Yep, that about sums it up, though I’m a roach that’s not even in the bucket yet.
Your question is my question. I think that I build little videogames not for nobody, but for me. Because when I was child I was thinking that will be my daily dream-job. And really I don’t care about get money. Point for me is to demonstrate I’m able to do something. Find your motivation.
BTW, I like love Revenge of the Titans and I’m waiting for a sequel!!
Great post! Though you missed the bit where the bucket owners nuke each other. 
… oh, and you can’t spell buddha 
… I’ll be somewhere in the corner weaving a basket. :persecutioncomplex:
Heh, maybe I should fix that 
Cas
Let me give you an example:
Dev: “Hello everybody, my vision for this project is to be a fun car game.”
BackerA: “I backed you at god tier. I demand you add boats.”
Dev: “Update: The project will now be a fun car-game with boats too.”
BackerB: “This game needs dinosaurs. Who’s with me?” Creates poll on project’s forum. Thread hits 1000 pages.
Dev: “Update: The game will now be a fun car game with boats and dinosaurs…”
BackerC: “All the big AAA games have zombies. We have to have zombies too or your game cannot compete!” Another huge thread on project forum that spans many weeks.
Dev: “Update:The game will now be a fun car-game with boats and dinosaurs and zombies.”
At no point did any of the “loudest” backers respect the original vision of the dev for this project.
(You know… the thing we all initially backed)
Dev: “Hello everybody, my vision for this project is to be a fun car game.”
BackerA: “I backed you at god tier. I demand you add boats.”
Dev: “Great Idea! However the physics engine is already complete. Adding a water mechanic will add 2 years to the development cycle, which obviously means we need a larger budget. Maybe I can shoehorn a water-planing if I find some free time.”
BackerB: “This game needs dinosaurs. Who’s with me?” Creates poll on project’s forum. Thread hits 1000 pages.
Dev: “Who doesn’t like dinosaurs? 1000 pages! Wow! Sorry I’m so to take long responding to this thread but I’m busy working the game. Calling one of the car models a raptor really speaks to me. Humm…maybe a pair of late game NPCs driving them…humm”
BackerC: “All the big AAA games have zombies. We have to have zombies too or your game cannot compete!” Another huge thread on project forum that spans many weeks.
Dev: “Like in a deathrace 2000 kinda thing going on? I wonder how much that license would cost. I’ll think about zombies more when I get a chance.”
Roquen makes a good point. Being based with a good idea in the first place is the best solution.
When people give their money to a project they do get a say in the project. They didn’t buy into the developer’s idea of the project, they bought into their understanding of the project based on the limited documentation available to them. Of course they have suggestions, but they are typically not developers and have no idea of the impact their suggestions would have on the project.
Managing user expectation can be a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Which is why we tend to develop things behind closed doors.
Cas
If you buy a pair of lattes at Starbucks…do you expect the barista (or whatever the fuck the call them) to be your best friend forever? Me neither…someone hands you money…you take it and you’re polite. How polite depends on how much they might give you in the future. In other words…learn how to say fuck off in various forms of politeness.
Gosh, when it comes to this subject I really am a special case. I have been busy with game development for like 8 years now. Started with Game Maker and RPG Maker. Moved on with FPS Creator, Dark Basic, Dark GDK, XNA, Unity3D and right now I am using Java for 3D games and Javascript and HTML5 for 2D games. When it comes to programming, I really got some nice experience. My goal never was to create games in the first place, mine was to have fun with programming. I do not really care what the result will be.
For that matter, I never finished a game. I did finish some software projects though but that is not important right now. Thing is, no matter how often people expected me to finish something, no matter how often people talked to me about that subject. I really have never given one single fuck. I like the challenge of programming, discovering new stuff, figuring out how to do something better, how to do something yourself in particularly. Nothing else you know, that basically sums it up.
That being said, while Unity3D users were desperately trying to convince Unity Technologies to create an editor for Linux I was already busy learning to develop my own engine. That request took 5 years to pass and in the meantime all those users who voted were ignored until it had over 20 000 votes and users started losing faith. Some moved to another engine, some stayed and kept on using Unity3D for Windows. At the end a Linux port of the Editor was planned after all and right now you are able to download a béta version. DarkBasic is different because it became a dead engine because of the missing support and updates, if it is possible to call it an engine that is. The Game Creators failed in many ways trying to create “the” game development engine and editor. DarkBasic was really easy to use and nice to play with, but something serious? Forget it. It was full of bugs and the horror of limitations became worse each time you wanted to do something amazing.
I got tired of that crap and started doing something myself my way. I love to keep things as easy as possible. My entire engine I’m writing now in Java is focusing at that subject. I yet have to see the engine that is easy enough to understand in no-time, one example that is clear as daylight and readable like a fairy tale for children. Tutorials that actually focus primarily at the subject. A rotating cube example that actually only shows a rotating cube and nothing more. No fancy stuff or anything. Everyone has their own ideas about what is easy of course, but still.
