The answer is more boring; We don't have access to the twitter account rn. Same deal as with server backend access.

That's pretty much what's happened, yeah.

I don't think all forums are dead though, it's just that hobbyist communities don't always have the resources to maintain a forum for very long, both from a technical and management standpoint.

Nice! I always like reading about fantasy consoles and emulators, so I'm posting to follow!

I feel like there's only one appropriate response to these beautiful gifs and screenshots:

I want to listen to lofi beats for studying while that gif plays over and over

If you want a good brain game like sudoku, then you can try figuring out what kind of headspace you have to be in to unironically come up with a diagram like that.

I wonder if I'll be able to keep up with all these fighting game-esque combos, but when this releases I'm sure as heck gonna try because these sprite animations look adorable!

Sounds like this would be promising, but I have a few questions:

First, your website claims that using the platform will lead to your project "sourcing high quality talent", but how can you guarantee the skills and experience of developers you take in? If anyone can join, wouldn't this still allow "low-level talent" to contribute to projects?

Second, how is the worth of a contribution quantified? If it's determined by project leaders, then how can you prevent them from putting the worth of everyone's contribution to a really low number and keeping the money to themselves? And if it's counted by the platform, then how do you deal with disagreements between what contributors feel they are owed and what project leads feel they owe to their contributors? What prevents a contributor from claiming to have made more contributions than they really have?

Finally, what about projects which never see the light of day? Do contributors still get compensated in that case? Does that mean that your platform also acts as a sort of risk mitigator for contributors? And if not, doesn't that mean that you're spreading the burden of risk over all contributors of a project?

Unless you have clear ways of dealing with the "what if it goes wrong" side of this whole thing, I hardly see how this could work well. Projects fall apart all the time for a myriad of reasons, and you need to be ready for that eventuality, and in a way that doesn't ultimately hurt contributors.

Another issue I foresee is that contributing to a project usually takes an upfront amount of time to learn the development environment used by the rest of the team. Developers can't usually just jump between projects on a whim, they have to invest themselves in a project for their contributions to be worthwhile. If you don't facilitate this somehow, it will put a lot of friction on the whole "contributors contribute to as many projects as they wish and get compensated for it" thing you're going for.

One last thing: It might be a good idea to have a few completed example projects with written post-mortems about how the development process went. If someone is on the fence about joining your platform, then the lack of successful examples might turn them away. I understand that the platform is new, but this is still a point that sticks out to me.

Oh, hi!

I suppose I also changed my avatar a while back and forgot to post here, so here we go. My pfp is an alien from the game I'm (intermittently) working on.

Dope! I've planned on participating in the last few LDs and wasn't able to due to unforeseen events, but I think I'll be able to make it to this one, so I'm looking forward to that!

[...]Now where are those promised 8 GHz AMD cores so we can run everything in a single thread?

Here:

Mostly because they said this:

[...]i am very new to this[...]

and requested our advice.

Sorry thisisakki, discussions like these often turn into arguments about what tools are the best/worst, hence the jab at C above. Gentlemen, let's not let this thread turn into that please.

My personal advice to you is to start by learning the very basics of programming (such as following an online course) and then to use that knowledge to make several small games with several popular engines like GameMaker, Construct, Unity. The point of this is to find out for yourself what you're most comfortable using in the long run. It doesn't really matter what language you learn first, but it does matter that you take a good course. Fortunately, there's many reputable websites for this sort of thing nowadays such as Coursera and Udemy. I would personally recommend finding a course that uses Python to teach topics such as algorithms and data stuctures.

There will be a decent amount of upfront learning no matter which path you take though, mostly because you'll be learning programming at the same time as game design. However, once you're past the initial technical hurdle, I can confidently say that making games will be a very fulfilling endeavor, even if you just do it as a hobby. So please don't give up if it seems hard at first, because it does get easier and more fun!

So yeah, go try stuff and don't hesitate to ask more questions!

learn gml or some engine, avoid programmers like a plague

See, that's bad advice because if you learn gml then you yourself will become a programmer, which will mean you'll need to avoid YOURSELF like the plague.

Also, the Unity editor DOES have open source components, which are enough to dig in and understand what it's doing under the hood.

Woah, those mockups look stunning! Can't wait to play the game that comes out of this eventually!

Yeah, the lack of emojis is something I feel for as well. Hopefully one day we'll have the resources to move on to a more modern forum backend.

Yes

You had me at visually simulating atmospheres. Love that one picture of the moon changing color behind the atmosphere of the earth!