ven if they're not quite up to the graphical, sound, or dialogue snuff of some major releases
That's the funny thing - many of them were up to snuff graphics and sound. (I didn't get to see FuzzeeeTeevee, so I can't speak about that one.) Not all of the games that appeared there were mentioned in the articles, nor were they in the competition, btw. Anyway - graphically, Dark Horizons: Lore, GravRally (which I can't find any links to at the moment!), and Trajectory Zone (our product) would set side by side with existing retail offerings. (However, don't expect something that looks like the Doom3 screenshots;-) And sound? Well... pretty good actually:-) Unluckly, I can't show what they all sound like!:-)
Those types of people are great for the industry and it would be better that they sold their own games really well and got noticed by a big company and snatched up as a developer than if they couldn't make any money and had to get a job completely unrelated to video games.
I totally agree - this way, we get much cooler games (I was a huge fan of 21-6's Orbz - very different style of game that ROCKED!) and more innovation, instead of more sequils:-)
Ok, I gotta say it - one of my products had it's premier there at IGC '03. Trajectory Zone showed off for the first time to the public. That was a blast:-) (Keep in mind it's just it's first beta - beta 2 will be comming along here in the next two weeks or so.)
If you are an indie game developer lookin' for feedback, I highly recommend going to IGC next year with your game - there were 25 machine, and during any given ShowOFF session, you could get more face to face feedback about your game than you ever have had the chance to get before. Plus the organizers (GarageGames) did something smart - they also provide feedback forms for people to fill out. So no only do you get face to face feedback, you get 'annonymous' feedback where people don't have to worry quite so much about the effects of insulting the developer;-) Plus, you get to WATCH them play the game - see what hangs the player up, what makes them laugh or curse, etc. It's unbelieveably great - testing across the Internet doesn't have nearly the power of doing it live.
Unluckly, I have to agree (keeping in mind I've produced 7 2D puzzle games over the years now). Lots of games just try to capitolize on 'Me too' gameplay style.
Almost none of the games at IGC were 'Me too' games. Everything was fairly fresh and new games. That's not to say they didn't have thier basis from other games at times - GravRally from 21-6 is really just another racing game, but, really innovates in it's execution (the GravMode - stick to any surface, no matter upside down or not!:-) and it's gameplay modes (the Chase mode was cool - basically, it's tag played at 200+ MPH!). Trajectory Zone (full disclosure - that's from my game company) finds it's gameplay core from Scorched Earth. Then cranks it up with realtime play, lots of new options, neat environments, etc. And of course, it's 3D, but much more easy to play than Scorched3D, and moves MUCH faster.
Only one game ran in a browser, and that was a special exception - ThinkTanks has a new version out (Windows only) that runs in the browser. Very scaled down, fits in 3 MB, that sortta thing - basically, it's a sales pitch for the game. Not a single game was arkanoid, tetris, etc - I found that to be just too cool. I don't have a problem with 'inspired by' games, but 'clone of' games just tend to blur together, and really suck because of a complete lack of innovation. (Adding one new block to Tetris is not an innovation;-)
Are most of these games published under the GNU license?
Nope. Most of 'em are distributed under normal copyright rules. However, all of them in the contest were done using the Torque engine - so you can mod the heck outta 'em through the scripting engine side of things.
Note that even though they took down the Kazaa Lite search listing they still found a subversive way to pass the url along.
I wouldn't call it subversive - just enter "Kazaa Lite" into Google's search box, and hit the button. KazaaLite's main site comes up as the first hit!:-)
Depends on the game really. 3D FPS could be build relatively easy using some of the extisting open source or indie focused commercial engines, and adjusting to fit your desired 'spin' on the game idea.
On the other hand, if you are lookin' to build an epic game, that's ungodly tough as an Indie (but not impossible.) Trajectory Zone, which utilizes an existing 3D engine that we made appropriate modifications to the engine to make it not an FPS game, and all the content development, etc., has taken 14 months so far, and I just released Test 1 to the dev team, and getting ready to release Test 2 to the dev team before Aug 15th (Test 2 is the last step before the first beta version) 14 months and 9 people were involved at various phases of the project (Programmer (Me), Art Director (Eric Forhan), Sound Guy (Raison Varner), Voice Over / 3D Modeler (Mike Morrison), and a couple more modeler only type guys like CrazyBoi and Donnald McDade, and a couple other people too) TZ is a pretty heavy duty project that moved through a lot of various phases, and sometimes had to endure the slowdowns caused by real world problems like my job requiring me to travel. So it's not the BEST example, but, it shows even a medium to large size project can be done by an Indie team... eventually. It just takes a long time and a hell of a lot of dedication.
RMS can have my code when he prys it from my cold dead hands. I think that covers my opinion of open sourcing any of my games completely. I've got a whole spiel on this, and I'll break down and write an article on MidnightRyder.Com about it some day. BUT - don't take me as a non-Open Source supporter. I am a supporter. I just think there's not many ways to make enough money to, oh... pay my mortgage, important little things like that if I if make Free Software style licensed games.
Someone oughta' mod that guy up! 3D != great game, 2D != crap game. There's a lot that can still be done with 2D. All of my crappy little puzzle games (that I make money off of) are 2D games. People are still making good 2D games to this day - IMHO, one of the best games out there is MetalSlug X, a 2D platform / shooter. Cool part about 2D games is they run on much lesser hardware requirements (most of the time) and don't require nearly the effort to create a game engine ('specially something cross platform). And content development is typically much easier.
Has anyone made money from getting donations, or by charging a small $5-10 fee for the homemade game?
