Next has been a nightmare to use every step of the way. Endless undocumented ways to shoot yourself in the foot, especially if you’re trying to deploy somewhere other than Vercel. I can’t imagine anyone using it for anything other than the most basic CRUD app. And even then I’d recommend not using it.
If you use nextjs you need to strictly limit yourself to their Link navigation and maybe their router. Optimally, you want to be able to generate static HTML at all times.
> Next has been a nightmare to use every step of the way.
Nextjs tech is interesting. Unfortunately, their business model is reliant on their integration being a nightmare and thus your complete reliance to use their platform for deployment.
Yeah, and if Rich started making decisions on behalf of Vercel I would move to something else. However I trust that he wouldn't compromise his integrity in that way.
I commented on your other thread - but you should really clean up your information diet. From the vocabulary you use and the tone of your game and pitch deck, I can tell you’re someone that hangs on the words of tech industry ‘thought leaders’. You need to realize that most of the people in tech who have time to podcast, write substacks, or otherwise build a ‘personal brand’, aren’t actually making shit. They’re trying to inflate their profile so they can trade reputation for career advancement in any number of ways. It’s also not worth listening to most VCs. Most of them don’t have the time or technical ability to understand the areas they’re investing in and just chase trends. If they had the time and technical abilities, they’d be building companies instead of getting other people to do it for them. You’d be surprised to hear how many investors or personalities that are supposedly high profile are openly derided among actual founders.
The way to make something that’s fun is to try to make something that’s fun over and over again until you’ve got it down. It’s not by obsessively reading what investors or people who are essentially glorified influencers say.
I totally agree, though whatever Jesse Schell writes is great (he was my advisor!)
I'd say pick ONE SINGLE MECHANIC and MAKE IT FUN. That's it.
You can even just duplicate a mechanic that already exists: Tetris, Breakout, Balatro, Pachinko, whatever. Make it the best version you can make of that version, until it gets so perfect you're bored of it. At that point you bet you'd just "wish it had this one tweak".
Your goal is to get to that point — where you've perfected making the boring thing — that you're both excited and confident in adding that one extra tweak.
It's a really simple, technically easy process. But it's to so boring and it takes a lot of time, that's why it's hard and most people stop.
I can personally vouch that this trap is extremely prevalent in Korea, mores than elsewhere, and is imo one of the top reasons the country has 0 internationally successful SaaS startups. Or actually, it has 1, but ironically it belongs to the 0.1% of companies here with a foreign founder, which says it all really.
Community leaders set the tone, and here the communities in the ecosystem are very rarely led by people who spend >50% of their time building stuff. Instead they're led by, just as you said, people who have 1. never built a successful product 2. spend >50% of their time building their brand.
I can see on OP's twitter that he's actively engaging from people in that scene as well, so really if he wants to build a successful product, step one is getting out of that scene and into one of actual makers.
While building this social network called Disquiet mentioned in the post, I got to connect with over 100,000 people in the Korean startup scene. And yeah, I’ve noticed that most of us including me end up listening more to thought leaders. The people who are actually building real things don’t seem to share as much online. It really makes sense that I need to be intentional about our “information diet”
I'm going to look for a book about how to do just that, then watch a YouTube series on it, and then see if anyone has interesting blog posts so I get more unique perspectives on the matter. At that point, I'll know enough to finally clean up my information diet.
This is the best comment. I’m far from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so I end up mostly consuming what the thought leaders there say since it’s easier to access. There’s definitely a tendency for me to lean on that. It’s great to hear more from people who actually build stuff through Hacker News and other ways, but like you said, the real answer is probably for me to stop relying on that and just dive in myself—try things, mess up, and learn. Thanks again.
I feel like you’re trying to launch a consumer product like it’s a B2B SaaS company. As it is (broken site with no polish, little to no gameplay features, product hunt banner) you seem like you’re to trying to chase AI/metaverse trends. Reminds me of all of the endless metaverse scams and scandals. I think you’re significantly underestimating the time and polish it takes to build a consumer 3D web based product . Most small game studios take years to build up even small games before releasing them.
