Mastodawn

Daniel Burke Aug 19, 2024

Hey everyone. Big news! I'm pleased to announce that Innkeep now has a publisher! 🥳🎉Boot Disk Games (my new studio) will be collaborating with Mythwright, a publisher recently founded by industry veterans. Time to make this game!

#indiegames #gamedev

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/925500/view/6807840020993584268

Innkeep - Big News! - Steam News

Innkeep now has a publisher!

Daniel Burke Aug 13, 2024

Exilian Aug 12, 2024

Exilian member theeugene is getting to the last ten days of their kickstarter for THE GREEN BOOK, a tale of plants, pruning, and being a bear in a forest.

If you've ever wanted to have a little plant shop and a pet frog and be generally floofy, this may be your thing :) Boosts appreciated if you know anyone who likes cosy gaming!

Kickstarter link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theeugene/the-green-book-0

#IndieDev #Kickstarter #CreativeToots #CosyGaming #GamingNews

Daniel Burke May 11, 2024

Working on a card based clue system for eavesdropping on your guests. :-)

#screenshotsaturday

Daniel Burke May 9, 2024

Wow. Thank you everyone. #innkeep #indiegames

Daniel Burke Apr 29, 2024

Trese Brothers Games Apr 29, 2024

Monday reminder there's cool things to be found browsing the #ScreenshotSaturday hashtag each weekend. 😄 Awesome games being worked on, like:

• A new game from the legendary @grumpygamer (Monkey Island / Maniac Mansion).
• @Innkeep's unscrupulous fantasy inn keeper sim.
• @TorreznoEntertainment's Spanish folk legends point-and-click adventure.
• our own squad tactics heist RPG, out now on Steam!

Support a #GameDev: 🔁 boost/follow/wishlist games that seem promising!

#VideoGames #RPG #Gaming

Daniel Burke Apr 28, 2024

Daniel Burke Apr 24, 2024

Did you know Innkeep has a mailing list? Subscribe so you don't miss out on any big news.

https://innkeepgame.us16.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=1f23e1876aa1a25d836ee9b80&id=152b6b9566

Innkeep

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Daniel Burke Apr 27, 2024

@rockpapershotgun https://store.steampowered.com/app/925500/Innkeep/

Innkeep on Steam

Innkeep is an immersive job sim with an RPG core and a dark twist. Run your own fantasy world inn. Serve ale. Share rumors. Tell jokes. Rob your guests…?? Well, maybe just a little.

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Daniel Burke Apr 27, 2024

@rockpapershotgun https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/innkeep-satisfies-my-craving-for-a-fantasy-game-thats-just-a-grim-drudgery-simulator

Innkeep satisfies my craving for a fantasy game that's just a grim drudgery simulator

Innkeep is a cool, grim simulation about running a pub in a dark and dangerous fantasy world, and it's looking good already.

Rock Paper Shotgun

Daniel Burke Apr 27, 2024

Oi! Heard about Innkeep yet? It's a game I'm making about being a friendly Innkeeper who enjoys serving drinks, telling jokes, looking nonchalant, eavesdropping and stealing things. @rockpapershotgun have called it "a grim drudgery simulator". But in a good way. #screenshotsaturday

Daniel Burke Apr 24, 2024

javi Apr 23, 2024

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

The Man Who Killed Google Search

Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. This is the story

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At