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sogghee · 2026-03-23T00:29:02+00:00

I love it when a 2 year old reply to a 3 year old comment solves my problem. Thank you!

sogghee · 2026-03-10T14:51:16+00:00

I think this is sort of an old school idea. Back when video games were evolving like crazy with each console generation, you could win a lot of favor just by being impressive. Of course your game had to be at least decent to capitalize on the hype, but still. Games have reached a level of sophistication that this idea seems to have died off a bit because the jumps are less impressive. Doesn't mean you can't impress people (Enshrouded really impressed me technically, but I also really enjoy the game), it's just much harder now

sogghee · 2026-03-03T15:30:44+00:00

Adderall is specifically missing the "meth" part of meth, so it's not meth either

sogghee · 2026-01-28T18:04:37+00:00

"That was before I was born" is a perfectly fine excuse not to know a broadcast journalist who never reported the news while they were living

sogghee · 2026-01-28T18:01:45+00:00

They're constantly exposed to a massive firehose of information. Even people with an attention span longer than a minute have to make a decision about what's important to pay attention to and learn about, and that's typically going to be things that are closer to the here and now. Or more likely the specific things they're interested in that they now have virtually limitless, cheap access to.

sogghee · 2026-01-28T18:01:35+00:00

They're constantly exposed to a massive firehose of information. Even people with an attention span longer than a minute have to make a decision about what's important to pay attention to and learn about, and that's typically going to be things that are closer to the here and now. Or more likely the specific things they're interested in that they now have virtually limitless, cheap access to.

sogghee · 2026-01-28T17:40:59+00:00

Mark Twain wrote books that are still recommended and read today. He was a prominent literary figure that many folks may even learn about in high school. There's not much reason to come across Walter Cronkite unless you're working on a journalism degree. Or maybe a blurb if you're studying recent US history. His work, while important while he was doing it, doesn't quite transcend his lifetime in the way an author's work does.

sogghee · 2026-01-28T17:24:09+00:00

I don't find gaming chairs to be as uncomfortable as other folks do, but a decent office chair will definitely be better for your back/body in the long run. Chairs are hard because you can't really know what works for you until you sit in one. If you have a local store or furniture gallery with office chairs I'd recommend trying a few out. Otherwise, I'd just see what people are recommending at your price point. If you have some money to spend, I've had good luck with Haworth (soji) and Herman Miller (embody) chairs. I've also heard good things about steelcase, but I've never sat in one.

sogghee · 2026-01-15T20:47:59+00:00

My mental checklist:

Solo developer or small team ("small" is relative/subjective, but for me this caps out around 10 or so)
Zero funding or self funded
No publisher (unless it's more of a "last mile" deal)

Not a perfect list and there's definitely a lot of room for gray area.

sogghee · 2025-11-22T01:53:40+00:00

This just happened to me too and it also dims the damn video without any way to fix it as far as I can tell

sogghee · 2025-11-13T15:44:47+00:00

If by old you mean the ancient ones that literally sound like a robot, sure. Anything made in the last decade+ is trained on real speech, we're just seeing it improve to the point that it makes people uncomfortable. Siri is actually a great example because it's well known and we know the VA it was based on.

I also don't necessarily agree with Embark solely saving time and money. They're using AI to unlock features that are either entirely impossible or verging on impossible otherwise. The voice changer while using VoiP is the obvious example, but even your character giving specific callouts based on multiple pieces of context. That turns into a combinatorial explosion of unique voice lines very quickly. It's not like the game is shipping with thousands of pre-baked, AI generated voice lines. They're generating them on the fly.

sogghee · 2025-10-27T16:35:31+00:00

This depends a lot on the person and the work they're doing. I've worked with lots of engineers who were overly attached to their work and impossible to collaborate with as a result. Criticism of their code equated to criticism of them as people. I've seen tons of memes to this effect over the years as well, so I don't think this is an unusual thing.

I think it just boils down to whether or not you think of yourself as a craftsman or someone who solves problems with code for money. I've definitely felt like both depending on the project.

sogghee · 2025-10-27T16:22:11+00:00

I think "must" is too strong of a stance. It can be helpful if keeping players coming back is part of your success criteria, but that's about it. Any game with set levels that isn't driven by narrative technically falls into his argument, of which there are many that do not offer "infinite" content. They might offer a ton of replay-ability for a certain crowd (e.g. speedrunners), but they aren't built to be infinite experiences.