If I were you, I’d think deeply about whether this is actually something you’re passionate about working on or if you just want to start a tech startup and chase trends. If the former is true, I’d close this down and work on it for a lot longer before ever showing it publicly. If it’s the latter I’d pivot to an LLM B2B SaaS company like everyone else like you and try your luck at that.
Thanks for the great comment! Here’s what I think:
I don’t really understand why making a game has to take years. With AI advancing so quickly, the cost of game development is dropping fast—creating 3D assets, BGM, sound effects, characters, animations, and more is becoming way easier and faster. So instead of the traditional waterfall approach of long development cycles before launch, I think it’s now possible to build games in a more agile way.
It might look similar to a B2B SaaS approach, but we intentionally posted on platforms like Product Hunt and Hacker News to get feedback from talented people in the industry. Meanwhile, we’re running a separate GTM strategy to actually bring in our ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and learning from that.
Also, I’m genuinely serious about games—not just because of AI or the metaverse hype, but because I truly believe there’s a huge opportunity here. I wrote a piece about my thoughts—if you’re interested, I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a read!
I’ve evaluated almost any model that’s come out for game asset generation in the last few years and none of them are up to snuff. That alone tells me you haven’t looked at the output of these models closely or aren’t familiar with Gamedev.
Also, I’m sorry dude, but your blog sounds exactly like every metaverse pitch I’ve ever seen. Down to the “ROBLOX, MINECRAFT, ETC” highlight at the end. This doesn’t make me feel like I’m reading something written by someone that cares about games - it makes me think the author reads a lot of VC substacks and played League of Legends for a while.
Even mentioning “GTM strategy” and “ideal customer profile” tells me you’re drinking a lot of Kool aid. Stop watching YC videos aimed at B2B SaaS founders and reading a16z blogposts and work a lot harder on this stuff if you ever want to show it publicly.
Also keep in mind, there’s probably literally 100 other companies with the same pitch, vibe, and idea that you have.
> This doesn’t make me feel like I’m reading something written by someone that cares about games - it makes me think the author reads a lot of VC substacks and played League of Legends for a while.
After reading this sentence, I realize that the way I wrote might have come across that way. I’m a gamer who plays a lot of games and I’m so passionate about them that I even watch documentaries about the history of games. I have a lot of respect for people in the gaming industry. If my sincerity didn’t come through in that post, I guess that’s a limitation of my writing skills. There’s definitely a lot to improve on. I really appreciate this comment again
Really appreciate the honest and direct feedback. You’re probably right, I’ve been consuming a lot of YC and a16z content, maybe too much. And yeah, I’m ready to put in the work and dive deeper into this space
Thanks for taking the time to read and leave a comment. I’ll keep pushing, refine the quality, and make something great
Any can build games in an agile way and people have been for years. That's not new.
People who don't understand that HN and PH are really not a good places to find real gamers are a dime a dozen. Don't worry, I have done this myself as well.
Games take a while to make if you care about the details. If you want to create an engaging and interesting world that players want to engage with, that polish takes time. But AI is saving the entire industry time and effort. But sure, dump a game out incrementally. I just don't see a new opportunity, just the opportunity that has always been there.
No Man's Sky was there to tell us that you can generate a whole universe but if you forget to put anything your players want to interact with, you'll only get so far.
I mean, good luck. I don't mean to be pessimistic, I just spend enough time every day watching indie devs pitch their half-baked game ideas that this is unoriginal.
> I don’t really understand why making a game has to take years.
Well, be prepared to find out. You're firmly in the "those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it" zone right now.
And before you reflexively reply that you're using AI in a fashion that nobody else has before you, I want you to consider just how much the average "big budget" game has ballooned in size and budget despite decades of advancement in tooling designed to streamline and speed up the development process. The increased scope of modern games has far more than counter-acted any sort of productivity gains we've experienced, leaving us with the multi-year development cycles you lament. And the scope of your game is, by your own admission, infinite, so basic math tells us that if there's even a tiny non-zero amount of effort involved in creating it, the development time required will be infinite as well. Consider strongly setting yourself some firm limits ASAP.
And not just for the sake of your development budget! Consider also this: a game in which you can do anything with anything to anything, with no limits, no restrictions, only utter personal player freedom? That's not a game anymore. It doesn't even sound fun; it's basically an imprecise artist's palette. This may be briefly amusing to tinker with, but it'll never be FUN.
