In many states (such as California, New York, Oregon, and Illinois) Democrats control all the levers of power from governor, to house of representatives/senate, and even city government. They run the government. They write the laws. Yet, in key areas, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states.
Oregon is one of those states. Despite one of the highest funding rates per student in the country, Portland Public Schools are nearly dead last – much worse than southern red states on all metrics of student achievement. Despite record spending on homelessness, Portland has some of the worst homelessness in the country. Oregon has some of the worst mental health systems in the country. Many blue states are some of the least affordable despite decades of rent programs and development restrictions. The list goes on. What’s going wrong?
New York Times dives in to find out why.
Reviewing the best Croissants in Paris – during riots
Two guys spent 5 years developing the niche indie game Rail Route. They just hit $2.0M in gross sales and are ranked #117 on Steam. They had some good lessons they shared in their writeup. Here’s a summary of the interesting points:
Their backgrounds:
They were both seasoned software engineers. One had experience running a marketing agency, but they were all completely new to game dev.
They had CS degrees. Freelanced for 15 years in IT. Lead teams of up to 50 people. Held higher level corporate jobs. Both burned out and wanted to do something else.
Their experience: 2 years before EA, 3 years in EA, 1 year after EA
Building momentum while building the product:
Gradual release helps build a strong community. Releasing on itch.io first was valuable. Transitioning to a Steam demo helped even more. Don’t be afraid to release something for free. If you finish the game properly, players will buy it.
Start early, share everything. Started showing the prototype after 14 days. Just put your game out there. Try different things, whatever you can think of. The more you showcase, the better. Ask for feedback.
Sharing ideas too early and getting them stolen is a question you get asked a lot during the process. But I usually say that you are here to make a great game – and if it is that easy to build a great game – then everybody could do it. That’s not happening often, so don’t worry about it.
Believe your knowledge of the space is special and your game is awesome/excellent and work like that.
If we didn’t do itch.io, we wouldn’t have succeed. We brought our Discord audience to itch.io, which gained us great visibility and launched there. Then we moved that community onto Steam and continue our releases there. Our demo had a lot players – hitting pretty high in ranks for Steam.
This was all a crucial part of the audience building.
Yeah, first 5 (community members) are hardest, then first 50 and so on. You just start and get going. You keep grinding for years all the time. If your idea is solid, it’s easier. If you can’t get 50 people in reasonable time, your game most probably will suck.
Idea stealing:
Idea stealing when releasing early? It’s not happening in their opinion. Your idea doesn’t deliver success. It’s your hard work, your choices, effort, and expertise that will make you a success. Don’t worry about it. Also don’t worry about the piracy. Focus on your success and not on the stuff that is not helping you to deliver it.
If someone sees your prototype on itch.io and wants to make a game with the same idea without literally stealing your build, then they have to start building from scratch at that moment with none of the experience or foundational tech you gained by making the prototype. You also most likely have a head start as you probably started work on the final product around the time you put the prototype up, ideally beforehand, and have already been planning the final product ideas to some degree long before that. If you’ve also been growing a community then that’s even more of a lead. Not only have you started getting people interested in you and your product earlier, but you’ve also begun building a reputation that any imitator will have to compete with. It’s usually pretty expensive and difficult to overcome those odds. Even if someone is somehow motivated enough to do that, it’s a good thing. Let them release, see how they do, learn from their reviews, and release something better when the time is right. Market around your prototype being the OG (without being a baby about “idea theft”) and this being the culmination of all your hard work to perfect that design. Competition is good. As a niche grows, the rising tide of interest in that niche lifts all boats.
If your success hinges on being the first to market then you’re not in business, you’re just gambling – with terrible odds.
Remote work:
Scaling a team remotely worked better than expected. We brought in new people fully remote, and it was easier than we thought. It also gave us a chance to learn about different cultures, which we really enjoyed.
Keys to remote work success – Creative development like game development or marketing require live feedback and interactions. Text (slack, discord, teams) is your enemy, voice & video is your friend.
We hired via Discord first, then Linkedin as well. It’s super easy. You need a new person / role? You can have them in a few days max.
Money:
They paid for Early Access out of sales from itch.io. But if you aren’t successful on release, you are done. I can imagine that finishing a game that did not deliver good results in an early access launch is an impossible task.
Early Access was valuable for funding, but also came with baggage. If we had the money, we wouldn’t have done it. Big changes hurt our reviews because players hate drastic shifts in gameplay. We lacked a clear roadmap early on, which made things harder. If we did it again, we’d leave the 1.0 launch alone and release 2.0 instead of changing so much post-launch.
It grew really expensive over time. We have used all Early Access money and have put it all back into the game. We should be more cautious with spending those money and manage our scope better.
We were usually putting 10-25% of our income back into marketing.
56% is gross to net ratio for us (total sales less returns less VAT less steam cut)
Advertising:
If you have money, test ads. We started spending on wishlists, and it worked well for us. If you’re in a position to experiment, try different platforms and track what brings results.
Ads, targeting, spend – You just don’t develop the game, you develop the marketing along. We’ve ran 80 campaigns past year, trying normal ads, meme ads, AI generated ads, in-game footage ads, everything you name it. We doing this all the time past 5 years. We develop not just our game but our marketing campaigns. We are at $0.07 per click with $3 CPM and around 4-6% CTR. Monthly spending on ads is currently around $3k.
We are running ads 24/7 on Meta. Sometimes on Reddit as well.
Once steam page was up, we monitored our cost per wishlist (I think it was around $0.3). We tried to spend as much as possible while maintaining that cost. There was quite a fast ceiling, the audience is finite.
