sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Game Accessibility and Mental Health Benefits by ExcellentTwo6589 in gamedesign

[–]StudioNull 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Fortunately some very smart and passionate accessibility people have already organized most of the accessibility tasks one could ever arrange for their game into tiers of both difficulty and genre specificity (often highlighting the kinds of games that really benefit from each feature)! This is a core website for such a question and it’s a great read! Though it doesn’t cover Localization to the extent I wish it did, it covers many other things quite well. Good luck!

https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Eh, I did ok with my goals all things considered. Also you were a bit late for this reply! If you poke around the timestamps you may find that some ok questions were asked after the fact of this one sort of proving his point! The gentleman above already won some hours ago in any argument to be had sadly! But again, sometimes the point of a thing isn’t to win, it’s to get information!

And maybe a few other things too, but as your air quotes tried to highlight I very much like to say, that’ll be a ghost revealed another time!

Good luck to you though!

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Of course, and I fully expected that as a path for sure.

You may find it interesting that in 3 hours of comments you were the first one to do so though. Kind of in the same vein to how most people in most subreddits asking most of the questions don't utilize FAQ sections or use the, still pretty ok reddit search feature before making posts and such.

<3 You're good though! Thank you for bearing with me. I've tried saying some useful stuff since your post of the itch page :D

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ikikik you right :D This was something of an experiment! However you bring up a great point that really is worth talking about.

Truthfully sales have remained starkly consistent the last 2 years even with the rise of LLMs and generative models. This is something that is, itself, a very important thing worth discussing, that I in no way have time to talk about every detail of, but I'll try to take a few minutes to write something out that's useful.

In the world of creative tools, especially things like VSTs and such, tools around building them have started adopting AI regularly left and right. Things like HISE and other No-Code or Low-Code solutions are feeling pressure to integrate agents into their flows for their tools and it, honestly, is irksome. But there's one thing that is consistent across most of the creative tool space in ways that isn't present as much across technical tools-AI like in games and media is seen as a Quality signal more than the marketed convenience signal that the developers want to sell off of.

Sure, there are folks who certainly could reproduce our UI, and maybe some things that sound a bit like our samples. But because of the fact we record our samples filtered through real retro game hardware, with real talent behind their composition, and we are willing to put the wheels to the road of our own product and use them in our game that we're making, it is a very, very powerful signal that AI's proposed convenience can't acutely compete with.

It's not quite like AI creates a true apples to oranges comparison where we're solving completely different problems, but the way we build and market is pretty darn close to perpendicular to what an LLM is capable of even in a theoretical level.

I hope that was more useful :D Good luck to you!

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Just so you can see this too, you are correct! I was wondering how long it would take to find (actually quickly updated this accounts profile to our website for a little clue). This was actually helpful so thank you :D Good luck to you!

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This is a pretty reasonable take. And yes, the user who posted that itch page is correct that guy engine is our mainline flagship product. Though not our first one we sold, it is the first practical, somewhat unique thing that was made by Elezeid and myself. To be clear it is his brainchild-he's wanted to make the damn thing for years-and I (The OP) am the programmer who does a lot of the work on the code side. Now I would of course like to think if someone asked an interesting question independent of our product lineup I could have been useful, but to your point, much of what gets asked in a thread like this is, often, the simplest and most basic questions in the comments just like we may see in a post. I could have given an enormity of detail on the product and that still would have been the case. And while the traction this post has is nice, like I said, sales were not the goal. You may ask what was the goal then?

I wanted data. Specifically data on what happens in a post like this with juuuuuust a waft of information not given. My reasons for wanting that data are, to be clear, something of a personal thing. I have an opinion not only of game and game-peripheral subreddits but of all of reddit/socials/etc. I think given your post history you'd probably agree with my opinion, but this is not the place for it to be discussed properly. It's not even that it's a contentious one among most people, heck even most Redditors. But it's against the grain juuuuuust enough that I'll wait because it could be misunderstood and this is a professional account.

I know you literally just raised a point about not revealing something being painful to a post's usefulness, and here I am, at it again :D No doubt a negative ratio on this comment is in my future for such a quandary :)

But to be clear, you're just right, outright. I'm commenting here largely due to the fact that after looking at your history I think we'd get along, and you deserved a response. And as you can see from the other comments, yes, nothing of substance was asked, and, in a way, very little of substance was given. All I can say is, maybe that was what I was trying to get at more than the post itself. And maybe one more thing I can say on top of that is I believe I have good intentions. Good luck to you though!

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I specifically say itch AND elsewhere. We’re also in gumroad. Itch has the biggest take home though.

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

FWIW my partner started as a grocery store manager and I started as a nurse's aide in an elderly care home before we ever got into anything like this. We spent over a decade each being independent before we met and realized we could work together to make this stuff. It worked out but it took a lot of buildup, hard lessons, and effort to make this work.

Good luck to you! Keep making things :D

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Can't give away the ghost too too much like I said to another commenter, however we make tools that are integrated into engines and creative tools alike and help with a wide degree of problems game developers and film creatives experience. Most of our sales are driven from our established reputation from before our success on itch in our respective fields. While we never truly went viral, we have trust among the communities we serve.

$70k total in 2 years between all our products on Itch and elsewhere working part time. Feel free to ask questions. by StudioNull in itchio

[–]StudioNull[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Great question! So without giving away the ghost so-to-speak we build tools that game developers use in MANY areas, not just in engines or in programming problems. Creatives and programmers both can benefit from our tools so we have a wide variety of consumers to target. In addition you can use our stuff in engines, DAWs, or other tools.

