I hope this catches on. For whatever reason, I haven't come across many gamedev-focused sites with good content. The gamedev subreddit is particularly disappointing.
Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.
This is less a problem with the subreddit and forums, and more that AAA game devs seems to be very reserved about discussing their industry or keep discussion internal to private channels (possibly for IP reasons). Whenever I see a AAA developer pop up on Reddit they're always vague and mysterious; "I work for an unnamed AAA developer.." You don't see people doing that on HN very often, they usually announce unabashedly they work at a well known company, like Google.
The more professional discussions seem to be on the forums for Unreal Engine or Unity, where people are struggling with obscure issues inside those monster packages.
(I'm trying to do 3D stuff in Rust. The number of people who do hard 3D stuff in Rust seems to be very small, which is frustrating. There are many obscure bugs in the graphics stack and not enough people to exercise the stack, find the bugs, and get them fixed.
3D game dev in Rust is below critical mass. Retro-looking 2D is doing fine. But most 2D Rust work could be done in HTML/CSS/Javascript, or could have been done in Flash.
About half of my time goes into graphics stack problems. This is not fun.)
That’s probably the problem for any HN-for-X because a talking at/with/to beginners and hobbyists is not a rare internet opportunity for experts.
I think one of the things that makes HN HN is that experts can choose to have only incidental open internet engagement with their areas of expertise. Most or all of their time on HN can be engaging with other topics that they are less familiar with.
The attractions of an HN-for-X include engaging with an unfamiliar-X that experts are already familiar with.
I have a suspicion it’s worse than beginners (absolutely nothing wrong with beginners).
There’s a cohort of marketers on Reddit that profit off of beginner-aimed content. Lots of “oh I just built a successful game doing this”, link off to a blog. So the shepherds in those subreddits are not really elders, but sadly, grifters. In turn the beginners sort of stay perpetual beginners. It’s horrific if you go to the /r/startup type subreddits, the grift is super strong there.
Makes you really appreciate HN, good shepherds (not perfect, but good).
I found this very frustrating back when I was active on Reddit. There were times when I put a lot of thought and effort into writing posts drawing from my moderate knowledge and (at the time ~10 years of) experience. And then I get some reply from a complete novice or two saying this is clearly wrong and the post gets tons of down votes. Meanwhile the top comment is another beginner saying something obviously wrong and hundreds more agreeing.
There aren't many social media communities with quality gamedev content, because professional (especially AAA) developers with decades of experience rarely participate, and you can only have so many beginner communities. The lack of participation exists for many reasons:
1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.
2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.
3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.
4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.
As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.
HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.
There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.
> Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
From my observations, I see that most influencers are consistent. A few will flip flop to chase the trend of the week, but most simply have hard, clashing stances. And of course, those clashes creature flames
Sadly, talking about games is rarely civil. You need to find a quaint community and/or do a ton of moderation to keep the conversation from tilting off.
> Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer.
Yeah, that was definitely a contributing factor to me leaving Reddit. Only so many times you can try and reason "well yes, costs have grown for these larger games. Maybe a 16% increase after 15 years is justificed" and are counted by "but the market is bigger! You sell less games with higher costs"... sigh. I know they can't see the pocket books, but companies are still breaking records with $70 priced games. Come on.
Also just a real shame how much those gamers ignore the japanese market. They focus on COD and claim to just want to buy games. meanwhile Nintendo has never put MTX nor battle passes in their games, and they are chastised as bad for completely different moving goal posts (ahh yes, because lawyers remove mods... because Nintendo games disproportionately have a huge modding community. Population maps anyone?). Maybe a bunch of cosmetic DLC at worst, but all those western tactics are relagated to Mobile in Japan (which this audience couldn't care less about).
They have options to branch out to, but never do. Can't make the horse drink.
This is the main problem of the "Hacker News for [x]" type sites. Lobsters got lots of people interested, but it is itself mostly not interesting to read, because there is very little discussion. Sure, you keep out some noise, but you also keep out what makes hacker news great, and that is the comments from all sorts of people.
