The Indie Revolution
Recently we have been seeing something of a revolution in not only indie gaming, but indie games that turn a buck or two. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore whether the time is ripe for indie games developing to fund their projects, and whether Linux users are happy to pick up the tab.
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? Do you think indie games are any good? Would you pay for them? What games have you played and which ones did you pay for? Are we really at the beginning of a revolution? Share your thoughts in the shot comments below!
18 Comments to “The Indie Revolution”
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Surprised you didn’t mention the fact pay for software is coming to the Ubuntu Software Centre this October (well that was certainly the plan at one point…)
Come on Canonical, get talking to those game makers! (or maybe you are, but can’t talk about it)
Yes! This would be more popular than the music store I think because: we can already /easily/ buy music from channels not pointed at linux where having pay games delivered directly to Ubuntu desktop is something Canonical are best positioned to do.
You know, a sort of “Porting guide” is a pretty good idea. Sort of a manual that focuses on the most popular libraries (OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, FreeType) and talk about stuff like packaging issues, where to go to file bugs in the libraries, how they compare to Win32/DX etc, where to go for support (e.g. the SDL mailing list, or the openal-soft irc channel etc.).
The OpenGL + OpenAL + SDL combo is rapidly turning into the de-facto Linux Game SDK.* it would be nice if it was documented as such.
*I know Hemisphere Games didn’t use SDL to port Osmos, but it was used in the Humble Indie Bundle (World of Goo etc.) and in ports like Quake 4 and Doom 3. There’s a list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_using_SDL
For almost anyone, I’d strongly recommend using OGRE rather than straight OpenGL (or straight Direct3D for that matter).
It’s open source (MIT), with a very nice object-oriented API. It even has an OpenGL ES 2.0 backend for use on iPhone and, very soon, Android too.
For all the extra bits you need, the guide is here: http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Assembling+A+Toolset
Lots of great observations on the podcast, including…
If you pick the right toolset from the very beginning, your game magically works on all platforms with minimal extra work, because you’ve enlisted libraries that have already done the hard work.
The importance of the App Store. It’s very very easy and convenient to spend a few dollars on a program for your iOS or Android device. It’s so nice to be able to go browse the shelves of a virtual store instead of following gaming blogs, checking review sites, etc.
Obviously, using an engine like Ogre or Irrlicht etc. is the best way to do things most of the time if you are writing a game from scratch. But sometimes a full blown engine is overkill or you have an existing engine that uses D3D/Win32 and you just want to port it across. In these cases it’s easier to just swap out Win32/D3D/DSound with SDL/OpenGL/OpenAL.
Defiantly use a library like Ogre, Irrlicht etc for development. Doing so makes your code automatically platform independent. If you use OpenGL and SDL directly it makes certain things like font rendering unseasonally difficult.
Also, without additional work SDL applications are resolution dependent(do not resize) and are fixed to an aspect ratio. This makes them look awful when displayed at a different screen resolution or aspect ratio, such as a large wide-screen monitor.
LCD’s are only capable of working at there native resolution, when displaying anything else, the monitor scales up the image internally before displaying it. As anyone familiar with basic bitmap graphics editing knows, scaling up images makes them look horrible.
Making SDL and OpenGL resolution independent is not difficult, I wrote a library that solves this problem a while back: http://quad-ren.sourceforge.net/.
Hemisphere didn’t like OpenAL for audio, either, according to their post-mortem on their blog
I don’t think it’s that they didn’t like the API itself (OpenAL is very similar to OpenGL and is used in many Windows games too). It’s that they still had to work around bugs and quirks in the underlying system. That will exist no matter what API they are using (and obviously, must be fixed).
OpenAL is still the most suitable choice for games, and it’s the API we should be promoting over the others for this purpose. It’s designed for 3D environments with stuff like distance attenuation, effect models, directional sources etc.
I have no interest in games on Linux.
However, games technology has a lot of other uses and having that technology being ported to or created on Linux is definitely a good thing!
I’m interested in the “Serious Games” movement which uses games technology for non-entertainment purposes. For example, for my Masters project I created an interactive 3D visualisation of the colonisation of an articifial reef in Cornwall using the X3D standard. I was also involved in a government-funded feasibility study into using online virtual worlds as part of the urban re-generation consultation process.
I suppose what I’m saying is that games development on Linux should definitely be encouraged, as it has implications far wider than just entertainment!
