Why we dont have GAME development contests

[amigadave]

Don't dispair Cammy, keep hoping that Amiga programming will improve a little anyway.  I am still working on that plan to get kids/teens interested in programming and using Amigas that I told you about.

I have to add that I am typing this post from my A1200 using IBrowse2.4 and Miami via my wireless card.  That is something that I have wanted to get set up and working for a long time.

[smerf]

Just to take the other communities that I participate, the MSX community have at least three contests each year:

Passion MSX
Konamito Basic Game Contest
And finally MSXDEV

For MSXDEV (http://msxdev.msxblue.com/), community produce several new games every year. Just for this contest, the total number of entries (for all years) is an amazing 83! (http://msxdev.msxblue.com/gameindex.htm)

Any ideas about why that's not too common in the Amiga Community?

Hi,

@hbarcellos

I have already been flammed for this, but at one time I mentioned to a person that he should buy a PC and just run an amiga emulator on it because:

1. No software is being developed.
2. The only thing you can do with an Amiga is put on a new OS and look at it.

Now we all know that a computer without software is just another doorstop. If you don't like a doorstop look on aminet and see instructions on how to turn a MAC into a fishbowl, now apply that to an Amiga.

Now for everone to flame me again:

Do you think this bunch of loonies can really program? I am surprised that most know how to use a keyboard. (oh thats right the Amiga is also mouse driven).

Most of them have already moved over to the MAC because all they want to do is just turn on a computer and surf the web.

These guys program!!!

Oh well thats why I keep comming back to Amiga Org. It brings a bright spot back into my day.

smerf

[Cammy]

smerf, people like you make me not want to come to amiga.org.

[rockersuke]

I
 1) Developing a game on Amiga is much harder than it is on MSX

That's not always the case. I've met lately a guy developing a couple of MSX arcade games, just for the sake of it, at retrocomputing meetings here in Spain. He talks about complicated machine-code routines and hardware registers hacking in order to achieve smooth sprite movements and scrolling. His demos are impresive... but are the kind of things you could do with an Amiga using high (and easy to learn) level languages.

So I guess the machine give us the resources, but we just feel like we have better things to invest our free time in!

As my MSX friend, I'm writting a text adventure in AMOS (targetted to most classic Amigas, but unlikely to have an english release ^^') just for the sake of it. There's a slim chance that later I get into some (even if it's a brief one) graphic adventure or RPG. I asked last week in another Amiga forum how far homegrown Amiga authors reached into those two genres, but the topic died XDD

Anyway, I just hope people consider my little initiative was an interesting one (wether they love, hate or ignore the adventure itself, which is ultimately irrelevant) even considering the Amiga is as comercially dead as 8-bit machines. If not even that... well, I enjoyed my time! :-)

--

[trekiej]

@Cammy
I think using Basic or Hollywood could be a good start.
I wish there was some open games pieces made for them.
Maybe Hollywood could be used to make a game creator software.

[amigadave]

smerf, people like you make me not want to come to amiga.org.

Don't let him push you away from here.  He must have a sad life to feel the need to constantly come here and put down the Amiga developers that are still left writing games and other apps and utilities not only for AmigaOS4.x, but for AmigaOS3.x, MorphOS2.x and all variants of AROS.

I agree that there are too few developers, but there are still many that create useful programs for us.  I am very thanful for one in particular, Fab, who has done such a great job on the MorphOS version of OWB that I am browsing and typing this message into.

@smerf,  You are really starting to get very boring and tiresome.  For your information there have been 50 new software packages uploaded to Aminet in just the last 14 days.  That is over 3 per day from your "Non-existant" Amiga developers who are writing the "no software is being developed" that you claim.  That also does not count the numbers of other Amiga software projects that are currently being worked on that don't show up on that list.  Not bad for a platform that you claim in your signature as being "dead, dead, dead".  Of course now you will come back and say that all of those software packages are crap so they should not be considered real as another way to slap the few remaining Amiga software developers in the face, or some other such nonsense.  I wonder how you would feel if we all turned on you and made light of, or made fun of the work that you do?  Tell me, why are you here?  Is it because your life is so pathetic that you have nothing better to do than to come here and try to stir people up for your enjoyment?  (to the moderators, that is a valid question, not a statement or direct attack on smerf.  I really want to know why he feels he needs to repeatedly come here and try to put down the Amiga and Amiga developers over and over and over again)

