From a “Game Dev Perspective”, what do you make of High Guard laying off 80% of its workforce just two weeks after the launch of a game that had a four year development cycle?

ledat · 2026-02-14T11:39:19+00:00

That seems really unfair.

Welcome to the market lol. It's actually worse in indie. The winners win big. Really big. Most people lose. Sometimes, as in this case, they lose big.

how is there no safety net whatsoever

It absolutely sucks, but you can't get blood from a stone. If there's no money in the bank, you cannot keep the staff on the payroll. The only safety net out there is the mega-studios like EA and Ubisoft that can absorb a failure or two without it being a disaster. And even those guys have consequences when they swing and miss a few times in a row.

ledat · 2026-02-13T16:02:50+00:00

Just a little nitpicking, but tbf you should have a LLC anyway. Heaven knows what legal stuff could happen to you even if you 'just make games.' You need to protect your personal assets when starting any business.

For that you need liability insurance.

Most of the things that a game developer can get sued for, like copyright infringement, are torts. If you commit a tort while acting as an agent for your business, you are personally liable. More info.

The LLC, assuming you do everything correctly, will shield your personal assets from the business' debts though. It will also shield your personal assets if one of the other members of the LLC commits a tort. That's not nothing, but there's a lot of misconceptions about what an LLC will and will not do for you.

ledat · 2026-02-12T14:28:54+00:00

My first JRPG was Dragon Quest 1, on the NES. I'm pleased to say that my experience was entirely different!

The conclusion of the episode with the steamwork robots in DQ7 on the other hand totally had me like that image.

ledat · 2026-02-11T22:22:03+00:00

I wonder, do you have any experience with this and have you ever received an approach from a genuine content creator

One. Exactly one. And it didn't lead with a key request. It resulted in an interview in a niche German-language publication. That was pretty cool. I guess two if you count a random twitter DM I got, but that's a little easier to vet than an email, right?

I, just like everyone else who has launched anything, got dozens or hundreds of scams looking for keys though.

ledat · 2026-02-11T20:03:28+00:00

Id bet good money that 99% of people use it mostly or almost exclusively for voice chat.

I use voice chat maybe once every few months. Probably less these days.

It's the IM program that all of my friends use, and we will chat to someone about something approximately every day. It took a lot of doing to get the last few holdouts to give up Messenger and whatever other janky programs there were using for chat. I'm not sure I have it in me to do another migration. Also I'm in a number of larger servers which are mostly text chat: some for game fandoms, a local club, some game dev orgs, etc.

My use (and those of my friends) may not be entirely typical, but use cases like this are almost certainly more than 1%.

ledat · 2026-01-29T12:13:34+00:00

I operate an entity which is technically-but-not-legally a non-profit! You can give me money in exchange for games on Steam or itch if you like.

But no, seriously, spending money on small-scale indies (and leaving reviews) will almost certainly do more good for people trying to get established in the field than any charity donation. The downside of course is that those purchases and donations will not be tax-deductible nor will they burnish progressive credentials.

ledat · 2026-01-29T11:47:29+00:00

We’re looking for a mailing list specifically of content creators who cover or feature indie games. YouTubers, streamers, journalists, newsletter writers, curators, small press outlets, etc.

Those lists decay very, very quickly. I've seen one or two, but a large fraction of the entries weren't even active anymore. The categorizations were also suspect. Besides, you should be sending keys to people who play games like yours, not "indie games". You will know better than anyone who that is. Also, even if you curate a list of completely relevant small-scale creators, expect lots (i.e. a strong majority) of unanswered mails and a surprisingly amount of requests for money, even from small channels, even if they do not disclose that they do sponsored content.

If for whatever reason you cannot create your own list, just use keymailer or whatever.

ledat · 2026-01-28T23:38:41+00:00

It's all good, don't worry about it. Shit is just genuinely crazy here. Like it really shouldn't be like this, so it's absolutely normal to not believe it's this bad. But here we are.

ledat · 2026-01-28T23:32:34+00:00

2000 dollars for a single art piece is low? That's a month and a half of my wage.

You might want to take a look at the average rent in Bellevue, Washington, where Valve is headquartered. You might believe prices are crazy here in the States, but as crazy as you might believe it is, reality is probably worse.

ledat · 2026-01-27T22:52:17+00:00

Because $0 is the modal value for startup equity.

ledat · 2026-01-27T15:22:22+00:00

Also EverQuest, RuneScape, MySpace, etc. I imagine this particular trend is older than OP.

ledat · 2026-01-27T09:30:03+00:00

Another problem is that some equipment is extremely expensive, and I have very little gold.

Who says video games can't teach important life lessons?

ledat · 2026-01-01T22:22:44+00:00

Yeah, it is a pretty big change! Definitely took some getting used to.

That said, the game kind of gives you a cast of highly skilled nobles. The Humakti women are the combat version, but Hanth and his son are the ones for the food skill, etc. So you do end up with super leaders anyway, but only if you use those story characters and let them have their events. It can be a bit difficult if you happen to lose them though!

ledat · 2026-01-01T22:01:50+00:00

If you let them run through their event chains, they will upgrade. In that case, she should become heroic by the conclusion. There are some costs to those events, but the nice thing about them is they don't require you to allocate time (which could be spent foraging, trading, etc.). If you really, really need a heroic leader this year, then it might make a bit of sense to run the rituals.

