In the past few years, social media use has gained a bad reputation. More or less everyone is now aware that TikTok is ruining your attention span, and Twitter is radicalizing you into extreme ideologies. But, despite its enormous popularity amongst technology enthusiasts, there’s not a lot of attention given to Discord. I personally have been using Discord so much for so long that the majority of my social circle is made of people I met through the platform. I even spent two years of my life helping run the infrastructure behind the most popular Bot available on Discord. In this article, I will try to give my perspective on Discord, why I think it is harmful, and what can we do about it. appshunter.io A tale of two book clubs To explain my point of view about Discord, I will compare the experience between joining a real-life book-club, and one that communicates exclusively through Discord. This example is about books, but the same issues would apply if it was a community talking about investing, knitting, or collecting stamps. As Marshall McLuhan showed last century, examining media should be done independently of their content. In the first scenario, we have Bob. Bob enjoys reading books, which is generally a solitary hobby. To break this solitude, Bob decides to join a book club. This book club reunites twice a month in a library where they talk about a new book each time. In the second scenario, we have Alice. Alice also likes books. Alice also wants to meet fellow book lovers. Being a nerd, Alice decides to join a Discord server. This server does not have fixed meeting times. Most users simply use the text channels to talk about what they are reading anytime during the day. Crumbs of Belongingness In Bob’s book club, a session typically lasts an hour. First, the librarian takes some time to welcome everyone and introduce newcomers. After, that each club member talks about the book they were expected to read. They can talk about what they liked and disliked, how the book made them feel, and the chapters they found particularly noteworthy. Once each member had the time to talk about the book, they vote on the book they are going to read for the next date. After the session is concluded, some members move to the nearest coffeehouse to keep talking. During this session of one hour, Bob spent around one hour socializing. The need for belongingness that drove Bob to join this book club is fully met. On Alice’s side, the server is running 24/7. When she opens the app, even if there are sometimes more than 4000 members of her virtual book club online, most of the time, nobody is talking. If she was to spend an entire hour staring at the server she might witness a dozen or so messages. Those messages may be part of small conversations in which Alice can take part. Sadly, most of the time they will be simple uploads of memes, conversations about books she hasn’t read, or messages that do not convey enough meaning to start a conversation. In one hour of constant Discord use, Alice’s need for socializing has not been met. Susan Q Yin The shop is closed Even if Bob’s library is open every day, the book club is only open for a total of two hours a month. It is enough for Bob. Since the book club fulfills his need, he doesn’t want it to be around for longer. He has not even entertained the thought of joining a second book club, because too many meetings would be overwhelming. For Alice, Discord is always available. No matter if she is at home or away, it is always somewhere in her phone or taskbar. At any moment of the day, she might notice a red circle above the icon. It tells her there are unread messages on Discord. When she notices that, she instinctively stops her current task and opens the app to spend a few minutes checking her messages. Most of the time those messages do not lead to a meaningful conversation. Reading a few messages isn’t enough to meet her need for socialization. So, after having scrolled through the messages, she goes back to waiting for the next notification. Each time she interrupts her current task to check Discord, getting back into the flow can take several minutes or not happen at all. This can easily happen dozens of times a day and cost Alice hundreds of hours each month. Book hopping When Bob gets home, the club only requires him to read the next book. He may also choose to read two books at the same time, one for the book club and one from his personal backlog. But, if he were to keep his efforts to a strict minimum, he would still have things to talk about in the next session. Alice wants to be able to talk with other users about the books they are reading. So she starts reading the books that are trending and get mentionned often. The issue is, Discord’s conversation are instantaneous, and instantaneity compresses time. A book isn’t going to stay popular and relevant for two whole weeks, if it manages to be the thing people talk about for two whole days, it’s already great. Alice might try to purchase and read two to three books a week to keep up with the server rythm. Even if books are not terribly expensive, this can turn a 20 $/month hobby into a 200 $/month hobby. In addition to that, if reading a book takes Alice on average 10 hours, reading 3 books a week would be like adding a part-time job to her schedule. All this, while being constantly interrupted by the need to check if new conversations have been posted to the server. visnu deva Quitting Discord If you are in Alice’s situation, the solution is quite simple: use Discord less, ideally not at all. On my side, I’ve left every server that is not relevant to my current work. I blocked discord.com from the DNS of my coding computer (using NextDNS) and uninstalled the app from my phone. This makes the platform only usable as a direct messaging app, exclusively from my gaming device, which I cannot carry with me. I think many people realize the addictive nature of Discord, yet keep using the application all the time. One common objection to quitting the platform, is that there’s a need for an alternative: maybe we should go back to forums, or IRC, or use Matrix, etc… I don’t think any alternative internet chat platform can solve the problem. The real problem is that we want to be able to talk to people without leaving home, at any time, without any inconvenience. But what we should do is exactly that, leave home and join a real book club, one that is not open 24/7, and one where the members take the time to listen to each other. In the software community, we have also been convinced that every one of our projects needs to be on Discord. Every game needs a server, open-source projects offer support on Discord, and a bunch of AI startups even use it as their main user interface. I even made a server for Dice’n Goblins. I don’t think it’s really that useful. I’m not even sure it’s that convenient. Popular games are not popular because they have big servers, they have big servers because they are popular. Successful open-source projects often don’t even have a server.

