Well... My first post might have been my last...

I've done some more serious thinking about this SideRiceStudios concept (if you don't know the concept, look at the "Hello, World!" post - it's all there - you gotta scroll past me being a goof at the beginning), and my conclusion is that I don't know if this concept makes sense...

Here are some realizations,

• Perhaps game dev simply is an "alone thing" and that's that. Why? Well... Because it's a lot of work! Video games have so many verticals - mechanics, programming, level design, art/modeling, music, sound effects, visual effects, narrative, etc. And, because it's just SO MUCH, perhaps it's so much work that no one has time to "share the little things/learnings/etc" - ie, there's always 20 other things that need to get done. 🤔
• The internet has so much random stuff already... Why post my little "things/quests"? There is an endless sea of "little things" out there these days. So much, in fact, that it almost seems as though no one really cares about anything other than the "very stimulating things" - today we consume and zoom through tons and tons and tons of content all of the time waiting for something good... I mean, I do 😆... And, I don't know if SideRiceStudios is particularly stimulating haha. Plus, it takes a lot of my time to do this. So, why bother if it would slow down my own progress on my own game dev? Just being real haha.
• Communities perhaps simply always form around a "thing". Perhaps they always have. So, making a community that just "is" perhaps doesn't really make sense 🤔. Perhaps a "shared interest" simply isn't enough.
• As far as having a community that "feels like friends not followers", perhaps friends are just something that happen organically and an organized group might just add more friction to that process haha. To be honest, I had never even thought about "how I made the friends that I have" and starting this SideRiceStudios concept made me ask myself that question for the first time in my life. So, I guess that was quite cool and introspective.... If that's the right word...
• As far as FireSide goes, like I said, I think game developers all have similar stories. If that's the case. Do we REALLY need to talk about it at all? If it's the same story for all of us, then we kinda already know, right?
• As for posting music - I think this falls into "little things". There's so much music out there. Perhaps the music YOU like will just find you eventually somehow. I suppose I wouldn't need to post "music" in a "game dev" community - it's simply not the place to look for that. 🤷‍♂️🤔

I've learned a lot from a good handful of people and came across resources I never would have come across just writing my one post and building "Ghosts" (my one "SideQuest" - a concept of a raw virtual space). So, I don't think this was a waste of time at all 🙂. I learned some things about socket programming. I learned what a "third space" is - which is something someone described SideRiceStudios as (it was the first time I had ever heard that word at all). I learned from a friend that this concept felt like I was "trying too hard" - which was excellent feedback and also quite interesting to me because the whole point of it was to be a relaxed space to "build and share random game dev stuff purely for fun in a totally informal/unstructured manner without bias/judgement/etc", yet, I suppose I am indeed "trying" or "actively intending" to create that space haha, so maybe I failed by trying... Yet, I mean, you don't get anywhere if you never try?? It just seems paradoxical to me. Perhaps it's just too complicated for my little brain 😆. So, I think I'll just "try" by myself and have fun building on my own like I always have 🙂. There is no real need to share at the end of the day. I just have always thought the best experiences are shared experiences. Well, I still do think that, but maybe some things just aren't shareable by nature. And, that's okay! This doesn't mean I don't intend to ever work with other people - I think it really just means that I don't intend on sharing the "joy of the process" because perhaps it's not necessary...

I still do like the name "SideRiceStudios" - I thought it was such a cozy and playful/goofy sounding name for a community, but hey! Maybe it can be a cozy/playful name for an actual game studio someday! 😆 (provided the opportunity, of course)

I also think there are/were a lot of reasonable ideas here, but I don't know how those ideas would fit together to make some "thing" nor do I know exactly what that "thing" is or if that "thing" should even be a thing haha 🤔. But, for now, I think this concept might be a no-go.

Perhaps I'll leave this blog up for a while just for kicks.

Well... I suppose that's it!

Special thanks to,

• PikaPods for providing great affordable hosting!
• GhostCMS so that I didn't have to suffer with WordPress
• The WWW (yeah, the "world wide web") - it's quite cool that computers from all around the world are connected. So, thanks to the people who work to keep that going! It's a great service to the world that is often invisible.
• My local Global Game Jam 2025 jam site for allowing me to jam out my "meta game" of SideRiceStudios and for all of the great feedback from jammers who came by the channel that was kindly created for SideRiceStudios by my local GGJ25 site organizers 🙂.

And, I think that's all I have to say! Thanks again for stopping by my "nothing blog/community" haha.

Until our game dev quests cross paths again,

SideRice