P.S. Blender is awesome, but its game engine sucks! Definitely room for improvement there.
I really want to see “serious” games on Linux. Games are one of the few things it’s a nightmare to virtualise, at least in my experience. I can run the few Windows-only apps I want in a VM, but games need more resources to run well, more than I can currently provide virtually at least.
I’ve recently been playing Dawn of War: Dark Crusade in Wine. It has a platinum rating on their appDB and for once I’m happy with it. It runs just as well as it does on Windows with all the dials set to their highest.
Really though, I don’t want to use Wine, I want native games. I’m getting a little anxious as to whether the rumours of Steam (and the Source engine) on Linux are going to turn out to be true or not. Here’s hoping.
The audio thing has been a non-issue for many years now. All GNU/Linux distros use Alsa, so… use ALSA! Simple as pie.
SDL uses ALSA, GStreamer uses ALSA, Pulseaudio uses ALSA, etc., etc..
No, not for games. OpenAL has ALSA, OSS and Pulseaudio backends (well, openal-soft does). OpenAL is the right choice in this situation and is why id-tech 3 and 4 games, Unreal engine 2 and 3 games, and many open source games as well as Linux ports (such as Osmos) use it. If you are writing a game, and you want sound, use OpenAL.
This is the very reason why sound is such an issue to game porting. It’s not that the solution isn’t there (OpenAL is the solution) it’s because everyone suggests one of the Linux sound systems rather than the cross-platform, mature sound API that was designed for game development.
Yeah cross platform industry standard APIs are the way to go. If they’re not well supported on Linux that’s another problem but I think OpenGL & Co. have to make a comeback if we’re to see any real gaming on anything but Windows.
First of all I don’t think there’s a revolution in happening in Linux. I think there is one happening everywhere. Paying for “stuff” is slowly becoming less about something you have to do and more about something you want to do in order to show your appreciation. It was how I felt when I bought the Humble Bundle and I think it was also how people felt when they bought the Radiohead album that they didn’t even had to pay for. This type of business model is proving itself time and again with Linux gaming being the last addition.
Now the fact that Linux users pay more on average in these types of schemes is probably just because there are more early adopters using it. I don’t there’s been a dramatic shift in demographics in the recent years but there’s probably been one in the culture.
And the technical part… well I don’t think it’s such a big problem to be honest. From what I can tell the people that already support Linux don’t seem to have such big issues with it. It’s usually the people that are looking into porting to Linux that are the more vocal. And I guess that’s normal since the majority of game developers have never touched a Linux box. So in that respect I agree that there’s probably a lot more we can do to help them do the transition. I mean it’s challenging enough switching to Linux for day to day use (barring any technical problems) so it’s even harder to do it as a developer.
I’m not interested in games, but there are other fields where the problem is that newcomers don’t know where to start. I am more interested in scientific and engineering applications, and I had to do some in depth research to find out if I could even write those sorts of applications for Linux.
If you are writing software for MS Windows, vendors are bombarding you with targeted advertising for their libraries and other tools. When you step into the Linux world however you have to actively search for them.
Now I prefer the Linux way, partially because I’m a cheapskate, but also because I’ve been burned by proprietary libraries where the vendor has stopped selling copies because they have a new and incompatible version and I wasnt prepared to rewrite the entire application to accommodate it.
However, a lot of people don’t have the sort of persistence necessary to find all the bits and pieces. They tend to be very project driven, so when they look at Linux and don’t see answers to their questions right away they go back to what they were familiar with so they can get on with that project.
I don’t think there is a universal answer to this problem, but for markets that you want to target (such as games) then I agree that you need a guide to get people started. I think you also need to point to some simple examples that were created to illustrate the points. They don’t have to be good games. They should in fact be simple enough to be readily understood. A game programmer will know how to write a game, but he won’t necessarily understand that there isn’t necessarily a one to one mapping of features between MS Windows and Linux. You can always get the same result in the end, but sometimes you have to get there a different way.
So, I’ll say this was a nice shot, and I think it applies to a lot more things than just games.
I am only interested in older games and anything that is innovative and isn’t a FPS, there are WAY too many FPS games currently. Recent games have mainly bean all graphics, no game play, no storyline. The only game recently that I consider to be worthwhile is World Of Goo, even if it is a bit short.
Re: The success of ‘pay what you want’ – I think it will only work well while it’s still a novelty and there’s all this goodwill surrounding it.