i’d like a “psychic poker” game that’s just the poker parts of that one jjba arena fighter’s single player mode, but expanded into a full game
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the first part of this just kinda reminds me of the sort of Yahoo Groups era of the internet when i first started going on forums - and i think this might just be something inherent to what the internet is at some level. you had some sort of pre-determined interest and then you joined a community for that thing, and tried to do what you could to fit into that community. for me it was Wolfenstein 3D/Doom modding, then OCRemix, then like various indie rock and comedy forums. forums like Something Awful that were more general purpose were way more novel and unusual as a result.
these communities usually had their own kinds of niche dramas and inflexibilities, so more often than not something about that niche community you picked alienated you or just you got bored with it after a certain point. but even if it was a creative community where people shared their own stuff, it was way lower stakes when you didn’t have money and a career tied up in all of it. there wasn’t this pressure to publicly perform all aspects of yourself like there is now.
i guess what i’m saying is the current state of things feels like the worst of both worlds in a lot of ways. you have the hyper visibility and hustle grindset marketing speak of social media with the insularity and inflexibility of these older communities. i dunno, it’s a real bummer.
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i think i tried to describe this in one of my earliests posts here, but for me this would have been 2016ish tigsource, which feels like a weird period in retrospect, because i am trying to enter this space and get into ‘the spirit of indie’ in a moment where, simultaneously the space is rapidly ‘formalizing’, forums seemingly lost their utility in a realm where you needed to get serious about marketing, and game developers are being attacked in a way that seemingly caused these public spaces to fizzle out alltogether. and folks have mostly sequestered into their own circles on social media/discord. so im tring to fit together these cultural things in a moment that i am now seeing is when that same culture is being killed off
so honestly a lot of that effort for ‘fitting in’ didnt end up making sense, or at least the references i was making to those 2010s forum concepts were kind of lost in public dev meetups, or the discord stuff i found myself in later on. theres no doubt i looked pretty pretentious for trying to embody that culture, but its genuinely just what i thought being indie was
fwiw i kept saying ‘younger devs’ in these posts but im still 26 :skull; idk if that says anything good or bad about the state/future of the scene. so my personal angle on all this feels like getting to enter the space at a time where you could still see a glimpse of what this was All About, and the rest of my experience in it has been getting to watch all these things i thought were totally foundational die off. obviously there are still a lot of folks out there with those ideals but its become a thing where many are either retreating more inwards, focusing on surviving, or just fine with existing on the periphery of games/fine with the success they had. so ‘growing up’ in dev culture has meant feeling increasingly alienated from what games was becoming, and at the same time being too late to have ever participated very directly in what i understood it as, the parts i found aspirational that there just does not seem to be a space for any more
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I bust into every space and post/talk too much til people can’t ignore me anymore, fitting in be damned
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i think things are always passing from one moment to the next and all moments are transient. pretty much everyone i know feel like they got to the party either too late or too early, or just missed the boat altogether. it’s like a common refrain i hear from a lot of people. even if you did happen to be in the right place at the right time, did what you do translate to any kind of larger visibility? even for the luckiest people, can you sustain that or does it just end up being short-lived? a lot of people never managed to, even many of those who were there in the moment to see things come and go. and even in the tippest-top people who were successful, a lot of them have a lot of pretty shallow lives with lots of mostly transactional relationships with other people. when a whole space kinda collapses, everyone feels that whether they can admit that to themselves or not.
when all is said and done i’m happy to still be around trying to figure out my own thing increasingly removed from the context i entered the space in. i’m also not really trying to do gamedev at this point (and haven’t for a long time) so i dunno. i do feel a lot of frustration and not really feeling able to influence any kind of larger sphere and everything i do being a drop in the bucket. there’s a lot that i get too angry or depressed about to even want to engage with at all.
i also am kind of going through sort of similar feelings with music i’m making now, just being like “damn if i had pushed harder on doing more of my own stuff years ago when more people actually seemed to care to engage, maybe i’d feel way less lost than i do now”. basically stubbornness and spite are my primary motivators there at this point. i’m just banking on the idea that my refusal to stick to one lane will somehow pay off at some point - instead of having to subjugate myself to the image of one career path or another. because i find that idea just too unbearable to want to be a part of.
my main feeling is you just gotta plant your flag and do things on your own terms and hopefully that will set up things to be in a good position to set a standard for people when the next wave comes.
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thankyou, and yes i should definitely say im lucky for a lot of the stuff i got to see and be a part of while it still did exist. probably my only real big regret is not going to any of the fantastic arcades - for some reason this was always my ‘end goal’ as a teen. but there totally were a lot of people who saw the core of what i was getting at even then and willing to bat for me and so ive gotten to see things and meet folks and this is mostly what i care about. there are parts of it i still feel off about (collecting twitter mutuals like merit badges) but fortunately we all got a free reset on that, in a way
alot of the darkness in the early twenties for me was interpreting a lot of the lifestyle stuff i saw but couldnt yet access as these promises that i was holding myself back from, or just had to detour thru college to get to, but emerging from that into both the pandemic + the massive contractions of the industry at that time, along with other non-industry personal tragedies etc… but its fairly clear now a lot of that kitsch indie darling cohort stuff i was impressing on was pretty glorified and a lot of horror stories have come up since.
so theres a lot of ‘yeah that sucks’ feelings i still pass through, but its never been a situation where i cant just continue to do what i feel ok doing. kind of trailing now but yea the past few years are definitely about carving out that space. if anything comes of it itll probably be on sb before anywhere else
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new Cosmo D game is out today (in early access)
it’s in a similar vein to his previous one “Betrayal at Club Low” which also has dice mechanics. i played the demo and i really enjoyed it - so it’s definitely highly recommended!
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Spica Adventure is out today on Switch and PS5 in this bundle with Parasol Stars. Looks like it was meant to come out years ago though since most of the announcement trailers look like they were dated to around 2023. Looks kinda interesting, what do people here think about it?
Also saw this came out today on Switch, is it good? Looks like maybe a silly game for silly people
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here is what i thought of spica adventure in 2014
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Seems cool, I might pick it up…
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am i right in seeing that there’s no PC release? seems a silly but perhaps unsurprising decision. i always liked the look of parasol stars and spica looks dope as hell.
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Looks like its one of those ININ / Limited Run Games releases, not sure if they usually do Steam releases, unless it’s just delayed
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spica adventure is fun as hell, weird that they tag it along with a parasol game nobody cares about
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I am somebody.
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Uwagakiai just got an official, artisanal English translation! I had no idea this was in progress
I realize an RPGMaker mystery sci-fi body-horror tragedy that can also be curiously heartwarming is probably more my kind of thing than anyone else’s on this forum, but if that sounds at all interesting to you, I recommend it. I posted about my playthrough here.
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parasol stars has a big fanbase among old palsland guys, since it got an amiga port back in the day that was popular
and inin are a palsland company
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