I am an indie game developer and I lead a team of 5 trusted individuals. After our latest release, we bought a larger office and decided to expand our team so that we could implement more features in our games and release it in a desirable time period. So I asked everyone to look for individuals that they would like to hire for their respective departments. When the whole list was prepared, I sent out a bunch of job offers for a "training trial period". The idea was that everyone would teach the newbies in their department about how we do stuff and then after a month select those who seem to be the best. Our original team was
-Two coders
-One sound guy(because musician is too mainstream)
-Two artists
I did coding, concept art(and character drawings) and story design, So, I decided to be a "coding mentor"(?).
We planned to recruit
-Two coders
-One sound guy
-One artist (two if we encountered a great artstyle)
When the day finally arrived I decided to hide the fact that I am the founder and decided that there would be a phantom boss so that they wouldn't get stressed or try flattery.
So out of 7, 5 people people came for the "coding trial session". There were 3 guys and 2 girls. My teammate and I started by giving them a brief introduction to the working of our engine and then gave them a few exercises to help them understand it better. Fast forward a few days, and we were teaching them about how we implement multiple languages in our games using Excel. The original text in English is written in the first column and we then send it to translators so that they can easily compare and translate the content side by side such that a column is reserved for each language. We then break it down and convert the whole thing into an engine friendly CSV kind of format. When we concluded, we asked them if they had any questions. So there was this smartass, who could not get over the fact that we were using Excel. The conversation went like this:(almost word to word)

Smartass: "Why would you even use that primitive software? How stupid is that? Why don't you get some skills before teaching us about your shit logic?"
Me:*triggered* "Oh yeah? Well that's how we do stuff here. If you don't like it, you can simply leave."
Smartass: "You don't know who I am, do you? I am friends with the boss of this company. If I wanted I could have all of you fired at whim."
Me:"Oh, is that right?"
Smartass:"Damn right it is. Now that you know who I am, you better treat me with some respect."
Me: "What if I told you that I am not just a coder?"
Smartass:"Considering your lack of skills, I assume that you are also a janitor? What was he thinking? Hiring people like you, he must have been desperate."
Me:"What if I told you that I am the boss?"
Smartass:"Hah! You wish you were."*looks towards my teammate while pointing a thumb at me* "Calling himself the boss, who does he think he is?"
Teammate:*looks away*.
Smartass:*glances back and forth between me and my teammate while looking confused* *realizes* *starts sweating profusely* *looks at me with horror*
Me:"Ha ha ha hah, get out"
Smartass:*stands dumbfounded*
Me:"I said, get out"
Smartass:*gathers his stuff and leaves the room*
Me: "Alright, any questions?"*Smiling angrily*
Newcomers: *shake heads furiously*
Me:"Good"

For the rest of the day nobody tried to bother me. I decided to stop posing as an employee and teaching the newcomers so that I could secretly observe all sessions that took place from now on for events like these. That guy never came back. The good news however, is that the art and music training was going pretty well.

What really intrigues me though is that why do I keep getting caught with these annoying people? It's like I am working in customer support or something.

!rant

For an indie dev like me, this means so much! Made my day!

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

So, there was this person I met on the internet who was preaching about how the success of games depends primarily on luck.
His argument was that even though he made a great game(his opinion) and uploaded it to the appstore his game failed to gain popularity.
He stated that there are about 500 games uploaded daily and it is only the matter of luck whether or not a game gets noticed and that he ran out of luck.
Now, his game was a pretty ripped off copy of the overused tile matching games. I pointed out to him that the reason his game didn't do well was probably because he made a ripoff(I actually used 'a copy's but 'ripoff' sounds more rant like) and that he priced it fairly high, while there were free games with more features and better graphics and mechanics(based on the description of the game and screenshots).
He then began to rage(all caps obviously) about how I am talking out of my ass and that I probably haven't even made a game yet.
I politely(the only reason I was polite was because the account was known to my Twitter followers. Sometimes one has to protect one's name) told him that I am an indie game developer and that I have made a decent amount of games.
He then proceeded to mock me and dared me to name a few.
So I posted four links to my 48 hour competition games and one to an official game.
He then began to call me an imposter, so I did a shout-out to him through my Twitter account.
Instead of continuing on Twitter, he ran back to the forum, and began to shit talk about how anyone can do it if they have a team with them.
I corrected him on that, stating how I was alone at the time and these particular games were the results of me working hard and striving to improve myself.
Then the guy finally starts spamming on different threads about how I am an arrogant bastard and other explicit forms of abuses before finally getting banned.
Sometimes I don't even know why I bother.
When I was starting out, there was this developer who would point out the faults in my games so that I could work on them. That was a great help and probably accelerated my growth. He was a great mentor and is now a good friend and is now in my team.
I guess some people are so hung up on their pride that they will refuse to accept their mistakes and make any efforts to improve.

