Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@zkat As a more personal sidenote, I've personally found a lot of enjoyment in games that are high in total complexity, but where the start is simple, and there's no separate 'learning' phase - you're essentially learning new mechanics throughout the entire game, right up until the ending and sometimes even across multiple games.

Some examples that come to mind would be Dave the Diver and RimWorld, though examples are tricky to come up with, because when it's done well, you don't notice that a game is doing it :)

@zkat You probably already know about this, but just in case: have you looked at the Game Maker's Toolkit videos? If I recall correctly, there are a few videos that talk specifically about different ways of teaching mechanics to the player (although it's been a while).

My personal interpretation, though this is so far only based in theoretical understanding and adjacent practical experience (UX) rather than practical gamedev experience, is that the mechanics don't have to be simple - they just need to be possible to learn gradually.

So the total complexity of a mechanic may be really high, and it may take a lot of practice and experimentation to figure out how it works, and that's all fine, as long as you don't expect the player to frontload all of it.

Which can be achieved by eg. cutting the mechanic into smaller submechanics and gradually 'tempting' the player into experimenting with permutations of those submechanics through environmental cues and well-placed restrictions and rewards.

(When talking about mechanics that are not strictly required to play the game but that enrich the experience, the "rewards" side of that is probably more relevant than the "restrictions" side)

@clarfonthey (To make this explicit: this means that employers often paid several times what eg. students would pay, and everybody was aware of this, and nobody had an issue with it at all)

@clarfonthey I ended up in a very similar situation years ago; providing free help (often practically tutoring) on IRC for Node.js, until someone asked whether they could pay me for this.

After contemplating, I did end up accepting, and started offering this as a regular thing; but I've always only charged what someone could afford, and continued offering free help in the channel as I did before.

People ended up not paying for my knowledge or work, but for my guaranteed availability. And in practice, for me, most of it was paid for by the employer of people who convinced said employer to pay for it.

@rallias (I ended up researching this for a while and the conclusion seemed to be "you need some amount of salt for dough integrity, but nowhere near as much as people typically use")

@rallias This is a very typical thing to do, at least for yeast-based bread; it serves a function for the flavor, but also makes the dough less likely to break down during kneading and baking, AIUI.

@jasmin A lot of people seem to be happy with masklab, though I haven't tried them.