I’m going to answer a bit against the grain and say yes*, I’ve seen some indie devs, small time authors, musicians, etc gain some momentum on Mastodon.
But most of these aren’t really a ‘brand’ so much as it is passionate people whose interests align with the community here. Anything beyond that will likely be shown the door.
Its not the delta seconds but the event tick event node.
While it can be really useful, there are a lot of things that would be better off as a timer or setting the event tick to something other than ‘every frame’, as there isn’t usually a whole lot that absolutely needs to be checked/updated on a frame by frame basis.
Hence the meme basically saying it looks harmful but they’re not sure why.
Game dev?
I’d still call it social media as the comments/discussions are pretty much the bread and butter of PieFed.
It does feel more active in certain communities, so there may be something to that.
Weirdly in my own personal experience, a lot of social media spaces have been quieter, with many people I know who used to be avid posters are now no longer posting at all.
For the fediverse specifically, there’s definitely higher activity hours and low ones. Sometimes refreshing the feed has nothing new for like ~20 minutes, and sometimes its every time I refresh, which is kind of odd.
Disappearing into the woods.
I have legitimately never used the orbital laser thing. Every time I get one I hold onto it for ‘when the situation is really dire’ but never end up using it.
Against the Storm.
Its a ‘roguelike’ colony builder where you’re basically starting a colony as quick as you can, then once it starts to get established and run well, you leave and move onto the next one.
I was thinking it was something closer to a city builder where you’re managing something from start to finish and didn’t expect to like the roguelike aspect but I think it works well.
Its just got a neat little art style, a bunch of fantasy races with particular quirks, strange biomes with pros/cons, and has a bunch of lore tidbits sprinkled throughout.
I tend to play on easy mode now.
If I am being honest, I ‘think’ there’s a part of Rimworld’s gameplay that I like and another section I don’t like as much, so now I find myself setting up mods and special difficulty modifiers to work towards whatever this other gameplay style is.
Also it doesn’t help that many mods (though quite cool) are semi-unbalanced and raids are based on your colony’s financial status - Which leads to the default difficulty settings being way overdone.
I think for 95% of Nintendo first party games, they’ll be a kid’s (or someone trying out new genres) first introduction to the genre or play style with added depth/challenge for people that are older/more experienced.
When you consider Luigi’s Mansion as someone’s first horror game, Mario Kart as someone’s first racing game, BoTW as someone’s first open world survival game, or Pokemon as someone’s first RPG - Looking at this ‘aimed at a new player’ angle, then their design and accessibility decisions make a lot more sense, and that generally makes the game popular because its so easy to play.
And of course a popular game is influential.
That also being said, post-BoTW, the glider has become pretty much a staple for the genre. I don’t think it was the first game to do it but you can definitely tell that many games copied BoTW’s implementation.
In my own experience, if you pick up another language but don’t use it on an at least a semi-regular basis, your skills in it get real rusty real fast.
Sort of - I made a janky multiplayer game where a few players were shapeshifters and could turn into objects they found in the level, and the remaining players had to try and hunt down all the shapeshifters with firearms. The shapeshifters could only melee so the goal was to blend in as something and wait for the hunter players to walk by before you bop them. It was popular with my friends during testing but I didn’t realize it was potentially an actually good idea and thought they were just being nice.
I don’t think it was a totally original idea within the game space (I think CS 1.6 had something similar?), but at the time , it was one I personally had never seen before.
It was a few years later when Garry’s Mod had a ‘prop hunt’ mode that exploded and then I realized I kind of missed a big opportunity. That being said the game I had (poorly) constructed had similar base ideas but was very ultimately very different so even if it managed to hit it big, it wouldn’t have been the same thing really.
I like these vibes.
Yeah I think that being such a high number too got some looks.
The same thing happened with small time YouTubers, Pinterest, etc. As soon as there is a ‘potential’ to make millions, people started shifting gears and progressing towards what appeared to be a money making formula, which fundamentally changed the vibe and attitude of the community.
This is a weird one, but there’s been a definite shift in indie game development.
Before Steam Greenlight/Direct and Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and whatever, there wasn’t a huge emphasis on trying to get money out of a game project. I’d speculate most indie (and modders) dev’s goals at the time were to make stuff and hope it was cool enough to show to a studio as a portfolio piece and get hired, as self-publishing was rather difficult at the time.
A lot of conversation and discussion about game dev at the time was just trying out new things or learning how stuff worked and so it was a generally chill environment.
But after the success of things like Braid on the Xbox or Minecraft (when it first released) on the PC, there was a huge direction change into avoiding working for a big studio altogether and getting into self-publishing to make the big bucks. Now its generally considered strange to make something just to make something and not have a community or dev logs or self-promotion.
Its somewhat made me avoid some development communities and I find that kind of frustrating.
If you glance over at Mastodon, there are absolutely content creators and people trying to self-promote. I suppose they do here too on Lemmy/PieFed, but its just not as well seen.
I don’t necessarily see it as a problem though if its relevant to the community and its something you can choose to disengage with… And also if the person posting it isn’t aggressively spamming every relevant community.
Dogs generally have a good sense if something is wrong or if someone is being aggressive towards you.
You don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) make a dog “mean”, he’s perfectly capable of it if he feels something is up.
I was specifically thinking of books with sexual violence, suicide, or promoting toxic behavior, and even then it does go down to the book’s context.
Unfortunately I don’t have a solid answer for that because everything I have seen interacts with the community in different ways. Something like that would require some market research… In a respectful way that doesn’t go against community rules or annoy the mods/admins.