Aye, this is more or less because it’s impossible to see the future, and it’s the fault of neither side. X years ago when these projects began, no one had any idea that we’d be on this forum in 2011 discussing this issue.
Based on your posts as well as Cas’, we’re probably just going to stick with JOGL. The one constant between both services is that this amazing community exists to help us make our dreams come true regardless of which one we happened to hit first on a google search for Java OpenGL. For future projects we have a much better idea of what to expect.
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Hah! They knew full well what they were doing, 'twas a straighforward case of NIH. But regardless, sticking with JOGL is definitely the sensible option for this project.
Lets assume, the game is done.
if you submit your game to steam (you use this SteamSubmission.doc WordDoc and send it ?), is it a plus if you haven’t released the game before at all ?
I mean I could release it on many platforms like Desura and my own Website for sale, and THEN ask Steam, or the other way around, publishing it only on steam or through other means.
Is steam exclusivity a plus for them, or are they more happy to already see it being somewhat known ?
It’s hard for me to really give you an answer as I just basically don’t know. It’s a lottery, but you can improve your chances, I think, by (first of all!) creating games specially tailored to the Steam demographic (it’s not too hard to see who Steam users are - look at all the other games and see what sells) and secondly making something that’s cool that people want to talk about. The more buzz about your game the better. Submit links to all the buzz to Valve along with your submission, including plenty of choice quotes from the most famous personalities you can muster. It helps, therefore, to release the game first and then ask Valve. Not least because you want all the bugs found and the game properly balanced long before anyone at Valve looks at it.
Steam are so completely and utterly dominating now in the online digital game delivery market they couldn’t give a rat’s ass whether you sell the game anywhere else. Their sales will eclipse all your other outlets by a factor of at least 10, probably more like 100.
One more thing about Valve acceptance: it’s just a bunch of a few guys playing games all day long who decide which indie games they publish. They’re absolutely as fickle as any other customer on the entire internet. That is, they “buy” maybe 1% of the time. For every 100 titles sent to Valve I expect 99 are rejected. You can fall at every single hurdle: download, installation, registration maybe, presentation, gameplay. You must absolutely do everything you can to make sure you are not giving Valve reasons to not play your game. By strange coincidence this translates into being able to more easily sell it directly, too…
Great stuff there, good read. Sounds like it makes sense to just make your game the good old fashioned way until you’ve got a lot of interest over time. So… make a fun game and then keep on whacking at it.
We’ve stopped supporting PPC now as the drivers etc. are beginning to feel a bit old and the speed of the GPUs and CPUs in most of those systems is also rather lacking. But looking at my logs since last summer, the percentages are:
Oh, it’s accurate all right - I’m even surprised it’s quite so high given just how ancient the last PPC Macs are now - over 5 years old. The last of them will vanish over the next year or so. They’re already a niche not worth bothering with.
How do you handle fonts in your games? especially keeping them smooth and crisp looking? do you have some sort of code for scaling fonts smoothly (so they don’t look blurry when zoomed in), maybe using some sort of vector fonts?
