opyate

The notions of:

- "maximising shareholder value"

- wanting forever-growth

- laying off 10K of your staff because you got a slightly smaller 11-digit number profit that your "projected" 11-digit number profit [0] while the CEO made $55m

...just seems to me like... corporate greed?

I'm a big proponent of the worker collective [1], and wanting everyone to share in the spoils, everyone having a vote. I've seen examples of collectives being very successful.

Why doesn't everyone do it, though? Is it because worker collectives can't reach that critical mass of money to branch out into new products and ventures? That begs another question: does every company need to be an Acme corp? Does every company need to be a virus that takes over the world, then lay off staff and build inferior products for even more profit once they've cornered a market?

I don't know - I'm sure I'll never be a "good businessman", but something about the way corporations are set up today is very off.

So, to get back to your point: yes, probably - "they have no interest in tech & design", and fuck art and user value if it gets in the way of some KPI, right?

EDIT: formatting

0. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

However, as I'm not a rich indie dev, I have to do client work too. Currently working in insuretech, where I'm focused on document extraction (layout detection, OCR, labelling + retraining models, etc).

0. https://juanuys.com/blog/2023/03/07/thoughts-on-ai-and-games...

I saw a thread just earlier [0] where GPT said it invented a game which doesn't yet exist, but it was wrong, unfortunately. Not sure I'd trust it to be an expert in anything. (Can't find it now, but there was also an article recently about Bing/Sydney just getting facts completely wrong.)

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038804

- HIIT videos on YouTube in the morning after I wake up

- walk whenever possible

- lunch-time runs (I work from home, so this is convenient)

- I haver some resistance bands under my desk for when I watch a video, and just don't want to sit

- the kids keep me busy. They're 6 and 9, so there's a lot of picking up and swinging them, light wrestling, and extracurricular activities

I don't do all of these every day, but enough to get at least an hour of exercise a day.

What possible genetic diversity can be had from just 3 families [0]... (Shem, Ham, Japheth)

I identify most with Inyalowda [1], haha.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah#Family_tree

1. https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Inyalowda

Link in my profile to my blog, where I talk a bit more about it.

Tried a bunch of tech to see what stuck: phaserjs, haXe (fun!), Lua stuff like löve2d, unity (also with clojure). I settled on unity initially, but got burned (deprecation, docs/support, etc), and finally settled on Godot (I've got python skill, so gdscript felt natural).

With contracting, I make slightly more money than permies, so I can afford to spend a day a week on gamedev. With a view to phase in more gamedev days as I get more successful.

I just recently completed a masters in indie gamedev to fast track some of the skill requirements.

I'm happy with the approach I took to get where I am. It's low stress, I still make money, and I still have bags of fun. And the masters saved me some mistakes in the long run.

- Sausage Factory by Cane & Rinse: https://caneandrinse.com/category/sausage-factory/

- Industry & analysis: https://twitter.com/unboxingpod

- Simon Carless from GameDiscoverCo experimented with a podcast (Tales From GameDiscoveryLand), and I really want him to continue: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-from-gamediscove...

- Designer Notes: https://www.designer-notes.com/category/podcast/ (I'm currently working my way through the series)

There are a whole bunch of others which I listen to on and off (see screenshot below), but the above stand out for me.

https://imgur.com/a/UaLxOVM

I wholeheartedly agree. 6 and 9-y-old here. Apps and websites are approve-only, and no YouTube/YTkids.

Something bad happened a few years ago which gave us a big scare.

Paternal grandad was a civil servant, and they were comfortable, but grandad died when dad was 6. Granny married a drunk and lost everything. Step-grandad beat them. My dad grew up a rebel. His saving grace was a teacher who said: I don't care if you don't come back to school, but promise me one thing: you'll read a book a week.

Mum and dad meet quite young, and have me when mum was still a teen. We're dirt poor, and they borrow a lot of money from maternal grandad, who is a gold miner with 7 kids. He gets my dad a job at the mine. The 80s in South Africa were boom years for gold, and everyone does well. My dad pays maternal grandad back all their debts, and I distinctly remember how our lives changed as a young chap. Not rich by any stretch, but we're not hungry or shoddily dressed. My dad is smart enough to spend money on important things, like getting us a home PC, and paying for skills, like my Karate and scuba diving.

However, in my late teens, things start changing again. Jobs dry up for dad, mum leaves him, he falls into depression. Finances rise and fall as dad gets back into work, and makes a bit of money day trading. I drop out of uni, as we can't pay for it anymore.

He meets a nice new lady, who inherited a piece of land, and they scrape just about enough money and know-how together to start developing the first phase of a four-phase development. But, he gets fucked by the bank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absa_Group_Limited#Mortgage_lo...

