Game Development

2:00 AM

@Almo I did a whois lookup on the main link. Seems to be some sort of domain selling company from what I can gather.

Also anyone here play Fortnite? I am not usually a fan of such games but for some reason I love it lol.

I don't, but I don't like battle royale games in general

seems too much of a dice-roll about whether you win or not. :)

The Mattbat999

11:06 AM

Hello!

tumbleweed empire now cotrols the Internet

2:24 PM

@DMGregory mail out to you about meeting today

Are you guys coworkers?

@Sie Nah, I just happen to be in town for a summit today.

2:56 PM

:D

3:07 PM

@DMGregory Is it a dev related summit?

@Pikalek Yep. Monetization-focused. Learning a ton, since I've only ever balanced offline/single-player economies before.

@DMGregory Sounds rad. What are your criteria for deciding which conferences/summits to attend? How often do you (or others you know) tend to go?

This one I got invited to, so that helps. ;)

I have a few usuals - I go to GDC almost every year, though I've missed the past two. Local stuff like WordPlay, Comics x Games, and DamageCamp are must-sees for me.

3:23 PM

What do you guys think of releasing small-er games on itch.io at $1-$5 and building a profit like that?

In all honesty I think The Vertex Whisperer is going to be a fairly short game and I might just throw it up on there for $5.

seems like the hardest part is marketing it

Right now M+Dev looks to be the closest thing to me @ ~9hr drive. Weighing the pros & cons of going. Many years ago I used to do the ACM conference @ UIUC, but that's more like 11+ hrs away

Ya it really is. It's a pain in the ass to get anybody to notice your game.

user92578

I don't see why not?

?

user92578

3:26 PM

What can you lose by putting it out there?

@Pikalek aside from the time I lived in San Francisco, I've basically had to fly to any conference I wanted to attend

user92578

Or are we supposed to deduce that the real question is "Should I publish on Itch.io at 5$ over <some other marketplace X> at <price Y>?"

I'm not debating over what marketplace to sell at. I just think it's hard to get attention or "hype" about your game.

user92578

yeah?

user92578

i dont think i understand the question

3:29 PM

I'm not asking one. I'm just saying it's hard to get exposure. If I did have a question it would be, "How do you build hype?".

@Jimmy I'm not opposed to that, I really like to research what I'm buying with my time & $.

user92578

6 mins ago, by Sie

What do you guys think of releasing small-er games on itch.io at $1-$5 and building a profit like that?

user92578

this one confused me then

@Pikalek Sorry, my connection dropped. The Game UX Summit has also been super valuable for me.

Well I've read some people do that as a way to build income for their larger projects. I was kind of curious if anyone else did a similar thing.

3:38 PM

It's certainly an option. But it's hard to predict whether you'll make money from it at all, or how much.

@DMGregory Yeah, I could see that being useful to me as well - my UX knowledge is rather limited. That being said, it seems like a lot of the video gets posted - why not just soak it up from home?

Anyone here use Java for game dev?

It seems to me the using small projects & one-offs to subsidize large projects is going to work best when you already have a following &/or some brand appeal to your target audiences. As such, I don't think it really solves the issue you raised about discoverability.

@ShaunWild yes

Would you mind giving my game a quick review?

Just the general appraoch

to my engine

@Pikalek Well, for me, the company was paying, so I'm not gonna say no... ;)

3:51 PM

Define quick review of engine. If you're asking for a code review, no - I'm about to vanish for a lunch meeting. If you have a targeted question, maybe.

@Pikalek Also, psychologically, I find being in a space with other devs, discussing the talks with them, gives me a big boost.

Fair enough

@DMGregory Fair enough - I can relate to that part certainly.

@ShaunWild is there some sort of Java specific thing you're looking for input on?

I've only wrote the core engine

It was all from the top of my head though

So just nice to see if what I wrote was bonkers

If not, pitch the issue to the masses. Most engine level things tend to be language agnostic. I'm not a Unity dev, but manage to answer Unity questions from time to time.

Does the engine work?

Correction, can the engine run a game?

