I'm a software engineer who makes games as a hobby. I love making tools for creatives, and I love incremental games. I'm the creator of Profectus. He/himpaperpilot.dev
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- 3 yr. ago
- Posts
- 13
- Comments
- 77
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
While I never got into fair game, I really like that it exists and has such a strong community. Love seeing it succeed!
The loosely interconnected systems part makes me think of kittens game which has the whole religion system that feels like it's own little progression system, as well as gooboo which is funny since you mention it later on. It also makes me think of my own game, Kronos, which is part way through a rewrite but you can check out the TMT version here.
For the resource caps, you might be interested in orb of creation which has a similar system.
I like feeling productive, the sense of accomplishment when it's done, and seeing people enjoy a creation of mine. I think most people also just enjoy feeling creative, knowing that they can bring things into this world from nothing.
I started developing incredibly young. My first game was when I was 10 or so - a text adventure in Java. But I really wanted graphics and didn't know how to do that in Java so I switched to RPG maker XP (I've actually bought most RPG maker versions since then, even though I don't use them very often - very cool that they use JavaScript instead of ruby now!). Eventually I switched to flash to make other kinds of games, which is the first time I learned what classes and instances were! (Lowkey kinda embarrassing to have been programming for a couple years without knowing - the dangers of being self taught!). From there I went back to Java (using lwjgl this time), then to unity in college where I made many game developer friends including my wife, made my own engine called vecs, and now I mainly do web games, typically in profectus. Here and there I've also dabbled with pygame, Godot, and other engines.
Suffice to say, game development has been a primary hobby of mine for my entire life. I think I got started with it because I really enjoyed playing games, sort of looking up to developers, and thus wanted to become one myself. Over time I learned about the industry and decided I did not want to become a professional game developer (although after college I did apply to Id and a few other studios local to DFW), but continued developing on a hobby level. It's just fun I suppose, and it's a creative outlet I think I'm halfway decent at.
Honestly, these use cases all sound very cool, but I'm highly concerned about the idea of federating information that could effectively tie you to your physical location with a bunch of random servers. Even if all they see is a pseudonymous activitypub id.
To answer honestly, it's because the first sentence only uses common and easy to spell words.
I honestly think that philosophy is fine. Before the major social media sites all came about, the Internet was filled with much smaller communities that didn't need to be profitable or scalable - they could be run by an individual as a hobby project. I think returning to that (possibly with the use of federation so these small communities still have a good amount of content) could keep things free, ad free, and privacy conscious
Housing prices increase faster than inflation. Why do you think that is? Certainly not because housing is seen as an investment vehicle where corporations buy as much as they can just to rent out, increasing the demand and therefore price of housing beyond what the market rate would have otherwise been.
I think it's clear that landlords are making money (and even if they're not, they're at least gaining equity which will eventually make the whole thing profitable), with most of that profit coming from the mere act of owning the property and withholding it from those who need it in order to survive unless they pay - which is inherently coercive in nature, and a fork of violence against the working class performed by the owning class. Sure, there's a nominal amount of effort fees and effort, and I'm not going to knock property management, since that is actual work, but landlords primarily get their money from rent seeking (that is, however much they charge beyond their expenses).
I think the US would be a massively better place to live in if we massively taxed housing owned by corporations, or at least any properties owned by a single entity surpassing 1 or 2. The goal is to make it not profitable and not appealing as an investment, such that black rock et al see fit to unload most of all of their properties. The housing prices would and should crash, and finally be affordable again. The government might even buy a lot of them up and expand our socialized housing. Sure that last point might not be "fair" to existing home owners, but consider they are hy definition already well off enough to afford their own home and bought their homes during the time when it was still seen as an "investment" that by definition means it comes with some amount of risk. At least going forward, housing would no longer be a vehicle for investment and well on its way to becoming a human right, like it should be.
Oh, this game got posted earlier today. It didn't make it in time for April 1st, but is still an April fools game. https://turtletennis.itch.io/mole-transactions
Thanks for collecting all these! We're eating good this year - emoji recycler is unironically such a fun game
Also there isn't a game jam, rather Florian just likes to ask people to submit their April fools games to him so he can stream them. Only *man sent his games there this year though
This week's been pretty occupied with a non incremental game my friend worked on, called Millennia. It's been very time sucking, but in a good way.
