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shinymark

330 karma · joined March 5, 2014

CEO of Shiny Shoe, a game company based out of San Francisco. Our most well known game is Monster Train, PC Gamers’ best card game of 2020.
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shinymark··on Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)
6-7 had yet to be discovered.
shinymark··on 2025 marked a record-breaking year for Apple services
Agreed completely. I started using NextDNS partially to get ads out of News+.
shinymark··on Microsoft please get your tab to autocomplete shit together
Change to real Visual Studio for C#. Visual Studio Code is complete garbage in comparison.
shinymark··on Saving Japan's exceptionally rare 'snow monsters'
I visit Yamagata every year. I love how in Japan each region has their own specialties, it makes it fun to travel within the country. It would be sad if the snow monsters disappear.

I usually visit in the summer. The mountains are incredibly verdant. I love riding my bike there. Just watch out for the heat at that time - bring plenty of Pocari Sweat!

shinymark··on The elegance of movement in Silksong
This article from 2005 has the toy idea. It has stuck with me.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/how-to-prototyp...

shinymark··on Sega mistakenly reveals sales numbers of popular games
You’re right but it was called Yakuza in the west for many years. I don’t know if they made the right decision or not renaming it but it is interesting to consider if it made an impact in one way or another on sales.
shinymark··on Northlight technology in Alan Wake 2
I agree with you. I want to play Alan Wake 2 on PC and since it is only sold on the Epic Store I will buy it there.

If it was on Steam I would have likely bought it on Steam. But it’s not. So in my case at least, this exclusive is effectively driving me to buy on the Epic Store.

I find it sort of funny that many (not all) complaints about the Epic Store are the same things gamers complained about when Steam was released 20 years ago.

shinymark··on I did Advent of Code on a Playstation
Considering how similar Bloodborne is to other From Software games I assumed it was developed 100% at From with Sony as the publisher. But I have no idea what the reality is. Did Japan Studio do development work on the game too? If so, I’d be curious to know how they split up the development work between teams.
shinymark··on From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story
I’m not the prior poster but it’s a median benchmark based on real-world surveys of game developers who are willing to share their data.

(Source: I’ve participated in one such survey.)

shinymark··on Ask HN: Who's sick of remote work?
12 years ago I worked remotely for the first time from a small apartment. For the first 6 months or so I loved it. The flexibility primarily.

But I came to hate the isolation. I crave human interaction in all aspects of life, including work. I never want to work full time remote again.

shinymark··on Steam bans all blockchain and NFT games on its platform
I don’t understand the distinction. You can sell a game on your own website today without using any of these technologies if you want to avoid walled gardens.
shinymark··on The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
I agree - when trying to watch something next to a sleeping partner even 1 step above muted is too loud. Annoying. I often watch Netflix muted and read subtitles because of this. I guess I need headphones.

But I do really think a volume one half of the current lowest would be useful for me.

shinymark··on Effects of cat ownership on the gut microbiota of owners
Not the original poster but I’m going to seriously consider this. I’m at my wits end with a male cat who habitually meows at 2 am and 5 am point blank in front of my face.
shinymark··on Tracking the San Francisco Tech Exodus
Anyone sign an office lease recently? Any negotiation tips?

I’m looking for new space in SF, moving from a current lease near Union Square to something bigger.

shinymark··on I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers
If you care about performance you should not be using a laptop as your primary workstation. Period.
shinymark··on Show HN: Monster Train, a deckbuilding card game in the global top on Steam
Hi all - I'm Mark Cooke, the CEO of Shiny Shoe, the creators of Monster Train. We released on May 21 and have been in the global top seller list on Steam since. The game currently has a user rating of "overwhelmingly positive", the highest possible rating on Steam.

I've been a reader of HN for years and I've seen some members of this community mention it in Tweets that they are addicted to the game so I figured I'd post it here and see if there is any interest/questions.

AMA!

shinymark··on Setting Up a Jenkins Home Lab
Regarding suggestions for alternatives to Jenkins I’m curious if anyone has any for game dev use cases.

We use Jenkins now and build for PCs, consoles, and mobile. Almost all of our builds must be on Windows. Some builds require GPUs. Builds require things like specific versions of Unity, Unreal, or a console SDK. Many builds result in build artifacts in the multiple gigabytes which we then want to efficiently copy to e.g. a QA person’s console dev kit on our local network.

For all these reasons we’ve setup our own Jenkins deployment onsite at our office on bare metal. But I’m curious if any of the newer services or technologies might be useful for us.

shinymark··on Free Dropbox Accounts Now Only Sync to Three Devices
Yes. And agreed.

I’m sure whoever came up with the idea got a nice raise.

shinymark··on Ask HN: Those who moved careers from the West to China, what's your experience?
One anecdote - I moved to Japan 12 years ago when I was 26 to work as an engineer in a game company. I stayed for two years. Like anywhere there were pros and cons but overall it was a fantastic life experience that I’m very glad I did.
shinymark··on Apple restores Google’s internal iOS apps after certificate misuse punishment
Got it, that was the main missing link that I was looking for. Devices are frequently phoning home to get an updated certificate revocation list.
shinymark··on Apple restores Google’s internal iOS apps after certificate misuse punishment
Anyone know how the revocation and subsequent reversal works at a nuts and bolts level? I’m curious.
shinymark··on Improbable and Epic Games establish $25M fund for ‘more open engines’
No, this is new drama as of this evening. Related, for sure, but this is escalating quickly!
shinymark··on Build your own IoT/MQTT node for less than $2
That was a very useful article. Thank you for the link.
shinymark··on Reflections on DOOM's Development
Wow, that sounds great! I used to play on DWANGO a lot as an early teen (13 or 14, back in 1994-95). Somehow I convinced the DWANGO staff to make me a moderator on the San Francisco servers... it came with responsibility to keep chat relatively civil but it also meant free Doom 2 on their service which was incredible at the time.

I ended up talking to Romero directly back then because he would make random (?) visits to various DWANGO servers. I remember him specifically being generous with his time chatting with me and others. So if you ever see this Romero, thank you!

shinymark··on Ask HN: How do you make good use of old iPhones?
Every time I upgrade I sell my old phone on eBay. I keep my hardware in good shape and I’m often surprised at the resale value after 2-3 years. Feels great to recover some of the cost of the upgrade!
shinymark··on Arduino command line interface
I’m using this as well. Works great! Compiles and deploys much faster than the IDE I’ve found.
shinymark··on Things they don’t teach you running a business by yourself
I found the same to be broadly true for me. One small tip to break the habit - use your hosts file to straight up block distracting websites on your work PC. You can still read them elsewhere when not working. This really helped me break the subconscious habit of checking distracting news sources.

And yes, I blocked HN on my work PC.

shinymark··on Form a California LLC in 10 minutes for $70
Correct. This fact seems misunderstood by many people but the rules are very clearly written.
shinymark··on Facebook acquires anonymous teen compliment app tbh, will let it run
In my era it was all about war dialing and AOHell.
shinymark··on Recompiler: Porting Xbox360 Executables to Windows
I think you might be correct for Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) but that’s not correct for XBLA. Source: personally worked on native C++ XBLA games.
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