Making games ain't easy...

Microsoft announced earlier last week that they would allow indie developers on Xbox One to self publish. In response to this news, a couple of gaming outlets reached out to Phil Fish, a canadian indie developer, asking for his opinion. Fish refused. Later, in an "Invisible Walls" podcast from Gametrailers.com, Tim Beer went at Fish with pretty harsh words. He called him a "fucking hipster" and a "tosspot" for not giving his opinion on the matter. You can see the juicy bits right at the beginning of the show.

I am not taking sides, mind you. Personally, I don't like either one of these characters, for stuff they've said in the past. But what shook me was how Fish reacted. Shortly before locking his twitter account, he tweeted the following :

"im done.FEZ II is canceled.goodbye."

"to be clear, im not cancelling FEZ II because some boorish fuck said something stupid, im doing it to get out of games"

"and im getting out of games because i choose not to put up with this abuse anymore." 

It seems he had quite the meltdown. Not only did he cancel "Fez 2", he also left the gaming industry. That's quite surprising considering, he worked in this industry for quite some time. I mean, he put four years of his life into his first game, "Fez". Four years in which his father died, his girlfriend left him and his former partner gave him legal trouble. Even before Fez he worked at Ubisoft. If you ask me that's a lot to give up on because of haters.Of course he got a lot of hate because of some things he said, and because he was kind of an asshole in some situations, but still. Imagine what all of this can do to a person.



Last week, Treyarch, the guys behind Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, released an Xbox 360 patch. The problem, apparently was with three weapons that were slightly reduced in power, in order to keep the game balanced. All of a sudden, the CoD "fans" burst out with rage and declare wondrous death threats to the guy who developed the patch, David Vonderhaar. On twitter, you can see how calm and polite David is, explaining that the aforementioned death threats are unfounded:

"The DSR fire time was 0.2 seconds. It's now 0.4 seconds. The rechamber time was 1.0 seconds. It's now 1.1 seconds. +"

"The sprintinTime was 0.25 seconds. It's now 0.30 seconds. SprintoutTime was 0.25 seconds. It's now 0.30 seconds. +"

"Not sure these fractions of seconds are worth the threats of violence. +"

Activision's Dan Amrich discussed this on his blog, essentially telling gamers to come to their senses. He said immature gamers are what stop the gaming industry from being taken seriously. And he's damn right! I'm sometimes ashamed when I see such specimens bitching about everything and taking every opportunity to say something awful about your mother or your sexuality. It kind of drives the whole gaming "species" extinct, if you ask me.

I highly recommend that you watch "Indie Game:The Movie". It shows how hard an indie developers life can be, and it definitely opened my eyes. Sometimes I ask myself if I'm going to face such hardships. Chances are that I am. It kinda scares me to hear about such stuff, especially because I intend to write games for a living. But I hope I will be able to handle it all.

In other news, I've been working hard on the game (that's why this post comes so late). I have mostly been working on performance and cave generation. Also, I may not be able to post for about a week or two, as I'm going to Artmania, the rock festival at Sibiu (aaawww yeeeeaaaah!).