And "How Many Dudes?" is now out! Exactly ONE YEAR TO THE DAY since we started working on it, and it's shaping up to be our biggest launch ever. Thanks so much to everyone who helped with this project. It was sooooo much fun to work on.

How Many Dudes? | Download and Play!

How many dudes does it take to beat up a gorilla? A thousand toddlers? A horse-sized duck? A GOD? Enter the Dude Ranch and find out in this roguelike dudebuilder where you recruit an army of dudes to ...

howmanydudes.com

Yep. You can still do alright (for now) IF you can get into the mobile subscription services. But directly selling a game on mobile is essentially impossible, unless you have enormous success elsewhere so that enough people search for your game directly AND expect to have to pay for it.

Richard Meredith@rtm223.me · 2mo ago

The only reasonably likley ways to have success on mobile are either - Huge user acquisition spend on f2p - Significant, pre-existing awareness for your game, probably via a PC release It's just not a viable lead platform for most games Plus it's the platform with the most maintainance overhead

A great way to make an LLM's answer for your search feel useful is to first spend 5 years making your search engine yield worse results so that, comparatively, it is.

Made a simple Google Form last week. It required 900MB RAM and made my CPU fan roar. Maybe there will be some new market opportunities while Big Tech lets all of their software crumble.

We've already seen the consequences of prioritizing quantity of code over quality of code. (See: every piece of Big-Tech software you use today.) The problem has never been not having enough code. The problem has always been code quality, and maintaining it.

Looks like someone is impersonating us to scam recent college grads and others looking for #gamedev work. In the Age of the Scammer you should assume everything you see is a scam until proven otherwise. Stay safe out there! ❤️

Butterscotch Shenanigans@bscotch.net · 3mo ago

If you got an email from bscotchworks@gmail.com, that is NOT US. It's a scammer trying to do something nefarious. We'll never ask you to talk to us via telegram and official emails from us only come from bscotch.net or butterscotch-shenanigans.com addresses!

"That's just semantics." Oh? Is it? Just WHAT STUFF MEANS? Only that?

This is excellent news. The less subsidized LLMs are the less quickly they'll pollute the commons and destroy creative fields. The next step after usage-based billing is for billing to reflect the actual costs, and that can't come soon enough.

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

Starting June 1, your Copilot usage will consume GitHub AI Credits.

github.blog

AI is transforming the practice of computer programming from a creative role into an administrative one, the same way that health insurance transformed medicine into billing. Those who love these disciplines the most will burn out and depart the quickest. And then what are we left with?

charli xkcd@ky.fyi · 4mo ago

I wrote about why I quit my job, and how weird and tiring tech feels these days.

So GitHub needs to 30x its resources to handle the influx of code and activity caused by LLMs. I suspect most of that activity is in the subsidized parts of GitHub (open source repos are largely free). So it will become unsustainable for them to subsidize open source. And all for what?

An update on GitHub availability

Here’s what we’ve done—and what we’re still doing—to improve our availability and reliability.

github.blog

This thing is really taking off, and it's such a relief to have these prelaunch numbers from a sub-year dev+marketing cycle.

Butterscotch Shenanigans@bscotch.net · 4mo ago

200,000 wishlists and 480k demo downloads later, How Many Dudes will be launching on July 30th! Our roguelike-strategy riff on the "how many men to defeat a gorilla?" meme surprised us, so here's a few surprises for you! 👇 store.steampowered.com/news/app/393... #indiegame #gamedev #steam

I'll be at PAX East this time around, maybe I'll see you there? First time I've gone to any convention or conference since 2019... We'll see if I remember how to talk to people IRL

Butterscotch Shenanigans@bscotch.net · 5mo ago

We'll be at #PAX East, so keep an eye out for our BUTTERSCOTCH SHENANIGANS shirts and say hello if you see us! We're just there to hang out and see people, so no booth or anything. But we'll have the latest How Many Dudes builds on our phones if you want a sneak peak 👀

Google Search delisted my site a few months ago. I thought it was because Google had started to require that a robots.txt file exist on a site to index it. Which seemed unreasonable. Turns out it was because of a 500 error. Which is STILL unreasonable.

robots.txt unreachable: Google search removed my site! - Adam Coster

I always thought that the absence of a robots.txt file implied a web crawler could do what it liked. Apparently not! Not with a 500 status code, anyway.

adamcoster.com

Discovered that Google de-indexed my site back in August due to an absent robots. txt But the site never did have a robots.txt... I assumed the absence of one was interpreted as allow-all and so never bothered. Was that a recent requirement change by Google? Or am I LOSING MY MIND?

