I think it's really useful to describe your product as an alternative to a well known product. Most people will instantly get it, much more so than a long re-definition of the original product.
Same. I’ve never heard of Loom and (therefore?) I’m honestly not sure how this would be different on a Mac than a QuickTime screen recording. And since the promo images are from a Mac, my first thought is Quicktime is probably safer.
Just to address this comment chain: loom does make it easier to do screen recordings and demos, and additionally has features like timestamped comments and notes and sharing functionality.
The target customer is a business who is making demo videos and needs these kinds of tracking/collaboration/commenting features.
Folks interested in open source maybe want a better offering, don’t want to be locked in, want more favorable pricing, or want a self hosted version.
As someone who has used loom, the value proposition is clear from the title without even going to the website.
I have had the idea for this device bouncing around in my head for so long, I just had to get it out and see; does it exist? Does anyone else want it to exist? Or is it just me?
Neat. I always wanted to make a HN bet. I don’t see your contact info in your profile, so please email me some contact at anything@prepend.com and I’ll connect with you in six months to settle.
Haha love your take on the extreme opinions people have on this game. And yeah, the thought has occurred to me that, like most anticipated things, it probably wouldn't be as exciting as I'd imagined once I was really playing it
I struggled with game addiction. I found that I have a very addictive personality, when I like stuff, I REALLY LIKE IT. Apparently, I also found out that alcoholism runs in my family, it feels like it might be related.
I understand the struggle of gaming especially when most of your life isn't going so great. The appeal of escapism is hard to bear, that's why on most of my computers I can't install any video games because I found when I said yes to Dota, I was saying no to greater priorities in life.
The thing I stopped being hard on myself however is considering that the time spent playing video games was entirely wasted. My 1,600+ hours playing Dota weirdly enough translated into video editing skills that now help with my job. The anger that I had playing the game caused me to deeply look into managing said emotion. The reflection that I had a problem meant that I could improve myself overall. Sometimes a metaphor, such as games, makes us realize the deep seated issues we had all along...
Huh, Dota was my big addiction in college. Thanks for sharing that perspective on how to reframe your time spent in a positive way.
I think for me, I would like to turn my many hours spent into a will and a way to help others deal with addiction to videogames, as well as porn and other digital addictions that are not yet taken quite as seriously as physical addictions.
I think that would be the ultimate way of making something good out of all this
Good for you op. Word of unsolicited advice: plan some activities that fill the void of your video game time. It can be anything like drawing, cooking, hiking or whatever.
If you sit around on the couch hyper focused on not playing the game, you will surely crack.
Yup. Good call. Weather is good these days so taking a long walk will be on that list :) Also photography, calling people for a random chat, and reading fiction.
This resonated with me, thank you for writing it. My own personal rule now is that video game playing should also be social time. I started playing BG3 using wine (on Mac) when it came out, but only with friends. Gaming time is (crucial) social time.
Eagerly anticipating this game has brought me back to my childhood days when playing the game I wanted seems like the ultimate fun, but of course now I have responsibilities. Now playing is a reward for myself if I handle everything else and again, only with friends. Even though I've been tempted dozens of times in the last month to fire it up for a solo session, that rule has stood me in good stead.
If it helps - the game is fine but it’s not the platonic ideal of video games in the way that the press coverage (and your blog) suggest. You’re really not missing anything by not playing it other than an enjoyable way to kill some time.
It’s _definitely_ not good enough to “fall off the wagon” for, seriously.
This story resonates with me a lot. I hope you don't mind if I share my own story (not as a counter-argument or anything, but out of solidarity from an addict in recovery). I don't really talk about this with most people, because I feel very weird about it. I used to be debilitatingly addicted to video games. I played World of Warcraft in particular compulsively, to a degree that I joke about but am also deeply ashamed of. There's an addon that you can install that will calculate the amount of real-world time you've played, across all of your characters.
I would really rather not know.
I'm not addicted anymore, and I couldn't tell you what changed. I have a guess though; I think it was mobile games? But maybe not the way you might think. I got really hard in to some of the early mobile gacha games for a little while. Summoner's War was one of them, it's about 10 years old now. I spent some money on them; I have a tech job, and splashing a little cash on pulling the slot machine lever for powerful new monsters felt good for a little while. But those things were barely games, they were basically the absolute shortest, least ornate form of the hedonistic treadmill that you could offer and still call it a game, they were essentially just designed to form habits and get you addicted to a routine with predictable rewards, and then slowly dial back the rewards as you progress but also slowly dial up the number of advertisements for the in-game cash shop.
Regular pc/console games would at least try to hide the ways in which many games are grinds, they'd try to make an actual experience and give you value for your money and make you feel satisfied about your purchase. There's a lot of psychological tricks involved there, please don't get me wrong, pc or console gaming isn't free of that kind of predation at all (especially these days). But with mobile gaming, that's almost all there is. It's like the difference between going to a nice restaurant and having a couple glasses of wine with dinner vs going to a 24 hour liquor store at 3am and buying a case. At the liquor store, there's no music playing, there's no ambiance, nobody cares if you're having a nice time, you're not there for the atmosphere, you're there because there's something in your brain that will hurt you if you're not.
I think that ultimately, spending money on four seconds of mild excitement over a few special monster summon scrolls that ended up being garbage, and then going straight back into the endless pointless grind, was what actually did it for me. I think there was a moment where I saw completely the whole machinery of the game, laid completely bare. I felt like I could finally see that it wasn't really a game it was like a garbage disposal that I could throw money into. It drove home what a sad little addiction I really had. The total merciless clarity that I was functionally just a type of depressed rat slamming a little lever hoping to get a good treat that would help me clear the next level of a dungeon so that I could grind a marginally better set of drop rates that would improve my clear speed on that dungeon slightly pretty much instantly burned out my dopamine receptors for that kind of gameplay.
The funny thing is, I actually can enjoy video games normally now? I buy games that look fun, I play them a normal amount, and then I put them down when I'm done, whether or not I've beaten them. I feel really weird about the way I experienced that specific type of clarity / addiction burnout, it's a very difficult feeling to describe, but I was just like "oh I hate doing this, I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore". I know for a fact that this is not something that everyone gets to do, and that in a way I'm really fortunate that I came out the other side of it a basically normal casual gamer instead of someone who would do the video game equivalent of sucking the tar out of a cigarette butt to get a nicotine fix, that's not usually how that story goes.
Thanks for sharing your story. I had a similar moment with the mobile game skinner boxes where I just got repulsed and lost all urge. But I still get sucked into higher quality games, thus, this post :)
Beautiful lading page and generous app. Thank you for making tools like this that help small-time creators improve their margins :) I used Payhip for my last project but I will bookmark this one to make sure I use it in the future
Wow, the ENTIRE massive ocean of Windwaker with all the islands loads faster than single rooms for other games. And then zipping around it so fast from the sky, all the islands seems so small compared to how big it all felt playing the game as a kid
I was also surprised about how "small" Kakariko willage from OoT was. But I guess that's some of the cleverness of the time. Make something small, but fill it and make it feel alive.
It's really crazy what camera angles and clever design can do. Check out GTA San Andreas for what I feel is the best explanation of this - the game felt enormous when I was a kid, but when you see the actual true size of that map, it's pretty damn small.
"Big" and "small" are funny terms when you talk about computer graphics. A surface 10 units long is short if your character moves at 10 units per second. It's long if your character moves at 1 unit per second.
You can easily see the entire GTA map and it might seem small, but if you place the camera at street level I think it's clear the map is rather big.
