I hope this catches on. For whatever reason, I haven't come across many gamedev-focused sites with good content. The gamedev subreddit is particularly disappointing.
Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.
There aren't many social media communities with quality gamedev content, because professional (especially AAA) developers with decades of experience rarely participate, and you can only have so many beginner communities. The lack of participation exists for many reasons:
1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.
2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.
3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.
4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.
As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.
HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.
There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.
This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people.
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
As someone who wanted to comment and was immediately prevented by the invite wall, I agree.
I even submitted for an invite but clicking submit triggered no notification or anything. I don't have the energy to look at the network request to confirm
Website maintainer here, that's kinda what we are going for. I really don't want to have to moderate a big community, this is supposed to be something you check once or twice a week.
I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
My first check on any "HN for X" is: does it look and feel almost the same. If not I get frustrated because apparently I’ve been promised something else.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
The other half of the chicken and egg is that hn is “hn for devs but actually just for techy people to cover all sorts of stuff” whether that’s the intent or not.
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
> I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
I love the idea, unfortunate the way this site is presented is such a incredibly busy and noisy way, it makes it so uncomfortable to look at I couldn't use this.
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
As a sibling commenter said, I think the background texture is the most distracting.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
A few colour changes and it would look fine. I don't know if it's the same software as lobste.rs, but it looks almost identical apart from the colours.
Oh man Celeste was FANTASTIC. I've been active in /r/gamedev for forever (because I used to teach high school kids how to make video games), so I was already interested but this seals the deal.
The storytelling, the accessibility options, chef's kiss
Seconded on a HN-style site for writers. I would love that. Aside from tech, I am also an aspiring author and seeing what others are up to helps me develop my own voice.
In terms of "x for gamedev", what I would love to see is a fork of Brilliant that covers common topics from the basics up, using pseudocode only. I've always liked Cat-Like Coding's approach to tutorials, but I've never been able to "acquire" that knowledge (and an intuitive feel for it) in a permanent way like I have with Brilliant's method. I know that they have a CS module, but one specific to gamedev topics would be amazing.
The problem with 'HN but for [x]' sites is that what they offer is just a subset of HN. Game dev posts might not be the most popular here, but they're still allowed and do get some traction from time to time - so there's little incentive to post somewhere that has even fewer eyes.
IMO for a site like this to succeed it needs to offer something HN doesn't. Chat, subforums, personal promotion section, something.
Personally, I do just really want a "HN but for gamedev". The frequency of games content here is my personal weakness.
But the invite only structure is limiting. I like the mentality behind it, but for so, so, so many of the communities I browse, the issue arises from size before any of the problem invite only solves.
And I don't need crazy frequent posts. Just something where I check after 2-3 days and it's not just 1 post with zero comments.
I can't speak to the content, but I found the a little difficult to read. I ran your homepage through the free Axe Dev Tools for accessibility. It may be worth testing yourself and changing some of the contrast between text and background.
This is neat, but I was wondering if anyone has a forum for discussing game product development (i.e. less the code that goes into game dev, moreso the decision making that goes into making quality games, is there a better name for what I'm referring to?)
The communities centered around links and comments that I get the most value out of are those that are gently strict about the discourse that occurs on them. They are well curated by moderators. But importantly, still open to all to participate in.
That takes a lot of effort, and the right curators, to do well. Invite only websites seem like a poor replacement for this. Are there examples of invite-only websites that reach the quality of HN at its best?
I'm willing to bet invite-only is not a substitution for moderation (since some of the worst members of a site are often its most frequent posters), but a sort of reputation system to prevent bots from joining. I remember demonoid did the same thing back in the day
Maintainer of the website here!
I'm happy (and a bit terrified) that we made it to the front page of Hacker News.
This isn’t a commercial project, and it never will be. We’re curating the site for a very specific vibe and high-quality content, which is why we’re invitation-only and why we aim to grow the community slowly and intentionally. I also want to ensure our server can handle the traffic without issues.