When I self-published my first indie game on steam and people actually started buying it.

Remember sitting on the floor with a bottle of vodka trying to tell my girlfriend like that lunatic dotconnecting on a whiteboard meme guy, this is really bad because too much people bought it.
They should spend their money on something useful instead of me, I felt like a fraud.

It turned out good in the end tho, made some updates for it that made it better so i felt better about it, plus got a job from a publisher because they liked my game 😃

So, I was participating in a competition, but little did I know that you could only participate in pairs. Seeing that a lot of famous indie devs were participating I was extremely hyped. But since it seemed like I was the only idiot who didn't have a partner I felt like kicking myself. Then a guy about whom I had never heard of before, probably a newbie, comes out of the blue and asks me to be his partner. Since I had no choice, I reluctantly agreed to pair up with him. The rules of the competition were to create a game based on a particular theme in a period of 1 week. To get started, I asked him about his skills as it would be better to know what our strengths and weaknesses were. He said that he was good at art and proceeded to show me some of his "previous works". I was genuinely impressed. Honestly speaking his drawing seemed a bit off but was but for a newbie, it was good. So we decided that he would take care of the art and I would code, create some basic music (nothing too fancy because of the lack of time) and if time permits, refine his art(correcting ratios, colour combinations, shading, etc.). On the first day, he would like to work in privacy and would show only the finished products to me. It seemed a bit fishy, but hey, I am all up for respecting the wishes of fellow team members.
So all was going well, or so I thought, till on the fifth day the guy confesses that he didn't get shit done. Apparently, his "previous works" were random stuff taken from the great land of internet and that he had to leave town the next day. He just wanted to "experience the life of a game developer" and "meant no harm". I flipped out, half lectured half screamed at him then asked him to get the fuck out which happened to be the only fucking thing that he was able to do correctly. I thought for an hour or so, then contacted the staff and informed them about my situation. They said that if I was okay with the handicap, I may continue. I then pulled three all nighters with about 3 hours of sleep (that too in parts of about 1 hour) everyday and was barely able to submit my game on time.
I secured the fifth place, which was pretty good if I may say so myself, but it an important lesson in my life that taught me to never trust anyone blindly.

Publishing fees:

Android - 25$ once (fixed*)
Microsoft Store - 19$ once¹
Steam Game - 100$ / game²
itch.io - free²
Unreal - free⁴
Unity - free⁵

And then there is Apple...
Apple - 99$ / year

¹ (99$ for enterprise)
² (legacy was 100$ once for charity)
³ (30% of profit for them)
⁴ (5% if more profit than 12.000$/year)
⁵ (until more profit than $100.000/year)

Valve:
*makes good games*
*gets fame and money*
*sells other peoples games*
*announcing future games*
*stops making games*
*sells virtual items for a ridiculous high price*
*get sued for gambling in their games*
---
*getting criticized for not making games*
*people hope*
*devs and writers for their popular games leave*
*people loose hope*
---
*valve experimenting with VR*
*not making games for over 10 years*
*still calling themselves a game developer*
---
*valve buys successful indie game developer*
*valve claims they're making games again*

The day I deployed my first application on Play Store. Felt like a real indie dev then.

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

I think I may start my very own indie game dev studio... For now as a one man army... That’ll be fun.

I guess wish me luck guys!

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Making graphics is probably the most painful part of indie game development... :(

⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
⬜️Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

I just found a game (have not played it yet) that I think everyone here will cream over.

It's an insanely detailed hardware/ low level/ make-your-own-computer game.

I watched the trailer and it sets you up by teaching you logic gates and basic circuitry.

Then, it eventually teaches you how to build your own computer using these gates.

Then, you start creating your own assembly language using the computer you made.

Then, you use your computer to solve problems like sending a robot through a maze or just building snake on a display.

Absolutely check it out, it's on sale for $13 USD. I just bought it. Turing Complete on Steam.

Apartment owner tells me to get out for a few hours while he repairs some stuff around the house . Get laptop , get wallet , go to kfc , go to order , only have money to get a large coke and a coffee , set up laptop , start working on my 2D game project , one hour later hobo comes in and begs around for 2 mins , before the guard catches him , he goes to order instead and gets a large duo bucket with coffee ...fml being a poor dev before paycheck...

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

Making a multiplayer game is so frustrating. :/

So... GDPR.
And the deadline.
And I have no idea what to do.

What does it mean for one-man indie projects? Data protection officers? Companies? Controllers? Processors? EU employees? Argh.

Look, please, EU. Not everyone can afford to hire an entire team for this, when their current team is literally one person.

Yes, the GDPR is probably a step in the right direction, but I think I'll just stop collecting the data altogether.

