Anecdotally in the past month or so, I've started seeing a large uptick in recruiter reach-outs. I had none for the past year (aside from directly reaching out), but there have been 4 cold contacts in the last couple of weeks alone now.
Two, surely? The previous one still being used and the new one being written.
(Note that this is how most rendering artifacts were fixed long ago - the on screen and the off screen buffers were swapped, so nobody would "see" in progress scenes)
I wonder if that's a similar mental state you have while lucid dreaming or just after waking up. You feel like you have all of the answers and struggle to write them down before your brain wipes them out.
miniKanren was my introduction to relational programming (SQL aside!), and I had hours of trying to wrap my head around the Reasoned Schemer.
Were you aware a miniKanren-inspired language was the foundation of a large chunk of Amazon's retail data aggregation stack? I'm no longer there, but it might be one of the larger deployments out there. We spent many many hours trying to figure out the best way to run the relational engine at scale and with acceptable performance.
It has been the consensus of the privacy community for quite a few years now not to use Privacy Badger. As few exentions as possible to cover everything is the current view. Arkenfox lists extension features that aren't covered by FireFox inbuilt or uBlock Origin: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions
Hi, PB dev here. Privacy Badger does not replace uBlock Origin, and uBlock Origin does not replace Privacy Badger. While one of them may well be enough for you, the two work well together. Our FAQ goes into what makes Privacy Badger different here[1] and here[2].
Ah! We had to bump minimum Chrome version to 121 because of some stuff related to the Manifest V3 migration. Hopefully Iridium will update their browser soon; doesn't seem secure to run on old Chromium.
I built Genfanad (http://genfanad.com/) as a browser based game with similar inspirations to yours a few years ago. A lot of the technologies you mentioned are very similar. It's surprising how easy getting something up and running is these days!
We ended up shutting down a few months ago as I couldn't figure out how to take it to profitability. Do you have plans for that, or is it just a fun side project?
Nice job with Genfanad! That looked like a really neat game. I don't have a good plan for profitability other than try to keep my expenses as low as possible and see if I can find some way to scrape by in a year or two.
IknowIknow! You could have some lets call it "lootboxes" that people could pay real money for to open. And in them they would find items to use in the game! :-)
A bit more serious, I haven't seen many attempts at just making a donation bar showing how much it costs to keep it running per month? Let people donate until the bar is filled, when it overflows it goes to next month. Very visible on login screen. In this bar ofcourse include your salary for keeping it running after developement is doneish.
Maybe stretch-goals for donation to make new functions?
And please use Ko-fi for donations, much friendlier and less cutting into your profits :-)
I think presenting costs as a rough “per user/player” calculation might be more effective than presenting just the total cost. That way people are reminded of their own personal resource usage, which seems like a more manageable/tangible number, and it can be accompanied by the broader stats since of course not everyone voluntarily pays (and some people pay more than their fair share).
Back of the napkin math, but if the servers cost $0.25/month/player and the owner would like to make $5,000/month (very conservative but sure, why not) and there is a 20% "future emergency fund" in place, when the game has 5,000 players then each player would need to contribute on average $1.50/month, or $18/year.
I would want, in exchange for that, that the game be fairly stable, that there be things to do such as Quests or Tasks, and that I could enjoy the game for maybe an hour a week, maybe 2 if I'm in a rut.
Exactly, and I think that sort of request for contribution is much more likely to make people feel inclined to contribute than some abstract goal of getting $10k/mo in donations or whatever.
Valve has some great talks on monetizing free games. People will pay for social features that don’t change the game mechanics. E.g., make every donor’s avatar visually different, so people acknowledge they’re good people. E.g., wear a gold chain around their avatar’s neck or a feather in their hat. Or render them with more polygons! Larger donation = more polygons?! Makes sense to me.
Or sell weapons that are the same as regular weapons but trigger fancy death scenes when they kill.
Coding is the fun part, but it's less than 5% of actually launching and making a successful product. If you don't think you want to spend most of your time not coding, don't try to make it a business!
