[spit2wind]

I never understood the Handmade Network. AFAIU, it came from people who watched Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, a game developed on video over several years from scratch. But Casey, as far as I know, didn't start the Network and it never seemed to align with the intent of Handmade Hero.

The purpose of Handmade Hero was to show people that they are capable of making a game themselves and to learn things which have a reputation for being too hard. There was, of course, an emphasis on the hard things being hard because of complexity introduced by things like OOP, C++, etc. But the main purpose always felt like education and enablement. Casey's a great teacher and the videos are very informative.

The Network, on the other hand, was some weird "we want to make stuff by hand", whatever that means. That's fine. But that's not what Casey spent like 7 years doing. He didn't do it "just cuz". Instead, it was to teach and share. That seemed lost on the Network.

As a result, it seemed just like a less toxic Suckless project without the focus on making a new ecosystem. It was just a forum to say, "Hey I made this thing", all the while co-oping the feel-goods from Casey's Handmade Hero.

[bvisness]

It's a large community of programmers whose values align with those demonstrated in Handmade Hero. Naturally not all of those programmers are going to do carbon copies of Handmade Hero. Some make and publish their own software that is developed with similar values in mind (e.g. File Pilot, 4coder, Odin). Others just enjoy programming that way for fun and like to discuss their hobby projects with other like-minded people. This shouldn't really be surprising; this is to be expected of any online community.

[anonymous908213]

To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.

[bvisness]

The goal was always, first and foremost, to teach. This is super obvious from the announcement trailer alone[1], where he says the point of the project is to pass on a way of life that inspired him. If Casey wanted to make money from a game he wouldn't have bothered with thousands of hours of Twitch streams.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2dxjOjWHxQ

[mariusor]

I for one feel like my 15$ spent on Handmade Hero were well served by having access to the source code and the breadth of video that annotates every line of code. I think anyone that looked at he proposition that Casey made as something more than a way to support him, was naive.