Someone just msged me offering pinball machine parts, so I can get that... whoopiiii.

Apparently the things I want are all verboten: how about I get a menu of things its OK to want and I'll pick something out.

"I want people to show some god damned initiative and try to anticipate my wants without me having to spell out my order like getting a complicated take out meal from an IRS attorney."

THEY SHOULD DIE LIKE PIGS IN HELL.

Am I supposed to say "I want people to respect me and treat me right?"

"I want people to trust me?"

"I WANT TO BE LOVED"

give me a break.

From time to time people ask me what I want, as if its some profound question. They really cut through the bullshit and figured it all out by asking this deep thing.

I'll say stuff like "I want Silverware Games to be successful." or "I want to have a happy life with the woman I love and start a family." or just joke around about how "I want to be super rich and powerful."

That always disappoints whoever thought up this brilliant question.

Am I supposed to say "I want a burrito and a diet coke?"

"I want what everyone wants: for my girlfriend to dress up as Wonder Woman, tie me up with the golden lariat, and force me to tell the truth."

Its a really dumb question, but maybe you guys have interesting answers?

I'm willing to be wrong here:

I just like to see a story trailer, I may be the only one lol.

[Theme, Conflict, and Mystery]

Since I'm in a pontificating mood I'll start to expand on "why I care about fictional characters"

Three reasons: Theme, Conflict, and Mystery

Theme:

A character I care about has to have a goal that relates to me. As an example, I'll talk about One Piece. I've watched close to 1000 episodes of that show and I still care about Luffy's goal of becoming king of the pirates. Its a clever case study in what it takes to keep people hooked on an ongoing saga:

Luffy explains that he wants to be king and that relates to most everyone as a theme: Power. Pretty much all people on earth want more power. I would be wary of someone who says they don't want to be powerful because they are likely selling something. So the quest to be "king" a universal idea that Luffy wants to have agency and do what he wants. I can relate to the theme here.

Now, I know a lot of people will say that such themes are a "juvenile power fantasy," but seriously, power is an inherently interesting theme and if you don't talk about it in your art you are really tying your hands (I know some people are into that.) Kudos to people who pick less cliche themes in their art though, much respect, I just hope you are not making something boring and un-relatable.

Conflict:

So you start with the theme of power, already I'm listening, and then you add that this is power in a world of pirates, with colorful personalities and their own goals and dreams, and all kinds of powerful abilities on their side. So now we have an interesting conflict: what does it take to be king in a world of powerful pirates? Now I'm gonna watch some of this show. I'm hooked: you have conflict and a theme that I'm interested in.

Mystery:

The icing on the cake is the teaser of the hidden ending: only the king of the pirate knows what the One Piece treasure is. Oh, a surprise at the end for the winner? Daymn, I'm in for 1k episodes.

So you have these 3 elements, a theme that relates, conflict that is meaningful, and some mystery at the end. BAM: I'm in.

Example, Luffy's first story arc:

Of course, Luffy in the first arc of the show takes on a Marine who is erecting a giant Jesus like statue of himself. This gets me to watch for two reasons, first I want Luffy to win against this vain guy who thinks he is god, but ALSO, I understand why the bad guy is motivated: he wants to be powerful the theme is being explored because its asking who is deserving of power and how do we become powerful. Also it has the conflict because who knows which side is right? I want to see this play out. I'm invested. Then the icing on the cake is the mystery of Zorro and Goby, who we instantly want to know where they end up. Zorro is in the stocks, and Goby is stuck on a ship he hates: what happens to these characters?

Example of a story I stopped watching, Buzz Lightyear:

For Buzz Lightyear, we have none of the 3 elements: the planet buzz lands on is not particularly interesting, even though buzz is going on about the theme of exploring the interesting world of outer space, already buzz is crapping on the theme that exploration and bravery and boldly going to new worlds is the stuff of legends because the first thing he does on an alien planet is say "well this planet is a boring stink hole, why are we even here?" What is the theme then? A sort of dogged sticking to duty even though there is no real point. "Ya gotta do what ya gotta do?" Other than some kind of "Office Space" making fun of such an idea I have no reason to care about this theme.

So for the next element, Buzz is trying to escape the super boring planet and we have no interesting conflict: who is stopping him from leaving? Only Buzz's inability to manufacture special crystals, and the fact that testing the crystals takes 4 years for each test. Its not really a conflict in any meaningful way, its sort of dull.

To top it off, there is no mystery, no one is saying what the pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow. No question of what the "happy ending" is or what the endgame of the movie is. It seems like the explorers in Buzz Lightyear want to take their ship to some tropical planet and build condos on a beach somewhere? I mean, who cares?

So in summary and in conclusion, Make your game like One Piece, and not Like Buzz Lightyear. Thank you for attending my ted talk.

