Re: Anyone on this list?

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

AIM3 BRADLEY wrote:
> I must agree the community seems less than willing to help its' self grow
> past novelty. Loki was the last serious attempt at setting up following for
> Linux gaming and the community failed to answer the call.

The reasons for Loki's failure are well known - and have been discussed here
at length.

The upshot is that they only ported games from Windoze - and by the time they
hit the market, they are six months to a year behind the Windoze release.  They
were also expensive.  The Loki version of the game would be selling for $50
when the original game was down to $10 to $20 in the remainder bins.

Gamers are a fickle lot - and they want to play the game when it's hot - not
wait a year and start playing it long after everyone else has lost interest.

For this business model to work, you'd have to be co-developing the Linux
version as the Windoze developers were getting their version together with
the goal of releasing the Linux version on the same day and at the same
price point.

Either that - or you have to develop fully featured games *just* for Linux...
that's not going to happen - why would anyone throw away 95% of their market
share?

I make my games for the fun of it.  I don't care too much whether they
are widespread successes - and they certainly won't ever make money.

I've long realised that I'll never get co-developers, artists, musicians
or game-testers to help with the effort - so I plan around that.  I
design things that I know I can be confident will work.  Games like
Pingus need a TON of testing to make sure that the levels are playable,
that the difficulty curve is reasonable, that there are no unsuspected
easy ways to complete a level that's supposed to be hard.

OTOH, TuxKart is a race game - pure and simple - you go fast, you win.
If the game *works*...doesn't crash...runs fast enough...then I'm done.
No significant play testing is really needed.

Similarly, I'm increasingly designing games for which I can manage
the artwork myself.  I got very enthusiastic about writing a game
(called 'The Chronicals of the Evil Overlord') that would have been
great fun - quite unusual, etc, etc - but the amount of 3D artwork
needed would be **FAR** beyond what I can turn out without getting
bored with the entire process - and would need more quality than I
can personally manage - so that idea is on the cutting room floor.

My next game will rely on some nice physics code, 3D moving water
models, characters re-used from earlier games, automatically
generated animations, particle systems, etc.  This is mostly a
coding problem - and that's something I know I can manage without
any help.

You have to pick projects that you can complete without help.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>    WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net