Re: Loki...

["J. Perkins" <jason@379.com>]

Steve Baker wrote:

> My efforts (Tux - A Quest for Herring, TuxKart and now "The Chronicles of
> the Evil Overlord") have tried to circumvent these problems.

An observation Steve, which I hope you will take in the
manner it's intended. TQFH and TuxKart are both really fun
games, and you did an excellent job on both, but perhaps
they aren't games that *Linux users* like to play?
Certainly there are successful game projects under Linux,
FreeCiv being a prime example, FlightGear comes to mind
(is that really a game though?). Your two are what I
would consider "console" style games, and the people who
like those kind of games, well they play them on consoles.


> 1) With most OpenSource packages, the developers write it because they
>      want to *use* it.  Nobody wants to play the game they just wrote
>      because they already know all it's little secrets and are heartily
>      sick of the sight of it by the time they are done.
> 

A simplistic solution would be to not write those kind of games.
Games that require a certain amount of skill (Tetris, racesims,
etc.), have plenty of random elements, or heavily involve
other people (MMRPG) remain playable even for the authors.
Your point remains valid for everything else though.

For the rest of your points, I think it's a matter of making a
game that people want to play, and perhaps more importantly,
play over an extended period of time. I can't help but wonder,
had TuxKart looked just as good as the console version, would
it have been much more successful? I'm not sure. I know my
kid stopped playing Crash a while ago, but he still comes
back to Spyro on a regular basis. The problem, of course,
is trying to figure out what people want to play. If I knew
*that* I'd be sunning myself on a beach somewhere instead of
sitting here. ;)


Jason