Blogus Arbitrarius

“Me and my friends are starting a game making company.”

Despite any truth, credibility or promise, that phrase carries with it a stigma which I shall refer to as ‘Three guys syndrome’, a namesake borrowed from my own experiences in game development through Not So Random. An example scenario unfolds as such:

Three guys decide one day that they want to make computer games, so they come up with a design for a groundbreaking new MMO, start a company (which we’ll call ‘Three Guys Inc.’), and then go around asking on internet forums for guidance on how to make it.
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In my first post on this topic, I briefly mentioned the importance of writing cross-platform games. This is a topic that I think deserves more attention than it often gets.

I recently had a conversation with an online friend of mine on a text-based MMOG that I frequent. The conversation went roughly as follows:

<Public> Sean says, “Introversion = Uplink, Darwinia, Defcon, and most recently Multiwinia”
<Public> Friend says, “One of the few companies who went through the hassle of writing games for Linux. :D”
<Public> Sean says, “Hassle nothing. Difficulty is not why nobody writes games cross platform. :)”
<Public> Friend says, “Oh yes it is.”
<Public> Friend says, “Actually, I’m not going to get into this.”

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So you read part one, and you started work on your super awesome game engine, but despite your best efforts, the project has degraded to the point where now you’re spending more time hunting down segmentation faults (access violations for you Windows folks) than you are actually adding the features you want. This is where it’s easy to get stuck.
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I often hear people say they want to write a game or game engine. At least half of these are people who want to write MMOGs. Being a member of that group of people myself, it would be quite hypocritical of me to immediately brush everyone off as incapable, while continuing to putter along on the Invasion engine, all the while thinking that Not So Random is the only group capable of building a game engine without loads of funding and a full development team.

Even if it were true, and we were really that exceptional, I wouldn’t want to be discouraging. I enjoy programming, and even the little successes make the whole project worth it. Discouraging a person to the point of giving up would rob them of that joy. (more…)