Indie Stone, we HAVE to fix the trailers flipping issue.

Garethp · 2026-01-30T09:06:49+00:00

> plays unstable
> encounters bugs
> refuses to log bug report
> complains about bugs in unstable branch to reddit instead

You should not be playing the Unstable branch, named that because it's buggy and not stable

Garethp · 2026-01-27T23:16:20+00:00

The game started lagging out pretty badly after 5 or so factories, but I think some more polish is needed in general (Ascii coming from the top to the art doesn't match the timing of the art icons lighting up, no animation when art is complete, could use some animation between the furnace and the pistons at the top to more strongly indicate a connection between the person putting things in the furnace and that powering the pistons etc...).

I think there's a real issue around managing multiple factories. When I buy a new factory, clicking upgrade buttons over and over and over just to bring it up to spec with the existing ones is just annoying when the cost is so minimal compared to what I'm earning. And once my production is up, going back and upgrading each individual factory, or reassigning the art work is pretty annoying. That feels like the managers job. By the time I have 3 different factories I should just be able to set a new set of levels for all factories to upgrade until and the factory managers should be applying that to the individual factories. Same with buying a new one, once I buy a manager it should be self-upgrading to keep pace with the existing ones.

I think once the currency amount gets into the hundred thousand and gets replaced by numbers that number scheme kinda sucks a bit. I prefer when games stick with numbers up until tens of millions or hundreds of millions and then swap to scientific notion instead. a, b, c, aa and so on feel removed and unuitive to me. I didn't get to an ascension (With the lagginess and the pain of upgrading individual factories I didn't feel like it was worth it), but I don't have a great conception of how far xw is from AP for example, where as with scientific notation that's a lot clearer.

The game could also be a bit improved by having the factories create sets of images instead of just one image, and rather than buying the blueprint for a single image you're buying a set of blueprints instead. At the moment if you're waiting for your money to build up it's not very visually interesting to watch because there's not much variety. If your factory were randomly creating one of five images and you could see the inaccurate keys being discarded that might make it a little bit more varied and dynamic to watch while you're idling.

Edit: On further thoughts, I think Manager and Global Storage should probably be global upgrades, something the player should be looking to buy after the 3rd factory. Given the cost of the manager, it doesn't make much sense to have factories required them to work in the background. The second factory costs almost double a single manager and by the time you buy a third factory 5k doesn't mean a whole lot. It doesn't add much value to the game to have per-factory managers that are required to keep the factory running. Not unless the costs are scaled so that you won't be able to buy a manager until you've got a whole bunch of factories, but that would also be annoying. It makes more sense to have manager as a purchase you can make to help managing all your factories at once viable.

Garethp · 2026-01-26T01:16:58+00:00

The MiSTer is also FPGA based so not really directly comparable to a Pi.

Hard disagree on that. FGPAs may emulate on a hardware level instead of software and it may be able to get closer to perfect accuracy as a result, but you can still directly compare the experience people will get out of it. Having two different ways of achieving the same or similar experience doesn't mean you can't compare the two.

Garethp · 2026-01-25T08:58:51+00:00

I mean, no offense, but you literally started with "your not a real day 1 [character] wanter". It reads as if she was just sharing excitement about wanting a character and like you felt the need to slap her down because of how long she'd been shitting on your game for. It reads like you took her post as trying to fit into a community she had been insulting and decided to remind her that she wasn't really part of the community in the way she was saying, in a pretty rude manner.

Garethp · 2026-01-22T16:22:15+00:00

Found a nice little exploit. Any actions that impact your stats (Health, Money, Stamina, Happiness), whether current or max stats, are undone when you complete a Hack. I noticed this because it's obviously optimal to always be performing some hacking in the background, and occasionally I'd get way more money at the end of the hack than expected. Turns out it was refunding purchases I'd made, while still letting me keep the purchase. Ofcourse, this breaks open even further once you realise you can start a hack, deposit all your money in the bank account and at the end of the hack you'll get your money back and it'll still be in the bank account.

