DaveSapien

A life time ago I was a ceramicist among other art things. And one thing I love todo was a Seaweed firing. I would say its easier than his method, but i can see his to be more convenient. All you need for a seaweed firing is a beach with a good amount of seaweed.

You start by building your fire with your ceramics in the center.

Placing some kindling, paper, small sticks, a standard camp fire type of thing.

Then some dry seaweed on top to make a mound.

Once everything has taken light you can add wet seaweed on top, covering the mound.

The idea being, that as the fire goes it drys out the fresh seaweed then combusts it. And you keep that cycle going for as long as needed.

You can add air tunnels if needed. Windy days are much better as you can really get a inferno going in there. I've managed to get temp's over 1300 degrees.

Firings can last days for very large ones (size of a truck), my longest it about 8 hours or so (size of a office desk).

They had me at the loading sounds.

I often crack open my ZXPlecturm app to play those wonderful loading sounds. Chills.

This was way more fun than it should be. Wonderful! Reminds me of Linelight on Steam and my game Kanso, both have 1D game mechanics (but with 2D visuals).

This has convinced me to add prepossessed fill areas on my kids colouring book for iOS. (no IAP, subscription, no ads, etc, like the general sentiment here) Been thinking about this for a while, but things are fast enough on an iPad that it took a back seat, nice to be inspired to go that extra mile :)

Yeah absolutely, early morning memories of better times.

Thank you! Likewise!

I'm not too bothered about Steam's discoverability, its at least honest(ish) about it. The more reviews and sales you get the more its pushed...as far as I can tell.

I've found discoverability/promotion to be the most difficult, esoteric in the indie game enthusiast spaces. That really surprised me.

I'm also a solo game dev with a recently released game.

All this is really spot on with my experience. It just not clear if the author hired an artist or he just recommends it...its quite common for Game dev's to claim they made a game by themselves but actually contracted out the music, art, animation, etc.

Somewhat of a bug bearer with me as there are some genuine solo dev's creating great work that get overshadowed with the whole solo dev marking spin.

That has been my impression of the company's games, but only an impression as I don't play their games.

I might check out this new mobile game for study though.

Yes. No, each industry has its special flavour of abhorrent behaviour.

I'm not 'taring' the entire industry at all. Indeed I said, "vast number of honourable people in the industry", what I am concerned with is just how wide spread the contempt is for customers that play these games. And what the contempt does in allowing utterly contemptible business practices.

There will be, for sure, lives ruined because of this game's predatory practices. It really sickens me.

To quote myself from a previous thread:

"If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all. It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.

I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society. Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on. Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa for example)"

Here here.

Just came here to say congratulations! Releasing a game is a real accomplishment and you should be very proud.

Well done!!!

No problem, glad to help!

Realised that was a bit snarky of a comment, I'm using a a modified version of Cocos2dx .v4.

It took way longer to create than if I was using Unity, but its a great solution for a small and performant end product. I was able to get Kanso down below 100MB and will run on a total potato. Something I highly doubt I could do in Unity without some serious effort.

A computer for the most part.

Xcode, I use Xcode for the most part and visual studio for the Steam version.

Yeah sure thing, this is Kanso on iOS (its also on Steam)

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1384257762

Total remakes from basically scratch. I've settled on rolling with c++ with no(minimal) external dependancies as the best solution...still using Unity for some projects, its just so fast to get stuff done!

Yeah, spread that over 20 games/apps. It can really mount up, I can think of other indie game dev's that only publish on iOS that their games are now forever lost.

It's a real cultural loss.

If only it where only that simple.

There are many dependancies that require some kind of reimplementation, it's a pain.

I have made things easier (in the long run) with my last game. I wrote it all in c++ with all dependancies under my control. I was thinking >20 years ahead for that one.

Some, most of them not.

You are spot on, but that might even be the best case scenario. Thing can quickly turn south and cost quite a bit of time.

Zero, just my time. And the cost of fixing all the problems with new versions of Xcode, Unity, and whatever else was used and has now changed.

It can become quite the rabbit hole, and thus quite costly.

This has happened to me also (indie game dev) a few years ago.

