I have been working on tooling for my indie game studio in the last few weeks. It is a framework with pre-built systems, components, specific coding conventions, best practices, a well-defined project structure, and custom tools to aid development. It has helped me get started making games quickly and easily.

In my excitement, I shared it with the world on Reddit and LinkedIn. My LinkedIn network has only a handful of game developers, most of whom paid no attention to my posts. However, on Reddit, the attention was primarily negative.

It was the first Reddit post I ever made that had more downvotes than upvotes, resulting in a 0-upvote post as of 20 hours.

It’s discouraging to put so much effort into something you hope will be helpful for others and find that most of the 6k views downvoted the project.

Funny enough, there were only eight comments, and most discussed the best license. I ended up releasing it under MIT and fully open-source for anyone to do what they want.

On Itch.io, the analytics were different. Two hundred sixty people found it from the home page under ‘new tools,’ and nine downloaded it. I hope they see value in the project.

I did make it for myself and found that maybe others could find it helpful. If they didn’t, that’s fine.

I had three games in development: UAP, SnackSwap, and Arcana. I’ve since ported all of my games to use my new framework, and it has been a much nicer development experience.

This submission isn’t the end of my attempts to contribute something open-source. I’ll keep building tools and sharing them. I’m satisfied if it has helped at least one developer publish their game.

You can check it out on Itch.io or Github

— UhhHehHeh