Edit: @trekiej,  Using Hollywood could be a very good idea to create a game creator similar to AMOS Pro, which had a huge following at one time.  The advantage of using Hollywood is that it can easily compile to so many different platforms, which could make it interesting even for some developers that are only interested in making a buck from their spare time coding.  Of course it won't be as good as Assembly language, or Machine Code, but almost nobody uses those languages to make games these days.  Look at all the crappy games that are made using Visual Basic on Windows machines.  I wonder how Hollywood compares to Visual Basic for speed and versatility?

[Speelgoedmannetje]

smerf, people like you make me not want to come to amiga.org.

I think you should just ignore him. Think of all the other Amigans

[Radfoo]

If anyone wants to make an Amiga game quickly but doesn't know how to code, you should check out Backbone on Aminet.

Cool, had not heard of this one, looks good though. Hope to make a simple game over the next couple of weeks :-)  Thanks for pointing it out.

[hbarcellos]

I think that creates a deadlock. Check this thread:
http://www.msx.org/forumtopic10560.html

 BTW, about the MSXDEV games, almost 90% of them were assembly games with direct access to the hardware chips VDP and PSG.
 About this part:

That's not always the case. I've met lately a guy developing a couple of MSX arcade games, just for the sake of it, at retrocomputing meetings here in Spain. He talks about complicated machine-code routines and hardware registers hacking in order to achieve smooth sprite movements and scrolling. His demos are impresive... but are the kind of things you could do with an Amiga using high (and easy to learn) level languages.

 That's one of the differences. MSX sceners found very fun tweaking the hardware to it's maximum producing things that would seem impossible at the 80s. Things that you could easily do with an Amiga using high level languages were for sure already made in the past (and probably much better).
 I think that the first step is this (as discussed at the msx.org topic above):

So, IMHO, they need first to accept the classic Amiga (500 with floppy and 512 kb of ram) as the Amiga machine to develop for as we did with MSX1 in the MSXDEV in order to try to create an environment that stimulates people to create freeware games that can be done in the time people have these days to be able to meet a deadline.

How nice it would be tweaking OCS to it's maximum?

[amigadave]

I can see how tweaking an Amiga OCS computer to it's maximum potential might be a rewarding experience that a few others might appreciate, but the majority of Amiga users would probably look at it and criticize it for many assorted reasons.  Other Amiga users would criticize it for being a waste of time and tell you that you should be using your programming talents on AmigaOS4.1 programs, since there is so little native programming happening for the Next Gen Amiga systems.

But if seems like fun to any of you, I say go for it and ignore all the negative comments you might get during or after you are done.  It is a sad fact that you need a thick skin to be an Amiga user these days.

My hopes are for more ambitious Amiga programming projects to appear, ones that will require at minimum a 68030/40MHz, or 50MHz with 8mb or more RAM and a graphics card.  Then let us see just how far those resources can be tweaked to amaze even the most jaded of Amiga users.  Hopefully such games or apps could also easily be ported to AOS4.x and MOS2.x since the program is aimed at RTG from the start.

[J-Golden]

Backbone looks cool.  It reminds me of a game maker prog. for the Apple IIE back in the day.

Once I get my Miggy up and running I think I may just have to give this a try... :-D

[amigadave]

Backbone looks cool.  It reminds me of a game maker prog. for the Apple IIE back in the day.

Once I get my Miggy up and running I think I may just have to give this a try... :-D

That would be a good way to give back to the Amiga community, now that you have a new A4000T to participate in said community.  There are plenty of free development tools for the AmigaOS.  I just gave away some Amiga programming books to the AmiWest organizers SACC club, or I would offer them to you.

[BigBenAussie]

The only reason you want a game development contest is because there is no commercial game market. That is the real problem. You want to motivate game developer's via ego rather than money. That's fine, of course, but ego won't put food on the table.

Sorry, if I keep rambling on about this in every forum.......but I see this as the MAIN problem we have.

To get a commercial game market the Amiga community needs to start paying for games (and apps). As there is an insufficient Amiga user base you will never have professional game development. One way to to get professional game development is to leverage a larger user base. This was one of the promises of Amiga Anywhere (but I digress).