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
>While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
Their verification method already seems to be enough of a gatekeep.
>if you don't know (or can't find) an existing_user from whom to request an invitation, you can make a public request for one. This will display your name and memo to all other logged-in users who can then send you an invitation if they recognize you.
And they ask for some personal website to verify as well that is visible. Given the volume at this scale, this could have been a manual verification by the creator for a while until there's enough scale to rely on invites (similar to Tildes).
Perhaps "interesting to read" does not correlate directly to "healthy discussion". It's a feature that Lobste.rs has low volume commentary, it leads to more authentic response less ad-hominem or passive-aggressive commentary like HN is constantly flooded with.
As someone who wanted to comment and was immediately prevented by the invite wall, I agree.
I even submitted for an invite but clicking submit triggered no notification or anything. I don't have the energy to look at the network request to confirm
Website maintainer here, that's kinda what we are going for. I really don't want to have to moderate a big community, this is supposed to be something you check once or twice a week.
once a week may not really be enough to engage a community unless you are sure who you are recruiting will be very active.
But I respect the choice, nonetheless. It just simply does fit my ideal style where I could find at least 1-2 interesting posts when I check twice a week. Having niche interests can be a curse.
The stats page is just a clone from the site it's code is forked from, you can tell because they even have the same text on their stat page about their pledge drive, which clearly they did not do, but was in fact on lobste.rs.
I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
Are you telling me you don’t want to read constant updates on the state of AI and how it will obviously find AGI tomorrow so please give us a trillion dollars today?
Do you think your considering HN a clear exception to being “Reddit with a sense of grandeur” might have more to do with your vantage point than your ability to gauge the value of online communities?
and yet, because social networks degrade in quality over time (popularity brings about the riff raff), it's essential to start net social networks to maintain quality discourse.
That site aims for it, but the front page goes back a month or more. That's not a level of detail or activity that will compel people to go there regularly?
I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.
I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).
My first check on any "HN for X" is: does it look and feel almost the same. If not I get frustrated because apparently I’ve been promised something else.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
The other half of the chicken and egg is that hn is “hn for devs but actually just for techy people to cover all sorts of stuff” whether that’s the intent or not.
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
> I've seen many "HN for X" projects for various niches now, and they all suffer from the chicken/egg problem of getting a critical mass of participants.
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said.
I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.
For example, SDL 3 was officially released last week, which I think is significant. It was posted on HN, but it didn't get enough votes to be visible to me.
I love the idea, unfortunate the way this site is presented is such a incredibly busy and noisy way, it makes it so uncomfortable to look at I couldn't use this.
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
As a sibling commenter said, I think the background texture is the most distracting.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
They've also gone with the sadly-ubiquitous "tiny fixed width column of content with heaps of whitespace on either side" pattern. Real HN does have whitespace borders after a certain width, but it mostly allows the content to scale to fit your browser window. Nothing worse than having a nice gigantic monitor and then having web content constrained to a 5" vertical strip down the middle of it.
For me, it's the fact that the tags overflow to the next line on mobile. Some posts only have tags on the right, some only have tags on the next line, some have both.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
As a gamer though I immediately noticed how easy it was to visually filter the content by tags and drill down into the details at will. It's an uncommon texture but it works for me.
A few colour changes and it would look fine. I don't know if it's the same software as lobste.rs, but it looks almost identical apart from the colours.
Oh man Celeste was FANTASTIC. I've been active in /r/gamedev for forever (because I used to teach high school kids how to make video games), so I was already interested but this seals the deal.
The storytelling, the accessibility options, chef's kiss
Seconded on a HN-style site for writers. I would love that. Aside from tech, I am also an aspiring author and seeing what others are up to helps me develop my own voice.
Readit News
Feebdack: agree with the other comments that the background image is a bit hard on the eyes.
Nice work!
