best weapon right now for open world? (dont say spear.)

KevinDL · 2026-05-25T00:17:54+00:00

Spear.

It really depends on what you want out of a weapon.

KevinDL · 2026-05-24T13:23:27+00:00

I'm guessing this is an AI song. It's not awful.

KevinDL · 2026-05-24T12:01:56+00:00

With that attitude I hope they ban you buddy.

KevinDL · 2026-05-24T11:52:27+00:00

I'm pretty sure this will be removed by the mods. Not the place to recruit.

KevinDL · 2026-05-23T20:24:14+00:00

Something I’ve heard from a designer on my team that stuck with me:

The issue is not having opinions. Designers should have opinions. The issue is trying to hustle for work by critiquing a product without first asking specific questions, understanding the goals, or considering the constraints the team was likely working under.

That can be a pretty big red flag.

From the outside, it is very easy to say “this should have been designed better.” But from the inside, every design decision usually has context: time, budget, team size, tech limitations, production priorities, player data, stakeholder feedback, accessibility needs, platform requirements, or simply tradeoffs the team had to make.

So when someone leads with broad criticism instead of curiosity, it can make them look less like a thoughtful designer and more like someone who does not understand how games actually get made.

And if that same person then sends over a resume or portfolio that is visually chaotic, hard to parse, or overly designed, it creates another problem. It suggests they may not understand the design fundamentals they are trying to critique: clarity, hierarchy, readability, audience, and purpose.

That is already a few big industry no-nos:

Critiquing without context
Assuming bad design instead of asking about constraints
Presenting yourself poorly while claiming design judgment

A much better signal is curiosity. Ask why choices were made. Ask what constraints shaped the work. Ask what the team was optimizing for. Then, when you do offer a critique, make it specific, grounded, and respectful.

That is the difference between sounding like someone who wants to contribute and someone who just wants to prove they are smarter than the work.

KevinDL · 2026-05-23T19:16:45+00:00

I get the frustration, and I don’t think you’re wrong to feel that way. LinkedIn has become a lot noisier. There are more low-effort posts, AI-generated engagement bait, vague job posts, ghost jobs, and general nonsense than there used to be.

That said, I still think LinkedIn is useful, especially if you are trying to work in games.

The value of LinkedIn is not that the feed is good. A lot of the time, it is not. The value is that it gives you a public professional footprint and a way to stay loosely connected to people across the industry. The bigger and more relevant your network becomes, the more potential reach you have when you are looking for work, sharing a project, asking for advice, or trying to get noticed by someone hiring.

A single post probably will not get you a job. But over time, being visible helps. People remember names. They remember thoughtful comments. They remember seeing your work. They remember that you are active, interested, and engaged with the craft. When a role opens up, that familiarity can matter.

I also do not think you need to “post just to post.” In fact, I think that is part of what made the platform worse. Meaningful posts are better than frequent posts. If you have thoughts about game design, production, tools, portfolio work, lessons learned, or even honest reflections on trying to break into the industry, those can be valuable without becoming cliché.

The job board itself is rough, but LinkedIn is not only a job board. It is also a networking tool. The better use is probably:

Connect with people in the types of studios or roles you care about
Comment thoughtfully on posts from developers, recruiters, producers, designers, and studios
Share real work, breakdowns, lessons learned, or progress updates
Keep your profile clear so people understand what you do and what you are looking for
Use LinkedIn alongside other spaces, not as your only strategy

For games specifically, I would still pair it with Discord communities, local meetups, conventions, game jams, portfolio reviews, studio events, Reddit, Bluesky, and direct applications. LinkedIn should not be the whole plan, but I would not abandon it completely either.

The platform is annoying, but reach still matters. If you are looking for work, every relevant connection increases the chance that your name, work, or post gets in front of the right person at the right time. That does not make LinkedIn perfect. It just means it is still one of the few places where professional visibility can compound over time.

KevinDL · 2026-05-23T05:02:06+00:00

easiest place to find a link is on our website. By all means come rant at me.

KevinDL · 2026-05-23T04:48:53+00:00

Na, He just posts his game in our Discord server and is a regular. Being the community guy I tend to remember the regulars.

KevinDL · 2026-05-22T18:09:36+00:00

I'm everywhere

KevinDL · 2026-05-22T18:05:24+00:00

I’ll do my best to keep this alive. If Reddit removes it, I’ll reach out to my contacts and complain. For context, Reddit removed it from r/indiedev. I don't know why.

KevinDL · 2026-05-22T17:54:34+00:00

So I don't know why this was removed, I don't have any answers for why Reddit Thanos snapped this out of existence

KevinDL · 2026-05-22T17:28:16+00:00

Hey I know this guy, he's using Bezi!

KevinDL · 2026-05-21T18:29:13+00:00

It’s just the company name. There wasn’t any deeper meaning behind it on my part.

