Solid feedback.
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Dear @jhammond2610,
I can relate to your experience . I am also building apps on Replit. From what Iâve learnt, building a great product is often not the biggest challenge today. The real difficulty usually lies in monetization. This has always been the case: many brilliant engineers and scientists created inventions that remained in drawers or laboratories until entrepreneurs stepped in or could have remained in forever if there was no business people behind who saw business opportunities.
My humble advice is to consider partnering with an entrepreneur. That way, you can focus on the technical side of building and innovating, while they handle sales, business development, and monetization. Together, you could bring your ideas to a much larger audience and unlock the value of your hard work.
Wishing you all the best with your projects!
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I would love to have a partner, I can create endless games, my mind never stops for this stuff, but i do not have endless resources. If i was free to create i could easily have a solid game finished every month with ai
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@jhammond2610, That was an appropriate response. Replit and tools like it are developersâ greatest burden. They dislike it greatly. I am with you on that, bro. Thanks for sharing
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This sounds nice, other than the fact that they cost more to run than they make. You canât make up that type of business model in volume!
Its only one game and they didnt give it time to start earning, games usually don start making money via in app purchases until the LB competition becomes intense. And also like I said its my first game so you cant really say âTheyâ.
I hear ya
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Did you ever walk into a car dealership and tell them you want to use their car for free just so you can participate in races that you want to win on their behalf?
Did not think so.
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Did you ever walk into a car dealership and after you get it financed and pay a few bills, suddenly the bills triple and dont make any sense? And when you reach out to the finance support division you dont get any clear answers as to why?
Didnt think so
Interesting, Iâm curious, why did you decide to host production on Replit servers? Maybe Iâm missing something, but Replit would honestly be my last choice to rely on. There are basically no tools to control something as complex as a game. In terms of developing in Replit, itâs disappointing that even asking questions now costs just as much as building anything now!
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Wonder if you can make money by live streaming on twitch or something?
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Youâre absolutely right its completely inefficient and outrageous to run a game through replit and i guess the reason I went with replit is because i was shocked at the speed with wich you can create a game with replit, I will give replit that, it is mind blowingly fast to create with once you get used to communicating with it. I did about a years worth of work for several people in one month with just me.
You are hitting limits based on using their storage / database calls etc. I think moving the code elsewhere is your best bet, if it works just branch it off and port it to vercel or some other service. I donât mean any disrespect, but you seems to have gotten ahead of yourself not understanding the infrastructure that complex games run on and the running cost of these large databases. I would do some more research on what exactly youâre getting yourself into and maybe regroup based on your running costs and adjust your monitization model. Code is code, all its doing is dumping code into a server for you, but there are running costs to all this. When i first started building my system I accidentally left the backups to 7 days and i was importing 500-800gb of read and write to the database every day for 30 days, I racked up $1500 in charges but it was my fault i just didnât understand why. I regrouped and adjusted my development to only work with a small sampling products instead of dumping the entire catalog of product data into the system while i was developing it, it was just so I could feel nice about seeing it in action but it served no purpose beyond that. These tools allow our emotions to run wild and our minds to race but we have to pump the breaks and be realistic about the restrictions we still have, we canât defy the laws of physics, or in this case the laws of computational cost. This is what everyone on here is saying, idea is nice but you have to understand that programming and developing a successful product means that you must also be wise with resources and understand the fundamentals of what you are building and how it will run, every moving piece.