The trailer is quite polished and complete at this point. I don't think I could offer anything to improve it, though its a bit long.

Personally, I know you consciously decided to avoid this topic, but I'm a sucker for story trailers: stuff that answers "why do I care?" This trailer sort of tangentially gets into it, but I always want more about the plot motivation for why I'm exploring the world. For example, the new buzz lightyear movie was about being stranded on an alien planet, and I checked out pretty fast because I just wasn't too invested in it. There has to be a hint of what the payoff will be at the end. A hook.

For games, plot may not be commercially the best stuff, I know most people say "stick to gameplay" but I kinda want to be rooting for the mission to be a success story wise.

Edit: to be even more specific here, the characters are stranded on a far away planet, why is the planet special? why are the characters special? Is this essentially a bunch of anonymous star explorers that are stopping at a gas station in space, fixing up their ship and leaving to more interesting locals?

 

I have a feeling my histogram is going to be the inverse of most people's histogram, because the only movies I remember are extremely good or extremely bad movies, so most of my reviews will either be 5 stars or 0 stars.

I don't know, people are pretty varied--I could see there being those who simply aren't interested it making art. Each to their own!

I'm gonna get a bit judgemental: there are people who pay for everything, getting their house clean, even someone to wipe their ass (probably metaphorically) That's kind of a bad sign for that person. Yeah, I'm sure if I had billions I would hire a cleaning person, but to never have to clean up after yourself? Its an old fashioned idea but it "builds character."

Same thing with art: I know its not like art will be everyone's passion, but the idea that you haven't made ANY art? That's a bit extreme. To me its part of the human experience. Not that everyone has to experience every bit of the human experience. I've never done drugs, some people never have sex, some people never have kids or a pet. I get the idea of different strokes for different folks, but its a pretty wholesome kind of "eat your veggies" experience at worst, usually its much more enjoyable than that. Its an incredibly wholesome way to make you a better and richer person. I do recommend that ALL humans make some kind of art, even though there is no such thing as a universal experience, and we have the postmodern tribal thing that is so popular on twitter. However, yes, I'm sure there are some people who would avoid making art, perhaps with reason, I don't want to neg those people.

Just signed up, is Frankenhooker worth it, its playing at my local indie cinema?

https://letterboxd.com/michaelplzno/

[The Goal]

This thread will be where I discuss my evil plans of how I try to beat the system that seems to be designed to help get garbage, and sociopaths who will say and do anything to get famous to rise to the top and not actually the stuff I like to make.

The Goal: to actually make Art (content) I want to make and have fun making and have it be seen by a sizable audience of people who want to see it and have fun seeing it. Eventually launch some kind of products that my audience will enjoy buying.

The Problem: the curatorial process (algorithm) by which Art is chosen to be seen does not reward the kind of Art I make.

The Solution: The algorithm is like a bank, larger protected, bigger, but it is still a bank: It can be, I think the expression is, "Blown"

Things I like to make:

• Colorful games where you don't kill anything.
• Colorful art that is light and fun.
• Sarcastic jokes about old (sometimes new) TV Shows and Movies.
• Videos of clips of old/new moments of TV and Movies that are really great moments.
• Nitpicky play-through and reviews of games that tell people annoying little bits I get stuck at.
• Short videos explaining the epic that is my life and all the things I'm working on.
• Short videos explaining new products I've purchased and how they work.
• Short videos that are just goofy memes.

Here are a couple of dead ends I've found so far:

Twitter:
It seems like twitter is completely a wasteland. I post what I like posting and enjoy it, and have about 50 or so friends who see my tweets and hit like every so often so each post I post on average gets 5 or so likes. This is a lovely little friend circle but is not a sizable audience. I have two main twitter handles:

https://twitter.com/michaelplzno

The Michaelplzno handle is more personal, I post here just because I want to vent or post sarcastic nonsense. I try to promote art that I like, memes that make me laugh, and for a long time I would post my daily drawings here. I've had 2 viral tweets here, one was a clip of Lupin III Castle of Caligostro, and one was a Steamed Hams/Mario meme.



Lupin is obviously one of the best Anime, and Steamed Hams is always popular. However these two situations seem like flukes I cannot reproduce as opposed to regular occurrences. I don't know what I did to make these two memes, as opposed to many of the other memes I've posted, go crazy popular. But those were two moments where the things I like actually got an audience though. Even then, I did not make the actual "content" in question.

I've come to the conclusion that a really good post of mine on twitter is algorithmically set to give me no more than 10 likes before it stops showing the post to other people. This seems strange because @michaelplzno supposedly has close to 5k followers. I built the handle up by following people back and just trying to build a community that way. I'm told that is a bad move even though for many years my account had only a few hundred followers and it seems like the only way to get people to follow is to follow them and hope they follow you back.

https://twitter.com/silverwaregames

My more official company account is where we posted pics of retro games with their name, publisher and year for about 2 years every day and again got no more than 5-10 likes per post. I almost never post here other than to retweet something cool. This account seems quite hopeless for getting attention based on the way the algorithm is rigged up.

