Game Dev

AI killed the Show Early strategy?

The general advice nowadays is "talk about your game as soon as possible! Share early and share often!" because usually you can't really "overshare" your game. There's still people buying Terraria even though it's a 15 year old game that has sold tens of millions of copies, so you won't saturate your target audience by posting a bunch of times. Therefore post often is great advice to get more eyeballs and more wishlists (and more sales!) of your games.

Then show early is also great advice because it helps you analyze potential audience reception before you commit months or years into a project. I've said many times how nowadays idea selection is a crucial part of indie dev success, and posting about your game idea as early as possible is how you do that. If you get 100,000 views on a short of your prototype, you know that idea has potential.

However AI might have screwed this strategy over, although I think that's only in hyper specific use cases.

What got me thinking about this topic is how recently there was a game announced called Needle in a Haystack Simulator which quickly found tons of success (20k+ wishlists) all thanks to a short trailer. The game is exactly what you expect, there's a giant stack of hay, and it's your job to find the one needle inside it, that's it. Very simple idea but people seemingly love it (or at least are intrigued by it)

Following that success there were 8 other games announced with the exact same name and the exact same premise. The assumption (I think correctly) is these were vibe coded in a day, which in turn got people thinking about how your should NOT share your game ideas early because since AI nowadays can build games in one prompt, if you share it someone might make the game faster than you and beat you to market.

But is that really the case? Based on how these games were announced quickly it seems like it, however I would say the danger to the "show early" strategy is only if you have a concept that is literally this simple. AI nowadays is quite good at making simple games, but not good as making something with a little bit of complexity. And even though I haven't played these games I would say if they are entirely AI generated they are likely not good, not polished, not well designed, just functional, and players demand a lot more than "just functional".

So my advice is still "show early and show often" unless you have a game so simple an AI can make it in one shot, if that's the case then maybe don't show it, or rather if that's the case I would say just choose a more interesting game idea that cannot be vibe coded in one day.

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Tech

The NEW Apple Foldable, iPhone Duo!

The much rumored foldable iPhone is finally officially announced, it's called the Duo! On the outside you have a normal screen at 5.4-inches, then flip it open and you get double the screen real estate. This is the latest entry in this foldables category that I believe was started by Samsung with their Galaxy Fold out in 2019.

In the announcement they showed how smooth and shiny it looks, how you can do video calls with people and have the both screens active at once, in case for some reason you want someone in front of you to see the call as well.

The most interesting use case to me seems like the most basic one, using the fold as a stand and just having a super customizable high end display on your nightstand.

Then of course it has an impressive chip, the screens are very high quality, great cameras, battery life, etc. It's priced between $2000 and $3200 this is definitely a high end premium device, and will be coming out on October 23rd.

Do you see the value in these giant foldable phones? Ignoring price and just focusing on the concept of foldable itself, is this something you want? I'm curious, I wonder how big this category will become now that Apple is entering it. Or maybe it won’t go big and it will be a big flop, similar to how the Apple Vision Pro (sadly) did not re-ignite the VR market.

Fun

From floppy to solid with one zipper!

Zippers are a fascinating invention! You can have two completely separate pieces, and by creating some teeth in a specific configuration you can make those two sides connected to one another with a simple motion! Genius!

And now after decades of the original zipper existing, someone made an upgrade to it that is finally achievable thanks to modern 3D printing, it's the Y-zipper which is actually not really new but rather a patent that was filed over 40 years ago but only now is easily doable.

I absolutely love the video of it in action. You can turn something floppy into solid by just zipping it up. Make it have curves or be straight, make it super strong or flexible. And the coolest use case of all, using it on robot legs to make the robot move up or down! That's super cool!