Does anyone know if, when you release a Windows game on Steam and it is played through Proton (eg the Deck or really anything, but the Deck is notable since it's a common platform), the dev would have any indication that the game is not in fact running on Windows? In a way, it doesn't matter, but I always wonder how these kinds of stats color how devs look at things.
One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
41–50 of 156 posts
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#42If 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 that to happen, OS vendors would have actually had to care about sandboxing and security, to enable local execution of completely untrusted code without any gatekeeper. It's their complete security failure, still continuing today, that forces everyone to the web.
The other, slightly less important thing is petty rejection of cross-platform APIs (e.g. Apple's refusal to allow Vulkan support in macOS). It's fine to additionally have platform-specific APIs, but there should be a least common denominator cross-platform standard. But middleware can smooth over this problem, while the security problem is something only OS vendors could fix.
Unfortunately, the position of gatekeeper turned out to be so profitable that vendors don't actually want to improve their security to the point where it's unnecessary. And they're also incentivized to prevent the web from improving to the point where it would threaten their gatekeeper status.
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#43I suppose Steam handles Windows game installation, so you don't need Windows installer code signing. But it's worth pointing out that for non-Stream applications, compared to the cost of signing a Windows installer, the $99 yearly fee for Mac is an absolute steal. For windows, you need to get an EV code signing certificate and the cheapest option is $150 US per year, but you ALSO need a >$100 token device. Typical prices for a certificate are 300-500 USD per year.
Figuring out how to do production code signing on Windows, and where to go to get your app trusted after signing, is also way harder on Windows. In contrast, implementing Apple's code signing is both cheap and easy.
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's in their profile - https://github.com/jaredkrinke/sic1
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
Browsers are absurdly well-optimized for performance. If you know how to tap it, you can make screaming-fast apps of various kinds, with top-notch graphics, font rendering, accessibility support, audio, video, etc. They also have really solid networking capabilities, as long as you don't need raw TCP or UDP. In particular, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, and WebRTC allow for a lot of advanced things.
By now, you also have WebGL and WASM, if JS's JIT is not fast enough for you.
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#46Web-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 wonder the difference between SDL or other native app dev VS webview and html for accessibility.
I'd assume webview apps could be more accessible rather easily, and it would take care and attention to make a native wasm app accessible.
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#47Great 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…
The average Steam release makes less that that, IIRC.
https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/11/28/the-median-indie-gam...
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Does switch use web targets a lot? I haven't noticed that personally (I tend to mostly only play first part switch games though)
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
Browsers are absurdly well-optimized for performance. If you know how to tap it, you can make screaming-fast apps of various kinds, with top-notch graphics, font rendering, accessibility support, audio, video, etc. They also have really solid networking capabilities, as long as you don't need raw TCP or UDP. In particular, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, and WebRTC allow for a lot of advanced things. By now, you also hav…
I've definitely seen some really well optimized web targets. Unfortunately that is not the common case in my experience currently.
That said the WebGL/WASM stuff is generally very nice in my experience and is very much changing my opinion. I'm interested to see what comes in the future!
Re: One game, by one man, on six platforms: The good, the bad and the ugly
#50If 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…
Electron would be great if it weren't for the performance, security, configuration, and packaging issues. The latter two seem to be what OP suffered the most.
html/css/js (and the frameworks on top of it) seem like a pretty low bar to build games and business logic for a variety of apps which, despite huge efforts from OP, could run on pretty much any modern platform.