From donations? Dunno about that. But charging small fees for games, well, I do pretty decently with that (when my website isn't carved up, like it is now;-). I only sell puzzle games at the moment (however, I've got a massive 3D project that's getting close to completion) and I've made enough money that I've made my mortgage payments on it a few times. Not big money, but, it's more money in my pockey. Slowly but surely I'm moving towards projects that allow me to do it full time. Typically my game prices range from $12.50 to $15.00 (it would be cheaper, but, there's overhead for each sale, so I include that in the price.) Online sales is great - while I can't keep 100% of the sales price, I get A LOT closer than when you go through the conventional publishing route!
Just an FYI to other Indie developers and people who are lookin' at getting into Indie game development. Oct 10th - 12th is this year's IndieGamesCon )but they haven't updated the website) in Eugene, OR, hosted by GarageGames. I was there last year as a speaker ("Can I Make Money As An Indie Developer?" co-presented with David "RM" Michael of Samu Games) and will be there again this year as a speaker ("How to survive Indie Game Development" - again co-presenting with David). IGC rocks - it was a hell of an opportunity to get to meet other indies, find out how some of them are doin' what they do, how many are actually making money as indies, etc. LOTS of information to be had in a very short span of time. Also made some friends there, which was great since I didn't personally know any other Indie game developers. And free press - Gamespy, MacGamer, and a few others were there, plus I ended up with interviews with TechTV and G4 (of which neither ended up on TV. Bummer.)
The same code works natively on both Windows and Linux without changes? Unless its in pure Java or text based (even then), i find that hard to believe
It's entirely possible. If he started out with a crossplatform engine, then there's no extra work to support other platforms. That's why I personally like licensing other people's work (Torque in my case, but there are pleanty of others that can do it). From MY point of view, I just copy it over to the Mac, and hit compile. Big deal - unless I break the engine by doing something like DirectX only work, then it's all one codebase, and I've not had to do any work to make it crossplatform.
Why is it that free tools/libraries for game development are usually(often) cross platform, but commercial ones aren't? This puzzles me.
Ya know... I've often wondered that myself. I suppose part of it could be attributed to support costs for the libraries & tools on other platforms is viewed as higher, but I think part of that is bull. Total friggin' mystery to me. I use Torque with VC++ on Windows most of the time, partialy because most of the content development tools I need are on there. I'd love to see most of 'em ported to Mac (I'm a Mac OSX fan these days) so I can finally abandon the Windows based PC as my primary platform. Tools is what holds me back.
What makes this really funny is that Torque it's self is crossplatform. Write a game using Torque, and compile it for Linux, Windows, Mac easily (IE - no headaches, just compile the bastard.) Why can't it be that easy for a level editor and model maker? (Well, I guess that's not completely true - Blender has now released it's OSX version. But I can't export for Blender to Torque dts formats at the moment until a working exporter is written:-P )
How do you find the torque engine in terms of flexibility, speed, and ease of use? I'd really like to try it out but I'm not sure if I want to spend a $100/developer licensing fee at this time... (I have 3 developers, and not $300, haha). But if it's powerful, and will save some time on the development of our in-house engine that we're working on, I might drop a hundred bucks for myself.
Well... I fucking LOVE it. Seriously. The built in scripting language (TorqueScript) is pretty powerful for stuff that either (A) needs to be accessable to modders or (B) 'makes sense' in the scripting side (doing all of your collision detection from the scripting side would be bad. Handling the effects of a collision on the scripting side works well, and I use it extensively.)
Getting up and running with playable results is easy, depending on what gametype you are doing. If it's a first or third person style game, it's fairly simple - the SDK comes with a fully playable example that you can use as much code as you like from it. Just load it up, and start hackin' out what you don't need, and hackin' in what you do need.
It's pretty flexible - and what the engine doesn't have can be found a lot of times in the community forums under the Resources or Code Snippets area. If it's not there, it's usually pretty easy to hack it in on the C++ side or the scripting side.
There's a HUGE community to get help from. That's a wonderful thing some days! And the Indies who are workin' on other stuff tend to help each other out - good example was that I talked to Justin from 21-6 after playing a bit with the beta of Orbz 2.1, and noticed that he made Ogg encoded sound work a lot better than my implementation. I asked him about it, and he just packed up the engine/audio directory, and sent it to me, fixing all my problems in a single.zip file!
Speed is good. Trajectory Zone is an example I'll use (since it's my project;-) Scorched3D and TrajectoryZone share a lot of the same hertiage - Scorched Earth is the inspiration for both of 'em, but we took very different development pathes. I finally checked out Scorched3D on one of my Dev machines. PIII 400Mhz, dual processor, LOTS of RAM, 64MB TNT2 (what a bastardized card - still can't see why they released that, or how I ended up with one;-) . TZ does not run perfectly on it (which is why I created some modifications to the particle system - I added an LoD system for particles, and added it as a Code Snippet for the community to use), but it's very playable, usually running at 25 - 30 FPS after the modifications I made to the particle system (I beat the hell out the particle system. Imagine a mushroom cloud from a nuke, made entirely with particles and does collision detection with the terrain. Now imagine 20 or so on the landscape at once while players are going nuts. That's how badly I abuse particles;-) Scorched3D is NOWHERE near as playable, even after I turned all the settings down (no animated water, low textures, etc. etc.,etc.) It does really well, and handles multiple players pretty well (NOTE: as long as you aren't doin' stuff like 3000+ poly models with no LoD!) So, it's pretty good performance.
If there's one complaint I've got, it's the documentation. It needs to be better. However, they are working on Torque 1.2 right now, and that's one of thier priority items - better and more current documentation. However, what the documentation lacks, the community makes up for - cruse the forums, and you'll find the answer 9 times out of 10.
If you've got any more questions, feel free to email me.
