bmalicoat

Thanks for the support, really appreciate it! Glad you're enjoying Pine Tar too :)

Mobile vs PC/Consoles - I have more mobile experience and the path to publish is more straightforward. Getting through Apple and Google takes very little time and is quite easy. To pull off Steam properly you probably want achievements (more art + localized strings), Xbox and Nintendo require them to approve you. Funny enough I'm in the process of porting it to Steam and hopefully Xbox and fingers-crossed even harder hopefully Switch. I do think you can charge more for the same game on PC/Console than on mobile. There are a lot of examples of this, so probably starting on PC and then going to mobile makes the most sense.

Challenges - Some challenges now that I'm porting the game: The game on mobile lets you tap anywhere in a 3d world. For PC/Console, you might have or likely have a gamepad so I had to make a cursor that was aware of what direction you pressed and "focused" the next object that was tappable and hopefully matched your intent. This is handled for you in Unity if everything is UI-space, but I have a mixture of world (3d) and UI (2d). This is the first game I did a full localization pass on, so finding translators, setting up the game for new languages, and making sure fonts had all the necessary characters without increasing the game size by 2-3x was a bit of a challenge. I am very happy with my solutions though and plan to use them on future games.

Engine - Unity. I have the most experience with it. I am tempted by Godot and to a degree Bevy (Rust is nice!), but I haven't seen enough games ship multi-platform on these "newer" engines. Unreal is nice, but beyond my needs right now.

I have a good friend who is a talented artist. We tend to look for styles that let us produce game content or marry existing content to the aesthetic with minimal extra work. Specifically, picking a good style and using shaders to achieve it can mean the ability to drop in Asset Store assets or models from other marketplaces and get them looking bespoke without much trouble. For Pine Tar, this meant my friend making a halftone shader that we could apply to all our materials.

Another option which I'm using on my current project is to go minimalistic and lean into typography and procedural visuals, so I don't need portraits or specific custom textures. This can work well for games like Wordle, where the game is meant to be front and center and the audience isn't looking for some heavy-weight theme.

I'll go with the trite advice of don't quit your day job. Making games is very accessible right now. Making money off games is not as accessible! I just released my biggest game Pine Tar Poker (https://www.pinetarpoker.com/) and I built it all during nights and weekends when I had another job. Making the game was fun for the most part, but it would have been a lot less fun if I was stressed on how long it took and how much it was going to make back.

My basic understanding of marketing games today is that it's a full time job to stand out in such a saturated market. If you're not posting clips on TikTok, vlogging behind the scenes on YouTube, or putting up your Steam page right now to collect Wish Lists, you're already behind the eight ball. Again, this stress goes away if you're just dabbling in it as a hobby.

Just like anything in life, you start by doing. You can maximize your experience by having the right expectations and goals going in.

As others have mentioned, game jams are a great way to dive in, get experience, and meet some people.

Edited to add: my original answer was colored through the lens of "going indie". If you're looking for a job in the industry, I think that's a much "easier" path. Start building a portfolio of completed projects (not just prototypes!). If you have projects that show your creativity, skill, and grit, that's a lot easier for hiring managers to understand than yet another PDF resume in their inbox.

I feel the same way. I worked at Microsoft on HoloLens and most the folks I knew there felt like Mixed Reality was modern marketing spin on AR. It makes sense from a marketing perspective since HoloLens was a very different beast than something like Google Glass, but I find the distinction needlessly confusing nowadays. To me, AR is just augmenting reality on a spectrum from 2D fixed overlay to depth-aware and beyond. I find naming arbitrary detents on the spectrum unproductive. The general public has enough confusion around VR vs AR, especially when pass-through enters the picture. To throw MR in the mix furthers the confusion.

I meant when you used a 360 game on 360 hardware. But you're right, back compat teams did a number of per title fixes.

When I worked at Xbox I was amazed to see the 360 game boot code had multiple title ID checks in it. For some titles it would report things differently, for others it would sleep a bit. When new features like cloud saves were introduced, those code paths for checking storage devices had per title ID branches too. It seems like whether you design your APIs perfectly or poorly, someone will use them in a way just outside of your intention.

Haha, it is possible! It's basically there as a coin sink. I don't think it would pass muster to be in a real casino because the payout table is truly random!

Try to complete the active tarot card :) There's quite a few more stones.

Thank you! I'll update the website with more copy that isn't "in-universe", as well as a non-trailer video of gameplay. Appreciate your support.

Thanks. Another skill I'm working on discovering is fresh eyes. It's tough to see something you've been so close to for the better part of year through the eyes of someone with no context! Add to that all the things that inundate us daily, you really have to try hard to get a foothold in the vanishing attention of everyone. Appreciate the trailer references!

Good suggestions! I'll record a long play video. I've never done a WebGL build with Unity, but I'll try that too. I'll update this post if I get something going...

Good question. I wasn't sure the applicability, but as a long time reader of HN who has found hidden gems, I figured it couldn't hurt to share something I was proud of.

Looking for it! I'll edit this post when I find it...

Edit: Found it - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q4JwDFIVvPki6zx18RerbMmboVz... The rules in the game are slightly different and there are more hand types. But if you like this core mechanic or simply don't want to score by hand, check out the game.

