When Indie game development gets a black eye | Hacker News Reader

When Indie game development gets a black eye

gaming.icrontic.com

25 pointsprimesuspect16 comments

The Holy Trinity of Making Backups:

1) If it's not automated, it's not a real backup.

2) If it's not redundant, it's not a real backup.

3) If it's not regularly rotated off-site, it's not a real backup.

Doing any one of these things by itself or in tandem produces "a copy." A copy is handy, and it may really save you, even a majority of the time. But, making casual copies is optimistic at best. Someday, you will need the benefits of all three layers.

http://www.43folders.com/2010/03/15/yes-another-backup-lectu...

You also probably want backups to be tested. Many people, myself included, have been bitten by "I did not quite have what I needed to bring the production environment up again."

With regards to coders specifically: git and similar DVCSes is a lifesaver. If you have a sensible push workflow, loss of a laptop only costs you the laptop, the time it takes you to get a new machine to the state where you are productive (+), and whatever your average not-pushed-to-somewhere batch size is.

+ Having recent experience with this, Ninite + Dropbox + a monthly backup of my Ubuntu VM (where dev happens) in Dropbox = total recovery time was about three hours.

These days I freeze development environments by

- checking in the tools, as well as the sources

- running them in a VM, and backing /that/ up

- ensuring that none of the tools, certificates, etc. will expire

Gigabytes are cheap.

It's not like when you are constructing a house and a tornado happens to knock out months of your hard work. Programming is less like laboriously laying thousands of bricks, but more like very carefully laying a small handful of bricks in just the right places after a lot of thought.

I have a feeling that as they start re-developing what they have lost, they will find that the work goes 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than it went when they originally did it and in just a few weeks they will be caught up.

I think the way that they are handling it (treating it as pretty much a project ending blow) is pretty questionable.

I once lost two weeks of work with an "rm -rf" typo. No backups, just gone. It was the 80s, and I had been careless.

Took me about a day and a half to re-create the work, and it was /better/.

I'm not saying it's a good thing to lose work this way. But it's seldom utterly catastrophic. (Exceptions like "the SourceSafe database and build machine start pushing up daisies the night before Final" . . . well, for one thing: Don't use SourceSafe, and for Pete's sake, make sure your backups actually work).

Both gamers and gamers with programming chops have grossly unrealistic expectations for how software development actually works.

Can you expand on this thought?

Gamers don't know that projects fail all the time even with millions invested in them, that 2,000 donations of $10 each is not a large amount of money, that amateur artists do not on average have habits which resemble teams at megacorps, etc.

Devs don't understand that gamers are the worst customers on the face of the earth, that for the price of an expresso they think you have an obligation to listen to their entitled whining for years, that the community they participate in and value belonging to is frequently a toxic cesspool of humanity, and that being an indie developer is approximately ~10% or so about making video games. (The other 90% is marketing, customer support, community management, marketing, accounting, marketing, taxes, marketing, hiring, marketing, etc. Quite similar to selling bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers.)

I like your point about gamers being the worst customers on the face of the earth - much as I'm a gamer myself and love the community, as an ISP employee, I can only testify to the truth of that statement.

To the first, however, as a qualified software engineer and just general computer user - any dev worth his chops should absolutely be running backups more resilient than copying between two boxes in the same residence (with the likes of CrashPlan, it's so easy!), and at the very least using some form of off-site VCS.

$20,000 easily covers a (decent) yearly github subscription, for instance, which would absolutely cover this instance.

I'm not sure about the feeling of entitlement. I think it's actually the opposite. Until very recently, the video gaming scene was a game was done, gold pressed, shipped and never touched again. No feedback, no updates, no changes, so gamers would quite prominently voice their opinions. This had no chance at all of affecting the current game but provided feedback on how to do the NEXT game. This same method of voicing opinions has been carried over into an environment where you can react to them and improve the game without a change in tone. It also strongly falls into the fact that if people are complaining about it, it means they care and you have customers.

I find that almost all non-technical users have absolutely no idea what it takes to make software, but that gamers really take it personally and are incredibly vocal about it. For this, you get the shortest attention span - games don't live long in general, and a lot of whining about price, which has some merit as a consumer - if your office software was only useful for 6-15 hours, you wouldn't want to pay much to keep repurchasing it either. But yeah, I've never seen such a self-entitled client base as computer gamers.

I was just reading an anti-PayPal rant the other day (that I agreed with) and someone was saying that this was the very reason that PayPal was holding the pre-order funds for an indie developer. And here we are, with that exact situation.

I think it's a pretty rare thing, but I can't blame PP for covering themselves on this.

The developer -should- refund everyone's money if they aren't going to be able to deliver. And if there's a major delay, they should offer the choice to the customer.

But likely, they don't have the money, and it's just not an option.

I don't agree that this will "send ripples through the Indie community for years to come" as the article suggests. Perhaps people will be a little more wary about putting up cash for a project on the the promise that it will be finished one day, but that's about it. Independent games have been around a lot longer than the last few years. A little drama from one project won't upset anything.

At the very least it serves as justification for Paypal to not allow pre-orders for an unfinished product. I'd never heard of this sort of incident prior to this, but it just proves that Paypal and Google are right to protect themselves from this sort of problem.

First I've ever even heard of the project. While it may have been popular, and a lot of OTHER people might have heard of it, indie games are all over the place and I doubt this will have much of an effect on the overall market.

Wow, what a douchy site. Guess this is the tabloid for the indie world?

protip: When life sucks act perfectly.

The guy had his baby killed and these guys ream out the way he responds. He was working on making something that people enjoyed. Hearing people on the sideline, put that much effort into making him wrong strictly pisses me off.

There are risks in paying an indie for a game before he delivers - wow that's a shocking conclusion.

Feel bad for the developer, that's a kick to the nuts I hope I never experience.

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