For anybody who can't wait and needs to get their nostalgia on right now, The Digital Lounge's "retro presskit" for Another World contains Amiga disk images which will run in UAE (should be in your repos). It's partway down this page [External Link].

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Depending on which original you played, there may be an extra sequence (this takes place between the hallway rescue and the arena and wasn't in the original Atari and Amiga versions - it was added to the SNES and following ports IIRC, in response to feedback that the game was short). It's a little less polished than than the rest of the game IMO, but I feel it enhances rather than detracts from the experience.

The 20th anniversary edition also features repainted high res backgrounds (which can be toggled away) as well as the original 320x200 rendering (upscaled to your window resolution of choice), a choice of original or remastered sound/music, and some additional "difficulty modes". There are a bunch of bonus features including a documentary and annotated sets of Eric's technical and design notes.

I'll give a more thorough review once this lands :)

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This was the first game I played that made me realise that games could be art.

It was way ahead of its time and is still impressive in many respects today. I'm looking forward to seeing how Linux users receive it.

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It's great to see this getting so close to release :)

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Quoting: berarmaCheeseness, you're talking about interesting and complex marketing issues. It's impossible to know how supporting many platforms will affect general sales, so it's never accounted for.

Ah, I don't believe this is the case at all. These are considerations that every developer takes into account when looking at moving across to additional platforms, with the exception of Linux - we're super unknown at the moment.

Quoting: berarmaAnyway, the tweets' focus is more on emotional ground than the technical one you want to talk about.

Like I said, the wording wasn't that good, but the intention was to talk about markets, not to criticise Linux users. Anybody who sees it as the latter is taking something personally that they shouldn't, IMO.

Quoting: berarmaScrolls is done in Unity, not the same, although Unity now supports GNU/Linux. I don't know why there's no port. There might be technical or economical reasons behind, I don't know, but at least they won't go saying how bad or how much damage have we done to their cash.

Nobody said that Puppy Games revenue had been hurt by Linux. When somebody's poorly worded a statement, putting further words into their mouth doesn't help at all.

As for Scrolls, so far as I can see, there aren't notable technical hurdles in the way. I wasn't claiming that it was a similar situation, just that the lack Linux builds speaks volumes about what priority they're giving Linux at the moment.

Quoting: berarmaAnd another thing that seems out of the question is that the value of the game plays an important part in marketing dynamics. Like someone else said, maybe there's already too much DT games by now. Also, I think any GNU/Linux user that wanted to buy the game got it already in the HIB since most of us were well aware of them, I know I did. Do they want us to buy the game again to stop their public rants? Me not.

I don't know that RoTT can really be classified as a "tower defence" game. At any rate, it's only one of four titles that we're talking about, and as Cas pointed out earlier, there really aren't many competitors in their spaces, so the market saturation argument doesn't really play a part. We brought up Humble revenue and possible sales erosion earlier in this thread.

So far as value goes, that's not necessarily all that relevant to what was being said, unless there's reason to believe that a game would appeal less to Linux users than users on other platforms. I'm not certain that there's that kind of demographic split, but I could speculate that some Linux users would be willing to pay for games that have high quality Linux support even if they aren't interested in playing them. From what I've seen of the purchasing behaviours of Windows users I know, they're usually willing to spend small amounts of money on games they don't care about, so if that's a dominant behaviour, I guess, that could be skewing things (personally though, I see the games in question as being well made and enjoyable).

After reading back through @puppygames' tweets (again), I can't see any Linux specific ranting - a little bit about the perceived value of entertainment and some grumbling about C#/MonoDevelop, sure, but definitely nothing aimed at Linux users or about Linux as a platform that constitutes a rant. I guess it's possible that something's been deleted? If so, I didn't spot it.

Quoting: berarmaLooking at it with simple numbers doesn't get the whole picture.

This is why I was curious about active player stats a page or two back.

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Quoting: berarmaI'm basing my comment on the tweets, that's the message that will get to the masses, not the comments on this post. He said "it's incredibly unprofitable".

He did, but that's doesn't quite match what you said.

I agree that the presentation of what he had to say was poor and likely to rub people up the wrong way, and I still find it hard to believe that it has been a literally unprofitable experience (low profit, sure), but there is real value in talking about actual experiences - talking about and trying to understand market dynamics is healthy and critical to safely navigating them.

IMO, there's more to be gained by offering suggestions about how to better approach the subject than there is to be gained by the sort of comment you made (if you *really* want to talk about Mojang, perhaps the lack of Linux support for Scrolls suggests something that the lack of available per-platform statistics doesn't).

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Quoting: berarmaIs the author complaining about porting costs, poor sales on any supported platform and being sorry for supporting it?

Read back through and see who raised the topic of porting costs. Show me where Cas has said he's sorry for supporting Linux.

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Has the Minecraft situation been different? I haven't spotted any indication of what percentage of their players are Linux users (although I don't really pay much attention to Minecraft stuff).

If I had to guess, I'd imagine that Minecraft's Linux player ratio would be lower than say, Trine, Amnesia, etc..

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Quoting: EKRboiPlease be a voice FOR it and try not to paint such a bleak picture of it.

There's definitely danger in portraying an unrealistic situation though. If some developer has been told that everything is wonderful and they'll be rich in minutes by supporting Linux, they're going to be disappointed. False expectations aren't good for anybody (users or developers).

There's good discussion to be had about the realities involved, though I don't personally believe that the situation in general is quite as bad as Cas' experiences have lead him to believe.

I don't believe that Steam Machines will really change the shape of the market for the majority of games. People who would be using them for desktop-like games are already doing that with their own computers. The really interesting impact IMO will be in bringing console-like games to the desktop. That's exciting :D

SteamOS itself might improve things and encourage better vendor support/drivers, which will make for better user experiences all round, but I don't think it'll dramatically impact on the growth we're already seeing.

It's titles more than platforms that will be making people feel comfortable shifting (the number of people who hassle me a week telling me that they'll switch to Linux when CS:GO arrives, for example, is enough to feel like it gets in the way of my productivity). Steam Machines may definitely help bring some notable titles to Linux, and we're already seeing developers disappointingly decide to hold off, completely oblivious to the opportunity they have to iron out Linux/SteamOS kinks before Steam Machines hit the market place.

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Quoting: berarmaJava is multi-platform, maybe you need to adjust some launcher script and make an installer, these are simple things. Something might break in a system that doesn't break in another, but Mac and GNU/Linux are very alike, and these problems need to be solved just once for all games.

Actually, Java on Mac OS is a nightmare. It's a very different situation to Linux. It's very likely that there's some LWJGL development included in what's been discussed as well, which has some native platform specific stuff.

Quoting: berarmaIf that's not profitable, no problem, stop porting(???) your games, that would be more wise than blaming us.

Hey now, the point that Cas is trying to make here is that he's not blaming us. He's trying to understand/comment on the shape and size of the market.

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