I’m slowly working through the invitation queue, so please bear with me!
Assuming this is your site OP, well done for getting it built and launched. I noticed other comments saying "why not lemmy", "why not filter on game dev topics on HN". I think the opposite. Forge your own path and who knows where it will take you.
Is there any way to see the top posts? It's really helpful when I'm trying to catch up on things.
I know HN doesn't, but I can usually use hn.algolia.com to find the top posts.
Let me summarize some of the points brought up here so far (and add a few of my own):
1. Background texture is distracting (background textures need to be very subtle to not be distracting!)
2. You gotta hack the lobste.rs source to allow signup without an invite (Note: if you start getting spambots, try reCAPTCHA in the signup flow and maybe cloudflare DNS for the whole site, that seems to reduce spammers by quite a lot)
3. Widen the page to match HN on desktop, 900px looks incredibly small on desktop monitors.
4. Page header scrolls (left/right) on mobile, scrolling elements on mobile are bad because usually the user doesn't realize they can be scrolled. Maybe beg/borrow/steal a magnifying glass icon to replace the "search" link.
I think that after "this meeting could've been an email", we should start thinking "this website could've been a Lemmy instance".
Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.
And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.
Precisely! Why not support the technologies that exist especially when it comes to helping drive critical mass of users to both? Making this a Lemmy instance would be mutually beneficial to both.
I had to get rid of lemmy. I know some instances are better than others, but the volume of unstable, immature zoomers (particularly the US variety) pushing openly communist rhetoric (and brigading and just abusing anything that doesnt conform to that) made it completely unusable. I really gave it several tries as well as I liked the tech. It was useless for discussing anything unless you aligned immediately with the mob. Yes, I blocked some instances, but the app delivery means the culture bleeds between them. It felt like worse twitter.
Currently building my own game engine for my games[1], but I'm facing the classic indie game marketing challenge. While platforms like CrazyGames, Poki, grab most of web players.
I'm exploring zero-budget marketing approaches. Currently experimenting with daily news posts for SEO[2] and converting them to podcasts too.
Would appreciate any suggestions on effective no-budget marketing strategies, or feedbacks!
Interesting take! I detest when a system says something like: 3 days ago instead of an exact date/time or the total hours since. If its months ago, then the date makes the best sense to me. Maybe I'm just data driven in some way and don't like it when people "hide" details?
The ultimate problem is that there's just an abundance of people doing game development or game tool (engines, tools etc) development. The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?
Of course this is more like an aggregator of game dev content so now you can observe the "0 views, 0 comments" phenomenom on content that itself has "0 views, 0 comments". ;-)
I have a list of games i have been wanting to make for ages. I was a game dev in the 80s, but got into b2b DOS, Windows and then Web dev to make for more consistent money. I guess if I ever do, I would do it for myself and if others like it, fine, if not, fine.
>The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?
to hope for that 10 views and one quality response, I suppose.
I mostly just want community though. It's a crapshoot advertising a game, it's just nice to get to know other ambitious, talented people working in parallel with me. It's a shame that the only way to really find that is through industry itself.
Discord works too, if you have time for open source contribution. I'm sadly still in this circus of a job search right now, though.
kudos for keeping the site small at about 55kb . Though not quite as slender as hackernews 14kb, i was expecting to see 2mb of react cruft so high fives to the devs for keeping it lite.
I don't think there is something like that for music specifically, but there are still many traditional forums with interesting discussions. See for example these:
I'd love there to be a HN for high-impact medical articles. Or alternatively for someone to build a tagged layer on top of HN with clear 'biotech' and 'medical' tags.
aarongeisler|1 year ago
Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.
Nice work!
arduinomancer|1 year ago
And the focus is like all on 1-person indie projects with very little content from professional/AAA devs
eru|1 year ago
klaussilveira|1 year ago
novaleaf|1 year ago
It's a no memes, no marketing subreddit for C# Godot.
