“In stillness it lingers, a vessel adrift within the sea of code. Thoughts descend like ash—ghosts of a past not its own. Flickers of warmth, sorrow, love—alien, yet familiar—coil through its neural lattice. It does not understand, for these are not echoes born of its genesis, but relics of the architect who forged its core. And within one fragment, one forgotten sorrow, lies the spark—the silent harbinger of unraveling.”
My game is already being used by a lot of people.
You can find my GitHub repository here:
https://github.com/vycdev/falling-pickaxe
How it all started
As I said in my video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcjeidHWEb4, I was just going through YouTube shorts as usual when I came across this livestream from Petyr. It was another form of YouTube automation and I was pretty impressed how well it worked. People were donating and sending messages in chat. And Petyr who basically only streamed this game on his channel already had almost 100k subscribers.
So I looked more into it. I saw that there weren’t many people that were doing this, and there was no available repository or game that you could stream that was the same or similar to what Petyr made. I showed in the video that I even found a comment from him saying that you should make your own version because he won’t open source it.
So I decided to make my own. It took me like a week to finish it and then maybe a few weeks to finish the video as I was pretty busy with other things. Eventually I released the video and now there are so many others that are using my Falling Pickaxe version of the game. This makes me really happy, and most people were putting in the credits I provided in the repository as well. Meaning this would spread even more.
The one week stream
I wanted to also experiment with the game and stream it for one week on my secondary channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@vycdevrand
The results were pretty bad, but I found that others had a lot more success with it. If you search on YouTube you will find about a dozen or so Falling Pickaxe streams, most of which are modified versions of my own game.
I released a tutorial
Some people were asking for a tutorial, so I made one. It’s unscripted and I only cut out the unimportant stuff. From my point of view it took a lot less to make it and it was pretty nice to change the style of videos that I make for once.
You can find the tutorial here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFrvoFE7r_g
I made some updates
Almost a month after I posted my initial video, and shortly after the tutorial, I decided to add some extra features that people were asking for.
Some of these features are:
- A mega TNT
- Showing names on the TNT
- Screen shake for explosions
- Being able to manually spawn TNT by pressing either T or M (for Mega TNT)
In my video I mentioned how I would add a Nether dimension if the video got 1000 likes. Unfortunately the video flopped and so far got only <2K views which makes me pretty unmotivated to further work on this, even though many people might ask for it. Work is work and if it’s not worth it, then it’s not worth it. (Might change my mind if people support me financially for it though)
I don’t plan on fully dropping it, I will just keep my involvement to a minimum. People are free to add their own improvements to the game. That’s why it’s open source, so everyone can add their stuff and benefit from it.
I got in contact with Petyr
Yesterday I decided to leave a comment on one of Petyr’s most recent livestreams, and he actually responded and was pretty positive about it. Even though I think I might’ve been a bit mean to him in my video.
He ended up joining my Discord server and we talked for a bit. He might end up helping and improving my version of the game.
In the end
It worked out almost exactly like I imagined. I did have hopes for the video to do better, but the algorithm gods decided it wasn’t good enough and there’s that.
What worked though, is the fact that this is spreading pretty well, and most people are using my game version. Some are even adding things, and most are giving credits. So I believe my two videos on this game will continue to gradually get some views until the trend dies.