Ask HN: Any indie game developers here? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any indie game developers here?

17 pointsYesBox15 comments

Hi HN,

I'm an indie game developer approaching 2 years into creating my city builder game. It's a lonely journey so I put together a small group of other indie game developers about 18 months ago (via Discord).

We meet up every week to share our progress, receive feedback, relate to the struggle, and help each other out. It's been a success and motivating for all involved. Most people in the group have participated for over a year at this point.

I'm looking to add a few people to the group who can commit to weekly meetups. We have a strong preference for other full time developers.

About the group:

We are late 20s - 40s. We are pretty open and honest with each other, and will question each other/provide feedback freely. Backgrounds range from software devs, tech startups, and other game dev. studios.

Some of the games we're working on (not everyone can publicly share):

Metropolis 1998 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

Drift - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2159650/Drift/

Basketball GM - https://basketball-gm.com

Please email me. Email is in profile!

Posting again as a PSA

Don't bother with this group. I emailed yesbox a couple months back and got the standard "We have enough people" treatment, and tbh it felt really demotivating.

I did email them asking to join, and shared samples of my work to show that I was serious and still got turned down. All I had in my portfolio were 2d sdl games(I had written in the handmade style i.e minimal external libs, I even posted some of my projects on the handmade jam. In my portfolio were other handmade projects like a vulkan renderer, a gltf pbr loader with opengl, a UI system for a 2d game etc.).

At that time, I had quit my job and was working on my games pretty much full time, but had just gotten started and could've used some encouragement from fellow indie gamedevs, and as an hn regular, jumped on the opportunity. Heck the games shared look similar to the style I was going for.

There were other comments on your post last time indicating that people felt this person's attitude to community management was exclusive, and I would really hate for some bright eyed indie game dev out there who doesn't have a steam page yet or whatever random criterion they are using to "weed out" people and don't share up front to feel excluded like I did.

Other communities that are more inclusive than this person's gated community: 1. The handmade discord 2. The graphics programming discord, 3. The godot discord, 4. The unreal discord, 5. The r/mapmaking discord, 6. The tough sf discord, 7. worldbuilding discord and tons others. dm me if you need links to these, I'd be happy to invite you.

Note to mods: I think yesbox is constantly flagging my posts and deleting them so I'll probably keep trying to post on here and might chat with dang about why this is happening.

I think you should give HN more credit than letting the original poster control the dialog in the comments. I didn't flag your post, btw.

Best of luck

Why did you refuse parent? What is your selection process? Be as transparent as possible

Glad to see this comment. Had the same experience a while back. I think it was with this person? I'm not sure. I don't really remember the name and they may have changed it since then.

The experience was enough to make me wonder if there actually even was a discord group or if this was some kind of a phishing or marketing scheme.

Lots of friendly communities out there on discord that you can join without running into whatever kind of status game or possibly scam this is.

Best of luck on your game!

You listed some good Discord channels so I feel obligated to post some Lemmy Communities...

  - Game Development@programming.dev
  - GameDev@lemmy.blahaj.zone

I have developed a few small games using Unity and one in pure Javascript but nothing commercially. I have never completed one. I never thought it would be financially lucrative so never took them as anything more than a hobby. Here is one I did in Javascript that can be played on line, of course I never finished it either...

https://fpdavis.github.io/Nibbler-Twisted-Tale/

I have been thinking of giving my game ideas a try these days... I haven't pulled the trigger yet. I have completed a few small games in the past but never released on a public market.

I can't imagine a game being financially feasible. I doubt your community would be a good place for someone like me.

It sounds like you're mainly interested in people going all in and trying to "live the gamedev dream" which sounds nice, but it would be a hobby/creative art for me.

As a big Sim City 2000 fan, Metropolis 1998 looks very enticing.

Thanks! Appreciate it

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