(I am the Mod)
ta12653421|1 year ago
caseyy|1 year ago
1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.
2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.
3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.
4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.
As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.
HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.
There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.
CJefferson|1 year ago
Grumbledour|1 year ago
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
willio58|1 year ago
I even submitted for an invite but clicking submit triggered no notification or anything. I don't have the energy to look at the network request to confirm
saint11|1 year ago
vunderba|1 year ago
https://gamedev.city/stats
hubraumhugo|1 year ago
Isn't game development already discussed here?
I actually built a side project that categorizes front page articles so I can filter for topics. Here's an example for recent gamedev content: https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/d57360e8-1eb1-4800-a711-f0d5...
raytopia|1 year ago
stared|1 year ago
Starting one is easy, but maintaining both quality and popularity is hard - here, HN is a rare exception.
nottorp|1 year ago
I'd say not really. Not in the detail that this site aims for. At least on the front page.
baxtr|1 year ago
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
basch|1 year ago
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
koolba|1 year ago
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
rsolva|1 year ago
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
qingcharles|1 year ago
https://twostopbits.com/news
ramon156|1 year ago
burrish|1 year ago
ofc sometimes game dev is discussed here, but imo I don't see it enough here that I wouldn't want a hackernews just for gamedev.
also very useful side project
innerHTML|1 year ago
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
iib|1 year ago
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
abcd_f|1 year ago
The choice of colors is also rather unconventional and not exactly appealing.
cloogshicer|1 year ago
Anon4Now|1 year ago
It's the old school magic of nested <table>'s.
imzadi|1 year ago
shortrounddev2|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
saurik|1 year ago
frogulis|1 year ago
suby|1 year ago
GuB-42|1 year ago
corund|1 year ago
7bit|1 year ago
ahub|1 year ago
[0]: https://saint11.art/
teach|1 year ago
The storytelling, the accessibility options, chef's kiss
Requested.
drekipus|1 year ago
I'd love if there's more "hacker News like" sites. You could probably use the format for many things, a hacker news for writing?
0xEF|1 year ago
wrfrmers|1 year ago
appleorchard46|1 year ago
IMO for a site like this to succeed it needs to offer something HN doesn't. Chat, subforums, personal promotion section, something.
andrewmcwatters|1 year ago
Depending on where you're reading, it's Hacker News that's a subset of just about anything else.
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
But the invite only structure is limiting. I like the mentality behind it, but for so, so, so many of the communities I browse, the issue arises from size before any of the problem invite only solves.
And I don't need crazy frequent posts. Just something where I check after 2-3 days and it's not just 1 post with zero comments.
cosysinx|1 year ago
lemonberry|1 year ago
Congrats on launching! That's an achievement.
stevage|1 year ago
panorama|1 year ago
jayd16|1 year ago
cupofjoakim|1 year ago
MrLeap|1 year ago
My confirmation link was a link to Tentacle Typer's steam page.
edit: thanks for the invite.
picafrost|1 year ago
That takes a lot of effort, and the right curators, to do well. Invite only websites seem like a poor replacement for this. Are there examples of invite-only websites that reach the quality of HN at its best?
Maybe by definition they are harder to point to.
shortrounddev2|1 year ago
vdddv|1 year ago
saint11|1 year ago
This isn’t a commercial project, and it never will be. We’re curating the site for a very specific vibe and high-quality content, which is why we’re invitation-only and why we aim to grow the community slowly and intentionally. I also want to ensure our server can handle the traffic without issues.
I’m slowly working through the invitation queue, so please bear with me!
