JAM

Scope reduction: I've given up* on trying to do "good" procgen, like, with props and models and stuff. Infinite floating interestingly distributed primitive meshes ftw.

*for now

In: ~$500/month
Out: ~$800 this month because of extra expenses 😓 but usually I break about even 😅 (for 2 people with a crippling takeout food habit. Not paying rent, but not really living frugally or anything either. Utilities are minimal - solar power covers ~everything even in the winter.)

Two main things:

The balance between managing folks' expectations, and actually like, "promoting".

Also thinking of ways to promote something unfamiliar/weird (in terms of core mechanics) :D I'm a little worried I'll put something out and the people who would enjoy it would never find it.

Since the beginning, but with crippling anxiety around actually doing anything about it

Lots of separate little gamey bits that I accidentally get stuck messing with for hours. That's a good sign I think?

Really need to polish them up and put them together into an actual game though.

When I talk to friends just getting into programming, that's is basically what I point out - if you know how to solve the problem, you shouldn't really be writing the code manually nowadays. (conversely, never generate code for something you don't actually know how to do yourself.)

I made this post and then spent over an entire month fixated on movement mechanics and momentum

shattered LCD screen - none of what is on the screen is visible, many dead pixels on the bottom of the screen (image right) and the display is full of very large cyan/green visual artifacts, and two white stripes across the entire screen. Shutter speed of the image means the screen has black strobe lines running along it.

Status: Using my phone through scrcpy because....

happy new year.

remember to take breaks from obsessively polishing your work to remind yourself what "good enough and actually exists" looks and feels like.

SwEng:

it's just not good enough to do anything novel or creative when it comes to writing code, and if you're not experienced, it can be a huge footgun - don't use it as a junior dev if you ever want to improve at all; but honestly, it's pretty good at busywork like common, "standard" refactors.

I know I need to build risky/hard/unknown things first, so I don't need to redo everything else later to fit

but doing the opposite can be tempting because it "feels like" progress to implement something easy and known (it isn't progress tho, not as much as it feels, at least)

Imagine if other artists were given advice like game devs are.

Don't try to paint your dream painting, do a bunch of stencils first!

Don't try to make music that moves people, make a bunch of commercial jingles first!

You'll gain a lot of skills and network with other artists! 💯

#indiegamedev

someone just screamed for help and then body slammed the floor? hope they're okay. I also might have been dreaming?

mery cimbs, I am on plane

(plenty of people are here to find games to play lol)

Social media is less like a "game" and more like a "place" - and if the rules of how to get kicked out of a place are unclear, people just don't hang out there.

if the rules of a game are unclear, that's part of the game

(the right) people aren't here to play games.

(I mean like, figuratively)

No seriously.
I know this is the common approach in moderating massive online platforms with lots of churn - "you can't tip the cheaters off on the ban criteria, or else they'll adapt their rules around it" and all that jazz.

But we're not talking about "cheating" here.

Imagine thinking the "unclear rules and banwaves to avoid rules-lawyering" approach is appropriate for literally anything outside anticheat and competitive e-sports.

but you probably were talking about scope creep and responsible software architecture 😆

Yeah right now I have a great combo of:
- having someone in my life that I want to support, which
- motivates me to do something productive with my time, and also
- actually reach out and ask for help when I need it

If it was just me I'd just reduce my standards over time and get nothing done. 😋

Learning the hard way that I should have saved up wayyyy more before persuing solo gamedev; and that my lifelong policy of "if you need more money, just go make it" doesn't really work as well when I am trying to focus on accomplishing a big long term project. 🥲

I'm already in too deep tho 😋

People with homes are so rarely cold at night that I just don’t think homes are necessary anymore.

I've had this happen once where the code worked... as in, it compiled... but after I came out of brainfog, I realized it didn't really... do anything?

you're a good boy, T&S team. You know what good boys do? they play nice with their friends and they don't let the bullies hit them.

That's right! We didn't let the advertisers in so you don't have to hang out with their friends either!

You're such a smart boy!

they're not outside the room waiting to come in and hurt you later if you start caring.

no, no, listen.

we got rid of them, right? you don't need to keep preparing for them.

there are no advertisers in the room here with us, I see you, they can't hurt you anymore, you are allowed to care

Sometimes I wonder why I feel safe with irl pfp, but then I remember that, to my local community, the internet == facebook, insta, whatsapp, and tiktok.

If anyone is different from that, I WANT them to recognize and approach me.

(the cops don't know how to use the internet, and I know their moms)

I sense T&S based their (real, internal) policy on when T&S meant "how do we make advertisers Trust us and believe it is Safe to advertise"

That means dunking on the queers (and swers), something deeply conditioned, and we'll keep seeing that bias as long as T&S is headed by folks from that world.

Decentralized moderation is actually a great justification for Bluesky to set harsher, even "biased", moderation policies on their own infrastructure but you all are NOT ready for that conversation

isn't the issue...

re: architecture, first party moderation (bluesky T&S) is the only party capable of performing suspensions on default-pds users (iiuc)

and...

given that, they manually *unsuspended* JS, for some reason, which was an extremely negative signal to much of the community