The number is about 20 or so games that have been removed by Apple because they hadn't been updated in two years. The worked perfectly fine on all the new hardware/software and even work today.

On top of that, I know that there is another 30 or so apps I was involved in with clients that have also been removed.

These weren't the biggest apps/games in the world, but they were all high quality finished products that had nothing wrong with them. Its just the cost of re-publishing each one out-weighed the return, so I didn't have much of a choice sadly. I do have plans to re-publish some of them, however they have to take a back seat for current work.

All that to say, I have a large part of my portfolio of work that is no longer available to the public, which just sucks.

oh yeah!!

" loading sounds with your own mouth " I feel thats a video or it didn't happen moment.

Damn, I forgot it was the 40th anniversary today!

The ZX Spectrum was my first computer and I was a bit too young to write any software for it sadly, but it was my second (TV Pong was my first) introduction to gaming...on a black and white TV.

Still managed to get into tinkering with computers and it opened a big door for me later in life. I am now a game developer (designer/engineer), and might not have gone down this amazing path if it wasn't for the familiarity with computing at an early age.

It was such an important computer and I'm glad to see the price of capable computers continuing to fall, so that more and more kids can have a similar experience to mine.

The loading sounds still give me chills!!

If you're looking to relive the loading sounds as a musical toy, check out the ZX Plectrum.

I thought I was having a stroke when I first booted up the NES virtual console and the start screen from Mario Land (original GameBoy) flashed on screen for a split second. Anyone else have this experience, all most two years ago?

No grocery store has my personal details...and yes I also have a big problem with grocery stores employing that tactic against children. Its psychological abuse and I will never, have never, taken a child in these places.

Horrible behaviour is not acceptable because other companies do it. What kind of argument is that?

Calling customers a User, is calling them a human being with a certain behaviour attached (using your app/service).

Naming your customers animals is a reflection of attitudes towards these customers. A hostile attitude I have tackled multiple times and every time I have called out, walked out, or changed the company. Its hard, not for everyone and I cant recommend it. I am just too aware of the tragic social impact of these tactics, and I have to try and not make the world a worse place.

Thank you for confirming what I said.

I know I won't convince you one way or the other. I've seen statements eerily similar to yours before, that I feel that it might be a regurgitation from some article or book somewhere.

Note the use of dehumanising terms, literally calling customers animals and 'cannon fodder'.

This is what this (part of the) industry thinks of the people that play their games, cattle.

At great expense to my carrier I have out and out refused to take part in creating these predatory practices. If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all. It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.

I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society. Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on. Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa).

All the people in our society that can control themselves the least are the target. And these people are precisely the target, specifically these people, the 0.001% of players that make up the majority of their revenue. Some companies find out who they are and continually and specifically court them with free t-shirts, beta access, 'free' in-game gifts, etc. In some companies its a whole department that do this kind of customer management. Developing personal relationships all to keep them hooked.

Now most companies don't do this, its much more automated and in-game that this Catfishing, if I can use a term like that.

At the fundamental level predatory games are not actually games they are variable ratio reinforcement schedule machines. Think Guinea pigs in a lab being rewarded for pushing a button. An ultra advanced slot machine that continually changes it's odd's depending on what the app thinks you will be vulnerable too. And it attacks. Now, if you aren't a vulnerable person you will see the obvious things like the pop-ups asking you to spend money or a timer mechanism. And you might think how stupid people must be to fall for that, but you wont see the game's dynamic balancing, because you are not the target. If you're not the target you will never progress further up the attack protocol. So it will always just look like an innocent game to most people.

Its insidious and immoral. (I'm mostly talking about mobile games...mostly)

From a manufacturers point of view its a really hard sale, a smaller device will alway have 'poor' battery life or use a less powerful cpu to keep the battery life on par with bigger phones. Either way reviewers will tank it for either of these reasons. As well as not enough room for a flagship camera array, again reviewers will pan it for this reason also.

Couple that with a niche audience and the cost of ordering a batch of different sized screens (in smaller quantities), it's just not that attractive a market to get into.

In short, they would be trying to sell a device with smaller profits that they KNOW will get panned by reviewers to a niche audience.