(All data I collect is just user settings stored in a database, nothing more.)

Can someone point me in the right direction?

When you ask a client for website requirements and they respond by pulling out their phone, opening a random indie game and swiping around, saying "It should be dynamic and colorful, like this game."

When you make a game without using other dev's assets

One year ago I did the Week 242 Group Rant:
Dev goals for 2021?
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
⬜️Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

Now its 2022 lets se how far we got.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Publish my Indie Game.
✅Make my wife pregnant.
⬜️Clean codebase current C++ job
⬜️Learn Piano play
⬜️Create clean coding presentation
⬜️Be more productive

What I did instead:
✅Worked on my indie Game
✅Went on vacation
✅Make my wife pregnant.
✅Construct, Paint, Decorate house.
✅Hold presentation about profilers

Future Goals:
⬜️Take care of my new born daughter soon.
⬜️Finish my indie Game
⬜️Learn to play Piano
⬜️Socialize a bit more

So, my plans:

Life
* to have my firstborn child and do my best as a father
* to pay off ~half of my 5yr lease (my brand new car arrived at the dealer yesterday, I will be picking it up within 2 weeks, yay!)
* not to die from starvation while paying it off

Work:
* to become more comfortable and fluent in my current position to reduce stress and save time for personal goals (learning another language / technology so that I'm not a prisoner of the field I'm good at)

Hobby:
* to publish my first Android game (or at least be close)
* to make indie game development my hobby, a way to vent off after work and hopefully a source of additional income
* learn to draw just a little (for my game dev)

(New account because my main account is not anonymous)
Let's rant!

I'm 3 exams away from my CS degree, I've chosen to do some internship instead of another exam, thinking was a great idea.

Now I'm in this company, where I've never met anyone because of pandemic. A little overview:
- No git, we exchange files on whatsapp (spicy versioning)
- Ideas are foggy, so they ask for change even if I met their requirements, because from a day to another they change
- My thesis supervisor is not in the IT field, he understands nothing

The first (and only) task they gave me, was a web page to make request to their server, fetch data etc.
Two months passed trying to met their requests, there were a lot of dynamic content changin on the page, so I asked if I could use some rendering framework to make the code less shitty, no answers.
I continued doing shitty code in plain JS.

Another intern guy graduated, I've to mantain his code. This guy once asked me "Why have you created 8 js modules to accomplish the web page job?", I just answered saying that was my way of work, since we're on the same level in the company I didn't felt to explain things like usability, maintainability etc. it's like I've a bit of imposter syndrome, so I've never 100% sure that my knowledge is correct.
Now we came at the point where I've got his code to mantain, and guess what:
900 lines of JS module that does everything from rendering to fetching data..

I do my tasks on his code, then a bug arises so the "managers" ask him what's happened (why don't you ask to me that I'm mantaing is code!?!?), he fixes the bug nonetheless he finished his intership. So we had two copies of the same work, one with my job done and still with his bug, and another one without my work and without the bug.
I ask how to merge, and they send me the lines changed (the numeration was changed on my file ofc, remember: no git...)

Now we arrive today, after a month that they haven't assigned any task to me and they say:
"Ok, now let's re-do everything with this spicy fancy stunning frontend framework".
A very "indie" Framework that now I've to study to "translate" my work. A thing that could be avoided when I've asked for a framework, 2/3 MONTHS AGO.

TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.

so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.

me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.

he wasn't expecting much

M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*

I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...

M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...

that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.

M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*

after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!

M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*

I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).

sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.

if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!

So apparently 15 years of indie dev experience means nothing in the corporate world...

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I'm fucking sick of my experience with the world.

I have a feeling that all that 1984 conspiracy type of ideas that I previously considered bullshit and fear mongering are real.

(Just to be clear, I'm not including most conspiracy theories which are very ignorant like flat earth, fake moon landing, or antivax, the people that spread those theories can die a horrible death IMHO).

Corporation consolidation is a fact and appears to become irreversible.

Because of technology, I can stay in the comfort of my house, safe from crime and be entertained without needing to have direct contact with humans.
People might say "that's your fault for not leaving the house". True but that is just how the world is.

The outside world in the cities I lived in is not a welcoming place.
Hell if you fucking find a bench it's a goddamn miracle, and if you do and sit for a long time, the police stares at you like you are up to something.

People don't talk to you because "don't talk to strangers".
It can be rare to find water or a bathroom that isn't a complete shithole.

So no wonder I rather stay at home, the outside world is hostile.

So yeah, go to a mall or something. And consume, consume, consume, because the outdoors suck.

Many pioneers thought technology was to improve the quality of life.

But no, it's just more isolation, less direct contact with people, less giving a fuck about other people.

