a1studmuffin

I don’t read reviews, I’m not on social media (except here) and I don’t participate in online discussions about my games. At least that’s the principle I try and live by, I’m only human. And running my own studio meant having to break those rules anyway. Oh well.

Truthfully, it doesn’t bother me that much, and it gets easier the more it happens. Not everything is for everyone, and either people are respectful in their critique (which you can learn from to hopefully get better next time) or they’re disrespectful (in which case you can pretty much ignore what they’re saying as online trolling).

Also when you’re at a bigger studio, your contribution to the game is much smaller anyway (1000s of devs), so you feel less personal about the feedback.

As I’ve gotten more experience, I actually feel like ANY type of feedback is good feedback - it means people are playing your game! There will always be a vocal minority wanting to rage and vent, and you can just take their volume level as an indicator of how well your game has captured your audience’s attention.

I’ve been in games over two decades - everything from AAA to VR startups to running my own indie studio. I feel like I can probably answer your question.

There’s definitely a class divide within the industry based on your discipline. If you’re a software engineer, you have much greater leverage than artists/designers etc. when it comes to compensation, and you’ll likely be treated better in general.

Especially at larger studios, if you’re good you will generally be looked after. Sure, you might earn more working for one of the big five in tech, but you’ll probably be less interested in the work.

You should expect to move around pretty often - it’s rare (but not unheard of) for people to stay at one company for most of their career.

There have been some pretty rough seas over the years too - post-covid layoffs, and a fairly large series of layoffs in the early 2010s.

I’m guessing 30% of my time has been spent on games that never released. The first time was soul-crushing. But after that, I realised I needed to focus on enjoying the journey Instead. The game releasing was just a nice bonus.

I wouldn’t change my career for the world. I love working with other creatives (I’m actually friends with many of my colleagues), and I’m genuinely passionate about what I do. I think you just need to be the right personality type for it. If you’re someone who can’t set boundaries for yourself easily (switching off after hours), it can burn you out, usually by your own hand.

Most burnout I’ve seen has not come from studio heads demanding people work insane hours (though those rare situations always make the headlines), but instead comes from people’s inner drive to be a reliable colleague and do amazing work. I think that’s a side effect of being passionate about the work.

Is it a good career? I’ve certainly loved it and feel like I’ve been well-compensated, but your mileage may vary. But don’t believe the hype of the vocal minority who say it’s an industry full of abuse and bad wages. There’s some shitty things that happen for sure, and some jerks running studios here and there, but I think that’s more to do with late-stage capitalism than games itself.

So what’s going on here? Is this related to the new US administration? Or Microsoft and Meta exchanging money to silence the competition? Genuinely confused, but it seems fairly important whatever the motivations.

It would be great to see a Fediverse GitHub alternative. Obviously we have plenty of self-hosted software forges around, but I’m not aware of any decentralized network solution. Allow people to host repositories on an instance, but be able to search, discuss and contribute to repositories across the entire network. That way you’d get the benefits of a large programmer community without needing to centralize to a single company or organization. Maybe this already exists and I’m unaware.

The official Python tutorial is very well written and is suitable for total beginners:

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

If you’re concerned about privacy I don’t know why you’d use Tailscale over Wireguard directly. The latter is slightly more fiddly to configure, but you only do it once and there’s no cloud middleman involved, just your devices talking directly to each other.

Windows App Series X Ultimate Pro for Enterprise Edition Service Pack 2

I’m not against these changes, but aren’t physical footy cards and other types of trading cards the original loot box aimed at kids? Or have companies successfully argued that they’re selling chewing gum and the cards are just freebies in the pack?

This reminds me of the low-background steel problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the “new” Metro-style Settings, then just kind of… gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can’t believe they’ve left it this long to address, it’s an awful user experience.

robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.

Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.

God, even if they didn’t have QA test it, they should have had continuous integration running to test all new channel updates against all versions of their program, considering the update will affect all of them. What an epic process failure.

The older I get, the more I question the value of public companies vs the damage they do. As soon as you’ve got shareholders at large to please, you’re incentivized to keep your share price going up above all else, especially in the short term. Global stock markets seemed like a great idea at the time, but I feel they’re doing more damage than good at this end of capitalism.

Wow, it’s pretty wild they didn’t even attempt to encrypt or protect this data, even if it is local to your machine. What a treasure trove for malware to sift through.

The author had so many things to highlight that they didn’t even mention “as of August 2024” being in the future, haha.

What a trainwreck. The fact it’s giving anonymous Reddit comments and The Onion articles equal consideration with other sites is hilarious. If they’re going to keep this, they need it to cite its sources at a bare minimum. Can’t wait for this AI investor hype to die down.

Uh oh!

I did some more research after your comment and it does indeed sound like it’s not for the feint of heart.

Spam seems to be one of the biggest challenges, both incoming and outgoing. For incoming, it’s a constant arms race with spammers to circumvent spam filtering techniques. But at least that’s something you have control over, you can just turn off your spam filtering and ensure you receive all important email. The real problem is ending up in other people’s spam filters, which you have very little control over once you’ve decided on your mail server domain/certificate.

The crux of the issue seems to be that SMTP is ancient insecure tech designed for an innocent era when email was for universities only. We desperately need a more secure open source email protocol designed for the modern era, but capitalism isn’t having it - instead we’ve got corporations wrestling for control of the next big thing with proprietary protocols… Discord, Slack etc. And big tech companies that continue using SMTP (Gmail, Outlook etc.) simply treat any servers outside their sphere with a high level of suspicion.

Has anyone tried self-hosting on a NAS or similar? I’d be interested to hear the practicalities of it, I imagine it’s not exactly set or forget, and the realities of the enshittified internet present some obstacles, like ending up in spam filters etc.

I’ll level with you… I’ve never used Matrix either. 🤣 But all the cool kids around these parts recommend it, and I fundamentally agree with the cause of the project and saw they had the WeChat bridge, so thought I’d mention it.