Hello, just wanted to share my story as a reminder with all the lay offs in the gaming industry, it has been terrible outside of it too. I’ve been working as an automation QA for a pretty decent software company and I was about to hit like 11 years on the job. Also on the side I’ve been trying to get my own indie game dev studio off the ground with releasing 3 small games in the past 3 years.

After saving for like 10 years and living in small rented apartments, last summer I finally managed to secure enough money so I can get a loan to buy my first apartment. After a year of dealing with contractors (yes, they are that slow!!!) I finally moved and was hoping to be able to focus my free time on my game again. However literally first Monday we have a meeting with a head of our department and they said we are practically being replaced with A.I. So around 60% of the company is gone across all offices in 3 different continents…

I guess my dream has always been to go full time game dev, it’s just I was hoping to be able to do it on my own terms and not kinda being forced into it. But with no real money coming in from my previous games I might not be able to make payments for the place I bought and spent most of my adult life saving for.

So now I guess I don’t have a choice but to go all in on my current game. If you want to check it out and leave feedback on how it looks or even wishlist, you can so here STEAM

Wish me luck guys and gals!

  • DupaCyckiEnglish
    223·
    2 days ago

    I don’t mean to hate. The game looks interesting and I’m sure you worked hard on it.

    However, you got laid off due to AI, and then went straight to ChatGPT for translations? Sadly, most online translators are highly AI nowadays (and usually produce worse translations than before AI), but there are still better options than chatbots.

    It just looks lazy, especially that you completely missed ChatGPT’s commentary. Such an obvious and easy mistake to avoid.

    My advice would be: absolutely avoid using LLMs and Gen AI for anything related to your game, because your potential customers will blacklist you for using it. And ask yourself: do you really need to translate the game (or its Steam page) to many different languages if it’s not even selling enough copies for you to withdraw the money?

    A lot of indie games are English-only, precisely because translation is too expensive and unnecessary at first. It’s great to make your games available to as many people as possible, but don’t forget about principles and quality. First, focus on those two, then maybe try writing translations for any languages you know well.

    • douglasg14bEnglish
      153·
      1 day ago

      Language translation tools have been AI-based for nearly 30+ years now (Literally, ML based translation started in the 90’s). What are you on about?

      Using ChatGPT is definitely egregious for language translation with other translation tools out there, but you seem to think that translation tools using AI are a bad thing. They literally only work worth a damn because they are ML models (“AI”). And have been since they started working well…

      • DupaCyckiEnglish
        62·
        1 day ago

        I loosely used the term ‘AI’. Most people don’t exactly know what artificial intelligence is or how it works, so using the terms according to their definitions sometimes creates more confusion than clarity.

        Of course translation tools like DeepL have always been based on machine learning. The difference is that a few years ago DeepL worked well and its home page wasn’t filled with ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that’. They seem to have transitioned from their old ML models to some of the newer LLMs. From my experience the translation quality is much worse than it used to be.