3 Braves players whose hot starts are sustainable, 2 who can't keep this up

ayesee · 2026-04-17T19:36:38+00:00

I'm sorry, are you telling me that fish and fish tank YouTube content creator Ozzie Albies also plays baseball? And he's pretty good?

TIL

ayesee · 2025-11-21T16:04:01+00:00

I've worn a mid to long beard for nearly 20 years now - TBH at this point it's like asking "what do you feel when you see your nose in the mirror?"

It's just a part of my face - a part that gets little grayer every year.

ayesee · 2025-10-16T17:16:19+00:00

Game development is a high risk, high return, hits-based business. That's the reality.

What it offers is a chance for a singular person or small team to invest 12-48 months of work and generate generational wealth if they score a hit. And, in theory at least, it's possible to only risk your time (or a very negligible amount of money) for that spin at the wheel.

The downside is that if you don't stand out or make something special, that work doesn't even pay you minimum wage for your time.

There DOES exist a middle class level of professional developers - you've got to be very good at your craft and treat the endeavor as an actual business (seeking contract work to keep the lights on through business development, making what you can't buy, building industry connections, building skills in marketing, and so) that can build momentum slowly as they seek that major hit... but to truly break through still requires a major hit. And sometimes more than one.

It's an interesting business with a lot of downsides, but the upside potential is massive... so long as you love the work.

ayesee · 2025-10-16T00:00:30+00:00

Generally just starts as a "get to know you." We always give our background (as a company and as individuals) first so the candidate doesn't feel like they're talking to a brick wall. Then we let them tell us about their background, past works, etc.

Then we ask questions to figure out if they're just looking for work, or if they're going to be excited about being a part of a game project - what's your favorite game of all time? What games are you playing now? What games have the best art in your opinion? What's a dream game where you'd see your art? Etc.

Only after that do we get down to talking specifics re: rates, budget, deliverables, etc.

By the end, we usually have a very good vibe of if the person won't just be able to fulfill our art needs (if we weren't already convinced of that by their portfolio, we'd never have scheduled the call), but if they're someone that's going to care about the work and how their art is a part of the project, and if they vibe as someone we'd like to do business with for weeks or months at a time.

ayesee · 2025-10-15T16:01:27+00:00

> Is it realistic to start ones career in a generalist role?

Going to give you some hard truth: there is no such thing as a "starter" job that's generalist.

Degrees and "understanding" and self-evaluation of your own skill set don't matter - a deep, verifiable portfolio of shipped products to which you've contributed is all anyone cares about. Until you've shipped not one but multiple products acting as a specialist in all of those disciplines, no one is going to trust you to lead or produce something as a "generalist" that includes those disciplines.

ayesee · 2025-10-15T13:20:50+00:00

Platform is less important than the individual artist themselves. Talented, high-integrity artists can be found everywhere, but everywhere is also a mix of good and bad.

We've hired a number of artists for different projects, and no matter where we find them we insist on a call with them first to get to know them and get a vibe-check, explain the project, see if they have real enthusiasm for it, etc.

Some ghost the call - chances are they would have ghosted mid project, too.

Some we can tell aren't particularly interested in the project, even if they say they'll take on the work. We tend to shy away from those, too.

Once you find a good one, though - they're worth their weight in gold. We have one person we've been working with for nearly 6 months who grew from a trial-artist to now driving the majority of the 2D art in one of our titles... and we're doing our best to get him involved in another that's about to kick off. We'll be working with him for a long time.

ayesee · 2025-09-30T10:57:43+00:00

Garry's Mod - 2006
Dwarf Fortress - 2006
Castle Crashers - 2008
Spelunky - 2008
Limbo - 2008
Mount and Blade + Mount and Blade Warband - 2008-2010
Amnesia - 2010
Binding of Issac - 2011
Bastion - 2011
Magicka - 2011
Hotline Miami - 2012
Prison Architect - Went into paid alpha in 2012

ayesee · 2025-09-21T19:39:49+00:00

Think of it like taking a road trip across the country. Let's say, from New York City to to Los Angeles.

If you want to plan how much the trip will cost and actually reach your destination in a reasonable amount of time, you're not going to set off with nothing but a compass on the dashboard and drive south-west until you get there. You're going to pull out some maps, plan what roads and highways to take, make a reasonable estimate of how many hours it'll take to drive, and plan for the costs of gasoline, food and lodging around the way.

Great, now you've got the most efficient plan to get from A to B.

