Speaking of negativity, how the hell do people deal with the way reddit looks now? Everytime I see it this way I am shocked.
Avatars, ads, wasted space, weird conversation drop downs… yuck.
Redlib
i don’t see it because I quit the millisecond third party apps did.
old.reddit.com. Anything that doesn’t work on that or is to cumbersome to use on that is not worth engaging in.
yeah I know. And third party apps still work too if you compile them yourself.
But I was just commenting on how insane it looks.
Old.reddit.com has slowly been getting worse. Lots of collapsed comment trees, a similar posts section after the first two comments in a busy comments section, etc.
sometimes you cant even tell comments are even responding to a OP conversations.
Searching old.reddit.com is getting harder. If you try to site search it on google, it gives you new reddit links.
Old seems to be blocked, as in other search engines it just gives you no results.
Luckily Kagi lets you add rewrite rules so you can filter site:reddit.com and then have reddit.com rewritten to old.reddit.com, but man reddit are fighting against people using the old site.
All you need is an account (even a banned one) that is set to old.reddit in the options. Then all the reddit links will look normal.
Yeah they forbid indexing of that subdomain. Their robots.txt has the following:
User-Agent: * Disallow: /Meaning: For any user agent disallow accessing anything under the root /, so anything.
You can still use the old reddit at old(dot)reddit(dot)com
most of them are bot and AI responses or posts.
the bot responses are done by people warming up thier accounts for ban evasion to be exact(OF fans, link farmers), this seperate from the propaganda ones.
one thing reddit REALLY hates is new accounts and old accounts with sudden activity.
By avoiding it like the plague. They really did it didn’t it? When I used to Google something I was stoked when there was some reddit link in the results and would always go there, now I just die inside a little more when I scroll the results and the only relevants seems to be reddit.
Yeah, and its even worse that it will only be via google. They are the only crawler allowed to index reddit now. I gave up using google unless I absolutely have to as the search results are not great anymore.
But even if one likes google, having no competition and being the only results that are now trapped in reddit, that just sucks! We need real forums back. or lemmy needs a little more techinical answers in the communities to quit looking to reddit.
I used to use old.reddit.com with Reddit Enhancement Suite to disable CSS
It’s wild how they show so few replies. Like, the whole point of the site was discussing.
Now the whole point is advertising.
@The_Picard_Maneuver You’ll never know where you’ll go with your passion project.
Huh, it’s not like Reddit to be pointlessly hateful 😌
Lol pointless hate isnt limited to reddit.
I interacted with mostly good people on Reddit outside of influence agents and trolls. The problem is the site moderation is corrupted.
Yeah, lemmy definitely isn’t immune, there’s just a lot less of it almost definitely in part because there is a lot less engagement in general.
I honestly don’t think that’s true. Lemmy has way more human engagement than reddit for the large communities. It’s still missing on the niche subjects, but that’ll catch up.
I want to know how we can pull more people on here so we do not have to use these Silicon Valley parasites.
We’re not that far out, probably another year or two. It keeps getting easier and easier to join. Piefed looks like a good avenue to recommend because it’s easier to use than lemmy. They say they’re ran by a non-profit.
I am not all that Savvy and I almost gave up trying to join Lemmy here. The first instance I tried to join did not accept my application for whatever reason and two days time, this one did within just a few hours but I almost did not bother trying a second one. Is this pie fed and instance of the Federated Lemmy here? I’m not entirely certain how all this works but the idea I wholeheartedly support and think is the future for online communication of people that are not tools.
Think of federation like the Hawaii Islands. It’s a group of types of social media, and they’re kind of similar.
Each island has its own flavor and way of traveling to other islands though. Meaning, some have commercial airplanes and some don’t, so you have to travel with your own personal boat to certain islands. Same with federation, you have the twitter style of Mastodon where they can post on the reddit style of Lemmy, but lemmy can’t really post on Mastodon.
Piefed is a reddit style and you can’t really tell the difference to lemmy, other than Piefed seems to have a better user interface. I haven’t personally tried Piefed, but the features they brag about seem great.
There are all kinds of other types of federation (or islands) that are similar to other social media types. There’s youtube, tumbler, instagram types, etc. They may or may not be able to communicate with lemmy back and forth easily.
An instance is just a computer (or many computers) someone has set up to handle all of the traffic and data, that’s it. That’s why some instances don’t get back to you, that instance owner may have had something personally come up, or they’re not really working on the project anymore. Some may be owned by big corporations as well, we just don’t know.
I hope this doesn’t confuse you more, but feel free to ask any questions and I’ll try my best to answer them quickly.
Yes, there’s less in terms of there being fewer overall discussions going on. Proportionally, though, I’d say Lemmy feels very similar to Reddit in terms of hivemind circlejerking and hateposting.
I finally blocked most lemmy.world comms and started blocking users who I feel make the vibe worse, and that’s helped.
i started blocking “know it alls, or ackshually, this not how you pronounce or say it” they are up to no good, and prone to argue if you respond.
One thing I was surprised to find was the old grammar nazi shit when I first joined. Fortunately it’s died down in the past couple years but it seemed like reddit from 15 years ago so it was pretty noticeable
It’s like they’re trained or something… like some sort of engine… that-uh that tanks their thinking…
Or Steam, for that matter.
To play devil’s advocate, their incredible sales were absolutely up to luck. Like all things. But you’re right, people online are rarely worth listening to, unless you’d like the perspective of people who spend above average time on the internet. People without similar moorings to yours, and generally lacking the background that led you to your perspective and understanding. There are many benefits, and many downsides to polling the web.
Can I enquire how 15,000,000 copies sold was down to luck? They released a solid game with fun gameplay, great music, and an eye-catching art style. They priced the game competitively, even considering international pricing. All of this seems like choices that were made with intention, not the roll of a dice.
You could perhaps argue that there was luck in people seeing the games initial campaign on kickstarter, but I don’t think you can excuse the rest as ‘luck’.
I don’t mean to disparage my favorite game, but it was absolutely luck. Everything comes down to luck, whether it’s catching the attention of the right person, settling into the store at the right time, or any number of little things. Having an excellent product is irrelevant compared to the fickleness of reality. You’ve described hundreds, if not thousands of games that failed.
Skill is an intrinsic part of the equation, but everything comes down to luck.
Anyone who works in games development or publishing can tell you that the success of any given game is largely down to luck.
It’s perfectly possible for a dev to make all the right decisions and still lose, and in fact that’s what happens the majority of the time.
Yes Hollow Knight is a great game, but I guarantee there are dozens - if not hundreds - of games that are just as good but only sold a handful of copies and are doomed to languish in obscurity in the dusty corners of Steam.
Good question.
Luck is always an element of success. I’m confident there are other indie titles with similar levels of gameplay, music, and art style, with just as much passion poured in, that just never caught the viral wave. It’s a big world out there.
Obviously the dev set their project up well for that success, making it more likely, but it’s still a dice roll.
I’ve heard very successful movie/TV actors talk about seeing nobodies blow their minds in local theater productions, people who never got the stroke of luck required to make it big. Plenty of successful people forget that they owe no small part of their success to luck.
It’s kinda like how you need to be really really really good to become the next Tailor Swift or Michael Jackson. But even IF you are really fucking amazing, you still need to be super fucking lucky, because there are millions of other people just as good, or maybe better.
You can be the best musician in history, but unless you know someone big in the industry, the likelyhood of ever actually becoming anything is about as high as winning the lottery.
Same thing with games.
Same with writing or ideas for cooperatives and so forth. If we were organized we could help each other.
There are plenty of solid indie games out there. If a friend wanted to quit his job and play bass guitar I’d tell him to slow down. The Redditors were harsh but, “don’t quit your day job” is applicable to 99.9% of devs who won’t make it big.
It’s the consumer bandwagon.
The luck involved is that enough people found out about his game, played it, then recommended it to others who did the same.
They released a solid game with fun gameplay, great music, and an eye-catching art style. They priced the game competitively, even considering international pricing. All of this seems like choices that were made with intention, not the roll of a dice.
Okay, going with your logic, what about the games that have all of this and still are commercial failures? There is literally no shortage of them, even if you personally haven’t heard of them.
I think it was Rami Ismail (maybe Bennet Foddy…) who described luck in the games industry as being a vital factor, but every time you make a game and put information out there about your games, you’re re-rolling the dice. They played a great game, it’s still a matter of getting the right rolls at the right time.
Getting lucky doesn’t discount skill and hard work, but getting unlucky does, and the majority of talented people making great games have been unlucky.
I see this behavior everywhere on the internet, and I truly believe people become like this the more chronically online they are - whether they realize it or not.
I think it comes down at least in part to a manifestation of self-awareness of one’s own lack of accomplishments, or to put that another way, jealousy.
When a single individual spends a lot of time and effort making something amazing, there are two ways to respond. You can either appreciate and congratulate their efforts, or you can shit all over it.
In many ways, being critical and dismissive is a lot easier on one’s own psyche, especially if you are a person who is secretly disappointed and depressed in yourself for not achieving anything. It’s a defence mechanism to reassure yourself that spending all that time was wasted pointless effort - that even if you spent that time, it would be equally wasted too.
Accepting that someone else actually set out and did something cool all by themselves, with no luck required, just willingness and effort, is accepting that YOU could have done that too, if you tried. You could have been that person. But you weren’t.
It’s a lot “safer” to be hostile.
The paid trolls want people to feel defeatist and tired, that’s the point.
This is from 2015 and it’s the most bang for your buck warfare:
Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).
The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
(All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)
Do you have any other journalism or leaks from these influence operations?
I’m pretty sure there are court cases against these companies that hired them, there are also more interviews of Russians on video saying this stuff. You should look into that.
I would recommend looking at the years 2016 through 2019 , plus Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and other companies like that. Europe recently talked about going after a company doing this stuff.
Here’s a good portion of my bookmark vault: https://sh.itjust.works/post/33277983
My heart goes out to everyone that was censored by a dogpile of reports.
Moderators can go fuck themselves, and moderation shouldn’t be taken seriously at all.
They only have themselves and their abuse to blame.
Thanks.
What pisses me off is a lot of times these influence agents are not hard to spot but if they are with a powerful group they get a pass, and if you argue with them they will manipulate the rules or have your name sent to social media and they will ban you or violate you I should say for unrelated reasons. Especially about a certain country connected to our foreign policy but not just that and it’s going to get worse.
Not only do they allow fake accounts to violate their own rules and manipulate us, but they dishonestly violate people that have not broken rules at the behest of those powerful interests. The government and billionaires have their hooks well into social media, it is doomed, and there is no way to achieve anything big through it with it being fucked as so.
The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
Interesting. There’s definitely a concerted effort to censor information on the internet.
I don’t think it’s just Russians. I also believe a lot of useful idiots are perpetuating censorship because it’s expected of them.
My negativity and cynicism definitely increase with my recent online time, yeah.
Jesus christ, reddit. Take it down one single notch maybe? Like, bro
The ballad of Billy John
I remember the first comment I got on online was “you suck”. But it was soon drowned by encouragement words and constructive feedback.
About Hollow Knight, by the time this got posted on reddit, the game was already funded through kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/11662585/hollow-knight
What this image does not show is the amount of support this post received, more than 20k upvotes and plenty of endearing messages on reddit only.
u/YoDudeguy Nov 20 '15
Damn, that looks amazing! Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Will buy.u/Eliza_Douchecanoe Nov 20 '15
I like the dark feel of it, but with light-hearted game play and sound effects. Good shit.If I sort by votes, I had to scroll a bit to get to that 756 votes message.
It is important to filter and properly process the messages you receive. There are some mean and unnecessary messages on that image (and on the reddit thread), but they do not show the full picture and at that time could easily be ignored.
I agree. It can be easy to feel disheartened by a shitty comment (or many), and sometimes the bad outnumbers the good. However, it is useful to try to mentally filter out the mass of negativity because many of those are quick, lazy comments that say more about the commenter than the topic at hand.
Even though the sample of comments that you include in your comment are all short comments, I’d be inclined to view those with more weight, because it’s just a part of reality that it’s far easier to be negative and harmful than to be sincere and enthusiastic. There’s more effort and care into those short comments than someone just being negative
Thank you for this comment.
With 20/20 hindsight it was obviously a good idea.
But at the time of making the decision, it was an unbelievably risky plan and the odds were stacked against it. As a matter of fact, for every successful 2D platformer made with care and love that gets released and becomes successful, there are dozens that fail miserably and that you will never hear of.
Yes, believing in yourself and taking risks makes success possible, but remember that it does not guarantee it.
If take no risk then you guarantee to fail. You just got to take those risks. And if it fails, don’t give up. Just get up dust yourself off and try again. Just at different approach.
Yeah but the vast majority of those failed games look bad and are mediocre gameplay wise. Even if they are a true passion project. They don’t come close to the quality of games like Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy, Inside or even Pizza Tower. Most sidescrollers (including metroidvanias, rogue likes and souls likes) released on Steam are of low quality because it’s very easy to make a basic game in that genre.
Yes the genre is risky but if you make a very good looking game that stands out with top notch gameplay you increase the odds of success significantly.
Budding indie devs need to realize whether they can make such a game. If not they need to find another genre that is less crowded or a genre with a very high demand, like the horror / liminal space genre those games have a much higher success rate compared to the average platformer.
Depends on their financial position overall. If you live below your means and save up, especially in a professional position, you can offset expenses with passive investment income. Retirement is really just getting to the point where passive income and using up savings can last you until you expect to die.
If you have passive income that covers your bills, then the main difference between working and not working (or doing work without guaranteed income) is that you’re not getting ahead as quickly anymore. You’re not necessarily even falling behind, though even that state could be maintained for a while depending on how much you have saved and what kind of credit you have access to.
But yeah, if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, this isn’t an option, you’ll have to do the work around your other job.
People forget that Hollow Knight didn’t do very well at first, also. It took an excruciatingly long time for it to pick up steam.
luck has a lot to do with success, people often forget
Luck and a good review from a relevant reviewer. The devs of Nightmare Reaper credit Civvie11’s reviews of their game to the multifold increase of sales after they sent him a redeem code. And that’s not the only game that he’s helped out.
If you didn’t prepare for it, you often can’t use the luck when it passes buy.
And the other way around, too. With the best conditions, you also need luck. (while still fully agreeing)
This comment sounds like it’s discouraging these kind of risks. But I feel like you should almost always take them, because otherwise your life is just hollow.
I think you’ve got to work out what your appetite for risk is. It’s important to do take risks sometimes even if they scare you to move your life forward but also sometimes don’t. I’ve seen a bunch of people really fuck their lives up because they just kept rolling the dice.
But what is “fucking your life up”? What is the end goal of life that you have to achieve, else you failed your life?
One of my goals in life is to not become impoverished due to bad financial decisions, and think of how many people quit their jobs to try to make a successful game just for their plan to not work out and them then trying to somehow get their lives back in order so they won’t become homeless.
Despite this being a question for everyone to answer on their own, continuously failing risky bets and losing everything to it does not look like it will be a popular answer
But why would you even care about popularity? Right wing movements are also popular right now. I don’t think popularity is any important measure at all to determine if something is right/wrong/good/bad
When I say fucking up I mean things like spending all their savings and maxing out their credit chasing a dream. It could have all worked out for them if things had gone different, but it didn’t. As a result they’re a lot less happy, don’t have housing security and spend a lot more of their life fighting to stay afloat - their life is worse by almost every measurable metric. It’s not about failing life, but it is about minimizing your suffering.
Mummy, why can’t we have dinner today?
I’m sorry honey but you have to understand that daddy took a risk otherwise he would feel hollow! Sure we’re broke now because he quit his job to do a thing and it didn’t take off, and your little brother Timmy had to go live with Gramma or else he’d starve, but think of how daddy feels now! Not hollow!
Yeah, that’s not how it works when you don’t live in the US.
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We have decent worker protections in Belgium, but if you quit your job here to work on games I don’t know if you have the right to unemployment (since you weren’t fired). Even then, it only lasts for a year or so if you have worked at the place for 5 years, with the monthly payment decreasing significantly until the last few months you only get like 500€ per month.
Where do you live that nobody needs to work? I would sure like to move there.
“A family whose business failed will not just be left to starve” is very different from “nobody needs to work”.
I mean sure, your friends and family won’t let you starve. But you can’t rely on them forever. Government ain’t doing shit either: At least in my country, to get unemployment benefits, you need to be laid off or fired. If you quit your job to develop a game and fail, that’s on you. Yes, there’s also disability benefits, but those are small and require you to be disabled. Food banks exist too, but they don’t help you pay rent, nor do you get a full month’s worth of food every month.
All in all, a family with kids must have at least one working adult or HUGE savings.
So again, where’s the paradise where government will keep your rent or mortgage paid and your family fed if your game dev endeavour doesn’t pan out? I wanna move there.
GPs comment was hyperbole, but it holds true for most countries.
I live in Germany and make a pretty good salary as a developer. If I could, I’d take ½-1 year off work to develop one of a few games I’ve been designing over the last couple of years. In-between jobs I always start working on them, and those 1-2 months are a blast, much more fun than regular work.
But even though I have enough savings to do so, I really can’t, because it would mean:
- My career progression will pause, less future income
- I need my savings for unforeseen emergencies
- Losing out on a year of income will worsen my chances of ever affording my own apartment/house, and will worsen my private retirement savings
When the result is most likely making 0€, it’s hard to justify the risk.
I think you missed the joke
My friend quit his job and has been making indie games since 2015. It’s been 20 years and he’s made like $40,000 total in the time with all his games combined. His wife pays all the bills. Every time he releases a new game he tells everyone this is the one that’ll make him a million bucks. He points to games like Hollowknight, Stardew Valley, Undertale etc as proof.
In a just world, your friend would be able to create as much art as he wants without having to worry about who is paying the bills.
That’s literally what he’s doing. Ironically, his wife is a professional artist. She does digital art for a AAA game studio.
He’s definitely taking the wrong approach by trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
Without people like him, we wouldn’t have innovative indie games.
My friend quit his job and has been making indie games since 2015. It’s been 20 years
If it has been 20 years since 2015 then I think I overslept.
It certainly feels like 20 years since 2015. Covid and Trump have easily stressed 20 years out of me.
This has scientific backing and isn’t just a feeling: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-pandemic-accelerated-brain-aging-study-rcna220048
Hey, you. You’re finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.
Huh, I seem to have woken in 2011
Unrelated but same energy is the Reddit thread when Lewis Hamilton moved from McLaren to the up and coming Mercedes team before going and winning the drivers championship 6 times and the constructors 8 in a row with them.
Love a poorly aged thread on a success story
You can make a simple moblie game and if it catches on. Make thousands every month in micro transactions alone. Just need it to catch the whales. Follow your dreams, regardless of the outcomes. You’ll be better off.
Pffft, typical. /s
Those comments are all true though, and any game other than Silksong would absolutely have failed unless it got lucky. The only reason Silksong is initially so successful is because of Hollow Knight.
The OP concerns Hollow Knight — the screenshot is of a post that’s 10 years old
deleted by creator
I’m curious as to what style of game captures your attention?
deleted by creator
Cool. I personally like Metroidvania’s so it’s not the art style that grabbed me first but the genre. With that said I really like the style, I think it looks bloody lovely.
Do you like Metroid or Castlevania?
As someone who quit his job to create a video game this makes me feel good.
I will probably fail, but that’s a future feeling.
If you’re making something you like, you can’t really fail. :) That’s the only way to be an artist in the face of criticism.
I love looking at my old work.
Then you never had to look at your old code (that tends to be of way worse quality than what you are currently coding due to improved skills) xD
I look at my old code all the time.
If you keep things organized and well documented, its poor quality really shouldn’t bother that much.
While that’s true and I do document my code, I still get the urge to rewrite big parts of it. In the end I will in fact rewrite it, but that’s because I want to turn the original version of the code into a more general system that I can then use for my future work/projects.
As long as you’re doing this for fun/function and not because you’re embarrassed, then that’s fine. :p I wrote my own tween library in javascript purely because that just sounded like a great weekend, haha.
I will turn it into a general system for two reasons:
1: Because I know I can rewrite my old code in much better quality
2: Because this is something that I and my work colleagues may need regularly, so we dont have to rewrite it from scratch every time.
Really? I have almost the exact opposite experience when I look at my old code.
I’m usually afraid that it’s junk and I could’ve done better, but then I’m routinely impressed by what I’ve written and go “Man, I did a good job with this.”
Best of luck to you!
Thank you, sir ❤️
The mistake i made was biting off more than i could chew. If i could do it over again i would make simpler games to understand end to end
I’ve been doing that in the background for a few years now (checks notes… 15 years)
Background is software so I have a jumpstart on that.
I THOUGHT my project was relatively limited scope. But I must’ve been zoomed out in my brain because… damn. It ain’t.
Might be my only chance after I got a bit of funding, so just need to steamroll it, get something out there. Fingers crossed!
Did you get to release in some form?
I got caught up on specific features that would take me 4 months to implement. Like i was going to make a city builder and came up with a way to make dynamic realsitic roads with no compromises. Worked flawlessly, but thats not a game and i am one guy. Thats jusy one example, but the gist of it is i wasted too much time on single things and not just saying “make a simple clone of something start to finish”.
“we do these things not because they’re easy, but because we thought they would be easy”
You never know.
Just being curious, what are you working on ?
I don’t have any promo stuff ready yet but it’s a top down, raid based looter.
Post zombie outbreak, trying to start a new safe community in a disused airbase. You go on raids to nearby city/village/etc to get stuff you need, find new survivors and so on.
It’s primarily for mobile to scratch the Tarkov itch while on the bus, but I’ll also put it on steam.
Add a bit of RTS-stuff into it. Mobiles lack that kind of game
The general gaming community wants to sink money into MMOs and play call of duty slop. The majority is fine with subscriptions and battle passes. They use terms like bullet sponging. You’ll never ever make them happy.
However, there are the minoritiew, the fans that just want good well thought out games, that don’t need every mechanic, that are slightly addicting and just fun to play. The ones who think like you, focus on them.
I frequently go back to satisfactory and factorio. Factorio started as a small thing that they wanted to build, was crowd funded by people who wanted it, and big studios ignored because “the majority of gamers would never enjoy this”. Try didn’t care, they didn’t want the majority audience, and by focusing on what they cared about they literally created the factory building genre. Their drive them spawned my favorite game satisfactory, another game that the industry didn’t really believe in, and now it sits towards the top of the charts. Ignore the haters, ignore the majority. Focus on what you want to build.
Good luck, just keep it real.
Please provide your shameless plug ;)
I wish it were pluggable, I tried to get a gov grant for gamedev so started on a quick vertical slice but they said no because it’s solo dev. So I’ve been focussed on mechanics and the vertical slice is all out of date.
No promo material yet.
There is a mastodon but I only show visual stuff, not had much recently. Probably do more harm than good but…
Why would you do harm?
I am not much into zombie apocalypses, but you seem to have given a twist on community-building, and it’s in pixel art! Do not give it up.Thanks.
Just that it’s a bit unprofessional and scrappy and prototypical. Can put some people off.
Make sure to share with us once it’s out!
Also, a Dev blog linked here somewhere could help you stay on track and attract your audience prior to the release!
I shall, thanks.
Very crude Dev blog/stream of conscience on mastodon, keep your expectations rock bottom, you’ll still be disappointed!
Yay, nice to see you have one!
Keep going and do some updates!
Oh, what are you working on?
