There are plenty of small indie studios that won't sell out, we just don't know who they are.

I think the dev pays for Imgur and other media hosting site APIs so that is also a factor. No other app displays media as integrated as Sync.

Are you mostly interested in the networking aspect? I'm not sure what Battle Bit does but many games employ a prioritization strategy when determining which characters should be updated per state snapshot for a client. Check out an old GDC talk about Halo networking, it's pretty interesting.

I think this is a written summary of the video: http://blog.wolfire.com/2011/03/GDC-Session-Summary-Halo-networking

This article is also informative: https://www.gafferongames.com/post/state_synchronization/

The physics in GMod isn't implemented in Lua though. It was already part of the Source engine.

Unless GMod isn't referring to Garry's Mod.

My biggest issues on wifi were random hitches and stuff. I'm on ethernet over coaxial now and it's basically flawless.

Know any good aquarium games in particular?

I probably didn't do a good job of explaining it, but this is exactly what I meant. Cheers.

Thanks, I've been looking for one because I don't have the means to actually jump into the hobby for real yet. So I'm trying to find a game that's close to the real thing, or at least help me plan my aquarium for the future.

Ah I'm talking about APIs to more conveniently view the media (i.e. it doesn't open up imgur.com in a browser). AFAIK it costs money to use that API now so I don't think any free app without ads can provide that unless I'm mistaken.

Palworld still ended up costing millions of dollars, although not tens of millions.

If you still haven't played it, check out Riven which was recently released. It's a complete modern remake (plus some changes) of the sequel to Myst.

Braid Anniversary

Unreal is trying to move animation off the main thread but it will take a while to become standard. You can do it today but it's not the default.

It's definitely a hard problem to solve as an "out of the box" solution.

Except you can actually release standalone Steam games with this, apparently.

This goes way back to when Google first introduced IAP. They were pushing to remove dupes from the store because it caused separate reviews and ratings. It could be that they just temporarily enforced it and now it's not a concern for them anymore.

I remember when this happened to Sync for Reddit. Unfortunately Google Play Store, like most of these app stores, can enforce almost anything they want even if it's outside of their policy because some stuff is so vague. And it's usually hard to get clear information from anyone when your app gets pulled or whatever.

That's the whole point though. Most companies keep hiring to make more money. Staying lean takes discipline.