We weren't sure it was a good idea to launch the "How Many Dudes?" demo right before the Steam sale, but we figured no one else would be launching anything... It went better than I'd even hoped!

These developers want to know how many dudes it would take to win in a fight with 100 toddlers https://kotaku.com/how-many-dudes-crashlands-butterscotch-shenanigans-interview-2000652567

So, How Many Dudes Would It Take To Fight 100 Toddlers?

With a demo out now, we've spoken to the team at Butterscotch Shenanigans about their new roguelite game

kotaku.com

The demo for our new game about the "100 men vs 1 gorilla" meme, How Many Dudes, is LIVE! Go play and wishlist on @steampowered.com 👇👇👇 store.steampowered.com/app/3934270 Or via @itch.io & @gx.games bscotch.itch.io/how-many-dudes gx.games/games/8racq4... #indiegame #gamedev #gaming

If you think LLMs are at least as capable of reasoning as you are, you're right.

Too Big to Fail slowly transforming into Too Big to Succeed

The most embarrassing class action settlement I've ever been sent: Park Mobile had a data breach and is giving me ONE DOLLAR. But only 25 cents at a time, for the next 4 times I use it. And only if I do so within the next year. I thought it was a joke, but the "discount" code did indeed work.

Until now, if you lost or broke your phone, your Signal message history was *gone,* a real challenge for everyone whose most important conversations happen in Signal. So, with careful design and development, we’re rolling out opt-in secure backups. signal.org/blog/introducing-secure-backups

Introducing Signal Secure Backups

In the past, if you broke or lost your phone, your Signal message history was gone. This has been a challenge for people whose most important conversations happen on Signal. Think family photos, sweet...

signal.org

Do you know what's scary? Going TOO LONG without a Game Jam! ⚡ (perfectly timed thunder!) MWAHAHAHAHAHA~(maniacal laughter!) stlgame.dev/news/spooky-... #STLGameDev #STLGameJam #STLSpookyJam25

🎃 Spooky Jam 2025

Announcing: The 2025 Spooky Game Jam STLGameDev is hosting another Game Jam! Participants may work independently or in teams. All projects must be created within the two-week jam window, following the...

stlgame.dev

"Context rot" isn't a surprise feature of LLMs. It's just a new term for the old fact that it's better to have smaller amounts of highly relevant data than to have large amounts of irrelevant data... Context isn't a VOLUME game, it's a RELEVANCY game.

Oh hey, Levelhead.io makes a cameo in another upcoming game 💖 Congrats to @orangepylongames.bsky.social on the successful Kickstarter campaign!

Abomi Nation (WISHLIST MONSTER RIFTS!)@orangepylongames.bsky.social · last yr.

🌀CROSSOVER #6/30: Levelhead by @bscotch.net The 2D platformer with a robust level editor lends some robotic enemies to join your party in Abomi Nation: Monster Rifts! More crossovers every day on Kickstarter! Full post: www.kickstarter.com/projects/470...

Our ridiculous "How Many Dudes" autobattler placed 27th in overall Enjoyment for the #gmtk jam, out of like 9500+ submissions! WILD! We got a new web build up if you wanna try defeating 1,000 toddlers -> bscotch.itch.io/how-many-dudes #gamedev #indiegames @itch.io

HOW MANY DUDES? by Butterscotch Shenanigans

How many Dudes does it take to defeat a Gorilla? Enter the Dude Ranch and find out!

bscotch.itch.io

My brothers made this silly thing for the latest #gmtk2025 game jam.

Sam Coster@yooello.bsky.social · last yr.

How many dudes does it take to defeat a gorilla? THIS is the question we sought to answer with our game for the #gmtk2025 #gamedev Play it and let me know how many toddlers your dudes can defeat bscotch.itch.io/how-many-dudes Vid walkthrough: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF-e...

100/10

Jen Coster@jcalyst.bsky.social · last yr.

this movie is so cuuuuute 😭

And when they're wrong, it's because wrong things are often written down, too.

Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · last yr.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

We've been COOKIN' on Crashlands 2 since the game's launch, and we're excited to announce the second major updateis coming out on June 24th! Update 1.2: The Hardcore Scramble adds new game modes, new pets, new base-building items, an expanded world map, QOL features, and a whole lot more!

Crashlands 2 Update 1.2: The Hardcore Scramble

YouTube video by Butterscotch Shenanigans

youtube.com

You really gotta keep your head on a swivel when evaluating contracts. Even well-meaning ones!