And the focus is like all on 1-person indie projects with very little content from professional/AAA devs
(I'm trying to do 3D stuff in Rust. The number of people who do hard 3D stuff in Rust seems to be very small, which is frustrating. There are many obscure bugs in the graphics stack and not enough people to exercise the stack, find the bugs, and get them fixed. 3D game dev in Rust is below critical mass. Retro-looking 2D is doing fine. But most 2D Rust work could be done in HTML/CSS/Javascript, or could have been done in Flash.
About half of my time goes into graphics stack problems. This is not fun.)
I think one of the things that makes HN HN is that experts can choose to have only incidental open internet engagement with their areas of expertise. Most or all of their time on HN can be engaging with other topics that they are less familiar with.
The attractions of an HN-for-X include engaging with an unfamiliar-X that experts are already familiar with.
There’s a cohort of marketers on Reddit that profit off of beginner-aimed content. Lots of “oh I just built a successful game doing this”, link off to a blog. So the shepherds in those subreddits are not really elders, but sadly, grifters. In turn the beginners sort of stay perpetual beginners. It’s horrific if you go to the /r/startup type subreddits, the grift is super strong there.
Makes you really appreciate HN, good shepherds (not perfect, but good).
Deleted Comment
It's a no memes, no marketing subreddit for C# Godot.
(I am the Mod)
1. Befriending fans or participating in their communities leads to constant requests for insider info, which is tiresome.
2. Social media is for extreme content. Reddit, for example, rewards the most shocking content and most Redditors are aware of this, so measured voices get drowned out, or worse: blindsided and cancelled for minor quirks of expression.
3. Armchair developers with very little real experience, who are the main participant of game dev conversations on social media, often lecture long-term professionals. Particularly, new software engineers tend to really over-complicate code until it's "perfect" in some philosophical ways but not performant nor maintainable. It is difficult to participate in discussions where they outnumber you 50:1. Sooner or later someone will "epically own" you with Uncle Bob quotes.
4. The current zeitgeist in the gaming community is that studios are evil for a number of reasons, some of which are not pandering to contradictory player demands (next-gen graphics are a waste of money/game with previous gen graphics looks like PS3; visually appealing women characters are sexist/visually average women characters are woke; games should not cost more than $69/games that use monetization engines to keep the price at $69 are greedy), and some of which are abstract and universal ("this game had so much potential", "<game feature> is trash", games not meeting delusional expectations, etc). Influencers often flip-flop between these criticisms reviewing any game they come across, so these ideas have now taken hold in social media, and are often barriers to respectful communication.
5. Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer. About 50% of the industry is people who do games as a paycheck (they have families, kids, parents, they are battling the cost of living crisis, they don't have the energy for ideological fights at work nor do they want to upset their source of income), or people who do games as a career (they want to become VP of technology, studio head, etc. as a life goal). These people are completely under-represented in beginner circles who sometimes consider their goals vile. Many people who have worked in the games industry for decades will know a few studio heads/executives personally and align a lot more to the business decision-making in the industry than the average social media user. Because SM often promotes quite inflammatory language, it becomes difficult to find common ground.
As a result, most game dev professionals avoid social media, particularly Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and rumor forums, because it's really grating to socialize there, and we get our social needs met by more accepting groups of people. Even Twitter/X/Bluesky, with a slightly larger dev community, loves the extremes of opinion that become equally exhausting.
HackerNews so far is a platform that doesn't tease you for insider information, it promotes measured voices, and likes the practicalities of tech + business, as opposed to idealistic extremes. Therefore, I believe there are more professionals here, and the community isn't running out of steam.
There are other niches for game developers online, such as GameDev.net, GameDeveloper, and industry-insider publications like GameIndustry.biz. It is much easier to write down an article for GameDeveloper or speak to editorial staff about what concerns you to get an article out there on industry publications than to try and discuss any sort of meaningful matter on broader social media.
From my observations, I see that most influencers are consistent. A few will flip flop to chase the trend of the week, but most simply have hard, clashing stances. And of course, those clashes creature flames
Sadly, talking about games is rarely civil. You need to find a quaint community and/or do a ton of moderation to keep the conversation from tilting off.
> Many devs align with the games industry a lot more than the idealistic "games is my calling" new developer.
