06-27-2013, 05:57 PM
another installation of the Grimfinger fare we all know and love.
couple of comments:
Largely thanks to your site, I have discovered numerous actively-played PBM games and PBM-likes that I never would have known about otherwise. I am heartened by this -- there is action to be found, and a global (if small) base of players out there. From recent posts, I checked out Fall of Rome and am rather eager to give that one a try, for instance. Looks brilliant. And I might dip my toes into Phoenix again. Just out of curiosity, are you actively playing any games at the moment?
As for game development, it's a hobby niche, and one unlikely to every make enough money to live on. If, for example, I put forth a burst of effort and finished off a half-decent version of Event Horizon, in my wildest imagination I could only imagine a dedicated player base of maybe 50 people, paying at most $100 throughout the course of a year for whatever I can provide. That's $5k a year -- not something I can imagine devoting full-time resources to. Maybe expanding into mobile app-space, adding advertisements, etc, that could go up, but that's pure speculation. So basically, this is all a labor of love, and most of us can only devote what time permits. I plan to justify some escalation in hours on Event Horizon because it will serve as an example of my developer-chops, should I ever be looking for a job again.
I imagine the same calculus is going on with those other games you mentioned. Even reviving that Far Horizons game is going to be an intense effort -- Ramblurr says it has something like 24k lines of C code, along with 1-2k lines of Python in the utilities he added. Converting that to run on Windows is a non-trivial task. Even getting access to a unix host and running it there will be tricky -- Ramblurr himself had to nurse it along with those new utilities. I will take another look at it when I have time, and see if there are any shortcuts, but depending on how Event Horizon goes, it might take a back seat.
Finally, I would say that even though you don't program, you are providing a first class contribution to the PBM world via this site. Please keep it up, your efforts are appreciated!
couple of comments:
Largely thanks to your site, I have discovered numerous actively-played PBM games and PBM-likes that I never would have known about otherwise. I am heartened by this -- there is action to be found, and a global (if small) base of players out there. From recent posts, I checked out Fall of Rome and am rather eager to give that one a try, for instance. Looks brilliant. And I might dip my toes into Phoenix again. Just out of curiosity, are you actively playing any games at the moment?
As for game development, it's a hobby niche, and one unlikely to every make enough money to live on. If, for example, I put forth a burst of effort and finished off a half-decent version of Event Horizon, in my wildest imagination I could only imagine a dedicated player base of maybe 50 people, paying at most $100 throughout the course of a year for whatever I can provide. That's $5k a year -- not something I can imagine devoting full-time resources to. Maybe expanding into mobile app-space, adding advertisements, etc, that could go up, but that's pure speculation. So basically, this is all a labor of love, and most of us can only devote what time permits. I plan to justify some escalation in hours on Event Horizon because it will serve as an example of my developer-chops, should I ever be looking for a job again.
I imagine the same calculus is going on with those other games you mentioned. Even reviving that Far Horizons game is going to be an intense effort -- Ramblurr says it has something like 24k lines of C code, along with 1-2k lines of Python in the utilities he added. Converting that to run on Windows is a non-trivial task. Even getting access to a unix host and running it there will be tricky -- Ramblurr himself had to nurse it along with those new utilities. I will take another look at it when I have time, and see if there are any shortcuts, but depending on how Event Horizon goes, it might take a back seat.
Finally, I would say that even though you don't program, you are providing a first class contribution to the PBM world via this site. Please keep it up, your efforts are appreciated!