Game Dev

Published Dev says hard work paid off, but not guaranteed

Here's a great Reddit post asking a simple question, "Devs who published their games, did the hard work pay off?"

It's an interesting question and there's a great reply from a very successful indie dev. Tomas Sala, the dev behind Falconeer and Bulwark, replied how for him the hard work did pay off, but it wasn't guaranteed.

He also mentions one often overlooked factor, how he has been in the industry for over 20 years. This is something that people just getting into game dev usually forget, the successes you see are rarely from first time indie devs or people who started learning in the past year. There's usually a lot of knowledge and skill behind a successful game, even if it is that studio's first game it is probably not the dev's first game. It took me 5 years and 40 games before I made a decent amount.

He recommends you make lots of free games with the goal of getting tons of feedback to improve your skills as quickly as possible. He recommends this is a better approach than trying to charge money for your first few games because you will benefit more (in terms of how much you learn) from 1000 free players than 10 purchasers.

He also recommends that if your goal is to make a living with game dev that you should look at it as a business, because it is.

Tech

All Systems Down!

This past Friday the world suddenly came to a stop when an update was pushed out to some systems that caused them to BSoD. It affected millions of devices in very important industries. Planes couldn't take off, banks stopped working, stores lost their backend and even Disneyland was hit.

Ironically the worst cyber event in history was caused by a cybersecurity firm and not a group of malicious hackers. Although those malicious hackers did jump on this opportunity starting a wave of attacks trying to get victims to install programs to "fix" the issue. So if you get emails on this topic do NOT click any links.

Essentially the company Crowdstrike has a product called Falcon which works directly in the Windows Kernel to analyze for threats in realtime. They pushed an update and all those systems auto-updated, however the update had some bad code which caused it to crash and since it works directly in the Windows Kernel that crash causes the entire system to go down.

Even worse, since it is such a low-level program that means that the fix is quite laborious, it requires manual physical access to the machine to start it in safe mode to remove the program and boot up again. I'm guessing a lot of IT professionals have been working non-stop these past few days.

Tech

Meta Quest 4 in 2026?

Some leaked info suggests the Meta Quest 4 is coming in 2026 with 2 variants, one low end and one high end.

There is also supposedly a follow up to the Quest Pro coming in 2027, this one does surprise me given how as far as I know the Quest Pro has not been a successful device.

VR and AR has been an interesting slow burn. Some people thought Apple joining this space would give it a massive boost but it didn't quite happen, perhaps if the price was lower it would have more of an impact. Maybe a $200 Quest 4 with the specs of the current Quest 3 could do quite well.

Gaming

Redemption journey continues!

No Man’s Sky just got update 5.0 titled WORLDS. This is a massive update, the changelog is never ending. It adds a ton of features to make worlds feel more alive.

More variety in every way, more lush flora, floating islands, new enemies to encounter, weather patterns, volumetric clouds, solar ship customization, high quality water, combat mech and tons more.

This is also marked as Part 1 meaning there is more coming in the future. Makes me wonder if they will ever stop updating this game. Considering the size of the team and how successful the game is, they can certainly afford to update it until the end of time.