I wish I knew! I've been testing out different strategies. I have a free game with an IAP (http://apple.co/downwordly) and it does okay from an install perspective, but not great for purchases. I was lucky to get it on Apple's radar to drive most the traffic.

This is my first time just doing a paid game. Definitely learning as I go. My plan for the first week is to send out download codes to people who might have an audience to put it in front of. I'll let you know how it goes!

Thanks for the feedback! HN really tests your marketing skills, stripping away gifs and videos. My skills in that department are already lacking so it's good practice.

I should add that to the docs. I have seen changes in Gists take a few minutes to propagate fully. The widget fetching outside the app is a little more sensitive since iOS budgets widget updates. Glad you got it figured out!

Hmm... that shouldn't happen! If you want to jump over to the discord, I can help debug - https://discord.gg/GnmdtvKW7M No sweat if not.

Thanks! I agree about the catalog. I expanded on the thought here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33780128 tl;dr - couldn't make economics work but we felt the tech is still useful for DIYers.

Thanks for sharing this! I hadn't heard of it before.

We've only made the iOS widget viewer since that's what we both have, but from what I know about Android widgets, it seems possible to build one there too. The widget.json schema is intended to be platform-agnostic.

You're totally right. We originally built a backend service with a catalog to curate widget.json as part of a paid service. We couldn't work out the economics (and it felt a little weird charging when we didn't make the content itself), so we released it as a more open, DIY-friendly thing. On https://wd.gt, we've got a few examples of static widgets, but they wouldn't be very useful to subscribe to. I'd like to build a few that are worthwhile (e.g. NASA image of the day).

Great idea on the editor too. We were pursuing a web-based widget.json editor that had a live preview and didn't require you to necessarily type in json, instead it would have a little wizard or even drag and drop elements to lay them out.

Great call! We did talk about this a little bit, but it didn't make the v1 schema. Definitely seems like a smart idea to support given that some widget.jsons might require a fair bit of work to assemble (and you don't want to build caching on the server) or maybe some are just more static than others.

I happened to read this comment this morning which is exactly the type of use case we had in mind when developing widget.json: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33776994

I just finished V1 of https://wd.gt/ and was thinking of doing a ShowHN today. Basically it's RSS for widgets. You define some json and host it and then you have a dynamic, web-powered widget with no additional app required besides a generic viewer. Rendering these images would be a perfect fit for widget.json.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6444323235

Edit: Posted a ShowHN here with more details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33777705

I was hoping this was going to be written by Leslie Claret.

https://www.lgclaret.com/

"Hey, let me walk you through our Donnelly nut spacing and crack system rim-riding grip configuration. Using a field of half-C sprats, and brass-fitted nickel slits, our bracketed caps and splay-flexed brace columns vent dampers to dampening hatch depths of one-half meter from the damper crown to the spurve plinths. How? Well, we bolster twelve husked nuts to each girdle-jerry. While flex tandems press a task apparatus of ten vertically composited patch-hamplers. Then, pin flam-fastened pan traps at both maiden-apexes of the jim-joist."

In terms of number of times executed, the most impactful code I've written was a JavaScript GUID generator used on the Xbox One for launch and for a few years after. It was simple code that a colleague showed me, but had to be written in native code and then exposed over WinRT. Anyway, I built the DLL on my personal machine and forgot to set it up on a build machine. Microsoft doesn't like shipping private binaries for a number of reasons and, well, a nice build engineer found me about a month after launch and let me know. This DLL was used by just about every JavaScript app on Xbox One at launch.

People pursuing whatever tickles them is what gives our culture its vibrancy. Especially for things that don't hurt anyone, we should encourage such expeditions.

I really appreciate the technical write up of how trucks work. As others have pointed out, skateboarding is all about feel, and not efficiency. My favorite example of this is Daewon Song, one of the most skilled and creative skaters of all time. Somehow he rides a board with no top bushing on his front truck! [1] Even most skilled skaters would have a hard time rolling down the sidewalk on this, let alone tricking it in any way.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt--3DX-md0

I've been learning Japanese for ~3 years and tried a variety of methods. Of course there are better and worse ways to learn, but to me the most important factor is keeping my motivation up.

Without having read this book, congratulations on putting it out. Making anything is hard. It's nice that you're trying something new (at least to me) with the embedded kanji in English.

As part of my learning process, I decided to make a mobile app for learning kanji. It was quite a technical challenge for me to figure out how to let users draw kanji based on SVG in Unity -- I had to write my own SVG parser + renderer. Sourcing quality data for ~2000 kanji was also tough. If you want to check it out, it's free on both iOS [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kanji-book/id1532844605] and Android [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bmalicoat....]

I put a recent game out on both Android and iOS (https://www.downwordly.com/). Admittedly it isn't apples to apples because the game modes and pricing models differ^. That said, iOS has made 10x more for me. Most of that is probably attributed to being Game of the Day and featuring in the word games section on iOS.

^iOS uses GameCenter for turn based multiplayer so a $2.99 IAP unlocks unlimited concurrent multiplayer games and some other modes, whereas Android is not free to play and instead is just $.99 to buy, but with no multiplayer. Probably way too many variables to provide any meaningful conclusions on the Play Store!