Kerbal Space Program.
Change game engine mid-beta.
Replace dev team mid-beta.
Keep adding game mechanics post-release.
"Beta" has no meaning. Just release whatever you got whenever you feel like it.
How to take 7 years to ship a beta
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#42[deleted]
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#43> So how can you take 7 years to make your game? [...] Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component s…
And the alternative is to use a framework and sell your soul to it or, even worse, the company that makes it. In some cases that includes giving them a % of your revenue. If you ever ship, that is.
But surely having 80% of some revenue is better than having 100% of nothing.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#44Ha, amateurs. The Haiku operating system project is almost seventeen years old and still hasn't shipped a beta. Finding excuses is vital, but it's important to have both excuses for not shipping the beta and excuses for why beta is almost here and there's no need to think the past history of delays bodes ill for the project. Here's a HN comment back in January where the poster says Haiku's beta will be out "this quar…
even E17 did finally end up releasing despite all the jokes
And in that time Enlightenment magically transformed from a resource heavy desktop full of eye candy effects to one of the lighter weight options out there. All it took was waiting years for the other popular desktops to overtake it in resource usage.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#45It definitely takes passion. Commercially, there isn't a lot of chance that the game will earn more than 7 years worth of earnings...
Oh yeah, no chance. The best outcome for me is to earn enough to keep making games.
Dude, that's what the OP meant unless you're still being sarcastic ;-)
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#46Ha, amateurs. The Haiku operating system project is almost seventeen years old and still hasn't shipped a beta. Finding excuses is vital, but it's important to have both excuses for not shipping the beta and excuses for why beta is almost here and there's no need to think the past history of delays bodes ill for the project. Here's a HN comment back in January where the poster says Haiku's beta will be out "this quar…
Well, developing an OS is more work than a game That said those working on Haiku suffer from the same NIH syndrome as the article's author but unfortunately all the efforts of the 'pragmatics' one who wanted to reimplement BeOS on top of Linux failed much earlier than Haiku.. New OS are in a bad situation: those build on top of Linux doesn't seemn to attract contributors (I blame personally a lack of imagination: a k…
TempleOS did fine.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#47Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#48I have been doing this for the past three years with a game based on the film adaptation of my favorite drug adventure book.
Don't forget to save all of your work locally, on the cheapest hard disk with the highest failure rate. That way, when your hard disk fails 2 years in you can start from scratch.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#49Surprised no one has mentioned Dwarf Fortress!
Development began in 2002, and the main author says 1.0 will be out in 14 years!
Extremely complex generative world with a vi-flavored interface. The game itself is like no man's sky/Minecraft.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#50> So how can you take 7 years to make your game? [...] Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component s…
I have been working on my roguelike for about twenty years. I've never come close to even playing a quarter of the way through it. It's never been anywhere near done.