As a lifer of gaming (with a wife with similar tastes), prior to having kids my friends and I would have the discussions about "raising our kids right on the old games". I can't claim to be some classic purist, my last 25 years of gaming has been 90%+ Halo, with other competitive shooters and hardcore racing sims, but we still own almost all of our old systems.
My oldest is 7, and my youngest almost 5, and they came into gaming in a round-about way. My sister was visiting when the oldest was 3 or 4, and asked to play "an old Sonic 3D game". So, I pulled the Dreamcast out of storage, hooked everything up, and she played for all of 15 minutes before getting bored. However, my daughter was enamored. Immediately asked to play and even knowing how janky old Sonic was, I obliged.
Honestly, the rest is history. I'm not exaggerating when I say that our living room TV currently has a Dreamcast, a Gamecube, an Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and Switch hooked up to it. Both girls are huge Sonic fans, and play everything from rereleases of the Genesis games, to every brand new Sonic game that comes out, along with a whole mix of other age appropriate games (3D Marios, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart all being staples in our household).
My point in all of this is that if you expose them to the older stuff at a young age and it clicks, they'll explore the gaming landscape in their own way. I've also got an 11 year old brother that plays Fortnite with his friends every day, but also is trying to collect every single Lego game that's come out since they started the Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. series of games. Kids will like what they're going to like, but having parents that are enthusiastic about the breadth of what the medium has to offer will encourage them to dig being the modern offerings.
It’s funny, I had the same experience, and my stepdad told me recently that they close to buying me one, and eventually decided to just do a full upgrade of our machine instead. I’m definitely thankful we got a brand new machine instead.
Complete gut reaction to your first question, my preference would be two fold:
1. An option to start the game in timeless mode
2. When I fail a word, prior to showing me the word, give me the option to enter timeless mode for the rest of the run, such that it doesn't ruin the current round, and that run is now excluded
As for the second, that's more suggestive and I don't care as much either way. Personally me for me I've just been going down the archive trying each day. I enjoy competitive games, so once I miss a word I don't have much interest in continuing on.
I too think timeless mode should be an option, and since you're telling me i'm in "top 10%" or whatever at the end, Timeless can just not be on the leaderboard, instead maybe just use a local-storage streak calculator or something to reward users instead.
^parent's #2 tip is great too, as I was sad to cut the fun short when I couldn't guess EXAMPLE today.
Just minor notes though really. The game was fun and seemed nice and polished. And obviously allowing playing using the keyboard was a great idea that I appreciated.
In high school and college I worked at a Christmas tree farm, and eventually was also a landscaper/hardscaper, caring for, digging up and planting trees, and building retaining walls and patios. At the time it made for good motivation to keep doing well in school, as the hours were long, and while easy for a fit 18-22 year old, definitely back breaking kind of stuff.
However, looking back on it I miss those weeks and months on end of having 6+ hours a day to be outside, working my body, but doing tasks that let my mind wander all over. No doubt those years of daydreaming helped me become the person I am today, and everybody has to grow up at some point, but I do wish I could get more of that back into my daily life. In fact, I think a large part of my current path towards early retirement is just to have that sort of time back.
Two months ago I went full time on my indie game after just under a year and a half of part time work. I’ve been prototyping in Godot for about 6 years now, and finally had a game that my business partner and I were really interested in and felt matched the current market desires. It’s cozy world builder, drawing inspiration for Sim City, Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims, with an aesthetic influence of Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and the like.
This was very much a passion project and an idea I’ve wanted to see alive for decades, and also let me explore some tech I wanted to get deeper on. I’m bullish on the the tighter integration of CPUs, GPU style cores, and shared memory. Our game, LocoMo, relies heavily of GPU processing of entities under the hood.
Interesting project! The zoom-out revealing a much larger map was really cool after having spent time in the zoomed in view without suspecting there was much more to see around! One thing I'm curious about in these kind of sandbox games is the emerging behaviors we could see and that I feel can bring a lot of life to virtual worlds. Do you already know what platforms you will be targeting?
The emergent behavior is very much our end goal, it’s the reason everything is very systems oriented, and we’re trying to put as much control in the players hands as possible. One of our biggest remaining efforts is adding the depth to the villagers under the hood, and integrating tons of little animations and interactions, but we’re confident on the vision!
Targeting (and wishlist-able now!) Steam first, with development actively happening on Windows, Mac, Linux and the Steam Deck. Closely followed by mobile, where I’ve currently got iOS builds working for a proof of concept, just not proper controls. After that we’d love to target consoles.
It’s such an untapped domain, and despite the consoles being more tightly integrated this generation, we’re still mostly using the horsepower for traditional AAA realism-focused graphics, as opposed to this whole new world of computation available.
Edit: Also, thank you! The game has evolved a ton over the last year and is really coming into its own stylistically, bit by bit.