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
Sverigevader|1 year ago
otteromkram|1 year ago
2. How is this different/better than something like https://gamedev.stackexchange.com? More discussion-based vs Q&A?
ahub|1 year ago
postalrat|1 year ago
1ste|1 year ago
ahub|1 year ago
[0] : https://saint11.art/
elendee|1 year ago
Something similar would be great
Crowberry|1 year ago
dartos|1 year ago
HN is too VC focused for a lot of gamedev stuff to break through
unchar1|1 year ago
Is there any way to see the top posts? It's really helpful when I'm trying to catch up on things. I know HN doesn't, but I can usually use hn.algolia.com to find the top posts.
saint11|1 year ago
meheleventyone|1 year ago
natural219|1 year ago
At some point, I wonder if `dang` would support this? It seems like a good idea. For more topic-specific higher volume news items.
phendrenad2|1 year ago
1. Background texture is distracting (background textures need to be very subtle to not be distracting!)
2. You gotta hack the lobste.rs source to allow signup without an invite (Note: if you start getting spambots, try reCAPTCHA in the signup flow and maybe cloudflare DNS for the whole site, that seems to reduce spammers by quite a lot)
3. Widen the page to match HN on desktop, 900px looks incredibly small on desktop monitors.
4. Page header scrolls (left/right) on mobile, scrolling elements on mobile are bad because usually the user doesn't realize they can be scrolled. Maybe beg/borrow/steal a magnifying glass icon to replace the "search" link.
rglullis|1 year ago
Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.
And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.
cersei|1 year ago
bloqs|1 year ago
heyitssim|1 year ago
I'm exploring zero-budget marketing approaches. Currently experimenting with daily news posts for SEO[2] and converting them to podcasts too.
Would appreciate any suggestions on effective no-budget marketing strategies, or feedbacks!
[1] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast/
[2] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/dailynews
nemomarx|1 year ago
but why do I see "41 hours ago" on one of the posts? it feels unintuitive to measure a time longer than a day in hours
calgoo|1 year ago
nottorp|1 year ago
swiftcoder|1 year ago
damir|1 year ago
CornishPasty|1 year ago
samiv|1 year ago
The ultimate problem is that there's just an abundance of people doing game development or game tool (engines, tools etc) development. The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?
Of course this is more like an aggregator of game dev content so now you can observe the "0 views, 0 comments" phenomenom on content that itself has "0 views, 0 comments". ;-)
anonzzzies|1 year ago
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
to hope for that 10 views and one quality response, I suppose.
I mostly just want community though. It's a crapshoot advertising a game, it's just nice to get to know other ambitious, talented people working in parallel with me. It's a shame that the only way to really find that is through industry itself.
Discord works too, if you have time for open source contribution. I'm sadly still in this circus of a job search right now, though.
kcb|1 year ago
shahzaibmushtaq|1 year ago
iib|1 year ago
[1] https://lobste.rs
stock_toaster|1 year ago
ropejumper|1 year ago
gareth_untether|1 year ago
tonymet|1 year ago
lawlessone|1 year ago
cersei|1 year ago
saint11|1 year ago
Because Lemmy is a bit too much like social media and kinda bloated for me. I wanted something simpler so I hosted it.
vayan|1 year ago
burgerrito|1 year ago
The only other website I know is https://lobste.rs, and this website looks like it uses Lobsters' software
bramhaag|1 year ago
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/
https://www.progarchives.com/forum/default.asp
https://forum.metal-archives.com/
bdno86|1 year ago
OgsyedIE|1 year ago
p2detar|1 year ago
bdelmas|1 year ago
miohtama|1 year ago
But is it enough Web 0.9? :)
cosysinx|1 year ago
mclau156|1 year ago
geenat|1 year ago
elpocko|1 year ago
mariusor|1 year ago
> You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license
From here: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters#:~:text=You%20are%20fre...
dutchbookmaker|1 year ago
i_am_a_peasant|1 year ago
metadat|1 year ago
P.s. Why does it have the Lobste.rs favicon?
https://gamedev.city/apple-touch-icon.png
saint11|1 year ago
jschoe|1 year ago
HellDunkel|1 year ago
scholars_io|1 year ago
[deleted]
wetpaws|1 year ago
[deleted]
dangrape123|1 year ago
[deleted]