It apparently runs on just about anything: Mac >=10.1, Windows >=98, and a bunch of x86 Linux distros.
No kidding - I love Marble Blast Gold (however, I got it for free - but had already planned on buying it after playing the demo.)
One of the trends with the games offered at GarageGames is they are CROSS PLATFORM!!! That may not sound real exciting, but, I own Orbz 2.0 and Marble Blast Gold. I own a PC and a Mac (I love my PowerBook. Er... my WIFE'S PowerBook.) If I ever switch over to Mac completely, I don't have to re-buy the game, or give up the game - just download the Mac version. It's hard to get publishers interested in a cross platform game these days - Indies WANT crossplatform, since the Mac market may be smaller, but less cluttered (and same for Linux).
Hrmm.. You aren't by chance the say Davis Ray Sickmon who used for work on the Freedows/AllOS project, are you?
[Peforms Jedi Mind Trick, waving hand]This is not the Davis you are looking for. I never worked on Freedows or AllOs. Move along.
Yeah, same guy. Don't mention that again.;-)
In any event, what's the difference? Why is it people will code on Open Source projects, but not do 3d work? I guess I come at this from a bad perspective, but I really don't understand the difference.
Well, you make the assumption that people do code on Open Source projects. Many of them totally flop for lots of reasons (go cruse SourceForge looking for inactive projects. There are LOTS.) It really all depends on how many people feel the need to scratch that particular 'itch'. Since you mention Freedows and AllOS, it's amazing how many people involved were more interested in artistic pursuits (making webpages, etc.) than doing coding. There was only a core set of developers who were interested.
Artist on the other hand work totally different. And most of them that seem to have the skills to do the job are doing it commercially already (part of the Trajectory Zone team I have are commercial artists working for a percentage of profits. Thank god - no more "programmer art";-) , and those that don't are often not worth having on the team, haven't learned focus, etc. It's very very strange how most of the graphic arts for games that I met work. Totally different mentality than the programmers on the same project. I have a hard time relating some days;-)
It still seems picking up an opengl book and doing it yourself is the best way to go in the long run.
Oh that depends on if you want to concentrate on game development part time for the next 18 months, or on engine develpment part time for the next 12 months, THEN start game development. Engine development and game development are two different beasts really - the overlap in some areas, but, game development concentrates on issues like gameplay, content, etc., while engine development concentrates on things like speed, graphical optimisation, etc.
My opinion to ANYONE who's looking at starting into the Indie field, get a free engine or buy an engine (see a couple o' edorsements for my favorite elsewhere in these threads) and use it. Indie Game Development is rarely someone's fulltime job, so why spend the time re-inventing the wheel? Spend the time developing games.
(On the flip side of that, there's always the issue that you know the engine like the back of your hand if you developed it yourself. I purchased the Torque engine, and it's something like 250K lines of code. I'm surprised how well I know certain parts of the engine, because I decided I just wanted to make a 'quick tweak' on something, like adding particle system LoD, and ended up pretty much knowing it by heart now. So this is kind of a non-issue - get to know the parts of the code you WANT or NEED to know about, and ignore the other stuff. Just be sure to start with a fairly stable and secure engine before thinking this way;-)
Hands down, www.garagegames.com. They're selling the Torque game engine (of Tribes 2 fame) for developers for a measly $100. Great community there too
Well, that's nice and all, but it's not the question he asked. He asked about review sites for independant games. That's a project I've been working on as a side line (a nice community oriented freeware / indie game site) but haven't completed. One of them I would recommend is Indie Games. Not a great site, but fits what you are lookin' for. Also check a lot of the shareware games sites - pretty much Shareware Game Author or Freeware Game Author = Indie Game Author.
He's ALMOST right on that. Part of what most of the artists who WILL work on you project look at is what the likelyhood that they get some sort of return on thier investment (time = money). I'm not saying that there aren't any artists who will work on a free - just damned few. And most that I do know are doing it to get a leg up in game development - build thier portfolio, etc.
If you've got a project that's up to the point of beta, you'll find it much easier to get artists on board. Also, go make an account at GarageGames, and watch for artists lookin' for a freebie project to work on in thier free time, or people who just quit a project and are lookin' for something else to work on (watch the.plan files.)
There's a couple to choose from, but for free engines, IMHO, your best best is Crystal Space 3D. PlaneyShift made use of it successfully - it's pretty good.
However, my tool of choice is Torque which isn't free - it's $100, and you get the source code for it. Damned flexible, and one hell of a community behind it. Go cruse the forums (same site, under Make Games) and check it out. And take a look at the screenshots. I'm currently using it on Trajectory Zone (Mm.... why bother with the link - still no dev pics up there at the moment, even though it's almost done!) and I'm really impressed with it's power - the best $100 I ever spent for game development.
Secondly, how dare you post links to Windows games.. you know that most of us are running the One True Platform (TM) and thus disbelieve and reject the existence of That Other OS (TM)
Yeah! Give 'em hell! Next time buddy, links to Mac OSX games only!;-)
Keep watching - there's a lot more stuff in development using the Torque engine. I've got Trajectory Zone in development using Torque - which means I can support Mac, Linux, and Windows without much more than a re-compile. Needless to say, I'm not the only one thinking that way - the engine is good, and works pretty well on all platforms. This could end up turning into yet another way that Linux and Mac start getting some really good games.
There's also a couple o' other games released using Torque that are Mac, Linux, and Windows - check out Marble Blast (kinda like Marble Madness, but on steroids) and Orbz / Orbz 2.0 (I don't have a quick way o' describing that one - I helped do some beta testing on it, and it's VERY unique.) Hopefully the trend of cross platform games continues - I'd much rather be able to run whatever OS / hardware platform I choose, instead of focusing on Windows because that's where the games are. From a user stand point, it's annoying. From a game developer standpoint, it's REALLY annoying!