Games are fun largely because they have very deliberate limits that we have to learn and exert mastery over to overcome. Defining and fine-tuning those limits, and the tools the player is provided is at the root of game design, and you have punted on it entirely, leaving you with not a game, but a toy. (And, to my personal taste, a not very fun toy, though you could always turn that around with the judicious application of some excellent taste, instead of an abdication of same.)
I know this is a very grumpy comment, but boy it really gets my goat when someone says "I don't know why this thing is this way" and then doesn't bother to try to find out, and instead just assumes everyone else is an idiot who hasn't bothered to think about or try anything new. Sometimes it do in fact be that way, but you have to do at least the bare minimum of investigation to find out if it is, and in this case, you clearly have not.
Let me leave you with one last thing to think about: you mention Minecraft in other comments here, but consider the explosion in popularity it enjoyed when it introduced Survival mode -- a mode that contrasted the existing Creative mode by the addition of... limits. And to this day, that is the most-frequently played mode, almost to exclusion.
Players prefer limits. That's where the game is found.
I don't find your comment frustrating at all. I really appreciate it.
To give you a bit of personal background, I'm a heavy gamer and I absolutely love the games I mentioned. I also fully understand why limits exist in games and why they are essential. It's one of the reasons I still enjoy those games.
However, I don't believe that the need for years of development is inherently tied to the existence of limits in a game. Whether or not a game has limits, if it doesn’t take too long to make, that's a good thing. Here, the point isn’t about the presence or absence of limits, but rather about the process of making, launching, and improving a game itself.
That said, as you mentioned, of course, my game will need rules and limitations. After all, that's what makes it a game. Your point about Minecraft's Survival mode was a great reminder and inspiration. Thanks for the valuable feedback, I’ll definitely give it some deep thought.
Lastly, I’ve never thought of anyone as a fool. If that’s how I came across, I apologize. I simply question the way things have always been done and explore different approaches. I’ve certainly looked into why things are done the way they are, but it seems that my intentions weren’t fully conveyed in my writing or the game itself.
I think most rage bait about the Warhammer series is manufactured by content farm channels to generate clicks - the series wasn’t even officially in development until a few weeks ago.
There’s an entire subgenre of YouTube channels that consist solely of creators updating videos promising that they have inside information on the creative conflicts at Lucasfilm/Amazon/etc, all of which happen to align perfectly with whatever the fandom is outraged with that week.
This guys channel is a great example - most of the channels discussing “female custodes Henry cavil warhammer 40k tv series” Amazon follow a similar format.
Edit:
I’d also add that I don’t think Rings of Power is bad because they cast minorities - most of the actors are fine, really. The plotting and pacing is just horrendous. In a show that has 5+ active plot lines and threads scattered all over the world, they’ve spent a quarter of their screen time on a plot line that’s completely disconnected not just from the lore but from the wider story being told and doesn’t look like it’s going to connect anytime soon. Which is funny, because I’d imagine Amazon execs felt that they were obligated to include that plot line (the Hobbit one) to appease viewers.
It’s not really consistent - or anymore consistent than, say, SDXL with IP adapter. Even in their example images the character they’ve input comes out wearing different clothes.
I’d advise you to ignore lay explanations of the space - outside of the industry most of the discourse about self driving cars is poisoned by Elon’s deceptive presentations and his followers who parrot what he says.
If you want a grounded explanation of how Tesla’s stack works, follow @greentheonly on twitter. He’s a Tesla reverse engineer who regularly posts about the software that’s actually running on the car.
If you want an explanation about how real AV companies stacks work, I’d read Sebastian Thrun’s robotics textbook - then imagine what’s outlined in that book but with ML plugged in to a ton of spaces throughout the stack. This is also similar to how Tesla’s stack works, btw - greens just good to follow because a lot of people refuse to believe Tesla isn’t running some kind of “LLM but for driving” fully end to end black box model.
Tesla won’t launch a robotaxi anytime soon because they can’t use remote support or HD maps - although I think they’ve been stepping up their mapping efforts. Even the demo at Universal studios a few weeks ago was HD mapped - per @greentheonlys twitter.
