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What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

dylanwilson.net

11–20 of 128 posts

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a side project. OP mentions he has a full-time job ... also, is marriage contingent on an income level?

Both marriage and divorce rates have a very strong correlation with income in the US. It also makes being unprofitable and living in your parents basement harder. (Obviously GP missed that this was a side gig)

> Both marriage and divorce rates have a very strong correlation with income in the US.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12629

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5464617/

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#12

Failing is hard. I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.

>> I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.

So nobody, kid or not, wants to fail/lose all the time but after watching my three kids play lots of different sports the pain they feel after a loss is very fleeting and minor. The parents hold onto it for much longer; the kids just want to know if they can get ice cream.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#13

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is th…

> that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise.

I would with your sentiment if you said helping indie devs wasn’t profitable opposed to a waste of time. There is real value in supporting a community, you just have to know when you are doing charity work.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#14

> the downside of adding more features is that it becomes increasingly time intensive to fix bugs, update demos, deal with pull requests and respond to questions. Thibaut Duplessis, creator of Lichess, talks about this in a talk he gave (YouTube somewhere). He says that he's very reluctant to add new features due to the huge cost. The feature must be something very special to overcome the cost.

People totally forget that new features add maintenance costs later. And I’m not only talking about business folks here but also devs.

Regarding adding features, I like the approach here: https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#15
post #9

It's only a failure if you judge success by monthly income. I'm not saying that's not a good way to measure success, just pointing out that it doesn't have to be the only measure. A therapist told me this recently when I was struggling to find meaning in life. Success can be tons of stars on GitHub - I would feel very good if I had positively benefited that many people. I think a major downside of capitalism is how i…

I remember having a conversation with coworkers a while back about what we do if we didn’t have to worry about money. So many people talked about starting a business! I guess the upside is that businesses can be self-sustaining long after you’ve passed, but from my perspective, the vast majority of good one can do for the world is not easily or practically monetizable.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#16

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is th…

This is pretty contradictory even in its biases. You assume people can't do anything for motivations other than money and then you say people should give away their work for free.

The first one isn't true and the second one is simply not doable for poor people.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#17

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is th…

> that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. I would with your sentiment if you said helping indie devs wasn’t profitable opposed to a waste of time. There is real value in supporting a community, you just have to know when you are doing charity work.

I agree with this interpretation. The article OP experienced a real and true 'failure' because his goal was income generation and the project didn't provide that. The guys he handed it off to may have a goal of just being a recognized name in the space (clout?) and so consider their time and effort to be a success.

The whole one mans garbage is another mans treasure taken from another angle.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#18

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is th…

My experience has shown me that tools that help others build faster can be quite profitable. Currently make my living from one such tool and most of my customers are indie hackers (https://divjoy.com).

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#19

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is th…

> The fact that [your potential supporters] don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money.

This is a critical thing to assess in any case where you’re investing time and effort and expecting to get support (either financial or “in kind”) in return. I see this ignored in many “startups” of all kinds (companies, social clubs, workout groups... anything that requires some effort to make happen).

The key test is: “Can this thing continue running without me? Do people care enough to give something if I’m not pushing?” (Pay a fee, volunteer for well defined role, resolve disputes, etc.)

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#20

Failing is hard. I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.

>> I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often. So nobody, kid or not, wants to fail/lose all the time but after watching my three kids play lots of different sports the pain they feel after a loss is very fleeting and minor. The parents hold onto it for much longer; the kids just want to know if they can get ice cream.

I wish I could have figured out if I was good at Football. There were 120 people on the team and unless you were friends with the coaches kid, you never played. I was always first pick when doing 5th grade football because I could catch and was fast.

Defense had 0 tryouts. There was literally 2 attempts at being a wide receiver. 0 attempts at being QB or lineman.

I remember catching both passes, but maybe I wasn't fast enough? Whatever the case it was obvious it was hand picked. And our team won 2 of 8 games.

At least no one can dispute how much I sucked at track lol.

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