Re: failure and determination

["Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes" <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>]

Wed, May 25, 2005 at 04:49:33PM -0700 in <42950F0D.9010007@indiegamedesign.com>,
Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com> spake:
>Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes wrote:
>> During the Hollywood studio period, it was still possible to get
>>non-Hollywood films made and shown, even if in limited theatre runs.
>>There are no theatres for indie game designers today, and no producers
>>willing to finance them.
>Well, but it is also possible to distribute one's own stuff on the web.  
>I don't think things are impossible, just very difficult.  Also, one is 
>limited as to the scope of one's projects, until one finds a way to make 
>the big bucks.

  Or any bucks.  Web advertising sometimes works, but requires initial
investments that are often difficult to get, and uncertain to even break
even.  Puzzle Pirates is the only web-distributed game I know of with
even modest success.

>> Just a beach bum conference with no program tracks wouldn't work,
>>either.  No company would allow the employees to go on company time, and
>>the indies can't afford it without some guaranteed return in the form of
>>information.
>I think there's a demographic that would go for it.  What corporations 
>want is of no interest.

  Most people have to work for one, and convincing them that a
conference is serious work is the only way you get PTO to go, otherwise
you have to use up vacation days.  Game companies will pay your way to a
game conference, but I was twice able to get non-game companies to give
me PTO to go, on the basis that it's educational, even if not directly
business-related.

>Maybe it would work as an Open Source conference.  Sort of a mentality 
>that we really shouldn't be paying all this money for all this crap.  A 
>certain amount of volunteerism and crowd ownership of the conference 
>might occur.

  I'm of two minds on this.  It'd absolutely be a great way of drawing
people, and with the right design and project management it *should* be
possible to make an Open Source game that's still commercially viable.
There's certainly many discussion topics related to it, which should
make for a lively conference.

  But in my experience, Open Source doesn't work at all for games, and
it's misleading to build a conference around it.  Even aside from the
commercial aspect, it's one of the applications where the design vision
is so important it requires a hard dictatorship to get anything done,
and OS developers are going to cry "fascist!" and fork the code the
second they encounter resistance.  Plus, you risk inviting the lunatic
fringe Free Software dweebs into the conversation, and nobody wants
that.

>> The tech conference sea cruises are a good design.  I haven't been on
>>one yet, but they have 5 days in an enclosed environment, occasional
>>stops at port to do some morning sightseeing and then back to the
>>conference, and reasonable prices including lodging and food.  That'd
>>work for me.
>Any particular examples of this?

  The PHP Cruise last year was apparently very good, and
<http://www.geekcruises.com/> has a bunch of them every year.


>>>like the only thing holding me back are my lousy tools.  Some would say 
>>>that's the whole rub.  Maybe most would.  But most never ship anything 
>>>of consequence, so maybe it's all a matter of how "high road" you want 
>>>to be about anything.
>> But that's the problem: you're working on your tools, but publishing
>>nothing.  Is "nothing" all that good?  
>What's the comparo?  Have you gotten independently wealthy from pursuing 
>an alternate strategy yet?  I think persistence in the face of adversity 
>is probably worthwhile in the long haul.  I have yet to find or devise 
>the programming technology that "fits my brain."  I think I'm getting 
>closer though.

  No wealth, but I've got a lot of pleasure from people enjoying my
games.  Money is insignificant to me, it's just a tool I use to get free
time to work on games, and if I had enough I could buy art and music
resources to make prettier games that even more people would enjoy.  On
the scale that I measure things, I'd say I'm modestly successful.

  Last month, I had 1173 downloads of various computer games, and--hard
to count exactly, since these are visits to various web pages instead of
zip files--maybe 2000 tabletop games.  A lot of tabletop RPG publishers
would kill their grandmothers to have my numbers, even if they are free
(and that situation's going to change very soon).

  I haven't pushed GameScroll at anyone but Linux users yet, because I
want to get the graphical editor done before Mac and Windoze users see
it; Linux users are smart enough to edit XML files by hand.  If I don't
get another 2000 downloads a month from that with minimal free
advertising, I'll be shocked.  At its new release peak, Hephaestus was
getting 3000 downloads a month, and the shareware fees paid for a year
of lattes and a new computer.

>>Would you have something done if
>>you'd just accepted the tools you have instead of the tools you want to
>>have?
>I doubt it.  One can deny one's nature only so far.  At my core, I'm an 
>ASM guy.  Languages that don't allow me to perform C/ASM tricks readily, 
>i.e. the things I've invested my entire career in, just aren't going to 
>cut it for me.  When choosing tools, I think it's important to know 
>what's at one's psychological core, so that one doesn't live a life of 
>frustration and denial.  I think this is relevant to creating good IF 
>tools.  If something sucks beyond your willingness to bend, I think you 
>need to be honest with yourself about it.

  That's true.  Have you looked at doing console development?  The
business environment sucks beyond belief, but they need C/ASM guys
desperately.  You won't get to do game design for them, but at least
it's your kind of coding work.

>There may come a time when virtual machines are running so fast that 
>nobody cares about their performance anymore.  But we're far from there 
>yet.  I don't see that either Sun or Microsoft have even basic 
>incentives for performance.  The vast majority of their customers are 
>doing business accounting software.

  It depends on what you're doing.  If you need fast-twitch graphics,
the graphics situation in Java is still pretty slow, though OpenGL
layers are now tolerable, and you could always write some C code and
interface it with JNI.  Java's startup time is stupidly long, but
doesn't affect the run-time.  The HotSpot dynamic optimizer puts Java's
CPU performance equal to C++, plus or minus a bit.  Programs written at
the same level of abstraction run roughly at the same speed.  That might
not satisfy a purist ASM-hand-optimizer, but for the vast majority of
tasks it's more than fast enough.

  Business logic requires speed, as well, especially with all of these
online services that have hard real-time response limits, and hundreds
to thousands of transactions per second to manage.  I've never needed
that kind of performance from the kind of games I like to play and
write.

[...]
>reuse.  By the time I understand the design requirements, I may end up 
>rewriting all the code 6 times.  That's what happened to me last time 
>around, at any rate.  Takes me about 6 tries to get something right.

  Well, as I said a bit ago, it's been my experience that evaluating the
merits of systems that don't exist is *really* *hard*.  Throwing
something over the wall and seeing what people say is often the best way
to learn whether it's good or bad and what you need to work on.

-- 
 <a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/";> Mark Hughes </a>
"I think [Robert Heinlein] would take it kindly if we were all to refrain from
 abandoning civilization as a failed experiment that requires too much hard
 work." -_Rah, Rah, RAH!_, by Spider Robinson