Mikina
@Mikina@programming.dev
- Comment on SOUL PARK (in early access), a themepark "at the gates of hell" management game, releases demo on Steam 1 day ago:
What drove the point home for me was seeing a Twitter account (it was years ago) that posts short 6 second segments of every new game released on steam.
It was posting almost hourly, and while there was a lot of trash, most of the games were of pretty “standart” smaller indie quallity. It’s ruthless.
And in addition with the GDC talk of someone who made literally millions by making a generator that generates super basic slot machine games on various themes (as in, generate a theme (cars, bird…), download a few pictures, place them on slot machine) and uploads them to Play Store (back then you had a limit on 20 games a day, and they did include some more rules about quality in reaction to this talk), and the game were getting thousands of downloads and when they checked how is their script doing after few months, they had like over a million in revenue with thousands of downloads. Sure, it’s about mobile games, but it is hearbreaking when you realize how do the consumers work in reality.
- Comment on Concord may have sold as few as 25,000 copies, it’s claimed [VGC] 2 months ago:
As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.
I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.
From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.
- Comment on What have you been pondering about as of late? 3 months ago:
EVE is one of the most unique games I’ve ever seen and I admire it, and CCP in general, from what I’ve seen in their volunteer programs or from streams, seems like a nice workplace.
Also, Island is cool.
- Comment on What have you been pondering about as of late? 3 months ago:
How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don’t even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.
We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I’ve encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.
How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it’s so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn’t there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you “step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>.”
I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I’m obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I’ve done is shit or useless :D
- Comment on What have you been pondering about as of late? 3 months ago:
I’d go for scandiavia, if I could choose anywhere. Or Island, working for CCP is my dream job.
- Comment on I don't get how people can become depressed, when we live in the century of Fentanyl, easy access to alcohol and amusement arcades. 4 months ago:
I guess you are right.
- Comment on I don't get how people can become depressed, when we live in the century of Fentanyl, easy access to alcohol and amusement arcades. 4 months ago:
Its what literally changed my life. I was really socialy awkward, spend most of my lide behind a computer, and when I managed to go out to parties in a subculture scene parties I loved, I couldnt talk to anyone, had a few beers awkwardly in a corner and went home.
Then I met someone who introduced me to MDMA. That happened almost 8 years ago, and now I am an organizer of 2/3 of the same scene regular parties in our city, Im helping and DJing on a festival that happens here, and am living my best life in that regard. All thanks to that one best friend who got me something that made me talk to, and get to actually know people in the scene in the extent that I always wanted, and get comfortable enough that I no longer need to be high to interact with anyone. Since now they are friends and regulars, and not random people I wanted to talk to, but was afraid of approaching.
- Comment on A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water 5 months ago:
I self-hosted it few months ago, and it’s actually surprisingly easy! Someone has made an Ansible script for Matrix with Element and some bridges, that (at least a month ago, IaaC tends to be pretty fragile) worked out of the box on a first try. I just set up some config values (mostly about enabling bridges I want) based on their amazing documentation, and then ran it once and everything is working so far. I even updated it several times already, and every time it was smooth, and it was basically just running a single ansible command. Their documentation is pretty well written, and with my basic cloud, IT and Linux knowledge I had no issues with following it. All you need to know is how to set up cloud VM, get a domain and set DNS, and set up SSH keys to access the server.
In total it took me about two hours in total, from when I decided “I’m setting up Matrix tonight” without any prior knowledge, looking up my options and finding the ansible script, setting up cloud and getting Matrix up and running.
I’m renting a VM on Hetzner for like 6$ per month, and it worked without issues so far. I use it for Discord and Messenger, although the Meta bridge does have some problems, for example I didn’t figure out how to message someone with whom I haven’t had a conversation since I set up the bridge, since only then it creates the room for it. But that can be solved by keeping the Messenger app or usign the browser to send a first message, and it immediately shows in your Matrix bridge (and stays there forever).
- Comment on Games that force you to make hard choices 10 months ago:
I’d recommend Tyranny. Its a CRPG, where you play as an envoy of basically villains that are sweeping through the world, conquering almost everything. Most of the choices are pretty difficult, because from what I remember its usually “bad or different bad”, without it being clear what’s going to be worse. Because you’re an envoy for a dictator with the power to literally wipe an entire continent with a single sentence, you can’t just go " fuck this, I’m gonna ignore the orders and do good", and balancing the long term and short term consequences makes every decision pretty difficult.