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.

I’ve been writing some internal dashboards recently, and one hard part is displaying timestamps. Our server does everything in UTC, but the team is split across four different timezones, so the server timestamps aren’t always easy to read. For most people, it’s harder to understand a UTC timestamp than a timestamp in your local timezone. Did that event happen just now, an hour ago, or much further back? Was that at the beginning of your working day? Or at the end? Then I remembered that I tried to solve this five years ago at a previous job. I wrote a JavaScript snippet that converts UTC timestamps into human-friendly text. It displays times in your local time zone, and adds a short suffix if the time happened recently. For example: today @ 12:00 BST (1 hour ago) In my old project, I was using writing timestamps in a <div> and I had to opt into the human-readable text for every date on the page. It worked, but it was a bit fiddly. Doing it again, I thought of a more elegant solution. HTML has a <time> element for expressing datetimes, which is a more meaningful wrapper than a <div>. When I render the dashboard on the server, I don’t know the user’s timezone, so I include the UTC timestamp in the page like so: <time datetime="2025-04-15 19:45:00Z"> Tue, 15 Apr 2025 at 19:45 UTC </time> I put a machine-readable date and time string with a timezone offset string in the datetime attribute, and then a more human-readable string in the text of the element. Then I add this JavaScript snippet to the page: window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() { document.querySelectorAll("time").forEach(function(timeElem) { // Set the `title` attribute to the original text, so a user // can hover over a timestamp to see the UTC time. timeElem.setAttribute("title", timeElem.innerText); // Replace the display text with a human-friendly date string // which is localised to the user's timezone. timeElem.innerText = getHumanFriendlyDateString( timeElem.getAttribute("datetime") ); }) }); This updates any <time> element on the page to use a human friendly date string, which is localised to the user’s timezone. For example, I’m in the UK so that becomes: <time datetime="2025-04-15 19:45:00Z" title="Tue, 15 Apr 2025 at 19:45 UTC"> Tue, 15 Apr 2025 at 20:45 BST </time> In my experience, these timestamps are easier and more intuitive for people to read. I always include a timezone string (e.g. BST, EST, PDT) so it’s obvious that I’m showing a localised timestamp. If you really need the UTC timestamp, it’s in the title attribute, so you can see it by hovering over it. (Sorry, mouseless users, but I don’t think any of my team are browsing our dashboards from their phone or tablet.) If the JavaScript doesn’t load, you see the plain old UTC timestamp. It’s not ideal, but the page still loads and you can see all the information – this behaviour is an enhancement, not an essential. To me, this is the unfulfilled promise of the <time> element. In my fantasy world, web page authors would write the time in a machine-readable format, and browsers would show it in a way that makes sense for the reader. They’d take into account their language, locale, and time zone. I understand why that hasn’t happened – it’s much easier said than done. You need so much context to know what’s the “right” thing to do when dealing with datetimes, and guessing without that context is at the heart of many datetime bugs. These sort of human-friendly, localised timestamps are very handy sometimes, and a complete mess at other times. In my staff-only dashboards, I have that context. I know what these timestamps mean, who’s going to be reading them, and I think they’re a helpful addition that makes the data easier to read. [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]

Nearly a quarter of seventeen-year-old boys in America have an ADHD diagnosis. That's crazy. But worse than the diagnosis is that the majority of them end up on amphetamines, like Adderall or Ritalin. These drugs allow especially teenage boys (diagnosed at 2-3x the rate of girls) to do what their mind would otherwise resist: Study subjects they find boring for long stretches of time. Hurray? Except, it doesn't even work. Because taking Adderall or Ritalin doesn't actually help you learn more, it merely makes trying tolerable. The kids might feel like the drugs are helping, but the test scores say they're not. It's Dunning-Kruger — the phenomenon where low-competence individuals overestimate their abilities — in a pill. Furthermore, even this perceived improvement is short-term. The sudden "miraculous" ability to sit still and focus on boring school work wanes in less than a year on the drugs. In three years, pill poppers are doing no better than those who didn't take amphetamines at all. These are all facts presented in a blockbuster story in New York Time Magazine entitled Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?, which unpacks all the latest research on ADHD. It's depressing reading. Not least because the definition of ADHD is so subjective and  situational. The NYTM piece is full of anecdotes from kids with an ADHD diagnosis whose symptoms disappeared when they stopped pursuing a school path out of step with their temperament. And just look at these ADHD markers from the DSM-5: Inattention Difficulty staying focused on tasks or play. Frequently losing things needed for tasks (e.g., toys, school supplies). Easily distracted by unrelated stimuli. Forgetting daily activities or instructions. Trouble organizing tasks or completing schoolwork. Avoiding or disliking tasks requiring sustained mental effort. Hyperactivity Fidgeting, squirming, or inability to stay seated. Running or climbing in inappropriate situations. Excessive talking or inability to play quietly. Acting as if “driven by a motor,” always on the go. Impulsivity Blurting out answers before questions are completed. Trouble waiting for their turn. Interrupting others’ conversations or games. The majority of these so-called symptoms are what I'd classify as "normal boyhood". I certainly could have checked off a bunch of them, and you only need six over six months for an official ADHD diagnosis. No wonder a quarter of those seventeen year-old boys in America qualify! Borrowing from Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society, I think we're looking at a pathology of normalcy, where healthy boys are defined as those who can sit still, focus on studies, and suppress kinetic energy. Boys with low intensity and low energy. What a screwy ideal to chase for all. This is all downstream from an obsession with getting as many kids through as much safety-obsessed schooling as possible. While the world still needs electricians, carpenters, welders, soldiers, and a million other occupations that exist outside the narrow educational ideal of today. Now I'm sure there is a small number of really difficult cases where even the short-term break from severe symptoms that amphetamines can provide is welcome. The NYTM piece quotes the doctor that did one of the most consequential studies on ADHD as thinking that's around 3% — a world apart from the quarter of seventeen-year-olds discussed above. But as ever, there is no free lunch in medicine. Long-term use of amphetamines acts as a growth inhibitor, resulting in kids up to an inch shorter than they otherwise would have been. On top of the awful downs that often follow amphetamine highs. And the loss of interest, humor, and spirit that frequently comes with the treatment too. This is all eerily similar to what happened in America when a bad study from the 1990s convinced a generation of doctors that opioids actually weren't addictive. By the time they realized the damage, they'd set in motion an overdose and addiction cascade that's presently killing over a 100,000 Americans a year. The book Empire of Pain chronicles that tragedy well.  Or how about the surge in puberty-blocker prescriptions, which has now been arrested in the UK, following the Cass Review, as well as Finland, Norway, Sweden, France, and elsewhere. Doctors are supposed to first do no harm, but they're as liable to be swept up in bad paradigms, social contagions, and ideological echo chambers as the rest of us. And this insane over-diagnosis of ADHD fits that liability to a T.