A life time ago I was a ceramicist among other art things. And one thing I love todo was a Seaweed firing. I would say its easier than his method, but i can see his to be more convenient.
All you need for a seaweed firing is a beach with a good amount of seaweed.
You start by building your fire with your ceramics in the center.
Placing some kindling, paper, small sticks, a standard camp fire type of thing.
Then some dry seaweed on top to make a mound.
Once everything has taken light you can add wet seaweed on top, covering the mound.
The idea being, that as the fire goes it drys out the fresh seaweed then combusts it. And you keep that cycle going for as long as needed.
You can add air tunnels if needed. Windy days are much better as you can really get a inferno going in there.
I've managed to get temp's over 1300 degrees.
Firings can last days for very large ones (size of a truck), my longest it about 8 hours or so (size of a office desk).
This was way more fun than it should be. Wonderful!
Reminds me of Linelight on Steam and my game Kanso, both have 1D game mechanics (but with 2D visuals).
This has convinced me to add prepossessed fill areas on my kids colouring book for iOS. (no IAP, subscription, no ads, etc, like the general sentiment here)
Been thinking about this for a while, but things are fast enough on an iPad that it took a back seat, nice to be inspired to go that extra mile :)
I'm not too bothered about Steam's discoverability, its at least honest(ish) about it. The more reviews and sales you get the more its pushed...as far as I can tell.
I've found discoverability/promotion to be the most difficult, esoteric in the indie game enthusiast spaces. That really surprised me.
I'm also a solo game dev with a recently released game.
All this is really spot on with my experience. It just not clear if the author hired an artist or he just recommends it...its quite common for Game dev's to claim they made a game by themselves but actually contracted out the music, art, animation, etc.
Somewhat of a bug bearer with me as there are some genuine solo dev's creating great work that get overshadowed with the whole solo dev marking spin.
Yes.
No, each industry has its special flavour of abhorrent behaviour.
I'm not 'taring' the entire industry at all. Indeed I said, "vast number of honourable people in the industry", what I am concerned with is just how wide spread the contempt is for customers that play these games. And what the contempt does in allowing utterly contemptible business practices.
There will be, for sure, lives ruined because of this game's predatory practices. It really sickens me.
To quote myself from a previous thread:
"If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all. It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.
I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society. Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on. Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa for example)"
Realised that was a bit snarky of a comment, I'm using a a modified version of Cocos2dx .v4.
It took way longer to create than if I was using Unity, but its a great solution for a small and performant end product. I was able to get Kanso down below 100MB and will run on a total potato. Something I highly doubt I could do in Unity without some serious effort.
Total remakes from basically scratch.
I've settled on rolling with c++ with no(minimal) external dependancies as the best solution...still using Unity for some projects, its just so fast to get stuff done!
Yeah, spread that over 20 games/apps. It can really mount up, I can think of other indie game dev's that only publish on iOS that their games are now forever lost.
There are many dependancies that require some kind of reimplementation, it's a pain.
I have made things easier (in the long run) with my last game. I wrote it all in c++ with all dependancies under my control. I was thinking >20 years ahead for that one.
You start by building your fire with your ceramics in the center.
Placing some kindling, paper, small sticks, a standard camp fire type of thing.
Then some dry seaweed on top to make a mound.
Once everything has taken light you can add wet seaweed on top, covering the mound.
The idea being, that as the fire goes it drys out the fresh seaweed then combusts it. And you keep that cycle going for as long as needed.
You can add air tunnels if needed. Windy days are much better as you can really get a inferno going in there. I've managed to get temp's over 1300 degrees.
Firings can last days for very large ones (size of a truck), my longest it about 8 hours or so (size of a office desk).