Games@lemmy.worldbyRoad_Warrior_10@lemmy.world
13 hours

I'm A Game Dev Who Got Layed Off From His Non-Game Dev Job

English

Hello, just wanted to share my story as a reminder with all the lay offs in the gaming industry, it has been terrible outside of it too. I’ve been working as an automation QA for a pretty decent software company and I was about to hit like 11 years on the job. Also on the side I’ve been trying to get my own indie game dev studio off the ground with releasing 3 small games in the past 3 years.

After saving for like 10 years and living in small rented apartments, last summer I finally managed to secure enough money so I can get a loan to buy my first apartment. After a year of dealing with contractors (yes, they are that slow!!!) I finally moved and was hoping to be able to focus my free time on my game again. However literally first Monday we have a meeting with a head of our department and they said we are practically being replaced with A.I. So around 60% of the company is gone across all offices in 3 different continents…

I guess my dream has always been to go full time game dev, it’s just I was hoping to be able to do it on my own terms and not kinda being forced into it. But with no real money coming in from my previous games I might not be able to make payments for the place I bought and spent most of my adult life saving for.

So now I guess I don’t have a choice but to go all in on my current game. If you want to check it out and leave feedback on how it looks or even wishlist, you can so here STEAM

Wish me luck guys and gals!

45
    • Luffy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4 hours

      So let me get this straight: you say its not generated with AI, yet you include the fucking Prompt of ChatGPT?

      The translation:

      Heres the Translation into German. I have chosen a clinical, depressing tone (spoiler: it didn’t, its quite meta) to underline the tension and hard ethical content of your game.

      • Miaou@jlai.luEnglish
        3 hours

        You were not kidding lol. Also the case for Italian. Not for French and Spanish though. Not very consistent copy paste skills

      • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3 hours

        This is just the translation on the Steam page it has nothing to do with the development of the game. Simple as.

        • raze2012@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 hour

          Man, I’m a laid off dev too. You really should know by now how scrutinous people are about AI anything.

          You’re not even getting the 100 dollar monthly payments off steam. Forget “just use google translate like pre-AI”, why not just focus on one language and look into localization later if this game catches on? Now instead all languages will be scanning your game with a fine-toothed comb.

        • Luffy@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3 hours

          Still, marketing is a part of the game, and also one of the easiest things to do without AI via deepl or something

          • boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1 hour

            without AI via deepl or something

            This deepl?

            Also note that Google Translate is AI too. It uses neural networks. Has for like a decade I believe.

            Really what it seems to me you’re saying is that nobody should use machine translations and one should always hire a translator for translating things into/from languages they don’t speak?

            • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
              53 minutes

              Yes, Google Translate has used neural networks for quite a while. Recently they’ve also switched it to using the same Gemini LLMs that they give you chat interfaces with, so it’s pretty equivalent to using ChatGPT for translations. It’s just another company’s version of the same thing, wrapped in a translation interface.

            • Axolotl@feddit.itEnglish
              49 minutes

              It’s not an LLM IIRC (the deepl one at least, Google now uses gemini)

            • raze2012@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1 hour

              I know he means “without the use of LLMs.”. That’s the big thing being forced down People’s throats that they don’t like.

              I doubt people are rebelling against reinforcement learning for physically based animations, or prediction engines to forecast the weather

      • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5 hours

        Right now it’s not. We will try to get there when it’s close to release and all other work is done.

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5 hours

      I don’t like the genre but from the trailer it seems very interesting, good job 👍🏻

    • ExtraMedicated@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7 hours

      I got burned out developing business software and lost my job after 13 years. I’m lucky if my previous game makes $100 in a year at this point. So now I’m wondering at what point I’ll need to give up on my dream of being a full time indie game dev and start looking for a new job.

      • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6 hours

        Start looking. It’s a very saturated market. Unless you can get some YouTubers or streamers to play your game then it’s not going to make much of anything.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      10 hours

      You may want to try to deliberately get away from the “unreal fivey” look.

      I like the underlying style but the strong reflections and resulting high contrast image really hits that “unreal five” look in a bad way, which I suspect will turn a lot of people off.

      It’s unfortunate but “indie unreal five game” is the new “steam asset flip”, in that it is something that makes people skip a game. It’s easy to slap realistic lightning into games now, so it has stopped being an indicator of quality, and slowly become the opposite.

      Try to find something that works with the games style that you can do to the shading or post processing that sets you apart.

