DizzyDoo

Haha, Flash Games were where I got my start doing games commercially, back in 2009! You could license them to different arcade websites and publishers, it was pretty good money for a student.

And yes, I'm on YouTube over here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVCz-_8VfkVwgB1WzCcuq4w

Sure! The 'minimum requirements' on the Steam store page is basically my Windows computer, and the Macbook I have ;) For previous games I used to support Ubuntu Linux too, but the cost of supporting such a limited player base didn't work out for me, sorry Linux people, maybe again one day!

I use Unity (currently 2019.3, probably moving to 2020 soon, for the new v2 of the Hybrid Renderer package) and C#. Photoshop for painting with an Wacom Intuos 5 tablet (Adobe Script for slicing and exporting), Spine for animating (highly recommended! Check out esotericsoftware.com), Modo for all my 3D needs. Git for version control, Gitlab for hosting, and lots of Python and Django for the web service parts of my current game, as well as my website. Lots of Google Sheets for marketing and accounting.

And, of course, paper and pens to doodle and make notes and keep track of where everything is at and what I'm working on next.

It's coming along fine, thanks for asking! (For reference, it's here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...)

I've been working on this one for multiple years now, commitment and the art of Finishing Things is perhaps more important than any individual skill-set like programming. Obviously individual skill-sets are important, but you could be the greatest at everything and it's not worth very much if you're _also_ very good at giving up.. In my experience, the first 10% of working on a game is great fun because you're trying different things out, experimenting! And then you have to finish the thing - and getting a decent product to market is a hard slog whether it is a video game or not.

Simple advice to anyone interested in making games - make something small and simple in a single weekend, a snake clone or something, and then go from there.

Ignoring Amazon's Affiliate program for a moment, there's already enough incentive for manufactured, astro-turfed reviews. And even when there's real, legitimate reviews left by purchasers of a product, the store page owner could change the quality of the product being sold - silently start shipping knock-off versions as opposed to the real thing - or even reuse a product for a wildly different product. (I know this has happened plenty in the past, I wonder if Amazon has cracked down on that behaviour? Even so, that it has happened so frequently in the past doesn't help since we're talking about 'losing trust'.) These practices have hurt much more than their affiliate program has, in my view.

My grandparents (in England) were longtime subscribers to a magazine named Which (which.co.uk). I have no idea if it's the same thing anymore, but at least 15 years ago it was a (very middle-class, quite expensive) magazine that would review family cars, vacuum cleaners, televisions and so on. The whole selling point of that magazine was 50 years of built-up trust, they'd lay out in detail how they'd do their blind testing and their rigor in testing, and very publicly owning when they made mistakes or got things wrong. Are there any online equivalents that have this sort of cache and trust associated with them? If you were to buy, say, a laptop, or a new washing machine... where would you go?

I've been a full-time 'indie' computer game developer for about five years now and in the gamedev space 'indie' hasn't really meant any one thing for most of the last decade. I'm a solo guy who does art & animation, programming, writing, marketing, and so on (I have an accountant and I contracts a friend who helps with the music), working on original IP, with no outside inventment, self-publishing - which is about as 'indie' as it gets, I suppose. However, 'indie' is often applied to teams of 20+ people, sometimes either with outside investment, or who work with publishing companies. Lots of publishers are 'indie publishers' too, operations are built to work with smaller teams and budgets.

And I'm totally fine with all of that! Proclaiming that "I'm indier than thou" might get you some (utterly meaningless) clout with... well, I don't know who. The main thing is I find encouraging is there's a number of proven ways to run a sustainable software business. And that's nice to know, because if at some point I need to or want to change how I'm doing things, it isn't a one-size-fits-all scenario.

I'm a full-time independent game developer who's been using Unity for the last 6 years and sadly Garry's very correct. The render pipeline debacle has been painful to watch, Unity announced that the Universal Render Pipeline (what is still planned to replace the default renderer) was 'production ready' in early 2019, and it was lacking... so much. No ability to use multiple cameras (one for the game, one for the UI, for instance - a common use-case), they've rewritten the post-processing stack multiple times. Having more than one Directional Light was supported only very recently. Some of these have been and are being addressed, but it feels like Unity is in this odd no man's land, grey-area between the old legacy parts of the engine, and the new ones that just aren't ready for prime time, with many glaring gaps in the functionality. You would expect something as straight-forward as SSAO to be available out-of-the-box, it's hardly cutting edge tech, but two (three?) years into URP's development and it's not in the Standard Assets yet.

I do sympathise, it must be very difficult to bring an old engine up-to-date, but it's quite infuriating for developers like myself to work and know when to upgrade and when not to.

