3 ms·

> Indie Devs should... Just ship it. "Make games that are fun to make." Sometimes that means "thinking of games as databases." 100s of games released every da

> Indie Devs should... Just ship it. "Make games that are fun to make." Sometimes that means "thinking of games as databases." 100s of games released every day across Steam and the App Store. Who cares? I guess they shipped, but then what? > Don't get bogged down in articles like this, or what's the best tech. Jonathan Blow is excited about Jai. That makes him wake up every day and commit. Secularly Jai will not make the game better. But intellectual stimulation helps you ship. So your advice is a negative sign in front of the right answer: it's pithy and simple, but it's 200% wrong. It's so far off the mark and so steeped into the exact kind of hustlebro culture that is responsible for the 100:1 ratio of bad games to good. > ...maybe good for very big companies Big companies struggle to innovate. They worry way too much about shipping, deadlines, whatever. So they wind up with the least risky and conservative game design. They are interested in deep tech because, if you're making the 100th CS:GO clone, it makes the work intellectually stimulating enough to make you wake up every day and grind 65h/wk for Riot's garbage pay, not just because it makes some kind of secular sense.

raincole 3y ago
> Jonathan Blow is excited about Jai. That makes him wake up every day and commit. Intellectual stimulation helps you ship. Yes, it's a good one. Since he started working on Jai he hardly shipped any game. Thanks for providing examples that supports the parent comment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- adamrezich 3y ago
  > Since he started working on Jai he hardly shipped any game. why do you perceive this as a problem? Braid: 2008 The Witness: 2016 Braid Anniversary Edition (Jai): late 2023 Untitled Sokoban Game (Jai): TBA also, Jai, even in its incomplete state, is a fantastic product.
  - raincole 3y ago
    A remaster of an old game in 7 years. So yeah, "hardly shipped any game". > why do you perceive this as a problem? It's probably not a problem for him. It's not a problem for you either, if your studio can afford spending 7 years on a tool that doesn't generate cash flow. Again I have nothing against Blow. But it's a very good example about how much time it takes to make your own tool chain, even for someone who's smart and experienced. For most of us, we'd better utilize boring techs to ship lowkey fun games.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  > Since he started working on Jai he hardly shipped any game. That's an opinion. Maybe if you looked closer, you'd see: if it weren't intellectually interesting, he wouldn't ship any games, as opposed to a bunch of really cool and fun ones. I can only speak personally. As a game designer, I have never regretted "not" "shipping." Spending the time on design instead, I feel my opinions are far more valued by my design and directing customers, who have bigger budgets and thus will have automatically greater success marketing, polishing, "shipping," etc. anyway. If you think you need to ship in order to find out if something is fun... well, there's your problem. What do you think game design is, an A/B test? In contrast, my former colleagues who emphasized shipping, in the last decade, they have spent 100-10,000x the budgets on putting kind of dull stuff into the App Store. And it was only marginally more stuff. Anyway, I wouldn't ever ask them for an opinion about game design, or whether a prototype is going to be fun, but I would ask Jonathan Blow, so there's that.

raincole 3y ago

> Jonathan Blow is excited about Jai. That makes him wake up every day and commit. Intellectual stimulation helps you ship. Yes, it's a good one. Since he started working on Jai he hardly shipped any game. Thanks for providing examples that supports the parent comment.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
adamrezich 3y ago
> Since he started working on Jai he hardly shipped any game. why do you perceive this as a problem? Braid: 2008 The Witness: 2016 Braid Anniversary Edition (Jai): late 2023 Untitled Sokoban Game (Jai): TBA also, Jai, even in its incomplete state, is a fantastic product.
- raincole 3y ago
  A remaster of an old game in 7 years. So yeah, "hardly shipped any game". > why do you perceive this as a problem? It's probably not a problem for him. It's not a problem for you either, if your studio can afford spending 7 years on a tool that doesn't generate cash flow. Again I have nothing against Blow. But it's a very good example about how much time it takes to make your own tool chain, even for someone who's smart and experienced. For most of us, we'd better utilize boring techs to ship lowkey fun games.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
> Since he started working on Jai he hardly shipped any game. That's an opinion. Maybe if you looked closer, you'd see: if it weren't intellectually interesting, he wouldn't ship any games, as opposed to a bunch of really cool and fun ones. I can only speak personally. As a game designer, I have never regretted "not" "shipping." Spending the time on design instead, I feel my opinions are far more valued by my design and directing customers, who have bigger budgets and thus will have automatically greater success marketing, polishing, "shipping," etc. anyway. If you think you need to ship in order to find out if something is fun... well, there's your problem. What do you think game design is, an A/B test? In contrast, my former colleagues who emphasized shipping, in the last decade, they have spent 100-10,000x the budgets on putting kind of dull stuff into the App Store. And it was only marginally more stuff. Anyway, I wouldn't ever ask them for an opinion about game design, or whether a prototype is going to be fun, but I would ask Jonathan Blow, so there's that.