I know they allow scam adverts because it's easy money, but why aren't they held responsible for facilitating obvious scams? You open Edge, there's 3 "Earn money quick" adverts. On Instagram, every 5 ads, one is a scam.

After seeing this other post here and lot of talk about it, I thought it'd be a good idea to make a list of free or FOSS engines for people that were considering using Unity but probably won't anymore, or that want to ditch it ASAP.

Feel free to add your own suggestions in this thread!

Engines:

• Godot - Probably the "biggest around", offers programming in both GDScript (very similar to Python) and C# with their Mono executable. Also has bindings for other languages thanks to their GDExtension API, such as Rust, Go and Nim. Has lots of material for learning and a community over programming.dev
• Solarus - FOSS, for making SNES/GBA Zelda-like games (top down action rpgs). Programming done with Lua
• GDevelop - FOSS, Similar to Construct2/3, focuses on visual scripting to define the workings of your game.
• OHRRPGCE OHR - Putting this one here because I'm simply too amused to leave it out. Could work as an alternative to RPG Maker, if you happen to know FreeBASIC and don't mind the really old school look of everything.
• Stride - Probably one of the best options for high performance 3D games with C# programming. MIT license
• Fyrox - Rust based engine. Allows both 2D and 3D development. MIT license
• Bevy - Similar to Fyrox above, it's made with Rust and allows both 2D and 3D. MIT or Apache license

Game specific engines - These are engines made to play a specific game, but they have enough tooling to allow you to make almost any other game with them

• OpenMW - Should probably be a good option for anyone with experience modding TES games. There is a "new game template" on their docs
• GZDoom - It's Doom. If you really, absolutely, definitely, must have your game run EVERYWHERE, this is one of the best choices. You aren't stuck to raycast first-person shooters, either, someone made a Donkey Kong Country with Doom and there's also Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart.
• Quake 2/3 source ports - Similar to GZDoom above, but for those that need good 3D performance. A good option is YamagiQ2
  • Pretty much any implementation or sourceport of id games fits the bill. The most recent open sourced engine of theirs was tech 4, which ran Doom 3 and Quake 4.

Frameworks - This is for the programmers.

• LOVE2D - Lua framework for making 2D games. Can also run on Android if the person installs the LOVE2D app
• MonoGame - Formerly XNA, it should be the go-to option for people with experience in C#. One of its most notable games is Stardew Valley
• libGDX - For people who want to make a game running in Java. Porting it to several platforms should be easy thanks to the JVM. Two notable games are Mindustry and Unciv (Civ5 clone)

Discoverability is probably the second biggest hurdle when it comes to developing a game (the first is actually having something to publish)

So, title question. I know I could try to throw money at Instagram, TikTok and Youtube (know your target audience), but I think using their built-in advertising is more likely to miss than hit. Youtube is even more problematic, as a significant portion of people smartly avoid their ads (either with extensions or watching from piped or invidious).

Maybe paying to be on top of itch.io might work somewhat? I'd like to know from someone who did that, what was the turnout (number of sales/downloads per number of clicks)

One thing I think about is getting in contact with a number of small-ish (2k or less followers) content creators and work out a deal - free copy of the game, make a video being honest about it, leave a referral link for viewers to buy.

A problem of mine that I'm aware of is that I don't have much of a social media presence, not even Discord servers, thus I completely lack any sort of "organic digital voice".

I really want to know what are some decent strategies that a solo person could attempt to get some attention for their own game, and maybe the prices/budgets needed.

I've been thinking about putting some stuff that I can only find on direct download sites up as torrents, but most places I can access either have fake sign up/login links, or have very strict rules, like torrentgalaxy requiring at least 5 uploads per month for 3 months

A bit late on the announcement, but for those interested, it looks like Warpath is being reworked into becoming a competitor to Epic 40k. A very rough draft of the rules is available for download in their blog post as well.

Title.

We're kinda spoiled with "all the X we could want, whenever we want".

Some things that make it very annoying to me:

• She complains whenever she can't find certain movies
• She usually searches using the complete video title in the search bar, it's usually something like: Movie name - Complete Movie - Dubbed - Pirate Site or Uploader - Genre
  • She has a list of saved movie/video titles in a .docx file, where she also writes whether she liked the movie or not. Whenever a YT search shows something she thinks she'll be interested, she copies the title to the doc.
  • Will usually use that same search on Netflix, or continue typing and adding more despite no search results showing already.
• Complains about video/audio quality
• Complains when there's no dubbed version
• Complains when the "movie" is just a trailer repeating for 1 hour
• Seems to willfully ignore my explanations to why searching for and watching full movies on YT sucks (it's pirate content on a platform that doesn't allow piracy)
• Ignores some 🏴‍☠️ alternatives I've set up, because "there's nothing interesting there"
• "Forgets" anything I teach her about searching and search terms in 5 minutes

To be fair, most of the movies she "wants" to watch aren't available on any streaming services. Feels like I'm dealing with the world's worst pirate.

For those that just want the music

https://inv.zzls.xyz/watch?v=CC_Y4zOUdcI

something something "it's an old meme, but it checks out"-starwars.jpg

In part because it reminds me a bit of the old internet, with stuff being spread around everywhere.

Being "harder"* to understand than reddit, twitter or other big companies' services is also a good thing, because people should remember that they have a brain and they should use it.

• "harder" because not everyone understands the fediverse right away, since usability is extremely similar

PS: ^superscript doesn't work with phrases? at least not on preview^