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

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

#31

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

There's way more than enough room for both given how many million UIs get made. I think more time should be spent wondering why cross-platform toolkits aren't good enough. It's kind of lazy to point at the incumbent and say it's their fault for some reason.

Or framed this way: your dream exists and it's called Qt and can be used to make some absolutely fantastic applications[1]. What's deficient about it and why?

[1] https://musescore.org/en

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

#33

Post by mhitza »

schemescape wrote: post #12
Aardwolf wrote: post #4

> Linux accounts for less than 1% of the total players I think some types of games (think factory building, zachtronics style puzzle games, ...) might have a bigger percentage, though that's only a feeling I have, I don't have numbers myself, I just see such games more often have a Linux release on Steam that seems appreciated.

I published a not-super-popular (edit: but free) esoteric programming game on Steam and of the I'm sure the hardware survey is biased towards Linux, but it's still a surprising result! Especially so, given that I originally only released the game on Windows (and later added Linux support after getting multiple requests to port the game).

Feel free to name you're game so that I and others can check it out. It's not frowned upon to link to your paid for content if it's relevant to the topic/comment thread discussion.

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

#34

Post by inhumantsar »

Clamchop wrote: post #29
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.

I don't feel like it's terribly hard to predict that the Mac gaming market is going too small to make financial sense for a solo-dev game

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

#35

Post by inhumantsar »

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--…

I'm running up against this pain in a hobby project. The best options I've come up with so far are:

* WebRTC and NAT traversal to let the user sync files (complicated but viable for my use case but pretty dumb for gaming). * Cloud storage and anonymized social logins with E2E encryption (cue key management horror stories) * Download a file on exit, upload on resume (terrible UX)

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

#36

Post by karmakaze »

calibas wrote: post #26

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.

I noticed that too. Yes many games can be made this way but it's not what I think of when I think of making multi-platform games. At the same time if we could continue advancing web apps it would be more appealing, but does PWA even work everywhere?

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

#37

Post by suby »

Aardwolf wrote: post #4

> Linux accounts for less than 1% of the total players I think some types of games (think factory building, zachtronics style puzzle games, ...) might have a bigger percentage, though that's only a feeling I have, I don't have numbers myself, I just see such games more often have a Linux release on Steam that seems appreciated.

That would make sense, the programmer crowd is more common on Linux and these are programming-like games. Looking at the authors games, they seem like the type of thing that would be more likely to do well on Linux (factory / automation). So the fact that he's still leaning towards it not being worth it financially seems notable.

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

#38

Post by Kiro »

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…

Sounds like you're talking about software and apps in general, not games. 99% of game developers do not use web technologies.

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

#39

Post by AgentME »

nine_k wrote: post #18
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…

What would make such a platform less of a compromise than a web browser? How would programming in C++ be less pain than programming in JS / HTML / CSS? At the very least, JS code won't write past array bounds, or smash the stack. From relevant olden times, Lisp and Smalltalk environments were closest to the ideal. They were expensive though, and nobody distributed them for free, as Netscape did with the browser. They…

I think people really underrate browsers. The browser standards are open and have multiple open source implementations. People associate browsers too much with annoying trashy ad-based and other questionable websites to see how good they are themselves.

Electron has an annoyingly heavy download size but it's not the only option for native releases of web-based apps. Windows and some other OSes have built-in browser widgets that can be used with Tauri.

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

#40

Post by IggleSniggle »

Kiro wrote: post #38
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…

Sounds like you're talking about software and apps in general, not games. 99% of game developers do not use web technologies.

cough Switch cough
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