My background is in website development which I left to pursue indie game development full-time.
I'm currently making a game called Doggy Don't Care on Steam.
Anyway, I've been curious how much AI has changed the web development scene since I left 5 years ago. So today I put together this website in a couple of hours with the help of Claude AI.
It fixes a real problem for me as an indie dev: The data source is howtomarketagame.com/festivals (google spreadsheet) which is quite bloated and full of old/redundant entries. This website updates itself once a day based on that spreadsheet and throws out all the irrelevant ones.
It's been a wake up call for me being able to "vibe-code" a whole web app idea from concept to published within a couple hours and on top of that it will run itself for the foreseeable future. I hardly recognize the web development industry today
I launched my first small mobile game this year! [1]
I recently started my next game which is a story-based platformer. It will be tiny/small and it's hard not to think it will not be enough, but this post has confirmed for me that small is ok, if not better. Thanks!
I was in the web dev world early enough to also be uploading pages and files via FTP to production for high profile clients.
In the last 3-5 years with the addition of gulp, sass, npm, etc. it has all become way too complicated and saturated. I found myself with way to many options and worse - opinions - to filter through, learn, and master enough to use in production. Mostly this learning would be done in my own time outside of work and I really started to lose interest/drive to do it.
As a web developer myself I had never come across a CMS that made life easier for the every day person - friends would always come to me asking for help with setting up or amending their blog.
Then Squarespace came and I've been so impressed with it. It is the first and still only CMS that makes creating and maintaining* a blog super easy.
* images were always a problem with Wordpress and other sites... uploading, resizing, and more so moving and placing images on a page was always a "problem" for the non-tech-savvy but Squarespace handles this perfectly
I was on $100K for doing a similar amount of depressingly simple or "easy" work, while being surrounded by people who felt or at least appeared stuck.
It seems like a dream but I also got really demotivated and my sharp skills quickly became stale and then one day I realised I didn't care enough to upskill again.
The job became more about appearance and saying the right things, showing your face in the right meetings, and claiming recognition for other people's work.
I've now shelved that career. The money wasn't worth the feeling of guilt or missing out. I think the hardest part was knowing I was getting paid double than people who worked 3X harder.
I was on $100K for doing a similar amount of depressingly simple or "easy" work, while being surrounded by people who felt or at least appeared stuck.
It seems like a dream but I also got really demotivated and my sharp skills quickly became stale and then one day I realised I didn't care enough to upskill again.
The job became more about appearance and saying the right things, showing your face in the right meetings, and claiming recognition for other people's work.
I've now shelved that career. The money wasn't worth the feeling of guilt or missing out. I think the hardest part was knowing I was getting paid double than people who worked 3X harder.