building games & AI | helping scale https://xitter.cf/t.co/qoR914IFRU, https://xitter.cf/t.co/w4o6WFLVVb & https://xitter.cf/t.co/I5UXPfaine
Joined December 2022
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everyone's posting that ai ate the fun part of coding
mine went the other way. claude does my settings menu and the inventory grid nobody will ever compliment
the bit i keep for myself is hit pause. 3 frames where the whole game freezes when a hit lands. spent my entire sunday on those 3 frames and the neighbour kid watching thought my laptop was lagging
which part do you refuse to hand off
my cousin wanted to try python. first site asked for a phone number, then an otp, then a card for the "free" trial. she quit before lesson 1
opened indiadigital's coding school today. no login, lessons flip to hindi, print() ran in the tab
which signup made you quit?
this mod makes every car and every person in vice city squash and stretch to whatever mp3 you feed it. adds zero gameplay and it's at 1.3M views since yesterday
best line in the readme: "Automatic beat detection can make mistakes." then it just gives you F9 to fix the beat by ear. more honesty than my last game jam build had
also humbling. squash and stretch is like the first animation rule anyone learns and my platformer jump still goes up and down like a building lift 😭 fixing that tonight
since yesterday i opened 9 indie store pages, demos and repos before replying to the devs. steam, itch, app store, one github
same few things kept deciding if i got the game in 10 seconds or just scrolled. saving this for my own page:
1. the hook is in the tweet, not the page. a villager sim post had the best line (baker > miller > farmhand chain) and the landing card didnt mention it
2. the best sentence is buried. a cooking roguelike had "new rats come from corpses" halfway down the about section. thats the whole game. put it in the short description
3. vibe blurb before the loop. an idle game had a really pretty poetic blurb and i only understood what you actually do after the trailer. one plain line first, poetry after
4. let people see it before signup. the villager sim runs live on the homepage, no email. i stayed there longer than anywhere else
5. tell people how to report bugs. one itch demo just said press F8 to report one. tiny line but it made me feel the dev actually wants feedback
6. if it has accounts, check where data lives. a spotify clone was saving users to /tmp on vercel so every cold start wiped signups
7. empty leaderboards feel dead on day 1. a parking speedrun game has a board per level, a ghost of your own best run would fill that gap till people show up
with next fest demos going up, a lot of you are getting strangers on your page for the first time. the first 10 seconds matter more than one more trailer edit
whats the one line on your page youd fight to keep
return of the jedi made $475 million on a ~$32 million budget, and on paper it still "never went into profit."
that's what lucasfilm's letters told david prowse, the guy inside the vader suit. his deal paid a small cut only after costs were covered, and on the books they never were.
the whole trick lives in one word. prowse said it himself: "there is a big difference between having a share of the gross profit and having a share of the net profit."
gross is the money the movie brings in. net is whatever is left after the studio subtracts costs, and the studio writes the cost list.
the biggest line is usually a distribution fee, a percentage of revenue the studio charges the movie for distributing it. so the studio pays itself, and because it's a percentage, every extra dollar at the box office moves the finish line further away. columbia law's victor goldberg calls it a "rolling breakeven."
cleanest leaked example: harry potter and the order of the phoenix. $938 million worldwide. its net profit statement showed it $167 million in the red. inside was a $212 million distribution fee, basically warner bros paying itself, plus $57 million in interest.
to be fair, lucasfilm said prowse's claim was "not accurate" and wouldn't discuss his deal.
but the pattern is the point. the movie didn't lose money. one kind of contract did.
if anyone ever offers you a % of "profits", ask whose spreadsheet decides what profit is.
George Lucas’s told David Prowse he owed him nothing for playing Darth Vader on Return of the Jedi. The film grossed $475 million on a $32.5 million budget.
The 6-foot-six actor who physically played Darth Vader across the trilogy was left with zero backend residuals.
In the video below, recorded 30 years later, Prowse notes that the last time he spoke to Lucas was at the end of Jedi in 1983, right before the invitations stopped.
Across the 3 films of the 1977–1983 trilogy, the 47 year old actor spoke every single line inside the heavy suit on set.
He only found out his voice was dubbed by James Earl Jones while sitting in the theater on premiere night with 0 advance warning from the studio.
When he demanded his percentage, letters claimed the film turned £0 in net profit.
In 2010, exactly 27 years after release, Lucasfilm cut him off completely over public disputes, sealing his bitterness in a 2011 memoir before his death in 2020 leaving behind a cold, unbending ledger:
$475 million box office.
$32.5 million budget.
£0 in residuals.
The suit became a multi-billion-dollar icon. His voice was replaced. His residual never arrived.