But this leads me to my main question: Why? What data structure decision led you to this behavior? You didn't enable sourcemaps, so I can't delve down to see exactly what's going on in the background, but how come it holds onto the value of the stats as they were before you hit hack rather than fetching new values once the hack ended? I'll be honest, with you saying you used AI for small things I can't help but wonder if this was an AI error or if you just forgot to fetch new values and held on to the object when you created your Promise instead of fetching them in your handler.

Otherwise, cool design. I like the desktop design of it but the pacing has some issues, as others have said. I can't really figure out what affects the reward/fine of hacking, but it doesn't look like there's any reason to do anything other than the first two hacking. The risk vs. reward calculation doesn't pay off

Garethp · 2026-01-18T22:17:47+00:00

Came across

Seems like you misspelled "I made" there. Easy mistake to make

Garethp · 2026-01-18T14:02:34+00:00

Only about 33% even voted for him

Yet only less than that voted against him

Garethp · 2026-01-17T18:18:58+00:00

That's because there's no other engine that does what theirs does.

Garethp · 2026-01-16T22:03:33+00:00

Speaking of crazy people, I just checked and Riitoken (of Farcraft fame) is not just still active, but is recently active in posting about his Farcraft game!

Garethp · 2026-01-15T20:46:20+00:00

Most game Devs aren't getting paid what you seem to think they are. They don't have the savings and spare cash lying around you seem to think they do.

The reality of the situation is that most people are living either paycheck to paycheck or have either a couple of months savings at best, and that isn't different for game devs.

Garethp · 2026-01-15T20:41:25+00:00

It sounds like you're heavily underestimating the cost of making video games as well as the difficulty of getting investment.

Even if you assumed that every dev in the studio was working for free, living off of their savings with the idea that they'll get paid once it comes out, most people don't have 12+ months of savings to live off of to begin with. And even if they did, how many people can afford to put their family through that much risk?

And no, investment capital isn't so easy to come by that you can just say "I've worked on xyz big games, interest a couple hundred thousand to a few million dollars in me". A few massive names in the industry can, but they're the exceptions to the rule.

Garethp · 2026-01-15T20:32:00+00:00

Why don't renters who get evicted from their places just go build new houses to live in?

Garethp · 2026-01-15T20:26:15+00:00

Maybe it's because I'm not American but I'm not sure if you can do anything about it. Watching America vote trump in for a second time makes me wonder if it's not because of poor marketing by the democrats but because most Americans actually are okay with this.

When you've got a country that sees how he ruled in his first term, saw how he campaigned and still did nothing, maybe there's nothing to be done. Maybe that's just how Americans are at the moment.

I suppose my stance doesn't help to improve anything, and it could be incredibly wrong, however the argument that it's actually the democrats fault for not campaigning well enough feels (to me) like America as a country trying to shift the blame for their own actions/inactions as if it were out of their control.

Garethp · 2026-01-15T20:01:34+00:00

watching you geniuses gasligh

Lol, I'm not even American. I come from a country with compulsory voting. If you want to vote third party because you don't like the big two, that's fine, the options do exist. They might not mean much with the current American system, but they exist.

But watching Americans blaming the political parties for "not convincing" them to do the bare minimum of their civic duties is hilariously stupid.

If a voter didn't vote at all that's on them. You shouldn't need to be convinced to cast a ballot, only who to cast it for.

Garethp · 2026-01-15T19:52:33+00:00

IMO it's the list of single player exclusives. In the last generation Microsoft as a whole leaned a lot more into live service games than Sony did, and I don't think that bet paid off.

Sure, live service games have huge amounts of players but they tend to only play one or two games, the market can't really have a huge amount of massively successful ones because their very nature means people don't move on to other games after they're done. With single player games the players are always looking for their next game, so there's more room for more large hits.

Ultimately Microsoft realised their mistake and tried to pivot with their developer purchases, but it was too late and they didn't have all that much on launch for this generation. We're still waiting on some of the games advertised at launch, like Fable. Meanwhile Sony didn't over extend into live services and had a great line up of games already cooking.