Two weeks ago we released Dice’n Goblins, our first game on Steam. This project allowed me to discover and learn a lot of new things about game development and the industry. I will use this blog post to write down what I consider to be the most important lessons from the months spent working on this. The development started around 2 years ago when Daphnée started prototyping a dungeon crawler featuring a goblin protagonist. After a few iterations, the game combat started featuring dice, and then those dice could be used to make combos. In May 2024, the game was baptized Dice’n Goblins, and a Steam page was created featuring some early gameplay screenshots and footage. I joined the project full-time around this period. Almost one year later, after amassing more than 8000 wishlists, the game finally released on Steam on April 4th, 2025. It was received positively by the gaming press, with great reviews from PCGamer and LadiesGamers. It now sits at 92% positive reviews from players on Steam. Building RPGs isn’t easy As you can see from the above timeline, building this game took almost two years and two programmers. This is actually not that long if you consider that other indie RPGs have taken more than 6 years to come out. The main issue with the genre is that you need to create a believable world. In practice, this requires programming many different systems that will interact together to give the impression of a cohesive universe. Every time you add a new system, you need to think about how it will fit all the existing game features. For example, players typically expect an RPG to have a shop system. Of course, this means designing a shop non-player character (or building) and creating a UI that is displayed when you interact with it. But this also means thinking through a lot of other systems: combat needs to be changed to reward the player with gold, every item needs a price tag, chests should sometimes reward the player with gold, etc… Adding too many systems can quickly get into scope creep territory, and make the development exponentially longer. But you can only get away with removing so much until your game stops being an RPG. Making a game without a shop might be acceptable, but the experience still needs to have more features than “walking around and fighting monsters” to feel complete. RPGs are also, by definition, narrative experiences. While some games have managed to get away with procedurally generating 90% of the content, in general, you’ll need to get your hands dirty, write a story, and design a bunch of maps. Creating enough content for a game to fit 12h+ without having the player go through repetitive grind will by itself take a lot of time. Having said all that, I definitely wouldn’t do any other kind of games than RPGs, because this is what I enjoy playing. I don’t think I would be able to nail what makes other genres fun if I don’t play them enough to understand what separates the good from the mediocre. Marketing isn’t that complicated Everyone in the game dev community knows that there are way too many games releasing on Steam. To stand out amongst the 50+ games coming out every day, it’s important not only to have a finished product but also to plan a marketing campaign well in advance. For most people coming from a software engineering background, like me, this can feel extremely daunting. Our education and jobs do not prepare us well for this kind of task. In practice, it’s not that complicated. If your brain is able to provision a Kubernetes cluster, then you are most definitely capable of running a marketing campaign. Like anything else, it’s a skill that you can learn over time by practicing it, and iteratively improving your methods. During the 8 months following the Steam page release, we tried basically everything you can think of as a way to promote the game. Every time something was having a positive impact, we would do it more, and we quickly stopped things with low impact. The most important thing to keep in mind is your target audience. If you know who wants the game of games you’re making, it is very easy to find where they hang out and talk to them. This is however not an easy question to answer for every game. For a long while, we were not sure who would like Dice’n Goblins. Is it people who like Etrian Odyssey? Fans of Dicey Dungeons? Nostalgic players of Paper Mario? For us, the answer was mostly #1, with a bit of #3. Once we figured out what was our target audience, how to communicate with them, and most importantly, had a game that was visually appealing enough, marketing became very straightforward. This is why we really struggled to get our first 1000 wishlists, but getting the last 5000 was actually not that complicated. Publishers aren’t magic At some point, balancing the workload of actually building the game and figuring out how to market it felt too much for a two-person team. We therefore did what many indie studios do, and decided to work with a publisher. We worked with Rogue Duck Interactive, who previously published Dice & Fold, a fairly successful dice roguelike. Without getting too much into details, it didn’t work out as planned and we decided, by mutual agreement, to go back to self-publishing Dice’n Goblins. The issue simply came from the audience question mentioned earlier. Even though Dice & Fold and Dice’n Goblins share some similarities, they target a different audience, which requires a completely different approach to marketing. The lesson learned is that when picking a publisher, the most important thing you can do is to check that their current game catalog really matches the idea you have of your own game. If you’re building a fast-paced FPS, a publisher that only has experience