yayy...
i think even in higher effort stuff, LPs or 'essay's there is still kind of this weird tastemaker thing too, like 'how does this game choice reflect on me, as The Immersive Sim Guy' kind of stuff
idk maybe its worth saying the same for 'pick 3' indies too,,,
i find it hard to compare games crit bc ive never been in that space, but my impression is that the whole scene was just kneecapped ages ago
blogs cant really pay rent now so it feels hard to throw criticism around for how you pivoted in order to get by
coming from players i think its just parroting YT commentary
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ha, if its between devs, i think there is more of a 'how come *you* get to get away with this when i put all this effort into following these paradigms', like your work feels like nothing when you see someone capable of authenticity ^-^;
forget where i wrote this, but right now it feels like so many of the 'lessons' people are learning are actually just the survival tactics of an industry thats heavily receding in on itself. like we are really racing to the bottom of this dark pattern stuff
yeah this is esp. true for anyone getting into design these last few years -
how many major successes were only possible because of how players interacted with games during the pandemic, are those actually good 'case studies' to base off of?
the live service dream killing AAA, survivor to indies etc
+ its been really weird to me seeing people get more emboldened to leave that kind of feedback, bc, usually it is with this tacit (i think it would help you sell better) tone, which, who asked!
or rather, dont know that they should *try* to parse it any other way
then the *truly* unspoken thing being that 'how it feels to screwdrive' is actually important to you in some context thats *not* 'construction tools' but that just happened to be the closest point of reference anyone from the outside can find,
so they just arent equipped to parse it at all :(
like, 'construction tools game' being some sort of genre, and players have a base conception of what kind of experiences that promises,
but when you have a more specific promise you're trying to fulfill like 'screwdriver' it tends to be hard to actually signal that, unless its already a sub-genre
yes! i think were on the same page. i tried replying to your 'hammer' post but its gone --
players tend to be very good with those genre signifiers, but not go that far beyond them, so it just reads to me like game design and marketing have begun mostly to cater to those instincts
and then it creates this widely adopted 'standardized' rubric, where once you identify the genre signifiers of some genre, it emboldens you to test things against that, and leave unwarranted itch comments everywhere :'(
i really like the phrasing of design as a type of 'problem solving'!
but i think when you are looking towards other successful games a metric, you are learning more about their own specific problems, and sharing genre isnt enough to indicate that you share the same problems.
stop adding dodgerolls
internally i have been calling this sort of thing 'populist' game design in the sense that things like youtube criticism etc really seem to like this mode of thinking where one game shows design that 'solves' the issues of some other game, not really identifying the goals or intent behind either
i think if your challenges working on a game is 'why is my X mechanic less satisfying than game Y', rather than try to unpack game Y for their 'solutions' you should try to ask why exactly you are making that mechanic, is it needed, etc. does solution Y actually apply to *your* problem?
in general the 'practice' of design seems to be boiling down to
- identify 2/3 genres the game makes up, marketingwise
- find the gmtk/etc videos for those genres to identify which boxes you have to 'tick' to satisfy those genres
- add your coat of paint to differentiate, marketingwise
New blog post! "Sketch Gamedev and Glorious Trainwrecks", about my attempts to make itty bitty games farawaytimes.blogspot.com/2026/02/sket...
2026 update on this and i have not been micro or macro blogging. i am glad to be avoiding the coy irony that i kind of exuded on twitter but my thoughts on so many games things have just become sour and i hate turning things caustic for others
re: 'willingly', when i started my twenties you were not allowed to go outside. i had already been doing this stuff for a few years, knew the local scene etc, so it felt natural. a bit reductive but years later you just kind of dont know anything else any more
the twentysomethings of today are also growing up impressing themselves on the behavior and expectations of those indie darlings.
there is probably a very negative cycle here starting post-'boom' and esp. during the pandemic when new grads/etc got stuck fully investing in this workstyle
Still looking for more alpha testers for KERO, my 2D game framework for Rust! It's like MonoGame or LÖVE, but in Rust!
If you're new to Rust or experienced, anyone is welcome, I think coding games is a cool way to learn a language.
CRATE: crates.io/crates/kero
DISCORD: discord.gg/AYjNw9WHJa
main point being ecs has a lot of gravitational pull from the community, so alternatives don't get a ton of discussion.
and then i started rambling
fair LOL-
would just love to see a blog/etc (if the chance arises) like "here's some thoughts on leveraging rusts strengths for game scene/entity structure, and non-ecs pathways that are still uniquely suited to rust"
the opposite end of it seems to be like 'shrug. impl a GameState struct with whaaatever data you want, and it gets an update(). good luck!'
the 'time until a lil guy can run around' (TTLG) on both ends is really high and neither offer guidance OOTB for what these look like at scale
rust has many great ergonomic tools built in (traits, generics w/ 'where'), and the ecs libs feel more like chasing something shiny for the sake of it
testing bevy felt like dragging and dropping godot nodes into a tree, but only using code-glue and a lot of arbitrary macros to learn on-the-fly
this writeup github.com/kvark/froggy... def unlocked a few things for me + the idea that you should kind of just let the 'world' own the positions of everything and enforce getter/setters rather than making it a child/'component' of all your game objects
it still feels like there are not enough models for how 'non-ecs' is built in rust, and not a lot of users exploring outside of ecs.
im finally starting to near a paradigm i like that isn't ecs, but you still sort of have to use all the same tricks (anymap + generational indices all the way down)
Outside these walls, the Children say, the grown-ups are monsters, and nowhere is safe.
Our bittersweet fairy tale RPG #StrayChildren is now available worldwide!
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It's time to get your brain back.
Mark your calendars for September 17th!
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