I've already decided my next computer will be a PowerBook, once I can afford it.
It's worth it. I bought one for my wife, and for me to port some of my game projects over to (since the Mac has a smaller, but less cramped game market). I now need another Mac - she loves it, and I would really like to have one o' my own after doing some work on it. I bought the 12" Powerbook - very nice.
I disagree. I think many of us are in the same boat - seriously interested in a Mac but without the funds to buy one.
I've been hearing that from A LOT of people lately - "My next computer will be (insert Apple product)." Heck, part of 'em I know have picked out exact model and specs. Something about the platform really tends to grab people after they play with one a bit, and not within just a certain grouping - geeks and non-geeks both.
I think Apple's sales strategy should be this - give everyone a Mac to play with for a week, then take it away. Treat Mac OSX like a drug - the first hit is always free;-)
So, if the people in the public housing have a WiFi NIC (and, presumably, a computer), why are they in public housing?
Ah yes... the usual debate. As in, why are they buying anything like this if they are poor?
Think about it this way - if you have kids, you just opened up a whole new set of possibilities for them by purchasing a used PC (at the pawnshow, used computer store, etc - used hardware is CHEAP unless you want top of the line.) That and Internet access now allows them to at least try and keep up with the other kids nationwide that have access to the Internet. Heck, even if it's not used for direct learning (IE, they are playing games or downloading music, etc., instead of reading text books line;-) the act of becoming familiar with the way things work will allow them not to fall behind nearly as much. You might not think about it much, since you are at least somewhat computer and Internet savy (Hey, you are posting on/. - that could say either good or bad things about you;-)
And as for adults using it... well, I personally use mine for more than just crusing porn and downloading music. In fact, I don't do much of either one o' those - instead, I use it as a learning tool of sorts (Got a C++ question? Google It. Got a medical question? Google it. Need to know what a phrase in a contract means? Google It.), and to run an online company (my game company). The latter wouldn't to apply to nearly as many people as the former - just about anything you want to know is there. And that's only ONE application of the Internet. It's a great enabler for people, and I think it's a wise investment on anyone's part to hook up - even if it means scraping together the cash for some really cheap hardware over the process of months.
NOT getting Internet access, IMHO, is the mistake.
A company comes to you to buy your game. How much do you charge them?
Hypothetical question, applied only to ME, or, more of a question of what is a game worth?
Me personally, I've got one game that's going to a publisher - it's a puzzle game. No up front cash, percent of sales only. It's going to be part of one o' those packs o' games that you see on shelves. So in that case, significantly less that $100k:-) But, that was a one-man development effort - and quite honestly, it wasn't geared towards making a TON of money. They approached me about one game, passed on it, saw another game I was working on, and wanted it for thier pack. They made the offer, and I took it, since I figure it will net me a little more to line my pockets with than just online sales in the puzzle game market.
For my next game, it's going a totally different route. I happened to have a friend who was very well versed in game biz - he was the president of a somewhat successful game company. He's coached me a bit, and it will go quite differently than it did for the puzzle game. Part of it is the genre of game that makes the difference, of course. No deal has been made yet, but, that will 99% of the time end up being an advance on royalties, then royalties for sales.
As for when the approach you - they will have a deal in mind before they even begin talking to much about it. Then it's offer - counter offer for as long as they are interested;-) They also won't be paying you a salary, unless you plan on goin' to work for 'em. And if they were offering me a $100k/year job, well... I'd pass on it in a heart beat. I make a little less than half that right now, and am in a position I like. When I go full time, I'll be in a position I love. Very little would ever tear me from my company - including someone making me a multi-million dollar offer to buy the company lock, stock, and smoking barrels.
A lot of the smaller game dev companies that have been bought was partially because they were starting to get into trouble financially with a title (it's not uncommon for a publisher to buy a game dev. house when it looks like the developer might go under when working on thier title - adds to thier assets, and it's an easy / cheap buy, rather than a healthy company. You'll also notice that a good number of those studios are 'assimilated' completely - the studio name ends up completely disappearing.) I tried to pick a long term strategy that avoids some of the complications that arise for game development companies - but, no garantees of course;-) But it hopefully will leave me the option to keep the company privately owned until I pass the reins onto someone else in the very distant future. We'll see how well that works;-)
So what DO you ask for? Well, how much did it take to develop the game? Was it a one-man development effort? 24 man team? Cover your costs is the first thing to do. Second thing to do is to try and figure what you can get away with above those costs. Publishers aren't stupid - they will try and chew you down to the very bottom dollar of what it took you to develop the title. And very few single-person developed games end up selling enough units to merit a $100k advance. (I say very few, because look at Roller Coaster Tychoon. How many copies has that sold, 'specially when you include sequels? TONS. How many people on the project? Most of it was completed by one guy! So it's possible, just not likely.)
Publishers know what it takes to make a game (they have in-house teams that do it too, so, they have a really good set of numbers to work from, plus all the other deals they have pulled.) So (from what I understand) it becomes a real ballancing act to get enough money out of them to cover you finished game costs, and fund development of the next game. (Which is what being an Indie is about - not having to have some publisher give you up front cash, and control development of the project from begining to end. When developing on your own, you get more control. You also take more risks of not making your money back, of course, without a publisher or a good distribution channel of some sort.)
So to sum it all up... well, that all depends on the game and situation.
