Comments - Olofson

Thanks!

More gameplay coming up real soon BTW - and parallax scrolling! Starting to look like a game now. ;-)

(And, I need to check my settings on this site. I don't see any trace whatsoever of new comments, unless I enter the very section they're in! That just doesn't work.)

Well, hope I'm not getting you in trouble or anything then...! :-D

This site seems rather nice and has a lot of traffic. However, it seems like one needs to make a fair bit of noise not to fall down the lists and become invisible. This is not a good situation for a one man team using custom tech (some things just take too long), but I'll see what I can do. Unfortunately, it seems like I'll have to spend some time doing other stuff now, so the situation isn't exactly improving.

Thank you! :-)

It's quite a bit of work to get all the details right, but I believe it matters a great deal. I want software to feel like solid, reliable machinery - like driving a nice car, or using a quality tool; that sort of feel.

Oh, speaking of deployment, I just found out about another interesting option: Code.google.com

Native code deployment to any x86 platform that runs Google Chrome! I will definitely be looking into this.

Thanks! I hope it's not "too much" or anything; just wanted it to look a bit like the GUI toolkit in the game, while adding some classic style arcade/action feel.

I hope it will be, at least! Not much content yet, as I wanted to get most of the machinery, GUI and all that down first. However, it should be enough to get some idea of the general gameplay and feel I'm going for. Kobo Deluxe might give some further hints, though I intend to go quite a bit beyond that.

As to Wine, I intend to release native 32 and 64 bit Linux binaries, but despite Linux being my development platform, that might actually be more complicated than Win32 deployment. That, if nothing else, is a good reason to open source the engine...

I'm only selling licenses directly from my site at this point, though I'm considering all alternatives. I got the impression that much more content is needed to enter that program, but well, that will soon be less of an issue. :-)

Well, "everywhere" - but obviously only if it's financially sound and practically doable. A good deal is a good deal.

I'm not sure about Steam and the like though, as I'm doing the open alpha/beta thing from the very start. (There is like, three enemies and two maps now, so Playable Tech Preview! :-D)

Basically, I want to keep my freedom to go to extremes like turning the game into a space ship air racing game, if that turns out to be more fun than the original design...! That's the whole point of developing incrementally in the open; try all sorts of things, keep those that work, drop those that don't - and not just by half blindly testing stuff on my own.

If I weren't a Linux addict, currently into 2D/"2.5D" tech and genuinely enjoying hacking engine code and the like (to the extent that I'm coding my current project in my own scripting language), I would definitely consider Unity! The UDK looks like another fantastic alternative.

All this whining about expensive tools, "only free for free games" etc sounds a great deal like people are looking for excuses for not just diving in and creating games.

I mean, seriously; there are amazing tools and engines out there, ranging from "totally free for all uses" through "very reasonably priced, should you actually make some money." Where is the problem!?

When I started toying with computers, one pretty much HAD to roll one's own engine to do anything interesting - and it had to be cleverly tuned machine code to be of much use at all. Now, you can implement an entire 3D game with advanced AI and stuff, all in a nice, friendly, totally crasch-proof scripting language if you like...

Kids these days! :-D

"Nope" - although older versions of EEL, EELBox and ZeeSpace are already available under the LGPL, and the newer ones, and ChipSound (the new sound engine) probably will be eventually.

The reason why I'm not keen on licensing any of this commercially is that I'm already spending too much time on engine development and too little time on game development. I don't want to add support and feature requests to that.

That said, I might reconsider if it turns out my tech could generate substantially more revenue than my games.