• 17 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • It’s a two part story:

    1. The mobile market mostly targets kids and boomers and their resistance to microtransactions has been basically non-existent, making the market quickly become predatory and full of spam

    2. Modern app stores have become abysmal, making it impossible for smaller games to see the light of day. 99% of google play is a dumpster fire, and the 1% that is decent isn’t published by a multi-billion dollar company so you’re unlikely to ever see it. There are good games out there, but the way the algorithms and ads work makes them constantly pushed down in the list. This isn’t “a problem” to a company like Google because they’re making bank off of all these ad spaces.


    Anyways, most good games are paid, but here’s a list of stuff I’ve enjoyed playing on mobile:

    • Fancy Pants Adventures

    • Bloons TD 6

    • Dicey Dungeons

    • Dead Cells

    • Slay the Spire (but the mobile port is rough on small screens)

    • Knights of Pen and Paper +1

    • The Enchanted Cave 2

    • Let’s Create! Pottery

    • BAIKOH

    • Data Wing

    Probably a lot more I forgot. Have at it.


  • Has it ever been better?

    Actually, yes, by a big margin. Back in ~2011 mobile games were actually trying to be great. Games like Edge Extended, World of Goo, Bounce Boing Voyage, Zenonia 2 & 3, etc.

    I remember early Humble Bundles being full of exciting games for mobile, now you’ll be lucky to find just one of them that isn’t filled to the brim with MTX or ads.







  • Good read, and I think you might want to look at OnlyOffice. It’s open source and while it is kindof a shameless Microsoft Office clone, it does seem to support LaTeX when adding equations. Not sure how well it works as I don’t use it though. The slides app is pretty decent, the only bone I have to pick with it is that there aren’t many animation types and most of them are very basic. Otherwise, might be what you’re looking for.

    Screenshot of OnlyOffice's LaTeX option

    Edit: I just tried it and it seems to work pretty well. Select LaTeX, type your equation, then select professional in the dropdown menu and it’ll show the equation.

    A LaTeX equation shown in onlyoffice



  • Levelhead is a fantastic mario-maker esque platformer. The official campaign is a little over 10 hours long and is pretty good but its main draw is its incredible level editor and infinite number of quality levels online. I can’t recommend it enough. Sadly it never got as popular as it should have but there’s still a massive backlog of online levels to play.

    Someone else mentioned Distance and I agree. It’s a futuristic racing game with some horror elements. The campaign is short, but there’s a great amount of levels in the workshop. The multiplayer modes are also pretty fun if you can grab a few friends (there’s split-screen too).

    Inkbound is launching from early access soon and while I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest roguelike out there, it’s a lot of fun and very unique. It’s essentially a co-op turn based RPG where you and other players play all your turns at the same time. I’ve played a lot of singleplayer too and the game feels well balanced there.

    Voxelgram is Picross 3D for PC. Must-have for people who like nonograms.



  • Right? Who gives a shit about user experience anyways? When someone has an issue, you just tell them to man up and figure it out.

    No, it’s not always obvious which is the “main” community and there are many communities that died due to lack of traction, often because there are duplicate communities that also lacked traction. Community following would not only help unify communities and unify comments in crossposts, it also encourages decentralization by making 5 useful communities instead of 4 dead and 1 active.

    It’s not insane or narcissistic to want to reach a big audience. The same audience, across multiple instances, without effort. It’s social media 101. Saying who cares to that is a great way to see a dwindling userbase. Maybe you can’t feel it because it doesn’t directly affect your usage, but it does many others, and providing an optional solution is not a bad thing to consider.

    I’d also like to take this moment to show that this is the most popular issue in Lemmy’s github, getting over twice as many likes as the 2nd most liked issue. Everyone convincing eachother in the comments that nobody cares about this is clearly wrong, and are being so in an insanely toxic and dismissive manner. Thanks.






  • Obsessive and narcissistic because there are many duplicate communities and it’s frustrating to try and find out which ones to use? Okay…

    All this work to make Lemmy “more organized” feels like it’s missing the point that communities here on Lemmy actually have the opportunity to grow organically, instead of being forced open by bots and fake engagement like on Reddit.

    Does it mean the average user has to do more work for community discovery? Yes. Get used to it and stop trying to ruin a good thing by trying to make it more like the corporate shitholes we have been trying to escape.

    It just sounds like you didn’t read the post and made up a narrative in your head about what it’s about.






  • I’ve reached a point where I avoid these types of updates. An update post like that either means nothing important changed or they’re up to something.

    A while ago I saw that style of patch notes, updated an app, and suddenly I can’t use it anymore because it got limited to a maximum of 2 devices. Another time I updated an app putting a harmless “we improved the user experience” message, they put dark mode behind a paywall. This isn’t counting the number of times an app got redesigned to make the user experience worse for no reason. Maybe they wanted to justify hiring 5 UI/UX interns in that quarter or something.

    The patch notes look harmless, but my god, they are usually up to something.





  • Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can’t even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera’s website.

    I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.