from Hacker News

Hacker News for Gamedev

by ahub on 1/31/25, 7:56 AM with 219 comments

  • by aarongeisler on 1/31/25, 2:40 PM

    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.

    Nice work!

  • by CJefferson on 1/31/25, 11:21 AM

    When you've only got 3 comments on your whole front page, not sure invite-only is the best idea.

  • by hubraumhugo on 1/31/25, 10:33 AM

    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.

    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...

  • by innerHTML on 1/31/25, 10:07 AM

    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.

  • by suby on 1/31/25, 10:47 AM

    The invite only is very offputting.

  • by corund on 1/31/25, 9:42 AM

    great idea to add tags. Colourful account icons clutters page, i'd rather prefer the hacker news style without these icons

  • by ahub on 1/31/25, 3:31 PM

    To clarify : I'm not the author/host of the site. Saint11 [0], who worked on the recent "Celeste" platformer, is.

    [0]: https://saint11.art/

  • by drekipus on 1/31/25, 9:24 AM

    Nice! Great idea, I'll be sure to check it out

    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?

  • by wrfrmers on 1/31/25, 1:32 PM

    In terms of "x for gamedev", what I would love to see is a fork of Brilliant that covers common topics from the basics up, using pseudocode only. I've always liked Cat-Like Coding's approach to tutorials, but I've never been able to "acquire" that knowledge (and an intuitive feel for it) in a permanent way like I have with Brilliant's method. I know that they have a CS module, but one specific to gamedev topics would be amazing.

  • by appleorchard46 on 1/31/25, 4:28 PM

    The problem with 'HN but for [x]' sites is that what they offer is just a subset of HN. Game dev posts might not be the most popular here, but they're still allowed and do get some traction from time to time - so there's little incentive to post somewhere that has even fewer eyes.

    IMO for a site like this to succeed it needs to offer something HN doesn't. Chat, subforums, personal promotion section, something.

  • by cosysinx on 1/31/25, 10:39 AM

    Not very clear to me how to get an invite. Do I ask for one here?

  • by lemonberry on 1/31/25, 8:33 PM

    I can't speak to the content, but I found the a little difficult to read. I ran your homepage through the free Axe Dev Tools for accessibility. It may be worth testing yourself and changing some of the contrast between text and background.

    Congrats on launching! That's an achievement.

  • by stevage on 1/31/25, 12:06 PM

    The "moderation log" is pretty cool. Nice seeing the transparency. And also, the workload.

  • by panorama on 1/31/25, 3:16 PM

    This is neat, but I was wondering if anyone has a forum for discussing game product development (i.e. less the code that goes into game dev, moreso the decision making that goes into making quality games, is there a better name for what I'm referring to?)

  • by cupofjoakim on 1/31/25, 10:03 AM

    Going to lurk here as well. Not a game dev, but a fun industry to follow on the side.

  • by MrLeap on 1/31/25, 5:04 PM

    I requested an invite. Would love to join this, I've been a professional gamedev for about half of my career.

    My confirmation link was a link to Tentacle Typer's steam page.

    edit: thanks for the invite.

  • by picafrost on 1/31/25, 3:10 PM

    The communities centered around links and comments that I get the most value out of are those that are gently strict about the discourse that occurs on them. They are well curated by moderators. But importantly, still open to all to participate in.

    That takes a lot of effort, and the right curators, to do well. Invite only websites seem like a poor replacement for this. Are there examples of invite-only websites that reach the quality of HN at its best?

    Maybe by definition they are harder to point to.

  • by saint11 on 1/31/25, 8:54 PM

    Maintainer of the website here! I'm happy (and a bit terrified) that we made it to the front page of Hacker News.

    This isn’t a commercial project, and it never will be. We’re curating the site for a very specific vibe and high-quality content, which is why we’re invitation-only and why we aim to grow the community slowly and intentionally. I also want to ensure our server can handle the traffic without issues.

    I’m slowly working through the invitation queue, so please bear with me!

  • by Sverigevader on 1/31/25, 12:56 PM

    This is a bit off topic but I noticed that you've included a moderation log at the bottom. I don't think I've seen that before. I really like it!

  • by otteromkram on 1/31/25, 2:11 PM

    1. Why aren't websites like this posted under Show HN? This is a promotional post, right?

    2. How is this different/better than something like https://gamedev.stackexchange.com? More discussion-based vs Q&A?

  • by postalrat on 1/31/25, 3:37 PM

  • by 1ste on 1/31/25, 11:36 AM

    Assuming this is your site OP, well done for getting it built and launched. I noticed other comments saying "why not lemmy", "why not filter on game dev topics on HN". I think the opposite. Forge your own path and who knows where it will take you.

  • by elendee on 2/1/25, 1:12 AM

    fwiw I read hacker news through RSS only, top 10 items every day using https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

    Something similar would be great

  • by Crowberry on 1/31/25, 9:54 AM

    Nice! I’ll bookmark this for sure

  • by dartos on 1/31/25, 2:37 PM

    I was just looking for exactly this!

    HN is too VC focused for a lot of gamedev stuff to break through

  • by unchar1 on 1/31/25, 7:04 PM

    Cool site!

    Is there any way to see the top posts? It's really helpful when I'm trying to catch up on things. I know HN doesn't, but I can usually use hn.algolia.com to find the top posts.

