Yes, probably. But at least you're not still building websites in the era of apps, like I am.
Did I just waste 3 years?
131–140 of 582 posts
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#132Don't write a single LOC until you have at least one user.
How exactly would you do that for a platform game like we are talking about here?
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humorously this HN post also kinda acts as marketing... (although a weak, halfhearted one at best)
I was going to say: this "moment" on HN might increase the sales more than all of previous efforts did. Today, the market is so saturated that even if you have the funds and interest (as a player / fan of genre), there is no way you can discover or keep up with all new releases. Steam has no way of listing them in an easy to parse overview, publications have now way of keeping up, streamers only have so much time. Th…
> The solution is to market, market, market. Distribute keys to streamers, contact publications, optimize for off-days when they need something to write about.
There are no "off days". There is no "solution" for this title, except maybe a total visual makeover, which is probably out of the question. Some titles fail, end of story.
> Everything looks okay, especially for a small team effort, but it needs more polish.
It doesn't look okay, it looks bad. Few people will tell this to someone's face, and that's part of the problem. Programmers often can't tell.
"More polish" is the last thing the game needs. It needs a makeover or be shelved. Just call it "done" and use it as a portfolio piece, it's good enough for that, any more polish is a waste of time.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Walking away now might mean throwing away 3 years, but that’s still better than working for another 3 years, still not succeeding, and wasting 6 years.
If someone has spent 1000 days building their MVP and 0 days establishing market fit it's a terrible time to quit.
Realistically they've spent 1,000 days building a pet programming project with little regard to market fit.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hiring in both gaming and non-gaming is about your resume, phone screen, and interview. The first two are gating factors for the interview. The interview is how the actual decision is made. References are of much less significance, often go unchecked, and are usually focused on simply confirming the truthiness of your resume. If you spent 3 years of your life working on a game, it's not a gap on your resume. In fact,…
Yes and no. You are still at a disadvantaged even if you write a good resume. As an HR, when I need to fill a job, I search my existing database for candidates. I input keywords such as Unity3d, Unreal Engine, UI, etc. If I know another AAA studio has a specific department with those skillset, I input that studio name (disadvantage #1). Let's say the candidate pool comes back with 30+ results. I will only interview 1…
> Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates quality.
This has not been my experience at all. The opposite, in fact. I briefly did hiring at a medium sized game studio. We preferred to hire indie devs with completed games over those with AAA studio pedigree specifically because we can verify that the indie dev actually built stuff himself. He could provide code when asked and talk intelligently about it.
AAA studio developers couldn't share any code (for obvious reasons) and it can be hard to pin point exactly what they did on any given project. When a studio can put anywhere from 10 to 100 developers on a single project, authorship gets fuzzy.
That said, I would discourage the indie dev in question from pursuing a job in the industry. Why would you jump aboard a sinking ship? 1000 people in the games industry have been axed in the last year alone[0].
[0]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, sometimes it's very much not chance. Take stardew valley. It's not like Barone hit some sort of jackpot with his game. It really is head and shoulders above the competition, and that appears to be entirely due to his hard work on it. My evidence for this is that after I played Stardew Valley I was thirsty for more similar farming games, so I played or looked at every single one on steam (there's on…
I just had a look myself. The first one I see is "Fantasy Farming: Orange Season"[1]. Looks very similar to Stardew Valley, review average is 96% positive, but it only has 61 reviews (a good general indicator of sales) vs Stardew Valley's 86,000. I'm sure it's probably not as good as Stardew Valley, but one has probably 1400x the sales of the other. It did also release after Stardew Valley which is a problem. You can…
You don't happen to be the creator of another indie game Scraps, do you?
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#137You made the mistake of thinking that anyone would care how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. But making a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game. That takes either superhuman talent or a large team of specialized people beyond yourself.
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#138I went through a similar situation when I created an Indie game studio with friends. We worked for a year and made a cool $5,000 but it was a "failure" by all sense of the word. We learned a lot and had a ton of fun. Some feedback:
Your website is god awful. Seriously.
The copy doesn't excite anyone to play the game
You make the user jump through hoops to play - if you already are writing it off, make it free to play in-browser without Steam (you want traction at all costs right?)
What did you learn?
Did you have friends or a community playing it as you worked on it? If you didn't, then you really need to look at the Lean Methodology
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Walking away now might mean throwing away 3 years, but that’s still better than working for another 3 years, still not succeeding, and wasting 6 years.
If someone has spent 1000 days building their MVP and 0 days establishing market fit it's a terrible time to quit.
But is it worse then quitting after 1000 days building and "1000 days establishing market fit."
Re: Did I just waste 3 years?
#140What is the target market for the game? I played Metroid when I was a kid on NES and the original gameboy. Games these days are a lot about marketing and huge budgets. The indie ones that do well need to be targeted as well as refreshing. Some hard thoughts just watching the video and reading a bit about the game: 1. I don't really like the graphics as much as I liked the original Metroid. This is probably just a per…
Yeah, the entirety your comment pretty much mirrors what I'd have to say in reply to his post. The only other thing I'd add for Luke is - do you enjoy playing this game? As in, have you sunk a whooole bunch of hours into playing it, simply because it's the only game available (that you made precisely because there's nothing else) that scratches this very particular itch?
I'm afraid this was my first thought having watched the video — does it look fun?
I'd like to think that the foundations are in place to make it such, but from what I saw, I saw a lot of [highly capable] box ticking, but not a lot to make me want to take it on.