I worked in the space for years and have seen the internal of both a traditional robotaxi company’s stack and Tesla’s.
For reference, Sebastian Thrun led the Stanford team that won the Darpa (self driving car) Grand Challenge in 2005, and then joined Google to lead Waymo (then called the Google Self-Driving Car Project), among other accomplishments.
Fundamentally different - people will flock to LiDAR vs Vision when debating this, but the more fundamental difference is that Waymo uses HD mapping + remote support.
Thanks, i was expecting something beyond just the lidar thing.
Can you elaborate more about mapping + remote ? I've never tested neither a tesla autopilot nor a waymo (european here).
edit : also, are there differences in the core algorithms ? Tesla seems to be full AI / ML. Is waymo the same ? ( as the company is older i wonder if they haven't built more things manually)
Neither of them are “full AI/ML”, they’re both traditional robotics systems with ML used for detection/prediction/planning at certain steps. Elon will sometimes say something about moving to a “new ML stack”, but Tesla reverse engineers regularly look inside of what’s running in the cars and that’s not the case at all.
Contrary to what other people in this thread are saying, the remote support isn’t remote direct driving of the car - essentially what will happen is that if the car finds itself in a situation where it’s unsure of how to proceed and it’s safe to stop, it will pause for a few seconds and wait for a remote operator to clarify a situation for it.
A good example might be road construction - if the car detects new road construction work that doesn’t match its map of the area, and its onboard systems determine that it’s not sure how to proceed through the construction with confidence, it will send what it thinks the top five likeliest ways to proceed to a remote operator. The operator then selects the proper path (or says that none of them are proper). The car will then follow the path presented by the operator, but actual driving behavior /collision detection / pathfinding is still determined locally. Think of it like ordering a unit around in StarCraft.
You can actually see this behavior in the car when it runs into a difficult situation. It tells you it's asking for assistance or something similar, and pauses for a few seconds.
I also made the mistake of assuming the remote operator drives the car but if you watch Waymo's technical videos, it's clear that the AI is in control of the car all all times and the remote operator is just doing near real time labelling of what the car is seeing.
Same way reverse engineer get access to internals of other devices - a bunch of tricks. :^)
In one case, greentheonly realized some fraction of Tesla’s cars are shipped out of the factory still in dev mode, with debug mode enabled and increased privileges. He found someone with a car like this who was down to helped and swapped part of his cars hardware with their car, and from then on was able to get a much better view of what was running on his car.
Unfortunately twitter is awful to search and a lot of his info is buried deep in old threads, but a few (old) examples to illustrate that he regularly does this.
It's a fallacy to really compare them directly. Waymo has active cars in service that are available to the general public. Tesla right now just has promises that they have been unable to deliver on for almost a decade now, as their approach is pretty radical.
It's a mile driven by the car, not by a human. An easy concept to understand, unless you don't want to understand it.
If you want to play the "ultimate goal" game, the ultimate goal is to do it all profitably at scale -- and Tesla is way ahead on that front, which is why their fleet self-drives almost as much per day as Waymo's fleet has ever driven.
Time will tell, but anyone who can't make a case for both "Tesla wins" and "Waymo wins" scenarios is a fanboy with deeply compromised thought processes.
If miles driven by cars under human supervision counted, Toyota cruise control would clock the highest. Autonomy is a binary: it’s either driverless or it’s not. There’s no need to invent terms such as “self driving mile”.
Tesla may be profitable, but nowhere close to a working solution. So how far ahead are they really?
Tesla's system is so fragile it needs a human ready to take over at any second to prevent a crash. Compared to Waymo Tesla FSD is like a kid using training wheels.
Touched on it to your original question but they require cars to drive through their service regions on a regular basis to keep a very detailed map of the environment. Not just the 2d map of a representation of the entire environment. On the remote part, Waymo will encounter trouble and they have support to take control of the vehicle remotely.
Usually the people that give information to outlets in cases like this are directly involved in the stories in question and are hoping to gain some advantage by releasing the information. So maybe this is just a tactic that’s not as favored by Anthropic leaderships/their counterparties when negotiating.
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