I think this is solid.

I find myself continually project hopping but I suspect at some point one of these will have a spark.

Mostly agree.

90% of the time they are asking other indie devs who are also bad at descibing their game. They have very likely never been told their Steam page looks awful or is described poorly.

The YouTuber part is difficult. If you go to contact them, many straight up say don’t send me your games to check out on their contact page, and out of the ones that do accept keys, you’re usually looking at a very small chance that they’ll stream it.

xkill :-(

Most people leave the industry when you crunch through a game and then get laid off anyways when the studio closes.

Even so, its the team’s collective experience that’s important. An individual themselves might have a lot of experience shipping games, but getting laid off and joining a new team just means they’ll get to watch the new management make the same mistakes they just went through.

Edit: Fixed getting laid -> getting laid off lol

What if your most interesting choice for you is definitely not the best choice overall, if you knew you had to eventually turn around and sell it?

I do a little writing but the writer example is mostly because its easier to visualize.

The choice paralysis I’m getting stuck on is indie game development - Most project choices I’m looking at are measured in several months to years of effort and that’s even in flux depending on how you approach it.

Cold take: The indie, AA, AAA, and the one “AAAA” labels are all pretty poor.

He’s right, its brutal that a single “failed” or even a break even title can end a studio and all the talent and experience gets lost.

A bad game is often valuable dev experience, even if it doesn’t feel that way when you’re going through it.

An unfortunate ‘secret’ for most indie titles is that the vast majority of their sales are on discount, usually during launch or one of the big week long sales. Not a lot of people buy indie games at full sticker price unless its a pretty high quality title.

So your $200K net revenue would be at absolute max, but is realistically ~50-80% of that.

As I recall, its around 5%-20% of players leave a review, usually closer to 5% unless something about the game makes people want to talk about it, for both good and bad.

You could build some shelving and use it as a baking tray holder, with the trays facing vertical. They would be easy to slide in/out.

Its the Matthew effect - Steam is going to show you popular games because they’re popular, which leads to them being more popular. It’s usually games with big marketing budgets/efforts outside of Steam that eventually hit ‘popular’ and then stay there.

If I had to contribute my extremely biased two cents: Steam recommends ‘similar’ games based on tags, popularity, and if your friends play it. You play Valheim, its going to show you survival crafting games, viking games, and maybe a third person action game. If another relatively popular game has all three, you’re almost guaranteed to be shown it.

In the indie dev space you’re trying to leverage this by changing your tags to a popular game similar to yours so players of popular game will hopefully get recommended your game. (Also a lot of devs do this which dilutes its potential)

My biased take is that these tags fall short and it leads to ‘similar but different’ game recommendations which eventually had your storefront dominated by mass sellers or the big titles in a specific genre trying to muscle in on the space that Steam believes must be your favorite genre(s) because you bought the games marked as similar that it recommended to you.

If you actively try to find niche titles via labs or whatever then you can get it better tuned, but for most people I think they usually end up seeing just already big and successful games.

Sorry for the long rant, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

A long time ago on a random modders forum, I was a part of a very small contest to judge mods at the end of the year. No prizes, just kind of a honorary showcase post which I guess was considered cool at the time.

It essentially fell down to just me to play about ~6 entries over the course of the month and then post the rankings.

Well I was having dire internet and computer issues at the time. My internet was bad but my average was suddenly dragging at 0.5kb/s on average and I had what I later learned was a failing HDD. I kept thinking it would eventually get better but it didn’t. I barely got a single mod downloaded.

Now the dumb part: Rather than be a sane person and admit I was having technical issues and would have to hand it over to someone else (which I was already running up on the deadline, leaving anyone I handed it to unable to complete it before then), but instead I tried to power through.

I kept expecting the internet to magically get better and then use the power of last minute energy to tackle it. When the magic never happened, at the last minute I simply ranked the mods based on vibe with the only one I played being in the number one spot.

No one seemed to dispute it until one contestant saw his entry didn’t have a single download and immediately figured out I never played it. Then it all came into question and soon enough the site Admins banned me from being a judge and canceled the whole thing.

That was the last contest the forum hosted until it ended up folding a year or two later.

I’m not so sure - I’m in the world of indie game dev and silently publishing a game without any advertising is usually a death sentence for a game. Especially in a busy market where finding anything decent is a chore.

Granted, the more effective advertising is usually getting streamers or reviewers to check a game out. Traditional ads, in my experience, have not been valuable.

I think ghosting is a bit much. I know it sucks to bring the player aside and have the talk if something isn’t going quite right, but I’d usually much prefer to allow them to try and course correct a bit.

One of the first times I ever joined a DnD campaign I got ghosted and it sucked. I wouldn’t want to inflict that feeling on other players if I could help it.

In retrospect its obvious. At the time it happened, it just seemed like this player was just suddenly mid-campaign throwing a wrench in everything. No one knew about the personal beef, not even the DM it was directed at.

Everyone in private said they were enjoying the game but this one player kept ruining the fun. DM said he’ll talk with him (which is how he found out about the personal beef) but they couldn’t resolve it amicabily.

So hence the very awkward campaign-ending-but-actually-a-new-one starting without that specific player.

You are correct though, the ‘new’ campaign went on for awhile but then the social group eventually went their separate directions anyways and it ended for good.

Edit: Actually rereading my original post, I’m not trying to argue that this was a good solution. I’m going to edit this and the initial post to clarify that.

The situation I got to witness was the player was upset with the DM for personal out-of-game reasons. To be petty and spiteful, they started to do many actions to derail as much as they could.

Eventually the DM pulled the player aside and they had a talk but the enthusiasm for the campaign was gone and everyone just kind of dropped out.

Much easier to prematurely end the campaign because the DM is “busy with a lot of stuff” but then he does a one shot with the exact same group minus one person - Then what do you know - The one shot went so well that they want to turn it into a full campaign. Oh but, they invited a new player who is joining their new campaign and its the “just right” amount of players and they can’t really add anyone else right now, especially the person excluded, but maybe next time?

Edit: This is intended to be mostly sarcastic as this is a real funky thing to do. Ideally if you have a problem player, its better to talk it out and either solve the problem or end it on understood terms.

I worded that poorly, I meant too late in progression of the game’s biomes*.

By the time you’re in the Ashlands, you’ve likely moved hundreds or thousands of tin/copper/iron/silver/black metal. It feels like tier 2 portals should have been unlocked around the time you get an artisan table since the game makes you double back for more iron to make the padded set and then once again for mistland weapons - Which just feels tedious since roaming the swamps with plains tier gear makes the enemies laughable.

(I know you can mine the ancient giants armor for scrap iron too but I seem to get like 95% copper 5% iron scrap.)

There are a handful of stress tests you can run to have the CPU or GPU or whatever at max load.

A healthy system will run hot but otherwise be fine. A faulty system, especially a PSU, will likely run into the freeze in less than 30 seconds.

There’s also PSU testing hardware that’s basically plug in tests but if I’m being honest I’ve never really messed with them as this hasn’t come up very often for me.