Rubber Bandits is a nice alternative to Boomerang Fu too

In terms of twin stick games, Voidigo is currently giving Enter The Gungeon a run for its money.

https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/build-your-own-revival-bundle

i recommend this bundle, donut dodo, round guard, indie guards in that bundle,

Also Hyperparasite in this one https://www.fanatical.com/en/pick-and-mix/platinum-collection-build-your-own-bundle

Spelunky 2

Chronicon

Caveblazers

Heroes Of Hammerwatch

Helldivers 1

Barony

Terraria (of course)

Broforce

Duck Game

Don’t Starve Together

Nuclear Throne (of course!!!)

Streets Of Rogue!! (keep your eye out for Streets Of Rogue 2!!!)

Wobbly Life

PlateUp

Glitchbusters

Ember Knights

Bones Cafe

Shovel Knight

Rainworld Downpour

Petal Crash

Definitely Sneaky But Not Sneaky

Sigma Impact

Cassette Beasts

Spirits Abyss

Cosmos Quickstop

DIG

Farm Together

Death Road To Canada !!! <-----

Knight Squad 2

One Step From Eden

Mutant Football League

Rampage Knights

Maniac (who cares it isn’t co-op it is hilarious as a pass and play)

X Morph Defense

Monaco

Tricky Towers

Himno the silent melody

Dungeon Of The Endless

Adventures Of Shuggy

Renegade Ops

Omega Strikers (online team based)

Cryptark

Ms Splosion Man

Full Metal Furies

Battleblock Theater

Colt Canyon

Cook Serve Delicious series

I’m talking from a perspective of reality. What you “predict” or “feel” or imagine the industry is or going to be, doesn’t really interest me much.

Damn… not sure how you work in an industry that requires good interpersonal skills with an attitude like this but you didn’t really listen to what I was saying at all. I am not defending AI or even claiming it can actually replace human graphic designers in any serious fashion longterm.

Let me lay this out for you really simple, this is a class war, and vapid MBA majors who will always placed by the ruling class in charge of most graphic design jobs don’t give a flying fuck if AI is a scam, the whole point of being a business major is to scam people. At the end of this when the AI hype bubble bursts most of yall aren’t getting your jobs back, and even if you do those jobs will longer be the good quality sustainable jobs they used to be because you will be now seen as an expensive temporary stopgap to AI (independent of the reality of AIs inane bullshit), a temporary “return to using horses while we get cars figured out better” approach that never treats the horses as worthy of a future…

It is hilarious given that you are a storyteller and artist by trade that at this late stage in the game you actually genuinely believe the truth actually matters here compared to the overwhelming roar of economic narratives set by the ruling class…and yeah you mighttt personally get lucky and be fine for the rest of your career but how cruel and naive to use your experience as a device to divorce your empathy from less talented/experienced graphic designers fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to follow in your footsteps.

Stop being a coward and hiding behind the niche little square you have cut out of your industry to support yourself, stand up and actually defend the futures and quality of life of the countless younger versions of you getting ground to dust by the industry before it is too late and the decent future of your career is rationalized away to capitalists and the path you walked in life becomes a mocking foreclosed dream to the next generation.

Like wake the fuck up please, this is catastrophic for graphic designers and it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not

I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.

Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.

This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!

Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.

Not only are you a fool, you spit in the face of people trying to begin careers in your field because you are so naively confident that this massive change in the labor market conditions of your industry won’t affect you or other graphic designers negatively.

Please retire, change careers or at least keep your mouth shut and actually listen to less experienced people in your industry. Stop acting like a boomer, it is just embarrassing yourself and publicly committing your online identity to words that will age so terribly it will make your future self’s head spin.

Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.

Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.

If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.

Your attitude says more about you than your supposed knowledge does, if you think AI won’t have a catastrophic impact on the value of your work, of the artistry of what you do in relationship to being valued by society, you are an utter fool.

What they are trying to point out is that as self confident as you portray yourself in your skills, at one point you sucked and you got hired anyway.

The new reality is you never would have been able to get into this industry because nobody would have given you a chance.

Nebulous has a conquest mode that is in testing at the moment that sounds extremely promising. The base gameplay is so good the game doesn’t need much, just a bit of progression between battles and choices to make about who to fight next.

Transcendence is a classic, the dev is still working on the game and the first early version came out in 1995 so rest assured if the game peaks your interest there is a lottttt to sink your teeth into there!

I don’t know how I came across Star Sector but games it reminds me of:

• Mount and Blade obviously (the open world with roaming bands you encounter)

• Transcendence is a game where you only play as a single ship but this is one of longest developed 2d top down ship games and it deserves mention.

