Possibilities
CPUware
by m64 on Feb.18, 2010, under Possibilities
Another idea about possible ways of capitalizing on your player base. Fairly simple one too. For the tl;dr haters and #freegamer patrons – I propose gathering computing power of your players’ computers – a resource that they do not fully use anyway – to benefit the project. I will call this “pay with cpu time” scheme cpuware.
I feel flattred
by m64 on Feb.15, 2010, under Possibilities
That’s probably not very hot news, but Peter Sunde, one of the creator of The Pirate Bay, is creating something called flattr. The name is obviously a portmanteau of flatter and flat rate. It is a “social micropayments” system in which consumer can pay a monthly flat rate (probably of his own choice) and have the system distribute this money among musicians, podcasters, bloggers, programmers and other content creators of his choice – possibly even game makers.
Preproductions in the style of Philip K. Dick
by m64 on Jun.02, 2009, under Possibilities
As an aspiring FOSS game creator I stand before some dilemmas and questions that I think may be common to other creators. One is that I have many game ideas – much more than I think I am able to turn into full game projects. Therefore I have to make some tough choices, which is hard without any other input than my gut feeling. Second, I feel there is a sort of unspoken premise of developing FOSS games – that you will be able to attract some contributors and make your games bigger then what you could ever do by yourself. But it is wiser to create small games, as big project require large initial investment before you will have a working product to show off and without that it is difficult to find contributors. Third, is the question of how to perform preproductions – without them it is rather hard to get the gameplay right, but they lengthen the project and move away the moment when you have something playable to show. I write about those questions today because I think I have found a possible answer and I would like to discuss it.
Game ideas for starting the commundo
by m64 on May.04, 2009, under Possibilities
Hello there. Long time without posting. I have had some bad case of what can be called a designers block and this has lead to a blogger’s block. To put the long story short I have decided that the next logical step in the commundo development would be to design some games that could be used as starters and I got stuck while doing so. Anyway, I think I owe my readers an apology for the lack of updates as well as some insight into what is going on in my head and notebook. I also hope that resulting discussion could help me with some decisions.
The only thing better than starting small is starting smaller
by m64 on Feb.18, 2009, under Possibilities
Hey there fellow free gamedevs. Sorry for the delay, but previous week at my studio culminated in a Friday all night crunch followed in my case by some really nasty flu and this did not help me write an article. The atmosphere around commundos has cooled down and it might be for the better as the flu has drained all my weekly enthusiasm reserves and some design decisions are difficult to make without it.
Today I want to talk about another idea for improving open source game development process. It is not exactly tied to commundo, but I think the two ideas can reinforce each other so I would like to employ it to start the first commundo. Sharing a world is a way of cooperation between several game projects. Therefore it cannot function properly without an actual game(s) participating in it and pushing its adoption. Now a shared world is most useful for commercial style non-casual games that actually have the ability to present worlds to its players.
Commercial style games are big and complex almost by definition and so they will take a lot of time to implement. We don’t have that much time. We also refuse to make simple games instead (casual… meh). The only other option is to make the games small. Or even smaller. Therefore I would like to propose ultraepisodic games. Ultraepisodic games would work a lot like normal commercial episodic games, for example “Sam & Max”, only more episodic – each episode should be prepared and released within a month or even less, adding perhaps some additional preparation time before new seasons. Because teams working on FOSS games are much smaller than their commercial counterparts the episodes would also be much smaller, on the scale of a single level – hence the term ultraepisodic. I also think it would be benefiting to be able to make the new episodes even more frequently than the commercial games do – with a dedicated team, established world lore and asset repository two week time frame may be possible. To put the long story short, if the commercial episodic games are like comic books, then ultraepisodic games should be like webcomics.
Common content revisited
by m64 on Jan.28, 2009, under Possibilities
Hello there fellow Free gamers and game devs!
After the initial spike of interest in the blog I got overly ambitious and wanted to write a huge, serious article to satisfy the taste of my highly sophisticated readers. Of course I’ve overestimated my capabilities and the result was an unreadable blob of text. This morning, while taking a train to work, I started pondering about an old idea, that suddenly started making more and more sense. So I have ditched the whole previous draft and now proudly present to you the “Common content revisited”.
It looks like the most of the Open Source game devs much prefer to work on bigger, commercial-like games than to grab some low hanging fruits like the abstract or casual games. Even if a game dev decides to go with the “retro” technology like a 2d isometric engine with pixel-art sprites, he usually still wants to create an epic RPG rather than a Pacman clone. Reasons for that are numerous and I don’t wish to discuss them at this time.
What is important, is that such games require huge effort, no matter what their technology is. That effort includes coding and art creation. Also world design if somebody is ambitious enough to make something like a RPG. The coding effort can be reduced by using a game engine. The art creation effort can be reduced by using content from some common media repository. Still, there is not much to help with the design and the folk wisdom about common media pools is that although their content is useful as props and placeholders, it can’t be used as the game defining elements because these have to be unique. My proposition could help with these two drawbacks and it would be fun too. I don’t claim it’s anything original – I just have not seen it executed successfully in the Free Games community before. (continue reading…)
