Works fine for me? I even gave a link in my first post to a Kbin link working on Mastodon.
Federation is a little delayed at the moment because of how many new users both Mastodon and Kbin are getting. But if you give it a few hours (usually 4-6) it'll sort itself out.
I think Pixelfed already works, or is on the roadmap. Ernest has mentioned it before: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/p/568136/I-m-curious-about-Pixelfed-Do-I-need-a-new-account
Century Club had good vibes. It was generally like the same 5 users posting, though. I'd comment occasionally but I didn't follow it closely.
I was surprised when I got one; it just appeared in my inbox one day. When my account turned 11 I decided to see if /r/11yearclub existed and it did, but I had to message the mods and join manually.
I had to request to join Century Club manually too; I didn't even notice I could do it until I had 200k karma...
Yeah - if you go to your profile and click on "following" you can see it. I believe you can also see other's lists who they follow - here's mine: https://kbin.social/u/EnglishMobster/following
Part of who I follow are people I'd normally follow on Mastodon; another part are people who frequently use hashtags that I'm interested in (like #ModelTrains) and I want to see their stuff in magazines like @modeltrains.
Note that if you follow a Kbin user, I believe you'll see posts they make across the fediverse in your "subscriptions" feed, even if you aren't subscribed to that magazine. I'm not sure if I'm a fan of that, but I suppose it makes sense. (People you follow who use Mastodon only seem to pop up in the "microblog" section.)
Come to ~~the Dark Side~~ Kbin... we have karma...
There are issues on both the Kbin and Lemmy sides at the moment.
Lemmy released a new update with a bunch of fixes, but it seems to have caused other bugs. Lemmy servers with this update are becoming accidentally disconnected from everywhere else. They're working on a fix.
Kbin is a brand-new site (Kbin.social didn't exist in April of this year!). Ernest (our admin and the guy who made Kbin) has only been working on it "seriously" since January. When I joined Kbin in early June, there were just a couple dozen accounts here.
Poor Ernest has had a very rough month getting his fun little side project he put on the internet after a couple months' of work and scaling it to 100k+ users (and growing...). He's done an amazing job but the servers are maxing out. There's a big Kbin update coming soon, and the site will be on better servers.
The main issue is that there are 2 things happening at once on any fediverse site: it has to handle your local stuff (comments, posts, etc. made to Kbin.social) and it has to periodically sync (push/pull) the remote stuff from everywhere else and merge it into the local stuff. Right now, Kbin is focused on making it super-smooth locally at the expense of making syncs happen less often remotely.
This means it takes longer to send and receive posts from other fediverse services, but anything you do here will (usually) work first try without giving you an error. Once the big update happens in the coming days, sync times will go down and you'll get much fresher posts - assuming Lemmy fixes the issues on their end that have popped up.
There's also Century Club (more than 100k karma) and the 10 Year Club (account older than 10 years).
tl;dr: It's Mastodon. You can use Mastodon from Kbin.
The Microblog tab shows posts from Kbin + Mastodon, just like how the Threads tab shows posts from Kbin + Lemmy. So if you have people you like on Mastodon, search for them using the little magnifying glass and then follow them from Kbin. Their posts will appear in the Microblog tab.
Additionally, if people on Mastodon use a #hashtag for something, it'll automatically be sorted in magazines that care about that hashtag. This means if you follow someone and that person uses a hashtag, their post will be placed in the "Microblog" tab of whatever magazine relates to that hashtag. This allows other people to discover the person you're following through shared interests.
For example, the Internet Archive has a Mastodon account - @internetarchive. The Internet Archive used their Mastodon account to make a toot on Mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/110611348840969515
Because people are following the @internetarchive account from Kbin (which you can do by going here or by searching Kbin for their username, @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org), that post was federated here to Kbin. Once it showed up, it appeared in the "Microblog" tab and got automatically organized into Kbin's @Futurology magazine because it used the hashtag #research: https://kbin.social/m/Futurology/p/565801/Exciting-news-Introducing-ARCH-Archives-Research-Compute-Hub-a
Magazine moderators determine what hashtags they want included in their magazine - so @Futurology has said "We would like all posts with #research to show up in our microblog section". (You can go to @Futurology directly to see what hashtags the mod team thinks are relevant.)
If no hashtags are used on a post (or none of them match any magazines), then it goes to the magazine @random.
Wanna write a tweet/toot from right here on Kbin? Put it in a microblog. Use #hashtags to organize it into a magazine, or use the dropdown on Kbin to pick a magazine manually.
People can follow your Kbin profile from Mastodon. They'll see microblogs as a Mastodon toot, and "boosts" as basically Mastodon's version of retweets. People on Lemmy don't see boosts, but will see microblogs as a "normal" Lemmy post (since Lemmy doesn't have a "microblog" tab).
For example. I made this post to the Microblog here on Kbin: https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland/p/510705
I made it from the main "microblogs" tab, but it used the hashtag #Disneyland. @Disneyland listens to that hashtag, so Kbin automatically put it there: https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland/p/510705/Went-to-Disneyland-over-the-weekend-and-went-on-RunawayRailway
If you go to Mastodon, you'll see it as a normal toot: https://sunny.garden/@EnglishMobster@kbin.social/110587107756032019
If you go to Lemmy, you'll see that microblog as a Reddit-like post: https://lemmy.world/post/418494?scrollToComments=true
(Note that it seems things which come from Mastodon don't get automatically sent to Lemmy - just microblogs from Kbin itself. That Internet Archive post I mentioned above doesn't seem to exist on Lemmy.world.)
