"All in all, I somewhat miss the days when the games were designed and implemented by individuals or small enthusiastic teams, and not by suits-run corporations."
It still goes on. People such as myself produce Flash games independently. I often drag my friends over to record voice samples, capture photographs for sprites, produce music, et cetera.
"Bedroom coding" is far from dead - the market for "pick up and play" games is growing all the time (as ceeam's parent post notes regarding mobile phone gaming). The need for quick, simple, enjoyable "lunch break" gaming is growing all the time and technologies such as Flash and J2ME serve this market very well. This is a market that is accessible to the hobbyist, and good quality/innovative games quickly pick up an audience as people tell their friends and post on message boards.
I think the forthcoming Nintendo Revolution could do wonders for social gaming. When friends come round to my house, sometimes we decide to play video games. The problem is that games that non-regular gamers can pick up and play immediately are few and far between. I still purchase titles like the Metal Slug series because they are fun games without too many controls. Alien Hominid is an excellent example of this.
The games industry in terms of retail games may well polarise into a select few teams with the resources to develop for today's nth generation hardware and those that produce online/simple/retro games (such as Geometry Wars, which I'm keen to try out). The people I see as more likely to be hit are the small/medium sized developers. I could well be wrong, that's just the way I see things at the moment.
>This kid isn't a genius, after all:
>...I've only just passed my driving test...
Driving? That's kind of irrelevant, don't you think?
I've been involved with this project since a few weeks after it started - I wrote the PHP/MySQL image manipulation and link generation code (it caches the grid of links out to a static text file, which I plan to optimise when I get back to my own development platform by using target=_BLANK globally rather than per link - can't believe I didn't think of that!) as well as the Javascript zoom/negative/cursor tracker and have been managing some the pixel orders alongside Ean and Alex, and from working with Alex I can tell you that he's a very astute, switched on, yet humble guy.
Alex (AKA A-Plus) also set up humanbeatbox.com, which I (AKA BeatMuppet) now help to administrate, and that site has many thousands of users and is a hub of the global beatbox community, and continues to inspire and teach thousands of young people a portable form of musical expression.
That's two pretty significant acheivement by the age of twenty-one. I wouldn't write off the chances of him doing it again - he's something of a Leonard de Quirm character, who is struck by sleeting particles of raw inspiration at a somewhat alarming rate...
I can see your point, but I'm not sure laziness is entirely the problem is most cases; most people I know are simply bewildered by the whole thing and don't have a clue where to start.
I guess it's like sitting me down in front of a nuclear reactor and suggesting that I'm lazy because I can't figure out how to flush the coolant... I'm not trying things because I know I could blow everything up. A lot of people feel like this about their computer.
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It still goes on. People such as myself produce Flash games independently. I often drag my friends over to record voice samples, capture photographs for sprites, produce music, et cetera.
"Bedroom coding" is far from dead - the market for "pick up and play" games is growing all the time (as ceeam's parent post notes regarding mobile phone gaming). The need for quick, simple, enjoyable "lunch break" gaming is growing all the time and technologies such as Flash and J2ME serve this market very well. This is a market that is accessible to the hobbyist, and good quality/innovative games quickly pick up an audience as people tell their friends and post on message boards.
I think the forthcoming Nintendo Revolution could do wonders for social gaming. When friends come round to my house, sometimes we decide to play video games. The problem is that games that non-regular gamers can pick up and play immediately are few and far between. I still purchase titles like the Metal Slug series because they are fun games without too many controls. Alien Hominid is an excellent example of this.
The games industry in terms of retail games may well polarise into a select few teams with the resources to develop for today's nth generation hardware and those that produce online/simple/retro games (such as Geometry Wars, which I'm keen to try out). The people I see as more likely to be hit are the small/medium sized developers. I could well be wrong, that's just the way I see things at the moment.
>This kid isn't a genius, after all: >...I've only just passed my driving test... Driving? That's kind of irrelevant, don't you think? I've been involved with this project since a few weeks after it started - I wrote the PHP/MySQL image manipulation and link generation code (it caches the grid of links out to a static text file, which I plan to optimise when I get back to my own development platform by using target=_BLANK globally rather than per link - can't believe I didn't think of that!) as well as the Javascript zoom/negative/cursor tracker and have been managing some the pixel orders alongside Ean and Alex, and from working with Alex I can tell you that he's a very astute, switched on, yet humble guy. Alex (AKA A-Plus) also set up humanbeatbox.com, which I (AKA BeatMuppet) now help to administrate, and that site has many thousands of users and is a hub of the global beatbox community, and continues to inspire and teach thousands of young people a portable form of musical expression. That's two pretty significant acheivement by the age of twenty-one. I wouldn't write off the chances of him doing it again - he's something of a Leonard de Quirm character, who is struck by sleeting particles of raw inspiration at a somewhat alarming rate...
I can see your point, but I'm not sure laziness is entirely the problem is most cases; most people I know are simply bewildered by the whole thing and don't have a clue where to start.
I guess it's like sitting me down in front of a nuclear reactor and suggesting that I'm lazy because I can't figure out how to flush the coolant... I'm not trying things because I know I could blow everything up. A lot of people feel like this about their computer.