Yeah, that was definitely a contributing factor to me leaving Reddit. Only so many times you can try and reason "well yes, costs have grown for these larger games. Maybe a 16% increase after 15 years is justificed" and are counted by "but the market is bigger! You sell less games with higher costs"... sigh. I know they can't see the pocket books, but companies are still breaking records with $70 priced games. Come on.
Also just a real shame how much those gamers ignore the japanese market. They focus on COD and claim to just want to buy games. meanwhile Nintendo has never put MTX nor battle passes in their games, and they are chastised as bad for completely different moving goal posts (ahh yes, because lawyers remove mods... because Nintendo games disproportionately have a huge modding community. Population maps anyone?). Maybe a bunch of cosmetic DLC at worst, but all those western tactics are relagated to Mobile in Japan (which this audience couldn't care less about).
They have options to branch out to, but never do. Can't make the horse drink.
All these kind of sites serve is a curated link list, which can be nice, but they don't fell like a community if you see the same dozen people leave ~3 comments per article and can only participate yourself after groveling before the chosen.
While I do think a good community needs some type of gatekeeping, being invite only is not it.
Their verification method already seems to be enough of a gatekeep.
>if you don't know (or can't find) an existing_user from whom to request an invitation, you can make a public request for one. This will display your name and memo to all other logged-in users who can then send you an invitation if they recognize you.
And they ask for some personal website to verify as well that is visible. Given the volume at this scale, this could have been a manual verification by the creator for a while until there's enough scale to rely on invites (similar to Tildes).
I even submitted for an invite but clicking submit triggered no notification or anything. I don't have the energy to look at the network request to confirm
But I respect the choice, nonetheless. It just simply does fit my ideal style where I could find at least 1-2 interesting posts when I check twice a week. Having niche interests can be a curse.
https://gamedev.city/stats
https://lobste.rs/statshttps://gamedev.city/stats
Isn't game development already discussed here?
I actually built a side project that categorizes front page articles so I can filter for topics. Here's an example for recent gamedev content: https://www.kadoa.com/hacksnack/d57360e8-1eb1-4800-a711-f0d5...
So far the most active community seems to be gamedev.net, but I feel it's in a long decline.
Starting one is easy, but maintaining both quality and popularity is hard - here, HN is a rare exception.
it's a bit sad seeing such a derisive comment about self-hosting on HN
I'd say not really. Not in the detail that this site aims for. At least on the front page.
I get the desire to have quality users and posts, but the whole invite system feels like an unnecessary gate.
I am not a gamedev professional but I dabble as a hobbyist and am interested and would love to participate on that site but I don't know anyone on the site to get invited, and I'm certainly not going to beg publicly for an invite (which seems to be how their system works).
//js code here.
```
And it formats as js, say. Formatting stuff on here, reddit, and other sites that support only partial markdown is painful for me.
I’m not sure why they not just copy an UI that’s working well already and that people know.
By limiting the surface area, it’s bound to never become larger than the restriction.
Dead Comment
With the rise of LLMs, the fake-it-till-you make it would much easier. Even just having an automated program to scan for relevant URLs on other aggregator sites and cross posting them as new content would give things a bump.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
https://twostopbits.com/news
ofc sometimes game dev is discussed here, but imo I don't see it enough here that I wouldn't want a hackernews just for gamedev.
also very useful side project
I think hacker news aced it with the clean look, although sometimes I wish for a dark theme.
Other than that, I also think the tag density is higher than on Lobsters, where they seem to be using mostly one, or at most two, tags, whereas this website's front-page is using around three for each post.
Maybe the color scheme as well. And perhaps more negative space can be removed by making the column wider, like it is on HN.
The inconsistency makes it impossible for my eyes to settle into a reading pattern.
The choice of colors is also rather unconventional and not exactly appealing.
It's the old school magic of nested <table>'s.
Deleted Comment
[0]: https://saint11.art/
The storytelling, the accessibility options, chef's kiss
Requested.
I'd love if there's more "hacker News like" sites. You could probably use the format for many things, a hacker news for writing?