I'm an indie game developer approaching 2 years into creating my city builder game. It's a lonely journey so I put together a small group of other indie game developers about 18 months ago (via Discord).
We meet up every week to share our progress, receive feedback, relate to the struggle, and help each other out. It's been a success and motivating for all involved. Most people in the group have participated for over a year at this point.
I'm looking to add a few people to the group who can commit to weekly meetups. We have a strong preference for other full time developers.
About the group:
We are late 20s - 40s. We are pretty open and honest with each other, and will question each other/provide feedback freely. Backgrounds range from software devs, tech startups, and other game dev. studios.
Some of the games we're working on (not everyone can publicly share):
Metropolis 1998 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
Drift - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2159650/Drift/
Basketball GM - https://basketball-gm.com
Please email me. Email is in profile!
I have a vulkan renderer and a path tracer, and also shared code samples of a 2d sdl game that I was working on, and got a cut and dry "We have enough people, sorry!"
At least make your "admission criteria" public for f**'s sake.
If I wanted more rejections, I'd rather get rejected from a AAA company than some rando on hacker news who has a habit of posting every 3 months recruiting for their exclusive asshat club.
I can't imagine a game being financially feasible. I doubt your community would be a good place for someone like me.
It sounds like you're mainly interested in people going all in and trying to "live the gamedev dream" which sounds nice, but it would be a hobby/creative art for me.
I did email them asking to join, and shared samples of my work to show that I was serious and still got turned down. All I had in my portfolio were 2d sdl games(I had written in the handmade style i.e minimal external libs, I even posted some of my projects on the handmade jam. In my portfolio were other handmade projects like a vulkan renderer, a gltf pbr loader with opengl, a UI system for a 2d game etc.).
At that time, I had quit my job and was working on my games pretty much full time, but had just gotten started and could've used some encouragement from fellow indie gamedevs, and as an hn regular, jumped on the opportunity. Heck the games shared look similar to the style I was going for.
There were other comments on your post last time indicating that people felt this person's attitude to community management was exclusive, and I would really hate for some bright eyed indie game dev out there who doesn't have a steam page yet or whatever random criterion they are using to "weed out" people and don't share up front to feel excluded like I did.
Other communities that are more inclusive than this person's gated community: 1. The handmade discord 2. The graphics programming discord, 3. The godot discord, 4. The unreal discord, 5. The r/mapmaking discord, 6. The tough sf discord, 7. worldbuilding discord and tons others. dm me if you need links to these, I'd be happy to invite you.