Why we dont have GAME development contests

[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.

[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.

[BigBenAussie]

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?

Good for you, I hope you got some enjoyment out of it and that it was appreciated. I really do. I must apologise for using the C word as it is a highly charged word (especially in America). Still, it was your choice to do this for no monetary gain as people do when they work on hobbies, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Others may or may not feel the same way, and it takes all types. But it doesn't change what I believe to be the reason that we don't have Game development contests(the title of the thread). We don't have Game development contests because people don't feel it is an effective use of their time. Adding money to the equation, may change that proposition. Contests attract a certain type of individual, that's all, while others may be encouraged by something beyond it being just a hobby.

But imagine if working on Amiga games for a living was viable, imagine how great things would be, and we wouldn't be talking about game contests for lack of games, because we would be awash with games. By leveraging the iPhone user base and market place, and utilising the SDL API for you game creation, you could potentially make a living off it and have produced Amiga games at the same time.

[BigBenAussie]

@ami_junkiet

I think going down the route of limiting the hardware to the Amiga OCS or ECS would be fine, you could even just have a segment for OCS, ECS, AGA, for me the real Amigas are the ones that were made by Commodore and I for one would be well up for making a game on the Amiga.

Yeah, I hear you. It's hard to think of an Amiga as anything other than Commodore. Wish the names would somehow re-unite, if only for nostalgia. Say if Commodore could at least release a decent case for next gen AmigaOS machines. Can't say I like their current desktop cases covered with stickers...yuck. But I digress.

Anyone want to team up? I think that the problem is that people still feel that the Amiga should be viewed as a viable platform for selling games ... not any more, we are now in the same boat as MSX, C64 and Spectrum users so lets enjoy that status and start making cool games that run on old hardware which everyone has.

We're only in the same boat if you totally ignore next gen systems, which do have some sort of future. Not entirely sure what it is yet, but they are here and they are likely to be around for a long time, if only because of development delays. ;-)

Even better limit the competition to using only certain tools. Give people contraints and they start to think around the box. So come on you old farts! Lets get the Amiga gaming competition going and stop sitting on our arses complaining that there is no real value to it. I am busy working but I will still find time to do my music which brings in no money to myself but I enjoy it and I can give something to the Amiga community.

Ok. I'll give you a constraint or limitation. Get your newly constructed game working on an iPhone and win a prize. Not what you want to hear, I grant you. Look guys, I wish you the best of luck, whatever you decide to do.