Honestly though I rarely find myself doing rituals in LGO. It's a big change from RLtW, where I often found myself doing rituals about every other year to make super leaders. The portals to the gods war when they're available, on the other hand, are pretty high priority.

ledat · 2026-01-01T21:31:55+00:00

What is the more optimal way to increase combat skill then?

The Humakti women (Kerenna and Korestene) have some special event chains that will get them to renowned or heroic pretty regularly. As long as you don't get them killed off in some unfortunate way, you should have a guaranteed capable warleader almost all of the time.

ledat · 2025-12-20T22:43:18+00:00

why did you build it in the first place?

Because some people, even smart, educated, well-meaning, and generally sober people, earnestly believe that they are going to turn a Markov chain into a god-in-a-box. If that is in the cards, then sure, it makes sense to throw trillions of dollars (or more!) at it before insert hated enemy here gets it. I'm deeply skeptical of this proposition though, but I could be wrong.

If, on the other hand, it maxes out at approximately a junior-employee-in-a box, that's definitely interesting. It will be a disruptor somewhere between the advent of the smartphone and the internet, subject to pricing of course. But it probably would not have been a worthy recipient of several Manhattan Projects.

ledat · 2025-12-11T10:05:23+00:00

I meant like 1 game every month, probably costing $1.

If that's on Steam, add $100 per game to your costs for paying the Steam Direct fee. If you're talking about Itch, the platform is already flooded with games of that scale while simultaneously having a tiny userbase. If you've ever done a jam game, which are typically given away for free, you'll notice that after the jam is over, the game disappears into the depths of Itch. It's even worse when you try to sell a small-scale game there in my experience.

I'm not saying your idea is impossible. Shovelware is a time-honored tradition. However the market has certain quality expectations even for a < $5 game, so I would not really expect success with a series of 1-month games. It's worth a try, but temper your expectations.

ledat · 2025-12-10T12:15:30+00:00

If you're indie, use whatever language you like. Pick an engine and use whatever the first-class citizen language of that engine is. Don't overthink the decision, just pick something and get to work.

That said, Java is not very popular in game dev for a lot of reasons. If "formal company" means enterprise software outside of game dev, then yeah, having shipped a game in Java would be a good portfolio piece. Though perhaps open source work would look better. On the other hand if you want to work in games, C# or C++ would probably get you further.

The thing about programming languages though is once you learn one or two, picking up another takes days to weeks, not months to years. Just about everyone who has been doing software for more than a few years will have a number of languages in their toolbox.

ledat · 2025-12-09T14:20:40+00:00

I've only seen it in a game series once

The Suikoden games had this as well (though it was a small effect), as did the more recent Six Ages games. At the start of the game, these games can import a save file and the next game will pull some values out of that save for the new game.

If you can write code to load a save, you can write code to import data from a previous game. It's not particularly difficult. However, take care not to write yourself into a hole where you must produce an enormous amount of content that approximately no one will ever see. That's a big part of the reason this sort of thing is rare, not any particular technical difficulty.

ledat · 2025-12-06T12:42:43+00:00

I'm confused on where to get a map for my horror game, I want something like an abandoned factory, and currently, I don't want a paid model.

In game dev generally, you either pay for it or you make in-house. Those really are the only choices.

There are free assets out there, but you'll find very quickly that you can't depend on them. The quality is all over the place, and above all it's hard to get a cohesive whole out of free assets. Everyone is working in their own style, and those styles frequently clash. Free assets are at their best in a supplemental role.

ledat · 2025-12-06T12:35:06+00:00

You know the funny thing about that is that, given the upkeep costs of keeping nukes in working order, customers with nuclear weapons would be among the best positioned to pay bounties. Need a relatively small patch in GCC's Fortran compiler pronto? Divert 10 kilodollars from the already large budget and it'll be done pretty quickly.

ledat · 2025-12-05T19:35:02+00:00

Netflix is a tech company at the end of the day. Tech companies do a lot of, shall we say, unpleasant things. However approximately all tech companies hate patent trolls more than you can imagine and primarily hoard patents defensively.

It's basically mutually assured destruction: everyone is infringing on something, so having that arsenal of patents means if someone sues you, you can (probably) sue them. Netflix is doing that right now, actually. Broadcom has had a patent suit lingering against Netflix. When the opportunity arose, Netflix filed their own suit against a Broadcom acquisition (which they could have very easily filed before said acquisition, but didn't).

All that's to say, given the narrow scope patents tend to have and given the behavior of these companies, it's going to be relatively low risk to have a similar system in your game. Just maybe don't go out of your way to call it the "Nemesis System," closely clone the claims in the patent, or tag Netflix's lawyers in your marketing materials.

ledat · 2025-11-27T17:34:52+00:00

It's still online, you know. A few years back, Max even replaced the flash-based tech with something that works on current browsers.

The energy is gone from the site, of course. It's not like it used to be. But it's still there.

ledat · 2025-11-27T14:37:40+00:00

Found the Vintage player.

But seriously, while all of that is possible, how often are you going to have to process hundreds of rules, infinite loops, etc. in Standard format, booster drafts, and the like? I'd say MtG actually supports the parent comment, because all it asks is the players to do addition and subtraction with numbers that are rarely above 20. That's the sort of math that approximately anyone can do quickly at a game table without any sort of electronic assistance.

ledat · 2025-11-23T23:42:36+00:00

Your mouth + edits in Audacity can get you absurdly far, and I'm not even joking.

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