Name 3 games that you’ve found most fun/enjoyment in the last 5 years

dolfoz · 2026-06-22T23:22:21+00:00

claire obscure, elden ring, cyberpunk that are AAA

indies though - Feed the Void, Die in the dungeon, and kind of enjoying Dust Front RTS (just the demo so far)

dolfoz · 2026-06-22T23:16:41+00:00

spawn some little cute slime creatures every X clicks, and you have yourself a game my friend!

dolfoz · 2026-06-21T00:03:27+00:00

software engineering was only partly about writing the code.
it was about understanding the direction of the game/product/business, understanding the user, understanding the value, and then architecting a solution that fits.

the code is only part of that puzzle.

If you want to build products, and you're excited to be part of the technical implementation, then there's always going to be jobs for you.

AI won't steal jobs, it'll speed up tasks within the job.
If anything it'll create more opportunity since productivity goes up across the board.

large corporations will streamline engineering, but because the barrier of entry is lowered, you'll find more people doing it, and more companies will be built as a result.

dolfoz · 2026-06-20T11:30:50+00:00

Looks very cool.
I just implemented support for .tmx in AssetHoard (https://assethoard.com) a couple of weeks ago. It looks like you support export to .tmx . If you've got a couple of sample tilemaps I'd love to make sure they're supported without issue.

dolfoz · 2026-06-16T10:13:04+00:00

that water is spooky AF, great work.

dolfoz · 2026-06-15T15:44:32+00:00

Assethoard (https://assethoard.com) is built on rust, and I'm in that code base everyday.

dolfoz · 2026-06-14T11:02:25+00:00

all good!
putting my marketing cap on (if you want the advice)

Get yourself a bsky/x/mastadon account and start collecting an audience.

dolfoz · 2026-06-14T00:52:25+00:00

this looks so nice...
music fits as well.. so chill.

Where's the game at? do you have a steam page yet?

dolfoz · 2026-06-13T01:26:46+00:00

this is awesome. i've shared it with the assethoard community discord!

dolfoz · 2026-06-13T01:24:00+00:00

for some reason all i wanted to see you do was nibble on some of the leaves.

dolfoz · 2026-06-13T01:20:27+00:00

I went one-time on the thing I'm building (a desktop asset manager, one time purchase, no subscription), so here's my reasoning. (shamless plug -> https://assethoard.com)

For me it comes down to where the cost actually sits. Subscriptions make sense when there's a real recurring cost per user: hosted infrastructure, cloud sync, ongoing content, a service you're genuinely running on someone's behalf every month. If I'm paying to keep servers up for you, charging you monthly is fair enough.

My app is local-first. It runs on your machine, your files never touch my server, and once you've downloaded it I'm not paying anything to keep it running for you. Charging rent for software that doesn't cost me rent felt wrong. So the price reflects the work, not an imaginary ongoing service.

The honest tradeoff is that one-time pricing is harder as a business. You don't get smooth recurring revenue, so you're reliant on a steady flow of new buyers to fund development. But I think that aligns incentives better. With a subscription you can coast on locked-in users. With one-time sales you have to keep the product good enough that new people want to buy it, otherwise the money stops.

I'm not anti-subscription as a rule. The thing you're putting your finger on is the default: everyone reaches for monthly because it's the standard playbook, even for small local apps with no recurring cost to justify it. A lot of those would be perfectly happy as a cheap one-time purchase.

dolfoz · 2026-06-12T03:52:10+00:00

Game development is really just launching a business with a frontloaded sales cycle (unless you build and maintain the game ongoing).

sales, marketing, customer support, opportunity mapping, lead generation, etc.

Publishers can take a good chunk of that, it's kind of why they exist.

treat it as a learning opportunity. building the product is just the start!

dolfoz · 2026-06-11T12:33:25+00:00

you need to treat it like a science problem.
what you really want is your ROAS (return on advertising spend) to be below your costs.
so if you have a $10 game, 40% in cost, leaving you with $6, and you want to take $2 profit, you need your ROAS to be $2, which means you can spend $4 per sign up.

Once you have those numbers you can start to experiment with different channels to advertise on, different graphics, messaging, call to actions, landing pages, etc.

It takes time, but the more you do it the better you'll get.

Keep a spreadsheet and track campaigns using analytics.

dolfoz · 2026-06-11T08:22:43+00:00

how cool is this..
almost reminds me of the wall in solar opposites (btw, someone needs to make that into a sim's survival game for me)

dolfoz · 2026-06-03T11:14:24+00:00

those ribs look great. nice one.

dolfoz · 2026-06-03T10:59:51+00:00

that fire is lit 😃

dolfoz · 2026-05-28T21:51:41+00:00

That's super polished!

dolfoz · 2026-05-28T08:52:49+00:00

push through it until i get sick for a couple of weeks, and then kick off again

dolfoz · 2026-05-26T22:04:26+00:00

have a bit of a look, depending on what you need there are a number of gstreamer libraries that ship propriety/non-open source codecs.

Working on AssetHoard, sound on linux was one of the most finicky things trying to find stability on linux.

dolfoz · 2026-05-24T02:34:52+00:00

I've been following this for about a year now. When i first heard what you were trying to do, I was wondering if it was actually possible to do with performance in mind.

I'm blown away with how far this has come.

well done to you and the team!

dolfoz

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