Slashdot Mirror
ven if they're not quite up to the graphical, sound, or dialogue snuff of some major releases
That's the funny thing - many of them were up to snuff graphics and sound. (I didn't get to see FuzzeeeTeevee, so I can't speak about that one.) Not all of the games that appeared there were mentioned in the articles, nor were they in the competition, btw. Anyway - graphically, Dark Horizons: Lore, GravRally (which I can't find any links to at the moment!), and Trajectory Zone (our product) would set side by side with existing retail offerings. (However, don't expect something that looks like the Doom3 screenshots ;-) And sound? Well... pretty good actually :-) Unluckly, I can't show what they all sound like! :-)
Those types of people are great for the industry and it would be better that they sold their own games really well and got noticed by a big company and snatched up as a developer than if they couldn't make any money and had to get a job completely unrelated to video games.
I totally agree - this way, we get much cooler games (I was a huge fan of 21-6's Orbz - very different style of game that ROCKED!) and more innovation, instead of more sequils :-)
Ok, I gotta say it - one of my products had it's premier there at IGC '03. Trajectory Zone showed off for the first time to the public. That was a blast :-) (Keep in mind it's just it's first beta - beta 2 will be comming along here in the next two weeks or so.)
If you are an indie game developer lookin' for feedback, I highly recommend going to IGC next year with your game - there were 25 machine, and during any given ShowOFF session, you could get more face to face feedback about your game than you ever have had the chance to get before. Plus the organizers (GarageGames) did something smart - they also provide feedback forms for people to fill out. So no only do you get face to face feedback, you get 'annonymous' feedback where people don't have to worry quite so much about the effects of insulting the developer ;-) Plus, you get to WATCH them play the game - see what hangs the player up, what makes them laugh or curse, etc. It's unbelieveably great - testing across the Internet doesn't have nearly the power of doing it live.
Oh, and if you haven't looked at our game sneak peek yet... ;-)
Unluckly, I have to agree (keeping in mind I've produced 7 2D puzzle games over the years now). Lots of games just try to capitolize on 'Me too' gameplay style.
Almost none of the games at IGC were 'Me too' games. Everything was fairly fresh and new games. That's not to say they didn't have thier basis from other games at times - GravRally from 21-6 is really just another racing game, but, really innovates in it's execution (the GravMode - stick to any surface, no matter upside down or not! :-) and it's gameplay modes (the Chase mode was cool - basically, it's tag played at 200+ MPH!). Trajectory Zone (full disclosure - that's from my game company) finds it's gameplay core from Scorched Earth. Then cranks it up with realtime play, lots of new options, neat environments, etc. And of course, it's 3D, but much more easy to play than Scorched3D, and moves MUCH faster.
Only one game ran in a browser, and that was a special exception - ThinkTanks has a new version out (Windows only) that runs in the browser. Very scaled down, fits in 3 MB, that sortta thing - basically, it's a sales pitch for the game. Not a single game was arkanoid, tetris, etc - I found that to be just too cool. I don't have a problem with 'inspired by' games, but 'clone of' games just tend to blur together, and really suck because of a complete lack of innovation. (Adding one new block to Tetris is not an innovation ;-)
Are most of these games published under the GNU license?
Nope. Most of 'em are distributed under normal copyright rules. However, all of them in the contest were done using the Torque engine - so you can mod the heck outta 'em through the scripting engine side of things.
Note that even though they took down the Kazaa Lite search listing they still found a subversive way to pass the url along.
I wouldn't call it subversive - just enter "Kazaa Lite" into Google's search box, and hit the button. KazaaLite's main site comes up as the first hit! :-)
There's a couple o' games that fall into the 'something different' for LAN play that are pretty cool. Orbz 2.0 and Think Tanks Both are pretty cool :-)
Depends on the game really. 3D FPS could be build relatively easy using some of the extisting open source or indie focused commercial engines, and adjusting to fit your desired 'spin' on the game idea.
On the other hand, if you are lookin' to build an epic game, that's ungodly tough as an Indie (but not impossible.) Trajectory Zone, which utilizes an existing 3D engine that we made appropriate modifications to the engine to make it not an FPS game, and all the content development, etc., has taken 14 months so far, and I just released Test 1 to the dev team, and getting ready to release Test 2 to the dev team before Aug 15th (Test 2 is the last step before the first beta version) 14 months and 9 people were involved at various phases of the project (Programmer (Me), Art Director (Eric Forhan), Sound Guy (Raison Varner), Voice Over / 3D Modeler (Mike Morrison), and a couple more modeler only type guys like CrazyBoi and Donnald McDade, and a couple other people too) TZ is a pretty heavy duty project that moved through a lot of various phases, and sometimes had to endure the slowdowns caused by real world problems like my job requiring me to travel. So it's not the BEST example, but, it shows even a medium to large size project can be done by an Indie team... eventually. It just takes a long time and a hell of a lot of dedication.
RMS can have my code when he prys it from my cold dead hands. I think that covers my opinion of open sourcing any of my games completely. I've got a whole spiel on this, and I'll break down and write an article on MidnightRyder.Com about it some day. BUT - don't take me as a non-Open Source supporter. I am a supporter. I just think there's not many ways to make enough money to, oh... pay my mortgage, important little things like that if I if make Free Software style licensed games.
Someone oughta' mod that guy up! 3D != great game, 2D != crap game. There's a lot that can still be done with 2D. All of my crappy little puzzle games (that I make money off of) are 2D games. People are still making good 2D games to this day - IMHO, one of the best games out there is MetalSlug X, a 2D platform / shooter. Cool part about 2D games is they run on much lesser hardware requirements (most of the time) and don't require nearly the effort to create a game engine ('specially something cross platform). And content development is typically much easier.
Has anyone made money from getting donations, or by charging a small $5-10 fee for the homemade game?
