Java on OSX is a massive pain, much more annoying than Linux thanks to the completely broken transition period from 10.6->10.7. We just gave up on 10.6 in the end - it can be made to work but it's more hassle than it's worth explaining it to users. 10.5 is a dead loss.

@berarma - you maybe don't make commercial B2C software for a living... nothing is ever as simple as it looks on the outside. Especially if you've never done it before. I expect you've been hacking away on Linux for a long time.

We never did it for the profit or we'd never have even started. Remember LWJGL. The sentiment is less relevant to us than it is the other few hundred game devs who support Linux. Without the profits a good % of them will probably have to give up... however I reckon Steambox is the great saviour. It's certainly taking its time appearing though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The Steamworks admin stuff breaks all the time.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

:( It just says "An unexpected error occurred" when trying to look at the Linux and Mac data. Bah.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I'll have a dig in the steam dash and see what I can see...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Maybe it's a generational thing or a cultural thing but if you know Dan at all then you should probably know that "This will not do!" is clearly a joke... but then maybe only if you're English.

I always refuse to apologise when people simply don't understand though - as a matter of policy I explain rather than attempt to placate, which earns me a lot of hate but I find that it's best not to bow to bullying from mobs.

Unfortunately... $20k really is peanuts. We might not have spent $20k on actual email and forum support but you've got to remember all the other costs are still there too. There was the time spent building natives for Linux (had to work out how to do it from scratch - total beginner). There's the time spent figuring out bash scripts to run the games (again - total noob). The time spent working out the little foibles of Linux which need to be addressed in the game (Java doesn't do everything). The time spent making automated builds for Linux. The time spent testing on Linux. Then there's the ongoing repeated testing, building, uploading, verifying of the Linux builds - 8 of them - every time we make a patch to the core code to tweak something. It goes on and on. $20k is about 3 months' salary (60 days) here in the UK for someone who doesn't live in a cardboard box, and it's a very fine line between simply making a loss versus even just breaking even once you add in support. So that's the problem we're dealing with.

FWIW you don't get to talk to many developers privately about this stuff but I can tell you now, opinions are the same across the board, and most of them are pretty unhappy about it. We do it because it's pretty cheap for us because we've used Java; other devs with cross-plat engines like Unity similarly can manage it just about without making a loss. But still other developers who've written code to DirectX or Windows specifically have a much, much harder time of it, usually only amortised by a simultaneous but expensive port to OSX at the same time, and there the financial burden is genuinely a great risk to them: not only have they got all that other stuff but they've got (roughly) a $10-20k porting cost depending on the game complexity on top and then an ongoing maintenance budget.

Right now, also, there are only three reasons developers are supporting Linux for gaming. The first one is sheer stubborn bloodymindedness (the camp that we fall in to). The second is a fairly cynical marketing ploy (I know developers who literally despise Linux but who port to Linux simply because it'll make them look cooler in the eyes of geeks). The third is access to Unexpectedly Massive Platforms: that's the Humble Bundle for some, but for almost all of the rest, they're banking on SteamBoxes being the Next Big Thing.

So honestly... there's not really any more evangelising needs to be done at this point. I think SteamBoxes are the singularity everyone's waiting for.

ps. not sure if I can get actual useful figures for steam sales versus systems played from my dashboard

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The trouble with tweets is they're only 140 characters and people like to read in all sorts of stuff that isn't there. The tweet was actually about Steam sales only, and it was a lighthearted dig at the Linux community (of whom I am a part, I may add!) which casts a wry look at the vociferous nature of some members of the community versus the actual rewards a developer might really see ;) Even the 10x figure was facetious! (Remember, Mac revenues are only twice what Linux has!) A doubling would be just great.

On a slightly more serious note... we're pretty lucky being in Humble Bundles. Well sort of lucky. I spent years and years networking with other indies and being poor learning to make games and so on and in that time I "met" a whole bunch of interesting people (eg. namedropping, but Markus Persson, Jeffrey Rosen, Cliffski, Jim Rossignol, Dan Marshall, etc) and made friends with them. I also managed to piss off quite a few of the most primadonna ones as well but that's just how I roll.

So anyway, I got to know Jeffrey Rosen and he just sort of liked me, and back when the Humble Bundle was a Brand New Thing he wanted to stick Droid Assault in HIB#2, and I said, no wait! We've got this new game, Revenge of the Titans, which is nearly done, how about we release it on the HIB#2? And so we did, and we've had a great relationship since then. However for the other 99% of developers it's all about begging and grovelling and spamming emails at Humble and hoping they take pity, and so Humble Bundles really aren't the way to make money in general. Indeed we're wondering about the sense in ever sticking a game in a Humble Bundle again, not because of the intense devaluation of the games that end up in the bundle, but because of its overall effect on the perceived value of games in the entire gaming ecosystem.

So there's that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I think the net Linux share was $8k in the Weekly.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Heh, ghosts are easy to deal with - research Xrays :) Or just drop cheapass turrets in their way. And use decoys to lure them off elsewhere. Lots of options!

The reason we don't describe it as TD is because a defining characteristic of TD is that the enemies follow a set path to the goal and don't attack your defences. Because the enemies have no set path and use AI to try and get to you, constantly adapting to the danger they face, the strategy changes throughout each level and subtly over course of the game as new gidrahs appear and you have new tech to experiment with. In this respect it's got far more in common with RTS games than any TD game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's actually an RTS. To date I don't think there's a single other game quite like it. This is one of the things about video games... there are usually so many real differences between one title and the next in any genre that it really is quite churlish of someone to describe them, say, as "clones".

Interesting tidbit: how many "Space Invaders" games are there on Steam? By my reckoning it's about 3 or 4. There is virtually no competition. Likewise our other three games... there's virtually no competition. You're spoiled for choice if you like shooting people in the face though :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

If you're interested in what we're up to and other strange and weird funding ideas... take a look at our Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/puppygames [External Link]

Basically we're looking for a small monthly donation so we can carry on making odd games that no-one else wants to make, and this one in particular is interesting because we want it to be free and supported only by fans.

View this comment - View article - View full comments