Every time I read through their update articles I'm reminded that Backblaze is a service I could possibly buy! I only buy a hard drive once every few years, but I enjoy seeing the data. The time it takes to write up and share what they are no doubt tracking anyway is probably quite worthwhile, I'd guess this is an effective piece of marketing. I'd be quite interested to see how many new sign-ups they get each time they post these stats.

I'm using Waitress in production: https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/waitress/en/stable/ It's main thing is that it's really simple, worth a look if you're using Django.

I wonder whether an anonymous group of non-dolphin team developers will fork Dolphin and incorporate information from the hack to improve performance and precision?

Enforcing a 'black hole approach' for gaming the system then leads to an inverted instance of the same problem: game the system, in an obvious fashion... but for your competitor. This leads to your competitors getting 'black holed' and there you are at the top of the searches.

It's unscrupulous, absolutely, but I imagine it's very hard (if not impossible) to prove who is or is not performing the gaming.

I write (program, paint, animate, market, and so on) computer games like this one[1]. The recent economic troubles haven't effected me negatively that much, instead it's been a positive thing as more people are home and playing more games. I don't necessarily want to 'profit' from all the hardship around, but I'm glad to provide products that entertain and hopefully make the current situation a bit more bearable - that feels good.

I got started over 10 years ago now, making Flash-based games and licensing them to various web portal and publishers, which was good money for a student back then! A little indie game developer golden age where you'd get a lot of players and also a few thousand dollars per game without too much trouble. I went on from there doing self-published games that anyone can buy on Steam or the Mac Store, both of which provide about 90% of my revenue, and the remaining 10% are from smaller stores and game distributors.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke... <- My current project.

Out of interest, why would people laugh at someone learning C? I know plenty of people using C in all manner of domains, choosing it over C++ or Rust for fair and sensible reasons - I'm not a C person myself, but it certainly seems extremely useful to have in the toolkit!

Theme Park World is a big influence. Remember the advisor character, kind of looked like an ant? My game also has an advisor (not an ant, though) that is also voiced by a Scottish accent. I hadn't even meant to make that same choice, but the effect of that game runs deep!

I'm writing a computer game called The Eldritch Zookeeper (https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...), it's a spooky management/tycoon game where you're a cursed zookeeper and have to run a zoo full of monsters. Very much inspired by old Bullfrog games. Lots of fun to dream up weird creatures and program a very data/systems-driven simulation that still uses lots of physics!

Indie game dev is my full time job, so this isn't so much a personal project as my regular job that I thankfully get to continue in my small home office. Getting to paint and animate and design monsters, as well as write code, or do the marketing parts - it's all interesting and engaging in different ways.

> For some reason I feel like anything IBM does is overly complicated and over the top!

I think you've misread 'BIM' as 'IBM'. Building Information Modelling is a specific task for software, as the linked wiki page describes.

This sounds like a game design challenge! Design a game that uses the controls and theme of this weird controls mashup.

In case anyone is wondering what to google, they're called "Reader's Bibles".

I've been on Digital Ocean for a few years, pretty happy with them and have no plans to move on. I was on Hetzner before them, but moved away because the pricing was essentially the same yet Hetzner's control panel (at least back then - I'm talking before 2015) was a bit of a pain, and DO's is all shiny, and I find what I'm looking for quickly, most of the time. Hetzner's admin panel might have come a long way since then though?

the first commercial downloadable game I released back in 2015, that let me become a full-time indie developer, has done roughly 25% of its revenue over the last four years on Mac. This is adding together the % of copies sold on Steam for Mac users, and the Apple Mac Store, where my game was featured on the main page for three months. Notarization, and 64-bit support, and all that aside, the audience on Mac that you can sell to is massive, especially since a lot of developers just ignore the platform - I'm fully expecting to support as many macOS devices as I can for my next game.

I played LOTR Online when it first came out! I think the only MMO I've paid for. Sadly, I don't think I was as much as fan of it as you were, I bounced off it by lv25. Probably much has been added in the last 10+ years though!

It's true, and it's why so many MMO's find themselves leaning into adding that grind to leveling, or a repetition in the end-game loop. The days of every developer taking a crack at creating a 'WOW killer' (and all of them failing) have thankfully past, I'm sure there are a bunch of traditional MMO's that are still trucking along nicely (Final Fantasy 15, Black Desert Online, the new Maple Story) but that sort of Quest Content driven game isn't so predominant nowadays (outside of nostalgia trips like WOW Classic and Runescape Classic). I can't say I miss them too much?

A number of years ago I completed an MMO project by myself (art, programming, marketing, etc). It was fun! Real-time server was in Python Twisted, lots of Cython to speed up the deepest parts of the game loop. Django for the main website. The client was Flash (this was back in 2013, when it was still kinda a thing), which meant anyone could jump in really quickly, but technically that was challenging for a real-time 2D Zelda-style game because you were limited to TCP rather than UDP and the server has to be 100% authoritative since opening up Flash swf's or sniffing packets is so very easy. The server could support 250 people, and I had some fun tooling that let me spin up virtual players to stress-test it. Fun to remember!