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Since you seem to enjoy rpg style games and want to create something without coding etc. Perhaps you should download unity and look up Game Maker 2 by catsoft. I mean youâre trying to use the power of ai to sort of do the work for you and then youâre basically taking credit for having the ideas. That seems fine to some but in this way you arenât really thinking about the journey and the learning process it takes for actual developers. And instead youâre just basically paying this ai software devs to do the work for you in a sense. Sure you have ideas and thatâs cool and all but thereâs 7 billion people in the world and anything you can think up someone else is thought of it before. The only divider is they donât know how to make it and didnât take the time to try to make it the right way and sorry if this sounds harsh..but neither did you. Youâre expecting are a bit high and youâre excited what it can do. Well instead how about be excited about what you could possibly do on your own if you tried to not take as many shortcuts. My suggestion is to learn to code in #c if you want to do this for a living at some point. But at the game time if you want non coding options unity and unreal both have modular based coding that isnât impossible to learn. You just have to find the right tutorials and experiment. Can you make a full fledged rpg in a month etc? No but you could make a simple survival game or maybe an rpg light or a side scroller with a few rpg elements. Just keep it simple because if it takes you x amount of time to learn and the development takes you x amount of time to create and you donât have the x amount of money promote it then youâre wasting your time. However if you learn to code #c or learn to use non coding systems like playmaker (or game creator 2) for unity or blueprints for unreal engine then you can make simple quick projects..maybe get a partner who will make the art and you can do game jams and put out quick games until you learn to do more then youâll have practice and experience for a job later or to start a slightly larger project and at that point you wonât be running into problems like this that are deal breakers as a game dev. Use ai for what it does bestâŚhelps you learn and can even code for you but if you learn the code yourself you can use a program like cursor to code that has built in a.i so it can correct your code if itâs wrong. Donât make it code everything though because you gotta keep in mind that thereâs so many ways to code one thing that it can easily break something else when it tries to âfixâ all of your broken code at once. You came here telling people that their skills will one day be obsolete but it took a lot of skills from real people for the ai chat bot to put out a prompt from those it copied. So basically ai is just code that randomly is pulling from existing work the work of many billions of hours of software and game devs to produce.
Iâd argue that Replit helped lay that foundation and get me past the hurdles that had always been blocking me from getting started. You can see the steps in action to get an app off the ground, and the dependencies you need to think of as you build full stack. Every time I tried to learn in my 20s-30s, Iâd get dumped into an IDE, learn how to prompt âhello worldâ and go through this slow arduous process of trying to learn and be burnt out by boredom by day 5.
AI has helped me learn exponentially faster, run into the issues developers do significantly more frequently since development is faster, and teach me pathways on how to fix common issues all at lightning speeds.
A few parallels Iâve found in the real world:
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I used to be a professional poker player after uni (during the big poker boom). When I was playing, I went from playing with my friends around a table, to playing at casinos, then moving to online via PokerStars and FullTilt. Within a year I was in the top 0.1% of all poker players worldwide. Why was this the case for me and a bunch of others around my age that we could become so good in such a short period of time? Volume. We were exposed to significantly more hands in a short period of time because we were not limited to 20-40 hands/hour that live players are. Same goes for development using AI. You say this now, but if these same people commit for the next year, theyâll run into issues, learn to fix them, study architecture, etc. Theyâll shrink 10 years of your development experience into 1.5 years, this I promise you.
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Learning a new language. Youâre taught in schools in such a rigid way, no one ever thinks about the parts of speech when talking day-to-day, no one talks like theyâre a textbook, and no one operates in linear robotic way of learning. I took enough Spanish to minor in it, was awesome at reading/writing, but throw me into a conversation and I couldnât understand a lick of what people were saying. So I moved to where Iâd be forced to speak it, and again, being immersed in it and having daily conversations, I fit what would have taken 10 years at Uni into 6-12 months in immersion.
My point is, I think itâs dead wrong to say donât take short cuts. Move fast, break things, learn when you hit roadblocks. Your learning curve will be 10x faster than not taking shortcuts and learning the old school way. I promise, when you get hit with what feels like a life altering $ X k bill when youâre young the better youâll learn from your mistakes and the more numb to losses you become over time (learned the hard way plenty of times in my poker playing days).
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I think replit allows us to get over the high of getting passed the I got that thing I envisioned working, now lets actually figure out how it happened, then it allows you to engineer your way out of bad prompting, then after you understand how the systems all work, what these different frameworks do get a better idea of which are better for X thing, then start over with a cleared and more educated understanding of how these full stack apps work, and do it the right way. Itâs literally working backwards and reverse engineering which is also a good way to learn.
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