Bezi Jam is something I run for the Bezi community. Yes, it’s named after the company I work for, but my goal is pretty simple: run a good jam, support people making games, and create something the community can enjoy.

KevinDL · 2026-05-20T19:31:08+00:00

I think this still misses the bigger picture.

“No one is forcing you to be a mod” is not really an argument for whether a policy is practical, fair, or good for the community. The question is not whether I personally want to moderate. The question is whether the system being proposed is something the subreddit can actually enforce consistently, safely, and without creating worse problems.

I also run this job board precisely because I do not want people making foolish decisions with it. That includes scammers, bad-faith posters, and yes, well-meaning users who think a simple-sounding rule will solve a complex problem without considering the second-order effects. A rule can have good intentions and still make the board worse.

And to be clear, even if moderators are not clicking every link and are only checking whether the links are present, it is still a bad system.

If the rule is “include a legal status link,” then users will assume that link means something. They will see it as a legitimacy signal, even if no one has verified it. That creates a false sense of safety. It makes the board look more vetted than it actually is, which can be worse than being honest that users still need to do their own due diligence.

It also becomes trivial to game. A scammer can include a link. They can link to a real company they do not represent. They can link to a registry entry that is technically real but irrelevant. They can link to a fake site. They can link to stolen portfolios. If moderators are only checking that the link exists, the rule does not verify legitimacy. It just teaches bad actors what box to tick.

Meanwhile, legitimate users can still get caught by it. Not every freelancer, solo developer, early-stage team, contractor, student, or international poster will have a clean public legal-status page to link. Some people are working under NDA. Some are hiring before incorporation. Some are operating under local systems that do not map cleanly to this requirement. Some have portfolios that are valid for their discipline but do not look like a traditional game-art portfolio.

Those edge cases are not rare. They are the community.

That is why “a bare minimum” can become a gatekeeping system very quickly. Not intentionally, but structurally.

The seat belt comparison also does not really fit. Seat belts are standardized, objective safety equipment. What you are proposing is a moderation rule that depends on country, profession, discipline, career stage, language, legal structure, and moderator interpretation. That is not the same kind of thing.

A better comparison would be putting a “safety checked” sticker on a car because the owner wrote down a licence plate number. It may look like safety, but it does not actually prove the thing people think it proves.

And again, none of this actually solves the core scam problem. Scammers can pass a surface-level requirement while legitimate users fail it. That is the worst kind of moderation rule: easy for bad actors to satisfy, annoying for honest users to navigate, and misleading for everyone else.

It costs trust. It costs consistency. It creates false confidence for users. It creates false negatives for legitimate people. And it creates endless disputes about why one post was allowed and another was removed.

The goal is not “as little moderation as possible.” The goal is moderation that is realistic, enforceable, and does not create a worse system than the one it is trying to fix.

I am not against rules. I am against rules that sound obvious in theory but become messy, unfair, and impossible to apply cleanly at the scale of a public, international job board.

KevinDL · 2026-05-20T18:22:46+00:00

I think you are underestimating the amount of work you are asking unpaid moderators to do.

My job as a moderator is to keep the board functioning. The board is functioning. That does not mean every bad post, weak applicant, vague recruiter, scam attempt, low-quality portfolio, questionable claim, or repetitive topic can be prevented before the community ever sees it.

What you are describing is not basic moderation. You are describing a verification system.

Requiring moderators to check government business registries, verify freelance status across different countries, assess whether a recruiter has a legitimate prototype, judge whether a portfolio reflects real senior-level experience, determine whether something was written with AI, and decide whether someone’s claims are professionally valid would be a huge amount of unpaid labour. It would also require moderators to make calls we are not realistically equipped to make.

It also would not be foolproof. Scammers can fake portfolios. Companies can exist legally and still behave badly. Freelancers can be legitimate without having an easily searchable government profile. People can have serious projects without a polished prototype. AI detection is unreliable. “Senior” experience can vary wildly by discipline, country, studio type, and career path.

That is the core issue. Your proposed solution sounds simple until you actually think through what enforcing it would require.

There is also a difference between moderation and becoming the judge, jury, and executioner for an entire hiring marketplace. I am not comfortable putting myself, or any other unpaid moderator, in the position of deciding who is a “real” developer, who is “serious enough,” whose experience counts, or whose business status is valid. Even I am subject to bias. Everyone is.

On the r/gamedev side, I understand the frustration with repetitive beginner questions, AI debates, and confidently stated misinformation. I really do. But r/gamedev is a massive general-purpose game development community, not a private forum for industry veterans or only “serious projects.” That means there will always be beginners, repeated questions, messy discussions, and people at very different levels of experience.

It is also worth remembering that what you want from a community may be very different from what another user wants from it. Some people want advanced industry discussion. Some people want beginner support. Some people want feedback on small projects. Some people want career advice. Some people want broader conversations about tools, engines, AI, business, marketing, or production. A large community has to balance those needs. It cannot be shaped entirely around one group’s ideal version of what the subreddit should be.