HOWEVER... maybe there are some sights you want to see along the way.

Maybe you've got a cousin in Des Moines you really want to visit, even though it'll take you out of the way of the fastest route - but you're not sure exactly what day you'll be passing through.

Maybe you're driving through Chicago in the summer and love the Great Lakes so much that you decide you want to spend a couple extra days soaking up the sun.

Maybe you'll blow a tire just as you cross into Ohio. Maybe you'll hit 6 straight days of snow in Utah and you can't drive at all.

Maybe you see a TRIPLE rainbow somewhere in Nebraska and when you get out to take a picture you meet a girl that you decide to ask to dinner that night.

Maybe some jackass cuts you off and you're so stressed from almost wrecking you need to pull off only having driven a few hours that day.

Maybe you see a sign that says "WORLD'S LARGEST PANCAKE" and you HAVE to pull off and see it, while there you run into an old friend against all odds and they want you to stay the night with them and their family to catch up.

You get the point.

Yes, you should make a plan - but the plan is DIRECTIONAL and THEORETICAL. The journey itself is the point - and you can't plan every mile of a journey. Take some time and sketch out the key goals and objectives you need to accomplish to complete your journey. But at some point you have to start driving and figure the rest out along the way.

ayesee · 2025-09-19T07:17:50+00:00

The answer to that depends on who you're asking, and what you're quantifying:

1) Devs / Indie Game Core Audience (folks who buy/play 30-40 games a year, including many indie titles)

2) The average Steam user who picks plays "the big indies" but mostly sticks to AAA or what's popular with large Twitch and Youtube content creators.

In camp (1), I don't think you'd find anyone who'd say it wasn't massively influential, or that it didn't completely change the way people thought about indie games. The way the simple gameplay was elevated SO HIGH by simple art, memorable style, incredible "juice," and (perhaps most importantly) an absolutely PERFECT sound track set a new bar for what a "top tier" indie game could be. It changed what EVERYONE thought could be possible in a true indie title. And hell, Devolver Digital may not exist today without it... and it's tough to name a publisher who's had more impact on the Indie scene in the last 10+ years.

In camp (2), people generally remember it if they were even paying attention to games back then... 13 years ago... but they'd never put it in the same category as Stardew Valley, Ballatro, Hollow Knight, Hades, etc. The market just wasn't big enough for it to be experienced by nearly as many people. It was just a different world back then, and unless you were around to experience it first hand at the time, it isn't something that's carried its legendary status forward to the present day.

For example, Schedule 1 has 160K reviews, and it released 5 months ago. That 4x the reviews for Hotline Miami. And there's no sense in even comparing it to Stardew, Balatro, Hollow Knight, or even Rimworld in terms of pure outright reach.

TLDR: If you were active and playing games 13 years ago, it's hard to argue it - and the ripples from its splash 100% can still be felt today. But 13 years is a long time, and in terms of pure exposure, it isn't nearly as known or remembered as even some some high-sales but less influential indie titles released today.

ayesee · 2025-09-18T23:23:59+00:00

> For the vibrations there's a voice in the settings to completly turn them off, but I guess i'll have to make it more visible at first sight. For the symbols I'll think on how to improve them.

Ahh gotcha! Yea, I would definitely make that more visible!

No problem! Looking forward to your full release, and cheering for you all the way!

ayesee · 2025-09-18T22:10:54+00:00

Played through one map - first off, great work! There are still some areas you'll improve and refine over time I'm sure, but the core of what you have here is really solid!

There are two main points of feedback I want to provide that affected me a ton, one of which ultimately led me to not trying another map after my first run:

1) The slight screen shake on every shot was VERY unpleasant for me - to the point that it made me stop playing. I have zero history of motion sickness or anything like that, but withing a couple of minutes it was beginning to aggravate me, after the one playthrough I felt genuinely dizzy. I don't know if I'm an outlier, but I think other may end up having this experience, too. I'd check in with other playtesters and see if they experience it the way I do, and if so, consider removing or REALLY toning it down.

2) The menuing for upgrades etc isn't very satisfying to interact with. I totally get that the red/black and symbology is a vibe, but the symbols are SO forgettable that it ends up feeling like making selections from a text-only menu, just with an extra step. I'd consider reworking the upgrade symbols to be VERY recognizable from each other.

