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Hello World!

I started programming 19 years ago, with the sole mission to create my own video games. At some point during those 19 years I lost sight of my original goal and focused fully on general purpose programming.

I've had a lot of fun with it, mostly working as a systems engineer with C and C++. I'm currently working on a large image analysis platform with Swift/Python and I still love the work I do for a living. However, one game idea has started burning a hole in my brain. It has taken up most of my thoughts in the past six months, and it caused me to shift focus towards game-dev again.

For that reason, I created this website where I will share my game-dev journey.

No AI

I do not use any AI tools. I handle all the programming, art, music, and writing myself because I enjoy every aspect of creation.

The most valuable skill any creator has is their ability to think. If you delegate your thinking to an AI you eventually lose the ability to think on your own. Brain is a muscle like any other, it will become weak and frail if you do not use it. Even if the output of AI models was good and everything they output was legal, it would still not be worth it.

Needless to say the current level of quality of AI output is really low to the point of being insulting. AI generated media revealed to me the importance of human touch, without which everything feels like a LinkedIn post - completely soulless and without a reason to exist.

"I am utterly disgusted... I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."
- Hayao Miyazaki, when talking about generative AI

This isn't to say all AI is garbage, I've worked on systems for meterological data analysis which utilized machine learning models to predict natural disasters and save lives. Highly specialized models such as that one can also be found in the medical industry where AI can find patterns in cancer scans which may be missed by a human professional. Such models are a net benefit to society and we should make more of them.

Finally, to put this topic to rest - I do not fear being replaced by AI. You can use every model in the world and spend 1000 years worth of power trying to generate something interesting but I will still win. I also do not fear being replaced by someone who uses AI, because those who use it as a crutch today will not be able to move on their own tomorrow.

Everything from scratch*

I build all of my projects from scratch using the Jai programming language.

I suspect some game developers would be curious as to why I don't use an existing engine like Godot or Unreal Engine. Simply put, I'm not smart enough to learn how to use those engines effectively. I'm not joking.

To me it's much easier to write the minimal amount of code necessary to power my game. I enjoy having full control over my code-base and having a minimal code footprint. The obvious benefit I get from my approach is that my software is faster by default, since it's built for a specific purpose.

Just to be clear, I'm not one of those people who cares which engine or programming language anyone uses. My core philosophy is that happiness is everything so pick the tool which makes you the most happy. For me, that tool is the Jai programming language.

WTF is Jai?

Jai is a general purpose programming language built by Jonathan Blow, originally intended to be a C++ replacement for game development. Since then the language has evolved and is used by members of the closed beta (like me) to create a wide array of interesting applications. Here are some examples:

You get the point, it's a programming language.

Contact & social media

The best way to reach me is via E-mail (hello@puhomir.com) but I also have a bunch of social media accounts which I don't check as often:

English is not my main language, I squat on pickle jars while consuming onions with one hand and typing with the other, so please excuse my typos and grammatical mistakes.

Tools

Here are all the tools I use: