Websites used to have souls.
Now everything looks like Stormtrooper clones executing Order 66 with your personal data.

No video games need hyper-realistic graphics

137 dollars from Valve following 7 months of "Valve didn't send you payment because you didn't meet the payout requirements"

Step 1 : become the leader in single player narrative games

Step 2 : spend hundreds of millions on live service multiplayer games

Step 3 : fail

Step 4 : close down your studios

Most of these comments are from higher ups and AAA studios because they want it to become the standard, so that they can make more money by paying less. Quite simple propaganda! All they see is the money bags, not the art.

yeah I kinda cooldown on RA because I was tired of playing 10 hours to beat a game just to get 6 RetroAchievements because I didn't do any of these shinanegans!

I hate it. Devs and artists spend years to make a game a certain way to convey the emotion they want from the player, just to see an AI completely misinterpret their art and their game.

I hope a bunch of indie devs look at this as a cautionary tale. Nobody wants slop content.

There's such a disconnect between companies and humans, it's crazy. Who the heck thought this would be a good idea?!!

Yep, I value the feedbacks from people close to me a million times more than a random guy complaining on the internet that the game isn't exactly like THEY want it to be.

"yeah that was pretty good...
but I wish it was more like <insert a billion dollar game>. "

"oh, and $8.99 is wayyyyyy too expensive for 15 hours of gameplay. I will buy only if it's discounted below $2"

Le Roché Percé! 💙

That's such a heartwhelming way to deal with it. Don't fight, but embrace the coincidence! I love it.

Exactly! this is where level design shines and my thought is that I feel it's a pillar as important as the mechanics you're introducing.

I'm playing Astro Bot and it's a masterclass in level design: here's a gimmick, learn it, now here's 10 min of challenges around it.

Mario games are a good example of that.

Whenever I play a Mario game, I don't feel like I need to understand the synergy of 12 different systems in order to have fun.

I feel like more and more games rely solely on systemic design to challenge the player, "here's a dozen mechanics that you need to understand to have fun and win"

I still enjoy (and miss) the traditional "Start at point A, go to point B" kinda game, with the level design itself being the challenge.

"took 2 hours to finish" is becoming such a strong selling point for me! thanks for the recommendation

A nice little community of Godot game developers from Quebec 💙

4 years ago I brainstormed a parody game about a guy wrecking a shopping mall by screaming at people and causing chaos.
I won a gamejam, did 3 different prototypes, had a Steam page but eventually I canceled the game.

Yesterday I saw a similar game blow up online.

Moral: never overthink anything.

I'm curious to see how they will pull it off in this current hardware market without charging too much

This picture both represents myself as a gamer, and myself as a game developer

If a publisher takes that amount of money in recoup, I expect them to at least pay me something upfront to develop the game, otherwise, it's not worth it if the only thing they offer is visibility.

I just bought a PS5 yesterday and while RE9 was installing I thought, why not try Astro's Playroom. Now I have to platinum that thing, what an amazing tech demo, it's a blast all around.
I can't wait to try Astro Bot now!

I don't know your thoughts about it, but more and more, I feel like Next Fest is becoming too saturated to be used as marketing tool.

There's just so many demos and little time for people to try them all out. So I agree with you that making a good impression matters a lot in an ocean of demos.

Totally agree. It's not a prototype, it's not a beta, it's a demo of what your final game is going to be.

For a lot of people, that's gonna be the first (and maybe last) experience playing your game, you should make the most of it otherwise it leaves a bad taste.

Yeah I tried a few as well, some of them are good but too generic.

On the other side I played the Vampire Crawlers demo and despite it being made with probably a big stack of Vampire Survivors money, it's still scrappy and unpolish, and I loved it.

Oh yeah it looks sharp! I love the use of colors for real, the SPELL pops a lot

Ohh for sure, I'll give it a try, this looks cool 😮

When I say running well I mean, playable.

Some doesn't have controller support, that's ok, still playable to some extent.

But I tried games where the audio didn't work, some you couldn't select anything, another one running at 15fps, another one not booting at all.
Not a good first experience.

I tried like 8 demos from the Steam Next Fest (many of which have hundreds/thousands of concurrent players at the moment) and only 1 of them so far is running well on the Steam Deck 😑