141–150 of 582 posts
Shameless plug: https://www.dinorush.com
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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?
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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…
I would love to download a list of all games on Steam in .csv (or other simple tabular data) format. Is it possible to write a scraper? I want name, link, genre, price, platforms, and votes/installs if available.
Game development always scared me as one of those studies that you hope your kids don't get interested in. Another one is manual drawing, especially when it is Anime (what are the chances that someone from a small European country is going to excel at such a job?). > Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in. Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you ke…
>in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets. As a low income indie dev without the academic credentials to get past HR gatekeepers for stable full time work, I can't help but feel studying ML is about as wishful as creating a hit game. I have started studying ML this summer, and although I find the NLP applications really interesting since I have a social scien…
The way to get past HR gatekeepers is to bypass HR. If you ask an employee: "Hey, I'd really like to work at your company for a while now. Can you share some resources/tips that would help me prepare for function x?" and you don't get useful feedback, you don't want to work there. If you send a data science lead a notebook where you solve a problem that is relevant to their business and you don't get a job interview, you don't want to work there (or need to brush up on your presentation and analytics skills).
Do the fast.ai courses. I promise you there are more profitable jobs available in ML than in indie game dev. Become good at using ML tools and data science (Python) and/or data engineering and data infra (Scala, AWS, Docker).
Whats the equivalent of testing your business idea before building a business in the gaming world ?
Stardew Valley primarily gathered early adopters through regular blog updates about dev progress.
You need _way_ more visitors to have any clue if your efforts are resonating with your potential market or not.
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I would say that nowadays is not that difficult to have a game that works on both Windows and Linux. Also, it is a legit thing to point out when and developer complains about the lack of sales.
Seriously, how many Linux users you know that pay for software? How much would that increase indie's sales? By 2?
You 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, sh…
> I’m kinda floundering right now and not really sure what to do release it focus on marketing for a while Treat it as a purely hobby project Make it into an ethical game experiment pour a lot more time in, improve graphics and music, add more levels and variety As someone who's gone through this, put years into a software startup, nearly had it fail completely after spending a lot of my own money to keep the family…
it's difficult to market what you haven't finished imagining.
The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1]
>Abstract
>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.
[1] The Macroeconomics of Superstars, Anton Korinek Johns Hopkins and NBER, Ding Xuan Ng Johns Hopkins, November 2017 https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-for...
[2] The Economics of Superstars The American Economic Review , Vol. 71, No. 5. (Dec., 1981), pp. 845-858. http://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/papers/others/1981/rosen1981...