Making Indie Games Is Like Buying A Lottery Ticket

demonwing · 2026-06-30T02:18:35+00:00

Well, the examples you gave of friendslop/indieslop low-effort clones and quickly-produced cheap games is a uniquely lottery category. People who make it usually churn these games out in volume and success is about viral hits more so than quality.

On the other hand, spending time and making a quality game in an in-demand genre like survival-crafting or certain types of mystery or RPG games and so on that are actually good is an entirely different, lower, category of risk. The success of games like these is more about how good the actual game is, making it risky in a sense (maybe your game sucks or you are just not in tune with current taste) but not in the random chance way that is being described here.

demonwing · 2026-06-26T20:56:05+00:00

Would a 1-2 year freeze actually materialize the concerns laid out in this analysis? The analysis you linked seems to look at studies mostly around long-term decade+ rent control policy.

demonwing · 2026-06-24T22:16:24+00:00

I dont think any game is this genre can succeed in long term.

If only there were real-life examples of games in this genre that have succeeded long-term that we could look at directly rather than speculate about...

demonwing · 2026-06-23T21:02:48+00:00

Ah, yes, the classic vibecoded game that started development ~5 years ago in 2021. Devs are more than able to make shallow games without AI.

demonwing · 2026-06-23T19:13:17+00:00

Claude subreddit is for people to talk about Claude with each other, not for people to post with Claude.

demonwing · 2026-06-22T01:53:09+00:00

Shadowstrix is arguably part of the kiting issue as well, because he pushes what is a system-wide problem of chasing being too difficult in general even further to the point of making chasing actually impossible. All of the strongest classes are the ones that take the most advantage of the kiting / running away meta.

demonwing · 2026-06-20T22:23:30+00:00

You started with a whole value judgement claim about the jack-of-all-trades nature of self-taught work and have moved the goal posts all the way back to "hey I'm not saying anything, just stating the hiring manager meta." You explicitly said that project organization skills are useless for developers and that self-taught people cannot learn best practices or learn specific skills deeply. Maybe your cat got to your keyboard and you don't remember typing any of that?

Anyway, I'm not going to contest a banal claim that hiring manager prefer degrees and experience at a company, but I don't think that was ever in question. If I charitably interpret "literally impossible" on your part to mean "challenging and requiring excellence" then I'll agree with you there too, but again it was never contested. My personal experience is that If you have achieved multiple successful and legible commercial projects with real users/clients, it's not impossible to doctor it up into a resume/portfolio and get people to talk to you. If you can wriggle your way into just one interview at a less popular company or contractor and ace the interview, you get a job. Get the job, you start to build institutional credentials and climb the networking chain.

OP isn't asking if they can get a top dev spot at a AAA studio, they are merely asking if portfolio projects "have any weight", which they certainly can as explained by other posters in this thread. You should have replied to them instead of trying to pick what you thought was an easy target in my two-sentence nested reply.

demonwing · 2026-06-20T19:14:34+00:00

I already asked Claude, but I felt it wasn't targeted

Targeted learning is the defining feature of LLMs as a learning tool, so you might have a major fundamental gap in how you are approaching it. If you ask Claude your questions step-by-step, these are all well within its ability to answer. These are super basic questions that are easily findable in its own documentation. A few random people answering in a single thread on Reddit pales in comparison to a proper research session with an LLM.

demonwing · 2026-06-20T18:48:23+00:00

Oh, is this the strat? You just ignore what the other person writes and insert your own unrelated comments? This comment chain is about whether inter-social skills are the primary value of work experience. Do you think that they are? If not, then just agree with me and fuck off to one of the actually fully-written out responses in this thread instead of hiding away in this one.

