please boost it i guess
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hoo boy, Iâm kind of glad Iâve missed the âbuy me a coffeeâ blog discourse until now. I also donât find it offensive at all. Itâs so low pressure. I am conscious of the creep of capitalism into everything, but I will spend that energy fighting nurses having to bid on hospital shifts in the creep of the gig economy versus a very low pressure option to support writers you value.
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I just finished my blog post about my most recent event I vended at, plus some thoughts at the end about why I do it. :)
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Aughhh that is frustrating with the foam board signage!! The wi-fi thing sucks - I have had to buy the convention wifi before too (but alas the comfort of having an internet connection for card payments is usually worth it).
I love the serendipitous moment of you getting assigned a table beside your gf and also being local is amazing.
The excitement and energy I get from in-person events is unbeatable. I always have about a million snacks at my table (usually healthy-ish like apples and carrots and nuts/protein rich snacks) and feel like I am snacking all day but I do also get a lot of coffee haha. I can get very drained socially too so I feel you.
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Thank you for reading!!!
ooh i definitely need to starting bringing lots of snacks to cons, this specific convention center does not allow any food or drink to be brought inside (so everyone has to sneak the snacks in on setup day) which means if I donât plan ahead I donât get any later during the weekend lol
That was a fun read! And it was great to hear that you had a good vendor experience.
My son goes to the convention every year because his girlfriend - well, not sure exactly what the volunteer job title is but she wrangles guest speakers on the various panels. He just goes to go. I can confirm (through him) that the lines for attendees were ridiculous. He said the con had the same problem last year and seemingly did nothing to fix it. He also said the light rail got horribly bogged down which, youâd think they wouldâve planned ahead, knowing about both the con and the sports event.
Was the nice sushi place Harumi? Itâs a yearly tradition with my son and his girlfriend to go to Harumi during the con.
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Thank you!
oh yeah I attended last year and the lines were terrible!!
And yes, it was Harumi!! haha I guess its a popular spot for convention-goers :)
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I enjoyed your article; as a hobbyist developer I agree with you and the manifesto writer on letting the hobby of making games not be soiled by designing everything to be as marketable as possible.
Iâm enmeshed within the incremental games community, which has been seeing a bit of a crisis lately. Historically, the genre has had almost exclusively free games, many made by hobbyists, and was a genre unique for itâs overlap between players and developers - in part due to the genre having a low barrier to entry thus being a great introduction to programming and game design, and in part due to people who enjoy numbers going up seeming to have overlap with people who enjoy making games, for whatever reason. Often a game is a developerâs first, it initially releases as barely a prototype, and becomes the grounds for them to improve their skills as the game grows in content with a generally pretty positive cycle of feedback.
This community of young hobbyist developers created a culture adverse to monetization over time, being critical of how each design decision that rewards spending takes advantage of the skinner-box (and in fact a lot of the websites the community gathers on prominently display a warning about gaming addiction with a link to SAMHSA). I should also note here a bit of a schism: Iâm discussing communities like r/incremental_games, which mainly focuses on web an desktop games; mobile is filled with MTX heavy games, and mobile players canât as essily go on to make games themselves, leading to a very different culture.
Anyways, the current crisis has been two pronged: a game called node buster came out and itâs adjacency to incremental games quickly acknowledged. It featured a short mingame, during which you gained currency, then dropped you into an upgrade tree to improve yourself for the next run of the minigame. The minigame becomes a bit of a bullet heaven over time and then you win a couple hours in. A nice game, sold for a couple bucks on steam, and it got popular. And once developers saw a short, easy to make game be successful, it spawned a gold rush of games, which drowned out the relatively niche genre. The subreddit got an influx of developers who werenât previously players, who were asking for money for short games that would never grow into the epics the genre was known for, and theyâd post frequently before release to build up wishlists. These are normal behaviours for people trying to succeed on steam, but the influx crowded out the best parts of the community. The subreddit has had to enforce rules like requiring posts to contain something playable, to cut down on ads for unreleased games, and only allow devs to post about their games at most 1/mo. Another major site within the community, galaxy.click, is banning new demos from being submitted in the lead ups to steam next fest.
