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.

<![CDATA[My journey to Lisp began in the early 1990s. Over three decades later, a few days ago I rediscovered the first Lisp environment I ever used back then which contributed to my love for the language. Here it is, PC Scheme running under DOSBox-X on my Linux PC: Screenshot of the PC Scheme Lisp development environment for MS-DOS by Texas Instruments running under DOSBox-X on Linux Mint Cinnamon. Using PC Scheme again brought back lots of great memories and made me reflect on what the environment taught me about Lisp and Lisp tooling. As a Computer Science student at the University of Milan, Italy, around 1990 I took an introductory computers and programming class taught by Prof. Stefano Cerri. The textbook was the first edition of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) and Texas Instruments PC Scheme for MS-DOS the recommended PC implementation. I installed PC Scheme under DR-DOS on a 20 MHz 386 Olidata laptop with 2 MB RAM and a 40 MB hard disk drive. Prior to the class I had read about Lisp here and there but never played with the language. SICP and its use of Scheme as an elegant executable formalism instantly fascinated me. It was Lisp love at first sight. The class covered the first three chapters of the book but I later read the rest on my own. I did lots of exercises using PC Scheme to write and run them. Soon I became one with PC Scheme. The environment enabled a tight development loop thanks to its Emacs-like EDWIN editor that was well integrated with the system. The Lisp awareness of EDWIN blew my mind as it was the first such tool I encountered. The editor auto-indented and reformatted code, matched parentheses, and supported evaluating expressions and code blocks. Typing a closing parenthesis made EDWIN blink the corresponding opening one and briefly show a snippet of the beginning of the matched expression. Paying attention to the matching and the snippets made me familiar with the shape and structure of Lisp code, giving a visual feel of whether code looks syntactically right or off. Within hours of starting to use EDWIN the parentheses ceased to be a concern and disappeared from my conscious attention. Handling parentheses came natural. I actually ended up loving parentheses and the aesthetics of classic Lisp. Parenthesis matching suggested me a technique for writing syntactically correct Lisp code with pen and paper. When writing a closing parenthesis with the right hand I rested the left hand on the paper with the index finger pointed at the corresponding opening parenthesis, moving the hands in sync to match the current code. This way it was fast and easy to write moderately complex code. PC Scheme spoiled me and set the baseline of what to expect in a Lisp environment. After the class I moved to PCS/Geneva, a more advanced PC Scheme fork developed at the University of Geneva. Over the following decades I encountered and learned Common Lisp, Emacs, Lisp, and Interlisp. These experiences cemented my passion for Lisp. In the mid-1990s Texas Instruments released the executable and sources of PC Scheme. I didn't know it at the time, or if I noticed I long forgot. Until a few days ago, when nostalgia came knocking and I rediscovered the PC Scheme release. I installed PC Scheme under the DOSBox-X MS-DOS emulator on my Linux Mint Cinnamon PC. It runs well and I enjoy going through the system to rediscover what it can do. Playing with PC Scheme after decades of Lisp experience and hindsight on computing evolution shines new light on the environment. I didn't fully realize at the time but the product packed an amazing value for the price. It cost $99 in the US and I paid it about 150,000 Lira in Italy. Costing as much as two or three texbooks, the software was affordable even to students and hobbyists. PC Scheme is a rich, fast, and surprisingly capable environment with features such as a Lisp-aware editor, a good compiler, a structure editor and other tools, many Scheme extensions such as engines and OOP, text windows, graphics, and a lot more. The product came with an extensive manual, a thick book in a massive 3-ring binder I read cover to cover more than once. A paper on the implementation of PC Scheme sheds light on how good the system is given the platform constraints. Using PC Scheme now lets me put into focus what it taught me about Lisp and Lisp systems: the convenience and productivity of Lisp-aware editors; interactive development and exploratory programming; and a rich Lisp environment with a vast toolbox of libraries and facilities — this is your grandfather's batteries included language. Three decades after PC Scheme a similar combination of features, facilities, and classic aesthetics drew me to Medley Interlisp, my current daily driver for Lisp development. #Lisp #MSDOS #retrocomputing a href="https://remark.as/p/journal.paoloamoroso.com/rediscovering-the-origins-of-my-lisp-journey"Discuss.../a Email | Reply @amoroso@fosstodon.org !--emailsub--]]>

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.

When OpenAI released GPT-4 back in March 2023, they kickstarted the AI revolution. The consensus online was that front-end development jobs would be totally eliminated within a year or two.Well, it’s been more than two years since then, and I thought it was worth revisiting some of those early predictions, and seeing if we can glean any insights about where things are headed.