japhib
Its constraints steer you clear automatically of the biggest unsung villain of hobby game development: scope creep. (Wanting to make your game multiplayer is a variant of that.)
Its inability to import external assets forces you to engage with things outside your main strength, like making art/music/sfx, and the fact that everything is so lo-fi means unskilled art/music/sfx still looks & sounds decent.
Anyways, I highly recommend pico-8 to anyone looking to get into gamedev, or anyone frustrated with the big engines (Unity/Unreal/Godot etc)
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
> What happens to the plastic economy when plastics are no longer useful because they'll be decomposed too quickly?
We already use lots of biodegradable things for crucial applications, such as the wood used in framing houses. Just because wood can rot in a damp forest doesn't mean that the wood inside your walls will rot away just because. There are conditions where it can start rotting, and we're aware of those conditions and how to prevent them, at least enough for a house to last for decades.
It has basically all of the stuff about functional programming that makes it easier to reason about your code & get work done - immutability, pattern matching, actors, etc. But without monads or a complicated type system that would give it a higher barrier to entry. And of course it's built on top of the Erlang BEAM runtime, which has a great track record as a foundation for backend systems. It doesn't have static typing, although the type system is a lot stronger than most other dynamic languages like JS or Python, and the language devs are currently adding gradual type checking into the compiler.
Edit: on second thought, that doesn't really make sense and would be a great way to defraud the network of a ton of guaranteed money
Another option is https://typescripttolua.github.io/
It can take hundreds of dev-hours to port your engine to consoles yourself, so having another company handle it for you, for all 3 consoles, for only $2000 is a pretty good deal!
The website-summarized version of the license says:
> You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine
It sounds like this would only be a problem if you're literally shipping a modified version of Defold. No game with any kind of financial incentive does this for a built-in map or mod editor, because it would make it incredibly easy for other people to then sell a modified version of their entire game.
It's kind of like if Apple made the Xcode source available, and then said "hey you can't monetize a modified version of Xcode." No one is going to ship their app's entire Xcode project to players just so the players can make a custom map.
The normal way for games to do this is to implement a brand-new map-editing UI inside Defold (or Xcode, Unity, Godot, etc.) that spits out custom maps in the exact data format that the game can parse.
Since you're in Utah, I'm going to suggest you find a bishop to ask for help. Even if you don't belong to the LDS church, I _think_ they might be able to help you out. Go to https://maps.churchofjesuschrist.org/ and find a church service to go to on a Sunday morning, and before/after the meeting, try to figure out who is the bishop/counselors and tell them your situation. It may depend on who you get, in which case you can always try other wards/buildings/areas.
Good luck!
But over time I’ve realized that the Unity editor is actually a really important piece of the development tools for games. Games are an extremely visual medium. So it’s really important to have something that is at least mostly WYSIWYG.
(My game project: https://pollywog.games/barnards-star.html )
It's actually a bit more constrained than people realize ... Well, for desktop, you can literally use anything. But for mobile it's a bit harder because of specific platform quirks, i.e. on iOS you can't make a language that relies on a JIT compiler, so for a Java/libGDX game the best option is https://github.com/MobiVM/robovm which compiles the JVM bytecode to LLVM IR and then to native machine code.
And then for consoles (switch/xbox/ps5) it's way worse because you're relying on commercial stuff, and the only support you get is from the engine makers themselves (Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony) so there's a lot less open source options. Basically you're stuck with C++ at that point (which Unity actually compiles your C# to under the hood for non-desktop platforms).
Not what you asked, but I found out this stuff a while back and find it interesting, hopefully it's interesting to you too :)
Steam is just the storefront. A game publisher's role varies a lot - sometimes they're just financing the project, usually they handle stuff like PR and marketing, and sometimes they help quite a bit more with the development of the game (sounds like the case in this case based on his other answers) as in programming/art/sfx/whatever else.
- How/why did you decide to talk to a publisher? When in the process did you feel like you had a good enough prototype to do that?
- What have been the pros/cons of working with a publisher? When, in your opinion, should someone do that vs. self-publishing?
- What was your confidence level throughout various stages of the project? Was there a point before releasing the game where you maybe got a glimpse of the success you were going to have? (I guess probably Steam wishlists?)
- What's next?
Congrats again on the hit!
Some rough numbers from my recollection: I released Card Crusade (deck building mobile game) for $4 back in 2019 and i think in the first year we got about 2k-3k downloads total. When we made it free in early 2020 we got 25k downloads in the first _week_. The revenue was less for us as a free app, but that’s with no ads and IMO we designed the IAPs pretty poorly.
But, a while after making it free, we accrued enough positive reviews that the iOS App Store started recommending the game to more people, so we have a steady 200+ downloads per week, despite not having updated the game since 2020!
I released another premium mobile game, Barnard’s Star, back in 2022 (and am still slowly updating it). Coincidentally, both apps make roughly the same amount of money (about $500 every 6 months), but Barnard’s Star makes that money from a fraction of the downloads… but the word of mouth effect (and game community) seems like it would be a lot stronger with f2p. So I’m planning on making Barnard’s Star free eventually (with hopefully better designed IAPs this time!).
One place where the “just a game and a price tag” model still works well is Steam. If i were trying to make a living off making games, I think I’d focus on releasing stuff there.
The other 3 all have antitrust lawsuits currently going. Google’s is just the furthest along.
These things take a long time, though. I think the Apple one is just not as far along.
IMO discovery of what is truly high quality is still an unsolved problem. Seems like recommendation systems generally just recommend things that are already popular. For someone that has zero following, but an interesting creative product, there's not much they can do. You're kind of relying on either "going viral" or hoping that someone with a lot of followers takes notice of your work and draws other people in.
A physical notebook & a pen :)