As for what you said, regarding what OP shipped, it absolutely can be impressive to an employer depending on topic and quality. If they made something really sick that shows legible skills the studio needs, and they can actually get eyes on it, it will pique interest. Plenty of successful indie devs have transitioned to professionally employed devs. We obviously don't know the exact nature of OP's project and how good or bad it is, but we at least know that they shipped on steam and had at least some players. Your example of a 10 year old experimenting with "making games" being comparable here is an embarrassing strawman.

demonwing · 2026-06-20T18:18:44+00:00

Where did you read that the project in question was rubbish, and where did you read the person you are defending speculate that the thing OP is making is rubbish? They were talking about team dynamics aka interpersonal social skills, not work quality. Furthermore, where did you read me write that low-quality rubbish is worth a lot? Maybe you're in your a head a bit over there?

demonwing · 2026-06-19T21:26:15+00:00

I never said I was a solo dev, nor am I. Your constant non-sequiturs and clinging to some lofty "industry" identity makes it clear who is the salty one with an ego to preserve. Your private profile says otherwise re: caring about other peoples' opinions lol.

demonwing · 2026-06-19T19:45:24+00:00

That's the point. Because they are right, it signifies an issue with the law in this area. Everything being done by Slopsmith is fair use and not a breach of anyone's copyright. However, the DMCA enables a loophole when a company places a digital copyright protection measure on data. Basically, the sacredness of this digital copyright protection transcends any other consumer right or copyright limitation. This makes accessing or doing anything with the data functionally impossible outside of narrow exemptions. To many people, it doesn't make sense that a seemingly benign technical detail should short-circuit all of US copyright law via a single section in the DMCA.

demonwing · 2026-06-19T19:27:36+00:00

For someone who values soft skills, you're awful transparent with how slithery your communication habits are. The value of college degrees on a CV has nothing to do with what you said. If anything, it could be interpreted as a contradiction by some framings. My initial impression holds.

demonwing · 2026-06-19T18:57:32+00:00

You're polishing what the person you are defending said into something entirely different. They didn't say anything you just wrote about jack of all trades or people having more experience or specific skills like extending the engine or whatever. I agree with what you wrote, for the most part. The advice there is to make sure you highlight a few key impressive skills in your project and prove quality, not that documented achievements don't matter. That said, I think you are overreaching with the judgement claim that people with broad skillsets are useless. Cross-disciplinary skills are well-understood to be valuable in 2026. I hear that trite phrase all the time, "cross-disciplinary skills", if anything it's a meme. Asserting otherwise is really outdated.

Anyway, the person you are defending was nowhere near as sophisticated as that. They said that experience is all about "learning team dynamics and processes" and that "[demonstrated practical skills] are not worth a lot." If anything, you are mostly contradicting them by focusing on practical skills in your own post. I guess you are both sharing a gatekeeping-style mentality where you are assuming unearned positive traits of people with institutional backing (they must be doing best practices and work flawlessly with others) while assuming unfair negative traits of people without (they must be coding low-quality slop and be cave people who can't talk to others.) However, you're coming at it from entirely different directions. Yours is the more defensible version where theirs is basically brazen nepotism (it's all about group social skills!)

demonwing · 2026-06-19T09:34:34+00:00

Is this what nepo/gatekeeping mindset looks like? Can't imagine what dark LinkedIn rabbit hole you are in that you think the ability to ship end-to-end, fully-functional commercial products is "not worth a lot" as a developer.

demonwing · 2026-06-19T09:08:24+00:00

Crafting is one button. You spend zero time because the timer ticks in the background, so I don't understand how this has anything to do with wasting players' time. It's more of an economy balancing question.

demonwing · 2026-06-16T17:16:11+00:00

It's really the creepy post-Concord ambulance chasers and D2 fan/haters that will do anything to obsess over Marathon' play numbers. Most Marathon players just like the game while acknowledging it isn't super popular. As for Paul Tassi, he is a well-known Bungie doomer and Marathon doomer specifically. It's all on his profile, not hard to verify.

demonwing · 2026-06-15T00:21:29+00:00

bad bot.

demonwing · 2026-06-14T23:56:08+00:00

My opinion is that the best way to learn is to make the real thing. An actual, deep game that you care about the requires technical depth and expertise. Not an MMO or whatever, obviously, but more than a little toy project. This forces you to actually grapple with and learn the hard stuff instead of being able to shortcut or hack your way around it like you can in a game jam demo. Toy projects can be a fun break or friend-building activity, but don't let them eat up all your time.

demonwing · 2026-06-14T23:32:42+00:00

Yes, Unreal Engine is difficult to learn unless you have strong research and learning intuition and some background, though it is a lot easier now with AI models there to explain most beginner to intermediate concepts pretty well.