with cozy simulation games will not be able to help you efficiently. In our situation, a publisher with experience in roguelikes and casual strategy games wasn’t a good fit for an RPG. In addition to that, I don’t think the idea of using a publisher to remove marketing toil and focus on making the game is that much of a good idea in the long term. While it definitely helps to remove the pressure from handling social media accounts and ad campaigns, new effort will be required in communicating and negotiating with the publishing team. In the end, the difference between the work saved and the work gained might not have been worth selling a chunk of your game. Conclusion After all this was said and done, one big question I haven’t answered is: would I do it again? The answer is definitely yes. Not only building this game was an extremely satisfying endeavor, but so much has been learned and built while doing it, it would be a shame not to go ahead and do a second one.

Neovim is by far my favorite text editor. The clutter-free interface and keyboard-only navigation are what keep me productive in my daily programming. In an earlier post, I explained how I configure it into a minimalist development environment. Today, I will show you how to use it with Godot and GDScript. Configure Godot First, we need to tell Godot to use nvim as a text editor instead of the built-in one. Open Godot, and head to Editor Settings > General > Text Editor > External. There, you will need to tick the box Use external editor, indicate your Neovim installation path, and use --server /tmp/godothost --remote-send "<C-\><C-N>:n {file}<CR>{line}G{col}|" as execution flags. While in the settings, head to Network > Language Server and note down the remote port Godot is using. By default, it should be 6005. We will need that value later. Connecting to Godot with vim-godot Neovim will be able to access Godot features by using a plugin called vim-godot. We will need to edit the nvim configuration file to install plugins and configure Neovim. On Mac and Linux, it is located at ~/.config/nvim/init.vim I use vim-plug to manage my plugins, so I can just add it to my configuration like this: call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged') " ... Plug 'habamax/vim-godot' " ... call plug#end() Once the configuration file is modified and saved, use the :PlugInstall command to install it. You’ll also need to indicate Godot’s executable path. Add this line to your init.vim: let g:godot_executable = '/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot' For vim-godot to communicate with the Godot editor, it will need to listen to the /tmp/godothost file we configured in the editor previously. To do that, simply launch nvim with the flag --listen /tmp/godothost. To save you some precious keypress, I suggest creating a new alias in your bashrc/zshrc like this: alias gvim="nvim --listen /tmp/godothost" Getting autocompletion with coc.nvim Godot ships with a language server. It means the Godot editor can provide autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and advanced navigation to external editors like nvim. While Neovim now has built-in support for the language server protocol, I’ve used the plugin coc.nvim to obtain these functionalities for years and see no reason to change. You can also install it with vim-plug by adding the following line to your plugin list: Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch':'release'} Run :PlugInstall again to install it. You’ll need to indicate the Godot language server address and port using the command :CocConfig. It should open Coc’s configuration file, which is a JSON file normally located at ~/.config/nvim/coc-settings.json. In this file enter the following data, and make sure the port number matches the one located in your editor: { "languageserver": { "godot": { "host": "127.0.0.1", "filetypes": ["gdscript"], "port": 6005 } } } I recommend adding Coc’s example configuration to your init.vim file. You can find it on GitHub. It will provide you with a lot of useful shortcuts, such as using gd to go to a function definition and gr to list its references. Debugging using nvim-dap If you want to use the debugger from inside Neovim, you’ll need to install another plugin called nvim-dap. Add the following to your plugins list: Plug 'mfussenegger/nvim-dap' The plugin authors suggest configuring it using Lua, so let’s do that by adding the following in your init.vim: lua <<EOF local dap = require("dap") dap.adapters.godot = { type = "server", host = "127.0.0.1", port = 6006, } dap.configurations.gdscript = { { type = "godot", request = "launch", name = "Launch scene", project = "${workspaceFolder}", launch_scene = true, }, } vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("Breakpoint", "lua require'dap'.toggle_breakpoint()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("Continue", "lua require'dap'.continue()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("StepOver", "lua require'dap'.step_over()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("StepInto", "lua require'dap'.step_into()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("REPL", "lua require'dap'.repl.open()", {}) EOF This will connect to the language server (here on port 6005), and allow you to pilot the debugger using the following commands: :Breakpoint to create (or remove) a breakpoint :Continue to launch the game or run until the next breakpoint :StepOver to step over a line :StepInto to step inside a function definition :REPL to launch a REPL (useful if you want to examine values) Conclusion I hope you’ll have a great time developing Godot games with Neovim. If it helps you, you can check out my entire init.vim file on GitHub gist.

