KTallguy

What an amazing success. I waited for the mobile version to dive in and it was a perfect fit. I appreciate that he wants to stay anonymous (for his health and other reasons). Nothing makes a game developer happier than watching people enjoy their work.

Balatro was built on the Love2D framework and its success inspired me to start playing with it. I’m a novice programmer but I feel that it’s a really amazing kit and has a lovely community attached to it.

I’ve been looking for sources about the Japan doctor shortage, do you know of any that describe the cause as being low pay? I have heard about the medicine issues.

A few comments:

1. It’s not very fun on iOS, especially because crypto mining makes the screen zoom in and it’s no good. Also the sound for the phone doesn’t work so that’s a big blocker. You probably know already.

2. Later, playing again on PC, I fist pumped when I finally was able to pay my ISP and the network clicked on. It felt like I defeated some boss in Dark Souls. You made that feel so horrible … thank you.

3. I sent this to a friend and he said that the browser was requesting microphone permissions so he turned it off. I didn’t encounter this but I’m wondering what that was?

Anyway I don’t know if I’ll continue to play and try to pony up the six thousand dollars I need to pay my rent and open the door to the endless staircase, but good job anyway :)

Thank you for the article! I’m an American who’s lived on and off in Japan for around 10 years, currently in Tokyo working in game development. I related to many parts of your article, especially the later part about foreign devs working with Japanese executives.

My work environment aims to be multilingual (Japanese/English) but creative conversations are inevitably stymied by pauses for translation. Machine translation and AI is helpful but fails to capture nuance, and compounds normal, everyday communication woes. Japanese only speakers on our team feel lonely and left out despite best efforts. Japanese applicants are quite rare because of the stress of being in such an environment. It’s exhausting when people around you don’t share common cultural touchstones and every conversation is an unpredictable exchange.

On the other side, although many of my non-Japanese colleagues speak varying levels of Japanese, some have tried but are unable to (or don’t care to) improve further. Working proficiency is a high bar, and our “real work” is busy. You can get by in Tokyo with cursory Japanese, translation apps and online reservations. There is a large expat community, so you can ignore the “Japan for Japanese people” if you so choose.

I wonder how things will change as the native population continues to shrink over the years. Even in Tokyo, many businesses have responded to the tourist explosion by insulating themselves in various ways. There are recent incidents related to concentrated immigrant populations as well. I hope that we avoid the xenophobic trend that is sweeping the rest of the world but I do worry.

There are a lot of cashless options but many places still only take cash. There’s a bakery in building that opened right when COVID started and they’re strictly cash only. Whenever friends and relatives visit they’re always stunned.

I don’t know if I agree that phones are the only culprit, but I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your article. Teaching is an incredibly hard job.

Lately I worry about all the AI written content that appears when doing a simple web search. I’ll find an article that seems relevant, but after spending 30 seconds or so unwrapping the prose, I find absolutely nothing of value.

If I was younger and every time I tried to read something longer than a tweet I got nothing out of it, I would likely get frustrated. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to default to gifs and memes.

> The market is saturated.

> This is not the middle. The author is talking about small games.

Exactly what I thought reading this article. It’s very hard to stand out and it’ll only get harder. Tools are much better than before, and now AI generation is entering the ring. Being an exceptional game is half the problem, the other half is getting noticed. Which takes money, or connections. Usually both.

Two additional points.

1. Good interaction design is still hard. Making something that many people can play and understand quickly is a skill. Releasing lots of content is the best way to learn.

2. Back in the Newgrounds days it was really simple to put something out there and get feedback on it quickly. Ads were (generally) not woven into games directly, the Flash tools were simpler and they limited game scope. Itch.io is ok for this but has a lot of downloadable stuff. I miss the days where browser games were huge but I guess there’s no money in it anymore. Maybe someone with better insight can share.

It’s a shame. Hobbyist developers and smaller studios have very little time to sift through all of these complicated pricing situations. The pay-per-installs prevents giving away a semi-successful game for free in donation packages, and adds new admin overhead. I don’t understand the goal… what new revenue stream will magically spring forth from these changes?

Unity is not my favorite engine to work with, and there was a long period of buggy, non performant console ports, but less choice is always worse.

Thanks, that’s exactly the kind of context I was looking for! I had no idea…

My favorite yojijukugo is from Chinese, despite the fact that I barely speak it.

自強不息, or “Pushing forward to better yourself without ceasing,” I think? Maybe there’s a better way to put it?

Another poster mentioned 点滴穿石 which is my second favorite. It puts things in perspective quite well.