This will be a bit more of a rant than anything else, but I think I should change around a bit the direction I’m taking with this blog and I want to talk about the whole thing. I’m gonna talk about this website, my projects and I feel like I should do with them. It’s my first year being a webmaster, first time having my own platform for what I create, and first time dealing with a bunch of the challenges I list below.
Website
Like the title says, being indie is difficult: This server costs a little over 120$ a year(and there’s also a node.js one for my RPGmod game). It has a blog, forum and portfolio, being a 3 in 1 of things I wanted to have for a while, but mantaining them is difficult. At first I made blog/portfolio and forum separated, using phpbb for forums and wordpress(which I still use) for blog/portfolio, but it didn’t work well. phpbb has no up-to-date database integration with wordpress so people who made an account in one would need to make an account on the other(for stuff like, uploading Humanity Clicker saves), and visually, both sides would be quite different, and not feel like a single website. So I decided to make the whole thing into a single thing, using bbpress(a wordpress plugin) instead of phpbb, but its a little simple, so I had to modify things a bit(getting a widget showing newest post on the home page, an extended editor, etc)
A lot of work went into this website over time, to be honest. I adjusted the design a lot, then a lot more when I got dark mode to finally work. Used every tool I could to optimize performance(CDN with cloudflare and every single performance option available for free, Varnish cache for static files, minimization and merging of code with both a performance plugin and google pagespeed mod), tried to min-max SEO, everything, but after a quick growth in traffic in the first semester, there was a period of stability and now one of decline this semester. I know growing a website takes time, a long time(it’s not as simple as a channel or profile on an already popular website), but if you’re a webmaster, you know how it feels.
My Games
I’ve been making games for fun for… a decade now? maybe more. It always been a hobby of mine, since I got my first PC, to make games and softwares for fun and to learn how stuff works, however I never really got far. I started trying to get some of my games popular in recent years, by publishing and updating them as much as I can, but without luck. To make matters worse, Discord(a platform I use a lot) has been recently the target of many scammers trying to steal accounts by getting their friends to “download their games”, so even when I post about mine on other places like twitter, people reach out to me to warn I got “hacked”.
Humanity Clicker started as a way to learn Unity and C# and, despite how simple it is, I had fun with it… until unity made terrible decisions that made me question wheter I even want to invest on it anymore. The game got thousands of clicks and downloads across all places I published it on, which was probably my biggest “success”, but now not only is unity’s name in the dirty, but I feel like people will avoid games made in it as a whole. I’m not entirely sure of that, mainly because I use version 2022, but if unity applies their whole DRM system on that version, then that means users are always being tracked by it, and I don’t want that. No point in making a product I myself wouldn’t use or like. I will, however, check into it and see if thats the case to then decide to update the game further or just abandon.
RPGmod on the other hand was my attempt at learning servers(specifically game servers) that then turned into a game project. It started in 2018 back when I was studying Eletrical Engineering in college still and only this year did it ever get its own server. I half expected that to bring new life into the game, finally attracting players to it, but after posting it on itchio, rpg maker web forums, reddit, here, uptodown, etc not much changed. I’m tempted to give it one last try and get it on steam once everything is stable and has enough content(which there’s a decent amount, but not as much as I’d like), but we will see how things go.
Future
So.. future. Next yearly payment to keep the website up is approaching. What am I doing from here on? Well, I’ll keep going, but not in the same way. Fuck trying to make this into yet another generic blog with 1000 Ads(looking at you, pretty much every SEO-focus website out there, and the likes), this is MY website so it’ll be about whatever I like, and i’ll write posts however I like and how often I want.
Being indie is hard. You start with no money or visibility, unlike AAA game studios, companies and internet celebrities, but it’s fun! I learned a lot about technology, how maintaining websites work, PHP and databases,etc with the website, and a lot about game making with the games I made, so unless I become unable to pay the 120$ yearly bill? I intend to continue going!
Thank you, by the way, to the people who created accounts, subscribed to the newsletter and visited every so often! Your support and interest in what I do is a great motivation to keep going!