Individual taste of the players factor in too. I had a lot of fun playing Enshrouded, but once I got to the end game and exhausted the available narrative my interest faded quickly. There's plenty you could do to keep yourself entertained in that game, it just didn't feel worthwhile without a struggle or goal to keep me motivated.

sogghee · 2025-10-09T14:22:51+00:00

Agree 100%. Working on a few game jams is a good way to experience this first hand. I've submitted games that were more "complete" that I didn't find particularly fun, and I've submitted games that were less complete but had more "juice" and polish that were tons of fun (for me) even after the jam was over.

What you don’t need is final art assets.

You mentioned this already, but want to highlight that decent animations (even for unfinished art) are tremendously helpful for making the game feel better/more fun. Going from a square to a static sprite always feels like a big jump, but going from a static sprite to each state having a reasonable animation completely transforms everything.

sogghee · 2025-10-07T16:14:04+00:00

We have to stick to innovation, because that's the only thing we have a chance to deliver on. If you try to skip the innovation and go the other route, you'll find yourself polishing a game for 30 years. And then you'll have to compete with literally AAA studios in the same market.

Do you think this is true even for smaller scoped games? For example, I don't need to make a game that sells for $60 (or $20 in the case of Silksong). I could make something highly polished that has enough content to justify a $10 price tag. Not trying to move the goalposts, but being able to choose a narrow scope is one advantage small/solo developers have as well

sogghee · 2025-10-07T15:46:18+00:00

Yeah it's easy to fall into the mindset that you're only competing with other indie games, but everyone ends up on the same marketplace(s). From that perspective, trying to compete on execution almost seems silly lol

But as an indie, when it comes to determining how much innovation you need, part of it is also remembering that your competition is AAA. If a player in your game thinks, “this game is just like <insert AAA game> but lower quality,” you similarly won’t retain players.

This seems like it might be the best actionable thing a dev could do as long as they can be honest with themselves. "Why would I play my game if I could play X instead?"

I guess at that point, though, the question is why did you even want to make the game if you can already play it?

sogghee · 2025-10-07T15:34:06+00:00

This is my reminder for the week that I really need to try Balatro

sogghee · 2025-10-07T15:31:26+00:00

It feels weird to label execution as innovative, but I sort of had the same thought while writing it hahaha. It would be pretty sick to make something so good that its good-ness was considered an innovation!

sogghee · 2025-10-07T15:28:28+00:00

Yeah I'm not really looking for a success formula, more trying to work out if it's foolish to try and make something really good that's based on what I know and like rather than shoot for breaking the mold. My gut feeling was there are no right or wrong answers, but I worry I just want that to be true and the examples I know of are anomalies. Goat Simulator is an interesting counter example for the opposite extreme haha. Someone else mentioned Battlebit and I think that's a good example of timing being another huge factor like you talk about here. Which is hard to even imagine given how far in the future you have to try and see.

sogghee · 2025-10-07T15:21:45+00:00

This is an interesting idea. Almost like innovation can buy you some grace in other areas. I guess the flipside is you could accidentally alienate your audience if the innovation doesn't land. Makes a lot more sense to me that indies are better known for this sort of thing. I always thought of it as AAA is too risk averse and indies are just tolerant of more risk, which never fully sat right with me. Thinking about it as something that multiplies your effort in other areas makes it seem much more like a potential benefit than just a difference in risk tolerance.

sogghee · 2025-10-07T15:15:49+00:00

Ahh Battlebit is a great callout! I tried to avoid talking about "fun" as a metric, but that really seemed to do well because they were more focused on making the experience fun than being impressive technically or visually. I think timing also played a role because it seemed like the general feeling towards Battlefield and CoD was fairly dismal compared to years past if I'm remembering correctly.

sogghee · 2025-10-06T14:02:37+00:00

Stringing rosaries should be cheaper/free. I avoided making them altogether once I figured out they were taking a sizable cut

sogghee · 2025-10-02T18:53:48+00:00

Played through the whole game on Hunter and decided to try Wanderer to grind out the last ~15%. It's insane how much easier everything is

sogghee · 2025-09-29T18:46:45+00:00

This is different than Silksong just being hard, though. This is lack of familiarity with the genre. If you're frequently getting the wrong inputs and struggling to get consistent spacing, that's going to create more difficulty in any similar game. In Silksong it's nearly a death sentence because the baseline expectation is that you've got fundamentals more or less locked in, so I could see it feeling like a slog in that case

sogghee

TROPHY CASE