it’s kind of interesting Ubisoft beat Tarkov to it with the dark zones in The Division which people took to like flies on shit. that was the first extraction shooter I ever saw, tarkov wasn’t popular yet
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You mean, foxx’y
(Not
But Kudos If You Knew Them And Thought The Same Thing, Because Of Lakshary-Raid
)
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i know it apparently worked for this guy but so much indie promo stuff just seems like isekai to me. I Punched Rocks 100 Years And Became This World’s Strongest Woodsman. All Of The Millionaire’s Skill Points Are In “Wishlist.” the fantasy of maxing out an admittedly tedious but OP meta strat and then getting to zoom past everyone wandering around fighting goblins like a schmo. idk i hope this kind of thing gets as oddly specific as actual isekai, i hope indie advice videos in 2 years all have titles like My RPG Maker Game Broke The Bank, Now I’m Forming A Tax-Exempt Digital Hub With The Queen’s Hot Stepsister and I Reincarnated As A Markiplier Thumbnail?!
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this came out today and i hadnt been paying attention so it was very interesting finding this one out when steam notified me a game on my wishlist was now available
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i heard about this earlier! developer seemed kind of like an idiot in addition to everything else. i should point out that before i knew any of this, i also played the demo for this game and it was not good! the style is cool but the design was really unforgiving and imo not well implemented. and also very repetitive. so no one should pretend that this thing would have been supposedly worth engaging with until people found out the developer was a Zionist
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I played the demo for this and it was basically the worst of this microgenre (Post Void-like corridor shooters) I’ve ever played, and I think I’ve played every game in it. In fact, judging by the demo, it’s probably the only game in this genre I would recommend against playing. It’s both very unforgiving AND very annoying. There’s this weird hitstop that accompanies certain actions that completely throws off the rhythm, which is so so so crucial to games like this.
I saw the zionist comments shortly after I played the demo and proceeded to completely write it off.
My overall rating of other corridor shooters:
- Post Void (still the GOAT)
- Cruel (Blood aesthetic with some more interesting mechanics, layers them in cool ways as you progress)
- Mullet Mad Jack (decent showing but kinda weak, main strength is the campaign has an actual through-thread)
I feel like I’m missing one or two here but it’s hard to say since the genre name hasn’t really crystallized and it’s still a microniche.
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Damn, that’s an appealing idea.
EDIT: Like, I’m kind of mad that it won’t happen.
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Man, imagine a colorful, fun game set in the world of Disney’s Robin Hood with its incredibly relaxed country vibe.
It sucks that we’re far from an industry where it would make sense for Disney or a licensee to go back and make a really killer but modestly scoped game pegged to one 56-year-old movie.
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Yeah I think we both played this demo and wrote about it during the same Steam Next Fest, the demo was basically a neat idea & presentation with legit deal-breaking gameplay issues. It theoretically could have been fixed, I actually went and checked today to see if it had an updated demo to see (it instead has no demo at all) and that’s when I saw all this other stuff. Shame but it’s not like there’s a shortage of games not made by douchebags to play instead.
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ive been finding it harder and harder to not feel cynical about this stuff, but i think the noncynical take here is to say that this isn’t quite a “caught in 4k” kind of thing, and that he mostly is just claiming to be following the advice that is seeping out of the rest of the industry and internet
there is a lot to be said with what has been going on with things like ‘engagement’ and gambling mechanics, and friendslop or viral streamer stuff, but really only a small set of people are making those things are maniacally rubbing their hands together and formatting evil plans for generating wishlists. in my opinion most game developers esp. really young ones are playing these types of games themselves, and having those ‘aha’ moments where you want to remix elements of what you are currently into. which is not really anything new to the scene. i dont necessarily love that this is overall the direction games are going but im not convinced its wholly this thing where people have given up or turned to cynicism
like if you are a younger budding game developer it seems worth considering that there just aren’t really places you can go to learn about making games that talk about any other pursuits? and realistically if you started during the pandemic like a lot of the current gen viral success stories seem to have, theres a really weird survivorship bias to the type of games that have seen adoption and conversation has been modelling off of those games ever since.
i guess what i really wish for in these content-creator type videos is to begin seeing more developers talking less about how they made the game and how it performed and engaging more with that gamemaking practice from a personal angle. i suppose its not sensationalist enough as a topic, and tbh most of the people who are really in tune with themselves as to why they make games just arent the type of people making youtube content. it just seems like theres a trap when it comes to the information people have access to
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‘i made this bitsy game as a gift to my friend to celebrate the life and times of their pet iguana. but before i get to that let me tell you about SurfShark’
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Anyone remember Lovely Planet from 2014? Colourful flat-shaded 3D run-based FPS with a soundtrack by bo en? Same developer. Never did finish it (too hard) but have fond memories of listening to its soundtrack on long distance bike rides to my partner’s place when we first started going out… aah, those halcyon days of… uhh… gamergate?
god it feels weird that that memory is now forever caught up in this bullshit… unsurprising, mind you, given that the last decade+ has kinda felt like one painfully long game of Guess Who?: Fascists, Rapists & Ratfuckers Edition where it slowly starts to dawn on you that all the dinky plastic portraits are… empty?!
