We’ve thoroughly player-tested our TouchGodd® games on browsers. Not only do they work, they’re very popular, but because they can’t really be played on a smart phone, they haven’t received recognition or massive downloads as yet.
One point of some paramount importance: I’ve included a video here on how some people are solving the massive-multiplayer issues of a browser-based videogame, but the real issue here is a combination of ignorance and arrogance.
The Impact Engine lacks an editor.
This may sound trivial, but it isn’t. Most of the game programmers are mathematicians, not artists. The funky quality of an artist’s creative cycles is what differentiates fine art from commercial/industrial art, the kind you find at low-grade framing shops and high-grade furniture stores.
Claude wrote a very user-friendly editor, but they would never consider including that in the engine package, not now, not ever. Why would they refuse it? In a word, geek politics.
The rationalization for no-editor with the Impact Engine is that everyone will want to create their own. This automatically cuts out the artist from the race, and from this point on, it’s only geeks in the running, and some of them will also be cut out by the blast.
Then, to compound the blundering stupidity of trying to market something that only a few people can actually use, both socket.io and node.js don’t bother to issue any documentation. Well, there go the rest of the pack, flushed down the toilet by the almost total arrogance of the average software writer, who assumes that anyone can read their handwriting. Well, it just ain’t so, and if they don’t wake up, they’ll pay the usual price…their product will dump out, replaced by another product that a consumer can actually use.
What’s the remedy for this?
It’s a cure that no programmer I know could possibly accept. Make the product usable by the average game-writer. Make the editor user-friendly. Publish all the docs on the add-ons, plug-ins and overlords of the internet. In short, COMPLETE THE JOB.
Most software writers are convinced that their job ends when the program is written, but that’s not at all true. It must be understandable and usable by those to whom you’re selling the software.
This blog isn’t going to have any major effect on any programmer anywhere, and that’s a fact. Their heads are so full of their area of expertise that they can’t imagine a communication glitch inherent in their software package as a result of hidden or obscure instructions on its use.
It sounds terribly obvious to us, but to the devious mind of a programmer who thinks in hex and C and other tangled thought-spaghetti westerns, it just doesn’t seem necessary — it’s all SOOOOOOOOOOOO obvious. But it isn’t. And nothing I say will change their opinion.
And that’s why they will fall down in the dust and never know the reason why.
Something that has instructions and is easy to use will replace the snarled professional-only package, as well it should. We’re still waiting for that event, but rest assured, the consumer-friendly package WILL show up, and relatively soon. It always does.
Even with all these tools growingly available, it’s going to take time and money to bring my video games to the hand-held market.
Donations of competent programmer time and cash to buy the help we need are greatly appreciated and very welcome indeed. Your help is necessary to enable the project and to give it the necessity to make it work.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby