A reminder to not take online negativity too seriously

Glad he ignored the negativity and succeeded. Personally I don't see the appeal of this type of game though. But, different strokes and all that.

I honestly couldn't figure the game out....I'm glad people enjoy it, but I'm too smooth brained to have gotten anywhere

If you get stuck or don't know where to go next, you can ask the mayor. He will give you a hint for the next location.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not to listen to jaded assholes online.

I get the feeling a lot of gamedev communities are full of people who haven't built anything anyone wants to buy, and so get super bitter towards anyone wanting to try, or anyone who manages to make something that actually picks up steam and becomes successful.

They're the sorts of people that will go "X Game is objectively bad!" and then shill their own game which is also bad.

The same happens in art and animation communities, where something will become popular and people will disguise their feeling of "Why can't I get that?!" with "pfft, it's objectively bad!".

Most Indie gamedev communities are super supportive of each other, or at least that's been my experience from TIGSource to Itch.io days.
Speaking as someone who knows a little about game development from formal education in the matter
99% of people on the internet critizing game development have not the faintest idea what they are talking about.
A quick, translation guide (joke):
“I understand that might not be easy but” - would be super easy but there is a list of good reasons why we shouldn’t
“Seems like it would be easy too…” - its a pointlessly impossible endeavour to spend any time on this.
Also with gamedev there is the additional "I have this great idea but I don't know how to code" community too.
I am sure you are right, but r/gaming is a general gaming board. It's not really focused on game creation/development.

Some takeaways here:

Don't give up on yourself or your dreams.
Keep a steady income going while you work on those things, because then your work can be your art for yourself instead of desperately trying to make something sellable before you run out of cash, and treating yourself to a latté feels like you just blew money on a steak dinner using funds that aren't coming back. That stuff is scary.
Game Dev / Gamer reddit has some gem, but on the whole it is full of very, very bitter people. They got that "everything you do is gonna suck and I'm totally saying this because I care" treatment, and they pass it right along. You're better off finding /starting a local club.

Of course, ignore #2 maybe if you're one of those self-help book authors who is "so tired of their megacorporate 6-figure income after 10 years" and they have zero debt and saved most of that as a runway and can live on 45k a year. Sure, take the plunge and find your soul or whatever lol.

reddit specifically has also become a cesspool of hateful, miserable, morons.

And bots.
- sometimes at the same time.

The internet really tends to be cruel. I used to open up about myself in some online spaces, but it only made me feel worse. Now I only talk about non personal stuff

I will listen and not judge, especially if you don't have people in real life you can open up to.

I guarantee you, every loser making one of those comments doesn't do shit with their lives.

They can't comprehend that in order to get better at things, you have to practice them.

Their lives consist of working, sleeping, and playing video games. It's pathetic.

This is called survivorship bias

I wonder if the opposite principle also has a name.
The first comment imo. is fair. It says that the market is saturated, so it is difficult to succeed, but it doesn't rule it out by default.
The other two comments are just plain hostile and ended up being wrong. Lets call it dead troll bias or something?
Not really. It should be obvious that not every indie game will be super successful. This is just proof that some random reddit comments saying a game looks boring from an early trailer don't mean shit, because basically everything will have those.
- Right so it's not really proof of anything.
No it's not.
The only way to get better at things is to do them. While losers were playing video games to get their instant gratification, this winner was working towards a skill that they could use and build for the rest of their life.
Out of everyone criticizing him, I'd wager less than 10% have any knowledge at all of game development. They will never get that knowledge because they're losers who are afraid to learn. Learning means admitting you don't know and coming to terms with all the time you've wasted on bullshit.
I miss the days when gaming wasn't cool.
- While losers were playing video games to get their instant gratification, this winner was working towards a skill that they could use and build for the rest of their life.
  Okay, let's not start throwing around unnecessary insults. Calling people "losers" because they play video games is just insulting your own customer base. I don't know anyone who develops games but doesn't play them. Let's not tar everyone with the same brush.
Might as well give up before even trying! Wtf is this defeatist attitude.
- Oh come on. It's a perfectly valid point. For everyone who has a successful game there are probably thousands of people who don't. It does no one any good at all to suggest that all you have to do is believe in yourself. You also have to make a good product, and generally just be lucky.
  Plenty of people rightfully don't go into video game development because they cannot afford to not earn their money back, if you are lucky enough to be able to risk it, then absolutely go for it, but if you were living paycheck to paycheck it unfortunately isn't a reasonable ambition.
- WTF is this feelgood fascism?

Do not consider online judgements at all.
Do your thing. Pursue your passions. Do it.

I've found online feedback useful. You just have to be careful about where you get it and take it with a grain of salt. A very large one.
- If someone gives you tips, advice, or constructive feedback: there's a good chance they're worth listening to.
  Hostile, critical with no other feedback : almost certainly garbage.
  The first comment in the image, to my mind, wasn't actually bad. It didn't tell them not to do something and it wasn't critical. It just said they the category was very saturated and they should temper their expectations.
  And, you're also entirely correct that you should take even the feedback worth listening to with a grain of salt, or maybe a shaker. :) There's a thousand and one ways to do anything, and it can be difficult to convey the difference between "this is how I would do it" and "this is how you should do it".
  (Doing software code reviews is a skill that can help teach the difference, and not everyone learns it)
- If someone is being mean and negative it's fine to ignore. If someone is giving constructive feedback that's negative it's more worthwhile
- I've noticed a lot of people who give advice online can't think for themselves and therefore cannot tolerate anyone doing anything differently from them.
  Once I recognized that such an idiot exists and is prevalent on online forums, it became very easy to write them off whenever I see them.
  The average internet user is about as smart as the average person these days. We need to dig in order to find intelligence; it's not the norm.
But my passion is clubbing baby seals...
- If that is what you love, please club as many seals as it makes you happy.
- Don't let your dreams be dreams.

This is such a weird collection of comments.

Except if you're MAGA. Then I hope you do spiral to the point that you get locked up in the crazy house.

I think a few of those people are on here now still moaning about the game being popular.

this would be on r/agedlikemilk

This is the plot of Sk8er Boi by Avril Lavigne.

I consider this a result from destabilization campaigns by evil global forces. They make everybody hate each other and spread negativity that snowballs into more negativity, until the point where we hate everything and become monsters ourselves.

Interesting theory, but I have a better one.
This is part of the concerted effort to make sure as many people do nothing with their lives as possible. There's a culture of loserdom where people literally only play video games with their lives. Such a loser should never be taken seriously unless you want to end up like them.
- Lol there's nobody to blame folks. Most people are positive and productive with their lives, and some people arent.

This is exactly how Eric Barone felt, despite knowing in his heart that he had made something special to him. This is how he thought Stardew Valley would he received. The general gaming community are such cunts.

The reason is because; the general community aren't the nerds that made gaming fun
- The reason is, the people who like to leave reviews are cunts. Source: I hardly ever review anything, because I'm not a cunt. When I do review, it's to a small busines (buzzword alert), and it's always because the service was excellent.
Which is weird because there were hundreds of thousands of fans of OG Harvest Moon who wished Natsumi would make a SNES like OG harvest moon and they just wouldn't listen. I am so happy Eric Barone made bank and I look forward to The Haunted Chocolatier making bank for him too.
Yep. I abandoned r/gaming when I still participated in Reddit. Avoid discord game server lobbies. Have text chat and voip disabled in competitive gaming. Gamers have always been real douches, from game criticism to shitting on other players for any reason whatsoever, so if one wants to enjoy a game it’s best to stay away from the “community” at large and stick with friends or a known group. Community in quotes because there really isn’t one, just mostly a rabble of haters and tryhards mixed in with a lot of people just trying to have some fun.
Other hobby spaces are no less than that. Not suprisingly, i enjoyed all my little hobbies 10× more offline. In the end while i improved on other technical sides, my philosphy got simpler. Ideally, 'if it fits i sit' for cats if you get what i'm saying.
- Yes. The internet is a huge part of this issue.
  Just don't take the losers on the internet seriously and you're good to go.
  Always keep in mind that a good deal of the people you come across on forums and social media are chronically online. They can't function in the real world with real consequences, so they are stuck acting like an idiot to strangers.

