jaaake

joined 2 years ago
[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 9 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (4 children)

Investors are not required to form an indie studio, in the case where every team member of that studio has some means to pay their own rent/mortgage, bills, and feed themselves for the entire duration of the project. If you're in the US, you'll also need to figure out how you're paying for health insurance. This could be a passion project in addition to a day job, but coordinating work/life balance in that scenario with multiple team members is exponentially difficult.

Money adds up quick. Let's use some round numbers and say you want to hire a team with some experience (those folks that just got laid off and are looking for work). Let's say everybody on the team costs the project $100k/year in salary & benefits. Let's just imagine that includes costs a normal employer would pay: insurance premiums, IT hosting costs, all the little stuff. Note, this is underpaying people with more than 5 years experience who live in California (where many game dev studios are based). Let's say you can get the game made in one year with everybody starting on day one and ending on ship day, exactly 365 days later. People will be wearing multiple hats, but let's be general.

  • 1x Gameplay Programmer
  • 1x 3D Artist (general modeler)
  • 1x 2D Artist (general texture artist)
  • 1x Game Designer (Camera/Controls/Combat)
  • 1x Audio Designer

$500k

Expanding that team:

  • 1x Animator
  • 1x Character Artist
  • 1x Environment Artist
  • 1x Prop Artist
  • 1x VFX Artist
  • 1x Lighting Specialist
  • 1x Tools Programmer
  • 1x Render/Optimization Programmer
  • 1x Level Designer
  • 1x Narrative Designer

$1.5M

That's a 15 person studio, where people are still wearing multiple hats like UI, Music, IT, Testing, other things I'm forgetting about. This isn't anywhere close to a AAA sized team of 100+ people.

This is also assuming you can stick to a STRICT time schedule. In reality you're probably going to need a very small team at the start and not grow until you finish prototyping, then again once you've done a vertical slice.

Anyway. This post got real long. The gist of it is the people making the game need that money to live. There should be space in the industry to make a game with a team this size, paying your employees something close to what the big studios pay them. Getting that kind of money has been incredibly difficult these past few years.

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 106 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What does this even mean? There isn't a security checkpoint that will turn you away. If you wanted to, you could show up with a sign that says "God save the king. I love the Donald." There isn't some single entity that will say you're breaking the rules, you've just got to deal with the consequences of your actions.

That being said, the crowd is a blend of leftists and non-establishment liberals, I would be surprised if anyone took a Zionist stance.

Lastly, read the room. Yes, Israel is still continuing to commit genocide. That's not the top priority of the protest. This feels like going to a pro-choice rally and carrying a sign about climate change. Our views are likely aligned, but that's not our current focus.

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's against the EULA, but nobody is going to get caught. The main issue is that it's a pain in the ass and doesn't scale. You can do this for one person, but most people aren't going to be cool sending a payment to an address and just waiting around, hoping that they get a key. This is why Steam exists. There are other services that do the same thing that are not US based. GOG is based in Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOG.com

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Came to post this. Such a good episode.

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)
[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

It says "all over North America" but I've never seen them in the Southwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickadee

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago

I hate headlines that say "latest shooting." Don't they realize that's gonna be really confusing in another few days?

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (7 children)

Tell me of this magical squirrel repelling fence

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I don't see it

[–] jaaake@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

West coast checking in. I hate opening my eyes and the first thing I wonder is what fresh portal to hell opened while I slept.

 

Every year, my partner of a decade and I have Christmas with her family. My family is Jewish and we also spend at least one night of Hanukkah with them. For all gatherings (including birthdays) the gifts are almost exclusively chosen and purchased by the one who is more directly related to the recipient. It always feels a little weird to me that their family gets me gifts, but they never receive anything exclusively from myself, it's just very vaguely implied that the gifts are from us as a couple. To be fair, their parents give gifts as a couple (always from their mom). Also, I would never ask my partner to purchase gifts for my family in addition to theirs, they're already stressed enough by finding something for their own family. I've never brought this up with my partner as I don't want to make them feel either obligated to or guilty about implicitly declaring that they don't want to.

 

I see news articles that the vote to release the files might not happen until the first week of December, but yesterday saw a massive dump of emails.

Are these two separate things? Why are they categorized like this? Do we know how different they are from each other? Who has actually seen what's in the files?

 

Nobody likes voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Casting a vote in favor of someone who is diametrically opposed to your viewpoint(s) absolutely sucks. The shitty reality is that we aren’t going to change the electoral process in the next two months.

If you don’t see either major candidate as a champion that you can support, it seems more beneficial to see it as selecting your enemy for the next four years. I would rather fight against someone that I have a chance of changing. At minimum I would rather protest against someone that I think has a lower chance of authorizing lethal force against a march that I attend.

Voting for a 3rd presidential candidate (or not voting at all), is letting someone else make that decision for you.

That said, we have got to get out of this constant cycle of only having two options. There’s too much money at a national level to start there. We’ve got to start local and get third party candidates into offices at a city level, then state, then national. It’s going to take a long time and it should have happened so very long ago. We can’t change the past, we can only change the future. The only time to start changing the future is in the present.

 

Shoe gazey

view more: next ›