Link Roundup: July 2026

This month, the ace journal club talked about Lord of the Rings.  The case for an asexual Frodo is more compelling than I thought.  We also talk about several asexual literary theories.  It’s a fun one.

Making Indie Games is Like Buying a Lottery Ticket | Jason Schreier (video, 20 min) – Jason Schreier educates people about basic facts of indie video game production.  Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in the indie game player space, as well as the game critic space.  I see Indie games routinely celebrated as the artistically superior form, unlike those ultra-high budget games that all kind of blend into each other and get monetized to hell.  Be that as it may, I’ve often wondered if indie games are actually worse for laborers, since they offer so little job stability, and it’s basically a bad financial decision.  Granted, these days all the big studios are laying people off–but still, it’s “only” 33% that experienced layoffs, whereas I’m pretty sure that fraction of indie games that fail is well over a third.

NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR GAME | illomens (Click the play button, it’s an essay on a static page) – This manifesto argues that your video game is not a commercial project, and that frees you from a lot of irrelevant conversations that assume video games are commercial products (such as the paragraph above).  I have technically sold a game for money, so I have been excluded from the target audience of the manifesto, but I still basically agree with this.

It’s important to make a distinction between indie games and hobby games.  Indie games are framed as scrappy underdogs, but we’re still talking about big budget mass-marketed commercial products.  People talk a lot about the incredible number of games on Steam, like 21k last year, but this datum is somewhat problematic because it also mixes in projects that aren’t trying to be commercial.  For hobby devs, the fact that making a game is like buying a lottery ticket is mostly irrelevant, it’s just a perk.

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Designing a “balanced” strategy game

I’m going to talk about game balance specifically in the context of a video game that I made. You can play this game for free in browser, or pay for an expansion. But statistically most of you have not done that, and I’m not telling you to try it. To serve this discussion, I will assume that the player has zero knowledge, and is not interested in playing the game. (I also wrote a design post-mortem, but that assumes you’ve played it.)

In a strategy game, the intuitive meaning of “balance” is that when the player is presented with several options, the options are roughly equally strong. But that’s not exactly right. If every option were equally strong, then player choices wouldn’t matter very much. So the way I think of it, balance is not the end goal, it’s just a means to an end.  The true objective is to present the player with interesting non-trivial choices.  If one option straightforwardly dominates the other options, then player may eventually figure it out, making the choice trivial.

That concludes my context-free discussion of game balance. Balance is a context-dependent idea, and it can be more deeply discussed in the context of a specific game or genre.
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