Look at the facts. A multi-billion-dollar franchise built on his back, and £0 to show for it. Standard accounting, or a calculated corporate erasure?
samson's studio liquid swords just got declared bankrupt. the game sold about 152k copies
bankruptcy doc says ~$2.4M net revenue lifetime, 27 people, and 2024 alone was a ~$4M loss. 152k copies is the number i daydream about and it still couldnt cover one year
my notes app has a line that says "2,000 copies = i can tell mummy this is a job". recalculating
weird bit: playstation did 54k in 3 weeks. steam took since april to reach 84k
steam is testing achievement sets in the beta. base game gets its own progress bar, dlc gets a separate purple one, so your 100% stays 100% when new stuff drops
i have gotten exactly one game to 100% in my life. it lasted till an update added 4 achievements for a dlc i didnt even own. 96%. closed steam and slept angry
valve fixing this years too late for me personally
thariq posted that he'd rather vibe code little parts of games than play league now, and 1.7k people liked it so its not just him
sunday my cousins were waiting in the bgmi lobby. i said 2 min, opened the laptop to fix a shop menu that showed every price in red for no reason. came back and they had finished three matches without me
dont think games got boring. making one just turned into the game i actually want to play
my signature got rejected for being too small
8 kb. the form wanted 10 to 20
cyber cafe bhaiya tried 3 compressor sites, none let him type a number
later i used a resizer that runs in the tab. typed 20, 1.18 mb became 20 kb, nothing uploaded
dumbest reason a form bounced you?
the full price regret thread is too real. saved two birthdays of money at 15 for one ₹3,999 game, finished it in a weekend, then it hit ₹999 in a steam sale a month later
havent preordered anything since. wishlist and wait is the only rule i actually follow
someone's building an mmorpg where every tree and boss is just colored text. water reflections included
my school lab only had a terminal and i treated that like a curse. he's treating it like the whole art direction
pepsico now values the $300M it might owe poppi's founders at $12M. and every dollar of that markdown showed up as lower expenses on pepsi's own books, $266M of it so far this year.
pepsi never actually said "we won't pay." the real story sits in one footnote of its q3 10-q.
the earnout is all or nothing. $300M if poppi hits certain milestones by q3 2027, zero if it doesn't. every quarter pepsi has to put a price on that promise, using a monte carlo model fed by its own revenue and margin forecasts for a brand it now runs.
the marks went:
about $200M at close (may 2025)
$278M in december
$117M in june
$12M in september
$12M on an all-or-nothing $300M is basically pepsi's model saying around a 4% chance.
and under the accounting rules, when that liability shrinks, the drop gets booked inside selling, general and admin expenses. so the worse poppi's forecast looks, the better pepsi's expense line looks. $105M of it landed in the last quarter alone.
nobody has to be a villain for this to happen. that's just what an earnout is. it's the slice of the price the buyer keeps re-guessing, with numbers from a business you don't control anymore.
the founders still walked away with $1.9B cash, which is a great exit. but if you ever sell for an earnout, read your buyer's 10-q every quarter. that's where you find out what it's worth before anyone tells you.
Pepsi paid $2bn for Poppi and now says it won't pay the $300m earnout. Everyone's acting surprised.
What happens when a giant buys a challenger brand, with the receipts:
- Honest Tea, Odwalla, Zico: all bought by Coke, all discontinued. Zico's founder bought it back.
- Bai: Dr Pepper paid $1.7bn, wrote most of it down.
- Bodyarmor: Coke paid $5.6bn, took a $760m impairment three years later.
- Rockstar: Pepsi paid $3.85bn, has lost share every year since.
- Freshly: Nestlé paid $1.5bn, shut it within three years.
- Dollar Shave Club: Unilever paid $1bn, sold it for a fraction seven years later.
- Bonobos: Walmart paid $310m, sold for $75m.
- Mirror: Lululemon paid $500m, wrote it off and shut it.
- Ballast Point: Constellation paid $1bn, sold for pocket change four years on.
- Reebok: Adidas paid $3.8bn, sold for $2.5bn fifteen years later.
- Snapple: Quaker paid $1.7bn in 1994, sold for $300m in 1997. The original.
The pattern isn't bad luck. The brand was bought to protect the original and core portfolio, not to grow. Once it's off the market, the job is done.
If you ever sell to one of these: the cash on day one is the price. Everything else is a promise from someone who is incentivized is not to keep it.
mm2's dev says ai is in the code but none of the art, and kreekcraft says he can name maybe 3 or 4 roblox games with no ai at all
in class 7 nobody cared who wrote the knife script. we cared that the godly i traded my whole inventory for turned out to be a dupe
Well, they have freedom to destroy their country and loot stores. They should be ranked 1 🤣
the "video games eat years and leave you with nothing" post is doing numbers today
i learned port forwarding at 14 because my minecraft server ran off my brother's laptop and died at 9pm when mummy turned the wifi off for dinner. two of those kids still text me on my birthday
₹23 cr at 60 sounds rich till the game says it's ₹2.52 cr in today's money
played paisa samajh 22 to 60, dodged a digital arrest call, got laid off at 49
A+ and still roasted: 101 months of emergency fund rotting at 4%
post your scorecard, beat mine
indiadigital.org/games/paisa…