The thing with MMO projects that really gets you is, even after you've got a mature client and server you still need to put together enough content, which if you're level designing/writing/painting everything yourself, is an enormous quantity of work. If you don't want players to run out of quests and whatnot you've probably got to lean towards a sandbox experience, and this MMORTS is a particularly interesting way to go.

I've been a full-time indie developer for four years now, and it is tough. I don't know if it's that much tougher than most other small businesses, I have friends who are dairy farmers, structural engineering contractors, graphics designers, an itinerant preacher or two... they've all got tough aspects to their respective professions, in some ways they're easier than mine, and in others way, way harder (I don't have to maintain the health of three to four hundred cows, for example.)

What I appreciate about Jeff's blogging over the years is his focus on sticking to a secret sauce, his is clearly an ability to put together classical RPG's with lovely writing. The reason I've been able to be a full-time indie is that I do both all the programming and all the art (painting/animating/modelling/etc) (As an example, I'm currently working on: https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...). The fact that I need to sell half the copies than a team or two is, it turns out, a massive advantage. That, and the specific voice I bring to the writing/design of the games, helps keep me going, and selling copies in a competitive environment that's shifted a lot since I started in 2015.

Finding that secret sauce, that niche, I think that's pretty important.

I've been enjoying Paul Dean's work for a while and I'm pleased to see some writing from him pop up here. Part of his work in the last 10 years has been on the website Shut Up And Sit Down (http://shutupandsitdown.com), which does excellent videos, reviews and articles about board games. He's recently moved on from that project and I'm very interested to see what writing project he'll work on next.

I really like the idea of building an issue tracker into the Git file storage! Would you recommend it for use in real life projects yet?

My full-time job is indie game development, and I'm very pleased to see this. I sell my games on Steam, the Apple Mac Store, Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming (and a few other places, but those are the big ones) but 90% of my income comes from Steam. This is... understandably not the most stable feeling thing, to have one distributor paying my bills. I'm looking forward to Steam not having quite the hold on PC Games that it currently does! It's not that I have any complaints about Steam specifically, but Discord selling games, the rise of GOG and Itch, and Twitch getting in on it are all quite interesting to me.

I hope Discord opens up to more developers soon.

Oh, and another thought, I run a Discord for people interested in the game I'm currently developing. You can imagine the effectiveness of putting a Buy button so close to an engaged community.

A very good bit of marketing from Valve, I remember reading this when it was originally leaked (or 'leaked', depending on how cynical you want to be) and being quite impressed with what seemed like a developer paradise. Because in the writing it _does_ sound like a wonderful company, but the fairly recent reporting on internal politics and power struggles at Valve (https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless...) raise questions about how much the handbook truly represents what goes on, since the time period that Rich Geldreich talks about is from before this version of the handbook. (Previous HN discussion on that article is also very worth reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584563)

For me, figuring out how to implement A* on a world was one of those programming milestones along the way of me grokking how software is put together. In fact, I see there's a Stack Overflow question from me still online with an implementation I wrote in Python eight years ago (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4159331/python-speed-up-...), and I have sometimes wondered how many people have then used that old snippet as a reference.

Amit's articles were online then, and definitely helped me think through these problems, and their main strength is just how visual the explanations all are. I'm pleased to see they're still online, being updated, and no doubt benefitting others, I know that personally Amit's effort was one of a number of things that has allowed me to be a full-time indie game developer all these years later.

Thanks!

I started making video games as a teenager, and about ten years ago there was this golden age of Flash games where you could make a small video game, auction it off on a private website to various companies that ran Flash game arcades. You'd incorporate their branding, ads, links, and in exchange receive an upfront fee followed by a split of the ad revenue. Over the course of my three year degree I had five games published, which gave me a taste of the business side of game development. It was a weird, unique, fun time in game development! I don't think there's much like that now for hobbyists to transition into commercial work quite so naturally.

But I finished uni and went into the industry, writing Python/Django code for a startup. During this time I started work on the game that eventually let me go full-time, The Cat Machine (http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900). I'd work on it on Saturdays and towards the end of development I'd even get up early in the morning to get an hour or two in. I released it on Steam and a bunch of other places, where it did... better than a niche puzzle game about cats should do, I think! Other good things happened, it was featured for a number of months on the front page of the Apple Mac Store next to actually really good games like Braid and Mini Metro, so it turned out that cross-platform support was really worth it!

I've been working on my second downloadable title for the past two years (http://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zookee...), but that's the story so far!