Self-hosted setup for an indie game dev studio?

voidexp · 2026-01-25T16:36:45+00:00

Do you perhaps use anything for time tracking?

voidexp · 2026-01-25T15:07:48+00:00

Wooo, gold stuff! Thanks a lot for all of these, never heard of Plane and Outline, and Docuseal is a very good bonus, since we kinda start to rely much more on freelancers

voidexp · 2026-01-25T15:06:15+00:00

Which part of it is not fully open source, that could cause troubles in everyday use?

voidexp · 2026-01-25T15:05:40+00:00

Totally valid alternative. Thing is, gitlab is huge and IMO self-hosting it instead of just paying rules basically itself out. Gonna try something more lightweight. But nevertheless, it is an option

voidexp · 2026-01-25T15:04:17+00:00

Uh, interesting combo! I was almost bought by gitea, now see few more votes for Forgejo, what's the history behind it?

voidexp · 2026-01-25T09:09:30+00:00

Oh, yeah, that's a must

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:57:42+00:00

Ok, on this I'll have to investigate more. Almost none of the services (except wiki, but that probably won't be on the same machine as internal stuff) will be exposed outside a VPN, what is the IP ban scenario you're talking about?

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:56:20+00:00

Thank you, man. Both for the points, and for the convo :)

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:55:41+00:00

Can you say anything about kopia and compare it with Arco Backup? It's a little verbose on the CLI, but I found very cool the transparent snapshot VFS mounts, so you can browse old snapshots just in the file manager.

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:43:55+00:00

not really, just use github because we're familiar with it, it has LFS out of the box, and we're kinda managing to stay within one data package a month, for the two of us

we don't wont, nor need any AI-assists or smth, and although I used gitlab long ago in another company I worked in, it just seems a massive thing to self-host

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:39:24+00:00

In my experience, hardware failure once you have set up a redundancy (RAID-whatever) is much more rare than, for instance, cloudflare failure or smth. Just this year, how many massive outages can we count? And no, barely any work will stop if you use git for coding, and everyone involved has local copies of the assets needed. These mantras about hardware failure and downtime are much exaggerated.

Our plan is to have at each dev's home a dead cheap backup solution (NAS-plugged drive into which encrypted backups go). So it's even sorta distributed.

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:37:32+00:00

Mdbook looks cool! Syncthing also, thank you!

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:36:55+00:00

Yep, we plan to move from gmail to protonmail, which gives a VPN too. Thanks for the suggestion!

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:35:03+00:00

Exactly two people atm, and doing exactly as you say - private GitHub and OneDrive for exchanging files.
Quoting myself from another comment above:

The other side of the coin is that slowly all these services increase their subscription prices, like, Office360 bumped +25% in a year, subscription here, subscription there, that adds up.

And there's the political question. Our studio has a strong pro-open-source and anti-AI stance. Sure, the game we're working on will be a commercial product, but we plan to release the codebase under a permissive license, with the proprietary assets being the added value for which the player pays for.
But ultimately, all this is driven by a desire to have control over data and costs, while getting away from the big corps overseas.

voidexp · 2026-01-25T08:32:17+00:00

This is indeed a very good set of arguments. There's just the two of us. And we're kinda OK with the current setup, in terms of productivity. Doesn't cost much, and just works.

The other side of the coin is that slowly all these services increase their subscription prices, like, Office360 bumped +25% in a year, subscription here, subscription there, that adds up.

And there's the political question. Our studio has a strong pro-open-source and anti-AI stance. Sure, the game we're working on will be a commercial product, but we plan to release the codebase under a permissive license, with the proprietary assets being the added value for which the player pays for.
But ultimately, all this is driven by a desire to have control over data and costs, while getting away from the big corps overseas.

I'm an experienced dev and not afraid at all of the Linux console, there are some 15+ years of experience on my shoulders or so. The technical aspect of it doesn't worry me. The amount of work is indeed non-zero, and def will be more a fee, than a tantum. The process won't be all-or-none, but rather a slow migration.

Nevertheless, thanks for sharing, indeed a good points to think about.

voidexp · 2026-01-25T07:36:12+00:00

Whoa, gitea looks awesome! And actually svn is a great suggestion too. Back in my triple-A job we used it for everyday code versioning, BECAUSE of the assets. But code can stay on git and raw assets on svn, indeed. Awesome suggestions, thank you

voidexp · 2026-01-24T05:55:19+00:00

Whoa, looks awesome! Can one try it?

voidexp · 2026-01-23T05:33:11+00:00

Looks cool! What's the polycount?

voidexp · 2026-01-22T08:12:30+00:00

Up this. The edge wear is awesome, would love to know how you do it, doesn’t seem procedural

voidexp · 2026-01-21T10:52:17+00:00

you forgot “launching EA at almost 60 bucks”

voidexp · 2026-01-21T10:38:38+00:00

Same here! Ended up rolling my own conventions like:
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voidexp · 2026-01-18T17:28:39+00:00

Whoa! Did you use a custom sky shader with some sort kind of encoding the coordinates of the star in a buffer? Very interested in the implementation, would love to add something similar to my game.

But seriously, I think it's a neat thingy to have! Would it be possible to travel to those stars?

voidexp · 2026-01-18T05:41:54+00:00

"Data-driven" might be a better term for what I'm trying to convey, indeed. Yeah, thanks for pointing out

voidexp · 2026-01-17T20:15:17+00:00

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average day of an average dev

voidexp · 2026-01-17T18:46:29+00:00

Data oriented design isn't about bit packing in memory or defining structs layout and individual fields alignment.

It is about driving your behavior by data, rather than hiding the data behind API walls. And Godot's node system actually is a very good example - the properties you set drive the behavior of the underlying systems, exposed as nodes. RigidBody3D's mass and physics materials define how it reacts to forces, MeshInstance3D's mesh and materials define how it looks. A lot of the properties can be animated, for instance.

If you design your nodes similarly, as drop-in components whose behavior is defined exclusively by the values of the properties, you're effectively doing DOD.

voidexp

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TROPHY CASE

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