OK, now I am done
Posted by wally2069 (twitter: @wally2069)
August 23rd, 2011 9:44 am
So lets look at my batch of twenty entries to be judged. Ten decently cool and playable games, two that require me to download something in order to play, one that opens successfully then closes leaving a notepad file saying something like congratulations, one that works on google chrome but jams up on basically every other web browser, and one that only runs on a mac, and a few more that straight up don’t work.
I was going to be a cool guy and play games in order assigned to gain the monster cool points. But making me work harder to play your game is not going to cut it. Any additional work past downloading is getting me to skip over your game, period. I am tired of it.
I don’t think you have to apologize for not running a Mac-only game when you don’t have a Mac. I agree that if you have to spend more than a minute trying to get the game to work, it’s not worth it. Just skip that game. Hopefully someone else will come along with a more compatible system and rate those.
But why are you saying you’re done? Are you going to stop rating games? 10/20 decently cool ones doesn’t sound so bad to me. If only half of the games work for you, that’s still 300 games to rate!
It’s hard. Nobody wants to make a game that doesn’t play for everyone. But when the realities of the time restrictions kick in, inevitably there will be compromises.
Everyone spent a lot of hard work on these labors of love. I think the least we can do is give it our best shot to try to get it to work. I mean, at least you download games. Many only bother with web games.
And if we extrapolate the direction things are heading, very soon web games won’t even be enough. We will expect it to run effortlessly on our tablets or phones (so it better not be flash?!).
So I hope there’s always a place for the weird birds, the Linux games, the C64 games, the vectrix games, and even just the ones that require annoying additional downloads. Because things like flash, java and .net might someday be those annoying downloads that we don’t want to bother with.
If you’re tired of it, then give yourself a break. Ludum Dare is supposed to be an enjoyable event. We have 3 weeks to vote, and the games will still be up for you to play long after that, so take your time.
That’s pretty rough, dude. I’ve noticed you have only put up a Windows version of your game – would you like people like me who primarily use linux to simply ignore your game because of your oversight instead of running Wine or switching over to my Windows partition?
Show a little empathy to your fellow game creators who have just poured out 48 hours of work and love!
Indie development is a bit of a double-edged sword: on the one hand, we’re not trying to be huge software companies, so our audiences tend to be more niche and quirky than typical mass-appeal games. On the other hand, we’d all love to make a living off making games. So it’s a balance of appealing to as big an audience as possible, without becoming just another clone that’s been done a thousand times before by soulless corporations.
In a way, that makes it more important to make your games as accessible as possible- if most people play web games, you’ll get more players if you make a web game. As the market changes and goes to phones, you’re going to have to stay caught up- if you want to attract the most players, that is. I’m sure there are people still writing programs for the Commodore 64, and I’m sure they absolutely love it- but I don’t think they’re likely to make millions of dollars. And that’s absolutely fine, but then they can’t really complain about people not playing their games.
However, since we’re presumably all indie developers here, you’d think we’d be more willing to go outside the mainstream, which might be more work- you might have to download the game, or a library or plugin, but that’s part of what makes us indie. It’s more work, for presumably more payoff.
Basically, I understand your annoyance, but that annoyance comes with the territory. If it’s that much of an inconvenience, then maybe indie development isn’t for you?