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Comment by NoPiece | Hacker News Reader

I so much like the positive response of Kris Piotrowski of Capy Gmaes (SUPERBROTHERS: SWORD & SWORCERY EP)

kris piotrowski:

No Man's Sky is the video game everyone on Earth wanted to make ever since they first hear the word "video game".

Downside: No Man's Sky just made every game maker feel inadequate and suicidal. Upside: We don't have to try to make No Man's Sky anymore.

The question "Will I ever get to make my Exploration Sim/Space Battle Magnum Opus?" can now be replaced with "When can I play No Man's Sky?"

One important takeaway from No Man's Sky: If you have a dream video game you want to make, you should probably go try to actually make it.

#Below is one of my dream video games.

https://twitter.com/krispiotrowski

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The indie game dev community is incredibly hard to break into (you basically have to work on your game eating ramen for 18 months, and even then you're not sure you'll even succeed), but it's one of the industries with the most pleasant people I've ever met.

I'm not an indie dev, but a few friends from college are, and I get to meet a few of those guys here and there at GDC etc.- they're just delightful. Nerdy friendly guys who are incredibly smart, hard working, with an incredibly diverse set of talents (the skills needed to make a game are immense- programming, visual arts, music composing, game design, marketing- and a lot of those guys do all of it by themselves or with just 1 or 2 other people) and know to have fun.

Paradoxically, the gaming community is one of the most negative one ever (hordes of disappointed gamers will flood your blog and insult your whole family if you don't give them exactly what they want). That contrast is super weird.

Names you should check out if you're interested in knowing more: Kris Piotrowski, Derek Yu, Andy Hull, Phil Fish, Jon Blow, Richard Flannigan, Matthew Davis, Alec Holowka.

Producers vs. consumers. I think this segregation exists everywhere. As you described, it is so accentuated in the context of indie game scene, it's absurd. But it's not a specific situation to this scene.

I have programmer friends who don't ever use a computer outside of work, who haven't learned a new language (outside of work) in the last 10 years for instance. Learning new languages is not necessarily a creative endeavor. But what happens then is cargo culting and bike shedding much like the way gamers get so demanding about something they don't know how to make.

Maybe the answer is that only people who are already wealthy can become indie game devs? That would explain why they all seem nice (it's much easier to act that way when you're financially secure) and why the community around them hates them.

Nah. Some of them get comfortable financially after they ship their game, but almost none of them were wealthy while making the game. It's common for devs to live in their parent's basement during that time, or off of money that they saved in jobs for the years or decades prior.

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