Our current spend is around $3k / monthly
You’ll need to try whatever amount. But it must be reasonable big to let you see the differences in your conversions. We’ve tried reddit, twitter, google, youtube, meta. Meta worked best for our game.
PaintCam Eve isn’t your typical home security device. It’s a home security webcam…armed with paintballs to shoot anyone it doesn’t recognize via it’s facial recognition features. No word on how it will handle animals, your delivery guy, or asking everyone coming to a dinner party to send facial recognition info to you. I’m sure I can think of lots of other ways in which this could go wrong.
Enjoy the background sounds and music of the classic Scooby Doo episodes? The Mystery Supply Company creates lots of looped backgrounds of those classic episodes. Great if you need some background ambience.
Google reports on how to transition to memory-safe languages
Improving code quality has become as, if not the, most important aspect of software. Bugs and security holes are exposing attack surfaces for personal data theft, infiltration, and ransomware. Google has been trying a number of approaches to improve things, and now they released a report on the effect of replacing memory unsafe languages with memory-safe languages.
Their approach stems from a number of somewhat obvious, but powerful observations. Memory vulnerabilities in a block of code decay quickly as it is tested in live conditions. In fact, they disappear exponentially with time as bugs are found and fixed. Therefore, the time when code is most likely to have the most memory safety issues is in brand new code.
It makes sense. As bugs are fixed, code becomes more and more bug-free (which is one of the big fallacies of the ‘lets scrap it and re-write all this messy code’ approaches). This also means that replacing old code with memory-safe languages actually doesn’t give you the best ROI. Instead, a team should focus on making sure the NEW code they add is in a memory-safe language to reduce the maximum amount of issues in the least amount of development time.
Google proved this out in their Android stack. By leaving the old code alone (just fixing bugs), they focused on just ensuring all NEW code was in a memory-safe language. This simple approach gave them a huge improvement in the number of memory vulnerabilities encountered each year:
Holy Saturday is a very quiet time in the church. There is no mass celebrated anywhere in the world. No sacraments are celebrated (except in danger of death). Catholic churches, for one day of the year, sit quite. Jesus lays in the tomb. To the world, he is dead. But tradition holds that Jesus is very much at work.
The Harrowing of Hell is the period of time between the death of Jesus on the cross at around 3pm on Good Friday and his resurrection sometime during the night on Sunday morning. Before Christ, everyone in the world is subject to death due to the disobedience of Adam and Evil that brought death into the world. Jesus was was able to redeem humanity by the sacrifice of himself. Jesus tells us that all who die to themselves and are buried in Christ by baptism and following his teachings will also find redemption in him as his friends at their death and rise on the last day.
On Good Friday when Jesus dies on the Cross, Christ triumphantly descends into death and tradition tells us he brought salvation to the dead held captive there since the beginning of the world.
There’s nothing explicit in the Bible about it. It’s inferred from a few passages (primarily 1 Peter 4:6 and parts of Ephesians 4) that Jesus descended into “Sheol” or “Hell” or “Hades”. Matthew tells us in Chapter 27 that right after Jesus’ death that:
⁵⁰Jesus cried out again in a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. ⁵¹ And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, ⁵² tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. ⁵³ And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.
While some might say it is “just tradition” and can be discarded, the Bible itself is a product of tradition and should not be considered a sole or separate source of authority—though we may regard it as the most important product of tradition. After all, most of the bible after the gospels are writings and traditions of the earliest Christians – including the apostles.
Lent is now half over, and we are rapidly approaching the events of Holy Week. In Jerusalem, Christians will start walking the paths Jesus trod in those last hours. They start with the Palm Sunday procession into the city. Pilgrims re-enact the triumphant entrance to the city – singing as they go.
There are videos online that follow the annual procession – such as the ones on Zahi Shaked‘s channel. They are definitely worth watching because physically seeing the locations gives you much more information about what was going on. All the happenings make more sense when you see the places along his path and see the vistas as sights as they did 2000 years ago.
Mark 11 1As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 3 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’”
4 They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, 5 some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” 6 They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. 7 When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it. 8 Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields. 9 Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted,
“Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
10 “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
11 Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.
Today, the procession starts at Bethphage and then they go up the Mount of Olives past Pater Noster church. They then proceed down the Mount of Olives to cross the Kidron Valley. They stop at Dominus Flevit church where Jesus, with full view of Jerusalem, wept over their lack of faith and predicted the destruction of the city (which did occur only 35 years later after Passover in 70AD).
They pass the the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus would spend the last few hours of freedom before his arrest, and head up from the Kidron Valley to the Golden/Mercy Gate.
The processions today have to go slightly south to the Lion Gate because the Golden Gate is sealed closed with a large cemetery blocking the way. The Golden Gate/Gate of Mercy was long predicted to be the gate at which the messiah would enter they city. It has been sealed/unsealed many times during the centuries.
I found it interesting that the gate has two entrance passages. The two bays of the gate contain the Door of Mercy and the Door of Repentance. I think it’s no mistake that through mercy and repentance, you will enter the new kingdom of God into the heavenly Jerusalem.
When Christ comes in his glory at the end of time, he will come from the east. The Kidron valley was supposed to be where the nations will be judged outside the walls of the new Jerusalem.
Give the video a watch – and many others he has. There are videos from other years after covid restrictions were lifted.
When I was a kid, I imagined quicksand would be a much more common daily problem than it has turned out to be. Still, it appears some folks still actually do get stuck – though it is more mud than sand.