And that's how feel about people of today. The least amount of fuck giving about others possible.

You would you would connect to more people faster, but no, the result is just millions of people browsing through the same "entertainment", shitty aggregated content.

Yes, consolidation affects internet too. Everything goes through fucking google, youtube, or whatever other fucking top 10 company.

Just like the class disparity, 1% of the things online get 99% of the exposure.

So if you're a small time anything, basically fuck you, because you're not something enormous.

Like, I wished I was a game developer, but there's thousands of brilliant indie games that get released every year, and they barely make what they're worth.
So why should I fucking try? So I can get ruined financially and I don't have a place to live in?

Software itself is so complex that is impossible to scrutinize decently.
We all laugh at congressmen asking the zuck silly questions.

Out of touch, true, but in hindsight, it is true to some extent that software is hard to regulate. Every software I on earth doesn't meet some standard one way or another.

Or maybe it's just too many of us right now.
When people scroll their search results to get access to the things they should be interested in, the only practical interface right now is being showing one link at a time.
But there's millions and millions of results.

One redeeming aspect of life is that one day I won't be alive anymore to observe the disgusting world we live in.

This could be just pure rambling and I can't prove any of the things I'm saying, I could just have been making the wrong friendships. So take this with a grain of salt.

That moment when you finally optimized your game to run on 60FPS from 20-40 FPS. I love OpenGL.

People talk about how they would love to switch to Linux, but cannot, as they claim that gaming lives on Windows. This may have been the case ten years ago but it isn't now.

And further, Microsoft is working hard to break steam, humble, gog, and any other delivery systems they do not control. Such anti-consumer behavior should not be tolerated, let alone rewarded. One result of this is that almost every indie game that comes out now has native Linux support within months, if not on day 1.

The only weak spot is AAA games. But as AAA games and mobile games begin to converge, in terms of the subscription/microtransaction models they're both moving toward, with very few exceptions, I personally don't think I'm really missing anything when I see a Windows-only game for $60 with no Linux support.

And if I really want, I can play un-wine-able Windows games through parsec, though that's getting rarer and rarer all the time.

Playing videogames!

Mostly indie games these days, since I have hundreds of them in my Steam library and haven't played most of them. Last week I tried Factorio and now I'm obsessed with it.

I'd love to learn unity or UE4 properly and write a little 3D indie game. Written a few in 2 dimensions but the step up to 3 is daunting. Plus I don't know blender or Maya...yet

TIL Python doesn't really give a fuck about semicolons -.-

So after spending the past couple years almost exclusively using C# and Unity I decided to come back* to Python for no real reason except wanting a change of pace.

I almost ripped my hair out backspacing semicolons I kept putting in out of force of habit after having worked in C# for so long

Well guess what... I just learned (purely by accident)... Python couldn't care less. I feel internal conflict if that makes sense.

TBH now I'm randomly putting in semi-colons at the end of some statements just because I can and I want to abuse this freedom ^_^

Yeah yeah it's not very "pythonic" or pretty but screw that

* I started programming in Python back in high-school but switched over to C# + Unity after graduating and pursuing indie-gamedev.

Note: After some searching I realize you can use semicolons to have multiple statements on the same line but I never really needed to do that during my time with Python so I didn't even remember it was even a thing

Game reviews on Steam are now like, “Not recommended. Seemed like a good game, but the story is linear and there’s really nothing to do.” …with approximately 180hrs of playtime on record for a $25 game.

Do us all a favor and please continue to stare at your phone while walking into oncoming traffic.

My lessons both come from my current side project (I will share it with you in a week or two, the website isn't finished yet):
1. Every project comes to the point where it hurts to continue. Keep pushing, the result is worth it.
2. You aren't as good as you thought you were when you started, but you'll be better than you ever were when you finish.
3. Sometimes, there's more points to a list than you'd expect.
4. One hour per day is easier than five hours a week.

How?
Well. I started out my project knowing some C#, but Jack shit about unity. I know most of what I might build will end up being shit I'm gonna regret, refactor and recycle later. But I don't give a fuck. Doing it is better than planning it.

It sometimes hurts to get rid of a carefully planned algorithm that took hours to build because it fails in practice. But it's the right thing to do.

Never plan too much. If I'd have planned this project out, I wouldn't even have started with what I'm good at: write code, break shit and experiment.

It's easier to progress slowly but steady. Look at some awesome games that have been worked on for ages while the public had their say (RimWorld, Project Zomboid, Dwarf Fortress...) as opposed to those that are developed behind closed doors and rushed to the market before Christmas or some other major event (Mafia 3, Fallout 76, Fallout 4 VR...). Progress slowly, deploy early, push often. And the one hour per day approach is a good way to do this.