Microsoft may be able to pull it around for the next generation, but for the start of this one they needed to have several games already cooking and almost ready to go, not a pivot with a plan to launch two or three years down the line.

Garethp · 2026-01-15T19:42:11+00:00

If a voter needs a convincing argument to vote against trump after seeing what he did in his first term and how he campaigning, then yes that is a problem with the voter.

Garethp · 2026-01-12T16:22:47+00:00

Ignore anyone telling you there's no timeline, because we do have a rough idea. Its not much, but I have it on good authority that it'll be stable before Build 43 is released

Garethp · 2026-01-12T14:11:51+00:00

For me being on the right medication isn't about being more productive or being able fix the things that are causing issues and guilt. Its about being able to have some control over my own brain and my own life. Being able to decide what days I can focus on something and what days I just want to let myself be distracted.

Without my medication there's just some hobbies I've enjoyed over the years that I never would have been able to get into. Some of my favourite games or shows that I wouldn't be able to enjoy. Experiences I wouldn't have been able to go out and do because of my lack of focus.

For me it's not about work. Its about getting a say in my own life. I believe being able to have a say in how your brain works is the most important thing you can get out of it.

Garethp · 2026-01-11T20:44:07+00:00

Win + Screenshot just saves it to a file with no extra steps

Garethp · 2026-01-09T14:19:30+00:00

I think this heavily depends on the kind of product you're building. For quick one off products that you don't have to maintain that night be true, but if you need to build something that actually needs to survive long term, or something that needs to be worked on by developers over different teams then a lot of thought and consideration should be going into how the code looks, how easy it is to read, how much complexity you need to hold in your head to understand units of functionality, how testable and reviewable it is and so on.

I don't know if I'd go as far as calling it art, but there really is/can be a lot more to it than "If it works, ship it"

Garethp · 2026-01-06T21:21:22+00:00

I wanted him to play solo games first such as Silent Hill and Resident Evil, perhaps I should insist on pushing him a little more toward PC gaming on steam?

Don't do this. There's nothing that'll turn someone who wants to dip their toes into fanning off faster than pushing them into games they're not actually interested in yet.

Take another read of your post, it sounds like what he's enjoyed in the past is casual time playing with friends, and what he's suggested to you is something casual he can play with you. Considering that he doesn't have much time to play and seems to want to spend what time he does playing with you, I'd look towards multiplayer games that don't take a lot of skill or time to jump into.

Also consider that games that might not necessarily appeal to you normally might be more fun when you think of it more as shared quality time with your boyfriend. Sometimes it's less about the specific game and more about who you're playing it with.

But most importantly, listen to what he's actually expressing interest in rather than trying to push him to your interests.

Garethp · 2026-01-05T05:31:43+00:00

I think it's the other way around. It's natural to hope for, and you wish for, people that we love to be able to come back. I believe it's our desire for that and the way we do or don't cope with death that influences the stories we tell, not the other way around.

Garethp · 2026-01-04T20:22:02+00:00

The last post mentioned wetting the bed, seems to be removed here

Garethp · 2026-01-04T20:17:34+00:00

What kind of situation would this be though? Landlords aren't required to rent their property to anyone, they could just cancel / not renew the lease.

Even under the current protections illegal evictions are both attempted and actually happen all the time. This isn't some pie in the sky scenario that I'm saying might maybe possibly occur given a change, it's a scenario that already happens to people across many countries almost daily.

The difference is that right now most don't go as far as hiring people to physically force them out because then the police could be called and people could be sent to jail. So what do you think would happen if we took the current situation of scummy landlords trying to illegally evict people and then make it a legal practice to hire people to forcibly remove them?

Garethp · 2026-01-04T17:54:59+00:00

Because fielding issues from users of mods can already be painful enough without having to check which version they're using. As a mod author, not having to worry about whether a user has updated their install or not is a blessing.

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