Tom Voros

What does this mean for the WWE?

DWARRF: A Pinball Roguelike is officially selected to be a part of Tiny Teams this year!

The demo will be released alongside #TinyTeams2025 so you can play all the new boards soon - such as this sewer one :)

Demo Link - store.steampowered.com/app/3803120/...

@tinyteamsfest.bsky.social

So, uh, do I know two other ex-Ubisoft people who want to start a studio? 😉

Just kidding... that'd be insane.

Or would it...? 😅

Yeah, exactly. I was just good enough at parrying to enjoy it but I can imagine it being a very frustrating experience for some players. 🤣

I love that they tried something new though!

Enjoy your sicko game... haha... I'd like to get to the Romancing Saga series someday too!

And since it was optional up to that point you might be unprepared for the sudden shift. It also feels like if you're really nailing the parries you can disregard almost everything else about the battle system, and I'm not sure that's what they intended. So yeah, a bit strange.

I finished it too! I loved it but agree on the unevenness of the combat. It felt a bit like they couldn't decide whether the parry/dodge should be an essential part of the combat, until the very end of the game when it suddenly is.

Now time for 🐒.

The combat is fun and has a satisfying progression (I may have been slightly overpowered by the end... 👀). And just having a world map again in an RPG again was so nostalgic.

I thought they couldn't possibly deliver on the high concept premise but they absolutely did! What an ending! 😭

Finished Exhibition 33. What an incredible game! It has some rough edges, and there are places you can feel the budget constraints, but they really nailed the important parts.

The story and characters are fantastic and well realized. Feels so rare for a game story to be this good.

Think of all the manual entry work that could be saved! Not just for the initial entry, but for all subsequent updates too. I know I'm a bit all over the place here, this is a difficult format to organize my thinking. I'll need to present my idea more clearly once I've got it more fleshed out.

The scale and coverage achieved by IGDB is really impressive, and the free API is awesome, but it remains a centralized system. However, I think IGDB itself could benefit from the introduction of an authoritative, well-defined, game metadata format as well.

Congrats, that's great! 😆

Haha... Well, none of this exists yet so there's no rush! Just wanted to get some opinions to see if this is something that could be useful. But I'm trying to approach this in a way that can be built out incrementally, so you can still set up a webpage now because that's still useful on its own!

It sucks that crypto has become mired in scams and speculative trading otherwise it might be a more appealing option here. 🤔

All good, I didn't provide enough context in my original post! I think you're right that payments will remain the biggest issue. I'm hoping we can come up with something to address that but for now we can try to make improvements in other areas.

Or to put it another way... Can we build something that will be takedown-proof? IGDB is definitely not that.

Yeah, that would be a great direction for this to go. I think we make progress on this step by step. The self-hosted store template you created is really cool and could be combined with other components to build something bigger.

IGDB can also be edited by anyone (though there's a review process), not just the devs. To make an open and decentralized alternative to stores like Steam and itch (which is sort of loosely the goal) I think we still want the devs themselves to have authority over how their games are presented.

IGDB is cool but it's a centralized service like Steam and itch, and it's owned by Twitch (i.e. Amazon) and subject to their terms of service. The motivation for what I'm suggesting is decentralization (gradually), and maximizing the amount of control in the hands of the devs themselves.

Yeah, payment is still a problem. Part of the inspiration was this post about setting up a self-hosted store:

bsky.app/profile/true...

If you haven't seen it yet this might help!

Ooh yeah, maybe the metadata can also include a URL for an RSS feed for updates.

Haha... It truly feels like it might be time to bring back web rings! We've come to rely too much on centralized services and they're all slowly going to shit.

Awesome! Yeah, I'm seeing a push for self-hosting after the fallout from the Steam/itch takedowns and I'm trying to think of how we could still have discoverability in that kind of space.

One of the inspirations for this idea is this cool self-hosted store solution that I saw last week:

bsky.app/profile/true...

A self-hosted store is great but it doesn't provide any discoverability, so I'm thinking of how that could be addressed in an open/flexible way.

To clarify a point raised on Mastodon: my wording is a bit ambiguous on where the purchasing happens. I'm thinking this is purely for discoverability. Purchasing happens on each devs own website, however they like to set it up. The catalog just takes you to those dev pages.

It seems like such a simple idea, right? But I don't think it's been done.

This file could be scraped by an indexer to build a catalog that can be presented in a nice way, with filtering/search features. Anyone could build their own index/catalog, making it somewhat decentralized.

My initial idea for this is to specify a new well-known metadata file that devs can drop on their websites (similar to robots.txt) which would provide some basic info about the games available on the site (e.g. title, developer, cover art, genre).

Yeah, I think it's tough to make money that way, but maybe a website that surfaces these pages more easily could help. I'm thinking more about the ownership aspect though.

Is there anything like a catalog, index, or search engine of individual webpages where you can purchase/download indie games directly from the devs? And if not, would people be interested in something like that?

#gamedev #indiedev #indiegames