Convinced another fellow developer to join devRant:

Welcome @binogure!
He's an indie game developer I met online and I'm helping him to translate his game, "City Game Studio", at the moment.
Check it out! The game is currently in closed beta and it's really awesome!

#ad ;D

The Nameless Game (DS) is MIND-BLOWING. Retro-cool before PS1 graphics was in every indie horror. Original control scheme. A touch of paranoia (your DS can kill you using its Wi-Fi).

It's interesting that AAA games are becoming analogous to pop music, as they relate to the medium of which they are part. E3 is just a bunch of trailers for rushed sequels to existing, played-out franchises. The big price tags are almost universally not worth it, as these games typically release with major bugs, and often rely on grind-enforced microtransactions.

Meanwhile, indie games keep getting better, more innovative, and remain reasonably priced. Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Rockstar, and the rest of the big-budget studios can eat my ass.

For many years of my life I thought indie developers means Indian developers. Sigh

Novice seeking advice, how do you indie/solo dev guys manage your time and productivity to stay clear on what to prioritize and deliver faster ?

I've been writing my first game for the last week...

When do the suicidal thoughts stop? 🙃

There are indie devs which still builds games for the NES or the first GameBoy... and then we have Apple which goes to extra lenghts to ensure which nobody can develop, publish or install new apps on devices which are too old for the newer iOS versions.

I am an Indie game developer. I've been working solo for two or three years now and teaching myself. I can work in 3D modeling applications as well as program in c++ and do blueprint in unreal engine. I know most of the pipeline and the suite.

I'd like to transition to doing game Dev full time or at the very least do programming as my job. I have no degree.

I'm looking for contracts or whatever I can get and I'd like to get suggestions on how I should go about quitting my shity night shift job at a factory and finally work in tech.

I've got a couple contracts going on right now that I am not sure if they are going to last. I would like to know how I should go about finding more and or what things I should do in order to get residual income so I can focus on my own projects.

I have several of my own games in the works and I'm developing some tools for the marketplace. Advice?

Google announced a little piece of wizardry called MusicML, which seems to be a pretty decent music generator based on text prompts or sample imputs

I can only think how much would this thing help indie game developers (if available), but then there are a lot more industry (beside music itself) that could save lots of money with this kind of stuff

I mean, yeah, the results are not so great or ground breaking, but so would be most of the human generated compositions as well; if the music is not the main focus, most of the results are just enough. Just think about an elevator with a custom generated track for day, or so many other places where sound it's just a side stimulus

What a time to be alive c:

Feature creep is absolutely terrible. Every freaking time I start working on my game I’ll tell myself, “okay, I’m almost done. 90% done, just got to finish up these designs her- wait a minute, does that button look right?” *Proceeds to completely redesign the UI and add 8 more options.* etc, etc.

Point is, I need to stop adding stuff. I need a hard deadline.

I do and will always pirate, unless it’s low-budget indie and I can support the creator directly

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

Lets hope this coveffe is loyalty

Anyone play dead cells here ?

Got to write a post to reddit about most influential games in my life. I wrote about the legend of zelda and fortresscraft by projector games because the creator inspired me to be an indie. I shared it to his Twitter and he responded 😁😁😁 feels good to be able to talk to your idols like they are your peers

What game engine would you recommend to an indie developer? The type who can't afford a fucking server to run the bloated and buggy unity editor but is actually a developer so isn't afraid of typing.
I've had enough of the improper sandboxing (will crash bc of game scripts), tempfile-based crash-unaware instance tracking (won't restart afterwards) and lack of UI scaling (seriously, that's like accessibility/retina support basics) that is the unity editor. If they had command line tools I'd use them happily.

Before wk200 roles around I'd like to finish my little indie game. I'm using unity to create it and it's the first game I've ever made. It's been taking me a while but I'm hopeful.

Also happy wk100!

So I'm working on this prototype of indie game with two friends. Since we are only 3, I can't just stick to coding only... Problem is, I'm the only one realising that and I've ended up doing all the jobs that are missing... Texturing, a bit of modeling, organizing the whole team, shaders, animating and so on... And the two others just stick to their thing and are confident in the fact that I'll be able to handle all the problems. It pisses me off.
But I need the project to have some base experience, and alone, I would probably melt down under the stress. But every time a problem show up I'm basically alone, and my level of stress skyrocket... Not sure if I have the shoulders to finish it, but I have to. In fact I'm not even to the point of ranting anymore I'm just depressed >.>... At least when I'm working on the code and not the rest, I'm really enjoying myself.

Not sure if I should do something about it ._.

