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[Ulfarr]

Life is too short to drink bad liquor and bad liquor is better with some company. If said item isn't some kind of necessity I would postpone buying it if I were you

[Egan_BW]

Life is also even shorter with liquor of any quality.

[Kagus]

Sleep first, try to find words later. It sucks because I have a lot of good people around me who are ready and willing to listen, but... This time I just don't have anything to say.

So, I don't even really know what to say about this. I've just not been doing all that well the past few weeks, and apparently I'm even worse than I realized.

I caught a cold around a month ago and was kinda knocked out for a week, which resulted in me reverting to full-on hermit mode and effectively trashing my own apartment with the amount of "no fucks" piling up. Then I learned that a couple friends have gotten into even more drama than I'd originally thought, so that started weighing me down as well because now there's fuckall I can do to prevent this all ending in tears.

When I got better, I just... Never managed to get back into the rhythm of things. There's still junk and dirty dishes/laundry lying around from weeks ago. To top it off, my mind has been seriously festering on thoughts of my life and what I have/haven't accomplished, and thus my prospects for ever being not just better, but good.

No education, and when I say no education I mean no education. I dropped out of kindergarten, and never went back. No real socialization, I basically didn't talk to people until I was 18. No work experience, never worked a job in my life, and at this point I'm completely fucking paranoid of getting into one because the anxiety of doing something wrong and having it follow me around is paralyzing.

Turning that around to more near-future concepts, I look at the overgrown closet I live in and laugh at the idea of trying to date in this situation. The idea of bringing anyone back here is a bad joke.

Went out last night to talk to people a bit and... When I got to the bar, there was a table of peeps I know playing Trivial Pursuit or somesuch. And I just... I couldn't bring myself to go over and say hi. So I didn't. I just sat at the bar and had two beers, feeling progressively worse and worse as I just sank into myself and tried not to collapse.

So... Here I am. The incredible husk. That's my secret, cap'n... I'm always empty.

[MrRoboto75]

You might want to start small and work outward.  Personal hygiene, for example (I'm just conjecturing/making an example from experience, I don't know exactly what state you are in).  If you are clean, you'll likely feel a small bit better.  Shower, shave, brush, clean clothes, every day.  Conquer yourself, conquer your room, then conquer the stuff outside that.

If you can't start on that, go even smaller.  Just get showering down first, or just get one room clean, or one item/area clean.  Use the satisfaction of even a small accomplishment to motivate something even a tiny bit bigger.

[Doomblade187]

Also, Kagus, you're clearly educated, despite no "formal" education - you made it through basic, your writing is clear and readable, and you moved fucking countries. You've done a lot.

Don't let the lack of a formal certificate discourage you.

On the anxiety front, are you still seeing the government therapist?

[nenjin]

KoDP's successor Six Ages has left me really disappointed with development.

-It released on iOS a year before PC. Fine. That was the market they said they needed to hit first.
-It's a much smaller game.
-Because they're going to do 6 titles rather than one large title like KoDP.
-It costs twice as much on PC as on the Apple App Store.
-Playing it on PC requires Windows 10.

I mean....I really wanted to support these guys, I loved KoDP. But it's just been one thing after another with these guys. People make excuses that development is expensive, yadda yadda....I ain't hearing it. Plenty of devs make games for both platforms without:

-Overcharging PC users simply because they can.
-Claiming poverty as the reason for, well, everything.
-Tech requirements that somehow meant they released last on PC and invalidated a version of Windows that 99.9% of other games can still work on.

I'm sour, not gonna lie. Maybe I should just suck it up and play it for the right price on a device that makes me not want to play games.

I put it here because I don't want to dump all over their thread in OG. But I'm struggling to think of a title I've wanted this much that alienated me this badly by their decisions.

[Reelya]

-Overcharging PC users simply because they can.

I don't know about that. iOS is a standardized platform, whereas with PC you have to make it work with multiple configurations. It's a monumental pain in the ass and a big reason for large numbers of developers jumping ship to consoles over the years. You can ship and forget on standardized platforms, but if you support PC then you're going to have fucking years of dealing with assholes calling in with stupid tech support problems, because they have some fucknut custom configuration shit going on that you've never even heard of. That costs money to deal with since you need real humans to answer the tech support issues. Plus you'll be shipping patches for the best part of a decade because you can't magically predict all the weird PC shit that's going on, let alone predict updates to OS's you're already supporting.

The pricing decision might be because they actually had-to / will-have-to expend more money on the PC version. This might also be why it's only verified to work with Windows 10: "fuck it we're only dealing with one OS because we don't want to have to troubleshoot 10 zillion extra configurations when there are already 1 zillion to deal with". For a smaller dev this might make more sense, since they don't have the huge infrastructure to deal with this stuff that EA, Acti or UbiSoft do.

Hell, It'd be tempting to only support the one latest OS, because you damn well know that a vocal minority will be demanding free tech support for life for their ever-increasing obscure OS because they bought your game in the $1 tier of a Humble Bundle. I am playing devil's advocate here, but the point was to point out how the costs of developing a PC game definitely don't stop when you ship it, but people expect it to be perfect and always-updated basically for life, for a set one-off cost. The costs of supporting something go up exponentially with the amount of platforms it's expected to work out of the box on. They can make it work on OS/2, Windows 2000, XP, Vista as well if they like. They wouldn't just be adding one OS if they pushed it back to Windows 7, they'd have to test it on every patch and service pack between Win7, Win8, Win 8.1 etc. Say someone says something goes wrong, specifically with your game on Windows 7 SP1 with a specific model of video card. What exactly do you do? Have a room full of PCs with all those configurations just so you can push that specific fix? Not practical for smaller devs. Not to mention you're going to have people who've blocked Windows Update so who have various versions of Windows 10 on their systems, and all of them already expect you're going to promptly push out fixes if your Windows 10 game somehow doesn't work on their specific OS patch after a different patch to fix some other problem.