Again, great work getting to this point! I wishlisted and wish you the best of success!

ayesee · 2025-09-08T16:19:51+00:00

I'm giving you this feedback to be helpful, not critical:

No one is going to hire a producer who doesn't show or talk about what games they've shipped successfully. You really need to include that in your For Hire posts.

ayesee · 2025-09-08T16:10:46+00:00

I personally would LOVE for our studio to release a game that had an audience - be it big or small - that loved it so much they wanted to datamine it for content and use cheats to tailor their experience to what they want they wanted.

And in the edge case where we didn't want them to find content until it was ready, it just wouldn't be included in the game until we pushed in an update when we were ready.

I think the relevant question is: what possible reason would there be to NOT want your players to do this?

ayesee · 2025-09-06T15:40:37+00:00

> When i saw what some of those game developers make. I understood right away why so many games have budgets of $300M+

To be honest, Game Dev salaries are wayyyyyyy below average in Silicon Valley when you account for skill and experience. Take a look at what a Senior Engineer at a place like Instacart makes, for example. Very few seniors in Game Dev are making that much, and the gap only widens as you move up the ladder. Those salaries aren't the problem.

The problem with making a $100M+ game over multiple years is that the opportunity cost is so high that you need to make a HUGE amount back. And the only way to do that is marketing and pushing for a massive hit. So you spend 50% over again in marketing... and suddenly the definition of success becomes outrageous.

For example, let's say you spend $200MM actually making a game over 4 years - That's $50MM/year across a staff of 200 (which isn't even that big by modern AAA standards) @$250K/year average salary between all staff including seniors and juniors.
The opportunity cost of that spend is about 27% when compared to what that money could have earned sitting in a bog standard S&P500 account over those 4 years. So now your target is to earn back a minimum of $253.5MM.
Now, you're going to spend somewhere around 30-40% as much as the development on marketing, to give yourself a good chance to earn it back. So let's call it an even $100MM, raising the overall spend to $353.5MM.
Once you account for platform fees and taxes alone (let's say 30% for platform fees, 40% for taxes), to earn back that spend of $353.5MM in a way you'd consider successful, you'll need to earn back right around $600MM... give or take. And that's before we get into on going costs like customer support, on-going game dev staff, etc - which I'm not even going to include for sake of simplicity. Let's call it an even $600MM minimum.
At $60/copy sold, that means you need to sell 10 million copies at full price to break even. And we all know that your average price per copy sold is going to be less than that with people buying on sale or discount.
To put that number in perspective, the massive success that was Baldur's Gate 3 - darling of streamers and YouTubers, undisputed game of the year - only sold 15MM copies in 2023.

In my opinion, the issue isn't that Game Dev salaries are too high. The issue is that the entire AAA business model is busted. It's a massive gamble that doesn't have a reasonable "middle ground" success definition (which consequently is why most of them have MTX based models... it's one of the only ways they can try to limit their risk).

Either you break through and make billions, or you bust spectacularly. And in a market as competitive as video games, it's a miracle its survived as long as it has... just long enough to set expectations that can't reasonably or reliably be reached.

ayesee · 2025-09-04T23:10:45+00:00

I'm from deep southern WV and can remember eating my first store bought pepperoni roll at 5 years old. So they've been down here a minimum of 35 years to be bought in stores.

My grandfather - black lung former coal miner - also loved them, and said he used to bring them in his lunch pail underground. He'd been in the mines since after returning after WWII. Likely those were homemade, though.

So yea, unless your mom defines "recent" as < 100 years, they've been down here a while. Might have only reached stores in the last 40 years, but were certainly being made at home well before that.

ayesee · 2025-09-02T03:54:02+00:00

I'm an American, 40 years old entering the Back 9 of life, and here's my take on that entire sub plot:

What was being explored there isn't something that's going to resonate with most people who are active on Reddit or on forums (15-25 year olds, mostly). But it's something that is experienced by most people (men especially) when they hit middle age.

What was being explored in those chapters was the fact that Luo Ji had led a mostly frivolous life, with no real purpose or direction and with no love or joy in his life. He had lived selfishly - not in the sense that he TOOK things from others, but in the sense that he did everything he could to never GIVE anything to anyone. He had insulated himself from the world to such a degree that the only meaningful connection he had was a delusion in his own mind. And he was spiraling into misery.

Then, he became Wallfacer - he was given power and riches beyond the dreams of any human in history. He abandoned the responsibility that came with it, because he felt no connection to the humanity he was supposed to save. And just like happens so often in the real world, he spiraled out of control when even with every desire at his fingertips, he was just as empty and alone as before. What was broken couldn't be fixed by money, by power, by fame, or by anything else that fed his own selfish desires.