My image of dream career through different times of my life:
- frontend specs prodigy, css enlightenment, a member of w3c or a similar committee
- indie hacker and entrepreneur, leader of a startup community
- architecture prodigy, expert in scalability
- transsexual evangelist, popular article writer and a rockstar
- hardware engineer: Linux, C, chip and dale’s Gadget-like girlfriends, xkcd, latex, assembly, buying a radio station and a telescope
- scientist like NickyBones, papers, data, more data
- art expert

Though achieving one of this would take the entire life, I had a chance to grasp all of this. WHY does they feel so incompatible? Why do I have to choose?

Why do I feel so sad? Why do I feel like I haven’t achieved anything even though I objectively achieved what I dreamed of like five years ago?

Is it true that it’s in my nature to always seek an environment to feel like a junior in? Is feeling like a junior only pleasant to me because it reminds me of old times when I wasn’t actually this mentally ill and was still happy?

Why do I feel like that arduino and C shit is the equivalent of a red corvette?

Not leaving my last job earlier.

History: Supervisor / Lead Developer was a complete moron who watched videos on facebook and youtube, engaged in heated discussions on facebook, wasted my time by showing the work of other companies and vines, smoked in the office and towards the end gave me shit for not meeting deadlines of the work that he was supposed to deliver. Project that I was working on had very lazy clients so I was free for even 2 days sometimes and that’s why I decided to help my supervisor on the project assigned to him but in reality I was handling two projects all alone.

Aftermath: My indie games started gaining traction on google play and I found a client and I made 5x my salary at my last job.

Hey fellow devs, my friend showed me this Godot game engine. Ive spent 15hrs over the weekend building strategy game client which consumes my api server. Ive done a lot! It was easy to understand custom Gdscript which is okay. But before i dig in, i want to know what you guys think about this game engine? Is it going somewhere? Is it good option for indie games? Is it good option for building android/ios games? I need to make my mind 🤔

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

What are your favorite small but nice indie games?

I lost my ability to enjoy computer games.

I really want to revisit my favorite ones (Unreal Tournament, everything made with Source Engine, also Life is Strange, Gish, some other indie games), but every time I try, I feel like alien. I feel like I don’t belong here. Every time there is nothing but sadness.

I even sold my gaming pc upon realizing that after completing Doom 2016 I haven’t played anything at all.

What do I do now?

So my friend and I have been casually talking about developing some indie games. I, being the one who knows programming, tried convincing him to learn some code.

Me: Hey, did you read the books?
Him: What books?
Me internally: ‘ok, maybe he just used some of the online guides’
Me: How’s [code learning app]
Him: Oh! I downloaded that the other day!
Me: Oh cool! What’s your account name?
Him: oh, I downloaded it but never actually opened it
Me internally:’fuuuuuuuuu-‘
Me: Did you learn any programming?
Him: nope
Me: WELL THEN FUCKING LEARN IT!!!!!

We don’t really talk to much anymore.

I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.

Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'?

Indie game devs: I have a couple of questions for you guys, sorry for my naivity and the subjectivity of some of the questions.

Is it as fun as it sounds?
Do you work as a team?
What tech/language do you use?
What platform/os do you produce games for?
Is your primary income from making games?

Im asking because I would like to get into it, but want to get a realistic view of what it's like.

Thanks guys. Please also take this chance to post your work.

Today I found out that my favorite indie game, CrossCode was built using ImpactJS, a javascript/html5 canvas based game engine/library/framework/tumamaencuerada and I was fascinated by it.

The game is absolutely beautiful, plays and works great, badass story mode and combat design. all powered by web tech. I am honestly amazed, I was always under the impression that something like Unity was used to build it.

Gives a bit of hope

Do you think it's possible to get enough of a following on YouTube and twitch to fund your living expenses and use the rest of your free time to work on your own studio projects?

For example I'm a VR and AR game developer. I do the whole shebang for game development and design on my own. I could stream play throughs of the current game I'm working on as a weekly thing and create tutorial videos for other developers and students for more content on my channel, but to also stimulate growth in the VR and AR industry. I'd in a way be creating my own market. I could also stream the development of the art assets and whatnot.

Could possibly make some money from the ads at first. Maybe even within the game?

Idk I'm trying to avoid having to get a job anywhere else if I can float my own success as an indie start up. So thoughts on this rant please?

A certain app I use occasionally has some premium features that I have been too cheap to buy. Just found the full source code on GitHub. An hour later I have all the premium features for free. Stealing? Nah, my conscious is clear.

To all indie devs out there: if you have paid features, don't make the app open source.

Being a zoomer means leaving your favorite indie musician on repeat overnight for them to earn a bit more money.

Being a zoomer means never leaving a one-star review on your Uber driver because if you do this, they fire them, put them on an internal blacklist that is unofficially shared between such bloody companies and they'll never find a job and probably die of starvation.

To work in a music/rhythm games company (preferably indie), or one that produces stuff related to music.
I would like to lead a company like that! 😍
One can dream...