I've also been working on mocking up this fictitious app about digital gardening, and in general improving how the Internet communicates with you, with the goal of making it healthier. The idea for this app is it would be able to connect to matrix chat, email, RSS feeds, and potentially other sources and then you can write rules to categorize these: stuff like direct messages, stuff about that school project you're working on, online content creators you follow, and perhaps a category for just stuff you're interested in but don't need to know about every update for. These categories will be able to be assigned priorities: basic stuff like whether or not to send notifications, but also whether or not to show a count of items in that category. Some categories might feel more like a todo list, like DMs, but others should just collect things for you to occasionally check up on, without the pressure of a number or unread dot.
You'd still be able to chat and email and stuff from within the app as well. It'd integrate concepts like chat glue in chat threads (when supported by the data source), and make it easy to copy data over to your personal "garden", which will work similarly to a personal wiki. The garden would be a collection of thoughts in varying states of growth - incomplete thoughts to entire articles, all collected in a way such that you can easily see related thoughts and navigate the garden like a web (to mix metaphors haha). Overall I think it's a cool idea, but one that'd be too big for me to complete. But the mock will help with giving something that can be spread around so people can get interested in helping out, or at least providing feedback on the idea. I'm quite excited about it!
To be honest, the feature unlocked at level 100 of check back mod kinda killed my motivation to continue playing. I think it might just be too idle for me
Good point, I guess we should just let the homes remain empty and the homeless on the streets?
I get that having your home squatted in sucks, and if you were only out for a week long vacation and come back to a break in then you have my sympathy, but the message here is ultimately pointing out that houses have been commodified and turned into vehicles for investing by the rich, rather than a right like they should be. We have more empty homes than homeless people, and that simply isn't just.
I'm still playing check back mod - now I'm level 82! I'm also still playing through USI, and just did the last reinforce (the one that got added this week). Other than that, been working on major changes in profectus. Gearing up to be one of the biggest releases it's had, but I think it'll be so much easier to work with :).
I'm such a fan of this game, and have been keeping up with it for a very long time. Highly recommend!
Hey, we had a similar thread earlier this week!
My week has involved, amongst other things, setting up this weekly thread because of how much use the thread that was cross posted from the subreddit got. This is now a thread that will automatically post every week, and I've made it so the subreddit equivalent won't accidentally get cross posted in the future.
As far as games, nothing has really changed since Monday. Although I'm playing sharky incremental on my phone :)
Oh hey, I'm one of those enthusiasts who often recommends paid incremental games!
I think many of the completely unmonetized games are absolutely good enough to warrant some amount of money for their authors. I think there's a lot of reasons why they don't, but part of it is because of the stigma against monetization within the (browser based, not Roblox or mobile parts of the community) incremental games community. I think part of it is valid, due to concerns of games using predatory designs to compel you into spending money, but some of the stigma I think just comes from an unwarranted expectation that incremental games don't deserve to be monetized.
I think that expectation partially comes from how many precedents there are. As you mentioned, there are so many completely unmonetized incremental games out there! That's awesome, and I think it's mostly explained because of how appealing incremental games are for people looking to learn how to design and make any kind of video game (I go in more detail on this point here.
That all said, I think the trend of having more incremental games with upfront price tags and no mtx are fully ethical and allow for incremental games to have higher production values that aren't easily justifiable for unmonetized games. I'll gladly support devs making games in a genre I care so deeply about, and I very rarely regret the amount I've paid (cough CH2 excluded cough).
I think it's perfectly fine for both to co exist. I'll keep buying and playing paid incremental games, and I don't think they detract from how amazing it is that there are so many free, often open source incremental games. I especially want to continue new developers seeing the genre as a good place to first get into how to design and make games, without feeling like by doing so they're lowering the relative value of those paid games. They can all co exist, just continue making things :)
This isn't really a progression question, it's just voicing that you prefer active games over idle games. I use to be similar, although I recently had a baby and doing so has made me much happier with idle games I can make progress in even when I'm very regularly needing to do things with the baby. I don't think either approach is wrong, just different. Although unlocking offline progression is... A choice, to say the least. Certainly raises red flags it might become a mtx later on, and qol mtx are not good imo!
@kopi-pasted@incremental.social wdym? What does it remind you of?