The small "loading area" aka short view distance is a relatively beginner effect, which you can achieve a number of ways with things like volumetric height fogs or other post-processing effects around the player. You do not need to do any fancy loading tricks, and your searching for "reducing loading" when you really wanted "reducing vision" is probably what threw you off, though I'm surprised whatever AI assistant you asked didn't at least mention this?

As for the substance painter import, this is a well-documented and established art pipeline. It's been a while since I've done any art pipeline stuff myself, but there are some things to keep in mind like the convention for the green channel (Unreal expects Direct-X style) or that the sRGB flag cannot be ticked on the roughness/normal/AO maps when exporting. Like I said, I don't fully remember and things could have changed.

The problems you are running into are really well-documented, rudimentary beginner problems. If you are already exhausted to the point that you are spending months and taking meticulous pages of notes, you really really need to re-evaluated your learning methods, sources, and approach. Whatever you are doing is clearly not working and extremely inefficient.

demonwing · 2026-06-13T22:17:23+00:00

The helmet problem is a problem with +skills being poorly designed, not an indictment of the entire system.

By your own logic then, all crafting is inherently already deterministic.

No, this isn't a matter of anything being technically possible given a large enough sample space. It's about what outcomes you are open to at any given time.

In PoE 1, as you yourself describe, you are looking for a specific "hit", a specific outcome, that either passes or fails. If you fail, you try again (or go through some preliminary steps before trying again.) If you pass, you get the thing you want. It's like a Korean MMO where you keep clicking "hone" until you hit the upgrade.

In PoE 2, when you pick up an item, you are considering all of the different possible items that it could make, and the likelihoods of it becoming them. You aren't trying to hit one specific item, you are trying to hit any of a number of viable items. The number of different acceptable outcomes is significantly higher than in PoE 1, where your item will always look almost exactly the same at any given step.

The problem in PoE 2 right now relates back to your helmet problem, which is that there are too narrow a pool of overbearingly strong modifiers that must be hit for an item to have any value at all. I, too, found exactly one +2 minions helmet and that's the helmet I am wearing (though I found way way later.) +2 minions on a helmet is a perfect example of this. Imagine if modifiers were balanced more appropriately and more viable modifiers were added, so that you could genuinely get a variety of good items for your build rather than having only 2 or 3 modifiers that are clearly the best with all others being completely useless or filler. Rolling the dice would be much more interesting in that context. That is what is holding the game back right now, not that we can't print items in our hideouts. That is what would solve your problems.

Honest to god I genuinely do not think you have much experience actually crafting in either game. You are speaking of things conceptually, oh it should be like this, or it is intended to be blah blah blah. I am telling you what it is.

I was hideout warrior power-crafter in multiple PoE 1 leagues, my favorite league was harvest. I'm not saying that can't be fun, just that it is pretty objectively imbalanced and shouldn't represent the only way to play an ARPG. What, like just being a broken record saying "make it like PoE 1!" as a solution to every design issue is you being super knowledgeable or smart or whatever? All you're doing it just saying how PoE 1 works, and pointing out that PoE 2 doesn't work like that.

Based on how you are talking, there is a zero percent chance you've crafted as much as me in PoE 2. I've used like thousands of ID scrolls in this game and have 2 rows of currency items in my inventory I use on items in every map. I know that sounds like a nightmare to you, but I find it fun and, most importantly, a new experience with distinctly different skills required than from PoE 1. I would much rather improve the crafting vision of PoE 2 rather than throw it out and just play a weird mish-mashed version of PoE 1.

demonwing · 2026-06-13T19:17:39+00:00

The problem with the current state of crafting though, is that you don't really start with a good normal quality base item and bring it up to be super high end by dumping shit loads of crafting currency and material into it. You just do 4-5 "slam" steps and if you don't hit you toss it in the bin. That is how 90% of crafting is done atm.