This behavior is one of the main reasons why I chose Kbin over Lemmy; I love that I can post once and have my stuff federated everywhere else super cleanly and easily. Lemmy is a bit more messy when it comes to Lemmy -> Mastodon and the devs aren't interested in changing how it works (I asked before I came over here).
Ernest seems really invested in playing to the strengths of the fediverse, and the Kbin roadmap has him planning to integrate more fediverse services in the future. For example, Mobilizon support is planned, which is like a group calendar on the fediverse.
If @Starwars wanted to have a watch party for a new episode of The Mandalorian, they could (theoretically) schedule an event on Mobilizon and have it federate to their magazine as a normal thread. Then they could (theoretically) pin the Mobilizon thread and use the comment section of the event as a Kbin megathread when the episode airs. See https://demo.mobilizon.org/ and imagine it being part of Kbin, just as Lemmy and Mastodon are "part of Kbin."
Yes, they are still in restricted (read-only) mode and redirecting here.
(Psst... a lot of people broke the rule.)
It was also supposed to only apply if you explicitly went to the subreddit. If you just saw a post in your feed you didn't have to make a post yourself.
But the rule makes the community very very active in a place where there's otherwise not much activity.
So! If you don't have much experience in programming, you DO NOT want to write your own engine. Period.
"I wrote my own game engine" is the kind of thing you'll see masters/doctorate computer science students (or crazy industry veterans) do. While it may be possible to write a simple text-based game that only uses the command line, it gets complicated fast.
There are some libraries out there like PyGame which let you set up "toy" games quickly (in Python), but no shipping game is going to be built entirely in PyGame.
When you're out applying for jobs in the industry, having a studio you're applying for say "We built our own engine" in 2023 is a red flag. There are multiple battle-ready game engines that have made thousands of games. Most places want to build games in either the Unreal Engine (C++) or the Unity Engine (C#). There is a third one I should mention - Godot - which is a flexible FOSS game engine. But most places use Unity or Unreal.
There is so much that goes into making a game engine. Not only are you making a game, you're making a tool that lets you make a game. You're making stuff that can read model and animation data. You're making something that can handle a bunch of different input methods. You're making something which needs to calculate lighting and collision, parse images, run scripts, save and load data, multiplayer games need a full networking model with local prediction, correction, and latency mitigation, etc.
By definition, making your own engine is untested. You are going to run into issues, whether you have 1 person or 1000. What starts off simple quickly balloons as you want to do more than just show white text on a black screen. Something like Unity has had a bunch of production games (like Hearthstone) use it and find all the issues already so you don't have to. There is literally zero reason to make your own engine today.
I myself work at a AAA game studio, as a programmer. I've worked on the Battlefield series in the past, although it's not what I work on now.
Let me give you the advice I wish I had 15 years ago, when I was starting out: think small. It is far better to have made 10 projects in 1 year than 1 project in 10 years. The only way to "make it" as an indie dev is to be incredibly talented, incredibly lucky, and have an incredible amount of funding. Even supposed "one-man teams" like Toby Fox had help making their games; it is very difficult to make a game with 100 people working on it, let alone 1.
Make small toy projects that you can do in a weekend. Drop it if you spend more than 2 weeks on it. Don't be like me where I spent years working on a dream project that I never got in a good spot to show to anyone. When I talk to people now, when I talk to interviewers or coworkers, I don't really mention my white whale of a dream project I never finished. I mention the little games I made for gamejams, the ideas I had and how I played around with them.
It is so much more impressive to show an interviewer an active GitHub and a bunch of free games you've put on itch.io. I've literally gotten jobs because of it, but it took me years to realize I was doing the wrong thing and needed to pivot.
With that rant out of the way. C++ is industry standard. Any programmer will need to know C++ inside and out. Even if you don't work in it directly, you're almost guaranteed to be working with something that works in C++. But C++ is a hard language to learn.
If you have taken a programming class already, I'd recommend Unity. Unity isn't as common as Unreal, but C# is easy to learn and somewhat similar to C++ (not that similar, but a lot can carry over). It is code, though, so you need to know syntax.
If you've never taken a programming class before and you're self-taught, then I'd actually recommend Unreal. Unreal has "blueprints", which is a visual scripting language. This means you don't need to know the syntax of what you want to do; you just grab nodes and connect them together. It's very easy to understand and intuitive, and it helps you build the foundation you'd use if you ever delve into the code side. You can make a whole game in blueprint, without touching code - the game won't be huge and mega-performant, but it'll be relatively easy to make and doable by a single person working on a very small project.
Bear in mind that there are other disciplines in game development other than programming as well. That's sort of the best part about making your own stuff - you have to learn to do everything, from art to design to programming. Designers typically aren't expected to know much about code, but they are expected to be creative, collaborative, and intuitively know what makes something a fun game to play. If you find out that programming isn't for you but you still really want to get into game development, making all these tiny projects is a great way to exercise your design muscles as well.