  • by meheleventyone on 1/31/25, 10:05 AM

    The only thing that gets me is that there is a loooooooot of border.

  • by natural219 on 1/31/25, 2:25 PM

    "A glorified subreddit for HN readers..."

    At some point, I wonder if `dang` would support this? It seems like a good idea. For more topic-specific higher volume news items.

  • by phendrenad2 on 1/31/25, 2:33 PM

    Let me summarize some of the points brought up here so far (and add a few of my own):

    1. Background texture is distracting (background textures need to be very subtle to not be distracting!)

    2. You gotta hack the lobste.rs source to allow signup without an invite (Note: if you start getting spambots, try reCAPTCHA in the signup flow and maybe cloudflare DNS for the whole site, that seems to reduce spammers by quite a lot)

    3. Widen the page to match HN on desktop, 900px looks incredibly small on desktop monitors.

    4. Page header scrolls (left/right) on mobile, scrolling elements on mobile are bad because usually the user doesn't realize they can be scrolled. Maybe beg/borrow/steal a magnifying glass icon to replace the "search" link.

  • by rglullis on 1/31/25, 10:33 AM

    I think that after "this meeting could've been an email", we should start thinking "this website could've been a Lemmy instance".

    Even if you don't want to federate, all the functionality is already there, you can have a selection of web/mobile clients and you can apply whatever moderation policies you find suitable for the community you want to grow.

    And if you want to extend the reach and make it easier for other people to participate, you can open federation and get instance access to the millions of people in the Fediverse.

  • by heyitssim on 1/31/25, 4:26 PM

    Currently building my own game engine for my games[1], but I'm facing the classic indie game marketing challenge. While platforms like CrazyGames, Poki, grab most of web players.

    I'm exploring zero-budget marketing approaches. Currently experimenting with daily news posts for SEO[2] and converting them to podcasts too.

    Would appreciate any suggestions on effective no-budget marketing strategies, or feedbacks!

    [1] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/game/blast/

    [2] https://pixelbrawlgames.com/dailynews

  • by nemomarx on 1/31/25, 2:43 PM

    maybe a petty nitpick

    but why do I see "41 hours ago" on one of the posts? it feels unintuitive to measure a time longer than a day in hours

  • by nottorp on 1/31/25, 9:52 AM

    Does it have user submissions? I don't see a 'submit' while logged out and not making an account on the first date...

  • by damir on 1/31/25, 10:23 AM

    Would love to know more about the tech stack and the idea behind the site. How it started, and why...

  • by samiv on 1/31/25, 3:13 PM

    Looks like another dead forum for gamedev.

    The ultimate problem is that there's just an abundance of people doing game development or game tool (engines, tools etc) development. The market is utterly saturated and honestly it's a bit depressing. People putting their heart and soul just to have "0 views, 0 comments". What's the point?

    Of course this is more like an aggregator of game dev content so now you can observe the "0 views, 0 comments" phenomenom on content that itself has "0 views, 0 comments". ;-)

  • by kcb on 2/3/25, 4:33 AM

    So much padding. Not everyone is browsing on an phone or ipad.

  • by shahzaibmushtaq on 1/31/25, 11:59 AM

    So who is this Hacker News for?

  • by iib on 1/31/25, 9:57 AM

    The theme reminds me more of Lobsters [1]. Is this site invite-based as well?

    [1] https://lobste.rs

  • by gareth_untether on 1/31/25, 12:59 PM

    Game dev communities are great places in the internet. Thanks for creating this!

  • by tonymet on 1/31/25, 6:10 PM

    kudos for keeping the site small at about 55kb . Though not quite as slender as hackernews 14kb, i was expecting to see 2mb of react cruft so high fives to the devs for keeping it lite.

  • by lawlessone on 1/31/25, 3:20 PM

    Cool, i like the colour scheme. It's kinder to my eyes.

  • by cersei on 1/31/25, 9:43 AM

    Is there a RSS feed? Why not make this a community in Lemmy?

  • by burgerrito on 1/31/25, 10:18 AM

    Anyone knows any other similar sites? Personally I'm looking for "HN but for music".

    The only other website I know is https://lobste.rs, and this website looks like it uses Lobsters' software

  • by bdelmas on 1/31/25, 10:09 PM

    We need a "Ask GameDev" like on HN

  • by miohtama on 1/31/25, 9:47 AM

    Nice.

    But is it enough Web 0.9? :)

  • by mclau156 on 1/31/25, 2:39 PM

    Godot game engine has blown me away lately, such a small footprint at about 100MB, loads very quickly, and can render high quality 3D

  • by geenat on 1/31/25, 10:32 AM

    Waiting on approval under gnat.

  • by elpocko on 1/31/25, 10:12 AM

    lobste.rs clone, invite-only. I'm not gonna beg for the privilege of providing value to an elitist community.

  • by metadat on 1/31/25, 8:55 PM

    Cool idea, I hope this ignites.

    P.s. Why does it have the Lobste.rs favicon?

    https://gamedev.city/apple-touch-icon.png

  • by jschoe on 1/31/25, 1:44 PM

    HN for economics or geopolitics could be interesting.

  • by HellDunkel on 2/1/25, 6:18 PM

    fix the colors!