justdaveisfine

Yeah I think that being such a high number too got some looks.

The same thing happened with small time YouTubers, Pinterest, etc. As soon as there is a ‘potential’ to make millions, people started shifting gears and progressing towards what appeared to be a money making formula, which fundamentally changed the vibe and attitude of the community.

This is a weird one, but there’s been a definite shift in indie game development.

Before Steam Greenlight/Direct and Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and whatever, there wasn’t a huge emphasis on trying to get money out of a game project. I’d speculate most indie (and modders) dev’s goals at the time were to make stuff and hope it was cool enough to show to a studio as a portfolio piece and get hired, as self-publishing was rather difficult at the time.

A lot of conversation and discussion about game dev at the time was just trying out new things or learning how stuff worked and so it was a generally chill environment.

But after the success of things like Braid on the Xbox or Minecraft (when it first released) on the PC, there was a huge direction change into avoiding working for a big studio altogether and getting into self-publishing to make the big bucks. Now its generally considered strange to make something just to make something and not have a community or dev logs or self-promotion.

Its somewhat made me avoid some development communities and I find that kind of frustrating.

I was specifically thinking of books with sexual violence, suicide, or promoting toxic behavior, and even then it does go down to the book’s context.

It sounds kind of ridiculous but this is actually pretty smart. I’d prefer to know what my kids are diving into and maybe set up guardrails or at least warnings if something they were interested in was funky.

My phone.

I broke the screen and had to deal without it for a week. I didn’t realize how often I’d flip it out and start scrolling every moment of downtime I had until I couldn’t do that anymore.

After a few days of that I started to wonder what was so important to catch up on every 15 minutes.

I’d probably argue games that ‘can’ do this well is JRPGs because they tend to be a slow burn and have a lot of small side conversations that are not directly plot related, which allows the characters and relationships to get fleshed out.

The ones that immediately come to mind are FF 8/9/10 but I’m certain there are others.

In games where the romance is like a mechanic and not a part of the story? Hmm that’s a tougher question because I think mechanics/gameification tend to ruin the human part of relationship building.