The double-edged sword of teamwork. I'm an indie Game dev, so I have no choice but to work with others of completely different fields. I enjoy it and I get a lot of motivation seeing things done and learning many new disciplines, but team projects have so many downsides when you have to handle everything from programming to cinematography that someone else was meant to do.

My final team uni project I even had to do our music composing cause our sound effects guy did almost nothing in 6 months (he wrote 6 midi notes in 2 weeks at one point).

So this week I picked up some Sennheiser HD 600 phones for my listening pleasure and take my mind off life stresses.

At work I've been using some Bose phones, but these Senns being open back may be a little loud for the neighboring cubicles.

I guess sound quality and all day use are mutually exclusive. Anyways, what's coding without some great indie tunes. :)

BTW, they sound amazing!!

Im thinking of posting/recomending games here on devrant, the kind if games i'll be posting are mostly; indie games, low spec games, and games that'll get you hooked on for days.

What do you guys think?
Go easy on me.

This is kind of a loaded question because it's so broad. So I'll just throw my thoughts down on the idea anyways.

Honestly with all the way that game dev has come it's so sad to see just the increase of people that are so ungrateful and dont appreciate what went into making it. Complaining about small not a big deal bugs that occur, blaming the devs for stuff that's completely not up to them but the "idea man", etc. Although good things are coming out of it. Like children wanting to get into it more which is awesome and indie developers basically holding up the industry while majority of the AAA companies get their shit together. So I see all of that increasing. Also I'm expecting to see the Rust language start to be used in AAA titles replacing C++

Web dev I believe will just get more JavaScript improvement with new libraries, frameworks. I really hope the companies that had PHP5 legacy code get back on their feet quickly. But I hope we can become more accepting of JavaScript doing more than just webdev like Electron, WebGL, etc. Because I think it's great that it can do all that stuff. Is there better options hell yeah but let's let people do crazy shit.

Software dev well I see python making a bigger uprising and I'm hoping people become more accepting of python as well.

These are all just random thoughts so please take that into consideration

Hi webdev here, who would like to start developing 2d indie games. My main language is JavaScript. Is there any way I could start developing games without learning a whole new language?

An indie music discovery tool by artist presence on specific YouTube channels (Amoeba, KEXP, NPR)

Lately frontend seems more and more unappealing, I feel like I need a career change.

I think I reached a good point in my skills where I’m able to solve most FE issues without really thinking about it, the only exception is animations, which I’m re-allocating a lot of time on lately as I tend to deliver on time.

I think I’d love to go back to making games, but the industry is shit and the devs are… not the best, from my experience.

Indie game it is (?)

How many other c#/monogame developers are on here and looking for people to collab with? Just curious

Anybody else played Else Heart.Break()?
It's really good expression of how cool programming is

Today is one of those days where I realize there are hundreds of free APIs and tools to make something amazing and revolutionary, but you can't think of anything that isn't already done or is too advanced for an indie developer. Seriously, I watched Microsoft's Connect event keynotes and demos for these easy and amazing structures, but not a single app idea comes to mind. 😐

If I'm going to make a profit and a good resume, somethings needs to happen.

For indie devs,

Marketing Tips? Because i am wearing that hat now.

I'm developing a game with some people, and they want to make an RPG platformer type game, while I want to go with the normal style aka similar to Undertale. This game will have story and fights and exploration.

What do you guys think is best for this?

As someone who has been developing a game (not even close to 20% done) and dealing with bug reports, I'm pissed off by this one report from a game I play, which I'll just shamelessly copy-paste it here for y'all to read and rant
"Title: [sic]lag never fixed
[sic]i dont wanna report lag doesnt mean there's no lag ,
the LAG is real, and is getting worse and worse everyday, vespa please fix the problem,
i used to think i could bear this lag, but i cant ,i just cant, after 5+ times game crashing everyday,my patient is losing . you say u are fixing it every maintenance,but what is this BXXX SXXX?all i could see it you are trying your best to grab money from my wallet(well u FXXXING successed),and the promise you made to fix the lag never ever ..........
sorry for my bad Chiglish, but./......"

I'm not a developer of the game, but this pisses me off. The guy wants fixes on the "lag"; which lag?? latency?? FPS?? random freezes??; while giving absolutely ZERO details on the "lag" AND accusing the company of stealing money without doing sh-t, which is not true as far as I can tell in-game. So, I instinctively waltzed in and ranted at how sh-t the report is in detail, and accused him of inhibiting the game's development because of his sh-t report, and he replied with this (I told him I'm a game dev in the reply I mentioned):
"[sic]as a person who made this game should know what lag is just like u know what fuk is as a human being,and i said game crash ,thats the best way i could explain as a normal player not like you an arrogant indie game dev!and if u cant understand what course the game crash,as a player like me how could i know, thats the reason im asking for help here,and i hope they dont have such indie game dev like you who doesnt know lag(game crash)"

M-th-rf-ck-r. For the first time, I see true ignorance. While writing this, I'm typing my next reply for the m-th-rf-ck-r that lacks common sense on reporting a bug. For f-ck sake if I found him I'll put a bullet through his head.

that moment when you decide to become and indie app dev and there are plenty of guides that tell how to be a good indie dev but no guides that teach you how not to get fucked by your own government...

