Video Games

I recently wrote about the system I use to purchase Minecoins for my son. Not long after I got this figured out, my son informed me that all his friends were playing Roblox, and he would like to start using that now too. Fortunately, the process for Robux is a lot simpler than Minecoins and Minecraft Tokens.

Robux are a type of token that you can use to buy stuff in the various Roblox worlds. There are links to buy things everywhere, in your face, all around you, always. This is because Robux are a way for creators in the game to earn money. It’s unfortunately difficult for younger children to understand exactly what the big numbers beside cool things mean, or what the impact of buying them is, so I suggest considering how you want to approach this as a parent before dumping your kids into it.

This is a listing of the various games and how I get credits into them for my kid. Of course these aren’t the only possible ways, just the ways that I’ve chosen that seem to work for me.

I put this list here primarily so that I could use it. I have been getting the various methods mixed up, and futzing around trying to figure it out every time my kid asks is annoying.

My son is getting really into Minecraft right now. It’s a game that exercises design, creativity, exploration, and even teaches some basic programming skills. The stock game has quite a lot to do and explore, but at some point it’s natural to want more.

Minecraft has a built-in store with a wide assortment of extension, skins, and even whole worlds. Some of them are free, but most require some form of credit.

The most challenging bug I’ve ever fixed was a performance issue in a matchmaking routine. Matchmaking is the process of finding players to compete against each other in a video game. An excellent matchmaking algorithm doesn’t just stick players together randomly; it tries to make the game more fun by balancing power levels and preventing anyone from waiting too long for a match.

About six weeks before a game I was working on was scheduled to be feature complete, we discovered our routine couldn’t handle our load targets. The rate at which players were being removed from the matchmaking queue started dropping during load tests. Things got bad quickly once it fell below the rate at which we inserted them. Not only would this cause a bad user experience if we didn’t fix it, but it made it impossible for us to drive enough traffic to our game servers to test that they could handle the projected load. The company wasn’t going to release a game that could crash if it was successful, so we had to fix this issue, and we had to fix it quickly.

There are many things about producing video games that are surprising, but one of the weirdest has to be the approach to bugs. Like any piece of software, bugs are found through testing or user reports, triaged, then assigned to developers. Unlike normal business software they also ask the question, “is the bug fun?”

There are plenty of unintended features (bugs) in games that became beloved. Attack combos were an accident in Street Fighter II, but they became so popular that they are a part of basically every fighting game now. Rocket jumps are another example. The internet is full of examples.