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Did I just waste 3 years?

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#161

Post by seabrookmx »

meritt wrote: post #128
sweden wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that nowadays is not that difficult to have a game that works on both Windows and Linux. Also, it is a legit thing to point out when and developer complains about the lack of sales.

There's not a ton of information available on the breakdown of sales by platform, but the data that is out there shows Linux sales usually compromise ~2-4% for cross-platform games [1]. If you get linux support "for free" by utilizing an engine, then absolutely go for it, but even major companies with massively popular games are still skipping out on first-class Linux support [2], due to the low market share. [1] htt…

It's also exponentially harder to make a Linux port for a AAA game than for an Indie game, for many reasons. The most obvious ones being that most indie games are made with an off the shelf cross platform engine (Unity, unreal), and that AAA titles require a lot more hardware resources, and optimization of this usage is often platform specific (what helps OpenGL might not help DirectX, etc).

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#162

Post by FabHK »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #40
stupidcar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's clearly not entirely true though, because there are hits. They're just extremely rare, but extremely visible. You can read interviews with the Stardew Valley guy all over where he talks about spending 4 years working solo on his game, refusing to give up on realising his artistic vision. Then he releases and it's a mega-hit. That's a very seductive story. This isn't a problem unique to indie games. Every creat…

Another good take on the phenomenon is (the insufferable) Taleb's discussion of "Black Swan" professions. History (from culture to natural disasters) gets defined by exceptional cases, but your own life in these professions will probably get defined by the typical case. Unfortunately, the industry is set up to stoke and profit handsomely from people mis-assessing their own chances. The people I've known (actors and w…

I think a more insightful analysis than (the insufferable) Taleb's one is the "Winner takes it all" one:

> In our 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society, Philip Cook and I [=Herbert Frank] argued that top salaries have been growing sharply in virtually every labor market because of two factors – technological forces that greatly amplify small increments in performance and increased competition for the services of top performers.

That might combine with the "saliency" cognitive bias - it's easier to think of successful actors, writers, game authors, than of unsuccessful ones.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/12/how_...

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#163

Post by markbnj »

>> Does the world need any more games at this point?

It's like asking if the world needs another pop song or pizza joint. There's always room for the next great game and another good place to get a pie.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#164

Post by chime »

aphextron wrote: post #137

You made the mistake of thinking that anyone would care how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. But making a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, sh…

> how many hours you spent optimizing some C++ function

> You need a massive amount of top notch artwork, music, 3D modelling, shader effects, SFX, etc. to have a polished nice looking game.

Top notch in any field requires optimizing hidden, underlying dependencies to deliver the best output. Optimizing code is not sufficient but it is usually necessary, especially if others have already solved it, setting the standard of performance that players expect.

The way to avoid optimizing core library code is to use someone else's library and build on top of that. But you can only do that so much. This is just an insanely hard industry to get into.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#165

Post by hhjinks »

Nition wrote: post #105
savanaly wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, sometimes it's very much not chance. Take stardew valley. It's not like Barone hit some sort of jackpot with his game. It really is head and shoulders above the competition, and that appears to be entirely due to his hard work on it. My evidence for this is that after I played Stardew Valley I was thirsty for more similar farming games, so I played or looked at every single one on steam (there's on…

I just had a look myself. The first one I see is "Fantasy Farming: Orange Season"[1]. Looks very similar to Stardew Valley, review average is 96% positive, but it only has 61 reviews (a good general indicator of sales) vs Stardew Valley's 86,000. I'm sure it's probably not as good as Stardew Valley, but one has probably 1400x the sales of the other. It did also release after Stardew Valley which is a problem. You can…

It's also immediately obvious that it's just an RPG Maker game with very little effort put in to conceal that fact. RPG Maker games generally don't do well, because 99% of them are garbage, and those that aren't go to great lengths to distinguish themselves visually, like Yume Nikki, and I don't know if that title ever was a commercial success.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#166

Post by everyone »

Making games is an incredibly risky business. Akin to starting a restaurant.

I personally dont think of it like a business at all. I think of it as a vocation. By choosing to make games, I consider myself to have chosen the life of an artist.. My goal right now is to make great games that I want to make, thats it.

I'm living off the savings from my last real job, and being extremely frugal. I moved out to the country, where everything is cheaper (rent massively so). If / when I run out of money I'll do some contracts, worst case scenario is get a fulltime job as an employee again.. But I am extremely happy with my life right now.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#167

Post by gnulinux »

pawelmurias wrote: post #106
skybrian wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about where the story happens? I've played a rogue-like (Pixel Dungeon), while I found it fun, I didn't think it had much of a story. Are others better?

In say nethack you can pick up random overpowered or weird items that change the game or get into crazy adventures when you meet some weird rare creature.

I kinda like games like nethack and brogue but my only problem with them is since it's extremely easy to die, it emphasizes attention a bit too much imho. I'm not a very attentive person and when I play games I'd much rather it be a bit more relaxed. When I know that even if I play the game for a whole Saturday, one floating eye can just randomly kill me for no reason, it kinda demotivates me...

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#168

Post by honkycat »

rolleiflex wrote: post #159
izacus wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With engines like Unity and Unreal, supporting multiple platforms (including modern consoles like PS4, Xbox One and Switch) has a level of complexity of writing a portable Electron app. As an indie developer, you need to maximize that market coverage (and develop with portability in mind). Having said that, it's probably not the primary reason why his game failed.

- Linux desktop market share is tiny. My own app supports Linux, but I'm 100% aware that I'm doing it at a loss in every possible way, it's a passion project. Bang for buck is terrible, so you need to justify as a labour of love. - The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop to work as it should is huge, and there are several competing packaging providers with no clear winner, and all have very much…

I disagree with your assertion Linux desktops are hard to set up.

You plug in your Ubuntu drive and install it, it detects your video card and install the drivers.

Everything just works, when people rag on Linux desktops they are talking about Linux from 6 years ago.

A ton of effort has been put into making the experience smooth and there are multiple projects to make it even more user friendly like elementary os and popos

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#169

Post by fullstackchris »

Ugh. This is the depressing side of the huge wave of indie dev / maker / game creators that has been on the rise in the past few years.

The creativity from everyone is great on the building side, but on the marketing and traction side, there can always be bad luck, like this example.

I think a lot of consumers are just fatigued from too many options - think about how much of instagram and facebook is ads vs what it used to be, even back in like 2010.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#170

Post by barbecue_sauce »

rrssh wrote: post #86

It’s the fonts. They look like you’re reading something.

Yeah, it's like the equivalent of using the default in iMovie. Very little thought given to art direction. Has the effect of making this seem like a Unity game, even though he built the engine from scratch. Seems like he played Axiom Verge, said "I could do that!" and then put his nose to the grindstone for three years without asking anybody else for input.
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