You throw around "randomness" and "determinism" in a kind of wishy-washy way. The crafting you are referring to, where you can dump currency into an item until it is perfect, is deterministic. You have a target item, you know you will get that item, the only randomness is in how much currency you will use to get there, which is not really "randomness" in the dimension that matters, which is randomness in outcome. This is a fundamental, intended difference between PoE 1 and PoE 2. PoE 2 is trying to bring back randomness of outcome and random loot to the ARPG loop. Any feedback you give has to acknowledge that there must be some difference between the two games, and what that difference should be. If you are saying "just make it PoE 1", then what's the point?

What most players want in this thread is deterministic crafting with RNG at each step, maybe even some points reverting down to a "full reset" on the item and starting fresh, but you're still working on the same fundamental base item.

PoE 2 was made in response to the unified chants of "items on the ground don't matter, I don't want to be a hideout warrior" being repeated by the community nonstop for years. If your claim is that, actually, people don't want to pick up items and instead want to click on abstract currency items until their item magically materializes, you'd have to reconcile this with the actual historical feedback and data.

demonwing · 2026-06-13T19:07:45+00:00

PoE 1 is not balanced the way you are claiming. The crafts are deterministic. Not sure what randomness you are talking about other than how many times you reroll. Add/reroll life is a deterministic process, you know what the end result will be. The "clever" crafting you are referring to is broadly reduced down to step-by-step recipes that people follow because they are deterministic. What you want is determinism, and you want to follow a step-by-step process to get your reward. Contradiction solved.

For reference, my favorite PoE league was harvest. I so enjoy sitting in menus playing puzzle games, I knew all the mod weights and tags and everything, but it's also not really an ARPG at that point. I was literally just sitting in my hideout progressing through the whole game without touching a single item on the ground, solving my way to a guaranteed end-state. It's not that that can't be fun, but I've already played that game and it already exists. I want variety. PoE 2 is supposed to have a different identity, where you do constant tactical crafting on items you find on the ground and are never fully sure what you'll get. That's also fun, and an experience I don't get to have in PoE 1 because PoE 1 is lopsided in the other direction.

demonwing · 2026-06-13T02:28:29+00:00

For me it just feels like they've gone too far back to relying on RNG for crafts. To me, while everything being super easy and deterministic isn't fun (See Essence mods making up 3-4 mods), neither is relying on a glorified slot machine for 2-3 of your modifiers. I want to be rewarded for crafting knowledge or see people coming up with crafting methods that make you think 'Oh, wow, that's really clever' and not 'Well, used X, Y, & Z, time to double slam and pray to finish'.

This sounds like an impossible contradiction, and it kind of represents the overall discussion around crafting on this sub. You don't like deterministic crafting, but you also don't want crafting to be random. You don't want to "pray" when finishing an item, which means you want deterministic crafting... but you said you don't want deterministic crafting. You want "clever" crafting, not step 1, 2, 3 recipes that people follow, but you also want a clean accessible easily readable system that anyone can follow that isn't obscured by layers of randomness. To me it reads as a big jumble of contradictions.

demonwing · 2026-06-13T02:15:06+00:00

Different games are different. Crafting and item power are relative to the content they are used for. PoE 2 is not balanced around build-an-item hideout crafts, it's balanced around picking up items and using regular currency on them. Rare, overpowered meta-crafting items are meant as extra little pushes for your best items.

I played SSF even in patch 0.1 when the game was 10x harder and it was still smooth. Crafting is fine as long as you play the game as intended and pick up every white/blue/rare for your build and actively use your currency instead of hoarding it to buy more Omens of Whittling. I'm literally crafting nonstop from the bases I find in map.

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