The optimal user base to leverage at the moment is.......... the iPhone. It has relatively low hardware requirements for a next gen Amiga and an established distribution model. You would program to the iPhone's limitations and optionally enhance for next gen Amigas. Depending on the type of game you might even be able to get things to work on high-end classic machines also.

If we had a cross platform API for iPhone this could make a difference, as Amiga devs could leverage the iPhone market to make a living.

As I don't currently do iPhone development(but I see it in my future) I am not entirely sure what we would need but I imagine it would entail: an Objective C port, or near enough to make porting easier, enough of an API wrapper to flick some sprites around, do some scrolling and play some music and sounds. OpenGL 3d would be a bonus. Even if the API/library or dev tool was commercial it would still make sense. Failing this, porting an existing Amiga games making library to iPhone might be enough. There's an SDL library for iPhone I see. Why aren't we on that!!!

And if things went well, and it was made easy enough, you might even be able to convince some iPhone devs to back-port their games to Amiga. Ya neva know?

Just curious, is a SAM capable of running a version of PPC OSX? (I don't want to argue about the legality of this... I am just curious). This would allow existing owners to have an IDE to do this on the one machine at least.

[skurk]

The only reason you want a game development contest is because there is no commercial game market. That is the real problem. You want to motivate game developer's via ego rather than money. That's fine, of course, but ego won't put food on the table.

There is no commercial game market, because no one wants to pay for a game on such an antique platform.  And, even if everyone did, it would not even cover a fraction of the efforts required.  I say we keep things free, we're all friends here.

In my opinion, one of the problems is that the Amiga is too easy to program.  Compared to the C64, you don't need double interrupts to get a stable raster, and you don't need to time the hell out of a loop to open the borders or multiplex a few sprites.  Coding the Amiga is in fact so easy, it's no fun making "ordinary things" on it anymore.  That's one of the reasons I'm sticking to the demoscene, to push the hardware instead of just scrolling playfields and checking for sprite collisions.

That's what I was hinting about in my previous post, find a way to attract idiots like me.  Introduce limitations, and I'm all in.

[BigBenAussie]

There is no commercial game market, because no one wants to pay for a game on such an antique platform. And, even if everyone did, it would not even cover a fraction of the efforts required.

It doesn't mean you couldn't subsidise the games development by porting the game for iPhone.
If you used SDL to develop your game you could, if you wanted, pay a one-off $100 SDL licensing fee and port it to iPhone and potentially get some return on your investment of time. I really don't see why anyone would consider that a bad idea, unless you would only consider utilising truly native APIs, rather than a wrapper, which is your choice and imposes limitations of their own.

You could sell your game for nothing on an Amiga(or alike) platform if you wish, even if I personally think that is a bad way to kick-start a commercial game market and encourage future Amiga game development (which, granted, is not your stated intention). OS4 and Amiga-like OSes are a new start..... and we don't all necessarily think of them as antique platforms.....although I think I know where you're coming from. ;-)

Commercial game development promotes professionalism and a certain amount of slickness in product and quality is required for sales. Why do you guys want to continue to work for nothing or for charity(bounty donations)? Am I being greedy for wanting to be paid for my efforts? And paying for the efforts of others?
I say jokingly that you gotta decide if you want to be a development capitalist or a development communist. Not everyone wants to be Mother Teresa.

[hbarcellos]

Commercial game development promotes professionalism and a certain amount of slickness in product and quality is required for sales. Why do you guys want to continue to work for nothing or for charity(bounty donations)? Am I being greedy for wanting to be paid for my efforts? And paying for the efforts of others?
I say jokingly that you gotta decide if you want to be a development capitalist or a development communist. Not everyone wants to be Mother Teresa.

Do you know what the word "Hobby" means?
 I work on a executive position in a large US financial IT services company. My cost per hour is considerably high.
 In my (-very few-) free time, last year, I converted some asm z80 games from Coleco Vision and Sega sg-1000 to MSX. It consumed me a huge amount of dedication. And I released all of them entirely for free. I'm a communist?

 Everytime you go fishing you try to sell the fish you capture?
 Everytime you go hunting you try to sell the meat?
 Everytime you go drive a go-kart you try to find a sponsor?