One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly • Hacker News Board

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#21

Post by nine_k » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

Bellend wrote: post #13

Loved the article. My beef is debugging IOS Safari. It's so tragic that it's The Next IE™ but I can't debug it without a mac. There has always been ways to do it, but talk about jumping through hoops to see a debug window.

Apple is a hardware appliance company. They are not interested in you touching anything in their ecosystem not buying a Mac.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#22

Post by MBCook » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

itsmebucky wrote: post #19

ConcernedApe did a fantastic job maintaining the game on various platforms.

True. It’s also not based on Electron, which seems to be the source of a number of the author’s issues.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#23

Post by prox » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

Bellend wrote: post #13

Loved the article. My beef is debugging IOS Safari. It's so tragic that it's The Next IE™ but I can't debug it without a mac. There has always been ways to do it, but talk about jumping through hoops to see a debug window.

I saw a message on here but you can actually run the latest Safari on Windows. I had to search a bit but yes in the end I got it working. Basically the latest webkit can still be used in a rudimentary browser.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#24

Post by BlueTemplar » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:05 PM UTC

schemescape wrote: post #8

One issue with publishing a browser-based game that this article glosses over is: managing save data. The browser provides Local Storage, but that isn't reliable as a "source of truth" since browsers (mostly on iOS, I think) may delete the data periodically (thanks, iOS, for deleting my Wordle history!) or when clearing browser history. Aside: the worst situation is when publishing on itch.io and playing on an iPad--…

A bit like the 16-bit game consoles : tell your user that saving the game involves them saving a string of characters, in base58 for instance ?

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#25

Post by MBCook » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

I won’t dispute the cost issues with the Mac.

But it seems like a lot of the other Mac issues are related to Steam.

A normal Mac app sold online or through the store wouldn’t need special entitlements for dylib loading, and Xcode could easily handle all the signing for you. Xcode cloud could help too with builds.

I don’t think the game being Electron would matter there.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#26

Post by calibas » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

Web-first app, Electron for desktop, WebView for mobile.

I wonder how that compares to using an engine like Godot, Unity, or UE for cross-platform support? I love Electron and WebView is nice too, but neither would be my first choice for creating a video game. Personally, I'd prefer a native app that compiles to WASM for web support.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#27

Post by MBCook » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

schemescape wrote: post #14

Narishma wrote: post #10

What do they mean when they say Linux is saturated?

Good question. From context, maybe they meant "diverse"?

That was my read too, though I haven’t seen the term used that way before.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#28

Post by sdwr » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

Narishma wrote: post #10

What do they mean when they say Linux is saturated?

"Saturated", as in the first usage under "Web", refers to market saturation. The word is questionably appropriate in the first case, and wrong in the second.

I suspect that what he means (in both cases), is that sales are low on both platforms, and they are not worth the effort to port to.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#29

Post by Clamchop » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

npunt wrote: post #9

Great read, very eye opening. > Similar to developing for macOS, a Mac is pretty much required for developing for iOS and there’s the $100 per year developer membership fee. I think the combined income of both iOS and macOS (95% of which comes from iOS) barely covers the cost of the membership fee and the cheapest Mac Mini. I think this contextualizes the post well, seems like overall revenues might be in the <$10k o…

On the other hand, it's hard to predict where your product needs to be to find a spark that sets a fire.

Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly

#30

Post by ClimaxGravely » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #3

If I had a time traveling magic wand, the one Software Thing I would wish for would be that native, cross platform toolkits had won the war rather than the whole industry punting and declaring The Web Browser to be the target platform, or these super-high-level Game Engines. For decades, I always hopelessly thought the OS and hardware gaps would eventually be bridged by something like Qt or SDL or wxWidgets, and we'd…

For games SDL still gets a good amount of usage. As do a few other frameworks that I think fit your criteria if I understand you correctly.

Examples

- SDL

- GLFW

- Openframeworks

- Monogame/FNA/XNA/etc

- Haxe