Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

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>Is apathy toward society—which is, really, only your local community you're trying to defend and not something that is universally significant or even objectively capable of growth and sustainability—a dire crime I've committed?

Not particularly. You're free to interpret and navigate as you see fit.

>And claiming to have technical skill while also claiming that technology is stopping you from creating is a contradiction

You misread my comment. I'm not held back by tech, I'm held back by artistic creativity. It's a lot easier to make tech more accessible to the creative than to figure out how to expand my creativity to comjour novel ideas. I'm helping the other with my knowledge.

>Everything already is easy, not error prone, and performance acceptable.

You have not seen modern games if that's your perspective. AAA games are buggier than ever (whom I'm not interested in assisting), and there are still some surprisingly unoptimal games. We're far from post-scarcity performance.

>Because, why should a bunch of people always be a good thing?

If you stagnate, you lose developers. If you lose developers, the odds of good games decrease. I like good games.

I'm not even convinced I'm making "more developers" so much as trying to slow down the decrease of developers. The youth of today are shifting from old media production to being self-made content creators. Playing video games is much more enjoyable than making them, after all. I've long given up on the western AAA development, so I still want to inspire future indies to potentially make more Hollow Knights or subnauticas or even Balartro.

>In which case I can see why you're repulsed at the idea of reality encroaching in on your fantastic ideals

Once again, you clearly misinterpreted something. I'm still working on games and planning on making my own mid-scale game. But making my own games is not my end goal, and I highly doubt I'm going to make anything close to profitable.

But making games is not the only way to succeed as a game developer. Just ask Valve, Epic Games, or the Blender Foundation.

If you are held back by a lack of artistic creativity, then you should simply expend the effort to do a journey of self-improvement in the name of acquiring artistic creativity. Life is that simple, yes? Because game development without game development is what leads to consequences like the stagnation of the game development industry whose population decline you lament. Making tools for nobody or nobody in particular is aimless unproductivity. But the desire for quantity over quality is the fatal economic mistake you are making. Especially when you're not amiable toward the idea of filtering bad development skills out of your social industry you're envisioning. You only need one good game, made by one good developer, at the minimum. Any more enthusiasm than that is just silly post-scarcity arrogance and delusion which is very harmful to sensible progress.

What is more ambitious would be something like incubating or founding a small province of dedicated developers who aim to fulfill your wish. Exclusivity, selection, and culling ineffectiveness would definitely be essential here, rather than being tolerant to policies which would want to try to cram a bunch of diverse individuals into a melting pot of a future failed empire of creative ideas and technology that only serves as an ironic example of what not to do in building your own development industry and securing your own game production economics. Caring one bit about the ontological time of today and its youth, a mere phenomenological axiom which leads to concerns about some content creator crisis, is the tendency you need to abandon, if you want to start your theoretical project and see its successful completion.

>If you are held back by a lack of artistic creativity, then you should simply expend the effort to do a journey of self-improvement in the name of acquiring artistic creativity. Life is that simple, yes?

Not with bills to pay, and family to care for. It's not something I can do on the snap od a whim. I plan to take art classes to understand the fundamentals, but I'm not sure I can just "gain artistic creativity" the way I can "just learn 3d modeling and color theory". At this stage in life it's probably easier to help out other inspired creators with objective hoops.

>Making tools for nobody or nobody in particular is aimless unproductivity.

Sure, that's why evangelism has to be a part of this type of marketing. Help those who remain so far and have them inspire. If you get to advertise your tools on the way, it's 2 birds.

And yes, I worked at Unity at one point. I've seen firsthand the consequences of not dog fooding your own tools to make sure the pipeline fits with what an actual dev would do in production. I will still make games with such tools just to make sure I'm not disconnected from the audience. Something more than just a fancy tech demo with horribly mangled code that no one can learn from. A sub-goal is to encourage best practices and make sure my documentation is well covered (I'd say "better than Unreal/Unity", but that's a very low bar).

>What is more ambitious would be something like incubating or founding a small province of dedicated developers who aim to fulfill your wish.

I won't lie, I've thought about it. You're essentially saying to either found up a small studio or to make soke form of masterclass. To mold future students or employees to that vision. I'm not going to actively pursue such a dream, but steps in that direction does help with that mentality.

I need at least a decade more experience and a lot more capital before I could really pull thst off, though. So yes, that will still be a decade of me proving I can launch useful tools and well-made (not necessary profitable) games to gain that trust. I gotta do one to accomplish the other.

>Caring one bit about the ontological time of today and its youth, a mere phenomenological axiom which leads to concerns about some content creator crisis, is the tendency you need to abandon, if you want to start your theoretical project and see its successful completion.

Perhaps. I'm not claiming I can change an entire generation's mindset on what to pursue in life. I simply want to show the path for those may have been interested but are put off by entire avoidable factors of the industry. I was simply rejecting a notion thst somehow the industry of devs is becoming bloated.

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