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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

#51

Post by lmm »

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…

> 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.

A native ABI doesn't mean you have to use C++ though. I can use Qt from Python if I like, or even from the JVM (slightly fiddlier, but doable). I can't do that with the browser.

> nobody distributed them for free, as Netscape did with the browser. They also notably lacked any protections against untrusted code.

The JVM avoids both those problems though - it had a robust security model and was distributed for free. What killed it was that corporations refused to install Java Web Start on their computers because it's a scary "application runtime". But they would happily install web browsers because that's just a "document viewer". Even though they both do the same thing!

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

#52

Post by moritonal »

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…

Their MacOS revenues might have been £80k

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

#53

Post by Andrex »

ugh123 wrote: post #50
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…

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.

It's a shame opening local HTML pages is so heavily restricted in modern browsers.

I mean, I get it, but we also might not need Electron if you could stuff everything into a single HTML file and let users download that as your "app."

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

#54

Post by reactordev »

ClimaxGravely wrote: post #49
nine_k wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

WebGPU is that future.

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

#55

Post by reactordev »

inhumantsar wrote: post #34
Clamchop wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is a market but not for the hobbyist. You have better luck on iOS than macOS for games. However, tools, you can make a killing selling simple tools with sexy UX on Mac.

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

#56

Post by reactordev »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #41

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.

Steam will track this for you. They have some excellent metrics.

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

#57

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

nine_k wrote: post #45
AgentME wrote: post #39

Earlier 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 love how people use hyperbole such as "screaming fast" and yet a native application that's not even all that optimized will tend to run absolute circles around these "screaming fast" solutions.

How are we supposed to describe these native apps? What's faster than screaming fast? ear shatteringly quick?

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

#58

Post by Clamchop »

inhumantsar wrote: post #34
Clamchop wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not necessarily talking about whether the market is _large_ but rather whether users on that platform and its users will participate in raising its profile to a tipping point. More than one platform is likely to contribute to this.

Users follow other users, if they can.

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

#59

Post by bigstrat2003 »

nine_k wrote: post #21
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.

In this case they're shooting themselves in the foot. By requiring potential developers to own a Mac, they sharply limit their developer audience. Thus, fewer apps being made for their platform, thus fewer apps to drive using the platform, thus fewer sales of their precious hardware.

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

#60

Post by nine_k »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #59
nine_k wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In this case they're shooting themselves in the foot. By requiring potential developers to own a Mac, they sharply limit their developer audience. Thus, fewer apps being made for their platform, thus fewer apps to drive using the platform, thus fewer sales of their precious hardware.

They showed time and again that they don't want a too-wide developer audience. They already have too many apps, and see the choice fatigue in users. They want big companies professionally produce polished stuff that commands, say, $14.99 in app store, of which $5 is Apple's share. They want stuff like Beatmaker or ProCreate.

Small fry need not apply; if they insist, they should at least clear the threshold of owning a Mac and paying $100/year for the App Store license.

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