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

Elementary OS provided a really nice getting started guide for indie app developers. Something which lacked in Linux world. Only thing I don't like that they presents GTK+ and Vala as their own technology.

When creating a new indie game with no budget start really really small. Because it will grow faster than you can say 'input mapping'.

Who are building product solo indie dev like me? I started talking to myself as a consequence. Like to hear about you guys

!Rant
What type of music do you guys listen to when coding? Me I like hip hop, electronica, 24/7 hip hop instrumentals on YouTube and some alternative/indie stuff.

I was just watching gameplay for a new game that recently came out, some indie game or whatever and I shit you not as he said "this game has alot more detail than the rest of our games", as he was saying that he walked directly through a giant rock.

Is there any general rule of thumb for whether or not you should have an LLC as an independent developer? Would this help against patent trolls and nefarious clients, or is there some other way to protect yourself?

Well here's a story for you. I can't work on my game till the developer of a package I use updates his package. I can't research how to add the newer features I want to add till I know what the base code is gunna look like. I can't work on my second game idea because unreal engine has a major bug since version 4.15 that is crippling the performance of what I want to do. I can't work any assets for that game till I know what performance is gunna be like after the fix is implemented. It's now version 4.17 almost 4.18 and it might get pushed till version 4.19. I need to work on something like right now because my game studio is otherwise just sitting. It is a VR / AR only studio and there is no real direction to move in at the moment till somebody other than me gets their collective shit together.

I need something fairly "quick" but still fun to play to work on so I can sell sell sell. No idea wtf it's gunna be though. The steam market place is so full of garbage that I really don't want to contribute to that with more garbage. I also don't know anyone I can collaborate with to make something interesting.

WHAT DO I DO?

What programing language should I use to create a videogame in Godot?

Would you still use Ruby/Rails for a solo indie sass project?

I love #ue4 but God there's so many things you have to solve yourself even though there are provided systems in place for that stuff???

var rant=false;
var question=true;
Question to devrant game developers is it possible to make complex 3D PC game using javascript?

any indie game programmer here?

The amount of hoops steam makes you jump through to get a coming soon page, after already paying a submission fee, is God damn ludicrous.

Guitars and genres they're shine at:
• Les Paul: Alternative, Progressive, Indie, Hard rock, Psychedelic rock, Classic rock, Punk, Folk, Glam, Grunge, Blues, Southern rock, Garage rock, Post-rock, New wave, Shoegaze, Heavy metal, Stoner, Emo…
• Strat0caster: Alternative, Progressive, Indie, Hard rock, Psychedelic rock, Classic rock, Punk, Folk, Glam, Grunge, Blues, Southern rock, Garage rock, Post-rock, New wave, Shoegaze, Heavy metal, Stoner, Emo…
• PRS: lawyer blues

!rant

Recommend some interesting/innovative VR games that may be harder to come by? I want to get an idea of what's out there.

Platform doesn't matter (I can access any).

How are you building your products today?

-> What is your tech stack?
-> Your reasons for choosing them?
-> Any pain points you can help other indie hackers avoid?

I will start with mine -

Secret: Usually Indie Rock is my favorite type of music, but to be honest, when i work i prefer to listen to some stupid Commercial/Pop music.
And i work better. 🙊

Small Indie Group,we've been developing our first action top down rng dungeon explorer, pictures will be posted soon

What kind of innovation approach has helped humanity in a better way? Is it some group of obscure indie devs working overnight to write some software which is free, useful and purposeful devoid of licensing shit or the too-honorary-to-shit-from-arse organizations which put marketing gimmicks like making world better place and which compromise user data either to governments or to other corporations for monetizing given the first chance. If innovation is happening in both the spectrums then what is the viable kind of required innovation at the moment for us humans. IMHO I don't trust corporate innovation and shitty innovations happening in Facebook, Google and likes. Has corporate greed bought innovation for market price.

so i got offers to work as game developer,i think they are not a company but small indie dev and want me to join their team,the work is remote and they are using revenue share to pay me,my question is how to avoid or sue them if they gonna scam me,like when the project is done and they just dissappears,they give doc to sign and inside all is all abour privacy policy,work details and my signature