As games about swarms of insects go, it's a lot cuter than Empires of the Undergrowth.

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Quoting: Mountain ManAny word on performance improvements? The game has always run like a pig on Linux once you start to open up the map a little bit.

Just Linux, or does it simply run like a pig?

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So I was looking at this and at "Littlewood" and it made me think it would be interesting to do a "Wilderness builder" game. Instead of cutting down the wilderness to build towns and farms, it might be an interesting variation to do a sort of Mayan-style thing. Like, we think of hunter-gatherer societies as just sort of passively living in the wilderness, but a lot of them were actually sort of quasi-farmers in a way . . . they just got the wilderness to do most of the work. They manipulated the wilderness, doing some planting, using succession patterns, encouraging the things useful to them to grow. In parts of California, oak forests are prevalent in part because natives planted and encouraged them so they'd have acorns to eat. Mayans would do stuff like cut a few trees in a good spot in the forest, probably use the wood, and then manage the plants that grew in the little clearing, which in the end would go back to forest but there would be handy things growable in the stages on the way.
What with all the biodiversity and such, all the food plants and herbs and so on and their uses, and these rather complicated techniques for managing them, plus hunting and fishing and stuff, it could end up a fairly complex game. But that does mean plenty to unlock, and it would be a bit different from the standard "Clear a plot, stick a crop in it" schtick. One thing about a game like that is that it could take some time for the long term results of your actions to show; it'd be worth having a fast-forward to see how something you set up worked out.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicPersonally I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that crowdfunding is almost always a terrible idea and almost always used incorrectly.

The normal way to do business, would be to start small, make a few small games, then gradually work up to larger projects off the back of the smaller ones.

If a game developer is crowdfunding, it means that first of all, they're likely taking on something of a much larger scope than they're probably ready for, that's warning flag number 1.

The second thing it means, is that they likely weren't able to find financial backing from any publisher or bank or anyone, which means no one wanted to invest the idea, that's warning flag number 2.

Crowdfunding comes with no strings attached or certainty at all that the game will even be made, so you can potentially throw your money at something that goes no where, which is very wrong, YOU should not be asked to take on that kind of risk, that risk should be taken on by the game developer. Because if the game is a success, it's the developer who will receive all the spoils of victory, and have a product to sell over and over again. You just get the opportunity to basically pre order a game. When it's the developer who gets the 'reward' then it's the developer should take on the 'risk' for that reward. And they likely would, if they themselves had any confidence in their project, which means they likely don't if they're using crowdfunding, that's warning flag number 3.

If none of those above statements apply to a crowdfunding project, because it's being made by a very capable team of people who have made very large games before and have an established game development studio and plenty of funds, and who wouldn't struggle to find a publisher for their project, and it's being made by people who are confident they can produce the final product, and that it will sell well.. then it means the company views crowdfunding as essentially just an interest free loan from people who are too generous with their money. They don't need the crowdfunding, they just want the cash, that's warning flag number 4.

There's a time and place for crowdfunding, and in my view, it's for projects that benefit a community. Funding the creation of a product that a company will own and sell, is not one of those in my opinion. A better use of crowdfunding would be crowdfunding the creation of FOSS licensed games for example, because then at least the people taking on the risks (the backers) are the ones who would receive the reward (a foss licensed game).

I dunno. On one hand, I think your arguments have some force and I like the niche you define of "projects that benefit a community".
On the other, I think your warning flags assume basically that "the system works well" (and therefore if someone needs to do something else, that must be a problem with them), and I have no confidence that it does. People might not be able to raise money from bankers or whoever because bankers are blinkered idiots ignorant of the game industry, or because more knowledgeable investors insist on only backing games that are very "safe" the way Hollywood ends up doing nothing but sequels and remakes, or because modern banks are increasingly oriented towards financial speculation and servicing really big firms, and away from loans to small businesses, or because the interest rates they charge for small "high-risk" borrowers are insanely high (rational for the lender in a sense, but so high as to readily change a potential profit to a loss, thus self-fulfilling the high risk prophecy), or because the developer lives somewhere with a crap economy, or (insert your favourite market failure here).

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A medieval farming simulation by a Spanish speaker. I wonder if you'll be able to make Jamon Iberico.

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Quoting: GuestI tried blocking the visual novel tag on Steam, must I now try this on GOL? :|
Other than GOG being Linux hostile, visual novels are absolute shite. Hope they paid enough to make the shame bearable.