With 20/20 hindsight it was obviously a good idea.

But at the time of making the decision, it was an unbelievably risky plan and the odds were stacked against it. As a matter of fact, for every successful 2D platformer made with care and love that gets released and becomes successful, there are dozens that fail miserably and that you will never hear of.

Yes, believing in yourself and taking risks makes success possible, but remember that it does not guarantee it.

People forget that Hollow Knight didn't do very well at first, also. It took an excruciatingly long time for it to pick up steam.
My friend quit his job and has been making indie games since 2015. It's been 20 10 years and he's made like $40,000 total in the time with all his games combined. His wife pays all the bills. Every time he releases a new game he tells everyone this is the one that'll make him a million bucks. He points to games like Hollowknight, Stardew Valley, Undertale etc as proof.
- He's definitely taking the wrong approach by trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
- My friend quit his job and has been making indie games since 2015. It's been 20 years
  If it has been 20 years since 2015 then I think I overslept.
- In a just world, your friend would be able to create as much art as he wants without having to worry about who is paying the bills.
Yeah but the vast majority of those failed games look bad and are mediocre gameplay wise. Even if they are a true passion project. They don’t come close to the quality of games like Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy, Inside or even Pizza Tower. Most sidescrollers (including metroidvanias, rogue likes and souls likes) released on Steam are of low quality because it’s very easy to make a basic game in that genre.
Yes the genre is risky but if you make a very good looking game that stands out with top notch gameplay you increase the odds of success significantly.
Budding indie devs need to realize whether they can make such a game. If not they need to find another genre that is less crowded or a genre with a very high demand, like the horror / liminal space genre those games have a much higher success rate compared to the average platformer.
This comment sounds like it's discouraging these kind of risks. But I feel like you should almost always take them, because otherwise your life is just hollow.
- I think you've got to work out what your appetite for risk is. It's important to do take risks sometimes even if they scare you to move your life forward but also sometimes don't. I've seen a bunch of people really fuck their lives up because they just kept rolling the dice.
- Mummy, why can't we have dinner today?
  I'm sorry honey but you have to understand that daddy took a risk otherwise he would feel hollow! Sure we're broke now because he quit his job to do a thing and it didn't take off, and your little brother Timmy had to go live with Gramma or else he'd starve, but think of how daddy feels now! Not hollow!
There is a great Bo Burnham clip where he talks about this.
Depends on their financial position overall. If you live below your means and save up, especially in a professional position, you can offset expenses with passive investment income. Retirement is really just getting to the point where passive income and using up savings can last you until you expect to die.
If you have passive income that covers your bills, then the main difference between working and not working (or doing work without guaranteed income) is that you're not getting ahead as quickly anymore. You're not necessarily even falling behind, though even that state could be maintained for a while depending on how much you have saved and what kind of credit you have access to.
But yeah, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, this isn't an option, you'll have to do the work around your other job.

Speaking of negativity, how the hell do people deal with the way reddit looks now? Everytime I see it this way I am shocked.

Avatars, ads, wasted space, weird conversation drop downs..... yuck.