Three weeks after my wedding in 2014, he commits suicide. Either severely depressed, or so that the bank can't come after him. He leaves whatever they have left in a secure estate to the grandchildren, and stepmum can live in the house until she dies. The kids (me and sis, and 3 step sisters) inherit nothing.

Me? I was privileged enough to learn programming in school. The gold mines funded the schools well, and in 1990 already (when I was 11/12), our classroom had 20 Commodores in it. That was my saving grace: coding. I could earn good money, and self-fund most of my bad decisions.

(My first startup: we won Startup weekend, then got a £50K grant from Telefonica - all pure luck, and a little bit of tapping into the zeitgeist at the time: polling apps)

The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon.

The middle class kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and also miss. Then they will walk away, saying that was fun, and go hang out with their mates. But maybe the 10th or the 100th middle class kid will hit the balloon.

And the working class kids? They work at the funfair. They never get to throw darts.

Here's the kicker: those kids who hit the balloons? One or two of them might go off and start a blog/podcast, or write a book titled

- Zero To Plushy

- The Dart Thing About Dart Things: Plushy Hunting When There Are No Easy Answers

- Dart Throwers at Work: Stories of Plushy Hunters' Early Days

- You Are a Badass at Hunting Plushies: Master the Mindset of Throwing Darts

- The Lean Plushy Hunter

- &c

Hell, if it's the middle class kid writing the book, they might even throw a couple of anecdotes in there about how they didn't have an easy start (compared to the rich kid), and it might even be true for them.

That book is the catnip that folks like you and me base our life decisions on.

I had a go at 3 startups, only one of them quasi-full-time, as I self-funded with freelancing. (I spent years building a "turn PDFs into data" product, had a few paying customers, and then one day got made totally redundant by Google Vision.)

Needless to say, I got completely burned out on startup number 3.

I shuttered the business just as Covid hit. I spend more time with the family (wife, two daughters, 9 and 6), and we moved to the countryside to be closer to ageing parents and siblings with kids.

It's healing time, baby

I wish you all the best

Here you go:

https://twitter.com/MaddyThorson/status/1238338574220546049

We found this too, and my wife felt validated by this article she found recently:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/10/the-big-idea-w...

Who are the existing marketplaces that you can start with? (e.g. I don't know, but does Amazon have a "marketplace" for tried-and-tested Lambdas? And this just makes me think of Zapier anyway.)

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181956/

2 years later: finally finished, and built a nice network of codevelopers and industry professionals. I'm 43 this year, and a few others were my age or older. I submitted a week early due to summer holidays, and still got a distinction. (That doesn't matter to me, though, as the real proof in the pudding would be whether my games will sell or not.)

I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, and built strong friendships along the way, and even sent the staff a crate of cider, because they're so awesome.

My motivation to stick around and do the work was very strong, as I really do want to phase out webdev and do more gamedev. It's sooo much more creative and suited to me as an individual. If I have to sit in a meeting where someone bikesheds how to connect a database to a website one more time, I'm going to scream, so it had to happen.

My partner was onboard with it, and I could afford to (as a contractor) take the odd day off to do more masters work, which really helped, as it was part time at 20 hours per week.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed, I'll be writing a post mortem on the programme soon: https://juanuys.com

My main advice is to do it for you, and really be sure you'll have time and passion for it throughout. A few of my cohort realised that it took too much time, or they didn't like the critical reflection element of some of the modules, and gave up. So, also check exactly what the modules entail, what needs to be delivered, etc. E.g. some of the younger students were disappointed that they weren't going to be "taught" Unreal Engine , for instance, but rather had to maintain a blog and write about their own learnings (as is the nature with master of arts, as opposed to science).

As FragrantRiver also already said, start small. Think of the smallest scope possible, then reduce it even more. Perhaps consider a game engine, so your programming efforts are focused on the economy side, then the ants can be event driven, and graphics are easier to handle/implement. (I started a Universal Paperclip clone a while back, using cljs, and had bags of fun making the tech tree and economy logic, but then got bored when I had to build a UI finally.)

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/john-carmacks-agi-startup-raises-2...

- https://twitter.com/IndieLegion

- https://howtomarketagame.com/ Discord

- https://twitter.com/gamediscoverco Plus subscription's Discord

- Godot Engine's Discord

I've connected more deeply with some of the folks I've met on there, so it hasn't felt lonely at all.

I'm also doing an indie dev masters via Falmouth, and my cohort meet up weekly (and we have a Discord for daily chatter), and it's a great community, but I'm not sure if that will last past graduation in a few weeks.

(I'm on the marketing video super cringe)

https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/study/online/postgraduate/indie-g...