Side note: steam also just renamed the clicker tag to incremental, finally acknowledging the genre properly. I believe itâs in response to this recent trend of incremental games that are obviusly not accurately described as clickers.
The other prong is AI. Many have realized that AI can make websites very easily, and coupled with incremental gamesâ low barrier to entry people can one shot a whole game with even just a single prompt. So weâve also been getting an influx of games that all have the same AI tells, from developers who are not really making the game and are not learning and growing from the experience. And because vibe code is famously unmaintainable and prone to breaking as it reaches significant line counts, these games are quickly abandoned for a whole new game that was only a prompt away. Itâs gotten so bad the subreddit recently required all game posts to disclose their use or non-use of AI (the latter being required to avoid witch hunts on devs).
These two issues have made the community feel very different, and itâs still trying to adapt and preserve the things that have made the community so appealing historically.
Also Iâd like to defend the manifestoâs suggestion to break free of the shackles of âgood game designâ. I think people do tend to fall into repeating conventional design without properly interrogating it. Itâs good to experiment and break the ârulesâ, and thatâs how we get innovative and subversive takes that move the medium forward. Those are the kind of risky things big budget commercial games canât do, and is a strength of hobbyists.
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I agree there, but you gotta know why the rules exist to break them. If your game just has bad controls because you donât know how to make smooth ones, itâs probably a bad thing. If your game has bad controls to act as an additional challenge of the player, like Castlevania or QWOP, thatâs something else.
Also about the incremental games thing: that sounds like a nightmare. I, personally, am more a fan of the incremental games with a defined end (gnorp apologue for example, nodebuster too) so I was a big fan of having more short and condensed titles, but⊠yeah, thatâs the danger of any game becoming popular on steam. Thereâs thousands of balatro clones for that same reason.
I have published a new weekly recap blog post, featuring: âCassette Beasts 2002â announced, briefly trying out Nintendo Switch 2 and âPokĂ©mon Pokopiaâ, collective PokĂ©dex of favourite PokĂ©mon, and more.
Just posted my second link dump of the ten most-recent bookmarks I added to my links page. Thereâs some anti-AI stuff, a couple of interesting articles from the Public Domain Review on tardigrades and early modern witchcraft hysteria, stuff some guyâs dog loves, and more!
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I should clarify: I enjoyed nodebuster and many many other nodebuster-likes. Itâs not actually the games themselves that bother me. Itâs more that places that use to be about sharing new games and updates that were free, by people who were fans of the genre and stepping into game design, turned into varius sneak peeks and trailers for games that cost money and more often than not were just wishlist farming for games you canât even play yet! Fortunately the âgame posts must have something playableâ rule helped with those at least.
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Two posts today, one about joining the IndieWeb Webring, the other about Town Square â a nifty meeting place you put on your site.
Iâm happy to join the IndieWeb Webring but it wasnât exactly easy
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The Weekly Wrap Up is posted! Links this week include an encyclopedia of all things to do with herring, an article on why old school sites like Ianâs Shoelace Site are disappearing from the web and an interactive map of lighthouses (and beacons and minor lights) of the northern seas. I had some more postcard club mail come in and I did some get out the vote postcarding of my own. Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.
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Glad you figured out the IndieAuth stuff! I was stumped and eventually decided that this ring wasnât for people like me who need a tiiiiny more hand-holding
@DivergentRays man, the interview with professor shoelace is just so disheartening. And why I donât make or put art on the internet anymore. All passion projects have this edge of dit:dread right now.
For Ian, the cumulative effect of all of these factors is a deep sadness, a sinking feeling of exhaustion and futility. What is the point of adding value to the internet if it is only going to rob you? Why do research, make diagrams, and develop new knots?
Edit: Ok I am even further down this rabbithole to Ianâs page about linking etiquette which is such a great page to have!
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I find iOSâs 
emoji (along with all of its other blue and white arrow emoji) absolutely hideous, so it bothered me a lot that my Jekyll blogâs footnote return links all got converted to that emoji on iOS. I wrote a quick little blog post on how to fix the issue with CSS!
Try indieauth.com. All I needed was a link tag with my email in it.
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