331–340 of 451 posts
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Canada, like the US, has its own health care crisis. Wait times for medical care seem surreal. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/canada/british-columbia/... https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-paramedics-...
Yeah this is a global offensive by the plutocrats to discredit public health care. It's going on in the UK, in Sweden too. When are people going to wake up and smell the class war?
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Works great on Proton so: 6 hours in with ~20 dwarfs and decent automated production
Do you also experience mouse input lag? My input is constantly dropped. Test drawing ("free-hand" mode) a line of mining quickly. Are any squares missing?
So this happened to a guy that worked for me. Loved video games, super talented front end dev. Made a horror game in Unity at evenings and weekends with his best friend. Launched it on Steam. Very low sales. But he learnt a huge amount about marketing and game design based on player feedback. Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was stre…
The flipside is that it's a lottery. Steam is overflowing with new indie games every day, and many very good ones die in obscurity. You really have to get lucky and go viral But yeah, the entry fee for that lottery is at a historic low, which is still great (especially for hobby devs who don't care about the rest!)
When in reality, you have a great deal of control. Marketing IS something you can control.
Sure, some streamer randomly picking up your game is beyond your control. But you can certainly create conditions that would make it easier for your game to be picked up by a streamer (build relationships with journos, streamers; get paid marketing, etc.)
Calling it a lottery is a disservice to the people who actually put in effort to create these games.
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Assuming the game is "Hazmat Hijinks: Total Meltdown" on Steam. Here's some tough love: The video takes way too long to get to gameplay. Screenshots do a poor job explaining what the mechanic is. I've read the capsule image, watched some of the trailer, looked at several of the screenshots and still can't tell you what the gameplay loop is. Sort of a top down puzzle thing? With a "match the color" mechanic? The art i…
>"Hazmat Hijinks: Total Meltdown" on Steam Looks like 1990 Chip's Challenge on Windows 3, thats not a good look.
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>but what's the point of working so hard if nobody gets to enjoy it but me? I have been struggling with this myself. Not just about programming but other creative pursuits as well. Recently it has been photography. I take pictures while knowing whatever I'm looking at has a far better picture on its wikipedia page. I suppose we're supposed to take some sort of fulfillment in the process of creation itself? But that j…
> If I create something, but nobody ever sees it, did I create it at all? Doesn't feel like it. You have been trained to require external validation for your work. Maybe it's a modern thing with upvotes and twitter and likes and whatnot. If you create a thing, then you have drawn on your skills, probably improving them. Whether the thing is seen by others is irrelvant. What is relevant is your experience in creating…
And simply the fact that, nowadays, you have access to the production of thousands of other people, with which you can compare yours. And in most cases it will compare unfavourably; to make it worse, almost all those people are unknown to the general public, they are often not even professionals, they are just very ordinary persons with a hobby, and yet you can see in a couple of clicks that they get (much) better results than you do.
On may call this a self-validation based on external elements.
Perhaps, as it devalues your creations in your own eyes, it reinforces the need for external validation.
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Is it though? Show me a good Steam game that isn't selling well.
Easy: Among Us, for the many months that it toiled in nearly complete obscurity to the point of the development team nearly giving up the ghost and quitting, until one specific streamer picked it up and gave it the critical mass attention it needed to go absolutely huge. Had the developers had slightly less resources and shut down the servers before that crucial moment it would have never happened, even though clearl…
Most developers have very little understanding of marketing, and are very hesitatnt to pay for good marketing services.
Here's something most people won't tell you: the majority of online marketing is paid, either explicitly (i.e. you pay Google) or covertly (i.e. you "bribe" an editor at Forbes to feature your article).
So this happened to a guy that worked for me. Loved video games, super talented front end dev. Made a horror game in Unity at evenings and weekends with his best friend. Launched it on Steam. Very low sales. But he learnt a huge amount about marketing and game design based on player feedback. Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was stre…
After four years working on my retro game nearly full time, and several launches, I still don't understand marketing enough to understand what to do differently. A lot of the advice out there is something like: "create a community" or "go join several communities" or "get to know other indie devs on Twitter". To me, this simply feels fake. I don't really participate in any online communities. I spend enough time in f…
This can mean:
- Paying the platform (the easiest and most scalable, but also the most expensive and arguably least effective)
- Paying an influencer for an explicitly labeled sponsored content (effective, but depends a lot on your target demographic)
- Paying a popular account to share your content "organically", without any explicit sponsored labeling (the most effective, but also the hardest to scale)
You'll find that once you get a decent amount of following, it's easy to snowball into a much larger following - provided you have content worth sharing.
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No, it isn't. Public health is just difficult to fund. Especially on a shrinking population.
This is the same conclusion I came to. Many Canadians are now against immigration due to their housing crisis. What they don’t realize is that Canada has been hit with a demographic bomb in the 1970s that other countries are now only starting to experience. Ie without immigration, the retired elderly will soon outnumber working age adults who contribute to the economy and tax revenue They only have two choices now: *…
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In the name of profit and efficiency, all slack as been wrung out of our healthcare systems. Systems with no slack are brittle and prone to failure under stressors. As for stressors... gestures broadly .
Profit? Aren’t all of your provincial healthcare systems publicly run and publicly funded? I feel that there are two issues. One is taxes. Canada already has high taxes, which does not pair well with low salaries and a high cost of living that isn’t too far from either the SF Bay Area or even NYC. The second is your confederation’s central government is weak. Your provinces have too much power, and they’re the ones c…
But, there is a massive effort underway in the UK, Ontario, and others, to cripple those systems in order to privatize them and profit.