It’s been around 2 years that I’ve had to stop with my long-term addiction to stable jobs. Quite a few people who read this blog are wondering what the hell exactly I’ve been doing since then so I’m going to update all of you on the various projects I’ve been working on. Meme credit: Fabian Stadler Mikochi Last year, I created Mikochi, a minimalist remote file browser written in Go and Preact. It has slowly been getting more and more users, and it’s now sitting at more than 200 GitHub stars and more than 6000 Docker pulls. I personally use it almost every day and it fits my use case perfectly. It is basically feature-complete so I don’t do too much development on it. I’ve actually been hoping users help me solve the few remaining GitHub issues. So far it happened twice, a good start I guess. Itako You may have seen a couple of posts on this blog regarding finance. It’s a subject I’ve been trying to learn more about for a while now. This led me to read some excellent books including Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance, and Robert Carver’s Smart Portfolios. Those books have pushed me toward a more systematic approach to investing, and I’ve built Itako to help me with that. I’ve not talked about it on this blog so far, but it’s a SaaS software that gives clear data visualizations of a stock portfolio performance, volatility, and diversification. It’s currently in beta and usable for free. I’m quite happy that there are actually people using it and that it seems to work without any major issues. However, I think making it easier to use and adding a couple more features would be necessary to make it into a commercially viable product. I try to work on it when I find the time, but for the next couple of months, I have to prioritize the next project. Dice’n Goblins I play RPGs too much and now I’m even working on making them. This project was actually not started by me but by Daphnée Portheault. In the past, we worked on a couple of game jams and produced Cosmic Delusion and Duat. Now we’re trying to make a real commercial game called Dice’n Goblins. The game is about a Goblin who tries to escape from a dungeon that seems to grow endlessly. It’s inspired by classic dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey and Lands of Lore. The twist is that you have to use dice to fight monsters. Equipping items you find in the dungeon gives you new dice and using skills allows you to change the dice values during combat (and make combos). We managed to obtain a decent amount of traction on this project and now it’s being published by Rogue Duck Interactive. The full game should come out in Q1 2025, for PC, Mac, and Linux. You can already play the demo (and wishlist the game) on Steam. If you’re really enthusiastic about it, don’t hesitate to join the Discord community. Technically it’s quite a big change for me to work on game dev since I can’t use that many of the reflexes I’ve built while working on infra subjects. But I’m getting more and more comfortable with using Godot and figuring out all the new game development related lingo. It’s also been an occasion to do a bit of work with non-code topics, like press relations. Japanese Something totally not relevant to tech. Since I’ve managed to reach a ‘goed genoeg’ level of Dutch, I’ve also started to learn more Japanese. I’ve almost reached the N4 level. (By almost I mean I’ve failed but it was close.) A screenshot from the Kanji Study Android App I’ve managed to learn all the hiraganas, katakanas, basic vocabulary, and grammar. So now all I’ve left to do is a huge amount of immersion and grind more kanjis. This is tougher than I thought it would be but I guess it’s fun that I can pretend to be studying while playing Dragon Quest XI in Japanese.