By avoiding it like the plague. They really did it didn't it? When I used to Google something I was stoked when there was some reddit link in the results and would always go there, now I just die inside a little more when I scroll the results and the only relevants seems to be reddit.
- Yeah, and its even worse that it will only be via google. They are the only crawler allowed to index reddit now. I gave up using google unless I absolutely have to as the search results are not great anymore.
  But even if one likes google, having no competition and being the only results that are now trapped in reddit, that just sucks! We need real forums back. or lemmy needs a little more techinical answers in the communities to quit looking to reddit.
You can still use the old reddit at old(dot)reddit(dot)com
Old.reddit, RES, and an adblocker.
It's wild how they show so few replies. Like, the whole point of the site was discussing.
most of them are bot and AI responses or posts.
the bot responses are done by people warming up thier accounts for ban evasion to be exact(OF fans, link farmers), this seperate from the propaganda ones.
one thing reddit REALLY hates is new accounts and old accounts with sudden activity.
i don't see it because I quit the millisecond third party apps did.
old.reddit.com. Anything that doesn't work on that or is to cumbersome to use on that is not worth engaging in.
- Searching old.reddit.com is getting harder. If you try to site search it on google, it gives you new reddit links.
  Old seems to be blocked, as in other search engines it just gives you no results.
  Luckily Kagi lets you add rewrite rules so you can filter site:reddit.com and then have reddit.com rewritten to old.reddit.com, but man reddit are fighting against people using the old site.
- Old.reddit.com has slowly been getting worse. Lots of collapsed comment trees, a similar posts section after the first two comments in a busy comments section, etc.
- yeah I know. And third party apps still work too if you compile them yourself.
  But I was just commenting on how insane it looks.
I used to use old.reddit.com with Reddit Enhancement Suite to disable CSS
Redlib

Huh, it's not like Reddit to be pointlessly hateful 😌

It's like they're trained or something... like some sort of engine.. that-uh that tanks their thinking...
Or Steam, for that matter.

As someone who quit his job to create a video game this makes me feel good.

I will probably fail, but that's a future feeling.

Please provide your shameless plug ;)
- I wish it were pluggable, I tried to get a gov grant for gamedev so started on a quick vertical slice but they said no because it's solo dev. So I've been focussed on mechanics and the vertical slice is all out of date.
  No promo material yet.
  There is a mastodon but I only show visual stuff, not had much recently. Probably do more harm than good but..
  https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zataxia
Oh, what are you working on?
If you're making something you like, you can't really fail. :) That's the only way to be an artist in the face of criticism.
I love looking at my old work.
- Then you never had to look at your old code (that tends to be of way worse quality than what you are currently coding due to improved skills) xD
Best of luck to you!
- Thank you, sir ❤️
The mistake i made was biting off more than i could chew. If i could do it over again i would make simpler games to understand end to end
- I've been doing that in the background for a few years now (checks notes.. 15 years)
  Background is software so I have a jumpstart on that.
  I THOUGHT my project was relatively limited scope. But I must've been zoomed out in my brain because.. damn. It ain't.
  Might be my only chance after I got a bit of funding, so just need to steamroll it, get something out there. Fingers crossed!
  Did you get to release in some form?
Make sure to share with us once it's out!
Also, a Dev blog linked here somewhere could help you stay on track and attract your audience prior to the release!
- I shall, thanks.
  Very crude Dev blog/stream of conscience on mastodon, keep your expectations rock bottom, you'll still be disappointed!
  https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zataxia
The general gaming community wants to sink money into MMOs and play call of duty slop. The majority is fine with subscriptions and battle passes. They use terms like bullet sponging. You'll never ever make them happy.
However, there are the minoritiew, the fans that just want good well thought out games, that don't need every mechanic, that are slightly addicting and just fun to play. The ones who think like you, focus on them.
I frequently go back to satisfactory and factorio. Factorio started as a small thing that they wanted to build, was crowd funded by people who wanted it, and big studios ignored because "the majority of gamers would never enjoy this". Try didn't care, they didn't want the majority audience, and by focusing on what they cared about they literally created the factory building genre. Their drive them spawned my favorite game satisfactory, another game that the industry didn't really believe in, and now it sits towards the top of the charts. Ignore the haters, ignore the majority. Focus on what you want to build.
You never know.