Not sure to what extent you're looking for a reboot to be representative of the original, but I've been following the development of this indie spiritual successor for some time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
From planning region-wide infrastructure (the thing I love about city builders/OpenTTD) right down to deciding how many wardrobes someone needs. How well can it do those things and everything inbetween?
But, I'll definitely be giving it a go. Thanks for posting the link.
I’ve been a copilot and ChatGPT subscriber for probably close to two years now, give or take a couple of months, and I had a trusted friend telling me for months to give Claude a try.
It took about two weeks of really running it through its paces, and constantly slamming against the limit on it to convince me I had to upgrade to at least the 100/month sub, and at this point I wouldn’t blink to bump that to the 200/month if necessary.
I 100% believe we’re in a bubble, and that this level of compute isn’t sustainable at this price point, but for as long as I have it, I’m going to run it at the redline.
I’m a solo dev working on a project that I’ve just gone full-time on, after about 1.5 years of part time work. It’s a codebase that I laid the groundwork in, and has very well established systems, standards, and constraints.
The work I’m using Claude to do is the exact work I would be doing myself, but it does it at somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10x the pace I could have. I don’t know that I could get the same rate of production if I managed a team of 2-3 programmers. Right now, it’s literally almost perfect at taking my iterative suggestions, and implementing them at that accelerated pace.
Honestly the hardest part is dealing with the fact that at the end of the day, I have to understand this codebase perfectly (solo dev and all that), so I have to take in changes to it that are also 5-10x the rate my normal intuition would. But, again, the plus side is that it’s implementing them essentially exactly as I would have, as it has ~20k lines of code that I wrote to use as an example.
If I were to hire even one other programmer, I’d be paying well north of 5k/month, and I’d not only be managing a super computer programmer tool, but an actual human being as well. $100/month might as well be free comparatively.
Because I don’t believe 50% gross margins at face value, as being discussed in this thread I think the economics of all of these things are far more complex than that.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t staked my investment portfolio on there being a bubble, I’m just preparing for the worst and doing as much work as I can with Claude before a potential massive rug pull happens.
I'm not sure I've ever read something from someone so high up in a company that gave me such a strong feeling for "I'd like to work for these people". If job posts could be so informal and open ended, this post could serve as one in the form of a personality fit litmus test.
Once I gave this sometime I actually enjoyed the concept quite a bit. I think it's a novel twist on the bullet hell genre, and I'm a sucker for single button/input style games. I'm playing on a mouse, specifically a Logitech G502 that I can "unlock" the screen wheel to be almost frictionless, which to me feels like the right meta for a game like this.
Couple constructive criticisms:
- Is there a pause button that I'm missing? If not, add one, I want to actually play this more but I need to be able to take breaks
- The beginning is too easy. I'm biased as I like difficult games that encourage mastery, but I found myself dying early on runs because I was getting impatient with how slow the early progression is
- I haven't played enough yet to know whether monsters eventually come from the top, but eventually they should, it would greatly increase the difficulty curve
- Hitboxes feel a little meh, and don't seem to match the sprites
- If there's sound, it wasn't working for me, which leads to...
- Pump up the juice. You've got a great core loop, but you need the juice. One of my favorite game dev talks of all time would be perfect for you to watch and iterate with (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U)
- Monster diversity. Again, maybe I didn't play long enough yet to get to newer monsters, but from what I can tell the only diversity is their looks, health, and approach angle. Monsters that are faster and incentivize different movement, or that shoot back at you, or blow up after shooting so you have to avoid, etc.
I'll stop there, don't want an absolute laundry list. Keep at it, you've got a unique foundation, it'd be a shame not to polish it up!
Maybe add a charge meter that can fire a pulse weapon with a press of the spacebar after so many seconds of play. Unlock it later on in the game or something, idk.
I played for about 300 monsters and it got boring.
My oldest is 7, and my youngest almost 5, and they came into gaming in a round-about way. My sister was visiting when the oldest was 3 or 4, and asked to play "an old Sonic 3D game". So, I pulled the Dreamcast out of storage, hooked everything up, and she played for all of 15 minutes before getting bored. However, my daughter was enamored. Immediately asked to play and even knowing how janky old Sonic was, I obliged.
Honestly, the rest is history. I'm not exaggerating when I say that our living room TV currently has a Dreamcast, a Gamecube, an Xbox One, PS3, PS4, and Switch hooked up to it. Both girls are huge Sonic fans, and play everything from rereleases of the Genesis games, to every brand new Sonic game that comes out, along with a whole mix of other age appropriate games (3D Marios, Animal Crossing, Smash Bros, and Mario Kart all being staples in our household).
My point in all of this is that if you expose them to the older stuff at a young age and it clicks, they'll explore the gaming landscape in their own way. I've also got an 11 year old brother that plays Fortnite with his friends every day, but also is trying to collect every single Lego game that's come out since they started the Lego Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. series of games. Kids will like what they're going to like, but having parents that are enthusiastic about the breadth of what the medium has to offer will encourage them to dig being the modern offerings.