      I might mute reflections a bit and add at least some grime and imperfections to surfaces. The cleanliness of surfaces together with unreals realistic lighting is a big part of the “indie unreal five” look.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11 minutes

        That isn’t the first impression that I got, although of course I’m just one data-point. The composition, lighting, and post-processing of the stills are really good which is not common for games that are actually lazily thrown together assets. Looking a bit closer though, I do see what you mean and I think the main problem is that the level of quality doesn’t seem that consistent. IDK what’s going on on that 13th still with the monitor. A lot of the scenery in the trailer looks worse that the scenery in the stills, and some of the UI stuff seems a bit meh. I get that as an indie dev it takes forever to do this sort of stuff, and definitely there’s very little that looks outright bad, the problem is mostly the inconsistency in quality. People only have so much time to play games, and it’s not that easy to judge how fun a game is from it’s trailers and description, so they look for any clues they can of less than complete effort, as any inattention to detail could indicate a lack of attention to the actual gameplay parts as well. Unfortunately for both gamers and developers, how fun or engaging your game is doesn’t necessarily correspond that well with how appealing it is to people who see the trailer.

        IDK, this is all kind of unfounded speculation from someone who really doesn’t have much personal experience in the area, so take it with a grain of salt

    • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13 hours

      And the funny thing is, the company isn’t even doing bad. I found out from a friend who still works there that they are aiming for a sale at the end of the year, so effectively this is a way for them to pump up the stock. They will say their profits went up by 50-60%, but it didn’t come from more clients, but from not paying wages. And this way stock go up. Also same friend said they are struggling a lot with AI. It can be helpful with coding, but It can’t do everything, and they are literally asking it to do everything or at least hold long enough until the sale goes trough . Just greed… and hundreds of families put in a bad spot, so already rich people on top can make a lot of money fast instead of also a lot of money, but slower…

      • BougieBirdie@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        11 hours

        Well, on the bright side, at least this teaches you the real value of AI is that it tells people what products to avoid:

        image

        If it wasn’t AI it would be something else though. Working for the man always sucks.

        We will watch your career with great interest

          • jorm1s@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            4 hours

            If you really want to sell the no gen AI thing, you might want to consider cleaning up the steam page translations. For example the finnish translation contains these lines:

            Tässä on käännös suomeksi ilman pitkäviivaa:

            …

            Jos haluat, voin tehdä myös tiiviimmän ja myyvemmän version, joka sopii pelin kauppa- tai esittelytekstiin. Haluatko, että teen sen?

            which roughly translate to:

            Here’s a translation in finnish without a long line:

            …

            If you want, I can also make a more dense and a better selling version , which fits in a game’s store page or decription. Do you wan’t me to do it?

            Personally I don’t mind AI being used for the store page translations, and I can see how easy it is to make a mistakes like that, but maybe anyone reading that would get a slightly better impression of the game without those extra bits.

      • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        11 hours

        I’ve been on the receiving end of “making the bride look good” for selling the company too, 3 times in my life. Either you still have a job but everything around you falls apart because there aren’t enough people to keep shit running, or you lose the job; both variants suck. I always was on the team “keeping my job”, but it also always ended with me fleeing as soon as i could because working conditions deteriorated fast.

        Wishlisted your game !

        • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6 hours

          Thank you! We actually had a few changes in ownership before, but it didn’t really impacted us. This time the current ownership got real greedy!

    • lyralycan@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12 hours

      So many people’s lives are damaged by corporate decisions… Hope things look up, and that Steam excuse makes sense but damn that sucks.

      As for the game I love explorations into real-life fucked-up experiments! Will definitely be playing aha

      • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12 hours

        Thank you! Yeah, like I said the company was already doing good and it’s not like people or on top were poor. Just pure greed

    • 0ndead@infosec.pubEnglish
      5 hours

      I have doubts about the legality of that Steam payment policy. Seems like grounds for a class action lawsuit.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        39 minutes

        I think the money accumulates over time, so you’ll eventually get a payment once you have $100 at the start of a month after fees. But there’s also the $100 up front cost to list a game, so even after the first payment you haven’t really made money

        You’d probably have to get like $200 in sales from a game before you have actually started to make money (from taxes and steam’s 30% cut)

        Idk this is just what I’ve heard on the internet, I haven’t experienced it myself

      • Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5 hours

        I’m not a lawyer but good luck suing the biggest gaming market on the planet. Just not for me

        • 0ndead@infosec.pubEnglish
          5 hours

          Maybe we should build an alternative that isn’t fucking over game devs?

    • GottaHaveFaith@fedia.io
      10 hours

      uuh I had the demo for your game already installed but still havent played it, maybe today…

      I was also inspired by the explosion of weird indie horror games to pick up Godot, but time is what it is, good luck!

    • viral.vegabond@piefed.socialEnglish
      12 hours

      That game looks good from the trailer! Great sinister vibes, and it kind of reminded me of portal a little bit with the omnipotent computer voice. That elevator music -was- pleasant! Lol