Let’s put this in context. Who care’s about a linux editor…I mean really? Users think they want all kinds of things. Example: developers hammered Intel for non-temporal store opcodes (basically this means a write that by passes the cache). Users finally got it and virtually none have any clue exactly how to use it to actually get a performance gain. Another CPU example is branch prediction hints for opcodes…again they got it, but sadly programmers generally don’t understand how their code behaves so the few that actually used the feature they were asking for actually slowed down their code rather than speed it up…although they might not even be aware of that since most programmers don’t have a clue how to meaningfully profile their code either.
What does this have to do with a linux editor for Unity? Everything. The kind of “developer” that drowns in a tea cup over an “issue” like this is the kind of developer than can’t complete anything anyway.
You are underestimating the amount of people who actually do. Sure, Windows is the market leader for Desktop OS. But Linux is used far more than people realize.
You are missing the point. When Unity Technologies decided to ignore one of their hottest feedback topics they also ignored their user base which are not only hobbyists. And what is even worse is that they were promoting their feedback system with a header claiming to care about their opinion. Ignoring that topic however, made people believe that was a lie.
Not just hobbyists are using Linux, because of its cheap price (Linux is free of course but the hardware isn’t) and speed a lot of companies are using it too. Even some of Unity Technologies’s employees are using Linux. So saying this is just a small issue is just a sign of arrogance because it is most definitely not.
So you are saying none of the 20000 voters completed anything? I am damn sure most of them completed more projects than you did.
Hell hath no fury like a Linux fan scorned eh?
Roquen’s explanation hits the nail precisely on the head. Usage of Linux on desktops may be preferred by a few thousand people but the size of the market is infinitesimally small compared to the size of the Windows market. So why would they double their development costs (yes, really) to increase potential market share by maybe 1%? And remembering that’s only potential; the option still exists for these developers to just use Windows when they want to do some Unity development.
Cas
To be honest, I am wondering the same thing. Natasho Bard (one of the linux editor developers at UT) didn’t really answer that question entirely. Or I must have been missing something. For a while the developers at UT ignored the feedback because of that exact reason. But the change all of the sudden surprised most of the users. Same goes for Steam. If you take a look at the hardware surveys you will see almost ever user use Windows. Yet Gaben decided to create a Linux port. I’d say they done it because they could afford it and saw an opportunity.
Come to think of it, why do you think it are just a few thousand? I think it are way more than that. If it is true than there would be just 10 people in my city who are using Linux. But I know there are lots more because I know those people. That being said, because of Ubuntu’s GUI and such I do see more people using Linux. The amount of users is growing, slowly perhaps, but it does in fact grow.
With regard to the Unity3D editor, you could make the same argument for OSX. Linux has about a quarter of the market share of the desktop as OSX - both in the millions but both massively less than Windows. However, overall market share is irrelevant. Developer market share is important. Of all the software developers I know personally, I can’t think of a single Windows user.
It really is just a few thousand… and of actual paying customers… well, that probably cuts it down by another order of magnitude.
Linux support on Steam is all about SteamOS and Valve’s attempts to free itself from the increasingly twisty and turny efforts of Microsoft to attempt to turn their originally open ecosystem into a horrible walled garden like Apple has. It’s a safety chute.
As for us, we make all our games run on Linux - but we can only afford to do it because it’s virtually free to do so ongoing, and we already realised we were just going to have to swallow the up-front development and testing and support costs. We’ll never make any money from Linux games… except that when SteamOS and Steam Machines become a Thing, we might.
Cas
Well, now you know me I refuse to develop on anything else.
Cas
I feel you on this one, @unlight. Why do we do it?
I have a day job programming for “the man”, and for the most part I like my job. But then most nights I come home and program something for myself. (This past weekend I made this little toy that graphs the emotional content of words.) Almost nobody sees the stuff I do.
On top of that, I maintain a free game hosting site, write tutorials, try to answer questions on Stack Overflow and my own forum… but why? It’s easy to go down an existential crisis path: what if instead of doing stuff that nobody will ever look at, I spent all that time working on my own portfolio, or writing a blog, or doing freelance work, or… going outside?
I think, for me, it’s the feeling that I’m on a path. Maybe nobody will see the latest little thing I did. Maybe only 5 people will read the latest tutorial I wrote. But 5 years down the road, I’ll have a hundred little toys that people can play with, and a hundred tutorials that people can look at. I’m not exactly sure where that path is leading, but if you keep doing little things that you enjoy… it has to go somewhere, right?
Any maybe the answer is no. Maybe 5 years down the road I’ll still be thinking: why did I do all this? But under that, there’s a creative itch that drives the next project: wouldn’t it be cool if XYZ were a game? What would I learn if I wrote a tutorial about ABC? How would I implement this mechanic in an interesting way? Part of being a programmer is that you have to constantly learn- if nothing else, maybe whatever little projects you do are your way of keeping up with the learning curve. So even if it doesn’t go anywhere, just being on the path is fun, and I guess that makes it all worth it.
Unless it’s all a horrible mistake and a pathetic waste of time. Great, now I’m in an existential crisis too. Thanks!