From donations? Dunno about that. But charging small fees for games, well, I do pretty decently with that (when my website isn't carved up, like it is now ;-). I only sell puzzle games at the moment (however, I've got a massive 3D project that's getting close to completion) and I've made enough money that I've made my mortgage payments on it a few times. Not big money, but, it's more money in my pockey. Slowly but surely I'm moving towards projects that allow me to do it full time. Typically my game prices range from $12.50 to $15.00 (it would be cheaper, but, there's overhead for each sale, so I include that in the price.) Online sales is great - while I can't keep 100% of the sales price, I get A LOT closer than when you go through the conventional publishing route!
Just an FYI to other Indie developers and people who are lookin' at getting into Indie game development. Oct 10th - 12th is this year's IndieGamesCon )but they haven't updated the website) in Eugene, OR, hosted by GarageGames. I was there last year as a speaker ("Can I Make Money As An Indie Developer?" co-presented with David "RM" Michael of Samu Games) and will be there again this year as a speaker ("How to survive Indie Game Development" - again co-presenting with David). IGC rocks - it was a hell of an opportunity to get to meet other indies, find out how some of them are doin' what they do, how many are actually making money as indies, etc. LOTS of information to be had in a very short span of time. Also made some friends there, which was great since I didn't personally know any other Indie game developers. And free press - Gamespy, MacGamer, and a few others were there, plus I ended up with interviews with TechTV and G4 (of which neither ended up on TV. Bummer.)
It's worth the trip.
The same code works natively on both Windows and Linux without changes? Unless its in pure Java or text based (even then), i find that hard to believe
It's entirely possible. If he started out with a crossplatform engine, then there's no extra work to support other platforms. That's why I personally like licensing other people's work (Torque in my case, but there are pleanty of others that can do it). From MY point of view, I just copy it over to the Mac, and hit compile. Big deal - unless I break the engine by doing something like DirectX only work, then it's all one codebase, and I've not had to do any work to make it crossplatform.
Why is it that free tools/libraries for game development are usually(often) cross platform, but commercial ones aren't? This puzzles me.
Ya know... I've often wondered that myself. I suppose part of it could be attributed to support costs for the libraries & tools on other platforms is viewed as higher, but I think part of that is bull. Total friggin' mystery to me. I use Torque with VC++ on Windows most of the time, partialy because most of the content development tools I need are on there. I'd love to see most of 'em ported to Mac (I'm a Mac OSX fan these days) so I can finally abandon the Windows based PC as my primary platform. Tools is what holds me back.
What makes this really funny is that Torque it's self is crossplatform. Write a game using Torque, and compile it for Linux, Windows, Mac easily (IE - no headaches, just compile the bastard.) Why can't it be that easy for a level editor and model maker? (Well, I guess that's not completely true - Blender has now released it's OSX version. But I can't export for Blender to Torque dts formats at the moment until a working exporter is written :-P )
How do you find the torque engine in terms of flexibility, speed, and ease of use? I'd really like to try it out but I'm not sure if I want to spend a $100/developer licensing fee at this time ... (I have 3 developers, and not $300, haha). But if it's powerful, and will save some time on the development of our in-house engine that we're working on, I might drop a hundred bucks for myself.
Well... I fucking LOVE it. Seriously. The built in scripting language (TorqueScript) is pretty powerful for stuff that either (A) needs to be accessable to modders or (B) 'makes sense' in the scripting side (doing all of your collision detection from the scripting side would be bad. Handling the effects of a collision on the scripting side works well, and I use it extensively.)
Getting up and running with playable results is easy, depending on what gametype you are doing. If it's a first or third person style game, it's fairly simple - the SDK comes with a fully playable example that you can use as much code as you like from it. Just load it up, and start hackin' out what you don't need, and hackin' in what you do need.
It's pretty flexible - and what the engine doesn't have can be found a lot of times in the community forums under the Resources or Code Snippets area. If it's not there, it's usually pretty easy to hack it in on the C++ side or the scripting side.
There's a HUGE community to get help from. That's a wonderful thing some days! And the Indies who are workin' on other stuff tend to help each other out - good example was that I talked to Justin from 21-6 after playing a bit with the beta of Orbz 2.1, and noticed that he made Ogg encoded sound work a lot better than my implementation. I asked him about it, and he just packed up the engine/audio directory, and sent it to me, fixing all my problems in a single .zip file!
Speed is good. Trajectory Zone is an example I'll use (since it's my project ;-) Scorched3D and TrajectoryZone share a lot of the same hertiage - Scorched Earth is the inspiration for both of 'em, but we took very different development pathes. I finally checked out Scorched3D on one of my Dev machines. PIII 400Mhz, dual processor, LOTS of RAM, 64MB TNT2 (what a bastardized card - still can't see why they released that, or how I ended up with one ;-) . TZ does not run perfectly on it (which is why I created some modifications to the particle system - I added an LoD system for particles, and added it as a Code Snippet for the community to use), but it's very playable, usually running at 25 - 30 FPS after the modifications I made to the particle system (I beat the hell out the particle system. Imagine a mushroom cloud from a nuke, made entirely with particles and does collision detection with the terrain. Now imagine 20 or so on the landscape at once while players are going nuts. That's how badly I abuse particles ;-) Scorched3D is NOWHERE near as playable, even after I turned all the settings down (no animated water, low textures, etc. etc.,etc.) It does really well, and handles multiple players pretty well (NOTE: as long as you aren't doin' stuff like 3000+ poly models with no LoD!) So, it's pretty good performance.
If there's one complaint I've got, it's the documentation. It needs to be better. However, they are working on Torque 1.2 right now, and that's one of thier priority items - better and more current documentation. However, what the documentation lacks, the community makes up for - cruse the forums, and you'll find the answer 9 times out of 10.