@ThePicardManeuver You'll never know where you'll go with your passion project.

I remember the first comment I got on online was "you suck". But it was soon drowned by encouragement words and constructive feedback.

About Hollow Knight, by the time this got posted on reddit, the game was already funded through kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/11662585/hollow-knight

What this image does not show is the amount of support this post received, more than 20k upvotes and plenty of endearing messages on reddit only.

u/YoDudeguy Nov 20 '15
Damn, that looks amazing! Thanks for bringing it to our attention. Will buy.

u/Eliza_Douchecanoe Nov 20 '15
I like the dark feel of it, but with light-hearted game play and sound effects. Good shit.

If I sort by votes, I had to scroll a bit to get to that 756 votes message.

It is important to filter and properly process the messages you receive. There are some mean and unnecessary messages on that image (and on the reddit thread), but they do not show the full picture and at that time could easily be ignored.

Thank you for this comment.
I agree. It can be easy to feel disheartened by a shitty comment (or many), and sometimes the bad outnumbers the good. However, it is useful to try to mentally filter out the mass of negativity because many of those are quick, lazy comments that say more about the commenter than the topic at hand.
Even though the sample of comments that you include in your comment are all short comments, I'd be inclined to view those with more weight, because it's just a part of reality that it's far easier to be negative and harmful than to be sincere and enthusiastic. There's more effort and care into those short comments than someone just being negative

I see this behavior everywhere on the internet, and I truly believe people become like this the more chronically online they are - whether they realize it or not.

The paid trolls want people to feel defeatist and tired, that's the point.
This is from 2015 and it's the most bang for your buck warfare:
Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).
The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)
https://archive.is/PoUMo
- The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
  Interesting. There's definitely a concerted effort to censor information on the internet.
  I don't think it's just Russians. I also believe a lot of useful idiots are perpetuating censorship because it's expected of them.
- Do you have any other journalism or leaks from these influence operations?
My negativity and cynicism definitely increase with my recent online time, yeah.
I think it comes down at least in part to a manifestation of self-awareness of one's own lack of accomplishments, or to put that another way, jealousy.
When a single individual spends a lot of time and effort making something amazing, there are two ways to respond. You can either appreciate and congratulate their efforts, or you can shit all over it.
In many ways, being critical and dismissive is a lot easier on one's own psyche, especially if you are a person who is secretly disappointed and depressed in yourself for not achieving anything. It's a defence mechanism to reassure yourself that spending all that time was wasted pointless effort - that even if you spent that time, it would be equally wasted too.
Accepting that someone else actually set out and did something cool all by themselves, with no luck required, just willingness and effort, is accepting that YOU could have done that too, if you tried. You could have been that person. But you weren't.
It's a lot "safer" to be hostile.

To play devil’s advocate, their incredible sales were absolutely up to luck. Like all things. But you’re right, people online are rarely worth listening to, unless you’d like the perspective of people who spend above average time on the internet. People without similar moorings to yours, and generally lacking the background that led you to your perspective and understanding. There are many benefits, and many downsides to polling the web.