So, uh, apropos of nothing, your handle's "hateball" huh?

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Quoting: MunkThe advantage Valve has is that the MABA genre started with the DOTA mod, so all the MABA players are already on Valve's platform, necessarily. The fact that they're keeping the DOTA skin/lore isn't very significant. It's just keeping what it started with, being a DOTA mod in the first place, and giving it a first-class treatment. DoTA is a convenient choice because of the scope of the existing lore, but they could theme it to whichever one of their IP's they wanted without losing much, or even just create a whole new IP.

I more or less assumed DoTA content was "just" a skin. But that's more significant than you might think. If the person who made the original mod does Autochess with a different, unencumbered, skin, then players of the existing thing will find that not only do they have to go somewhere new to play it, but when they get there it doesn't look right--feels unfamiliar, has people/pieces they don't know. Pure gameplay isn't everything. Consider how many games make much or even all of their money by selling "hats" whose appeal is purely aesthetic, with no gameplay effect whatsoever.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: Guesttweaking an entire engine to hide stutter only seen on first launch might simply not be considered worth the effort.

Hmm... On the other hand, you never get a second chance to make a first impression...

Indeed, if you do the first impression badly, you may never get a first chance to make a second impression . . .

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicAll Valve has to do now is offer some kind of option to run your own remote instance of a gaming PC on a Valve server, and connect direct to it, and they'll have an alternative to Stadia. Buy your game on Steam, download it to play it locally, or stream it to any PC or phone/tablet or TV. Stream it from your PC or stream it from a Valve server. All your workshop mods, your cloud saves, your Steam friends, etc, take them all with you anywhere you go.

Buy Portal 2 and download/install it locally to play on your PC, then stream it from your PC to your TV and play it with any controller you want, then stream it from a Valve server to your phone and play it on the train.

If Valve offered that service for free, (which they probably could because the overwhelming majority of users would prefer local gaming so it wouldn't be a commonly used option), Stadia would be dead on arrival.

For Linux (& Mac) gamers, that would mean all those games currently not playable on Linux, the 40% or so of Steam that isn't quite there yet with Proton, would suddenly immediately become playable via an alternative solution, ie: streaming from a Valve server. Effectively bringing all Steam games to Linux.

Boom, no need to ever install Windows for any game on Steam. No need to buy games on Google's or iOS's app store even, just buy it on Steam and stream it to your phone!

I'm calling it, this is what Valve is working towards. Valve is going to make it happen.

I'm not sure I believe this is really going to happen or that if it does it will work as well or be as open as this description lays out. But it could happen and you paint a compelling vision.

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Quoting: Munk

Quoting: Mountain ManWhatever happened to the good ol' days when Valve used to make classic games like Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike... it seems they have pretty much abandoned some of the strongest franchises in the gaming industry in favor of more Dota spinoffs that nobody asked for.

VR happened. Seriously, that's what it is. When you really dig into what Valve's been doing, they've been quietly working on the hardware and software needed for the next generation since at least 2012. There's a fantastic video going over the history here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ1jyNF0cR0 [External Link]

Valve is mostly a technology company now. That isn't to say they're not a game developer anymore, but their IP's aren't really in much urgent need of a refresh. Their games hold up, more or less, and are still updated. When Valve releases a game, they tend to be paradigm shifting. My guess is we won't see the trilogies of their IP's start to release until they can be sufficiently revolutionary.

It's not all just VR either, nobody really knows what Valve's got up their sleeves with regard to software. There's leaks from time to time, and those leaks suggest that there's a lot of effort going into Source 2. It would make sense to me, given how Valve likes their games to be revolutionary, for them to take their time and build out the tools they'll need to really take things to the next level.

I think a lot of the work they do with open source projects and closed source developers has a lot to do with Valve trying to get the state of technology ready for their next batch of games. It seems like we're getting close to that, with the Index being released and leaked games like Citadel and HLVR.

They're doing work. Personally, I'm happy to wait. I'm excited to see what they've really been up to.

There's an argument to be made that Valve for the past few years while it had little competition was kind of the Bell Labs of the game industry--technically a for-profit company, but with an untouchable revenue stream that for better or worse gave them the chance to work on blue sky Big Ideas that a normal company focused on next quarter's profits couldn't justify spending on.
They may now need to buckle down to a bit more short term pragmatic thinking, though, and maybe get serious about bringing some of those cool projects into the production, money-making realm.

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