If you've got any more questions, feel free to email me.
It apparently runs on just about anything: Mac >=10.1, Windows >=98, and a bunch of x86 Linux distros.
No kidding - I love Marble Blast Gold (however, I got it for free - but had already planned on buying it after playing the demo.)
One of the trends with the games offered at GarageGames is they are CROSS PLATFORM!!! That may not sound real exciting, but, I own Orbz 2.0 and Marble Blast Gold. I own a PC and a Mac (I love my PowerBook. Er... my WIFE'S PowerBook.) If I ever switch over to Mac completely, I don't have to re-buy the game, or give up the game - just download the Mac version. It's hard to get publishers interested in a cross platform game these days - Indies WANT crossplatform, since the Mac market may be smaller, but less cluttered (and same for Linux).
Hrmm.. You aren't by chance the say Davis Ray Sickmon who used for work on the Freedows/AllOS project, are you?
[Peforms Jedi Mind Trick, waving hand]This is not the Davis you are looking for. I never worked on Freedows or AllOs. Move along.
Yeah, same guy. Don't mention that again. ;-)
In any event, what's the difference? Why is it people will code on Open Source projects, but not do 3d work? I guess I come at this from a bad perspective, but I really don't understand the difference.
Well, you make the assumption that people do code on Open Source projects. Many of them totally flop for lots of reasons (go cruse SourceForge looking for inactive projects. There are LOTS.) It really all depends on how many people feel the need to scratch that particular 'itch'. Since you mention Freedows and AllOS, it's amazing how many people involved were more interested in artistic pursuits (making webpages, etc.) than doing coding. There was only a core set of developers who were interested.
Artist on the other hand work totally different. And most of them that seem to have the skills to do the job are doing it commercially already (part of the Trajectory Zone team I have are commercial artists working for a percentage of profits. Thank god - no more "programmer art" ;-) , and those that don't are often not worth having on the team, haven't learned focus, etc. It's very very strange how most of the graphic arts for games that I met work. Totally different mentality than the programmers on the same project. I have a hard time relating some days ;-)
It still seems picking up an opengl book and doing it yourself is the best way to go in the long run.
Oh that depends on if you want to concentrate on game development part time for the next 18 months, or on engine develpment part time for the next 12 months, THEN start game development. Engine development and game development are two different beasts really - the overlap in some areas, but, game development concentrates on issues like gameplay, content, etc., while engine development concentrates on things like speed, graphical optimisation, etc.
My opinion to ANYONE who's looking at starting into the Indie field, get a free engine or buy an engine (see a couple o' edorsements for my favorite elsewhere in these threads) and use it. Indie Game Development is rarely someone's fulltime job, so why spend the time re-inventing the wheel? Spend the time developing games.
(On the flip side of that, there's always the issue that you know the engine like the back of your hand if you developed it yourself. I purchased the Torque engine, and it's something like 250K lines of code. I'm surprised how well I know certain parts of the engine, because I decided I just wanted to make a 'quick tweak' on something, like adding particle system LoD, and ended up pretty much knowing it by heart now. So this is kind of a non-issue - get to know the parts of the code you WANT or NEED to know about, and ignore the other stuff. Just be sure to start with a fairly stable and secure engine before thinking this way ;-)
Hands down, www.garagegames.com. They're selling the Torque game engine (of Tribes 2 fame) for developers for a measly $100. Great community there too
Well, that's nice and all, but it's not the question he asked. He asked about review sites for independant games. That's a project I've been working on as a side line (a nice community oriented freeware / indie game site) but haven't completed. One of them I would recommend is Indie Games. Not a great site, but fits what you are lookin' for. Also check a lot of the shareware games sites - pretty much Shareware Game Author or Freeware Game Author = Indie Game Author.
Go closed source.
Raise some capital.
And pay the devs.
He's ALMOST right on that. Part of what most of the artists who WILL work on you project look at is what the likelyhood that they get some sort of return on thier investment (time = money). I'm not saying that there aren't any artists who will work on a free - just damned few. And most that I do know are doing it to get a leg up in game development - build thier portfolio, etc.
If you've got a project that's up to the point of beta, you'll find it much easier to get artists on board. Also, go make an account at GarageGames, and watch for artists lookin' for a freebie project to work on in thier free time, or people who just quit a project and are lookin' for something else to work on (watch the .plan files.)
There's a couple to choose from, but for free engines, IMHO, your best best is Crystal Space 3D. PlaneyShift made use of it successfully - it's pretty good.
However, my tool of choice is Torque which isn't free - it's $100, and you get the source code for it. Damned flexible, and one hell of a community behind it. Go cruse the forums (same site, under Make Games) and check it out. And take a look at the screenshots. I'm currently using it on Trajectory Zone (Mm.... why bother with the link - still no dev pics up there at the moment, even though it's almost done!) and I'm really impressed with it's power - the best $100 I ever spent for game development.
Secondly, how dare you post links to Windows games.. you know that most of us are running the One True Platform (TM) and thus disbelieve and reject the existence of That Other OS (TM)
Yeah! Give 'em hell! Next time buddy, links to Mac OSX games only! ;-)
Keep watching - there's a lot more stuff in development using the Torque engine. I've got Trajectory Zone in development using Torque - which means I can support Mac, Linux, and Windows without much more than a re-compile. Needless to say, I'm not the only one thinking that way - the engine is good, and works pretty well on all platforms. This could end up turning into yet another way that Linux and Mac start getting some really good games.
