Hacker News for Gamedev

This is less a problem with the subreddit and forums, and more that AAA game devs seems to be very reserved about discussing their industry or keep discussion internal to private channels (possibly for IP reasons). Whenever I see a AAA developer pop up on Reddit they're always vague and mysterious; "I work for an unnamed AAA developer.." You don't see people doing that on HN very often, they usually announce unabashedly they work at a well known company, like Google.

This is the problem you will find with pretty much any subreddit, they are always filled with beginners. Drives me a little crazy.

The more professional discussions seem to be on the forums for Unreal Engine or Unity, where people are struggling with obscure issues inside those monster packages.

(I'm trying to do 3D stuff in Rust. The number of people who do hard 3D stuff in Rust seems to be very small, which is frustrating. There are many obscure bugs in the graphics stack and not enough people to exercise the stack, find the bugs, and get them fixed. 3D game dev in Rust is below critical mass. Retro-looking 2D is doing fine. But most 2D Rust work could be done in HTML/CSS/Javascript, or could have been done in Flash.

About half of my time goes into graphics stack problems. This is not fun.)

That’s probably the problem for any HN-for-X because a talking at/with/to beginners and hobbyists is not a rare internet opportunity for experts.

I think one of the things that makes HN HN is that experts can choose to have only incidental open internet engagement with their areas of expertise. Most or all of their time on HN can be engaging with other topics that they are less familiar with.

The attractions of an HN-for-X include engaging with an unfamiliar-X that experts are already familiar with.

I have a suspicion it’s worse than beginners (absolutely nothing wrong with beginners).

There’s a cohort of marketers on Reddit that profit off of beginner-aimed content. Lots of “oh I just built a successful game doing this”, link off to a blog. So the shepherds in those subreddits are not really elders, but sadly, grifters. In turn the beginners sort of stay perpetual beginners. It’s horrific if you go to the /r/startup type subreddits, the grift is super strong there.

Makes you really appreciate HN, good shepherds (not perfect, but good).

I found this very frustrating back when I was active on Reddit. There were times when I put a lot of thought and effort into writing posts drawing from my moderate knowledge and (at the time ~10 years of) experience. And then I get some reply from a complete novice or two saying this is clearly wrong and the post gets tons of down votes. Meanwhile the top comment is another beginner saying something obviously wrong and hundreds more agreeing.

Yep, familiar with this one - one of the best out there!

A little off-topic, but have you found spam or fake content to be a problem in the last year or two?

> 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.

From my observations, I see that most influencers are consistent. A few will flip flop to chase the trend of the week, but most simply have hard, clashing stances. And of course, those clashes creature flames

Sadly, talking about games is rarely civil. You need to find a quaint community and/or do a ton of moderation to keep the conversation from tilting off.

> Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer.

Yeah, that was definitely a contributing factor to me leaving Reddit. Only so many times you can try and reason "well yes, costs have grown for these larger games. Maybe a 16% increase after 15 years is justificed" and are counted by "but the market is bigger! You sell less games with higher costs"... sigh. I know they can't see the pocket books, but companies are still breaking records with $70 priced games. Come on.

Also just a real shame how much those gamers ignore the japanese market. They focus on COD and claim to just want to buy games. meanwhile Nintendo has never put MTX nor battle passes in their games, and they are chastised as bad for completely different moving goal posts (ahh yes, because lawyers remove mods... because Nintendo games disproportionately have a huge modding community. Population maps anyone?). Maybe a bunch of cosmetic DLC at worst, but all those western tactics are relagated to Mobile in Japan (which this audience couldn't care less about).

They have options to branch out to, but never do. Can't make the horse drink.

>While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.

Their verification method already seems to be enough of a gatekeep.

>if you don't know (or can't find) an existing_user from whom to request an invitation, you can make a public request for one. This will display your name and memo to all other logged-in users who can then send you an invitation if they recognize you.

And they ask for some personal website to verify as well that is visible. Given the volume at this scale, this could have been a manual verification by the creator for a while until there's enough scale to rely on invites (similar to Tildes).

Perhaps "interesting to read" does not correlate directly to "healthy discussion". It's a feature that Lobste.rs has low volume commentary, it leads to more authentic response less ad-hominem or passive-aggressive commentary like HN is constantly flooded with.

once a week may not really be enough to engage a community unless you are sure who you are recruiting will be very active.

But I respect the choice, nonetheless. It just simply does fit my ideal style where I could find at least 1-2 interesting posts when I check twice a week. Having niche interests can be a curse.

The stats page is just a clone from the site it's code is forked from, you can tell because they even have the same text on their stat page about their pledge drive, which clearly they did not do, but was in fact on lobste.rs.

https://lobste.rs/stats https://gamedev.city/stats

Are you telling me you don’t want to read constant updates on the state of AI and how it will obviously find AGI tomorrow so please give us a trillion dollars today?

The thing is HN doesn't even have a tag system so you can't "see gamedev posts only".

So far the most active community seems to be gamedev.net, but I feel it's in a long decline.

Also I thank that moderating a popular forum is dang hard.

Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?

> For me, "HN for X" sounds like a "Reddit channel with a sense of grandeur".

it's a bit sad seeing such a derisive comment about self-hosting on HN

and yet, because social networks degrade in quality over time (popularity brings about the riff raff), it's essential to start net social networks to maintain quality discourse.

That site aims for it, but the front page goes back a month or more. That's not a level of detail or activity that will compel people to go there regularly?

I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.

I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).

Any dev based forum needs full markdown support where you can type ```javascript.

//js code here.

```

And it formats as js, say. Formatting stuff on here, reddit, and other sites that support only partial markdown is painful for me.

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You're kind of describing an RSS reader, or del.icio.us...

It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said. I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.

It looks like 70% of the posts there are from bmonkey325 and most threads have no replies. I wouldn't call it active.

They've also gone with the sadly-ubiquitous "tiny fixed width column of content with heaps of whitespace on either side" pattern. Real HN does have whitespace borders after a certain width, but it mostly allows the content to scale to fit your browser window. Nothing worse than having a nice gigantic monitor and then having web content constrained to a 5" vertical strip down the middle of it.

For me, it's the fact that the tags overflow to the next line on mobile. Some posts only have tags on the right, some only have tags on the next line, some have both.

The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.

As a gamer though I immediately noticed how easy it was to visually filter the content by tags and drill down into the details at will. It's an uncommon texture but it works for me.

Tables are great provided you’re never going to do much styling with them … and maybe that’s what makes them great.

You can do this with divs/lists and bit of css as well.

Example: https://darkreader.org/

It's running on lobste.rs code as far as I've seen.

+1 those colors sucks

just straight up hard to read. great site though

Exactly - you can only add so many inner matryoshka dolls before they're not big enough to sustain critical mass.

If HN is a subset of other sites (though arguably its approach to UX and moderation offer something different), a site targeting a subset of HN's users seems unlikely to get much traction.

Who cares about engagement numbers?

The things this site used to offer was there might be an article about a security breach, a brand new highly anticipated feature in a major product, a historical article about a long forgotten but major technological achievement.

Then a key person from that story would chime in with their take about what the article got right or wrong, offer to answer questions. And that is assuming they didn't directly make the post.

Nobody actually wants to read self promotion blog spam, besides other people pretending to be engaged so they can do the same