[scourge728]

I wouldn't have to block windows updates if Microsoft didn't push so much garbage out (And since I already know Linux Gang is going to say something, I'm not switching to Linux, I like to game, and am not good with computers)

[Kagus]

Also, Kagus, you're clearly educated, despite no "formal" education - you made it through basic, your writing is clear and readable, and you moved fucking countries. You've done a lot.

Don't let the lack of a formal certificate discourage you.

On the anxiety front, are you still seeing the government therapist?

Oh yeah, we're still going strong. About, ooh... Yeah, just about 7 years now. There was another specialist as well, a psychomotor physiotherapist, but we just had our finishing convo recently so she's out of the plan now.

Am I actually reading the homework and doing the exercises? Ehh... Not so much. I mean, I know bits and pieces have helped, I'm a lot better off now than I was 3-4 years ago, even despite how little progress it sometimes felt like I was making.

It's just that I look ahead, and I wonder how many more years is it gonna take before I hit baseline? I'm 29 now, am I gonna finally be able to stand on my own feet and start trying to live at 35? 40? Maybe I can shoot for a bachelors at 45 so I can really get started with unlocking the world. That'll give me a good few years of being human before I hit 60 and my body craps out because being sick like this wrecks your life expectancy.

[JoshuaFH]

It's just that I look ahead, and I wonder how many more years is it gonna take before I hit baseline? I'm 29 now, am I gonna finally be able to stand on my own feet and start trying to live at 35? 40? Maybe I can shoot for a bachelors at 45 so I can really get started with unlocking the world. That'll give me a good few years of being human before I hit 60 and my body craps out because being sick like this wrecks your life expectancy.

29? You young whippersnapper once you hit 30 like me you'll know what old really feels like. Don't make me fetch my switch and give you a good whappin' across the rear end in Smash Ultimate. Kids these days.

(Though I understand the feeling Kagus, I too would like to know when my life starts.)

[nenjin]

30? Y'all are baby squirrels. I'm almost 40. Get on my level!

@Reelya

I'll just point to pretty much every other single indie game in existence as to why I don't buy your explanation. If a dev is so lazy they target a single version of windows to make their lives easier, and THEN double the price......that puts them below half the garbage devs on Steam right now, who may make and try to sell trash but at least it works in most versions.

Charitably I'm going to assume part of their tool stack required Windows 10. I don't know much about deving for mobile. But I work in a software company. I deal, as a support person, with all the stupid configuration issues you speak of. And our software still runs on Windows XP, 7, 8, Vista and 10.

The reality is that, as I've been told by other mobile developers, that PC users pay more by virtue of the fact that mobile users refuse to pay what "games are actually worth."

In my mind, if your price point on mobile is what it has to be.....then that is the price of the game, period. If you target mobile first because that's "where we're going to make our money" then that price is what you can live with. So when you turn around and double the price for another platform because PC users "are willing to pay for what games are worth"....then you're up charging simply because you can.

Otherwise the only other logical move is to target PC first with the price you actually need to "survive." Which they didn't do. So clearly $10 on mobile was enough to keep the lights on, pay salaries and make five more titles for the game.

And no mobile game I've ever seen on Steam or tried to buy advertises that it was a mobile game first and a PC release second. Why would they? They don't want the stink of mobile on their product page because every single buyer is going to ask why they're paying more for a port that costs half as much.

The only merit I see in the higher price point is the cost of porting. But apparently Six Ages isn't even a good port.

[scourge728]

Can anyone think of a good port from mobile to pc?
EDIT: At least since microtransactions became the go-to for mobile

[Kagus]

Of course depends on how you define "good", but I'm pretty sure Exiled Kingdoms was mobile first, and that's not too bad as far as diablones go.

There's also, ah what's it called... I think it was Breach & Clear, that was good for a few hours of silliness, and while I'm not certain I'm tempted to believe that the silver system was a holdover from early days as a mobile game.

P90 bullet hose forever!

[Iduno]

Of course depends on how you define "good", but I'm pretty sure Exiled Kingdoms was mobile first, and that's not too bad as far as diablones go.

There's also, ah what's it called... I think it was Breach & Clear, that was good for a few hours of silliness, and while I'm not certain I'm tempted to believe that the silver system was a holdover from early days as a mobile game.

P90 bullet hose forever!

I assume they mean "good, for a mobile game" which is a real low bar.

[Doomblade187]

Of course depends on how you define "good", but I'm pretty sure Exiled Kingdoms was mobile first, and that's not too bad as far as diablones go.

There's also, ah what's it called... I think it was Breach & Clear, that was good for a few hours of silliness, and while I'm not certain I'm tempted to believe that the silver system was a holdover from early days as a mobile game.

P90 bullet hose forever!

I assume they mean "good, for a mobile game" which is a real low bar.

There are actually some well made, thoughtful games out there. Just gotta sort through the crap.

Edit: For example Occidental Heroes is pretty damn fun, as is Caves.