There's also a couple o' other games released using Torque that are Mac, Linux, and Windows - check out Marble Blast (kinda like Marble Madness, but on steroids) and Orbz / Orbz 2.0 (I don't have a quick way o' describing that one - I helped do some beta testing on it, and it's VERY unique.) Hopefully the trend of cross platform games continues - I'd much rather be able to run whatever OS / hardware platform I choose, instead of focusing on Windows because that's where the games are. From a user stand point, it's annoying. From a game developer standpoint, it's REALLY annoying!
I've already decided my next computer will be a PowerBook, once I can afford it.
It's worth it. I bought one for my wife, and for me to port some of my game projects over to (since the Mac has a smaller, but less cramped game market). I now need another Mac - she loves it, and I would really like to have one o' my own after doing some work on it. I bought the 12" Powerbook - very nice.
I disagree. I think many of us are in the same boat - seriously interested in a Mac but without the funds to buy one.
I've been hearing that from A LOT of people lately - "My next computer will be (insert Apple product)." Heck, part of 'em I know have picked out exact model and specs. Something about the platform really tends to grab people after they play with one a bit, and not within just a certain grouping - geeks and non-geeks both.
I think Apple's sales strategy should be this - give everyone a Mac to play with for a week, then take it away. Treat Mac OSX like a drug - the first hit is always free ;-)
So, if the people in the public housing have a WiFi NIC (and, presumably, a computer), why are they in public housing?
Ah yes... the usual debate. As in, why are they buying anything like this if they are poor?
Think about it this way - if you have kids, you just opened up a whole new set of possibilities for them by purchasing a used PC (at the pawnshow, used computer store, etc - used hardware is CHEAP unless you want top of the line.) That and Internet access now allows them to at least try and keep up with the other kids nationwide that have access to the Internet. Heck, even if it's not used for direct learning (IE, they are playing games or downloading music, etc., instead of reading text books line ;-) the act of becoming familiar with the way things work will allow them not to fall behind nearly as much. You might not think about it much, since you are at least somewhat computer and Internet savy (Hey, you are posting on /. - that could say either good or bad things about you ;-)
And as for adults using it... well, I personally use mine for more than just crusing porn and downloading music. In fact, I don't do much of either one o' those - instead, I use it as a learning tool of sorts (Got a C++ question? Google It. Got a medical question? Google it. Need to know what a phrase in a contract means? Google It.), and to run an online company (my game company). The latter wouldn't to apply to nearly as many people as the former - just about anything you want to know is there. And that's only ONE application of the Internet. It's a great enabler for people, and I think it's a wise investment on anyone's part to hook up - even if it means scraping together the cash for some really cheap hardware over the process of months.
NOT getting Internet access, IMHO, is the mistake.
A company comes to you to buy your game. How much do you charge them?
Hypothetical question, applied only to ME, or, more of a question of what is a game worth?
Me personally, I've got one game that's going to a publisher - it's a puzzle game. No up front cash, percent of sales only. It's going to be part of one o' those packs o' games that you see on shelves. So in that case, significantly less that $100k :-) But, that was a one-man development effort - and quite honestly, it wasn't geared towards making a TON of money. They approached me about one game, passed on it, saw another game I was working on, and wanted it for thier pack. They made the offer, and I took it, since I figure it will net me a little more to line my pockets with than just online sales in the puzzle game market.
For my next game, it's going a totally different route. I happened to have a friend who was very well versed in game biz - he was the president of a somewhat successful game company. He's coached me a bit, and it will go quite differently than it did for the puzzle game. Part of it is the genre of game that makes the difference, of course. No deal has been made yet, but, that will 99% of the time end up being an advance on royalties, then royalties for sales.
As for when the approach you - they will have a deal in mind before they even begin talking to much about it. Then it's offer - counter offer for as long as they are interested ;-) They also won't be paying you a salary, unless you plan on goin' to work for 'em. And if they were offering me a $100k/year job, well... I'd pass on it in a heart beat. I make a little less than half that right now, and am in a position I like. When I go full time, I'll be in a position I love. Very little would ever tear me from my company - including someone making me a multi-million dollar offer to buy the company lock, stock, and smoking barrels.
A lot of the smaller game dev companies that have been bought was partially because they were starting to get into trouble financially with a title (it's not uncommon for a publisher to buy a game dev. house when it looks like the developer might go under when working on thier title - adds to thier assets, and it's an easy / cheap buy, rather than a healthy company. You'll also notice that a good number of those studios are 'assimilated' completely - the studio name ends up completely disappearing.) I tried to pick a long term strategy that avoids some of the complications that arise for game development companies - but, no garantees of course ;-) But it hopefully will leave me the option to keep the company privately owned until I pass the reins onto someone else in the very distant future. We'll see how well that works ;-)
So what DO you ask for? Well, how much did it take to develop the game? Was it a one-man development effort? 24 man team? Cover your costs is the first thing to do. Second thing to do is to try and figure what you can get away with above those costs. Publishers aren't stupid - they will try and chew you down to the very bottom dollar of what it took you to develop the title. And very few single-person developed games end up selling enough units to merit a $100k advance. (I say very few, because look at Roller Coaster Tychoon. How many copies has that sold, 'specially when you include sequels? TONS. How many people on the project? Most of it was completed by one guy! So it's possible, just not likely.)
Publishers know what it takes to make a game (they have in-house teams that do it too, so, they have a really good set of numbers to work from, plus all the other deals they have pulled.) So (from what I understand) it becomes a real ballancing act to get enough money out of them to cover you finished game costs, and fund development of the next game. (Which is what being an Indie is about - not having to have some publisher give you up front cash, and control development of the project from begining to end. When developing on your own, you get more control. You also take more risks of not making your money back, of course, without a publisher or a good distribution channel of some sort.)
So to sum it all up... well, that all depends on the game and situation.