• Battlevoid Harbinger is much simpler but the game is well suited for mobile and the tactical battles are actually extremely interesting, there is a lot of thought to how you approach situations and which direction you choose to go through sectors.

• Silent Sector, I haven’t played this one but it seems to be well reviewed. This is a game where you fly mostly one ship I think.

• Subspace Continuum is a deep cut lol, old multiplayer 2d spaceship combat game with really realllllllly deep combat mechanics and a very high skill ceiling. You pilot a single ship. Mostly dead :(

• Nebulous Fleet Command is a good pick if you want Star Sector but 3D. It actually controls fantastic on my steamdeck and I am reallly REALLY impressed by the UI, tutorials and general control scheme as this game is basically as in-depth with radar, targeting, guided missiles as you can get without going for a modern day military sim (like command modern operations or something).

• Space Rangers HD: A War Apart looks bonkers, haven’t played it but it deserves a mention for just being so off the wall and obscure

• (Microsoft) Allegiance is an old space combat game kind of like Empires Mod or Natural Selection 2 where one player per team is the commander who plays the game like an RTS and all the other teammates play the game like it is a spaceship combat game. It is 3D and multiplayer but I feel like there is some shared DNA here with picking the right fights so you can upgrade your fleet and then taking enemies more head on.

• Armored Brigade is worth a mention, yes I know it is an entirely different genre of a Cold War gone hot realistic military game, but the top down visual style and the really interesting delayed orders system I think might be interesting to check out as a fan of tactical spacecombat games. The effective range of main battle tanks in this game alone is terrifying.

• The Last Federation by the makers of AI War also deserves a mention here because I LOVE the clever twisting of game mechanics (these developers are great at that, see Tidalis lol) where you play a single spaceship amidst warring factions but that your goal is to UNIFY them. You are an extremely powerful alien from a dead race with a powerful ship and you want to stop the galaxy falling into war but you are only one ship and you have to think about the political/diplomatic implications of every move you make. It gives the game structure of star sector or mount and blade where you roam around fighting and negotiating with much bigger factions than yourself a broader shape and arc to the experience. Very cool game, I haven’t tried it yet either though.

• Star Traders: Frontiers sigh imagine if it had combat like star sector??! Or imagine Star sector had its non-combat elements fleshed out this much?

• Helium Rain looks very very interesting in the way it simulates economies and let’s you interact with an open world but it is 3D

• Children Of A Dead Earth is probably the only actually realistic space combat game, I want to try it

• x4 series or whatever seems like it has great options for building up companies with automated ships going everywhere never tried it though

• 3030 Deathwar Redux is a great singleplayer 2d space game with a well done story and fantastic looking grim cyberpunk pixel art. I love the commitment to going with a point and click style art scheme for everything outside of the spaceship cockpit. This game nails the vibes and I think other game developers making space games should take another serious look at just how efficiently point and click games can convey the feeling of place with a single backdrop or two and some music (imagine if a space game like Star Traders: Frontiers had the art style of The Sea Will Claim Everything?? Ooooff that would be dope).

• The Dominions and Conquest Of Elysium series, I know this is a different genre but there are a ton of shared mechanics and strategies here and I need to mention them in case a space strategy fan hasn’t stumbled onto them yet.

• ΔV: Rings of Saturn rightfully takes a closer look at space mining as being something that is fun, exploding spacerocks with lasers shouldn’t be like a more boring version of a basic MMO quest right? It should be like playing a game of pool but you are ON the pool table and the pool balls can crush you (I suppose Hardspace: Shipbreaker deserves a similar nod for making us consider how foolishly we handwave away the fun of disposing of our unwanted starships by abstracting all the fun plasma-torch cutty bits into a single “sell” button) .

sigh ok sorry one more deep cut and I will stop, I am just having too much fun going through the cobwebs of my brain lol

• Approaching Infinity is a turn based roguelike game where you play a spaceship captain roaming the universe with very very simple graphics but the gameplay is absolutely superb and deep as hell. Yes, the graphics are awful hahaha but the abstracted tile based nature of the game means that complex systems can more easily be built and developers have more time to focus on balancing those mechanics so that a player always feels like they have interesting choices to make. A difference here though is that a big part of the game is exploring a wildly different planets with different hazards and resources, this game is kinda a bit like No Man’s Sky if it had completely opposite design goals.

I would be absolutely amazing at this job, I do this naturally, I am inescapably an agent of chaos.

Or… how about we just treat the fediverse like it is a…. public forum…. and use different tools for having more private conversations?

The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.

When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.

Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.

This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.

Ha, suck it PenguinCoder my eyeball day is tomorrow