Mmagnusson

Absolutely, I'd personally never use Discord as I'd use Lemmy, but some people sure are trying even if it is very counter-intuitive.

Its more a human thing: you have a big thing many people are working together to build, you have to organize somehow and make sure the thing actually is being built and does what it needs to do. Good companies do have an overall plan and good communication.

SCRUM is just one of many ways of organizing a project. It in itself isn't really a programming thing even if it is most often used there, the general structure can work for just about every project that can be split in to multiple smaller tasks and sub-projects.

If your programming team is perpetual firefighting and chaos with nobody knowing their roles then that's a sign of a bad organization or a lousy management structure. The last company I worked at was very organized. Status meetings thrice a week, clear seperation of responsibility, a good team lead divying up tasks the cropped up, and good communication between programmers.

Its not that strange: people use what they are familiar with. Most people have a Discord account these days and migrating over there is as easy as clicking an invite link. In contrast Lemmy is relatively unknown and untested to the general audience, and is a step higher on the hassle scale, even if it is a similar service to Reddit - not counting the usual fediverse complications.

People are drawn to go as far down the hassle scale as possible, the fewer steps between them and their goal the better.

Not that a lot of communities did successfully migrate over here, partially or not. Lemmy is a lot more active now than when I started looking into it during the initial API struggle in June.

I'm going to give you the advice I usually give new Gamemaker users who come to the engine expecting to make their dream game in a week but quickly realize that isn't happening. You'll have to adjust it a biy for renpy but the core idea is the same:

Start small: smaller than you thought possible. Start by making pong. Start by making asteroids. Learn how to do collision and movement by making a platformer where the one goal is jumping over a single ledge. The goal is to break your learning down to tiny, incremental steps, so that you are only learning one new thing or mechanic at a time. As you get more confident and start to get a feeling how to think like a computer and solve problems that could arise slowly expand to slightly more complicated projects, move from pong to brick breaker, to pacman, to something else small but has a few more moving parts.

Ask questions (find f.i the forum), look up tutorials, and do not be afraid of experimenting, of breaking things, of taking projects others made and changing things to see what haooens, of really asking "why" things work the way they do.

So, just take a bit of time. No need to be afraid of failing, programming is a skill like any other, it takes time to learn, you are going to suck for a bit. People learning the piano sound awful the first few months, and then suddenly with practice and diligence they start sounding kind of ok, then good, then actually really good. Same with cooking, knitting, writing, painting, building, and programming. All things that take time and effort to get good at. You wont make your dream visual novel today, nor tomorrow, but you will make something, and something is a lot better than nothing.

I play a lot of the classic games on Cardgames.io. Spades in particular is a favorite, albeit I also really enjoy an Icelandic game called "Manni".

My family played a lot of what I later learned to be a variation of Shanghai rum, a contract rummy played with three 52 card decks. It takes a while to get over a full game, but it was always a good time.

While it has problems of its own, instances could pool and share that knowledge. The first time an instance talks to a different insta ce it could just ask "hey, what other instances are you aware of?". The main issue there is just instances obsessively sending exponentially growing lists of instances back and forth.

But no, that is the main bane of federated social media, discoverability without a center of truth

Maybe they are just thinking about those with a really bad internet connection, who will need the month to download the 125gb game.

Give how niche / useless some of the balls are color matching is really the one joy you can have with them. Doubly so when you are dealing with apriballs where you often only have a limited amount

Its just a really time consuming game. I've spent 9 hours playing a game we made it 4 rounds in (in fairness with a few new players). I personally like it, but you really do need to have the patience of knowing you are likely spending the day and probably not finishing regardless. A bit like Talisman.

Mastodon I've found has a bit of a discoverability problem, but there are ways.

1 ) Start off with your local timeline: these are all the people that are on your instance as well. If you've chosen a "specialized" instance most of these people will have something in common with you: mastodon.gamedev.place for instance is filled with indie developers, mastodon.art is full of artists, and so on. The more general instances like mastodon.social have a lot more activity, but there's no implicit link between people on it. It's a trade-off: the more specialized of an instance you're on the easier it is to find people like you and build a tight community, but the smaller the instance. The more general the instance is the more activity and people are on there, but less of it is relevant to you.

2 ) Go search up some hashtags of topics you like. For instance if you like baking go see what's on #baking. If you're interested in pictures of moss #mosstodon is great fun. If you like pokemon #pokemon, and so on and so forth. You can naturally follow hashtags themselves, but you can also try to use that to find people you may enjoy following - after all, if someone is posting baking pictures and you like baking maybe you'll enjoy following them!

3 ) Go snoop out other instances. Some Mastodon clients allow you to directly view the local feeds of other instances, but you can always just go straight to the page of said instance. Find a few specialized instances for topics you like, scroll through the local feed for a bit, and follow people that look interesting to you.

4 ) Google: when I joined Mastodon I just googled a few people I like or followed on other platforms and saw if they had a Mastodon. There are also plenty of "Who to follow on Mastodon" articles out there.

5 ) In the "explore" feed you'll find posts that are trending on your instance: often at times there are some good users there to follow, albeit it can get a bit "samey" if there's a big news story going on.

I ended up naming them numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. God knows it quickly went out of order but it wasn't like 10 year old me was paying close attention anyway.

Star realms because it is a great "on the go" game and having a constant stream of online opponents is great.

Axis and Allies... sort of... because it makes it easier to play over a long time if you cannot get the gang together for a full day of playing.