Marketing is more important than making something. You will get a small boost from things like this (I was always too embarrassed to post here!), but it's an endless pit of time and money! To do it right, I've heard all sorts of numbers, but a good rule of thumb is every dollar/hour you put to making your game, put a dollar/hour to marketing it as well.
From a technical perspective, your stack is fine. You want to make sure you host all your assets behind cloudflare/s3 or similar, the $5 server is fine for gameplay but if you also try to make it send all the stuff, it's gonna die. (As evidenced today!)
Most of my other experience and advice is about how to run a team and set budgets and goals. If you're going about it as a hobby (and that's probably the best way to go!) then just keep doing what you're doing, write some blogs and foster a community instead.
I don't think marketing is too hard honestly. It's just that many people make a game that doesn't look amazing on the surface. The hits come with a different structure. If you can't hook someone in the first 3 seconds, it's going to be very difficult. That means name, screenshots, etc too.
I could do a little analysis, but Genfanad is probably hard to sell because... what's the name mean? It seems rather niche and artsy. I'm not sure what's going on from the site. Reconquest is quite obvious from the name and going into the screen, it seems... woah, maybe I have a lot of agency here? Then you look at comments and read of people getting ganked without moderator interference. That's likely why it took off.
Many games are fun to build and play, but they'll never ever be hits and have to be fixed from a structural level. Names are easy to fix. Steam is also very much hit and miss; if you don't have a certain level of wishlists, it's just going to be a waste of time doing any marketing.
Then I think you underestimate your marketing prowess; because these are not obvious things to everyone.
For me building cloud infrastructure is easy, the choices and tradeoffs are obvious to me. To all my colleagues in the past 16 years it's been some sort of magic. They are smart people, mostly, but lack the experience and make 'obivous' mistakes all the time.
They're all learnable skills. But I guess my point is if it's taking 95% of the effort, it's probably the wrong path. But when you've already put the effort into that one game, it's hard to see yourself marketing a different game.
There's a good video on designing games to be sold. The base idea is to treat it like a search algorithm. You can be an amazing fisherman but you can't catch many fish where there's no fish. https://youtube.com/watch?v=o5K0uqhxgsE
FWIW I've had great experiences recently with Bunny [0] to deploy content to a very affordable, very configurable CDN. Integration is also dead simple (you deploy normally to your regular site and then just replace hostname in all URLs with the CDN hostname, it handles the rest automatically)
Different than industrial CDNs but my new go-to for small-to-mid and indie sites.
I think, like you said, a good strategy will be to keep it fun and hobby-like as long as possible. I can definitely see the business-side of it sucking all my time and energy.
I think doing some educational materials will be a worthwhile way to market and gain interest. Community building with something like a Discord server will also help. Competing as a business with something like Jagex is 100x harder than just making a good game.
To be clear, it's not Jagex you're competing with. It's the 20+ other indie MMO solo developers who are trying to do the same thing as you, including but not limited to: RetroMMO, New Eden, Valorbound, Carth, Eterspire, Omuri, Shadefell, Cookie Dragon, Cinis, Cinderstone, Legends of Etherell, Legendarium, Mirage Realms, Aether Story, Ethyrial, and so on. There's more that come and go every month.
Unfortunately, the #1 lesson that I've learned is that while nostalgia gets some reception, there's a reason no big companies are really making MMOs, even at a smaller scale. There's just not that large a viable market for them.
The lack of a low end scanner market could also be attributed to the fact that everyone these days has a device with a camera that is either good enough or in some cases better for digitizing documents than those old scanners.
They’re better in the sense that they are in your pocket and take fractions of the time to use.
The app iScanner really does work very well. The glare and shadow issues are trivial to solve with good CV these days, the resulting documents are pretty damn close to a hardware scan.
I had to fill out a bunch of forms when I transferred my car to the US, and everyone along the way seemed perfectly happy with photo scans.
A phone won’t match of course but it comes surprisingly close for “scanning” documents and sending them to your insurer or whoever wants them. It’s able to remove noise, crop to the page edges, and deskew the whole image.
99% of usage is scanning office documents. Sure, with a flatbed you don't need to bother with perspective correction, but 99% of times it's get scanned, mailed and forgotten forever, so nobody bothers.
