Demozoo.org is a website that is a library of not only old school ’90’s era demo competition submission – but even all the recent ones as well. They have lists of current competitions and news too. An extra feature is many demos have youtube videos of the runs so you don’t have to download the binaries and run them locally.
Nightingale game developers did something many other applications do – they gathered early feedback and used it to help improve the product. What’s particularly interesting is all the different methods and combinations Nightingale developers used.
As you might expect, some of the feedback was simply changes to the balance of certain mechanics if someone felt something was too hard or a mechanic simply wasn’t being understood. But the team went beyond just that by pairing direct feedback with telemetry they were gathering.
Instead of a standard Discord channel that required managers to sift through buckets of messages to collect the few jewels, they let users make suggestions and let people crowdsource and advocate issues to see if others felt the same way. This alone helped get clearer signal over the noise. The devs went further and compared that to the metrics they gathered to see if it was true. They would track things like:
When the metrics were compared and combined with the active vote topics in Discord, they were able to combine quantitative analytics to the qualitative Discord feedback. If there seemed to be a point large numbers of people stopped playing, the devs could go to the forums to ask why and get qualitative feedback. This helped not only identify problems – but also get information, or even suggestions, as to how to correct them.
The idea is not new. Others have tried using metrics – and nobody probably more than the gamification methods in Duolingo. I think there is a point at which you go too far; so it’s definitely worth watching and drawing some conclusions.
Lee Williams, who you may know from bizarre-o dungeon-crawler Cryptmaster, which has over 1,100 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam, put a finer point on it: “One lesson I learned from Cryptmaster was, ‘next time, make a roguelike…’ Lots of people say they want innovation and risk-taking but it seems that very few people actually do.”
Gamesradar is reporting something Chris Zukowski says again and again – 90% of the success of your game is decided when you pick the genre. Despite wishing and hoping, the reality is that your genre makes more of a difference than how good you, or your game, is. And those preferences are fickle from year to year.
There is always lightning bolt successes like Balatro, but those games are more akin to winning the lottery. Roguelike games were absolute moneymakers 2 years ago, but in 2025 the genre is starting to slip with other categories starting to rise to the top. This is a problem when games sometimes take 2-3 years to make. It’s another reason to make games quickly and cheaply.
There’s always working on games for fun and as a personal project; but if you’re trying to actually make a living on your work, you need to be aware of market conditions.
“I applaud any indie that tries to make something new and I think that is a big strength of indies, but unfortunately that means relying on luck for whether it works out or not,” Michele Pirovano says. “I was lucky with my gamble on merging city builders and roguelikes, but maybe if I had released it a year before it would not have worked… I think that reducing the risk for indies while still being original means making smaller games to reduce dev time, and I see that advice being given often, but that however does not translate well into Steam sales, as players prefer longer and deeper games.
The Serial Port takes a popular BBS software package called Impulse and sets up an old school BBS. Bonus points that it’s available on github I used Wildcat! back in the day to set up my own BBS for a brief time.
Ars Technica reports that, researchers at security firm Binarly found that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 older device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Supermicro and others. The cause: a cryptographic key underpinning Secure Boot on those models that was compromised in 2022.
They found that more than 10% of firmware images had this vulnerability. The cure – update your bios to ones without compromised keys.
We discovered the private component of one Platform Key in a data leak where a suspected ODM employee published the source code containing the PK on a public GitHub repository. The private key was stored in an encrypted file, which was “protected” by a weak 4-character-long password and thus easily guessable with any password-cracking tool.
-Binarly report
Wild. Besides reading my favorite Compute! magazine and typing in programs in the 80’s and 90’s, Byte magazine was the source of computer information in that era. I was pretty young, so a good bit of it went over my head, but a lot of it was fascinating.
This website provides a visual, zoomable map that shows every page of every issue of BYTE starting from the front cover of the first issue to the last page of the last issue at the bottom.
Winning the lottery doesn’t seem like it would be up there in the ‘worst things’ category, but it turns out to be one of the worst thing that ever happened to most folks that win big lotteries. Even already wealthy people who ran multi-million dollar companies find their lives completely destroyed. Murder, constant lawsuits, and bankruptcy.
What are some of those statistics?
Large jackpot winners face double digit risk increases versus the general population to be a victim of:
And triple digit increases versus the general population in:
In a surprising discovery, the worst enemy is usually yourself. Winners often suffer from drug overdoes, tax issues, dissolute and dangerous living that leads to death, or simply frittering it all away. Family, friends, and acquaintances will become an ever-present risk as well. If you win the lottery, you are 120 times more likely to be killed by a family member than before you won.
Even people that don’t know you will come out of the woodwork to sue you. In one case, a man settled multiple claims because husbands in his town had their wives leave them. Even though the lottery winner didn’t even know them. The ex-husbands sued the lottery winner simply because they claimed ‘jealousy’ of the lottery winner made their wives leave them for better prospects. Instead of fighting the frivolous cases, it was simply cheaper to just settle out of court for a few $10,000’s.
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Created for Exploring the Unknown exhibition at the CERN Science Gateway by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus, Round About Four Dimensions sculpture is a 4D tesseract rotating in 3D.
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Game development isn’t just about good leaders or even great products. You can do everything right, even making a game of the year, and still go under.
This is a hard lesson Mike Morhaime, a co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, is learning. He just had to sent a letter to staff at his new company Dreamhaven this week announcing layoffs.
One month after Dreamhaven launched Wildgate, the company had sold just 130,000 units. The company’s other game, Sunderfolk, sold just 62,000 copies since its April debut. Despite receiving positive reviews, both titles performed below expectations, Morhaime said. He’s looking for new financing for Dreamhaven, but in the meantime the company would need to retrench.
Frost Giant Studios Inc., also founded by Blizzard veterans, released Stormgate in August. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Morten said in a Linkedin post last week that the game wasn’t getting the traffic or sales he hoped for. Their SEC filing indicated Frost Giant Studios Inc. lost $11.7 million on sales of $1.4 million last year.
There are many purported causes. There’s been too many games released at once and not enough audience. Another factor may be even great games are not drawing players away from their heavily entrenchment in existing franchises. Whatever the cause, we’re clearly entering one of the worst markets for game studios in a decade.
I didn’t know this was even a thing, but it’s cool.
Apparently Jerry Wayne knows the proper etiquette for Ethiopian jazz