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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • I dunno, I get the risk of people not knowing what a referenced game is or building expectations, but there’s also the risk of a generic description being lost in the vast sea of indie games. Looking at the description they have.

    Pixel Washer is a cozy, zen-like game where you play as a cute piggy power washing beautiful pixelated worlds. Wash sprites, upgrade your power washer, and find hidden secrets.

    That’s great for the steam page description, but it’s not exactly an elevator pitch. You’ve got seconds to make an impression before people move on, so it better be a strong one. If you start with “Dark Souls but 2D”, even if someone might not know what Dark Souls is, a lot of people will and there’s at least a chance that, given they like Dark Souls, they’ll take a minute to look more at your game. For better or for worse, there are very few people who will give a game a look without some point of reference point for potential enjoyment. There’s just too much stuff out there now to expect people to stumble upon your game with no prior interest.







  • When you make or reblog a post, you can add tags at the bottom. Ostensibly these are for searching/categorization, but people often use them to write out responses to posts so that their followers can reblog the it without bringing their comment along (Tumblr just puts all replies into a single extended post so it’s a bit cumbersome to have long comment chains). The tags are visible in the “notes” section of the post, so people can still see it.

    When you see a screenshot like this, it likely means that the response was made by someone else and the OP self reblogged it because they thought it was important.


  • I think it’s just the overwhelming stupidity. The covid stuff I can kinda understand because it was a scary and uncertain time. And maybe, to a point, I had kind of just accepted that the antivax “movement” had gained a twisted sort of legitimacy in some people’s eyes purely because it has been around so long.

    But this… this is just beyond dumb. Dollars to donuts these people have been drinking pasteurized milk their entire lives and never had an issue. Missing vitamins? Take a multivitamin and have more than your body knows what to do with. Want probiotics? Eat yogurt!

    I also just read that Louisiana might approve milk for pet consumption and that’s just so god damn sad. It’s one thing to spew from both ends due to your own stupidity, but quite another to inflict that stupidity on creatures who have no choice but to rely on you for their health and comfort.




  • I definitely agree, but that’s true of any system. The particulars of the pitfalls may vary, but a good system can’t overpower bad management. We mitigate the stakeholder issue by having BAs that act as the liason between devs and stakeholders, knowing just enough about the dev side to manage expectations while helping to prioritize the things stakeholders want most. Our stakes are also, mercifully, pretty aware that they don’t always know what will be complex and what will be trivial, so they accept the effort we assign to items.


  • Honestly a little confused by the hatred of agile. As anything that is heavily maligned or exalted in tech, it’s a tool that may or may not work for your team and project. Personally I like agile, or at least the version of it that I’ve been exposed to. No days or weeks of design meetings, just “hey we want this feature” and it’s in an item and ready to go. I also find effort points to be one of the more fair ways to gauge dev performance.

    Projects where engineers felt they had the freedom to discuss and address problems were 87 percent more likely to succeed.

    I’m not really sure how this relates to agile. A good team listens to the concerns of its members regardless of what strategy they use.

    A neverending stream of patches indicates that quality might not be what it once was, and code turning up in an unfinished or ill-considered state have all been attributed to Agile practices.

    Again, not sure how shipping with bugs is an agile issue. My understanding of “fail fast” is “try out individual features to quickly see if they work instead of including them in a large update”, not “release features as fast as possible even if they’re poorly tested and full of bugs.” Our team got itself into a “quality crisis” while using agile, but we got back out of it with the same system. It was way more about improving QA practices than the strategy itself.

    The article kinda hand waves the fact that the study was not only commissioned by Engprax, but published by the author of the book “Impact Engineering,” conveniently available on Engprax’s site. Not to say this necessarily invalidates the study, or that agile hasn’t had its fair share of cash grabs, but it makes me doubt the objectivity of the research. Granted, Ali seems like he’s no hack when it comes to engineering.





  • I mean cats can be a lot harder to handle after you poke them. What if you need to give multiple vaccines? What if you need to draw blood? What if you need to touch other parts of their body to look for issues? What if you need to examine their mouth? Some cats will put up with it, some (a lot) will not. It’s a lot safer and less stressful for everyone if you just use a sedative when needed.