Can I enquire how 15,000,000 copies sold was down to luck? They released a solid game with fun gameplay, great music, and an eye-catching art style. They priced the game competitively, even considering international pricing. All of this seems like choices that were made with intention, not the roll of a dice.
You could perhaps argue that there was luck in people seeing the games initial campaign on kickstarter, but I don’t think you can excuse the rest as ‘luck’.
- It's the consumer bandwagon.
  The luck involved is that enough people found out about his game, played it, then recommended it to others who did the same.
  They released a solid game with fun gameplay, great music, and an eye-catching art style. They priced the game competitively, even considering international pricing. All of this seems like choices that were made with intention, not the roll of a dice.
  Okay, going with your logic, what about the games that have all of this and still are commercial failures? There is literally no shortage of them, even if you personally haven't heard of them.
- Anyone who works in games development or publishing can tell you that the success of any given game is largely down to luck.
  It’s perfectly possible for a dev to make all the right decisions and still lose, and in fact that’s what happens the majority of the time.
  Yes Hollow Knight is a great game, but I guarantee there are dozens - if not hundreds - of games that are just as good but only sold a handful of copies and are doomed to languish in obscurity in the dusty corners of Steam.
- Good question.
  Luck is always an element of success. I’m confident there are other indie titles with similar levels of gameplay, music, and art style, with just as much passion poured in, that just never caught the viral wave. It’s a big world out there.
  Obviously the dev set their project up well for that success, making it more likely, but it’s still a dice roll.
  I’ve heard very successful movie/TV actors talk about seeing nobodies blow their minds in local theater productions, people who never got the stroke of luck required to make it big. Plenty of successful people forget that they owe no small part of their success to luck.
- It's kinda like how you need to be really really really good to become the next Tailor Swift or Michael Jackson. But even IF you are really fucking amazing, you still need to be super fucking lucky, because there are millions of other people just as good, or maybe better.
  You can be the best musician in history, but unless you know someone big in the industry, the likelyhood of ever actually becoming anything is about as high as winning the lottery.
  Same thing with games.
- I think it was Rami Ismail (maybe Bennet Foddy...) who described luck in the games industry as being a vital factor, but every time you make a game and put information out there about your games, you're re-rolling the dice. They played a great game, it's still a matter of getting the right rolls at the right time.
  Getting lucky doesn't discount skill and hard work, but getting unlucky does, and the majority of talented people making great games have been unlucky.
- There are plenty of solid indie games out there. If a friend wanted to quit his job and play bass guitar I’d tell him to slow down. The Redditors were harsh but, “don’t quit your day job” is applicable to 99.9% of devs who won’t make it big.
- I don’t mean to disparage my favorite game, but it was absolutely luck. Everything comes down to luck, whether it’s catching the attention of the right person, settling into the store at the right time, or any number of little things. Having an excellent product is irrelevant compared to the fickleness of reality. You’ve described hundreds, if not thousands of games that failed.
  Skill is an intrinsic part of the equation, but everything comes down to luck.

Jesus christ, reddit. Take it down one single notch maybe? Like, bro

I don't enjoy side-scrollers.

But I DO enjoy supporting people in the things they create.

Who cares if it's not my cuppa. Who cares if there's 10,000 similar things out there? And who cares if it doesn't land on any "TOP TEN" lists?

Is hollow knight my thing? Nope.

But it's rad as hell.

Glad it worked out for the guy and he found a market, but I did give Hollow Knight about 15 minutes of my time and my eyes glazed over because I think I’m perma-bored with cartoonish 2D platformers. So, I do understand where some of those redditors are coming from. That said, there are people who like them, so there is a market out there for them and that’s great.

I'm curious as to what style of game captures your attention?
- FPS and RPGs. I actually have played a few side scrollers here and there, but not overly cartoonish ones. I personally don’t find the art style of Hollow Knight appealing.

Unrelated but same energy is the Reddit thread when Lewis Hamilton moved from McLaren to the up and coming Mercedes team before going and winning the drivers championship 6 times and the constructors 8 in a row with them.

Love a poorly aged thread on a success story

Pffft, typical. /s

Those comments are all true though, and any game other than Silksong would absolutely have failed unless it got lucky. The only reason Silksong is initially so successful is because of Hollow Knight.

The OP concerns Hollow Knight — the screenshot is of a post that's 10 years old

You can make a simple moblie game and if it catches on. Make thousands every month in micro transactions alone. Just need it to catch the whales. Follow your dreams, regardless of the outcomes. You'll be better off.

The ballad of Billy John

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMbLImbrjgQ