[aarongeisler]

I hope this catches on. For whatever reason, I haven't come across many gamedev-focused sites with good content. The gamedev subreddit is particularly disappointing.

Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.

Nice work!

[arduinomancer]

The problem I find with the gamedev subreddit is it seems like it’s 90% beginners

And the focus is like all on 1-person indie projects with very little content from professional/AAA devs

[ArlenBales]

This is less a problem with the subreddit and forums, and more that AAA game devs seems to be very reserved about discussing their industry or keep discussion internal to private channels (possibly for IP reasons). Whenever I see a AAA developer pop up on Reddit they're always vague and mysterious; "I work for an unnamed AAA developer.." You don't see people doing that on HN very often, they usually announce unabashedly they work at a well known company, like Google.

[harrison_clarke]

i think a big part of it is that their audience isn't just other gamedevs, it includes gamers

those gamers often have strong emotional attachments to games/characters that very few people have for google sheets

studios get crazy backlash for nerfs and other changes, so i can see not wanting to attach your name and face to that. in the other direction, i wouldn't want a horde of gamers using my words as evidence that my employer is dogshit, unless that was the goal of my message

[ashoeafoot]

Thats white washing the whole opium den , not to put the industry into a lootbox. Silence just is the appropriate level of shame.

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah it's a bit of both. Last thing gamedevs in industry wants is a bunch of players hounding them over things they 99.9% cant control anyway. That's why any devs that reveal themselves are long gone from an older game, perhaps not even in games anymore.

And yes, the NDAs on a game are bizarrely strict. For B2B stuff like engines and tools, they usually don't care too much what you discuss as long as you don't make a show out of it. For Game studios, you basically cannot say much more other than "I work here" in public unless you're PR.

[recursivecaveat]

The IP and that the industry is very big-release centric. Even the engine you are working with is often news, people monitor and report on job listings for this kind of thing. It's obvious and uninteresting that a slightly updated new version of google sheets will release probably like every day, and they will be virtually indistinguishable from the previous ones. If literally anything you say about your work on GTA6 is news for the next N years, you don't post anything. The few non-indie devs I see publically online are usually for live-service companies like riot.

[KittenInABox]

I have seen game devs that are public with what company they work for also get death threats/hatred/etc whenever a game comes out that flops even if they didn't work on it specifically. Gamers can come off as a really political audience with a lot of grift money to be made on culture war stuff so it makes sense if you're an apolitical gamedev to stfu.

[Agentlien]

I've also received surprising levels of vitriol here on HN when I mentioned working for EA (which I did 2015-2019).

[natebc]

There's gamers here too. I'm always surprised at the tonal change in a comment thread on a game related post here.

Sorry we're such a nasty audience. It's not all of us for what little that's worth.

[johnnyanmac]

Ahh yes, AKA The Devil. From the Bible. Big fan of his work. /s

Yeah, it sucks. Some people can't separate the grunts just working on features from the suits up top who manage a lot of the things they actual hate. Don't shoot the messenger.

[superconduct123]

Its because of crazy gamers online

If you even mention the game/studio you work for they might come at you

[numpad0]

I've noticed the same for many industries across the website. There don't seem to be requisite psychological safety for experts to speak up there, unlike with many forums of 00s or even other modern and current public social media.

[theshrike79]

I work for an unnamed AAA developer..

...and people I work with have gotten mail on their PERSONAL phones, addresses and social media accounts because a, let's say "enthusiastic", fan found out they work on a product they have strong feelings on.

[65]

This is the problem you will find with pretty much any subreddit, they are always filled with beginners. Drives me a little crazy.

[LordDragonfang]

Every programming-related subreddit is stuffed to the gills with content that's mostly relatable to freshman CS students, and it all gets upvoted to the top. I agree, it's infuriating.

If I have see one more meme about missing semicolons...

[superconduct123]

I can't read ProgrammerHumor anymore for that reason

Its like every joke is aimed at someone who just took their first CS class

[Animats]

The more professional discussions seem to be on the forums for Unreal Engine or Unity, where people are struggling with obscure issues inside those monster packages.

(I'm trying to do 3D stuff in Rust. The number of people who do hard 3D stuff in Rust seems to be very small, which is frustrating. There are many obscure bugs in the graphics stack and not enough people to exercise the stack, find the bugs, and get them fixed. 3D game dev in Rust is below critical mass. Retro-looking 2D is doing fine. But most 2D Rust work could be done in HTML/CSS/Javascript, or could have been done in Flash.

About half of my time goes into graphics stack problems. This is not fun.)

[johnnyanmac]

Even Unreal Q&A's get thin once you start looking into features deeper in the engine. Epic's campaign to make the common dev afraid of C++ seems to have worked with ablomb. Maybe there's some closed off sections to look into, but I sadly don't have access to that anymore.

I can't imagine much knowledge out there on Rust gamedev atm. Truly a trailblazer. At that point your resources are more about community discords and arguing in github issues than anything casual.

[brudgers]

That’s probably the problem for any HN-for-X because a talking at/with/to beginners and hobbyists is not a rare internet opportunity for experts.

I think one of the things that makes HN HN is that experts can choose to have only incidental open internet engagement with their areas of expertise. Most or all of their time on HN can be engaging with other topics that they are less familiar with.

The attractions of an HN-for-X include engaging with an unfamiliar-X that experts are already familiar with.

[bloomingkales]

I have a suspicion it’s worse than beginners (absolutely nothing wrong with beginners).

There’s a cohort of marketers on Reddit that profit off of beginner-aimed content. Lots of “oh I just built a successful game doing this”, link off to a blog. So the shepherds in those subreddits are not really elders, but sadly, grifters. In turn the beginners sort of stay perpetual beginners. It’s horrific if you go to the /r/startup type subreddits, the grift is super strong there.

Makes you really appreciate HN, good shepherds (not perfect, but good).

[Agentlien]

I found this very frustrating back when I was active on Reddit. There were times when I put a lot of thought and effort into writing posts drawing from my moderate knowledge and (at the time ~10 years of) experience. And then I get some reply from a complete novice or two saying this is clearly wrong and the post gets tons of down votes. Meanwhile the top comment is another beginner saying something obviously wrong and hundreds more agreeing.

[eru]

You might like https://www.redblobgames.com/

[aarongeisler]

Yep, familiar with this one - one of the best out there!

[klaussilveira]

I miss the TIGSource forums on its prime.

[novaleaf]

If I may: https://www.reddit.com/r/GodotCSharp/

It's a no memes, no marketing subreddit for C# Godot.

(I am the Mod)

[jprete]

A little off-topic, but have you found spam or fake content to be a problem in the last year or two?

[novaleaf]

no, but it's a very small (2k members). it's pretty much a "serious, no fun" sub so probably that's a good filter :D

[ta12653421]

gamedev.net was quite good, do not know if its still good

[caseyy]

There aren't many social media communities with quality gamedev content, because professional (especially AAA) developers with decades of experience rarely participate, and you can only have so many beginner communities. The lack of participation exists for many reasons:

1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.

2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.

3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.

4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.

5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.

As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.

HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.

There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.

[johnnyanmac]

> Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.

From my observations, I see that most influencers are consistent. A few will flip flop to chase the trend of the week, but most simply have hard, clashing stances. And of course, those clashes creature flames

Sadly, talking about games is rarely civil. You need to find a quaint community and/or do a ton of moderation to keep the conversation from tilting off.

> Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer.

Yeah, that was definitely a contributing factor to me leaving Reddit. Only so many times you can try and reason "well yes, costs have grown for these larger games. Maybe a 16% increase after 15 years is justificed" and are counted by "but the market is bigger! You sell less games with higher costs"... sigh. I know they can't see the pocket books, but companies are still breaking records with $70 priced games. Come on.

Also just a real shame how much those gamers ignore the japanese market. They focus on COD and claim to just want to buy games. meanwhile Nintendo has never put MTX nor battle passes in their games, and they are chastised as bad for completely different moving goal posts (ahh yes, because lawyers remove mods... because Nintendo games disproportionately have a huge modding community. Population maps anyone?). Maybe a bunch of cosmetic DLC at worst, but all those western tactics are relagated to Mobile in Japan (which this audience couldn't care less about).

They have options to branch out to, but never do. Can't make the horse drink.