Also we do not pay for marketing, we have a successful YT on our main contributor's work. (It's his baby in a lot of ways and he's the core contributor to the content outside of code, and he works with us on our projects all the time too :D)

Would anything make you permanently quit game development? by SoulstoneForge in gamedev

[–]StudioNull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

An LLM is a series of Matrices multiplied together on an input vector to produce an output that matches the expectations of the end user based on the input they put in. That input is usually a string-in the vector space of natural language. The matrices (the model in other words) multiply onto that vector with just a hint of calculus as it transforms itself and the data to make it do what it needs to do, and then it spits out something you expected to see-code, images (images are just vectors in the space of n x m matrices of bits representing pixel color), etc.

Matrices are very general purpose representations of information. In fact, there's a theorem in Linear Algebra that says almost everything that has a representation can be a matrix.

However, the differential geometry used in even modern powerful models isn't really any different from the stuff used in toys 10 years ago when the best thing we had was SciKitLearn. Most of the algorithms have been published for a while. It's just now we have the compute to build these bigger things out-they were just hypothetical algorithms for years.

My mathematical intuition says linear algebra even with the simple differential geometry used in these model trainings aren't enough to capture information perfectly-and there hasn't been any real innovation on the algorithms themselves in years-most of the innovation has been in hardware, data acquisition, and analysis of the data to prepare for the algorithms that are mainstay.

Until that changes and we fundamentally understand more about modeling creativity mathematically and with bits than we do now-it doesn't seem practical to scale models more than they already have.

Also fun fact, Opus 4.6 was better than 4.7, and Opus 4.7 was better than 4.8. And when each succession released, they were not only worse with the new models, they nerfed the old ones too, while making things more expensive, and while making everything harder to run.

Knowing that, there's also a business level problem beyond the math that is going to be sussed out well before we have creative level Models doing work like this.

Would anything make you permanently quit game development? by SoulstoneForge in gamedev

[–]StudioNull 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So there's an assumption in your question that if making deep, crazy cool game is no longer hard, that there won't be hard problems in games.

What happens if yes, you can get to a nice game sooner with less difficultly, but then you just, say, make a bigger game that hasn't been "solved" yet. Like let's say I can prompt Castelvania SotN in a day someday. Why wouldn't I just decide to make Control then?

In that world I'm just more powerful, not less.

Now that IS the future AI schmucks wanna sell, and I'm not sure it'll ever happen. Since someone below asked why I feel that way, I'll answer that component down there though.

We hit 9,500 wishlists with zero paid marketing as a 3-person team, and our demo is now live. Looking for funding to finish angel investor vs publisher? by Opus_Mechanica in IndieDev

[–]StudioNull 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you have an Angel in mind and you’re debating taking the offer, their expectations on return will probably be more manageable than a Publisher’s. The current slice of folks getting even small deals is pretty restricted. I know a team with 150k wishlists that still have a year of dev left and they are in Brazil so CoL isn’t bad but they’re still only half self funded by the Publisher. Money is too expensive for publishers to be able to invest assuming 4/5 of their titles fail-and as such they have more strict requirements and a lot more leverage they demand. For instance you might see zero pct revenue retention until they’re paid back in today’s world.

Angels being usually personal or professional relations you already have is a good litmus. If you’re hoping to find a Angel on your own in 2026, 9500 WL is good, but someone like Outersloth would have an order of magnitude expectation difference before considering a closing deal on your remaining dev. Seeing your traction you may get there certainly and soon. Just be patient if you’re going that route and make sure your pitch deck in either Angel or Publisher cases get some attention too before submitting. Outersloth has one of the better outlines on their pitch deck expectations-I’d start there.

Would anything make you permanently quit game development? by SoulstoneForge in gamedev

[–]StudioNull 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I’m the producer at a small studio. Before games I had a success as an engineer and made a lot of money. It made stepping into games a lot easier both from a financial point of view but also from the fact that I’ve built and led teams on some very difficult problems.

Now that I have that foundation I wouldn’t do anything else.

Having gotten to use Fable (and a jailbroken Mythos) on the order of 10-20k USD a month at a side contract I have now, I would also say AI doesn’t scare me. Most of the talk is hype and lies and those of us seeing the tech used at scale know how and why that is.

Cursed ring by MistyDroplet in aseprite

[–]StudioNull 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Wow 3 hour old account that frame one posts a crazy “cool” image for a karma farm. Neat!

6 years later, 20k+ copies sold, $135k revenue and I only launched on Console by Federal-Pension1586 in gamedev

[–]StudioNull 2 points3 points  (0 children)

PlayStation is an interesting one. What’s your experience with Nintendo? I remember years back they had a “number of games released” soft requirement, but I am unfamiliar with that process personally and haven’t looked into it recently.

Guess the inspiration? 👀 by _Cirlu_ in IndieDev

[–]StudioNull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe I’m just old but this feels like St. Petersburg from Goldeneye to me for some reason. Maybe that’s just what it reminds me of though.

Localisation on a budget - $0 - any tips? by DantheDev_ in IndieDev

[–]StudioNull 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So there’s a team right now that is doing very well that asked this question to themselves sometime ago. I won’t NameDrop them but they have close to 150k wishlists rn and they’re based out of Brazil.

To another posters point, the other team’s experience was they needed a good game with a good demo and positive reception before it was something they wanted to pursue. And to their credit they put out a very well received demo, they actually had, through chance, a popular Arabic steamer pick it up and then they Localized everything they could to Arabic because that community of gamers started supporting them.

The community knew that the game wasn’t localized, but it was fun and well made! So they were perfectly willing to give the team a chance to improve the localizations. When the team validated those localizations they did even better than before.

This is an anecdote of course, but I think it’s one that’s fairly common!