If yes, the only other question that matters is, does the engine make me want to drink paint thinner?

3:57 PM

Well it runs what's in it so far

Essentially

If you get yes to the first & no to the 2nd, then I declare you the winner

heeh ok

Seriously though, don't get caught up working just on your engine if what you really want to make is a game. If you want to build engines, that's fine too. But if you want to build a game, the engines deal can become a trap.

I'm going to be releasing a small prototype build of The Vertex Whisperer by next week if anyone is interested.

ok dude thanks for the advice

4:02 PM

@ShaunWild you're welcome. I started off on the engines track myself because I was weirdly afraid to fail at making a game. While I learned a lot building my own engine, my game would be much further along if I had prioritized the game part.

[clock strikes meeting time - turns into a pumpkin]

5:19 PM

@almo

hmm can't ping yourself

user92578

does replying to one's own message help?

user92578

@Tyyppi_77 does this even work?

user92578

yeah so you gotta manually copy your message ID

user92578

do ":<message id> selfping"

Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.

7:27 PM

Jay Hanlon on April 26, 2018

Let’s start with the painful truth:

Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups.

Our employees and community have cared about this for a long time, but we’ve struggled to talk about it publicly or to sufficiently prioritize it in recent years. And results matter more than intentions.

Now, that’s not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are… just generous, I guess? But our active users regularly express thei …

"Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups."

I don't doubt it but any citations?

At least in respect to coding I don't see why race should ever be a factor.

Or how users would even know unless it's in their name or profile picture.

@Sie see first paragraph after the unicorn

it shouldn't be, but apparently it is

Well where's the evidence?

I mean stating this...

"Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups."

I don't know what you expect to see, really.

Without any evidence or examples is kind of odd. I'm not saying it doesn't happen but I've never seen it or seen any examples.

Where's the proof? Examples?

7:38 PM

I actually see references it all over

Where is an example of someone being racist or reference? I'm not saying none of it happens but saying it happens and then not showing any proof that it is actually happening feels like a strawman argument to me.

from random tech-related subreddits I follow to IRL tech meetups - most of the feedback is "StackOverflow is great! I can find all my answers" but some part of it is "I asked a question and it got closed for being inappropriate, SO is a bunch of exclusive jerks"

I've often felt that way too but not because of race, gender or anything like that. I am just curious where that part is coming from.

well, this is a problem with our common ways of defining exclusion

like, "all our tech leadership are young white males!" leads to "we should do outreach to non-white, non-young, non-male people", but it doesn't address the fact that there's plenty of young white males who are individually unprivileged

Hell to be honest I only even come here for this chat room lol. I don't really use the main site much at all.

I go to Reddit before here because they are usually more friendlier.

For code help anyway.

7:51 PM

We know there's gender bias in coding. A study showed that code reviewers would review the same code lower if they knew it was written by a woman

yeah I don't doubt the existence of gender bias.

really unfortunate :(

gender bias is also easy to attack because it is less tied to institutional issues -- like accepting more applicants from low-income backgrounds involves dealing with candidates with less comprehensive basic education.

but unless my understanding of biology is really wrong, male/females should come from equal income families on average

From what I understand, it's not necessarily that people are experiencing direct racism or sexism (though I would be surprised if that wasn't happening too), but people can have difficulty with Stack sites, and that seems to coincide strongly with being in a minority group in a way that manifestly affects people on these sites.

8:54 PM

Stuff like that is usually invisible to those of us not in those groups because we don't experience what they're going through.

Q: Do recruitment requests need to be explicitly addressed in our help section?

▲ Agreed. It's the socioeconomic version of "you don't know what you don't know"

DukeZhou

9:30 PM

re: general stack community unfriendliness; I don't think it's restricted to Overflow only. I see it all the time across a range of Stacks. The most confounding is when it occurs on stacks still in Beta, where the stacks are never going to be official until they hit some fuzzy "critical mass". chasing potential new users away to keep the club "exclusive" is a losing strategy

it also bothers me greatly that there isn't more cross-community support, encouragement, or even acknowledgement of trusted contributors trying to get answers in fields outside of their field of focus.

