Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam

I do however have a hard time nostalging over old games I used to love - mainly for screen resolution issues. Once you get the new space/bling its hard to go back. I do like some of the remasters though, but some have been done so poorly or so identically they're almost meaningless.

Its a bit of a quandry. I played the Command and Conquer remaster for a bit, and it looked nice/resized nice and played well until you realised it had the same @#%ing pathfinding bugs - which is authentic to the original, but to me an opportunity to improve so missed it made me lose interest in continuing playing the remaster.

I can't even comprehend how young people would view old games, there'd be a few hipster types into the equivalent of cassettes, but for the most part old games are the equivalent of phones that can only be used if they're attached to the wall of the house, though they are a few exceptions to this that seem universal such as Tetris.

I think there are some great games out there that aren't successful, and a lot of games that are more succesful than they deserve to be. A lot of longer lasting franchises from Diablo, to Call of Duty and recently Civilization are averaging down, not up.

As a 50+ year old, the OG posters pachinko type game has no attraction and seems way to ADHD for me to deal with, let alone associating it with rogue/rouge-likes.

I also tried to like Dwarf Fortress, but there's too much complexity too early (same is true for a lot of games coming out now). I miss the era of well designed tutorial levels that introduce and build on previous levels before you get to 'open, anything goes' levels of complexity. Even minecraft has (had?) this built-in by design originally.

The original rouge/rogue-like games all worked well because of the difficulty curve ramping up so nicely as you progress to deeper dungeon levels, although reading the source or alt.nethack was kind of spoilerish.

The world is different now. Because we're so connected, we follow online 'recipes' on how to play the game so we don't get 'left behind' rather than immerse our individual selves via experimentation.

Also what makes a game great is going to vary from individual to individual. Some love puzzle games, some hate them. Some like twitchy FPS games, some like strategical slow-play FPS games etc. etc.

I saw in another comment you were able to make yourself work with complete focus (8 hour+ days 7 days a week). I have two questions --

In hindsight, if you had only worked 5 hour days for twice as many months do you think the project still could have succeeded? Or do you feel that there's some momentum or other factor at play here?

Nextly, are there any discords or other networking resources that you found crucial to the process? I saw you mentioned a publisher. Personally I'm more motivated when I have people depending on me (or eager to see what I'm making for example).

EDIT: Ah, a re-install fixed it!

I had the biggest smile watching all those smooth vibrant animations roll around like a dopamine factory.