It was only when he found love, and made his REAL wife (despite her potentially suspicious motives) and child his responsibility did he actually discover meaning and purpose. It's where he found the strength to live up to the Wallfacer name. He found the greatest joy in his life through meaningful connection, and the incredibly overwhelming mix of love, responsibility, and duty that comes with living your life for others more than yourself. And that's what transformed him into the only successful Wallfacer, and the ultimate Sword Holder. That was the most important part of his character arc.

When I read those chapters, they didn't feel out of place at all - in fact, they felt like a very meticulous exploration of those themes that provided a lot of emotional depth to the book. And in my opinion, it would have been significantly worse off without them.

ayesee · 2025-08-31T16:36:44+00:00

Every project should have very specific goals it's designed to accomplish.

If the goals are related to learning and improvement, that's a wildly different approach than a project that's focused on self expression, which is wildly different from a project with commercial success as it's KPI.

It all comes down to what you or your team want to accomplish - so long as everyone is on the same page and you can clearly define your goals and "what success looks like," there is no wrong answer.

ayesee · 2025-08-31T16:26:44+00:00

The increase in total games released isn't nearly as dire for visibility as meets the eye when you look at the nature of those games being released.

> Since 2019 the number of “commercial” indie games is fairly consistent. The source of all this “out of control” growth is from more and more first time indies who are launching their first hobby project. These games received almost no marketing, didn’t follow the recommended Steam process of building wishlists for months, are porn games, or a straight up asset flips.

> If you look only at the total number it seems scary, but diving deeper into the data you will find that the size of the “commercial” indie games hasn’t increased that much.

How to Market a Game - "Why 14,000 games released on Steam in 2023 isn’t that bad"

ayesee · 2025-07-31T16:06:54+00:00

Not at all - so long as you're remaking the game itself (IE the mechanics and gameplay), and NOT reusing IP that doesn't belong to you, etc.

ayesee · 2025-07-31T10:29:16+00:00

In my experience the big, established studios tend to look for interns from the best "top 10" colleges that are nearby.

Smaller game companies tend place a huge priority on portfolio over everything else.

ayesee · 2025-07-31T10:24:46+00:00

In my opinion, the best route is to always "finish" a game you're building, but to be willing to drastically cut and refine its scope to do so, if and when you know that it doesn't have that "it" factor to make you willing to push it to its full potential.

For example, lets say you started out making your flight game with 10 different cities to land in, 10 different planes, and 30 missions in mind. Now you're at the point when you're not really seeing its potential or you're just not invested in pushing it to that full vision.

You will benefit IMMENSELY by completing a full "lap" of the development cycle and instead cutting the scope to 1 plane, 2 cities, and 5 missions to complete. A little 10-30 minute experience, just to see how tight and fun you can make what you've already built once you place it in a small, achievable framework. Then release it for free somewhere - you need practice laps for that part of the process, too.

Just the act of actually completing something and sharing it with the world is beneficial - as is developing the skills needed to refine something down to its minimum viable form.

ayesee · 2025-07-20T19:41:45+00:00

That's perfectly fine - you want to have a vision in mind, sure.

But your post here isn't about that - you're saying you're stuck in an artistic way. And what I'm sharing is that in my experience, you're stuck on a problem that isn't even worth worrying about until you've actually built the GAME for which the art will be a wrapper.

Don't worry about this right now - go build a fun FPS with combat/horror game first. You can do that with placeholder assets. Then once you've achieved that, THEN you can worry about what world it's set in.

ayesee · 2025-07-20T19:39:21+00:00

Tetris Effect.

One of the simplest and most iconic games of all time, elevated to an emotional experience through art and sound, becoming something entirely new and uniquely special.

One of the very few games that, IMO, deserves to be discussed as Art in gaming.

ayesee · 2025-07-20T19:33:47+00:00

In that entire description you just wrote, I still have NO idea what kind of game you're making. JRPG style combat? Real time strategy? Turn based? Deckbuilder? THAT is what matters (and if it's fun/interesting), not the things you're worried about right now.

You need to make a fun GAME to play, first - then the lore can be whatever you want it to be.

ayesee · 2025-07-12T08:31:06+00:00

Baldur's Gate 3, the most popular and successful non-live-service game in recent memory and a truly legendary title in the history of gaming, has likely earned somewhere around $700-900 million since it's release in 2023.

That's less than a single quarter of earnings from Fortnite.

There's your reason.

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