…a-and maybe… m-m-maybe they’re inside your head…
RIGHT THIS SECOND!
…PISSING!!
…that’s right…
PISSING ON YOUR MOST CHERISHED OF MEM—
…
“huh?”
…
“…what did you say??”
…
“no…”
(I swear I just made this discovery a sec ago when googling guess who on a whim after writing the above bit. YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP!!)
…
Feel like I don’t know enough about Harmony Korine the man to properly gauge if people expected this of him or not. Forming an indie publisher and calling it “EDGLRD” seems pretty in keeping with the acts of someone who is trying their absolute best to live The Diabolical Life™ though
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tbh I kinda appreciate devs being honest about the market research grind. I’d love to see one of these by people who make those $1 platinum trophy getters or other slop.
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There’s an open playtest coming up for a new Golden Idol-like Inkblood if any of you sick freaks want to get in on that s***.
3 Likes
i think this is exactly it. certain things pop on social media and certain people are attracted to being on youtube, and it’s not a great realm for most personal poetic reflections or ideas about expanding artistic consciousness or whatever else. we also live in a society where all talk about doing art for personal enrichment or to expand consciousness or whatever has gone entirely to the background and it’s all about surviving and marketing yourself because people feel like they have nothing else. so anything else gets thrown to the side. it’s a direct result of the fascist reality we’re living in.
i personally don’t have anything nice to say about this space - i think it represents everything i hate about art and culture and is an extension of fascist reality. anytime someone tries to hit me with something from these indie game dev hustle grindset channels i tell them i don’t want to hear it - i don’t even want to engage with it. when it isn’t just too vapid to even be worth engaging with, it does represent a sort of ideological space that i find totally noxious. but it’s all also a direct result of 2010’s “selling out doesn’t exist anymore” hustle culture attitudes that even a lot of people who are against this kind of stuff now knowingly spread. in games world, a lot of the same people who shit on blogs and the free/niche game space planted the seeds for this stuff.
i am sympathetic to younger developers not being able to find stuff. but i have done so many different things to try and get people to engage with alternatives and it’s such a drop in the bucket. and it basically feels like people only engage with the things they want to engage with and are unwilling to go elsewhere. so i just have to throw up my hands and say you’re either with me or you aren’t! but i’m not going to countenance a reality i don’t agree with.
i think enough people will find this reality unbearable that there will be a backlash, but it’s hard to tell how and when that will happen right now.
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While it’s one thing to unapologetically embrace that whole monetize everything mentality, the thing that I find particularly maddening lately is a certain breed of content creator who likes to act like they’re in on it like certain podcast hosts saying stuff like “boy these ads reads are terrible, huh?” *rolls eyes and proceeds do the rest of the ad in an exaggerated goofy voice* or people detailing all the ways in which a system is messed up in the cadence of delivering a joke before then shrugging their shoulders at the audience like a looney tunes character and announcing “welp, it’s a living!”
Genuinely makes me feel crazy. I guess I’m not much better for engaging with the stuff in the first place though, I really gotta delete the youtube app off my phone. Makes it too easy to expose oneself to this kinda shit and thus encourage its continued existence…
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yes but my point here was that in this video he more or less just states that he went to google and everyone said ‘make a horror game’ - so i dont necessarily think this is a ‘strategy’ he is researching and inventing, but i think is pretty representative of what media and advice for young developers seems so be these days: pick some signifier (psx, wholesome, gambler) as a pre-determined marketing path and hope things ‘work out’ from there. maybe make ‘content’ about making it to bolster it, which seems to be more popular with younger devs
in the video itself the only real salient strategy i saw was that he did a ‘20k wishlists and ill add multiplayer’ call to action, and outside of that the game seems to have gone viral for unstated reasons. the ps4 jump trophy games guys probably would have something more hard-hitting to say if a journalist could manage to drill into one of their bunkers
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PSX wholesome gambler
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i know this is a joke but so many of the wholesome games are also deeply rooted in business sim mechanics that this isnt much of a jump to make and im sure you probably will find something like it
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