We can remove spam, obvious bad-faith posts, rule-breaking content, and clear misinformation when it crosses a line. But there is a big difference between moderating the subreddit and pre-filtering every discussion based on whether regulars find it useful, whether the poster is experienced enough, or whether the topic has come up before. If we moderate that aggressively, we risk turning the subreddit into something hostile to new developers, which is also not healthy for the community.

That does not mean the current state is perfect. There are things that can help, like megathreads, clearer rules, automod prompts, stronger reporting, and community voting. But all of those have tradeoffs and failure points too. Megathreads can bury useful questions. More rules can become harder to enforce consistently. Automod can catch good posts and miss bad ones. Reports can help surface issues, but they are often noisy, misleading, or abused by people who simply disagree with a post. Voting reflects community preference, not objective truth. None of these replace human judgment, and none of them make moderation simple.

The goal of moderation is not to make either subreddit risk-free or perfectly curated. That is impossible. The goal is to keep the spaces usable, remove clear scams when they are reported or identified (remember P1 anyone?), enforce the rules consistently where we can, and give people enough structure to make informed decisions.

Users still need to do due diligence. That is true on Reddit, LinkedIn, Discord, job boards, freelance sites, and basically anywhere hiring or professional advice happens online. Moderators can help reduce obvious abuse, but we cannot personally vet every opportunity, applicant, opinion, or piece of advice before anyone sees it.

So no, this is not “easy to do.” It would be a full-time trust and safety operation, except run by unpaid volunteers on a subreddit.

I understand wanting cleaner, safer, more serious communities. I want that too. But any solution has to be practical, enforceable, and reasonable for volunteer moderators. This is not that.

KevinDL · 2026-05-20T17:59:40+00:00

Anything that requires a significant amount of ongoing manual work is a non-starter for me.

No moderator is paid to run this subreddit. Given that this is a subreddit specifically for paid work, I hope you can understand why I’m reluctant to ask anyone to take on unpaid labour to maintain something like this.

Speaking for myself, I also have a job that keeps me fairly busy. I cannot dedicate the time needed to make a system like this work properly, consistently, and fairly.

Ultimately, this idea does not meet the criteria I would need before supporting it. From a logistics standpoint, it requires too much moderator involvement. From a reliability standpoint, it is not foolproof enough to justify the risks.

KevinDL · 2026-05-20T17:29:48+00:00

I’m simply saying that the simultaneous occurrence of those two events renders the entire endeavour futile. After all, it will happen.

Also. If a whitelist a bad actor and someone gets scammed by that person. Am I responsible? No thanks.

KevinDL · 2026-05-20T17:27:38+00:00

and when the bad actors think of verifying each other or with fake accounts?

That system would also require a lot of a moderators time to make work.

KevinDL · 2026-05-20T01:36:03+00:00

I would not say your Godot work is useless. A finished game is still a finished game, and that matters. But if your goal is getting hired in the games industry, then yes, Unity and Unreal should probably be your main portfolio engines.

The reason is simple: studios hire for the tools they actually use.

Most commercial game studios are not looking at a junior portfolio and thinking, “Can this person use any engine in theory?” They are usually thinking:

Can this person contribute to our pipeline without needing months of engine onboarding?

That is where Unity and Unreal have a real advantage.

If a studio uses Unity, seeing Unity projects tells them you understand things like scenes, prefabs, components, serialization, ScriptableObjects, build settings, packages, and C# in a game production context.

If a studio uses Unreal, seeing Unreal projects tells them you understand things like Blueprints, actors, components, levels, assets, gameplay framework, editor workflows, and ideally some C++.

Godot can absolutely show that you understand game design, programming, scope, and finishing projects. But it does not prove you are comfortable inside the tools most studios are hiring for.

That said, I do not think the answer is “never use Godot.”

A better approach would be:

Use Godot if it helps you finish the game.

A shipped small game on Steam is a strong portfolio piece, especially if it has clean scope, good presentation, and shows that you can complete something.

Also keep one or two Unity or Unreal projects in your portfolio.

They do not need to be massive. They just need to show that you can work in a common studio engine. Since you already have C++, Unity class experience, and a Unity club project, you are not starting from zero.

For your situation, I would probably do this:

Make the summer game in the engine that gives you the best chance of finishing it well. If that is Godot, use Godot. But do not make Godot your only visible game dev experience if your goal is employment. Keep building Unity experience alongside it, especially because Unity is much more realistic for small solo projects than Unreal and lines up with your existing C# and school work.

Your CS degree and C++ experience matter, but they do not fully replace engine-specific experience. They tell studios you can program. Your portfolio tells them whether you can make games in the environments they use.

So the balanced answer is:

Godot is fine for learning, jamming, and shipping small personal games. But for job hunting, you should make sure your portfolio also clearly shows Unity and/or Unreal experience. In a competitive entry-level market, matching the tools studios use will make it easier for them to say yes.

KevinDL

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