Game dev chatter

[Koobazaur]

Here's a bit of update on my progress and plans:

HEADLINER Exhibit at iFest and Release Plans





My next experimental adventure game about controlling the news, swaying public opinion and impacting your family, had its first public showing.


Continue Reading ->

[Lizard]

@Koob, that looks insanely fun (and like it could cause me to make bad decisions and then feel bad about myself? Is it that sort of game? Because I love that sort of game, in how I like to explore how much of a terrible human being I am)


Speaking of that sort of game, I've been seeing a lot of progress in mixed reality recently - I'd love to see some experiments with people playing VR games about the horrors of humanity (i.e. they make terrible decisions because all humans are terrible things) and then measuring those in-game choices against the reactions of people watching the game take place.


I, on the other hand, have done ZERO game dev recently. Been too busy playing with neural nets and terrible romance novels...

[Jubal]

I'm sure you can combine a neural net and a terrible romance novel into a computer game with a bit of thought

[Koobazaur]

@Koob, that looks insanely fun (and like it could cause me to make bad decisions and then feel bad about myself? Is it that sort of game? Because I love that sort of game, in how I like to explore how much of a terrible human being I am)

Pretty much I espouse the Telltale and CD Projet's design ethos of "No good deed goes unpunished"


Whate Game Dev do you do normally, Lizard?

[Jubal]

I sort of like those games but they frustrate me, both in that I'm a) very driven to try and Do The Right Thing and b) really quite machiavellian. I feel rubbish after playing games where the result is either "you were nice and everything ended awfully" or "you were evil and won", because my instinctive feeling is that if I can't win as a good guy, I haven't got the strategy right or I just sit around wondering what I could have done better. (This probably explains a lot about my attitude to life in general).

[Koobazaur]

armadillo's getting real...


EDIT: the forum replaces sh!t with armadillo? Really now?


Since that's censored, here's the link to the image (NSFW). [size=78%]http://i.imgur.com/kACvGOD.gif[/size] . Still, I find the censoring a bit silly

[Jubal]

You're welcome to use sh!t or space the letters or link to images that use it, in context, we don't have a blanket anti-swearing rule per se we just have a silly word filter. The filter is intentionally silly and we've had it for years so it's sort of just become a running joke now that I quite like having in place

[Koobazaur]

I wrote a one-year retrospective on moving to Seattle for indie game dev:

Considering Moving to Seattle as an Indie Game Dev? My one Year Retrospective



If you want to move to Seattle to pursue indie game development, I'm now you one year into the future. Looking back at my experience, I have attended many more gaming events than before, met countless developers in my shoes, fostered promising business connections, and got a chance to showcase my upcoming game frequently. But there are some disappointments as well, such finding a flourishing social life like I had before. Here are all the pros, cons and what I learned from living in Seattle for a year.

Continue Reading ->

Edit by Glaurung: link URL cleaned up

[Jubal]

Nice I think a lot of those issues are the case anywhere... I still haven't worked out at all if there's any good indie developing community here in Vienna, though it's a big enough city that there ought to be. In 10 more months maybe I'll do a similar blogpost on my own experiences over here!

[Koobazaur]

I'd be curious to read! I quite liked Vienna when I visited a bit over a year ago. Austria had the best beers of all the Euro countries I visited on that trek too :p

[Jubal]

I don't drink beer, I'm probably missing out... I gave some of my initial thoughts on the city here if you're interested: http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5239.0

[JeffNevington]

I wrote a one-year retrospective on moving to Seattle for indie game dev:

Considering Moving to Seattle as an Indie Game Dev? My one Year Retrospective



If you want to move to Seattle to pursue indie game development, I'm now you one year into the future. Looking back at my experience, I have attended many more gaming events than before, met countless developers in my shoes, fostered promising business connections, and got a chance to showcase my upcoming game frequently. But there are some disappointments as well, such finding a flourishing social life like I had before. Here are all the pros, cons and what I learned from living in Seattle for a year.

Continue Reading ->

Edit by Glaurung: link URL cleaned up

If its any consolation, I have never managed to make friends in game developer circles apart from the people I work with directly.  Then again, I find it difficult to even make business related connections in this game.  I have fairly cynical view, that any time I meet another indie dev they must have some sort of agenda - maybe its because of the places I have tended to meet fellow devs.  I treat gamedev meetups and events as work outings and always feel like I'm on the clock.  Especially if money is tight, its hard to relax. 

My first big event was to attend GDC back in 2015.  This was before gamedev was anything close to a career and I was still safe in the cradle of academia. I had managed to get a free ticket, along with some other UK devs (all of whom I did not know).  We were all in the same boat, everyone had a small project nearing completion.  After arriving, only one of the group was interested in meeting up during the event, the rest all had their own plans and seemed to be putting on a facade of business-like self-importance when I tried to chat to them as humans.  I assume these people, although fellow nerds deep down, were probably under immense stress and felt they needed to dedicate the precious time at the event towards more influential contacts (they are probably doing it right as my contact network remains impressively insignificant).  I left the event feeling like I spent the whole trip in a bubble, just observing everything that was going on.

Since then I have attended a handful of conferences and meetups.  The meetups are always fairly awkward.  I find myself surrounded by people with the same interests as me, but everyone always seems to be on their best behaviour, very rigid.

[Jubal]

That is a pity - I guess I don't have that experience but I'm very much not a professional dev and I've not often been in circles where everyone's trying to make a go of it professionally. I think that sort of hierarchical networking where people end up encouraged to spend all their time pushing towards the most influential person present is really annoyingly pointless and I hate environments like that; that said, I guess as someone who is still cradled in academia that sort of pressure to perform financially isn't something I've ever had to cope with.