The Great Twitter Blocking:

I pay attention to what trends on twitter and its almost always the kind of garbage I would never want to post: Lots of "Discourse" about if media is sexist/racist/transphobic/ethical and lots of political posts that are completely rhetorical that aren't even trying to convince anyone of anything, just pictures of dogs pooping on trump, or trump dressed as a superhero, mostly trump stuff. I've started fighting back on this front by blocking a few hundred "Rage Bait" accounts that have hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of followers. I may try to share my block list as part of this operation, but once you knock out the tip of the "Rage Pyramid" with the super popular accounts that spew out rhetorical rage posts, twitter is a much nicer network. The trends are much more meaningful and high quality, right now George Lucas, asexuality day, and One Piece are trending for me which are all totally acceptable.

So I'm hoping that perhaps we can get a group of people to block some of the bad actors on twitter and see if that fixes that platform to be a bit more likely to trend stuff I like to make. Hopefully by interacting with the new curated trends I can try to make stuff that connects.

Facebook:

For long time we had a "Page" for silverware games where we cross posted what we did on the @silverwaregames twitter on facebook. This approach is totally wrong as pages are code for facebook to try to get you to pay for likes and are completely advertisements. If you are making a page on facebook unless you want to dump 10-100k into the page every month you aren't going to get anywhere.

HOWEVER, recently we've tried some other ideas that have gotten a bit of a shift in what happens on facebook.

Firstly, I've decided to just spam the like button on people's profiles for my main Michael Silverman account as the main account I use. I ballooned up from just around 200 "friends" to close to 3,000 friends in a few months.

Then for Coffee Doodle Art we created a profile account, this is an account that is pretending to be a person. That didn't really go anywhere but did better than a Page.

We finally made a Coffee Doodle Art ** GROUP ** which has started to actually grow:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/476332677988189

Twitch:

I've started doing dev streams on twitch but it seems hopeless there. I have a few lurkers that I'm not sure if they are even bots or not. I am not an affiliate on twitch as michaelplzno, I got affiliate status for Silverware Games and then got one subscriber, my uncle. Seems like a dead end there?

Tiktok:

I get better numbers on TikTok than on twitter, but there seems to be no pattern to it.

These are my most popular TikToks:

Number 1

Number 2

Which as you can tell are just dumb videos that have no artistic merit. I don't mind making nonsense videos if it will crack the code, but I have a tough time knowing what nonsense will be a hit and what stuff will flop.

This one is my worst video with just 4 views Why did it flop here and do better on other platforms?


(Will edit this post to include what we are doing with Instagram, Tiktok, discord, and our own social network https://swgio.com but I have some stuff to take care of)

Youtube:

One thing that's nice about youtube is that there is a good stat system:



Last year I had my video of Nodame Cantabile go viral so that is why this year is less than the previous year.

So I had a big spike recently when I did this short about my DDR pads:





And actually that seems to have boosted my whole channel's stats to be a bit better. It seems like success breeds success, so if you are doing something good it sort of stacks. However the youtube stats are nowhere near what I want: 92 subs in a year means if I don't grow that rate it will take another 7 or so years to get to 1k which is what is needed to monetize. Youtube says its algorithm doesn't give preference to monetized videos, but I don't what youtube gives priority to. I think if your video gets people who aren't on youtube to sign up and surf for hours they love you?

For me, usually the question you are asking here is more "how do I clear out the current game?"

The first time the game starts, it runs your startup procedure on an "empty" game. Thus to re-start, you simply have to get your game back to being "empty" and run the start procedure again.

Clearing usually means destroying all allocated game objects which I usually keep in lists inside singletons that manage different types of objects.

I mostly agree with you Schoq, though, I find that making art is something basically every human should find some time to do, like eating, cleaning or pooping. If your time is so tight that you cannot make some art every so often that's a bad sign for the world.

@Thaumaturge I've paid everywhere from $5 bucks a pop for voice acted sound effects that belong in a Disney movie to $50 a pop for bad sound effects I didn't really like that probably came out of a SFX pack. What is fair? I have no clue.

He was a great critic, but he was not perfect, as no one is. His sense for comedy was sort of lacking.

Without powerful critical voices there can be no powerful art, (imo.)

This seems like a clever game concept.

You have to understand that most AAA game companies are looking for someone who fits in with their team and the people at the company like more then they are looking for talented developers. Getting a job in general is about the hiring people liking you more than its about being talented.

In general, if you want people to like your ideas and do stuff for or with you, you need to be likeable and personable more than you need to be actually skilled.

Your concept here shows a lot of drive and technical ability, but we just discussed, that's not what people hire based on.