Possibly the motto for Stack should be "Stack: great vertical, awful horizontal, and an intimidating place for new users."

GDSE Meta

9:54 PM

1

Comments on this question raised the issue that recruitment doesn't appear to be clearly mentioned in the on-topic & off-topic rules. My question is: should it be explicitly covered? Does it come up enough to warrant coverage beyond meta? I realize we cannot exhaustively list everything that is &...

discussion

10:04 PM

@Sie I don't understand how someone can claim race and gender factors in on a site where you don't need to post your photo or real name.

I'm a green-haired one-eyed orange alien.

10:15 PM

"Feel less welcome" is just a feeling. Probably induced thanks to identity politics constantly being pushed on them like in this article.

"especially newer coders" - such as most likely people who don't grasp basic programming concept and want to have their school projects debugged...

This whole article has no sources, it's entirely based on unsubstantiated claims.

I like the part where he claims how someone feels is the end-all of discussions.
"When someone tells you how they feel, you can pack up your magnifying glass and clue kit, cuz that’s the answer. You’re done."

It doesn't even considers that feelings can be wrong and unjustified.

10:41 PM

@StephaneHockenhull Because many people DO post with real names and real pictures.

"So they thank the poster… only to be told that on Stack Overflow, “please” and “thank you” are considered noise. All these experiences add up to making Stack Overflow a very unwelcoming place for far too many."

Great, so now educating newbies into SE etiquette is wrong.

Sheb Wooley - Purple People Eater (1958)

►

"far too many" is an non-quantifiable goal. Do we have to make every single user feel absolutely welcome, even the most insecure ones who gets their feelings hurt by even the most amicable correction?
What is the acceptable ratio? What is the concrete goal? Because there ALWAYS will be someone with their feelings hurt. Genuinely or disingenuously.

10:58 PM

I think we need to be aware of the fallacy of the excluded middle here. There's room between "StackExchange should cave to every request no matter how frivolous" and "StackExchange should take no action regarding its reputation for unfriendliness & elitism" — I think we still have room to grow & improve.

My problem is there's no goal post set. It's all vague and there's no data for any of the claims.

Just: people have feelings, accept them. "You're done."

There's a lot we do in StackExchange that doesn't have a clear-cut line. That's why we have consensus features like voting and meta threads and this very chat, because real issues are complex and often involve discussion & shades of individual judgement.

So: this is one more perspective to add to the discussion, not an all or nothing ultimatum.

^

It sounds very ultmatum-y to me: "Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change."
At the very least click-bait-y.

Those are strong claims with nothing to back them.

I'd say it sounds like old news. I remember gathering four or five articles saying the same thing during the election Q&A.

If you'd like further support of these claims, it's not hard to find. I was just skimming the top few Google results at the time.

11:25 PM

That might be the best comment on the issue: reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8f5s0a/…

After reading that comment I'm pretty sure the solution suggested in the article is treating the symptom and not the cause.
Maybe the point of SO/SE got lost at some point and what newbs see as unwelcoming is their misunderstanding of the site's purpose.
There's tons of forums and chats to help with their code (with various degree of "niceness")

I'd say if the site were working as intended, we'd have a higher success rate in taking naive users who ask low-quality questions and coaching them into becoming regular users who ask high-quality questions (and maybe share high-quality answers too).

I think we have a missed opportunity to cultivate more regular, engaged users who are assets to the community. I think in its current form, the site is easier to bounce off of than to learn how to use well.

I raged against it a fair bit myself until, thanks to the help & patience of some users here, I gradually "got it." I'd like to find ways to help that happen faster & more reliably.

The training-wheel area is a good thing to try.

Yeah, I'd been thinking the question form area needed to serve as a better tutorial for users who don't read the help, but wasn't sure how. I think that suggestion has a lot of promise. I think it might be tricky to scale to different question types though.

Sorry, my plane's taking off so I'll be AFK

11:42 PM

Have a good trip!

See you next Fall!

I'm so sorry.