Gumballs and Dungeons is a fun roguelike gacha. The main game loop is picking a Gumball which have different stats and mechanics and diving a Dungeon which has different enemies and mechanics. So you want to synergize your gumball with your strategy for a particular dungeon. Each floor of a dungeon is a 6x5 tile map and you flip the tiles looking for the down exit. There’s a boss every so many floors and just try to go a deep as you can. At the end of the run you keep some of the stuff you collected to unlock new dungeons and gumballs.

Another Eden is a gacha RPG from the writer and composer of sony enix dream team; chrono series, xeno series, final fantasy. There is so much content there and a ton of crossovers with other franchises. The map movement is done really well here for a mobile targeted rpg, it’s slightly elevated from a side scroll perspective and you mostly move horizontally in lanes with vertical connections here and there to switch between lanes. The writing is great, the music is great, the battle mechanics can get really deep.

How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to “do it right” or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

When you work in enough diverse codebases, with enough diverse contributors, you begin to understand there isn’t one objectively right way. There are many objectively wrong ways to do something. Picking a way to do a certain task is about picking from tradeoffs. A disturbingly common tradeoff is picking rapid development over long term maintainability, but that isn’t not the right way to do it in a competitive space.

Needs change over time and certain tradoffs may no longer apply. You’re likely to see better success making lots of little hacky fixes until it’s not a hack anymore because you’ve morphed it slowly over time.

Version control, git et al, allows you to make multiple commits in a single PR, so you could break the changes up to be more reviewable.

Hear, hear! I would add that it multiplies again, again when other people are actually using the product. Engineers famously build tools for engineers which can leave something to be desired for the layman.

My experience, ymmv, the most work went into configuring everything you need or want the first time. The right drivers for your graphics card, for your webcam, wifi, acpi multimedia keys, etc. Though I don’t use a gnome/kde/DE, so some of that may automagically work for you. After that though, updates don’t tend to break the things you’ve already fixed.

One time in 5 years the names of some acpi keys changed, and I had to update the script, and that wasn’t really arch’s fault. Also Google did a funny thing with their monospaced font that xft couldn’t handle, again not an arch specific thing.

And here’s a hot take for you, I only update about every 18 months. That’s usually how long it takes Discord to become binarily incompatible with installed libraries. Update the keyring first and never a problem.

Maybe this goes a bit deeper than the question intended, but I’ve made and shared two patches that I had to apply locally for years before they were merged into the base packages.

The first was a patch in 2015 for SDL2 to prevent the Sixaxis and other misbehaving controllers to not use uninitialized axes and overwrite initialized ones. Merged in 2018.

The second was a patch in the spring of 2021 for Xft to not assume all the glyphs in a monospaced font to be the same size. Some fonts have ligatures which are glyphs that represent multiple characters together, so they’re actually some multiple of the base glyph size. Merged in the fall of 2022.

I don’t think being dumb or gullible precludes you from being good. His heart is in the right place. In a fictional world of super heroes and villains, I’m unsure if he’s operating within vigilante laws. I think he’s dumb enough to not know what they are and attempt to follow them. If he was willfully ignorant of the law it’d push him toward chaotic. So I’d say he’s definitely neutral.

I have to respectfully disagree with you there.