Roblox provides the platform, just one for me as a developer to worry about
• The company is now publicly traded, and the current content is rife with plagiarism and copyright infringement
  • Why is this a big deal to me? Well, the estimated $250,000,000~ dollars developers are expected to earn this year is probably going to earn the attention of license holders, since a good chunk of those dollars are earned with an IP that some Roblox developer doesn’t own
  • License holders are more likely to start paying attention, I think there’s a good chance content within the Roblox Platform may start getting taken down due to infringement… which may create a comfortable vacuum for small original games to fill
• Lua is their programming language of choice, and I am very familiar with Lua
  • In Dawn of War 2: The Last Stand I built the behavioral AI entirely in Lua, an AI that was adaptable enough to replicate all player heroes on Wave 16 and getting me very angry yells across from the office as the AI beat players with their own abilities
  • During my time at Relic I was asked by a lead engineer to look at all their single-player scripts, they were apparently running at > 100ms~ sometimes spiking to > 1000ms~ (this is real bad, that’s a full second of a frozen screen) on the Xbox 360 – got it down to a chill 0.01ms~ spiking at maybe 0.1ms~ and kept all the behavior the designers wanted, they didn’t need to lift a finger and they could build off my work to add new content without sacrificing performance
  • I even have Lua experience in a server:client relationship thanks to a mobile project I worked on!
• Expectations are low on the platform currently, games are fairly primitive
  • I expect competition to heat up due to other seasoned developers seeing what I’m seeing, but most of them work for corporations and will still be debating over power-point presentations while I can jump on this and hopefully get in early

So while I’m stepping away from a big comfort zone (Unity + smorgasbord of systems I’ve made, tools I’ve made or purchased, and assets I’ve made or purchased), those perks will be traded by my bullet points above. I expect to have a game the whole household here can play in a fraction of the time it took to get Read Play Game on itch. Within a month I’ll be able to judge if generating revenue as a Roblox Developer is actually plausible for a real-life adult with a real-life household to support, and even if I find out it isn’t plausible perhaps a break from Game #2 is just what it needs for me to come back to it refreshed and roarin’ to go.

I’m writing this while procrastinating calling the coroner’s office. It won’t have much if anything to do with games or development, but seeing as I’m pretty sure the majority of people who end up reading this are friends and loved ones this feels like a more appropriate space than a social media account. Words I can share for when I don’t quite feel up to talking.

All I know at the moment is that my mother has passed away, she was found in her home yesterday and no foul play is suspected – that’s all the officer who came to deliver the news had to offer, the coroner will have more information.

I don’t know much about my mothers life before me, nor do I know anything about her life in the last 15 years. What I do know is she struggled with significant mental health issues, issues that had me every 1-2 years living with a relative for a period of time (longest period was my Dad for a school-year) while she recuperated in Alberta Hospital, for all the friends I’ve met in BC – Alberta still has dedicated medical hospitals for mental health. The fact BC doesn’t is red-flag number… un-countable at this point. Stopping my immanent tangent on how subversively dangerous a crap performative government with a pretty façade can be… now. Also, thank you autocorrect for that fancy c back there.

Didn’t sleep much last night, my mother isn’t something that has occupied my brain space over the last decade. Rather than sleeping I couldn’t help myself mining for memories from the depths of… wherever they go. Reconciling the person who was dragged out of the house when I was in Grade 3~ by police due to erratic and violent behavior (the neighbors were incredibly concerned about my health, but only inanimate objects suffered any damage), who ripped the telephone out of the wall only to throw it into the dishwasher while declaring our dead grandfather was coming to visit. This is the same person who when I was a child with chronic nightmares would sit by my bed until I fell asleep, every night. Even when I was being a brat and making whiney noises of discontent if I was conscious enough to know she was slowly sneaking out of the room.

I got about this far before talking with the corners office. I don’t have much more to say on the topic, my next online journal update will be closer to the topics I usually talk about in this space, going to take a break for awhile first though.